{"id":10772,"date":"2019-03-19T12:47:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T16:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=10772"},"modified":"2019-03-22T11:04:58","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T15:04:58","slug":"gragger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/03\/19\/gragger\/","title":{"rendered":"Gragger Retells The Jewish Purim Tale As A Radical, Queer Burlesque"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gragger<\/a>\u2014Boston Workmen’s Circle<\/a>\u2019s annual, grown-up \u201cevening of gender-bending, ancestral-healing, world-transforming Purim festivities\u201d\u2014is named for the clacker or rattle traditionally used to blot out the villain’s name in the ancient Jewish holiday tale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s traditional to blot out the name of evil when you hear it in the shpil,\u201d Maddy Popkin, cultural worker and member organizer for the center for Jewish culture and social justice, tells the Gragger crowd at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston\u2019s Downtown Crossing neighborhood Saturday night. \u201cIf I say Haman\u2026\u201d The crowd loudly boos.<\/p>\n

\"Purim<\/a>
Purim shpil performed at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gragger celebrates the Jewish spring holiday of Purim with costumes, dance music by a DJ and the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and a recounting of the old account. “The reason Purim is my favorite holiday\u2014and certainly the best for queering and topsy-turvy exploration\u2014is there’s a rabbinical edict to drink so much that you cannot tell the good guy from the bad guy,” Popkin told me.<\/p>\n

\"Second<\/a>
Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band plays at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“The origins of the actual story are murky, nobody knows,” Popkin said. It’s one of those (as the old joke goes) they-tried-to-kill-us-we-survived stories.<\/p>\n

In the ancient tale, Haman, a top advisor\u00a0to a Persian king, becomes upset when a man by the name of Mordecai fails to bow to him. So he hatches a plot to murder all the Jews in the empire. But the king\u2019s new wife, Esther\u2014Mordecai\u2019s niece\/cousin and a Jew herself\u2014intercedes with the king, who allows the Jews to fight those that would kill them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t show you the gore that happened next, but rest assured the Jewish people stood up to the test,\u201d a narrator says in the Gragger performers\u2019 quick rendition of the Purim story\u2014as a radical, rhyming, queer burlesque. “There’s always an element of critiquing the powers that be,” Popkin had told me.<\/p>\n

\"Purim<\/a>
Purim shpil performed at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then they do the shpil (play) again\u2014reimagined in a pair of rival nightclubs in 1925 New York. One is a tearoom run by Eve Adams (Eva Kotchever), a Jewish immigrant from Poland, a \u201cnotorious lesbian\u201d and author of \u201cillicit short stories.\u201d In this version, Haman is the manager of the other club, who reports Adams as a lesbian to the police, who raid the place. This Esther\u2014played by a performer with breasts hidden by tape and hair painted down chest, working in \u201cdrag\u201d as a woman at Haman\u2019s club\u2014gets the king\/club owner to bribe the cops to let Adams go.<\/p>\n

\"Purim<\/a>
Purim shpil performed at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Adams was a real person. The Adams character tells the crowd that what actually occurred was \u201ca beautiful woman walked into my nightclub. I flirted. She was an undercover police officer and I was arrested and deported from the U.S.\u201d Adams landed in Paris, where she opened another club. \u201cIn 1943, along with many other bright and beautiful Jews, I was murdered at Auschwitz. That\u2019s how it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really need people to be daring and to see and imagine worlds that feel impossible. We need to make a practice of that work,\u201d Popkin tells the crowd. \u201cIn a time of both heightening white nationalism and a time of constricting the tent, we\u2019re so in need of your support.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Purim<\/a>
Purim shpil performed at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Purim<\/a>
Purim shpil performed at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Second<\/a>
Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band plays at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Second<\/a>
Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band plays at Gragger!5779 at SEIU 32BJ Meeting Hall in Boston, March 16, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gragger\u2014Boston Workmen’s Circle\u2019s annual, grown-up \u201cevening of gender-bending, ancestral-healing, world-transforming Purim festivities\u201d\u2014is named for the clacker or rattle traditionally used to blot out the villain’s name in the ancient Jewish holiday tale. \u201cIt\u2019s traditional to blot out the name of evil when you hear it in the shpil,\u201d Maddy Popkin, cultural worker and member organizer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,108,119],"tags":[534,533,435],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10772"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10772"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10887,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10772\/revisions\/10887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}