By Jonathan Feldstein
Screengrab via Social Media. Courtesy of the author.
You don’t know this about me, but Mandy Patinkin, and I go way back even though we’ve never met. In 1988 following being named ABC News Person of the Week, I spent most of the rest of the year negotiating a TV movie contract about my life and story that led ABC News to select me with this distinction. There’s a lot more to the five-minute ABC News story, enough to have a LA producer call me the following Monday in my office.
The movie never happened because the liberal Hollywood producers looking to make a profit on my story decided that after Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced liberalizing measures, glasnost and perestroika, and became the darling of the West, they changed their mind because doing so, according to them, would be perceived of as being anti-Soviet.
I reminded the producer that my story was pro-freedom, about what one person can do to help another person achieve freedom. Even still, I was not ashamed with it being branded anti-Soviet because the Soviet Union literally represented nothing good globally, or specifically vis a vis the Jewish people about which my story was focused. I was fine leaving the contract.
What did all of this have to do with Chicago-native Mandy Patinkin?
At the time, the conversation about the movie had progressed that even though we never signed the contract, we were talking about who would be the lead actor playing me. Mandy Patankin was well enough known, though throughout his entire career, he’s only received a handful of noteworthy awards as an actor. Patankin was (and still is) about 10 years older, but people believed he could be made to look younger. He had a beard, as I did at the time. He was Jewish and my story is a very Jewish story about freedom. So I guess they wanted a Jewish actor to play me.
I don’t know if anyone ever spoke to his people about it, but his name was floated significantly.
I was thinking about Patankin recently following comments he made regarding Jewish support for the Senate candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed for Senate in Michigan. His comments show that despite his relative fame as an actor, he and I diverge from his ignorant and dangerous views.
Patankin has posted videos urging Jewish voters to support Abdul El-Sayed citing concern for their “safety” in the US. “Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy, and Abdul is the one fighting to protect it.” The contradiction of Jews electing an Islamist for their safety, is profound.
In addition to my five minutes on ABC News, I have acted in one movie, and done some TV commercials and promos. I have done hundreds of live and recorded interviews. While I do know how to deliver a line, none of these make me an actor.
By the same token, that Patinkin has lived through and experienced modern Jewish history, neither makes him an historian, or an eligible qualified speaker on Jewish history. In fact, his uniquely diaspora perspective influenced by Buddhism is void of modern Jewish and Israeli history through which he has lived, much less not-so-ancient discrimination against Jews under Islam going back to Mohammed.
Saying that “Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy,” views Jewish history through the prism of being outside Israel, with no awareness of Jewish life in Israel. It’s from the perspective of a tolerated second-class citizen protected by others. If that’s Patankin’s view, no wonder he supports (and has been fooled by) the anti-Zionist antisemitic candidate in Michigan. Hooking his cart to El-Sayed’s Islamist horse, it doesn’t faze Patankin that the candidate will not even call out antisemitic ads supporting his candidacy. Patankin places himself solidly in the timeless role of Jews and Chrisitans under Islam as dhimmi – the second-class citizen who is either tolerated because of paying the Islamic jizya tax required of infidels, or being forcefully converted. It makes one wonder if Patankin is trying out for the role of King of the Dhimmi.
Embracing El-Sayed, much less the narrow diaspora-based mentality that Jewish security can only be granted by others, Patankin has written himself out of any role in the Jewish future. Forget a leading role, he’s not even an understudy.
Patankin, however, does embrace the role of useless idiot quite well. He plays it so well, he may even be nominated for an Oscar. Sadly, too many Jews over history have become radical leftists, and many of whom have become the puppets to the Islamists. It reminds me of the parents of another Chicago-born Jewish friend, Abe Stolar.
Born in Chicago in 1912 to Russian emigree parents who fled Czarist pogroms, Abe’s parents were homesick for the motherland and inspired by communism. Imbibing the communist Kool-Aid, as a teen, Abe’s parents took him to Moscow to build up the worker’s paradise. Five years later under Stalin’s purges, Abe’s father was arrested and never seen again.
In 1975, Abe, his wife Gita and their son applied to leave the USSR. That’s right, Communism offered no freedom just to leave the socialist utopia. They received permission to leave, selling all their belongings yet at the last moment – before boarding the plane – their permission was revoked. The Stolars were forced to return to their empty Moscow apartment, hopeless.
I met Abe a decade later. He was an American citizen detained in Moscow, frustrated and desperate to leave, but he was jovial, friendly, and welcoming. Two years later, I went back to Moscow and visited Abe again. He was more hopeful as he saw signs that things in the USSR were changing, but he was still an American citizen forcefully detained in Moscow. Eventually, in 1989, at 77 years old, Abe and his family were able to leave and settle in Israel. Abe understood that the Jewish future, even at 77, was in Israel, not based on the whims of others.
Mandy Patankin’s ignorance of history is a shanda, an embarrassment. Unlike Abe Stolar’s parents, he has decades of seeing the horrible and dangerous consequence of the Red-Green (Communist-Islamist) alliance which he plays into now, Islamists using leftists to advance their ideology with the leftists gladly playing their role with glee.
Abe Stolar’s parents had not yet witnessed or experienced the Red-Green alliance, much less suffered under it. Perhaps they could be forgiven for their communist fervor given how badly Jews had been treated under the Czars. Patankin should know better. There is not a single surviving and thriving Jewish community under Islam. To suggest that Jews in America – or anywhere for that matter – should outsource their future and safety to others, much less Islamists like El-Sayeed, is more than foolish. It’s dangerous.
Closer to Abe Stolar’s age now than he was to my age in 1988, perhaps one day there will be a movie about Abe Stolar in which Mandy Patankin can play the lead. Or maybe there will one day be movies about the Jewish communities purged under Islam with a role for Mandy Patankin as one of the Jews dismembered by their Moslem neighbors. Until then, he’s defined himself in such a fringe role among the Jewish people that he’s essentially written himself out of the Jewish people. So for him, of all people, to preach to the Jewish people, is inane at best. I have other words, but my story is still PG-13.
Jonathan Feldstein is president of the Genesis 123 Foundation (www,genesis123.co) whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians and Christians with Israel. He was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and grandfather of four (so far).
Two sons and a son in law are currently serving in the IDF and have been involved in combat in Gaza and Lebanon since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.
Jonathan is a leader working with and among Christian supporters of Israel, and shares experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel through his work, writing, and as host of the Inspiration from Zion podcast. Since the war began, he has authored more than 150 articles, and participated in a similar number of interviews, briefings, prayer events, and more.
Jonathan is working with Christian leaders all over the world to realize a true peace in Gaza, details of which can be found at www.SolutionforPeaceinGaza.com.
In 2023 he published the highly acclaimed book, Israel the Miracle (www.israelthemiracle.com), which makes a great gift for Chanukah and Christmas, and year round.
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