The son of a Jewish history professor and grandson of a Jewish political icon grapples with his identity in a pre- and post-October 7 world.
A blisteringly honest, laugh-through-the-pain one-person show, Jew, Interrupted returns to Los Angeles after its acclaimed run at the Hollywood Fringe Festival last June. Ethan Stanislawski returns to bring audiences a no-holds-barred personal journey through mental health, family legacy, cultural contradiction, and what it means to be Jewish both before and after October 7.
Jew, Interrupted unfolds in seven raw, riveting chapters that delve into everything from post-Holocaust trauma to psychiatric malpractice, from sibling rivalry and chaos during a childhood trip Israel to finding unusual methods of processing grief— all stitched together with biting wit, intellectual rigor, and emotional vulnerability.
Part memoir, part cultural critique, the 60-minute solo performance journeys from Ethan’s old world legacies of his pioneering Boston politician grandfather and his father, a Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University. It covers an Upper West Side childhood fraught with privilege and pills, upending his expectations going to college in the Midwest, emotional breakdowns and familial clashes in his early 20s, and ideological reckonings in a post-October 7 world.
What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal story about inherited beliefs, cultural contradictions, and the search for an identity untethered from family myth and societal expectations.
“I was more afraid of being called a self-hating Jew than being called an anti-Semitic slur,” Ethan quips at one point — a line that captures the show’s heart: irreverent, devastating, and unafraid to sit in discomfort.
Jew, Interrupted offers a searing and often hilarious lens on what happens when progressive ideals collide with inherited dogma, and how trauma — personal, cultural, historical — shapes the way we love, fight, and grieve.
Wednesday, 28, 19.30 - Wednesday, 28, 21.00 Los Angeles, CA _$25