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Hank Azaria

Henry Albert "Hank" Azaria (born April 25, 1964) is an American actor. He is known for voicing many characters in the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons since 1989, including Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Superintendent Chalmers, Comic Book Guy, Snake Jailbird, Professor Frink, Kirk Van Houten, Duffman, and formerly Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Lou, Carl Carlson, among others. Azaria joined the show with little voice acting experience, but became a regular in its second season. For his work on the show, he has won four Primetime Emmy Awards.

Alongside his continued voice acting on The Simpsons, Azaria became more widely known through his live-action supporting appearances in films such as Quiz Show (1994), Heat, The Birdcage (1996) (for which he won a Screen Actors Guild Award) and Godzilla (1998). He has also appeared in numerous films including Mystery Men (1999), America's Sweethearts (2001), Shattered Glass (2003), Along Came Polly (2004), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) and The Smurfs (2011) and The Smurfs 2 (2013). Further voice roles include Anastasia (1997), for which he won an Annie Award.

His live-action television work includes recurring roles on the sitcoms Mad About You and Friends, as well as dramatic roles in the TV films Tuesdays With Morrie (1999) as writer Mitch Albom and Uprising (2001) as Jewish resistance leader Mordechai Anielewicz. For the former, Azaria received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. He starred in the title roles in the Showtime drama series Huff (2004–2006) and the IFC sitcom Brockmire (2017–2020). His recurring role on the drama Ray Donovan earned him a sixth Primetime Emmy Award in 2016.

Azaria made his Broadway debut as Lancelot in Spamalot, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He returned to Broadway in 2007, playing David Sarnoff in The Farnsworth Invention.

Early life
Henry Albert Azaria was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City on April 25, 1964 to Ruth and Albert Azaria. He began going by the name "Hank" as a child, after a pediatrician he visited said he felt it was a more suitable name for a child than "Henry". His grandparents on both sides were Sephardic Thessalonian Jews (i.e. from the Greek city of Thessaloniki). His family spoke Ladino, also known as Judaeo-Spanish, which he described as "a strange, antiquated Spanish dialect written in Hebrew characters." Azaria's father ran several dress-manufacturing businesses while his mother raised him and his two older sisters, Stephanie and Elise. Before marrying his father, Azaria's mother had been a publicist for Columbia Pictures, promoting films in Latin American countries as she was fluent in both English and Spanish. During his childhood, Azaria would often "memorize and mimic" the scripts of films, shows, and stand-up comedy routines he enjoyed.

Azaria attended The Kew-Forest School in Queens' Forest Hills neighborhood. He decided to become an actor after performing in a school play at the age of 16, becoming "obsessed with acting" at the expense of his academic studies. Both of his parents loved all forms of show business, which further spurred him to become an actor. He studied drama at Tufts University from 1981 to 1985, where he met and befriended actor Oliver Platt and noted that Platt was a "better actor" than he was and inspired him. Together they starred in various college stage productions, including The Merchant of Venice, before Azaria went to train at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Although he did not expect the endeavor to be successful, he decided to become a professional actor so that he would not regret not having tried later in life. His first acting job was an advertisement for Italian television when he was 17 years old. He also worked as a busboy. He originally intended to work predominantly as a theatrical actor, and he and Platt set up a company called Big Theatre, although Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter was the only show they ever performed. Azaria decided that television was a better arena and offered more opportunity, and moved to Los Angeles after being offered work with talent agent Harry Gold.

Early career (1986–1988)
Azaria got along with talent agent Harry Gold, who was lukewarm about working with him but still sent him out for auditions after a woman Azaria had worked with in New York "got really furious with [Gold]" for breaking his promise to work with Azaria. He made his television debut with a role in the pilot episode of the 1986 ABC comedy-drama series Joe Bash. His part—a one-line role as the police officer Maldonado—was edited out before the show was broadcast, although the role secured him admission to the Screen Actors Guild. Azaria appeared in the TV film Nitti: The Enforcer, about the gangster Frank Nitti, and appeared in the failed pilot Morning Maggie alongside Matthew Perry, with whom he became good friends. He played Joe in an episode of the sitcom Family Ties in 1988 in which he had one line, and the following year he played Steve Stevenson in an episode of Growing Pains. Azaria has described his career progression as being gradual; he did not achieve overnight recognition or fame. In Los Angeles, Azaria was trained by acting coach Roy London. Between acting jobs he performed as a stand-up comedian, and worked as a bartender for a catering firm.

The Simpsons (since 1989)
Azaria became famous for his voice work in the ongoing animated television series The Simpsons. He joined the show having previously performed only one voice-over—as the titular animated dog in the failed Fox pilot Hollywood Dog, a show he described as "sort of Roger Rabbit-esque, where the dog was animated, but everybody else was real." The first voice he performed on The Simpsons was that of town bartender Moe Szyslak, replacing Christopher Collins who had initially recorded the character's voice. Having known him from Hollywood Dog, casting director Bonita Pietila called Azaria and asked him to audition for the voice of Moe. At the time he was performing the role of a drug dealer in a play, utilizing a voice based on Al Pacino's performance in the film Dog Day Afternoon. He used the voice in his audition for The Simpsons and, at the request of the show's executive producers Matt Groening and Sam Simon, made the voice more "gravelly". Groening and Simon thought the resultant voice was ideal for Moe and took Azaria over to the Fox recording studio. Before he had even seen a script, he recorded several lines of dialogue as Moe for the episode "Some Enchanted Evening", dubbing Collins' voice.

Azaria did not expect to hear from the show again, but they continued to call him back, first to perform the voice of Chief Wiggum and then Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. He felt that, initially, "[the producers] didn't seem too pleased with what I had done...[Simon] was very exacting...[and] was kind of impatiently directing me on the ABCs of comedy. But then, much to my surprise, he would still keep having me back every week. But each week, I thought it was going to be my last week because I really didn't think I had done that well." Nevertheless, by the show's second season he was performing multiple recurring voices and so was given a contract and made a permanent member of the main cast. Since he joined later than the rest of the cast, Groening still considered Azaria the "new guy". In addition to Moe, Wiggum and Apu, Azaria provides the voices of Comic Book Guy, Carl Carlson (until season 32, now voiced by Alex Désert), Cletus Spuckler, Professor Frink, Dr. Nick Riviera, Lou, Snake Jailbird, Kirk Van Houten, Bumblebee Man, the Sea Captain, Superintendent Chalmers, Disco Stu, Duffman, the Wiseguy and numerous one-time characters. His co-star in The Simpsons, Nancy Cartwright, wrote that: "The thing about Hank that I most remember is that he started out so unassuming and then, little by little, his abilities were revealed and his contributions to the show escalated. I realized Hank was going to be our breakaway star."

As Moe's voice is based on Al Pacino's, likewise many of Azaria's other recurring characters are based on existing sources. He took Apu's voice from the many Indian and Pakistani convenience store workers in Los Angeles that he had interacted with when he first moved to the area, and also loosely based it on Peter Sellers' character Hrundi V. Bakshi from the film The Party. Originally, it was thought that Apu being Indian was too offensive and stereotyped, but after Azaria's reading of the line "Hello, Mr. Homer", which the show's producers thought was hilarious, the character stayed. Azaria, however, disputed this on LateNet with Ray Ellin, claiming that Apu was always intended to be stereotypical. Chief Wiggum's voice was originally a parody of David Brinkley, but when Azaria was told it was too slow, he switched it to that of Edward G. Robinson. Officer Lou is based on Sylvester Stallone, and Dr. Nick is "a bad Ricky Ricardo impression." The "Wise Guy" voice is "basically Charles Bronson," while Carl is "a silly voice [Azaria] always did." Two of the voices come from his time at college: Snake's is based on Azaria's old college roommate, while Comic Book Guy's voice is based on a student who lived in the room next door to Azaria and went by the name "F". Professor Frink is based on Jerry Lewis' performance in the original The Nutty Professor, and the Sea Captain is based on English actor Robert Newton's portrayal of many pirates. Azaria based his performance for the one-time character Frank Grimes, from the episode "Homer's Enemy", on actor William H. Macy. He counts Grimes as the hardest, most emotional performance he has ever had to give in the history of The Simpsons.

Azaria's work on the show has won him four Emmy Awards for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance, in 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2015. He was also nominated for the award in 2009 and 2010, but lost to co-star Dan Castellaneta and guest star Anne Hathaway respectively. He was nominated again in 2012. Azaria, with the rest of the principal cast, reprised all of his voice roles from The Simpsons for the 2007 film The Simpsons Movie. Azaria notes that he spends "an embarrassingly small amount of time working on The Simpsons." He works for "an hour on Thursdays when we read through the script, then four hours on Monday when we record it, and I'll pop in again once or twice." He concludes it is "the best job in the world, as far as I'm concerned."

Up until 1998, Azaria was paid $30,000 per episode. Azaria and the five other main The Simpsons voice actors were then involved in a pay dispute in which Fox threatened to replace them with new actors and went as far as preparing for the casting of new voices. However, the issue was soon resolved and from 1998 to 2004, they received $125,000 per episode. In 2004, the voice actors intentionally skipped several script read-throughs, demanding they be paid $360,000 per episode. The strike was resolved a month later, with Azaria's pay increasing to something between $250,000 and $360,000 per episode. In 2008, production for the twentieth season was put on hold due to new contract negotiations with the voice actors, who wanted a "healthy bump" in salary. The dispute was later resolved, and Azaria and the rest of the cast received their requested pay raise, approximately $400,000 per episode. Three years later, with Fox threatening to cancel the series unless production costs were cut, Azaria and the other cast members accepted a 30 percent pay cut, down to just over $300,000 per episode.

In an April 24, 2018 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Azaria discussed his reaction to The Problem with Apu, a 2017 documentary by Hari Kondabolu that examined Azaria and other white actors who had played South Asian roles as stereotypes. During the interview, Azaria described how watching the documentary had changed his perspective on the issue: "The idea that anyone, young or old, past or present, was bullied or teased based on the character of Apu, it just really makes me sad." Azaria also offered to stop voicing the character: "I'm perfectly willing and happy to step aside, or help transition it into something new." In response, Kondabolu tweeted his appreciation for Azaria's statement: "Thank you, @HankAzaria. I appreciate what you said & how you said it." In early 2020, Azaria announced that he was stepping away from the Apu character, primarily because of the stereotypes and bias it perpetuated. Later in the year he would retire from voicing Carl for similar reasons. In April 2021, Azaria formally apologized for voicing the Apu character, on Dax Shepherd's podcast.

Television work
With the continuing success of The Simpsons, Azaria began taking on other, principally live-action roles. He was a main cast member on the show Herman's Head (1991–1994) playing Jay Nichols, alongside The Simpsons co-star Yeardley Smith. He regularly recorded for The Simpsons and filmed Herman's Head during the same day. Following the series' cancellation Azaria unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Joey Tribbiani, one of the lead characters in the sitcom Friends. He was instead cast in the role of the scientist David, one of Phoebe Buffay's boyfriends in the series. He appeared in the show's tenth episode "The One with the Monkey", before the character left for a research trip in Minsk. He reprised the role in the show's seventh season (2001), before making several appearances in the ninth (2003). This return culminates in David proposing to Phoebe; she rejects him, and David leaves the show for good. From 1995 to 1999, Azaria had a recurring role in the sitcom Mad About You as Nat Ostertag, the dog walker. Azaria was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his roles in both Mad About You (in 1998) and Friends (in 2003). Azaria had the lead role in the short-lived sitcom If Not For You in 1995, playing record producer Craig Schaeffer.

Azaria produced and starred in the sitcom Imagine That in 2002, replacing Emeril mid-season in the NBC lineup. He played Josh Miller, a comedy writer, who "transformed" each episode into a character Miller has imagined, "provid[ing] a humorous outlet for his frustrations at home and work". Production closed after five episodes and it was canceled after just two aired, due to poor critical reaction and ratings. Azaria later commented on the show: "I wanted to do something really truthful and interesting and impactful. We had a bunch of executives sitting in the room, all agreeing that The Larry Sanders Show was our favorite thing on television, but we couldn't do it on NBC, and nor would we want to from a business standpoint; it simply wouldn't make enough money. By the time it aired, the writing was sort of on the wall, and I don't blame them at all. It was apparent it wasn't working."

He starred as psychiatrist Craig "Huff" Huffstodt in the Showtime drama series Huff, which ran for two seasons between 2004 and 2006, airing 24 episodes. Azaria served as an executive producer on the show and directed an episode of its second season. After reading the pilot script, he sent it to Platt, who took the role of Huff's friend Russell Tupper. Azaria enjoyed working on the show, but struggled with the bleak subject matter and was often in dispute with its creator Bob Lowry, noting that it "was tough to marry our visions all the time, [because] we both cared so much about it that neither of us were willing to let go." Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly called Azaria "impressively subtle" in the role, while John Leonard of New York magazine said he was a "shrewd bit of casting." The show garnered seven Emmy nominations in 2005, including a nomination for Azaria for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Despite the awards, the show continually received low ratings, and Showtime chose not to commission it for a third season.

Returning to live-action television in 2011, Azaria starred in the NBC sitcom Free Agents, a remake of the British series of the same name. He played Alex Taylor, a recently divorced public relations executive "who is missing his kids and trying to keep himself together", and ends up sleeping with a co-worker (Kathryn Hahn). Azaria also served as a producer on the show. He was apprehensive about the project, disliking the lengthy schedule required of a lead actor in a single-camera series, and favoring the "sensibility" of cable shows. However, he liked the script and executive producer John Enbom's previous series Party Down and decided to accept the part. Despite Azaria mounting a campaign on Twitter to save it, the series was canceled after four episodes due to low ratings. Between 2014 and 2016, Azaria had a recurring role in the second, third and fourth season of Showtime's Ray Donovan, playing FBI agent Ed Cochran. He won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his work on the show in 2016, as well as earning a further nomination the same category the following year.

Azaria starred in the IFC series Brockmire, which ran for four seasons from 2017-2020. He played the lead role of Jim Brockmire, a legendary baseball announcer, fired for a profanity-filled breakdown live on air after discovering his wife was having an affair. Azaria based the voice and style of Brockmire on several veteran sportscasters, including Bob Murphy and Phil Rizzuto. The character originated as part of the third episode of the Funny or Die web-series Gamechangers, entitled "A Legend in the Booth", which Azaria also co-wrote. He subsequently appeared as Brockmire on the NFL Network's The Rich Eisen Podcast to discuss the National Football League. In November 2012, Azaria sued actor Craig Bierko over the ownership of the Brockmire voice. The case was ruled in Azaria's favor in 2014. Both actors had been using a baseball announcer voice before and since meeting at a party in 1990, but US district judge Gary Allen Feess ruled that only Azaria's voice was, as Brockmire, a defined, "tangible" character and thus subject to copyright. In 2016, IFC confirmed development on the series, on which Azaria also served as an executive producer. Azaria received three nominations for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his performance on the series.

Film work
Azaria made his film debut in the direct-to-video release Cool Blue (1990), as Buzz. His first theatrically released feature film appearance came the same year in Pretty Woman, as a police detective named Albertson. His next major film role was as television producer Albert Freedman in the 1994 film Quiz Show, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1996, Azaria played gay Guatemalan housekeeper Agador Spartacus in the film The Birdcage. For the role, which Azaria considers to be his "big break", he was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role, and critically branded "the most hilarious performance in the film," by Alison Macor of The Austin Chronicle, while Empire wrote that he "[stole] the show." For the role he used a Guatemalan accent, and made himself sound as effeminate as possible. He had chosen two possible voices, an effeminate one and a tougher one. After advice from a drag queen, he chose the effeminate voice. Three weeks into production, he realized he sounded exactly like his grandmother, which aided his performance. Agador was originally going to be a single scene part, with the larger role of the housekeeper being played by David Alan Grier. With the producers fearing the racial connotations of a black actor in such a part, Azaria inherited the full role.

He appeared in numerous other films in the late 1990s, including Heat (1995), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Celebrity (1998) and worked opposite Gwyneth Paltrow, as Walter Plane, in the 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations. He played photographer Victor "Animal" Palotti in Godzilla (1998). Godzilla was one of Azaria's first starring roles in a blockbuster film. Its five-month shoot was the longest of his career to date, but he considered it a good chance to boost his profile. He noted, "I'm so used to melding into every character I play. Even people in the business think the guy who did Birdcage, Quiz Show and Great Expectations are three different actors—which in a way makes me proud, but in another way is very frustrating. It's the curse and blessing of the character actor". The shoot's physical challenges, and the film's critical failure, led Azaria to later describe it as "tough to make, and very disappointing when it came out. It was one you definitely chalk up and say, 'That was part of paying your dues, better luck next time'." In 1999, he starred in the drama Mystery, Alaska as Charles Danner, and the comedy superhero film Mystery Men, as the faux-British silverware throwing expert The Blue Raja. Other film roles included Hector Gorgonzolas in America's Sweethearts (2001), Claude in Along Came Polly (2004), and the young Patches O'Houlihan in DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (2004), the latter two with Ben Stiller. For his role of Claude, a French scuba instructor, in Along Came Polly, Azaria donned a wig and worked out extensively to get into the physical shape the part required.

Azaria played composer Marc Blitzstein in Tim Robbins' film Cradle Will Rock in 1999. Paul Clinton wrote that Azaria was "brilliant as the tortured (is there any other kind) artist Blitzstein." The same year he appeared as author and journalist Mitch Albom alongside Jack Lemmon in the television film Tuesdays with Morrie, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for the role. Azaria described the latter as the "best work [he has] done." These were two of the first dramatic roles Azaria had taken; throughout his career, Azaria has primarily worked in comedy, but tries to balance the two. Azaria commented: "all the roles I got were in comedy at first, and I was certainly happy to get those, so I never felt the lack of being considered a dramatic actor because I was so happy to get what I got. And then I became surprised later on when I got dramatic roles. But I never went, 'OK, now it's time to get a dramatic role.'" His next dramatic part was in the television film Uprising in 2001. The film was based on the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Azaria played Mordechaj Anielewicz, one of the revolt's leaders. Azaria was confused by his casting in Uprising and frequently asked the film's producer and director Jon Avnet why he was selected. "I know [Avnet] liked the fact I was Jewish, and he knew I could do accents well. He cast me and David Schwimmer in [Uprising], and we were both sort of mystified. He had some instinct that he wanted people who were more known for being funny. He never explained it satisfactorily to me; I don't understand why." His parts in Tuesdays With Morrie and Uprising affected him, causing a depressive state which he countered with DVDs of the comedy series Monty Python. Azaria found Uprising to be "very difficult very depressing very emotionally challenging" material. In 2003, Azaria played journalist Michael Kelly, the former editor of The New Republic, in the drama film Shattered Glass. Kelly died a few months before the film was released and Azaria said the film "has become a weird kind of eulogy to him."

Since Huff's conclusion in 2006, Azaria has continued to make multiple film appearances. He played the smooth-talking Whit in David Schwimmer's directorial debut Run Fatboy Run (2007). During production he became good friends with co-star Simon Pegg, performing The Simpsons voices on request, frequently distracting Pegg when he was supposed to be filming. He worked with Stiller again on 2009's Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian in which Azaria played the villainous pharaoh Kah Mun Rah, utilizing a Boris Karloff accent. Although the film received mixed reviews, critics praised Azaria's performance. Perry Seibert of TV Guide wrote that "thanks to Azaria, a master of comic timing. His grandiose, yet slightly fey bad guy is equally funny when he's chewing out minions as he is when deliberating if Oscar the Grouch and Darth Vader are evil enough to join his team." He appeared as Abraham in Year One (2009), Dr. Knight in 2010's Love & Other Drugs, and played Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano in Lovelace (2013).

Azaria played Gargamel in the animated/live-action adaptation of The Smurfs (2011). Azaria wore a prosthetic nose, ears, buck teeth, eyebrows and a wig, as well as shaving his head. He spent approximately 130 hours in the make-up chair over the course of the production. Azaria considered Gargamel's voice to be the most important part of his performance. The producers wanted an "old, failed, Shakespearean actor" voice, but Azaria felt this would lack energy and wanted something more Eastern European. He eventually selected a voice similar to that of Paul Winchell's from the cartoon. Azaria disliked the cartoon when it first aired, and considered Gargamel too one-dimensional a character and "just this straight villain"; he opted to make Gargamel "more sarcastic" than in the cartoon, but "discovered that there's no way to play Gargamel without screaming your head off at certain points – ramping him up and getting him very upset over Smurfs". He interpreted him as "very lonely", adding that "he hates the Smurfs because they're such a happy family. He wants in really badly. I think he wants to be embraced as a Smurf". Azaria worked with the writers to "infuse" the script with some of his ideas about the character, "particularly with the 'married' relationship between Gargamel and [his cat] Azreal [sic]" which Azaria conceived.

Reviewers from The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe commented on Azaria's "overacting" in the role of Gargamel. More positive reaction came from Scott Bowles of USA Today called Azaria the "human standout"; Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times felt he suffered the "greatest disservice" of the film's cast due to a poor script. Azaria noted in an interview with The A.V. Club that The Smurfs and Night at the Museum were films he agreed to do primarily for the money, but that "I won't even do that unless I think it will at least be fun to do...I really try to throw myself into it, figure out the funniest, cleverest way to get the material over, and make it fun to do and fun to watch." Azaria reprised his role in the 2013 sequel The Smurfs 2. In 2016, Azaria starred in Norman with Richard Gere.

Further voice work
Azaria performed a number of voice roles in addition to The Simpsons, although he noted in 2005: "I started doing other voiceovers for cartoons for a couple of years, but I didn't really love it. I was spoiled by The Simpsons." He voiced Eddie Brock / Venom in Spider-Man: The Animated Series between 1994 and 1996. In the animated feature Anastasia (1997), he voiced Bartok the bat and reprised the role in the direct-to-video prequel Bartok the Magnificent (1999). For his performance in Anastasia, Azaria won the Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Male Performer in an Animated Feature Production. He also voiced Eric in the American dub of the series Stressed Eric, Harold Zoid in the 2001 Futurama episode "That's Lobstertainment!", and Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg in Chicago 10 (2007). For the 2011 film Hop, Azaria voiced Carlos and Phil. The response to the film was mostly negative, but many reviewers praised Azaria's performance. For example, Sandie Chen of The Washington Post said "Azaria has been honing his over-the-top Spanish accent since The Birdcage, so anything he says grabs some laughs", while Emma Simmonds of Time Out called him an "unflappable presence, voicing two characters with style". Later in the year he voiced The Mighty Sven in Happy Feet Two. He also voiced the lead character, Texan border agent Bud Buckwald, in Bordertown, which aired in 2016, as well as Shelfish Sheldon in Mack & Moxy the same year.

Once The Simpsons was "going steadily" and Azaria had enough money to live on, he stopped working on commercials as he found them "demoralizing", feeling that he sounded sarcastic whenever he read for them. When recording the part of "Jell-O Man" for a Jell-O commercial, he was told to make the voice he offered "more likable and friendly so that children like him." After pointing out that "Jell-O Man" was a fictional character, he left and pledged to never record for an advertisement again. However, in 2012 he voiced several insects in a commercial for the Chevrolet Sonic.

Other work
Azaria wrote and directed the 2004 short film Nobody's Perfect, which won the Film Discovery Jury Award for Best Short at the US Comedy Arts Festival. In January 2007, he was confirmed to be directing Outsourced, a film about two American workers who journey to get their jobs back, after their factory is moved to Mexico. In 2009, Azaria told Empire he was instead focusing on making a documentary about fatherhood. Two years later he told the Los Angeles Times that this project was "half-complete" and was "forever looking for financing to finish it." It eventually began in 2014, airing on AOL as an online series titled Fatherhood. According to AOL, the series of short episodes documents Azaria's "touching, humorous, and often enlightening journey from a man who is not even sure he wants to have kids, to a father going through the joys, trials and tribulations of being a dad."

He has periodically returned to theatrical work, appearing in several productions. In 2003, he appeared as Bernard in a run of David Mamet's play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, along with Matthew Perry and Minnie Driver, in London's West End. Azaria made his first appearance as Sir Lancelot, the French Taunter, and four other characters in Spamalot, the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which opened in Chicago in December 2004, before moving to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. The show met with critical acclaim and received fourteen Tony Award nominations in 2005; Azaria and Tim Curry both received nominations for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. Reuniting with The Birdcage director Mike Nichols, and being a huge Monty Python fan, he saw it as an opportunity he could not pass up, describing it as "so much fun that I haven't realized how tiring it is," and "the most fun that I've ever had in my entire life." He took a break from the show in June 2005 to work on Huff, but returned in December 2005. Alan Tudyk played the role during Azaria's absence. In late 2007 he starred in Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, playing RCA head David Sarnoff. In 2016, he starred in the world premiere of Dry Powder opposite Claire Danes, John Krasinski, and Sanjit De Silva, directed by Thomas Kail, at the off-Broadway Public Theater in New York City.

Acting style and vocal range
Azaria's friends refer to him as "the freakish mimic" due to his ability to copy almost anyone's voice, instantly after he has heard it. As a child, he believed that everyone could do this, but later realized that it was not a common talent. Azaria has said, "I can remember every voice I hear, famous or otherwise ... they kind of remain in the memory banks, so I'm ready to trot them out." Azaria was glad to have found the "ultimate outlet" for this skill, in The Simpsons. He "didn't realize it [when he joined the show], but it became like a lab for a character actor. [He] had to do so many voices." In the early 2000s, Azaria felt he had reached the maximum number of voices he was capable of: "For the first 10 years of The Simpsons, I would develop a bunch of voices. And then ... I hit a point when I was tapped out. Every noise I can make, I have made. Even characters like Gargamel, I've done. Even if it was only two or three lines, at some point I've done something similar on The Simpsons, at least somewhere along the line."

For many of Azaria's characters, much of their humor is derived from a "funny voice", such as The Birdcage and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. He stated that "being funny with a funny voice is more my comfort zone, a broader character that I try to humanize, a kind of silly or wacky persona that I try to fill in," although he finds it "much easier to be someone much closer to myself," as it requires "less energy ... than playing characters that are so out there and high strung."

The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has stated that Azaria possesses the ability to turn unfunny lines into some of the best in an episode, while former writer Jay Kogen stated: "Just when I think I know [Azaria's] bag of tricks, he's always got a new thing he does to surprise me." Throughout the run of The Simpsons, Azaria has had to sing in character several times, a task which he describes as easier than singing normally. The Smurfs writer David N. Weiss says Azaria "has a beautiful treasure trove of talent," and "became what you wished you were writing." Playwright Jenelle Riley wrote in 2005 that Azaria was "by far" her favorite actor, praising his "versatility" and "tendency to take small roles that would normally fade into the background and to consistently create characters people care about," noting his roles in Shattered Glass, Mystery, Alaska and especially DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story.

Personal life
In the early 1990s, Azaria was in a relationship with actress Julie Warner. His relationship with actress Helen Hunt began in 1994; they married in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the couple's home in Southern California on July 17, 1999. The two had appeared together in Mad About You and the Simpsons episode "Dumbbell Indemnity". After a year of marriage, Azaria moved out of the couple's home, and Hunt filed for divorce after a six-month separation, citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce was finalized on December 18, 2000.

Azaria began dating former actress Katie Wright in 2007, and the two married later that year. They have a son named Hal (b. 2009). The family has one dog, Truman, and two rescue cats, Mookie and Wilson. In 2013, the family began renting a home on 80th Street in Manhattan, with plans to make a final decision on where to live in two years. They previously lived in a four-bedroom house in Pacific Palisades, which Azaria bought from his Simpsons co-star Dan Castellaneta in 2011. Several weeks earlier, Azaria had sold his home in Bel Air. Azaria previously owned the fifth-floor co-op loft on Mercer Street in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood, which he bought from photographer Cindy Sherman in 2005, before selling it in 2013.

Azaria suffered from alcoholism for several years. He credited his longtime friend Matthew Perry for encouraging him to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and has been sober since about 2006.

Azaria is the godfather of Oliver Platt's son, George. He is also a regular poker player, appearing twice on Celebrity Poker Showdown and competing at other events, finishing a few places short of the bubble in the main event of the 2010 World Series of Poker. Azaria is a supporter of the Democratic Party. He enjoys the music of Elvis Costello and has stated that he would have been a therapist if he were not an actor. Azaria co-founded the educational support charity, "Determined to Succeed".

On May 22, 2016, he was awarded the Honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters (DHL) from Tufts University.

title: Hank Azaria


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Tress MacNeille

Teressa Claire MacNeille (born June 20, 1951) is an American voice actress, who has contributed to voice over work with credits including voicing Dot Warner on the animated television series Animaniacs and its revival, Babs Bunny on Tiny Toon Adventures, Chip and Gadget Hackwrench on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and Daisy Duck in various Disney media since 1999. She has also worked on animated series such as The Simpsons, Futurama, Disenchantment, Rugrats, and Hey Arnold!.

Early life
MacNeille loved cartoons as a child and wanted to be a voice actress from the age of eight, but instead chose a "practical" career, feeling she would never be able to realise her ambition. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended broadcasting school, becoming a disc jockey.

Career
MacNeille worked in numerous jobs and had many minor voiceover roles before becoming a regular on an animated TV show. In her words: "I'd been doing radio spots, some TV, demos, sound-alikes, industrial narrations—anything that came my way for about two years." She was also a member of the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings for ten years. MacNeille took acting workshops and worked as a casting assistant for voice acting talent agent Bob Lloyd in what she calls "The University of Voice-over." Lloyd and fellow agent Rita Vennari got MacNeille her first role on an animated show: a part in an episode of the 1979 Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo.

She sang and appeared (as Lucille Ball) in the music video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Ricky" (1983), which was based on the I Love Lucy television show and parodied the song "Mickey" by Toni Basil. MacNeille and Mary Kay Bergman also appeared on Yankovic's 1999 album Running with Scissors, on the tracks "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi" and "Jerry Springer".

MacNeille was cast as Babs Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–1992). Writer Paul Dini said that MacNeille was good for the role because she could do both Babs's voice and the voices of her impressions. MacNeille commented: "The best part of doing Babs is that she's a mimic, like me...In the show I do Babs doing Billie Burke, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Madonna, and Cher. I even have her doing Jessica Rabbit." The success of Tiny Toon Adventures led to the series Animaniacs. MacNeille was brought in to voice Dot Warner, one of the show's three main characters, because Dot's character was very similar to Babs Bunny. Andrea Romano, the voice director and caster for Animaniacs, said that the casters had "no trouble" choosing the role of Dot: "Tress MacNeille was just hilarious (...) And yet [she had] that edge." MacNeille was nominated for an Annie Award for her performance on the show in 1995.

She has provided voices for numerous films, television shows, video games and commercials, garnering over 200 credits. MacNeille says: "The characters that I do all come from people in my own life – as well as the material I've stolen from my friends!". Her TV roles include characters on The Simpsons, where she voices Agnes Skinner, Brandine Spuckler and Lindsey Naegle, and Futurama, in which her main role was the character Mom. MacNeille has provided voices on many other television shows and cartoons such as Rugrats (as Charlotte Pickles), Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (as Chip and Gadget Hackwrench), TaleSpin (as Kitten Kaboodle), Histeria!, Hey Arnold! and Dave the Barbarian (as Fang), as well as dubbing work on English-language anime translations.

She is the voice of Daisy Duck and Wilma Flintstone since 1999 and 2000 respectively. MacNeille also appeared as an angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and served as the voice of Elvira's Great-Aunt Morganna Talbot. She provided voice acting for the 2003 Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner short feature The Whizzard of Ow.

Personal life
During an interview for Jim Cummings' podcast "Toon'd In! with Jim Cummings", her friend, and Animaniacs cast mate Rob Paulsen mentioned that she has a husband named Mike.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Tress MacNeille


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Pamela Hayden

Pamela Hayden (born November 28, 1953) is an American actress, known for providing various voices for the animated television show The Simpsons, such as Milhouse Van Houten.

Biography
Hayden provides voices for characters in The Simpsons including Bart Simpson’s unlucky best friend Milhouse Van Houten, teenage thug Jimbo Jones, Ned Flanders' first-born son Rod, Chief Wiggum’s wife and Ralph Wiggum‘s mother Sarah, Lois Pennycandy and Lisa Simpson’s friend Janey Powell. She also originally voiced the character of Katrina (Shanks) Meltsner and Doris Rathbone, on the Focus on the Family radio drama Adventures in Odyssey from 1993 to 2000. She is also the voice actress for Bianca from Spyro: Year of the Dragon, Douglas McNoggin on Lloyd in Space and Sublimity Jill/Daughter #2 in Party Wagon.

Video games

 * The Simpsons Cartoon Studio (1996) – Milhouse Van Houten, Jimbo Jones
 * The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield (1997) – Milhouse Van Houten, Rod Flanders
 * Spyro: Year of the Dragon (2000) – Bianca, Handel and Greta, additional voices
 * The Simpsons: Road Rage (2001) – Milhouse Van Houten
 * Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (2002) – Bianca, additional voices
 * The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003) – Milhouse Van Houten, Jimbo Jones, Rod Flanders, additional voices
 * The Simpsons Game (2007) – Milhouse Van Houten, Jimbo Jones, Rod Flanders, additional voices

Theme park

 * The Simpsons Ride (2008) – Milhouse Van Houten

title: Pamela Hayden


text:
Marcia Wallace

Marcia Karen Wallace (November 1, 1942 – October 25, 2013) was an American actress and comedian, primarily known for her roles on sitcoms. She is best known for her roles as receptionist Carol Kester on the 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, Mrs. Carruthers on Full House, and as the voice of elementary school teacher Edna Krabappel on the animated series The Simpsons, for which she won an Emmy in 1992. The character was retired after her death but sporadically appears through archive recording.

Wallace was known for her tall frame, red hair, and distinctive laugh. She had a career spanning five decades on TV, film, and stage. She was a frequent guest on The Merv Griffin Show, which led to her receiving a personal request to appear on The Bob Newhart Show in a role created especially for her. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, she became a cancer activist, and remained so throughout her life.

Early life
Wallace was born in Creston, Iowa, on November 1, 1942, the eldest of three children of Arthur "Poke" Wallace and wife Joann. Her father owned and operated Wallace Sundries, a general merchandise store in the typical small rural country Iowa town, where Marcia, her sister Sharon, and brother Jim would often help. While Wallace was in the local high school, a teacher encouraged her to consider a career in acting after she did well in a school play. Following her 1960 graduation from Creston High School, Wallace attended nearby Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, which had offered her a full scholarship. She was a member of the Delta Nu chapter of Delta Zeta sorority. At Parsons, she majored in English and Theater, graduating in 1964, and performing in several campus productions, including Brigadoon and The Music Man.

Career
On the day she graduated from college at Parsons, Wallace moved from Iowa to New York with $148 in her pocket. To make ends meet, she typed scripts, performed in summer stock local theatre, did commercials, and worked as a substitute English teacher in The Bronx in the late 1960s. After performing for a year in a New York City / Greenwich Village nightclub, Wallace and four fellow entertainer friends formed an improvisational group called The Fourth Wall. In 1968, Wallace appeared for a year off-Broadway with the group. Afterwards, she made several other appearances in improvisational shows, and, after losing 100 lb from her previous weight of 230, appeared in a nude production of Dark of the Moon at the avant-garde Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village (now known as The Kitchen - a performing arts institution relocated to the West Village area of Manhattan).

Wallace was a semiregular on The Merv Griffin Show long-running syndicated daytime talk / variety show, appearing over 75 times. When the show moved its production from New York to Los Angeles, Wallace moved with it at Griffin's request. One of these appearances in March 1972 led to a phone call from TV producer Grant Tinker (husband of comedic actress and fellow producer Mary Tyler Moore), who offered her a supporting role on their new The Bob Newhart Show on the recommendation of CBS-TV  founder and longtime chairman William S. ("Bill") Paley. The role of "Carol Kester" (later "Carol Kester Bondurant"), the sarcastic and eccentric office receptionist to "Dr. Robert Hartley", Bob Newhart's central character, was written specifically for her. Newhart and Wallace later reprised their roles from The Bob Newhart Show to guest roles on "Anything but Cured", an episode of Murphy Brown (starring Candice Bergen).

When The Bob Newhart Show ended its six-season run in 1978, Wallace began three decades of television appearances on various game shows, including Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Password Plus and Super Password, Celebrity Whew!, Crosswits, Hot Potato, Body Language, The $25,000 Pyramid, Double Talk, Win, Lose or Draw, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, and Acting Crazy. She was also on special celebrity episodes of the Ray Combs version of Family Feud and the Jim Perry version of Card Sharks. In April 2008, she appeared on the interactive show GSN Live on the cable TV channel Game Show Network (GSN).

Other brief television roles include: as Samantha's husband Darrin's secretary in "Laugh, Clown, Laugh", a Bewitched episode in 1971; two appearances on The Brady Bunch: once as Marcia's teacher in "Getting Davy Jones" and once as the woman who sells Jan a mod wig in "Will the Real Jan Brady Please Stand Up?"; as school principal Mrs. Lyman in two episodes of ALF; as Mrs. Carruthers in a few episodes of Full House. Wallace also had guest appearances on programs Charles in Charge, Murder, She Wrote, Magnum, P.I., Columbo, and A Different World. On one of the last episodes of Taxi, she portrayed herself, chosen as the ideal date of Rev. Jim Ignatowski. Later, Wallace played the maid on the satirical series That's My Bush!, and, in 2009, appeared on the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless, playing Annie Wilkes, an inefficient assistant kidnapper.

After The Simpsons cartoon / animated series started in 1989, Wallace joined the voice acting cast as the voice of Edna Krabappel, whom she played until her death in 2013. In 1992, she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for the episode "Bart the Lover" on The Simpsons.

On film, Wallace appeared in such features as My Mom's a Werewolf, Teen Witch, and Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. In the 2008 film Tru Loved, she played a high school drama teacher who sponsors a gay–straight alliance.

Wallace's work onstage included An Almost Perfect Person in Los Angeles, which she also produced; a tour of the female version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple; and productions of Same Time, Next Year, Twigs, It Had to Be You, Supporting Cast, Prisoner of Second Avenue, and Plaza Suite. Wallace made her musical stage debut in the August 1983 California Musical Theatre's Sacramento Music Circus production of Gypsy: A Musical Fable about the famous entertainer and dancer Gypsy Rose Lee in Sacramento. (based on her 1957 memoirs / autobiography and first performed on the stage in 1962 and followed by a feature film and subsequent stage revivals over later decades). She returned the following season in the musicale Promises, Promises. Other stage productions included Born Yesterday, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Steel Magnolias, and Last of the Red Hot Lovers, in which she played all three female roles at various times. She performed in The Vagina Monologues production in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Diego. In 2013, shortly before her passing, she voiced the character of the librarian in Monsters University, and in 2014 (posthumously) she portrayed herself in the movie Muffin Top: A Love Story.

Personal life
Wallace married hotelier Dennis Hawley on May 18, 1986, in a Buddhist ceremony. The couple adopted an infant son, Michael Wallace "Mikey" Hawley. Dennis died from pancreatic cancer in June 1992.

Before her marriage, Wallace was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, after which she became an activist and lecturer on the subject. On January 27, 2007, Wallace won the Gilda Radner Courage Award. It was annually given by the longtime nationally prominent institution in the medical fight against the disease of cancer, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. It was given to her six years before her death for helping educate Americans about the importance of early cancer detection and inspiring others through her 20 years as a breast cancer survivor.

Wallace was a member of Delta Zeta sorority from her college years at Parsons College in Iowa, and was named the "Delta Zeta 2010 Woman of the Year" at their 2010 Biennial National Convention in Tucson, Arizona. Her autobiography, titled Don't Look Back, We're Not Going That Way, was published in 2004. Besides describing her film and TV career, the book importantly recounts the early detection of her breast cancer, the early loss of her husband Dennis, her nervous breakdown, her single motherhood, and other personal experiences such as a private history of bulimia. She credited the title of the book to her father, who used the phrase often during her childhood.

She was noted on a list of "Famous Iowans" by her important state capital daily newspaper, the Des Moines Register, in November 2013.

Illness, death and funeral
Wallace died from pneumonia and sepsis on October 25, 2013, at age 70. Breast cancer was also listed as a significant condition on her death certificate. Wallace was cremated following a private funeral service. Staff on The Simpsons had reportedly been aware of her ill health. Showrunner Al Jean said, "I was tremendously saddened to learn this morning of the passing of the brilliant and gracious Marcia Wallace." Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson, tweeted, "Heaven is now a much funnier place b/c of you, Marcia." Former co-star Bob Newhart commented on his Facebook fan page, "Marcia's death came as quite a shock, she left us too early. She was a talented actress and dear friend[.]" Al Jean said that producers planned to retire her "irreplaceable" character Edna Krabappel. The Simpsons episode "Four Regrettings and a Funeral" was shown on November 3, 2013, and dedicated to her. Wallace had recorded lines for several upcoming episodes, and her final episode, "The Man Who Grew Too Much," aired on March 9, 2014. In February 2021, it was announced that archival recordings of Marcia Wallace's voice that she provided as Edna Krabappel would be making a final appearance on The Simpsons. The character is mentioned in a chalkboard gag and shown in flashback scenes in the show's 696th episode, entitled "Diary Queen." In an interview with Variety regarding the announcement, Al Jean remarked: "we never got the chance to give sort of a proper goodbye to her in the show, and this is a small attempt to do that."

title: Marcia Wallace


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Israel Shahak

Israel Shahak (ישראל שחק; born Israel Himmelstaub, 28 April 1933 – 2 July 2001) was an Israeli professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Holocaust survivor, an intellectual of liberal political bent, and a civil-rights advocate and activist on behalf of both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews). For twenty years, he headed the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights (1970–90) and was a public critic of the policies of the governments of Israel. As a public intellectual, Shahak's works about Judaism proved controversial, especially the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994).

Biography
Israel Shahak was born Israel Himmelstaub, in 1933, in Warsaw, Poland, and was the youngest child of a cultured, Zionist family of Ashkenazi Jews. During the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Poland (1939–1945) interned the Shahak family to the Warsaw Ghetto; yet his elder brother escaped from Poland to the United Kingdom, where he joined the Royal Air Force. Life in occupied Poland forced Shahak's mother to pay a Roman Catholic family to hide Israel, whom they returned when she could not afford their safe-keeping him from the Nazis.

In 1943, the Nazis sent the Shahak family to the Poniatowa concentration camp, to the west of Lublin, where his father died. Fortuitously, the ten-year-old boy and his mother escaped from the Poniatowa camp, and returned to Warsaw; yet, within a year, whilst emptying the city of Jews, the Nazis recaptured Israel and his mother, and imprisoned them in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they survived for 2 years, until the camp and its inmates were liberated in 1945 by the British Army. At age 13, in 1946, he re-examined the idea of God's existence and concluded that evidence for the theory was lacking. As displaced persons, mother and son managed to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, where Shahak's application to join a kibbutz was denied, because he was judged to be physically too slender.

Post-war, the twelve-year-old Israel worked and studied and supported his mother, whose health had deteriorated in Bergen-Belsen. After a religious Jewish education at boarding school in the village of Kfar Hassidim, Israel and his mother moved to the city of Tel Aviv. Upon graduation from secondary school, Shahak served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). After the military service, he earned a doctorate in chemistry, at Hebrew University.

In the course of his professional career as a scientist, Shahak's work in organic chemistry produced science about organic compounds of the element fluorine (F), contributed to cancer research, for which he gained an international reputation and included posting as an assistant to Ernst David Bergmann, the nuclear physicist who was chairman (1952) of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC). In 1961, Shahak pursued post-doctoral studies at Stanford University, in the U.S.; in 1963, he returned to Israel, where he became a popular lecturer and researcher in chemistry, at Hebrew University; moreover, by 1965, Shahak actively participated in the Israeli politics of the day.

In 1990, the academic Shahak retired from the faculty of Hebrew University, because of poor health (diabetes mellitus) and greater interest in research work in other fields of intellectual enquiry. For most of his adult life, Shahak resided in the Rehavia neighborhood in West Jerusalem; at the age of 68 years, he died of diabetic complications, and was buried in the Givat Shaul cemetery.

Shahak had a deep affinity with Spinoza: he always packed a copy of The Ethics in his suitcase for reading during his periodic stints of service in the Israel Defense Forces, and had been writing a book on the philosopher before his death. His activities as a public intellectual fighting for human rights causes and for a secular state earned him a reputation for controversy, and frequent abuse. He was regularly spat on, frequently given death threats, and decried variously as an Israel basher, self-hating Jew, traitor, and enemy of the people.

Public intellectual
In the late 1950s, as a citizen of Israel, Shahak became politically engaged on hearing a comment of David Ben-Gurion that, with the Suez War (29 October 1956 – 7 November 1956), the State of Israel was fighting to achieve "the kingdom of David and Solomon". In the 1960s he joined the Israeli League Against Religious Coercion. In 1965, he began political activism against "Classical Judaism" and Zionism; and wrote a letter to Haaretz about having witnessed an Orthodox Jew "refusing to let his phone be used on the Sabbath to help a non-Jew who had collapsed nearby"; in Israel, Shahak's complaint began a long-running debate about the attitudes (religious and cultural) of Orthodox Judaism towards gentiles.

In 1967, after the Six-Day War (5–10 June 1967), Shahak ended his membership to the League Against Religious Coercion, because they were "fake liberals" who used the principles of Liberalism to combat coercive religious influence in Israeli society — but did not apply such protections to the Israeli Palestinians living in the IDF-occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. In the event, Shahak joined the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, and became its president in 1970. The League, composed of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, protested and publicized Israel's restrictive policies against Palestinians and provided legal aid to them. Some settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron so hated him that in 1971 they had their pick-up truck painted with "Dr. Shahak To The Gallows".

In 1969, Shahak and another member of the faculty of Hebrew University staged a sit-down protest against the Israeli government's policy of jailing politically active Palestinian students, by way of administrative detention authorised by state-of-emergency laws; likewise, Shahak supported the political efforts of Palestinian students to achieve equal rights, like those granted to Jewish Israelis, at Hebrew University. In 1970, Shahak established the Committee Against Administrative Detentions to formally oppose such legalised political repression.

To make public what he considered the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian legalised discrimination, Shahak published English translations of Hebrew-language reportage about illegal and unjust actions of the Israeli government against the gentile citizens of Israel; Shahak's English reports were intended for the Jewish community of the U.S. The translated reports featured headlines such as "Torture in Israel," and "Collective Punishment in the West Bank", which Shahak sent to journalists, academics, and human rights activists, and so ensured that the mainstream population of the U.S. would be informed of the religious discrimination practised by the government of Israel.

Civil rights advocate
As a public intellectual, Shahak wrote about the Israeli government's actions against the non-Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, such as the suppression of freedom of speech and general political activity; land ordinances, living restrictions, and the confiscation of lands from non-Jews; the destruction of houses; legally-sanctioned unequal pay and work restrictions; emergency-defence regulations allowing the summary arrest, detention, and torture of prisoners (civil and military); the collective punishment of communities; the assassinations of leaders (religious, political, academic); racial discrimination in access to education; and the deprivation of Israeli citizenship. Such political activities earned Shahak much hostility and death threats; after the 1982 Lebanon War (June 1982 – June 1985), Shahak also reported Israeli abuses of the populations of Lebanon.

In effort to explain the behaviour of the State of Israel towards their Arab neighbours, Shahak proposed that the Israeli interpretation of Jewish history produced a society who disregard the human rights of the Arab peoples, within Israel and around Israel. That Zionism was a "régime based on structural discrimination and racism".

In the book review of a festschrift in honour of Rabbi Elmer Berger Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections (1988), Sheldon Richman characterized Shahak's interpretation of Zionism as viewing it as an atavistic reaction against the European Enlightenment's individualism that strove to revive the suffocating world of the Jewish ghetto. The founders of the movement did not believe Jews could lead a normal existence in democratic societies. In this sense, for Shahak, Zionism can be thought of as "a mirror image of anti-Semitism," in that, in common with antisemites, Zionists considered Jews to be aliens who must be quarantined from the rest of the world, a viewpoint Shahak read as capitulating to European antisemitism. For Richman, Shahak's analysis shed light on the tragic consequences that followed upon the establishment of Israel, as Arabs were swept away to forge a state for Jews alone.

In letters published in the Ha'aretz and Kol Ha'ir newspapers, Shahak criticized the political hypocrisy demonstrated by the radical Left in their uncritical support of the Palestinian nationalist movements. In his obituary of Shahak, Christopher Hitchens said that Shahak's house was "a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed", and that:

"The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation — none were ever turned away. I have met influential 'civil society' Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him, not just for his consistent stand against discrimination, but also because — he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion, and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, 'I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation, and I can 'visit' them as a privileged citizen.'"

Shahak was also active in protesting the public burning of Christian books such as occurred on 23 March 1980 when Yad Le-akhim, a religious organization that was at the time a beneficiary of subsidies from the Ministry of Religion, ceremonially incinerated hundreds of copies of the New Testament publicly in Jerusalem.

Author
Among the books publish by Israel Shahak are Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1994), co-authored by Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994), and Open Secrets: Israel's Nuclear and Foreign Policies (1997). In the introduction to the 2004 edition of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, the historian Mezvinsky said, "We realize that, by criticizing Jewish fundamentalism, we are criticizing a part of the past that we love. We wish that members of every human grouping would criticize their own past, even before criticizing others."

Alleged telephone incident
In 1965, Shahak wrote a letter to the Haaretz newspaper, about an injustice he witnessed; that letter originated "the current major debate within and outside Israel about Orthodox Jewish attitudes to non-Jews." In the letter, Shahak said he witnessed an Orthodox Jew refuse the use of his telephone to call for an ambulance for a non-Jew, because it was the Shabbat. Shahak added that the Beth din, the rabbinical court of Jerusalem, had confirmed that the Orthodox Jew correctly understood Halakha law on Pikuach nefesh regarding non-Jews and the Sabbath, and quoted passages from a recent legal compilation.

Consequently, the cultural matter of a religiously-denied telephone became public political discussion in the Israeli press and the Jewish press abroad, all of which directed attention to Shahak as a public intellectual in the cultural politics of Israel. The Jewish Chronicle in London stated that "The halakha (Jewish law) abounds in such abominations ... in conflict with the humane instincts within which anyone raised in Jewish tradition is imbued." In the Maariv newspaper, the minister of religious affairs, Rabbi Dr. Zerach Warhaftig said that the Orthodox rabbinical ruling was correct, but quoted traditional Jewish passages that allowed a Jewish physician to save the life of a non-Jew on the Sabbath, despite not being religiously required to do so.

Public controversy
In 1966, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits disputed the veracity of Shahak's story, claiming that Israel Shahak had been compelled to admit that the incident had not occurred. He cited a lengthy responsum, by Isser Yehuda Unterman, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who said that "the Sabbath must be violated to save non-Jewish life no less than Jewish lives", and cited a ruling by Rabbi Menachem Meiri that Jews should desecrate the Sabbath to save a gentile's life. The opinions of these rabbis derived from the book Noda B'Yehuda (Known in Judah), in which the 18th-century religious authority Yechezkel Landau said: "I emphatically declare that in all laws contained in the Jewish writings concerning theft, fraud, etc. no distinction is made between Jew and Gentile; that the (Talmudic) legal categories goy, akum (idolater) etc., in no way apply to the people among whom we live."

In 1967, Ze'ev Falk, while dissociating himself from Shahak's Sabbath story which he regarded as an invention, acknowledged that it was this "fiction" and method of action which had indeed brought about Rabbi Unterman's ruling that allowed the Sabbath to be violated to save the lives of Gentiles. For him, Unterman's ruling may have opened a "new page" in Orthodox Jewish attitudes to righteous Gentiles and non-Jews alike.

The history book
Despite the controversy, Shahak published his account of the telephone in the first chapter of Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1994), and said that "neither the Israeli, nor the diaspora rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. They added much sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that, if the consequence of such an act puts Jews in danger, the violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake."

In 2008, seven years after Shahak's death, the controversy of religious interpretation continued when Rabbi Shmuley Boteach doubted the veracity of Shahak's report of Jewish injustice against a non-Jew: "From the beginning, the story was curious. What prohibition could there possibly be, in allowing someone else to use one's phone on the Sabbath?" In support, he cited Eli Beer, the chief coordinator of Israel's volunteer ambulance service (1,100 medical personnel, 60 per cent Orthodox), who said, "If someone would say we won't save a non-Jewish life on the Sabbath, he is a liar. If he is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim we save everyone's life on any day of the year, including the Sabbath and Yom Kippur, and I have done so myself. Indeed, as an Orthodox Jew it is my greatest honor to save the life of a non-Jew, and I would violate any of the Jewish holy days to do so."

Jewish History, Jewish Religion
In 1994, Shahak published Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, about Jewish fundamentalism, which history professor Norton Mezvinsky, at Central Connecticut State University, said is a:

"Scathing attack upon Classical Judaism and its more modern outgrowth, Orthodox Judaism.... As a lover of prophetic Judaism and as a disciple of Spinoza, Shahak, in a learned and rational manner, condemned the parochialism, racism, and hatred of non-Jews, which too often appeared in the Judaism that developed during and after the Talmudic period, and which, to a goodly extent, still exists."

That the initial history of most nations is ethnocentric, and that, in time, by way of a period of critical self-analysis, the nation incorporates the social perspectives of the Other, of the ethnic groups living among them. That, after the Age of Enlightenment, the Jewish emancipation from legal and religious social subordination was a dual liberation — from Christian antisemitism and from the rabbinate of conservative Judaism, and their "imposed scriptural control" upon daily Jewish life.

The journalist Robert Fisk said that the examination of Jewish fundamentalism is invaluable, because Shahak concludes that: "There can no longer be any doubt that the most horrifying acts of oppression in the West Bank are motivated by Jewish religious fanaticism.' He quotes from an official exhortation to religious Jewish soldiers about Gentiles, published by the Israeli army's Central Region Command, in which the chief chaplain writes: 'When our forces come across civilians during a war, or in hot pursuit, or a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then, according to the Halakhah (the legal system of Classical Judaism) they may and even should be killed... In no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilised.... In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed, and even enjoined, by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good."

In his foreword to the second edition (1997), Edward Said said that Shahak was "one of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East" who he credits with doing more to dissipate the "ideological smoke screen" of Zionism than any other single individual. He goes on to describe Shahak as "un- and anti-racist" and emphasizes Shahak's consistency in applying a single standard for infractions against human rights. Said describes Shahak's writing as "rigorous and uncompromising", often at the expense of putting things "'nicely'".

Said comments specifically about Jewish History, Jewish Religion as a powerful contribution to the study of Judaism and rabbinical and Talmudic traditions and it's associated scholarship. In summary, he describes this work:"Shahak shows that the obscure, narrowly chauvinist prescriptions against various undesirable Others are to be found in Judaism (as well of course as other monotheistic traditions) but he also then goes on to show the continuity between those and the way Israel treats Palestinians, Christians and other non-Jews. A devastating portrait of prejudice, hypocrisy and religious intolerance emerges."About his other writing, Said also emphasized Shahak's willingness to criticize Palestinian policies, addressing "the PLO's sloppiness, its ignorance of Israel, its inability to resolutely oppose Israel, its shabby compromises and cult of personality, its general lack of seriousness."

In his book review, Werner Cohn said that Shahak was making "grotesque charges" and that specific passages in Jewish History, Jewish Religion are without foundation:

"Some are just funny. He says (pp. 23-4) that 'Jewish children are actually taught' to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery. He also tells us (p. 34) that 'both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God... but on the other he is worshiping Satan...' I did take the trouble to question my orthodox rabbi nephew to find what might be behind such tall tales. He had no clue. If orthodox Jews were actually taught such hateful things, surely someone would have heard. Whom is Dr. Shahak kidding?."

The remark regarding children passing a cemetery occurs in Shahak's discussion of passages modified by rabbis who, under pressure from antisemitic Christian authorities such as those in Tzarist Russia, altered the texts, while keeping private copies of the originals which, according to Shahak were restored as the proper manuscript readings and published in Israel after the founding of the state of Israel.

Samuel Heilman writing for the Review of Middle East Studies gave a negative review and proposed to dispose the book " into the same dustbin as the infamous anti-Jewish tract and fraud, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Critical reception
As a public intellectual, Israel Shahak was accused of fabricating the incidents he reported, of blaming the victim, of distorting the normative meaning of Jewish religious texts, and of misrepresenting Jewish belief and law. Paul Bogdanor claimed that Shahak "regaled his audience with a stream of outrageous libels, ludicrous fabrications, and transparent hoaxes. As each successive allegation was exposed and discredited, he would simply proceed to a new invention." Ari Alexander, co-founder of the Children of Abraham Organization for Jewish–Islamic dialogue, said that, despite the use of Shahak's works by neo-Nazis and anti-Israel organisations in Arab countries:

"The texts that Shahak cites are real (though Shahak's sporadic use of footnotes makes it difficult to check all of them). Often, the interpretation [by Shahak] of these texts is debatable, and their prominence in Judaism negligible, but, nonetheless, they are part of Jewish tradition, and, therefore, cannot be ignored."

Accusations of being an antisemite were among the responses to Shahak's works about Judaism and the Talmud. In that vein, in The Talmud in Anti-Semitic Polemics, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) listed Shahak as one of four authors of antisemitic polemics, and Bogdanor said that in his works, Shahak was "recycling Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda". Werner Cohn said, "without question, he is the world's most conspicuous Jewish anti-Semite.... Like the Nazis before him, Shahak specialized in defaming the Talmud. In fact, he has made it his life's work to popularize the anti–Talmud ruminations of the eighteenth-century German anti-Semite, Johann Eisenmenger". Emanuele Ottolenghi, reviewing Alexander and Bogdanor's book, argued that Jews such as Shahak, George Steiner, Tanya Reinhart, Tony Judt, Avi Shlaim, Seymour Hersh and Daniel Boyarin act as enablers for antisemites, because the rhetoric of antisemitic Jews plays a "crucial role... in excusing, condoning, and — in effect — abetting anti-Semitism." In his opinion, "Anti-Semites rely on Jews to confirm their prejudice: If Jews recur to such language, and advocate such policies, how can anyone be accused of anti-Semitism, for making the same arguments?... The mechanism through which an anti-Semitic accusation becomes respectable once a Jew endorses it is not limited to Israel's new historians.... Israel Shahak made the comparison between Israel and Nazism respectable — all the while describing Judaism according to the medieval canons of the blood libel".

The journalist Dan Rickman argues that

"Shahak ignores [the dialectical nature and humanist] aspects of the sources. Further, through overstating his case, his analysis fits into anti-Semitic traditions of such accusations against the Talmud. Copies of the Talmud have been burned, and the text of the Talmud that is studied today is still heavily censored. Shahak's view that chauvinism in these sources in any way 'justifies' anti-Semitism is also very troubling. However, I do believe that his trenchant critique of Judaism is, tragically, not without some force. The contemporary situation is that we do see some modern Orthodox rabbis utilise xenophobic sources in modern rulings. Orthodox rabbis in organisations such as Rabbis for Human Rights are sadly the exception rather than the rule."

Death
Shahak died of diabetes in July 2001 and was buried in Giv'at Shaul cemetery, Jerusalem. His death was the occasion of tribute and criticism; the Bar-Ilan University historian Haim Genizi, said that "Shahak's extreme anti-Israeli statements were welcomed by the PLO, and [were] widely circulated in pro–Arab circles", in detriment to the interests of the State of Israel. Gore Vidal said Shahak was "the latest, if not the last, of the great prophets", regarding the influence of religion upon the civil law of society. Norton Mezvinsky, said that his friend and collaborator was "a rare intellectual giant and a superior humanist"; in that vein, Edward Said said that Shahak was "a very brave man who should be honored for his services to humanity." An obituary in Haaretz called him "the scourge of nationalists".

Christopher Hitchens considered Shahak a "dear friend and comrade... [who was] a brilliant and devoted student of the archaeology of Jerusalem and Palestine", who, "during his chairmanship of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, set a personal example that would be very difficult to emulate." Alexander Cockburn, writing in Antiwar.com, described Shahak the intellectual, the "tireless translator and erudite foot-noter... a singular man, an original." Allan C. Brownfeld, of the American Council for Judaism, recalled a humanist who actively opposed "racism and oppression in any form and in any country"; that Shahak possessed a "genuinely prophetic Jewish voice, one which ardently advocated democracy and human rights." In an obituary, the journalist Elfi Pallis called Shahak essentially "an old-fashioned liberal" in principle, thought, and action. Moreover, Michel Warschawski said that Israel Shahak was "the last Israeli liberal", who was "above all, one of the last philosophers of the eighteenth-century school of enlightenment, rationalism, and liberalism, in the American meaning of the concept."

Selected bibliography

 * Israel Shahak, (ed.), The Non-Jew in the Jewish State; a collection of Documents, Jerusalem, 1975
 * Israel Shahak (ed), Begin & Co as they really are, Glasgow 1977
 * Israel Shahak and Noam Chomsky, Israel's Global Role: Weapons for Repression (Studies in Geophysical Optics and Remote Sensing), Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., April 1982, paperback, ISBN 0-937694-51-7
 * Israel Shahak, Israel's Global Role: Weapons for Repression (Special Reports, No. 4), Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1982, paperback
 * Israel Shahak, (ed.), The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (a translation of Oded Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" or the "Yinon Plan", Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., October 1982, paperback, ISBN 0-937694-56-8
 * Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years: Pluto Press, London, 1994, ISBN 978-0-7453-0819-7; Pluto Press, London, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7453-2840-9
 * Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, Pluto Press, London, 1997
 * Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Middle Eastern Series), Pluto Press (UK), October 1999, hardcover, 176 pages, ISBN 0-7453-1281-0; trade paperback, Pluto Press, (UK), October 1999, ISBN 0-7453-1276-4; 2nd edition with new introduction by Norton Mezvinsky, trade paperback July 2004, 224 pages

title: Israel Shahak


text:
Loose Booty

Loose Booty may refer to:

 * "Loose Booty", a song by Funkadelic from the 1972 album America Eats Its Young
 * "Loose Booty", a song by Sly and the Family Stone from the 1974 album Small Talk (Sly and the Family Stone album)
 * "Loose Booty", a song by Faster Pussycat from the 1992 album Whipped!

title: Loose Booty