The Last Jew of Boyle Heights: A Showcase for Acting Talent

Aug 6, 2019 by Two Sues On the Aisle

By Sue Weston and Susan Rosenbluth, Two Sues on the Aisle

Steve Greenstein the writer and director of “The Last Jew of Boyle Heights,” which was seen last month at the Actors Temple Theatre in Manhattan, created an environment to showcase the breadth and talent of the cast.

Imagine sitting in the audience, and having the person sitting directly in front and behind begin speaking just as the lights dim. My immediate thought was, “Only in New York – sigh,” but then that is how the play began. We in the audience were joining them on a train to Boyle Heights, California, and what a ride it is! 

Eliud Kauffman, playing the part of Ortiz, gave his all to the role, playing a Hispanic labor organizer, proud of his purple heart and outraged by immigration policies. As Hersh, the Holocaust survivor who now owns a factory, Jeffrey Farber was believable as a self-made man whose focus is making money and loses everything when his factory explodes.

Making his Off-Broadway debut, Marco Torriani, played the boss’s son, Joshua, who is challenged to balance his devotion to family with his love for an illegal factory worker.

The dynamics and interplay between the cast work well to keep the building tension, but the plot appeared contrived as Greenstein attempts to connect immigration, OSHA, unions, and the Holocaust. While the range of scenarios offered wonderful ways to stretch the cast, showing an amazing range of emotions, including love, grief, defeat, and resilience, it failed to connect the themes to make a moral statement. 

Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine the Off-Broadway theatergoer who would fail to find it an enjoyable evening. I for one left the theater richer for the experience.

***

The Last Jews of Boyle Heights: An Overreach That Comes Close to Trivializing the Holocaust

By Susan L. Rosenbluth

It’s always dangerous to attempt to equate the Holocaust to other situations of inequality or unfairness, and when Jewish Holocaust survivors are singled out for unexemplary behavior, the result comes perilously close to a double-standard verging on antisemitism.

This is the case in Steve Greenstein’s “The Last Jew of Boyle Heights,” which was featured last month in performances at the Actors Temple Theatre in Manhattan.

In the 1950s, the Boyle Heights neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles was racially and ethnically diverse, with Jewish and Mexican immigrants living cheek-to-jowl with others from Russia, Yugoslavia, Portugal, and Japan. By the 1990s, when “The Last Jew of Boyle Heights” takes place, the neighborhood was 94 percent Hispanic. The others left not so much because of racism, but, rather, in the wake of banks refusing to grant mortgages in order to prompt the construction of several freeways through the community.

This, then, is the setting for Mr. Greenstein’s play, which pits Hersh (Jeffrey Farber), a Holocaust survivor who came to the United States penniless and built a successful toy factory, against Ortiz (Eliud Kauffman), a Mexican-American Vietnam veteran who works for Hersh and enrages his employer with his efforts to unionize the factory.

Even the hint of a suggestion that there is any comparison between Hersh’s experience and Ortiz’s is outrageous. The biggest problem Ortiz and Hersh’s other Latino employees face is how to resist and stave off deportation. Mr. Greenstein’s obvious displeasure in a Holocaust survivor who wants to obey American law rather than break it so that the illegals can stay in the country reeks of unfairness itself. The playwright’s not-so-subtle inference that Hersh resembles Nazi-loving Henry Ford because of his resistance to unions is creepy.

There is no comparison between the Nazis’ ruthless Nuremberg decrees and America’s immigration laws. In the US, no one, not even Hersh, is seeking to murder, enslave, starve, or torture anyone. The worst the American authorities can do to undocumented migrants is send them back to their home countries. The real worst American officials can do, as Mr. Greenstein demonstrates, is fail to do their jobs properly.

Mr. Greenstein complicates the plot by inserting a budding romance between Hersh’s son (Marco Torriani) and a lovely Latina employee, Maria (played to effervescent perfection by Francisca Muñoz). Given the American government’s predilection, especially during the 1990s, for regulations that would gladly shut down a factory rather than chance a bureaucrat’s being blamed for a catastrophe, Mr. Greenstein’s tragic ending seems better suited for the era of the Triangle Factory fire, but because his characters are so finely drawn and the young lovers so irresistible, the emotions provoked are real.

Mr. Kauffman’s Ortiz is a wonder. By turns charming, wounded, enraged, and amused, he is the heart of the play and, in many ways, really is “The Last Jew of Boyle Heights.”