Jason Alexander

“IT SPECIFICALLY SAYS in the Torah that you can eat shrimp and bacon in a Chinese restaurant,” pronounces actor Jason Alexander—formerly Jay Greenspan—as he sits in a maroon sweater in a corner banquette of a New York restaurant near Lincoln Center.

While he was growing up, the Greenspan family of New Jersey did Jewish rituals “by the book”—separate dishes, never mixing meat and dairy, celebrating every holiday, a perfect Jewish report card—except, that is, when they ate Chinese out. He recalls seizing on this hypocrisy to argue his parents out of forcing him to attend Hebrew school. “I mean, it was a pig parade in these Chinese restaurants!” he protests. “So my logic with Mom and Dad was that, ‘If these traditions have that little significance ultimately for you—the big, grown-up enforcers of this Judaic world— why the hell am I going through all this?”

Does he recall his parents’ response? “Oh sure. They said, ‘There are people in this world who would kill you just because you’re a Jew, and you have to know what you’re dying for.’” He laughs. “This was a real incentive program.” He eventually gave up trying to enlighten his folks. “These were very brief conversations because they were pointless, and even in my eleven-year-old mind I knew they were pointless. So I just toughed it out until the bar mitzvah.”

Though he dreaded Sunday school, he always looked forward to “lovely” Passover seders. “Just like most of the Jewish families I know, getting through the Haggadah meant,” he nudges an imaginary cousin, “‘Skip a bit, brother.’ God forbid you should suffer through the entire book!” His mother cooked most of the multiple-course meal. “There was just abundance,” Alexander recalls. “You have to have a brisket, of course, in case somebody doesn’t like chicken.”

When Alexander, now forty-six, was finally bar mitzvah, he washed his hands of observance for a while. “I was finished to the point that I don’t think I ever did a Yom Kippur fast again. I was pretty done.”

He says part of his disengagement was his discomfort with the concept of one supreme deity. “I just could never muster the ego to believe that when I speak, Paine Webber listens. I kind of think about it this way: ‘I think there’s an ultimate spirituality and morality that keeps the universe balanced and in harmony. But I don’t know if any of that requires reading the Torah, or growing my sideburns really long.’”

So, despite a somewhat observant childhood, he felt almost no qualms about giving it all up. “It was fairly simple,” he says. “Except I remember the first time I ate on Yom Kippur and I went, ‘You know, if I’m wrong, then this is probably a death sentence right now.’” He laughs. “So I took the Woody Allen approach of ‘I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I’m taking a change of underwear just in case.’ It was always, ‘Oh, God, I’m not showing up to temple today—but no offense!’”

He says he married a Jewish woman by accident; he hadn’t been looking for one. “I was very attracted to blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, very Aryan, Nordic, which is not your average, typical Jewish girl. And amazingly, my wife looks nothing like that and I found her very attractive.” His parents were relieved—“It was very important to them,” he concedes, adding that both his brother and sister had already married non-Jews. Still, he says he didn’t choose a Jewish wife for the sake of his parents. “I was not a good enough son to worry about it.”

Now that he’s been married to Daena Title for twenty-four years, Alexander says that sharing a similar background helps. “The more common your mutual knowledge is to each other, the easier it becomes. Not that it isn’t fascinating to have your eyes opened to all new things by someone you’re in love with, but on that particular level of religious background, there is nothing that divides us. So there was no question about who’s going to marry us, or ‘If we have children, what will they be?’ Daena and I both grew up with twenty-seven Yiddish tunes that we can reference when needed.”

Their traditional Jewish wedding vows were modified a bit to accommodate Daena’s egalitarian sensibility. “There’s a ritual where the husband basically says, ‘With this ring I consecrate you unto me,’” Alexander explains. “So Daena asks the rabbi, ‘And then what do I say?’ And the rabbi said, ‘Well, you don’t say anything; once the man says that, it’s done.’ Daena went, ‘Hold the phone: he’ll be consecrating himself unto me as well.’ The rabbi said, ‘Well, he can say it, but it doesn’t mean anything,’ and Daena said, ‘It will mean something to me.’”

Their two boys—Gabe, born in 1991, and Noah, born in 1996—were both circumcised, but not without their parents’ hesitation. “It was a real decision with Gabie for many reasons, not the least of which was that Gabie was born sick—he was born with a pneumonia-like infection, and he was in intensive care for ten days before going home. This whole notion that a perfect little baby comes out and then he’s sick and we put him through this living hell for the first ten days of his life and then we say, ‘And now we’re going whack the tip of his dick off’—just didn’t feel right.

“We went back and forth on it. Apparently many couples do it because there’s a desire on the father’s part to have his son look like him, but I had none of that, at least that I was conscious of. We did it only because we said, ‘Look, we’re probably going to give them a Jewish education of some kind and it is possible—unlikely, but possible—that our sons will have more of a feeling for this than we do and want to be more religious than we are. In which case, they’re going to be ostracized for not being circumcised. So why don’t we just get it over with while there’s no memory of it, and no stigma on it.’ And that’s what we opted to do. But it was not a slam-dunk. It was a real hard decision.”

Despite Alexander’s dreary memories of Hebrew school, he’s already enrolled his young boys. “Part of it is the same dopey reason my parents gave to me,” he says sheepishly. “I’ve even used the same line with them: ‘Somebody’s going to kill you one day because you’re a Jew. You might as well know what you’re dying for.’ ”

Though Daena also likes the idea of their sons getting Jewish history, she worries about the brand of indoctrination. “Daena feels that Judaism is a sexist religion,” Alexander says with a smile. “She thinks most religions are sexist religions. So Gabe comes home and she’ll say things like”—he puts on a detective’s suspecting voice— “‘What did they tell you today?’” He laughs. “So she can de-program him.”

Alexander confesses he has a secret fantasy that motivates him to keep his kids in Jewish school. “When I was twenty-nine, I had a life-changing experience by going to Israel,” he says. “Not the religious Judaism, but the cultural connection. It became important to me. And my fantasy is that my kids will, individually, as they prepare for their bar mitzvahs, learn this history and this journey that their people have taken, and I will take them by the hand to Israel and say, ‘Here’s where it all happened . The history is real.’ That to me is worth four years of going through some hard Sundays.”

Alexander has become very involved in peace efforts in Israel, but he is often reluctant to agree to front a Jewish cause. “You know I’m the first one to say, ‘If I can, I will, but you really got the wrong Jew.’” He says it’s because he won’t proselytize. “I don’t think it’s important to be part of the Jewish Federation. I like service groups that don’t have a religious mission.”

I ask whether he knows who his fellow Jews are in Hollywood—if there’s a special camaraderie among them. “I can tell you that project to project it’s profound. I mean, on Seinfeld, the poor goyim who came to work on our show were walking into the Land of Canaan. Our director for the first four and a half years was a guy named Tom Cherones—not a Jew. Never really got what was going on there—and was an outsider because he couldn’t riff with us. That being said, Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] and Michael [Richards] aren’t Jewish, and Jerry was no more connected than I am; but between Larry [David, creator] and Jerry, and their writing staff, and the network guys, it just became a Jewish show. It’s not a Jewish show, but it was a very Jewish show.”

And yet Seinfeld wasn’t usually discussed in terms of its Jewishness. “Well, that’s because Jerry and Larry would have absolutely rejected it as a notion. They would tell you, if anything, it’s a New York show. So many times people would say to me, ‘George and his parents are Jewish, so what’s with the Costanza name?’ But Jerry and Larry in fact would shy away from anything Jewish, with the exception of one episode, which I think is the worst episode we ever did: the mohel episode.” (A mohel is a person ordained to do ritual circumcisions.)

“We had a character who was a child-hating, neurotic mohel. I said, ‘Here is a Jewish figure that you’re taking head-on, and to a non-Jew, a mohel is already shrouded in voodoo and evil-doing, and you’re making him into a child-hating neurotic!’” He said he tried to get them to make a few changes to make the character less awful, “but I don’t think they ever fixed it.” I confess that I don’t recall that particular episode. “It’s very forgettable,” Alexander says. “The mohel was a very nervous guy, and he would say things about the baby like, ‘All right, bring the little bastard in.’”

The restaurant keeps sending out extra courses; a celebrity is in the house. “This is evil,” Alexander remarks as we’re plied with panna cotta.

Though Alexander has held on to the Greenspan name on all legal documents (he points out that his children are also Greenspans), he says it’s occurred to him since 9/11 that perhaps a Jewish name on a passport may not be prudent. “Of late, I have wondered if I am being foolish not to get a passport that says ‘Jason Alexander.’ That has crossed my mind. Because I do have that fear of”—he puts on a German accent—“‘Passports!!! Hand over your passports!’ ‘Greenshpan?’ Oh, well. Dead man. And I’ll tell ya, and this is a horrible thing to say, but I know it’s true, so I’ll put it out there: If I’m on a plane and I’m being held hostage and they yell out, ‘All the Jews step forward,’ I’m not stepping forward.”

Though he might disown his Jewishness in a hostage situation, he resents those who do so at Christmastime. Put simply: He judges Jews with trees. “It absolutely bothers me,” he confesses. “I always make a joke about this: I say, ‘You know, I got nothing against homosexuals. But I have a little problem with bisexuals. Make a goddamn choice . What is it, ‘I’ll fuck anything’?” He laughs. “You’re a Jew or you’re not a Jew.” He puts on a whiny voice: “‘I’m a Jew, but, you know, I like candy canes.’ Either get out or get in. One or the other.”

I assume he feels the pressure so many Jewish parents feel to make Hanukkah as great and enticing as Christmas so the kids don’t feel cheated? “Yes,” he nods. “You already get into the pissing match: ‘We have eight nights, kids! Your poor non-Jewish friends? One night and it’s all over.’”

As our dinner winds down, I ask him how important is being Jewish to him? “The true answer is, I don’t think I could have accomplished what I’ve accomplished without being a Jew,” he replies. “I think that my essence is supremely Jewish. It oozes out of every pore. And since most of my acceptance as a celebrity or as an actor has been as a comedic actor, the sensibilities of Jewish humor, culture, and background are so much the basis for what I think is funny, that without that grounding, I don’t think—” He pauses a moment. “In a strange way, I lead with my Jewishness.” Which means what? “There are two kinds of Jews: There’s the alter-ego Jew who says, ‘I’m a Jew and everyone else is dirt’—that tends to be the more Orthodox variety. But take that away, Jews are the most self-deprecating people I’ve ever met. A lot of that is me.

“I was incredibly shy as a kid, and compensated for it by developing this sort of public persona that has become what people think of me. But the way to do that is to walk into the room and say, ‘It’s all right. I’m a short, bald person; nobody has to look at me. I’m nobody. Keep going about your business.’ It’s a very Jewish entrance.

“The whole key to playing George for me, which became my calling card to the world, was that this guy, who’s full of piss and vinegar and bravura, is, in the next second, asking, ‘Too much? Did I overdo it?’ A guy so fully aware of his own limitations, and self-critical, that it took the onus off of all his selfishness and bad behavior.

“The only way I can function in life as Jason Alexander instead of Jay Greenspan is because if Jason Alexander fucks up, I can go, ‘Hey, I’m only a Jew from Jersey. What do you want from me? I’m playing with big kids out here and it’s not me. I don’t know how to act, I don’t know how to behave, I’m just a Jew. I’m a little, unsophisticated Jew.’ I actually carry that everywhere I go.”