When the lights come up, performer Monica Piper transforms a small stage into a synagogue. Colorful images of stained glass glow behind her, the eternal flame overhead. The swell of a Jewish hymn fills the theater.
“It's Rosh Hashanah, so I'm here,” says Piper in character, kicking off her one-woman show. “I don't even know why. I think sometimes I just need to feel more Jewish, to be more Jewish.”
Next Piper launches into a story from her childhood:
“When I was growing up, we didn’t belong to a temple, but on High Holy Days, my mother would make us dress up and stand outside the apartment building so it looked like we just got home from temple. Shanah Tovah, Mrs. Schwartz!”
The charade seems to be working until her nosy 7-year-old neighbor catches on. The girl insists that Piper isn’t Jewish if she doesn’t go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah – or at least, she’s not that Jewish.
“Not that Jewish?” Piper asks. “What did that mean?”
Across 85 minutes of Not That Jewish, Piper attempts to answer that very Jewish question.
She doesn’t hit you over the head with an answer. She talks about her father, who instilled in her a sense of humor; her pivot from school teacher to single motherhood and adoption; and stand-up and winning an Emmy Award for her work on the show Rugrats.
“There's not one moment where you're being lectured, ‘And this is what it means to be a Jew,’” Piper says of the show. “It's a subtlety you go home with.”
But to the people behind the production – and this theater – the question “what does it mean to be Jewish?” is especially poignant today, when Jewish identity is often framed around Israel’s war in Gaza and antisemitism is surging around the globe.
“We're delivering a comedy, a heartfelt, joyful experience,” the show’s director Eve Brandstein says about the production. “It's something else to remind us — particularly the Jewish community — we beat them all with laughs. … We have stories to tell that are not just about the brutality of these times.”
For Piper, being Jewish is an attitude, a mix of facial expressions, Yiddish phrases, traditions, and an assortment of Hebrew school values, like compassion, acceptance, and good deeds. But “the main one for me,” she says, “is humor.”
Ronda Spinak founded The Braid as a Jewish women’s theater in 2008. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Telling stories that reflect the expansiveness of Jewish identity is central to The Braid, a small theater in a Santa Monica office park that its founder Ronda Spinak refers to as the only Jewish stage in Los Angeles.
The project is not new.
In 2008, Spinak started a nonprofit called the Jewish Women’s Theater. “This was at a time when Jewish women didn't really have much of a voice in theater, and their stories were being told by men,” says Spinak. “It came out of a desire to debunk stereotypes and to share our lived experience today.”
Early on, Spinak called Monica Piper, whom she had worked with on Rugrats, and explained her vision for the theater.
Piper didn’t immediately understand.
“I had visions of women in babushkas dancing around a shtetl,” Piper says. “[Spinak] said, ‘No, it's a modern take on Jewish women. It's to dispel stereotypes and myths about Jewish people.’ And she said, ‘I want you to write and perform some original pieces.’ And I said, ‘But Ronda, I'm not that Jewish.’”
Piper started writing while Spinak met with her early partners, Ellen Sandler and Deena Novakwomen, to build a theater nonprofit. Their idea was simple. Each show would center around a theme, like forgiveness or family secrets. They’d post a call for submissions, then work with writers to make their stories ready for the stage. Writers would get royalties and actors would be paid.
Spinak ran into problems right away. The theater debuted three weeks after Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme came to light. The financier, who was Jewish, had used his professed interest in philanthropy to defraud investors, including major Jewish charities like Hadassah, and the Holocaust survivor, writer, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
“So much money was lost within the Jewish community,” says Spinak.
She found a fiscal sponsor in the Los Angeles organization Community Partners, and earned nonprofit status. At the time, renting a theater was financially out of reach, so she brought her theater to people’s living rooms.
“We would go in and move furniture, and bring chairs in, and set up our lights, and set up our stools,” she says, referencing a lineage of counter-cultural Jewish women, including the writer Gertrude Stein, who hosted salons in their homes.
Soon, she learned there was an appetite for all kinds of Jewish stories. The theater expanded their roster to include the stories of Jewish men, and focused on amplifying stories of Mizrahi, Sephardic, Black, and Asian Jews, as well as Jews in the LGBTQ community, and converts.
She changed the theater’s name to The Braid, evoking the way stories are braided around a theme, or a challah, or a woman’s braided hair.
Spinak opened the theater in 2014 with Monica Piper’s production of Not That Jewish. It ran in Los Angeles for 16 months before moving to New York, off Broadway.
The stage shuttered in 2020 during the pandemic, and for years, performances from The Braid debuted online.
In her new space, which once again opens with Not That Jewish, Spinak aims to create a place where Jewish stories are celebrated and all are welcome.
“We're not going anywhere,” she says. “Come and hear our stories, and be a part of our community.”
Not That Jewish is running at The Braid until December 29. The theater will launch a new show called Traveler’s Prayer in January.