Morgan Bassichis

Last winter, Gregg Bordowitz, ever the yenta, gave me and Douglas Crimp a copy of the Bible, because neither of us had read it. (For the sake of “Best of 2019,” let’s call it Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary [W. W. Norton]. In our shared ignorance—Douglas’s because of his devout skepticism of religion, and mine because of an evangelical loyalty to television—we started where it literally all began, in the Book of Genesis. We took turns reading to each other about humans trying and failing to be better, shouted at the misogyny of blaming Eve for everything, tried to

performance May 2018

MASK 4 MASC

IN MY FANTASY, Gregg Bordowitz is a famous maggid—a traveling mystical Jewish preacher—in town for a rare three-night engagement at the New Museum. We gather at sunset on Friday night, that sacred turning point in the week, settle into the building’s pungently lit auditorium, which is still, after all, a basement on the Bowery, and prepare to listen.

Bordowitz’s fantasy is different from mine, but not incompatible: We are the audience of The Benjamin Zev Show, a television variety program he has invented for this performance. Bordowitz hits the stage with a false start to the Yiddish