JEW, INTERRUPTEd

A NEW SHOW By ETHAN STANISLAWSKI

A blisteringly honest, laugh-through-the-pain one-person show, Jew, Interrupted, is set to debut at theaters across Los Angeles in January, and internationally in Toronto, in May.

Written and performed by Ethan Stanislawski, Jew, Interrupted unfolds in seven raw, riveting chapters that delve into everything from post-Holocaust trauma to psychiatric overmedication, from sibling rivalry in Israel to unusual methods of processing death— all stitched together with biting wit, intellectual rigor, and emotional vulnerability.

Part memoir, part cultural critique, the 60-minute solo performance journeys from the old world legacies of a war-hero grandfather and an academic father (who “literally wrote the book on Zionism”) to an Upper West Side childhood fraught with privilege and pills.

The show covers Ethan’s journey through college in Chicago, emotional breakdowns in 90s New York, and ideological reckonings in a post-October 7 world.

What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal story about inherited beliefs, cultural contradictions, and the search for an identity untethered from family myth and societal expectation.

“I was more afraid of being called a self-hating Jew than being called an anti-Semitic slur,” Ethan quips at one point — a line that captures the show’s heart: irreverent, devastating, and unafraid to sit in discomfort.
Jew, Interrupted offers a searing and often hilarious lens on what happens when progressive ideals collide with inherited dogma, and how trauma — personal, cultural, historical — shapes the way we love, fight, and grieve.