Felice Friedson opens [1] with the kind of scene that belongs onstage: Tovah Feldshuh, the actor who can land a punchline and a moral argument in the same breath, tracing a life where craft, Jewish identity, and public responsibility refuse to stay in separate boxes. The conversation moves fast—Sarah Lawrence to the Guthrie, Yentl to Golda’s Balcony—yet it keeps returning to one stubborn theme: mastery is earned, and values are lived, not announced.
Feldshuh describes a childhood shaped by a father who taught independence through vivid maxims (“Never beg a man for a hat”) and by a post-Holocaust America that wanted Jews to blend in even as antisemitism was, for a time, socially unfashionable. She trained relentlessly: music, languages, Hebrew school, and later the unglamorous repertory grind that turned “holding spears” into a professional ethic.
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That ethic shows up in the choices: turning down a sitcom because she “didn’t know how to act yet,” spending Yentl money on coaches, and treating every role as an apprenticeship. It also shows up in the identity piece. A name change to Tovah becomes both a calling card and a magnet, pulling her into Jewish communal life and into stories that feel scripted by history—Yad Vashem records, long-lost relatives, a photo linking her family to Golda Meir.
What makes the piece sing is the collision of the intimate and the geopolitical: tikkun olam and theater lore, family reunions and October 7-era obligations, coexistence ideals, and a refusal to romanticize danger. Read the full interview [1] for the arc, the full humor, and the full weight—Felice Friedson lets Feldshuh’s voice carry all three. It’s a reminder that the past doesn’t stay backstage; it walks on with you.