Word: steinberger
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Janus has spent ten years and $20,000 of his own money traveling around the country to interview top comedians and give them psychological tests. So far, he has tested 76 Jewish humorists, including Milton Berle, George Burns, David Brenner, Sid Caesar, David Steinberg and Mort Sahl. Most, he says, were ambivalent about their Jewishness and compulsively turned to humor to ward off their private demons. As Joan Rivers told Janus, "If I were marching to the ovens, I'd be telling jokes all the way." What makes them funny, says Janus, "is their pain...
Many of the comedians had been in psychotherapy and almost all had major traumas in early childhood. The late Totie Fields' mother died when Totie was five; Art Buchwald's mother died shortly after his birth. David Steinberg's older brother died young, says Janus, "and the family never stopped mourning." In general, the psychologist believes, these comedians had overprotective, constricting mothers and a drive to break out of the Jewish world and gain general acceptance. Says he: "Only a few will talk about their Jewishness with any sense of pride; Alan King, Jack Carter and Don Rickles are rare...
DIED. Harold Rosenberg, 72, author (Saul Steinberg, Barnett Newman) and art critic of The New Yorker; of a stroke, in Springs, N.Y. Rosenberg's essays on Pollock, de Kooning, Gorky, Motherwell and Rothko, whom he called action painters, helped legitimize the first New York school of abstract expressionism...
...York University Saul Steinberg, D.F.A., artist...
DIED. William Steinberg, 78, German-born conductor who transformed the listless Pittsburgh Symphony into one of the nation's best; in Manhattan. As a Jew, Steinberg was forced to leave his post as music director of the Frankfurt Opera in 1933. He moved on to Palestine, where he recruited an orchestra in Tel Aviv, and then to the U.S., where he became Arturo Toscanini's assistant at the NBC Symphony. In Pittsburgh, Steinberg was known as a disciplined maestro of self-effacing humor whose camaraderie with his musicians helped bring out their best talents...