Houdini new york exhibit

In a sense the master illusionist metamorphsed himself, from an immigrant, runaway, son of an unsuccessful rabbi, who with Houdini ultimately attempted to survive by sewing neckties, and become world-reknown with a name equated to escape artist, daredevil. Houdini was the master of self promotion. It is likely that afficianados of conjuring will know much about Houdini, and the miraculous escapes witnessed around the world. He worked for-a-time with a locksmith.

His life partner, Bess Rahmer, was not Jewish. For many years, this ritual was observed with no communication from the beyond. On the last year, disappointed as Bess left the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood where the ceremony took place, there was a sudden and unpredicted torrent flash of rain.

A sign? Doctorow famous novelist et al. The Jerusalem Report. Jerusalem Post Lite. March of the living. Kabbalat Shabbat. Shapers of Israel.

Maariv Online. Maariv News. Tools and services. JPost Premium. Ulpan Online. JPost Newsletter. JPost News Ticker. Our Magazines. Learn Hebrew. RSS feed. And in Houdini the museum has found the perfect impostor who is Jewish at the core, yet unquestionably American to the general public. Growing up, I remember being mesmerized every time I watched the Curtis movie, which happened once a year, in November, when for some reason Mexican television showed it on a Sunday afternoon.

The last scene, in which Houdini dies without being able to escape a fish tank, is engraved in my imagination.

In one such debunking, he ridiculed a medium who pretended to have spoken with his deceased mother — in English, although his mother only communicated in Yiddish and German. Still, what captivated me personally was precisely what was left unsaid on screen: his Jewishness. The Jewish community loved Harry Houdini then and continues to love him today. This is because he was simultaneously an insider and an outsider. Was he seen in the s as an assimilationist?

He surely was, yet that was also the general impetus of those Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement: to make it in America, and to make it big. Harry Houdini was a role model. His Hungarian identity was in his way, so he hid it. That Houdini remains an object of adoration today, in some measure, is a result of his bifurcated identity.

In the end he died, at age 52, after a McGill University student punched him in the abdomen as part of a dare.