Behind the scenes in Hasidic Borough Park
IN “Menashe,” out Friday, a hapless widower risks losing custody of his young son, simply because, as his rabbi explains, there’s no real home without a woman.
That’s both the plot of Joshua Z. Weinstein’s new film and, more or less, the story of its star, Hasidic comedian Menashe Lustig. Shot in Yiddish, with English subtitles, “Menashe” is a labor of love for Weinstein, who doesn’t speak Yiddish but became fascinated with Brooklyn’s Borough Park, where the film is set.
“I’ve never seen this community portrayed accurately in cinema,” says the 34-year-old director, who co-wrote the film after meeting Lustig and hearing his story. “I knew it deserved a deep dive.”
As Weinstein said at a recent sold-out screening, the film almost didn’t happen. “You can’t cut a pig with kosher techniques,” naysayers told him. Out of roughly half a million Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in the tri-state area, he says, a mere 50 showed up to audition.
But he knew he had a star in Lustig, 39, a former class clown who tells The Post he felt pres- sured by his fellow Hasidim not to make the film, which they feared would ridicule them and their community.
That, Weinstein says, was the last thing he wanted to do.
“Whenever you see Hollywood [portray Hasidim], it’s laughable,” he says. “A lot of times, because they don’t know what Hasidim are like, they’d write the character as if they never spoke to a Hasid before.”
He says his goal was simple: “All [the] films I’ve seen in the past were about people who decided to leave. Here, the protagonist never thinks of leaving. It just shows everyday life.”
Lustig, meanwhile, says he’s hopeful that “Menashe” will give outsiders a better understanding of his closed-off world. “We didn’t make it for us,” he says. “We [made] it for the outside world.”