I want my gravestone to read, ‘I tried to connect,’” Mandy Patinkin said

in a phone interview with me on January 6, 2023. This talented singer,

actor—and mensch!—brought his beautiful voice and compelling stories

to his 2023 eleven-city concert tour, Mandy Patinkin in Concert: Being Alive

with Adam Ben-David on Piano.

The show featured Patinkin’s favorite Broadway and classic American

tunes, including selections from Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim,

and Harry Chapin. He had fun and wanted his audience to have fun as well.

“We are alive. Tell people to come, to have fun, to enjoy,” he shared. “And if

you don’t enjoy, eat a sandwich!”

While the Tony and Emmy award winner stressed that Being Alive cele-

brated the joy of life, he also expressed his lifelong concerns about truthfulness,

righting wrongs, maintaining the memory of grief, and learning from his own

experiences to do the right thing for the oppressed and refugees today.

Patinkin is known for his many Broadway, television, and film credits,

including Evita, Sunday in the Park with George, The Secret Garden, Chicago

Hope, and Criminal Minds. Patinkin is also known for imbuing his characters

with a Yiddish neshama (a Jewish soul). This gevalt (force) can be seen in his

iconic role in The Princess Bride (“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You

killed my father. Be prepared to die!”); Avigdor, Barbra Streisand’s unrequited

love interest in Yentl; and Saul Berenson, the CIA operative in Homeland. In

Homeland, Berenson’s desk held a framed picture of the Talmudic dictum,

“Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved an entire world.”

Patinkin sings in Yiddish, often in concert, and on one of his many albums,

Mamaloshen. An audience favorite is his Yiddish rendition of “Somewhere

Over the Rainbow.”

Mandel Bruce Patinkin was born in Chicago in 1952 to Doris and Lester

Patinkin. His parents raised him and his sister Marsha in a loving conservative

269Remembrance and Legacy

Jewish family. Patinkin attended both Hebrew and Sunday school, sang with

his synagogue’s choir, and attended Jewish summer camp. After attending the

University of Kansas and Juilliard, he found employment and then success on

the New York City stage.

When he was eighteen, his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Doris and Marsha insisted that Lester not be told. Patinkin went along with

telling the dying man that he had hepatitis, a lie he regrets. “My father was a smart

man. He knew what was happening,” said Patinkin. As a result, many important

conversations did not occur before his death in 1972 at fifty-five years old.

Many years later, Patinkin channeled his loss into his role in The Princess

Bride. As his character slays the nemesis who had killed his father, the grief

of his own father’s death spilled out in the lines, “I want my father back, you

son of a bitch!”

In 2021, Patinkin encountered another family secret. While he felt a

connection to the Holocaust—“it was in my DNA,” Patinkin said in his inter-

view—he never knew of any family members that perished. In an episode of

PBS’ Finding Your Roots, host Henry Louis Gates revealed to Patinkin that in

November 1942, the Germans and their collaborators rounded up the entire

Jewish population of Brańsk, Poland, including twenty members of Patinkin’s

grandfather’s family. They were packed into trains, deported to Treblinka, and

immediately murdered in the concentration camp’s gas chambers. Patinkin,

devastated by the news, broke down during the filming. “I was never given this

information,” he sobbed. “I don’t have words.” It took him a while to compose

himself enough to complete the taping.

Patinkin is still wondering why his family never shared this terrible chapter

in their past. “Lies are nothing new until they hit you in the kishkes,” he said,

and the lies hit him hard. He reflects on how this “lie of omission” deprived

those who were murdered of having their stories told.

He said that this episode heightened his need for truth. “Much of what is

happening in this world is based in lies, and we can fight those lies by listening,

270A Lie of Omission: Mandy Patinkin

by connecting, and by showing kindness.” Those three principles shape his life

not only as a Jew but as a self-proclaimed “humanitician,” a person who cares

about all humankind and fights against any form of bigotry and hatred.

Though he knows little about the relatives he lost, Patinkin has shared

the stories of other Jews who lived under the shadow of fascism. Since 2022,

Patinkin has narrated a series of podcasts produced in collaboration with

the Leo Baeck Institute. The episodes share accounts that range from Albert

Einstein to an unknown hero, Florence Mendheim, a Jewish librarian who

spied on Nazis in New York City.

As a second-generation descendant of Russian Polish, immigrants, he feels

deep rachmones (compassion) for those who have fled their own countries to

escape persecution. Patinkin is thankful to those who let his ancestors into

the United States and works to make sure others can do the same. “The wheel

is always turning,” said Patinkin. “We must help everyone as we can be top of

the wheel one day and bottom of the wheel the next.”

A longtime social activist, Patinkin supports multiple social justice orga-

nizations. He has worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an

organization that highlights the plight of refugees worldwide. He and his wife

Kathryn have traveled with IRC to Greece, Jordan, Uganda, Afghanistan, and

Serbia, and Phoenix, Arizona and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

With IRC and Exile, he honors the Jews who fled for their lives during

the Holocaust and sheds light on those escaping from similarly oppressive

regimes in the present day. Patinkin noted that, as antisemitism is raising its

ugly head, it is a good time in history for everyone to listen with kindness and

to share the refugees’ stories with others.

Originally published January 19, 2023.

Photograph of Mandy Patinkin

used with permission from Catherine Major, C Major Marketing.

Provided by Joan Marcus via Bond Group. https://www.

joanmarcusphotography.com.Mandy Patinkin