When Alicia Jo Rabins wrote “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff,” she had no idea it would come out the year Bernie Madoff actually died. “Wow. It’s an odd experience to have my phone blowing up because someone I’ve never met died in his 80s!” she said when I emailed her today.
Though the kaddish prayer is generally said for the dead, Rabins’ film is not about Madoff’s death at all. It began as a one-woman show that Rabins, the film’s author and star, conceived when she developed an obsession with the pyramid scheme mastermind during an artist’s residency in Manhattan, where she watched the market crash from her window. She adapted it into a movie with director Alicia J. Rose, whose expertise lies in directing visually rich music videos for artists such as Cake. (Yes, they’re both named Alicia and yes, it’s confusing; they go by AJo and ARo respectively to make things easier.)
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(RNS) In 2008, Jewish singer-songwriter Alicia Jo Rabins had a front-row seat to the financial crisis.
Rabins, who has released three albums featuring the stories of women in the Torah as part of her project Girls in Trouble, had a day job teaching bat mitzvah students to chant from the Torah. She also was an artist-in-residence in an abandoned office building on Wall Street.
From her ninth-floor studio, she found herself drawn into the stories surrounding Bernie Madoff’s arrest for his role in the largest Ponzi scheme in history and the spiritual questions it raised.
She wrestled with the fact that both Madoff and many of his victims were Jewish. She heard rumors that a Palm Beach synagogue, which counted many of the victims among its members, had recited the Mourner’s Kaddish for Madoff, effectively excommunicating him. She interviewed people connected to Madoff, turned their stories into songs, searched spiritual texts and created rituals to make sense of it all.
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