When actress and artist Lisa Edelstein met her now-husband, artist Robert Russell, he came with a deep desire to rediscover his Jewish identity and pass it on to his sons from a former marriage, then three and five. He found the perfect partner for the job in Lisa.
In addition to being Jewish, Lisa has played numerous Jewish women, including Dr. Cuddy on House, the lead (and a producer) of Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, and the adult daughter of Alan Arkin’s character on Netflix’s The Kominsky Method.
Now she’s playing the matriarch anchoring Long Story Short, Netflix’s time-shifting adult animated series about three generations of a Jewish family.
The following is a blend of a written and a Zoom interview. She was warm, funny, and thoughtful.
Lisa grew up Conservative and kosher, building sukkahs and sitting through four-hour Seders, attending synagogue on Saturdays and Hebrew school until she was sixteen. Shabbat dinner was non-negotiable.
“My father would usually give a very simple Parsha,” she told me. “I didn’t know that’s what he was doing at the time. I just knew that every week he talked about the Torah portion. And that continued for my whole childhood.”
Edelstein's Jewish roots
HER GRANDPARENTS were immigrants, their first language Yiddish. Pogroms and war had scattered the family. Some cousins went to America, but many more ended up in Argentina and Israel.
Her father’s Aunt Leah founded Kibbutz Daliya in the early 1900s. “They turned the rocky, dry land into a forest and farm and hosted dance festivals once a year. That part of the family is still there, although some of their descendants have left the kibbutz.”
Other family members live in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Nir Zvi, Haifa, and by the border of Lebanon. Her last visit was a few days after the last living Oct. 7 hostages came home.
“Israel is a beautiful, messy, complicated, diverse, loud, funny, tragic, amazing, gorgeous, powerful country, and I’m grateful for its existence.”
She drifted away from Jewish traditions in her young adulthood, but meeting her husband – and his own Jewish journey – pulled her back in.
“When we met, it was pretty apparent to both of us that we were going to stay together forever, and so we created a home. The boys were going back and forth 50/50 between our household and their mom’s, and we wanted to find a way to give them a joyous Jewish experience in this house.”
Their solution was a “hip-hop Shabbat” with dance lessons from an instructor followed by a big Shabbat dinner. When the boys outgrew hip-hop, it became Shabbat Dungeons & Dragons: friends over for dinner, then up half the night immersed in the fantasy tabletop game.
The boys have since graduated high school, but the joyous Shabbat dinner tradition continues at the Edelstein-Russell household, now with dozens of friends and family members.
ALTHOUGH SHE grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, Lisa got a taste of antisemitism and “otherism” at an early age. Her family moved to Wayne, a Jewish enclave in New Jersey, in 1967 – the same year the Civil Rights Act finally forced the town to take down the “No Negroes, no Jews, no dogs allowed” signs in shop and restaurant windows.
During a re-election campaign, the head of the school board claimed that the Jew running against him was going to cancel Christmas. In response to this outlandish charge, The New York Times dubbed the town “The Home of Antisemitism in the United States of America.”
“He won the election, by the way, and then he became mayor for 12 years. So that guy was running my town in one way or another during my entire childhood there,” Lisa said.
Her feelings of otherism, however, “weren’t because someone pointed at me and yelled JEW,” she explained. “It was our culture, in general, that somehow accepted the idea that Jewish women were spoiled princesses that only cared about Bloomingdale’s … that they had big noses and frizzy hair and were grating.”
I remember the jokes and the moniker Jewish American Princess, with its derisive acronym JAP. Jokes like, “What does a Jewish American Princess make for dinner? A reservation.” And, “How do you tickle a Jewish American Princess? Gucci, Gucci, goo.”
“I didn’t want to own that stereotype,” she continued. “And I guess on some level, I believed that that was true because that was what I was being told, and so I felt shame around my Jewish identity.”
When Lisa left home to study drama at New York University, she made a concerted effort to separate herself from that unpleasant association. “I felt like it was a part of myself I had to grow out of or away from, or somehow bury or erase.”
Edelstein's reinvention and journey of self-exploration
THAT REINVENTION, and an explosion of self-exploration, led her into the New York City club scene and a walk on the wild side. She became so well known in the clubs that famed journalist Maureen Dowd wrote a feature about her in The New York Times titled “Lisa in Wonderland.”
Dowd painted a colorful picture of the full-time drama student and celebutante: “She talks fast, walks fast, laughs often. Her stride is a fast-motion version of Marilyn Monroe’s bouncy gait. Everything about her, from her vivid alto to her mane of brown curls, seems to vibrate.”
Lisa immersed herself in a world of experimental theater and experimental human beings. “It was the most exciting and diverse group of creative people I’d ever seen,” she said of the club life.
“I couldn’t get enough of how weird and wonderful and psychedelic the city could be. I learned an enormous amount, met incredible people, and was immersed in a community bursting with imagination and juice. So it was more than just fun for me; it was me finding out what excited me, what surprised me, even what terrified me.”
In the club scene, she went by Lisa E, unsure how to “own a name like Edelstein out in the world without having to constantly battle with the preconceived idea of what that meant.” In time, she realized the stereotype had nothing to do with her.
Writing an AIDS-related musical, Positive Me, forced a decision: Lisa E, or Lisa Edelstein, on the poster? “Am I moving forward as myself, or am I moving forward as this creation?”
She decided she couldn’t leave herself behind. Changing her name felt like “Hitler would win. Like I was abandoning my people and my heritage and my ancestors. I started to realize, you have to find a way to carry yourself with you, despite what people might think.”
For decades, Jewish actors anglicized their names. Woody Allen was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg. Peter Coyote was Robert Peter Cohon. Winona Ryder changed her name from Winona Horowitz. And Albert Brooks was born Albert Einstein. Okay, you can’t blame him for that one.
JOINING THE Screen Actors Guild, Lisa said, marked another milestone. Was she worried about typecasting?
“The answer is yes, and for sure it got in my way. I had several experiences where producers would call me crying or tell me years later that they were not allowed to cast me because I was too Jewish. If I had changed my name, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. Who knows? I got jobs anyway, and a lot of those characters became Jewish without my trying, because people saw me that way, so that’s fine.”
That’s more than fine with me. The casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles, a rare practice today for other marginalized groups, remains ubiquitous in Hollywood. I don’t love the idea of artificially restricting actors who can convincingly play other ethnicities, but if we are calling for authenticity for other minorities, we should do the same for Jews.
Lisa has also portrayed many Jewish mothers, so I asked her to describe her mother. “HA!” she playfully responded, “describe YOUR mother.” I didn’t, but Lisa did.
Bonnie Edelstein graduated high school at 16 and married at 19. She’s tough, critical, deeply opinionated, “confused by technology but offended by that confusion,” and loves playing solitaire on her phone.
Bonnie’s mother, Grandma Gertie, was one of Lisa’s favorite people – an unstoppable force of hilarity and attitude. “She smoked two packs of cigarettes for 70 years and then gave it up in a day. She was the president of the sisterhoods of five different synagogues in Coney Island and Brighton Beach.”
Both women fed directly into Lisa’s performance as the matriarch of Long Story Short, Naomi – a feisty, witty woman unafraid to pick a fight over something that matters to her. She loves her family the best way she knows how, but she still gets under the skin of her three kids.
Lisa admitted Naomi leans toward the stereotypical “cloying Jewish mom,” but believes it’s those very expectations that trick the audience into falling in love with her.
In a second-season twist, we learn, right alongside her children, that she’s beloved by the wider community and a heroine to many. It strikes me that in families, we’re all playing roles. Whether you’re the provider, the nurturer, the rebel, or the complainer, we get locked into those parts, and it keeps the people closest to us from ever fully knowing who we are.
Edelstein explores hidden histories in Little Bird
THAT THEME of hidden histories carries into another project of Lisa’s: Little Bird, a six-episode Canadian miniseries about the “Sixties Scoop,” when government policy tore Indigenous children from their families to be raised in foster care or adopted into non-Indigenous homes, cut off from their culture.
Adoptive parents believed they were rescuing abandoned children, not participating in a kidnapping scheme.
Lisa plays Golda Rosenbaum, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated from Poland to Montreal and adopted a young Saskatchewan girl, raising her as a Jew and renaming her Esther.
“Golda thinks she’s raising somebody who she shares the experience with of having lost their families,” Lisa explained. “She adopts her when she’s 5, and by the time her daughter is 25 and ready to get married, her daughter cannot move forward without finding out what actually happened to her.” So Esther sets off in search of her Indigenous family.
When a member of her Indigenous family dies, Esther processes her grief through both traditions. Lisa and I talked about how ritual and tradition help us process events and regulate our emotions.
“No one does mourning better than Jews,” Lisa opined. “We’ve got a guidebook like no other guidebook. There’s a written plan about how you walk through this tragedy in your life, and it’s beautiful.”
Jewish characters are rare in film and television outside stories with intrinsically Jewish storylines. Yet, Lisa made her Abby in Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, a show about a recent divorcee going through a common modern experience, a member of the tribe.
“That was a dream job. One that I’m so glad I got to experience while I could still wear really, really high heels for any length of time. To get to be funny and sexy, smart, and emotional all in one job was deeply fulfilling,” she said.
Edelstein's impulse to create
LISA STARTED PAINTING as an extension of a lifelong impulse to create, transforming what she once viewed as a private coping mechanism into an applauded second career.
“My husband gave me a painting on our second date, and asked me for a drawing in return,” she shared. Exchanging handmade gifts gradually became central to their relationship, helping her recognize that “that part of myself was valuable.”
The turning point came when COVID slowed the world. Looking for a subject for her artwork, Edelstein immersed herself in family photographs she inherited after helping her parents downsize. She discovered “so many stories, so many memories, so many things I didn’t remember,” and decided “to make myself a coloring book out of these images.”
What began with magic markers evolved into increasingly intricate works. When friends urged her to abandon markers for paint, she switched to watercolor, opening new creative possibilities.
She worked obsessively – sometimes “6 hours, 10 hours” – and found the experience exhilarating. Since then, she has moved into oils and mounted four exhibitions, with two works entering museum collections.
“It’s been a really magical journey,” she told me.
I was struck by the paintings’ vivid colors and dense patterns, which evoked their eras without overshadowing the people. Edelstein explained that her early reliance on markers naturally led her to seek photographs rich with pattern, making the 1970s of her youth “just a gift.”
Although her source material now spans about 100 years, she unifies work with a consistent palette.
“Mostly what I’m looking for in these images is narrative,” Edelstein said. She is drawn to photographs that “accidentally tell a story,” revealing something unexpected about a person’s character or life. Carefully posed family portraits rarely interest her.
One of my favorite paintings is Vampirella, a portrait of Lisa at eleven, in glasses and a nightgown, surrounded by the intimate clutter of her bedroom. Another painting that stays with me is Celebration, which bursts with affection and movement. Lisa believes the original photo was one of her grandparents’ wedding anniversaries.
What captivates her is not the event but the exuberant humanity within it: “There’s just so much momentum, there’s so many stories in that image.”
I am struck by the family dynamics – fathers and daughters, husbands and wives – and by the many yarmulkes. Edelstein explained that the visible Jewish identity in her work became an intentional artistic choice even before the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of innocent Israelis and visitors by Hamas.
The impact of Oct. 7 on Edelstein's Jewish identity
When preparing for her first gallery show, she remembered being asked, “Are you sure you want to go this Jew-forward?”
“Well, yeah, it’s my family. We are also a minority,” she said, “and we have a rich culture in this country [USA].” After Oct. 7, that commitment deepened, and since then, she has made sure every exhibition includes work reflecting Jewish life and culture.
LIKE MOST JEWS, Lisa and Robert were devastated by the attack, but the reactions from friends were mixed.
“We have a few friends who cried with us, who checked in frequently, who never stopped wanting to talk about what happened and what we have all been going through,” she said.
On the other hand, “We had to end a few friendships completely because they were total dead ends. It has been painful and sad and also made us furious.”
While the hostages were still being held captive, Lisa wore a Star of David she bought during a visit to Israel in the 70s along with a yellow ribbon hostage pin. At work, a colleague referenced the star and pin, saying, “It seems like you’re making a very political statement. Are you sure you want to do that?”
“A Jewish person said this to me!” an exasperated Lisa told me.
“It doesn’t matter what statement people think I’m making by wearing this,” she told her colleague. “It matters that they know who they’re talking to, and edit accordingly.”
And then there was the silence.
“I confronted one of our friends post-Oct. 7. I felt she’d let her politics get in the way of her empathy when she didn’t even bother to check in with us after such a traumatizing event. Her excuse surprised me: she had no idea we would care about what was happening there. She had no idea that Jewish people feel connected to each other,” Lisa shared.
“She was shocked to be confronted, and I was shocked to realize that this was something completely unique to us. We are a people. We feel each other’s successes and failures, triumphs, and tragedies. Some of us are annoyed by ‘others of us,’ but we are still, somehow, an ‘Us.’ And that isn’t something most people experience or comprehend. It makes us incredibly special.” ■
The writer is an attorney and 20-year entertainment veteran, the CEO of Liberate Art, and the author of Artists Under Fire: The BDS War Against Celebrities, Jews, and Israel. Her column, Hollywood Stories, spotlights Jewish and non-Jewish entertainers who voice support for Israel and the Jewish community. Instagram: @hollywoodstoriesbylanamelman
www.hollywoodstoriesbylanamelman.com/