Moni Ovadia

Ovadia worked across playwright, writer, politician, composer and singer and 6 further recorded occupations. This article rests on 1 catalogued composition, 20 published texts, 3 issued recordings and 5 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Moni Ovadia studied at University of Milan. The recorded working language is Italian and Bulgarian. The field of work recorded is theatre, acting and singing. Places of work recorded in the authority are Strasbourg, Brussels and Milan. Residence is recorded at Milan. Positions recorded include Member of the European Parliament. Distinctions recorded are honorary citizenship and honorary doctor of the University of Pavia.

• Name — Moni Ovadia • Birth Name — Solomon Ovadia • Born — 16 April 1946 • Birthplace — Plovdiv, Tsardom of Bulgaria • Occupation — Actor, musician, singer, theatrical author • Height — 1.74 m

Solomon Ovadia was born on 16 April 1946 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family. His father, a violinist, had Greek and Turkish roots, while the family of his mother, a singer, was of Serb origin. In March 1943, the 1,500 Jews of Plovdiv, including Ovadia's family, were saved from the Holocaust in Bulgaria by the actions of Metropolitan of Plovdiv, Cyril, one of the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who threatened to throw himself before the train were it to depart with the community's Jews, whom the Nazis planned to deport to a concentration camp. His family's sense of Judaism was restricted to observing key feastdays. They shifted to Italy in 1949 to flee a rise in antisemitism in post-war Bulgaria, which had otherwise protected its Jews.

• Illustration — Ovadia in 2019 Ovadia speaks Italian with a Milanese accent. In Milan, he attended its Jewish school. There he was taught to sing Yiddish songs, but only began to learn the language much later, from a Chabad rabbi, after an acquaintance, Rudi Litwak, insisted that, instead of frequenting Milan's Central Synagogue, with its Italian rites, they visit a small synagogue, Beit Shlomo, at Porta Romana, an apartment used as a shul or shtibi where the language was being spoken passionately by elderly Holocaust survivors and that rabbi. A formative influence in this period, particularly for his interest in Jewish culture, was the mathematician and psychoanalyst Haim Baharier, who had studied under Emmanuel Levinas, and who opened up for him the riches of Yiddish culture. Ovadia graduated in political science and made his debut in the theatre world under Roberto Leydi as singer and musician in the band Almanacco Popolare.

In 1972, Ovadia founded a company, the Gruppo Folk Internazionale, dedicated initially to the study and playing of traditional Italian music, a focus which quickly expanded to embrace traditions of songs and music in the Balkans. He renamed it the Ensemble Havadià in 1978, a name drawn from his remote family origins. In 1984, Ovadia made his debut as a theatrical actor. In 1986, he produced Dalla sabbia dal tempo ("From sand, from time"), staged in collaboration with his friend from his Jewish lyceum days, Mara Cantoni, with an accompanying orchestra that also plays a role in the spectacle. Here Ovadia adopts his future format, of recitations interleaved by Yiddish songs and music. The unnamed protagonist (Shlomo in the script) is a Bundist émigré from an eastern shtetl in the process of assimilation. The period may be the 30s, and the ambiance either that of Vienna or Paris. The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, whom he met in 1983, became an important influence on his work. Throughout the 90s, Ovadia's performances drew rave reviews in Italy, and played a seminal role in the rise of a vogue for Jewish culture in that country. In 1990, he created the Theatre Orchestra, which became a stable component of his theatre, a backing of some 11 musicians. The innovation was perhaps influenced by Max Reinhardt's Gesamtkunstwerk and aspects of pre-war Yiddish theatre. • Illustration — Ovadia during one of his shows Around 1990 and 1991, Ovadia developed the idea of Golem, a cypher for Jewish diasporic identity, which crystallised in 1992 with his production of Oylem Goylem, Based on H. Leivick's Yiddish play The Golem, Ovadia's version (Oylem Goylem is Yiddish for "The world is dumb") skillfully melded satire and klezmer music sung by himself and deploys a range of accents: the Italian parts being recited by a Polish actor while Ovadia himself, when speaking Italian, pronounced it with a species of szmonces, a comic Yiddish accent used by Jewish actors in the interwar years when speaking Polish in cabaret performances. Ovadia and his team then toured Italy, France, Germany and the United States with the play, and the spectacle was broadcast by RAI, Italy's public broadcaster, in 2005. In 1995, Ovadia wrote Dybbuk, which addresses the Holocaust. His treatment drew inspiration from both S. An-sky's Yiddish drama Der Dibbuk and the Yiddish poet (murdered at Auschwitz) Itzhak Katzenelson's Song of the Murdered Jewish People. Dybbuk has come to be regarded as one of the most important Italian theatrical shows of the period. In the same year, he produced Taibele e il suo demone and Diario ironico dall'esilio, written with Roberto Andò. His following spectacles include Ballata di fine millennio (1996), Pallida madre, tenera sorella (1996), Il caso Kafka ("The Kafka File", 1997, with Andò), Trieste, ebrei e dintorni (1998), Mame, mamele, mamma, mamà... (1998), Joss Rakover si rivolge a Dio (1999), il banchiere errante (2001), L'armata a cavallo (2003). In The Kafka File, he plays the role of Yitzchak Lowy, whose Yiddish theatre fascinated the Czech writer. The premier of his Trieste piece, which took place on the eve of the Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, was full of topical allusion to the Jewish experience of that city, which Ovadia noted drew on the work of his friend Claudio Magris, combined readings of the Torah with Jewish jokes and songs. In the finale, the lights are doused, to symbolize the erasure of that rich culture, which exists only in imaginative reconstructions like his own. In 2005, Ovadia collaborated with the band Modena City Ramblers for their album Appunti partigiani. In 2007, a poll revealed that he was regarded as one of the six most popular cultural figures in Italy. In 2009, he appeared in the movie Mi Ricordo Anna Frank (Memories of Anne Frank). In 2010, together with artists from nomadic cultures such as the Roma and Sinti, he performed a theatrical piece entitled Rom & Gagè after France took measures to expel its gypsy population. A long time advocate of the cultural rights of persons with disabilities, Ovadia held for the first time a full representation in Italian Sign Language of "Il registro dei peccati", one of his most famous monologues, on 20 June 2013. The project was commissioned by and held at SoundMakers Festival, the only Italian multidisciplinary art festival fully accessible to persons with sensory disabilities. In 2016, in an event that was broadcast by RAI to an audience of millions, Ovadia was chosen to deliver one of the eulogies at Sforza Castle on the occasion of the funeral of Umberto Eco, Italy's most prominent post-war public intellectual and writer. He chose to honour his friend by recounting one of the numerous Yiddish jokes he had heard from Eco's vast repertoire.

Ovadia identifies as Jewish and agnostic. His characteristic woolen headdress is not a kippah, but rather bears close similarities to those worn by Moroccans, a likeness which has often led to Arabs in the street greeting him as "one of them". He says that it is something of the comfort factor of Linus's blanket. In response to the possible impression his comic performances of a constructed shtetl "Jew" might feed into antisemitic stereotypes, such as that of a putative Jewish greed and Jewish noses, Ovadia has remarked: "The merit of my success is that I simultaneously satisfy vast categories of people: Jews who love to laugh at themselves, those who feel a sense of guilt for that which happened and finally can laugh at Jews along with a Jew; anti-Semites who see their stereotypes confirmed." In a learned article penned for the Corriere della Sera in defence of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, which was panned in some quarters as fabricating a version of the Holocaust and distorting its horror by introducing humour into its narrative of the tragedy, Ovadia documented the importance of the comical in Judaism and Jewish civilization generally. In appreciation of Benigni's work, he called him "a Jew honoris causa".

Although he previously labeled himself as a "non-Zionist", Ovadia has progressively moved on to identifying as an anti-Zionist. The writer first visited Israel in 1966, and when asked of his feelings about the country, he replied: Let's start by saying that I prefer 'Land of Holiness' or 'Land of the Holy One' to 'Holy Land'. It's a land whose (proper) destination is that of constructing holiness. In the Bible indeed the Blessed Holy One states: 'You shall be holy because I am holy'. To build holiness means therefore to pursue the imitatio Dei (imitation of God), while avoiding falling for the Luciferean temptation of substitutio Dei (Taking God's place);...The land in itself therefore is not holy. During the following years, Ovadia has become more and more critical of Israel, and of the double standards used by the United States in sanctioning human rights violations elsewhere, but never against Israel. In 2013, Ovadia broke with the Milan Jewish Community, which he joined out of respect for his parents, after complaining that it had become a "propaganda office for Israel", and in protest at what he called attempts to "Israelize" Judaism. After the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, the writer repeatedly accused Israel of genocide and ethnocide against the Palestinian people and criticized the press for the improper use of the term antisemitism, which according to Ovadia has been instrumentalized to silence critics of Israeli policies, adding that within Israel there is widespread "the worst idolatry ever". During an intervention in Turin on 27 January 2025, he doubled down by asserting that, considering the situation in the Middle East, "the Remembrance Day has failed".

Moni Ovadia was born on 16 April 1946 in Plovdiv. Ovadia held the nationality of Italy. Ovadia was educated at University of Milan. Ovadia worked as playwright, writer, politician and composer, and the authority record catalogues a further 7 occupations under the same name, among them singer, screenwriter, stage actor, theatre director, actor and director. Ovadia worked in Strasbourg, Brussels and Milan. Ovadia held the posts of Member of the European Parliament. Ovadia played the voice. Ovadia worked in Italian and Bulgarian.

• 1996 – no?: L'ebreo corrosivo (it:La nave di Teseo), • 1998 – Oylem Goylem, Mondadori, • 1998 – L'ebreo che ride, Giulio Einaudi, • 1998 – Speriamo che tenga – Viaggio di un saltimbanco sospeso tra cielo e terra, Mondadori, (a hilarious autobiography) • 1999 – La Porta di Sion. Trieste, Ebrei e dintorni, Libreria editrice goriziana, • 2000 – Ballata di fine millennio (book and CD), Einaudi, • 2002 – Vai a te stesso, Einaudi, • 2005 – Contro l'idolatria, Einaudi, • 2007 – Lavoratori di tutto il mondo, ridete (a humoristic revolution of communism), Einaudi, • 2010 – Il conto dell'Ultima cena (in collaboration with Gianni Di Santo), Einaudi, • 2010 – Introduction to the Italian edition of Yehudi Menuhin's book Musica e Vita Interiore • 2013 - La meravigliosa vita di Jovica Jovic (in collaboration with Marco Rovelli), Feltrinelli,