Sister act sees Adam Hammer a new niche for himself and bearded twin

Jewish Telegraph, May 2011

ACTOR and musician Adam Goldberg isn’t halachically Jewish, but he is “very defensive of the Jewishness I do possess”.
Adam, whose most Jewish role was in 2003’s The Hebrew Hammer as Mordechai Jefferson Carver, is the son of a Roman Catholic mother and a Jewish father.
His latest project is the album The Goldberg Sisters released via Play It Again Sam.
Adam made his musical debut in 2009 as LANDy with the critically-acclaimed album Eros and Omissions.
Among his most famous acting roles was Jewish-American soldier Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan. He has also appeared in Nancy Drew, Zodiac, 2 Days in Paris, Mr Saturday Night and A Beautiful Mind.
In sitcom Friends, he stole the show as Chandler’s nutjob roommate Eddie and he has appeared in Entourage as Nick Rubenstein.
So as he appears in so many Jewish roles, is he proud of his haimishe roots?
“To be frank I am not proud of roots over which I had no control,” the 40-year-old told the Jewish Telegraph.
“I don’t mean to sound snarky — though I am very snarky — just that the idea of cultural pride is something that has been difficult for me to understand, perhaps because I am a bit of a mutt or quite a bit of a mutt.
“But perhaps also because I see people very lazily, often, not always, defer to their cultural roots as though the fights of their forefathers entitles them in some way.
“Having said that, I identify with Jewish culture and am very defensive of the Jewishness I do possess. For instance it absolutely f***ing maddens me the way people very easily, glibly — non-Jews as well as Jews — make Jew jokes or even fetishise Jewishness in what I deem to be an extremely condescending way that if it were applied to more notoriously ‘tougher’ cultures there would be a f***ing uproar.
“There’s this accepted ‘nice Jewish boy’ thing that drives me mad.”
His mother enrolled him a Jewish school in Beverly Hills, but he refused to have a barmitzvah.
Adam has never visited Israel, but says his girlfriend Roxanne Daner “extols its virtues regularly. I am a terrible flyer. Bring it closer”.
Roxanne appears on The Goldberg Sisters’ album.
He said that acting came first for him, but he played drums as a kid.
He caught the acting bug after seeing a version of Macbeth at the Westside Jewish Community Centre.
“I never had the discipline or facility really to pick up other instruments,” he said. “It wasn’t until 1993 that I started writing and recording my own music in some fashion. Self-taught and crudely at that.
“I’m always writing and recording music in some fashion, even if it’s into a tape recorder.
“The actual recording of the songs from my two albums probably didn’t take more than a few months if you lay them end to end. Playing live would be the really time consuming investment and I don’t really do that except when really pressed.
“So really it’s just a part of my day, save for the rare instances like this record where I had a little money in the bank and could say I’m taking six weeks to do this record.
“The LANDy record was recorded on weekends, in bits and pieces, over many years.”
He added: “Acting is something I wanted to do since I was six-years-old. So in many ways as I’ve grown, acting has become more of means and less an end.
“In other words there is something very anachronistic about a 40-year-old man playing dress-up. It has become, for the most part, a career, one which has ebbed and flowed, but largely been a means by which I can support myself.
“I have little say over my career. It chooses me, not the other way around. But the movies I made, I wrote and directed, as with the music I’ve made; so for better or worse they are ‘deeper’ representations of who I am I suppose.”
Adam claims that his partner in The Goldberg Sisters is his bearded hermaphroditic twin sister, Celeste “who for many years has lurked in the shadows, playing a rather important role in my non-acting venture. I wanted to out her before she outed me”.
“I would love to like to play live,” he said. “I also don’t have a band. So it always comes down to that really, having to hire people which I can’t really afford or get some of my collaborators to carve out time which they can only ever do for a gig or two.”
Adam claims the character he has played most close to himself is Jack in 2 Days in Paris.
“I was playing a very thinly-veiled version of me, much of the dialogue having been improvised,” he said. “All the jealousy stuff was based on something else, but the guy, how he speaks for the most part etc . . . me.”
The Goldberg Sisters contains 10 tracks including the single Shush, the video for which was shot in one take on an iPhone.