The Media Line: From ‘Golda’s Balcony’ to a Family Photo: Tovah Feldshuh’s Full-Circle Encounter 

From ‘Golda’s Balcony’ to a Family Photo: Tovah Feldshuh’s Full-Circle Encounter 

The six-time Emmy and Tony nominee reflects on the fierce values that shaped her, the discipline behind her craft, the family history she never expected to uncover, and the moral clarity she believes this moment demands 

By Felice Friedson / The Media Line 

The first time Tovah Feldshuh tells a story, it lands like a Broadway monologue—precise, funny, and suddenly piercing. One minute she’s recounting a father’s throwaway line about a horse; the next, she’s tracing her own name through Europe’s wreckage and into a Yad Vashem ledger—only to have surviving relatives later appear, quite literally, at her door. In conversation, Feldshuh doesn’t separate the artist from the citizen, or the performer from the Jew: mastery matters, memory matters, and values aren’t background texture—they’re the plot. 

In this wide-ranging interview with The Media Line, the six-time Emmy and Tony nominee moved from Sarah Lawrence to the Guthrie, from Yentl to Golda’s Balcony, and from comedy to conviction without ever losing the thread. What emerged wasn’t just a career timeline, but a philosophy: excellence earned through relentless study, identity held without apology, and a belief that coexistence was sacred—but never naïve. 

Feldshuh’s path wasn’t preordained. She went to Sarah Lawrence College, and her audiences may be surprised to learn that she planned to study at Harvard Law next, where her father had studied and where she was waitlisted. A career as an actor wasn’t even on the horizon. 

She adored her father and intended to follow in his footsteps, saying plainly, “I loved my father,” and adding that he shaped her “empowerment as a woman, long before the women’s movement.” 

Her father’s lessons came in vivid metaphors. Feldshuh recalled him buying her a horse and asking, “How often can a little girl tell a big animal what to do?” Then, he trained her to ride—an early lesson in capability and command. Another of his sayings stayed with her as a guiding principle: “Never beg a man for a hat.” For Feldshuh, it echoed Virginia Woolf’s insistence on independence: “You have to earn your own living, and you have to have a room of your own.” 

Her formative years coincided with an America that, in her eyes, was simultaneously assimilationist and newly wary of overt antisemitism. She described how, in the years after the Holocaust, “the Jews were running to assimilate.” Yet Feldshuh also called her childhood “the golden age of it’s not fashionable to be antisemitic,” because “they had just killed 6 million Jews.” 

She grew up as Terri Sue Feldshuh, took dance, tap, and singing lessons, played classical piano, and attended Hebrew school “eight hours a week.” Her parents also made her an international citizen early on, sending her abroad repeatedly: “I was sent to live in France for a summer … Mexico for a summer … Florence …” The result, she said, was linguistic range: “I am fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian, and speak prayer book Hebrew,” adding, “I would say, four and a half languages.” 

Feldshuh’s recollections of mid-20th century American Jewish life included the era’s quiet exclusions—“Of course we weren’t allowed in certain country clubs”—and the self-sufficiency that followed: “The Jews had their own country clubs.” But the deeper thread was that she “grew up without any notion that we weren’t OK.” 

Then came the career decision that changed everything. 

Her brother was at the Guthrie Theater as a McKnight Fellow, and he urged her to apply. The McKnight Fellowship—she noted they “give out four a year in the United States”—would pay for a master’s degree and place her in classical repertory training at a major institution. Harvard Law, despite her legacy connection, didn’t come through: “Nobody lifted a finger.” Feldshuh believed she “could have done probably a wonderful job as a litigator,” but instead she went to the Guthrie and did the hard, anonymous grind: “held spears for two years,” with “22 parts in 11 plays,” entering and exiting as everything from an actress to a poet to a nun. 

It was during this formative period that Feldshuh changed her name—both personally and professionally—from Terri Sue to Tovah, her Hebrew name. Tovah was a name connected to her aunt Tilly and a choice also propelled by first love: a boyfriend, “a complete wasp,” Michael Fairchild, who told her, “Tovah, now that’s a name.” She took it, and in a twist of stage-world perception, “Tovah was a Danish name,” leading people at the Guthrie to assume “Tovah Feldshuh was a local girl from Scandinavia.” 

That misunderstanding followed her east. When she came to New York with Cyrano, she understudied the leading lady and had “14 lines in a red dress.” She worked alongside Christopher Plummer, whom she referred to as a lifelong friend, remembering a moment that was small in text but huge in consequence because she “had one scene alone, six lines with him alone,” and “he’d kiss my hand eight times a week.” 

Her professional progress as an actor was stunning. Within 18 months she was on the marquee of the O’Neill Theatre, starring in Yentl. Feldshuh said that when she arrived in New York, people assumed her name meant she was “Orthodox European, and a maven, an expert in Judaism.” She insisted she wasn’t—but she was prepared to learn fast: “I was a very diligent student,” and when opportunity arrived, she “rode the horse in the direction it was galloping.” 

Asked to characterize her artistic persona, Feldshuh framed it as moral training as much as talent. She said she was raised to “worship the God of excellence and merit,” and cited a fatherly ethos of mastery—“like Malcolm Gladwell says, 10,000 hours”—because “nobody can ever take that from you.” Life later taught her something else: “You need more than mastery. You need mastery and the ability to relate to other people.” 

That dedication to craft shaped major choices early. Feldshuh recalled being offered Three’s Company by the head of Warner Brothers Television and turning it down. When he told her she was out of her mind, she answered, “I don’t know how to act yet.” Even after Broadway success, she insisted it was “an accident. It’s a happy coincidence.” 

Instead of chasing visibility, Feldshuh built a private conservatory for herself. With her Yentl salary, she hired elite coaches and studied intensely around her performance schedule. “I used my money to gain more skill,” she said, crediting director Jack O’Brien and the Old Globe with deepening her classical work and helping shape her first one-woman show—work that later supported her during the birth of her children. 

As her career progressed, her Jewish identity became both unavoidable and, increasingly, central to her public life. She noted that the perception of her name being so Jewish connected her early on to national and international Jewish communities. Organizations asked her to help them raise money—“All I did was say yes.” She attributed that trust to an informal audition of sorts: Holocaust, the miniseries, and Yentl was enough of an audition for them.” 

Feldshuh’s understanding of identity was rooted in family pride. “My father loved who he was, and he loved being Jewish, and I loved my father, so I never needed to be that American,” she said. 

She remembered being empowered as a small child. Her father took her to the Supreme Court when she was 6 and “treated me like I was 18 when I was 6.” He taught her concepts like empathy and even trusted her with money beyond her allowance because, he told her, she understood what to do: “You know how much to give to tzedakah, how much to put in your penny bank, how much to spend on 3 Musketeers [candy bars].” 

She insisted there was no attempt to blur Jewishness at home: “I never had a Hanukkah bush, we didn’t have Christmas trees in our home, we never had any iconography that wasn’t Jewish.” Yet she also recalled friendship across different cultures and religions—going to her best friend’s home for Christmas and noticing “a cross over our bed.” The lesson she received was direct. Be proud, because “the world was going to remind you anyway.” 

That pride also sat alongside moral clarity about pluralism and integration. Feldshuh shared a striking childhood memory: when the school bus came, her mother instructed her to sit next to Sam Houston. Only later did she grasp the meaning: “Well, Sam Houston was the only African American on the bus.” Years later, in San Francisco, she received a note from him thanking her for being his first friend—an act that, in context, “took commitment,” she said, recalling the era of desegregation enforced “at gunpoint with the National Guard in the South.” 

Those early values—standing alone, practicing diligence, living without apology—shaped both her musicianship and her acting. She described being “the only bat mitzvah at Quaker Ridge,” practicing and performing major works (“Bach Inventions … Rhapsody in Blue … the G minor concerto by Mendelssohn … the D minor concerto by Mozart”) by her early teens. “I learned to stand alone and know I was going to be OK,” she said. 

When asked about Jewish roles, Feldshuh rejected the idea that she sought them out. “They sought out me,” she said, emphasizing classical training and transformation. She listed her Broadway nominations—“one is for a Brazilian Catholic, another one for an Italian Catholic, another one for Yentl and another one for Golda”—as evidence that Jewish roles weren’t her only lane. She cited portrayals ranging from Irena’s Vow, “a righteous Christian,” to playing Katherine Hepburn opposite Tommy Lee Jones. For Feldshuh, historical roles were “the easier ones,” while the deepest satisfaction came from challenge and immersion—the roles that became, as she put it, her “favorite obsession.” 

That immersion could be extreme. For “Helena Slomova,” the character she played in Holocaust, she was told at 26 that she had to speak fluent Russian—so she hired a tutor and did it, noting she could “memorize that Russian overnight.” 

It wasn’t just technique; it was identity as international belonging. Feldshuh said she felt no dividing line between Jewish communities: “I see no distinguishing factor between me and an Israeli Jew, an Iraqi Jew, an Iranian Jew.” The differences, she noted with affection and specificity, existed in customs and food—“they do scallions at ‘Dayenu’ and we don’t … we don’t have rose water at the Ashkenazic Passover”—but the affiliation was profound: “I feel extremely affiliated and very honored to be part of an international community that’s 5,000 years old.” 

That international community became personal—and startlingly literal—in the stories Feldshuh told about finding relatives and recovering family history. 

Talking about a 2008 visit to Ukraine, Feldshuh said she found her family home in Borshchiv, marked by “MF” in iron on a chimney—once a mansion, now the administration building of St. Agnes Hospital. She was there because she was preparing to star in Irena’s Vow, about a righteous Christian who saved Jews, and she wanted to understand hidden spaces—“underground tunnels and underground rooms where Jews could hide in the event of a pogrom.” 

She walked the streets asking about the family name until an older man recognized it, connecting Feldshuh to “the palatz … the palace,” remembering how the family gave food during what he called Easter—“it wasn’t Easter, it was Passover.” Feldshuh even floated to relatives the idea of buying the property, but the practical burden stopped it: “If we buy it, we have to pay back taxes from the war.” 

Linking the Ukraine thread to an earlier moment in 1974, she said that a visitor with a cane knocked on her dressing-room door after Yentl at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The man “looked like Freud,” and introduced himself saying, “My name is Ruben Ben Shem Feldschu, and I was the chief rabbi of the remnants of the Polish Jews after the war.” Feldshuh later verified who he was, finding him pictured with Abba Eban, Menachem Begin, and Moshe Sharett. 

Decades later, the connection resurfaced again. At “the debut of the Golda picture on December 8, Golda’s yahrzeit at the Jerusalem Cinematheque,” Ruben Ben Shem Felschu’s granddaughter reached out with a photograph featuring her grandparents standing alongside Golda. Feldshuh quoted the message she received: “The photo was taken in 1958. Golda was the minister of foreign affairs, and my grandfather was the … ambassador in Argentina for the Jewish Agency.” 

When Feldshuh visited Yad Vashem in 1982, a librarian asked for her family name. She initially replied that she didn’t think she had family who died during the war, but the librarian pressed and then found records in handwritten volumes: “There they were, 15 of them—Julius Feldshuh, Marina Feldshuh, Rosa Feldshuh… all from Vienna.” 

Feldshuh mentioned the discovery in a Jerusalem Post interview, and months later, she received a letter from an Emil Feldshuh: “The people you talked about in your interview are my parents, and I wrote those records.” Emil explained he had escaped Vienna on “the last Youth Aliyah boat out of Vienna to Turkey,” walked to Palestine, and survived the war with his brother Alexander, who had been studying in England before being deported as an enemy alien and interned in Canada until the war ended. Emil and Alexander later came to Israel and built families. 

The family story then arrived in Feldshuh’s living room in Los Angeles. In 1983—after she had given birth to her son Brandon—Emil’s son Joel, then training as an Israeli Air Force Mirage pilot and in Texas with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), visited her. “He came from Texas to Los Angeles and knocked on my door and said I’m Joel Feldshuh and I said I’m Tovah Feldshuh,” she recalled. “What a reunion. We cried, we cried,” she said. 

Those connections didn’t stay sentimental; Feldshuh described them as active obligations. She said Joel Feldshuh later became “a brigadier general in the IDF,” then head of major defense and aerospace entities, and later was active at the University of Haifa. After October 7, when Haifa needed money, Feldshuh said, “I sent money immediately to pay for the tuition for soldiers who had to go fight and couldn’t afford to do their jobs and get themselves to school.” 

For Feldshuh, this was what values looked like in motion—familial, national, ethical. She framed it in her own language of purpose: “If you have values that dedicate yourself to tikkun, it can be a traffic jam of kindness and goodness.” 

Even the lighter parts of the conversation returned to moral seriousness. When asked about the enduring comedy trope of the Jewish boy and the non-Jewish girl, Feldshuh responded not with punchlines but with theology. She spoke about Jewish responsibility “to be enlightened to the nations,” clarifying, “it doesn’t mean we’re superior to anybody else, it just means we have an obligation.” She called tikkun olam central—“everybody is put on this earth for the purpose of healing the world”—and she defined Judaism not as dogma but as deed: “The core to me of Judaism is the mitzvah, it’s the deed of loving kindness.” 

Yet Feldshuh was also adamant that moral clarity required vigilance. She warned that pluralism can be fragile and that societies can drift when they confuse tolerance with surrender. Her phrasing, in places, was sharper and more political, and it carried the unmistakable imprint of a woman who has watched history repeat itself and refuses to pretend otherwise. 

Her current and recent work reflected the same blend of comedy, character, and cultural commentary. “This January I’m doing Tovah Out of Her Mind,” a show she connected to her memoir, Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I’ve Played. She called the piece “the jewel in my crown,” describing it as virtuosic and wide-ranging—“characters 8 to 80, comic and dramatic all of whom sing.” She quoted a section from the show’s mixed-marriage child character, Molly Kelly Kugelberg, capturing the “December dilemma” chaos: “My daddy keeps putting yarmulkes on the nativity figures and mommy keeps roasting chestnuts on the menorah. … Were Mary and Joseph visited by three wise men or three guys named Weitzman?” 

Her acting method remained, in her words, obsessive precision—explaining that when you played a character you had to “find the path in you,” find “where you’re affiliated with her.” She defined the difference between excellence and genius in a line that read like a manifesto: “Excellence is the ability to hit a target nobody else can hit, genius is ability to hit a target nobody else can see.” 

When asked what kept her going, Feldshuh said her motivation evolved. “What used to inspire me was the fear of failure,” she admitted, shaped by a family ethos that demanded she “reach for the stars.” But she drew a sharp boundary around what “mastery” should mean, contrasting it against violence—“not mastery of an AK-47, not mastery of a million tunnels under Gaza, not mastery to murder other people”—and returning to mastery as a moral good, “as in Einstein, as in Freud … Elie Wiesel … Herzl, even Golda.” 

Her admiration for Golda Meir was both political and personal. Feldshuh recounted Golda’s reported reaction upon being elected prime minister—“What do I need this for? I can just live in my little house,”—and the famous “kitchen cabinet” meetings around a kitchen table where Golda made pastries. 

Toward the end of the interview, Feldshuh instinctively returned to the works that, in her view, promote coexistence in their own way: Golda’s Balcony and “our wonderful number one comedy on Netflix, Nobody Wants This.” She pointed to a key line from Golda’s Balcony: “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews.” 

“Keep envisioning coexistence, keep living a holy life, keep your tikkun, keep your mitzvahs, but don’t be a fool, don’t shut your eyes to that which exists,” she said. 

In the end, the portrait that emerged wasn’t only of an award-winning actor, but of a woman who treated her name—first inherited, then chosen—as a summons. 

Feldshuh’s life, as she told it, was built from craft and conviction: a childhood trained to value independence, a career disciplined by study, and a Jewish identity that kept reappearing—through roles, through fundraising, through family records in Yad Vashem, through a knock at the door, through a photograph that collapsed history into a single frame.