Milwaukee native produces the ultimate Seder

Back in the late 1970s, when Michael Dorf was a student at Nicolet High School, he knew he had “no musical chops whatsoever.”

“My friends in high school at Nicolet were great musicians,” he recalled, and he, too, wanted to be in a band. So he started managing a high school band called Aurora. He put up posters for it at prom, promoting their gigs, while handling sound and lights for shows.

This small seed would grow into a tree of many branches, becoming an entertainment management career that has included a move to New York City, opening performance venues around the country, organizing events at Carnegie Hall and putting on star-studded Passover Seders featuring performers like Al Franken, Lou Reed, David Broza and Dr. Ruth.

The Dorf adventure is a dizzying one and at the age of 53, he’s got big plans for what’s next.

For more than 15 years, Dorf has been running an annual “Downtown Seder,” a free-spirited Seder like nothing you’ve ever seen, with readings and performances by artists, political figures, writers and poets. The Downtown Seder concept started in New York City but has now expanded to Chicago and Atlanta. Dorf leads each of the Seders, which generally take place several days before Passover.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has done the Seder twice, having recited a blessing over the wine. Karpas is about spring renewal, Dorf said, so it’s a chance for one of the performers to talk about the environment. The maror is usually a great chance for a comedian to talk about the bitterness of their mother, he added.

“Maror is always a very fun slot. You have somewhere between 15 and 20 slots,” he said. “It’s all over the board.”

In running the event, Dorf introduces performers, for example delivering “30 seconds on why Lewis Black is the appropriate maror for the year.”

For information on attending the Downtown Seder in Chicago on April 18, with tickets ranging from $70 to $145, visit CityWinery.com. About 300 people attend each city’s Seder, which comes with a full meal and snacks during the Seder.

“One of the worst things as an event promotor is to have 300 hungry Jews waiting for food,” Dorf said. “We do take some liberties. We have hummus and tabouli and all kinds of noshes on the table.”

“I’d say more than anything I’d give camp credit for turning me onto music that was both Jewish and very activist minded,” said Dorf, referring to the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken JCC here in Wisconsin.

The camp had a special flavor to it with “Madison ‘60s hippies” as camp counsellors and a strong indoctrination in tikkun olam, the Jewish commitment to repairing the world. He also gives great credit to his parents, Jerry and Harriet Dorf of River Hills.

In fact, Michael Dorf traces his longstanding interest in the Seder to the one put on by his father.

“My dad in particular, in growing up he tried to make the Seder a very contemporary and living and real and a meaningful experience,” Dorf said. “The basic idea is that Martin Luther King’s message is built into the haggadah even though 100 years ago they didn’t know that.”

Dorf attended law school in Madison for a year but decided it wasn’t his path to his dream of getting into the entertainment business. It also didn’t hurt that his girlfriend at the time, now his wife Sarah Connors, was attending New York University’s film school.

He dropped out and moved to New York City in 1986, along with a Madison band called the “Swamp Thing.” He put out records for them and other bands under his own label, Flaming Pie Records.

Still influenced by memories of his 1960s counsellors at Camp Interlaken, with their ripped jeans and tie dye shorts, he sported long hair and an interest maintaining a house for jazz and performance art in New York’s East Village. So in 1987 he opened a live music venue in the city, called The Knitting Factory.

“Right away I fell into a strong community of the jazz players in New York that were both black and white but the white musicians for the most part were Jewish,” he said. Artists included John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Frank London, Roy Nathanson and John Lurie. A new klezmer scene was emerging. “He turned the Knitting Factory in New York, once ensconced in a tiny Houston Street storefront, into a mecca for underground jazz, rock and hip-hop, and much else in between and beyond,” noted the New York Times, back in 2001.

Dorf is no longer affiliated with The Knitting Factory, but back when it became an outlet for a new Jewish cultural community in New York, it’s what led him to conceive of the Downtown Seder.

“Wow I could do a Seder for the community,” he said to himself. “Let’s make it an interpretive experience to tell the story. That was my kind of weird slant on this ancient ritual.”

Dorf also started a school in New York City called Tribeca Hebrew School (he had his twin boys in mind, now 17). He started a concert series at Carnegie Hall in New York that has raised over $1 million for music education programs, he said. But in the mid-2000s, with the Hebrew school and the Carnegie Hall series “making no money,” he came up with the idea for an urban winery that offers live entertainment.

“There was a need for a luxury concert experience. Big name acts in an intimate environment,” he said. People in their 40s, 50s, or 60s don’t necessarily want to go to a big stadium or large theater. They’d rather eat dinner, drink wine and watch someone like Suzanne Vega perform in a 300-seat room.

City Winery serves its own wine and other wines, too. It produces its own kosher wine.

Dorf’s own life gave him the idea for City Winery. “People are very busy, they don’t have a lot of time. It’s hard for me to get a sitter and go out with my wife,” he noted, with two hours for dinner and two hours for a Broadway show. City Winery combines it all into one elegant experience.

“We found a niche that started in New York for a high-end, sophisticated consumer,” he said. “Our model is working. It’s making money.”

City Winery locations already exist in New York, Chicago and Nashville, Tennessee. He’s planning to open in Atlanta and Boston this year.

“In 10 years we’re probably going to have 25 locations around the globe.”

Also in 10 years, he added, he hopes to continue to “use my business and platform for tikkun olam.”

“We do a lot of charity work. We give a lot of wine away. We donate the space to good causes. We try and raise awareness to issues,” he said, adding, “I hope I’m still producing my Passover Seder.”