Lectures For Lifelong Learners!

Many stories, including those featuring fairy tale characters, are very popular because they operate at multiple levels. The beloved film series featuring the green ogre, Shrek (a Yiddish word meaning fear or terror), began as a children’s book by William Steig, who was the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. While working beautifully as a kind of fractured fairy tale that kids love, the background adult story is based in anti-fascist, feminist, and ecological themes. Farquaad is committing ethnic cleansing of the fairy-tale people and controlling his environment, while Shrek and Fiona signify the greenness of nature, happiness in the body, the refusal of conformist beauty standards, and wildness and beauty of that creative power of Mother Nature that cannot be owned or dominated.