arts & culture
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
I n Yiddish, “potchki” means to daw-
dle, dilly-dally, waste time.
First-generation Polish-Jewish
immigrant Robert Palmer feels the word
is grossly underrated.
Palmer’s Polish parents immigrated
to Philadelphia in the 1960s and met
at Temple University, finding a slice of
Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the likes of
satirist Jackie Mason. Palmer himself
was a fan of Jewish comedy giants Peter
Sellers and the Marx brothers, “potch-
ki-ing” comedians who were the life-
blood of 20th-century entertainment.
It’s a lifeblood Palmer wants to keep
alive. Taking inspiration from his Jewish
entertainment heroes, Palmer, along with
childhood friend Eric Horowitz, created
“The Potchki Chronicles” in 2001, a hokey,
low-budget film that they reprised as a
podcast “The Potchki Audio Chronicles’’
in 2019. Palmer, Horowitz and the rest
of the “Potchki” crew teased the sec-
ond season of the podcast at their first
Philadelphia Fan Expo panel on April 10.
“The Potchki Audio Chronicles,” a de
facto sequel to the film, is a scripted comedy
where inept sleuth Potchki teams up with
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Courtesy of Eric Horowitz
Podcast With
Local Roots
Makes FanExpo
Debut “The Potchki Audio Chronicles” team at the 2022 Philadelphia Fan Expo
pseudo-intelligent and hyper serious I.M.
Nebbish to stop crimes in the underbelly of
a very fictionalized, very Eastern European
Philadelphia-esque metropolitan.
Like Potchki, sidekick Nebbish — and
the rest of the podcast’s characters — draw
heavily on Yiddish vocabulary. Nebbish
in Yiddish means timid and submissive,
foreshadowing the sidekick as ineffective
against recurring villain Flaczki, whose
name derives from a Polish tripe soup
Palmer deems “absolutely disgusting.”
The escapades of the intrepid heroes
take them to even sillier locales. In a
future episode, Palmer and Horowitz
intend to take Potchki and Nebbish to
the Borscht Belt — not a summer resort,
but to a wrestling tournament, where the
winner takes an oversized wrestling belt
with the familiar, if not misleading name.
Palmer and Horowitz may now be liv-
ing in different cities — Palmer is in Los
Angeles and Horowitz is in Ambler —
well into their careers as movie and film
producers, but their love of storytelling
together has deep roots.
The two met through Palmer’s brother,
who was friends with Horowitz at Lower
Moreland High School in Huntingdon
Valley. Palmer and Horowitz hit it off;
Horowitz’s love of Mel Brooks and
his encyclopedic memory of “Blazing
Saddles” helped the two find an instant
connection in Jewish humor and media.
Beyond superficial interests, Palmer
and Horowitz shared similar stories.
Horowitz had Russian and Ukrainian
ancestry, understanding the obscure, lit-
tle details of Palmer’s childhood, such
as kogel mogel, a raw egg drink which
Palmer describes as “similar to the one
Rocky would drink.”
“Eric came to me, and he was like,
“Hey, have you ever heard of kogel mogel?
My mom mentioned it,’” Palmer said.
“And I’m like, ‘Yes! My dad used to make
me drink it!’”
Kogel mogel later made an appearance
in “Potchki.”
Their collaboration culminated in the
2001 “Potchki” movie, but even after the
life of the film reached a dead-end, the
life of Potchki certainly didn’t.
In between Palmer’s credits as execu-
tive producer is Hulu horror film “I Am
Alone” and Horowitz’s helming of Green
Socks Production as executive producer,
the two stayed in touch, still throwing
“Potchki” pitches back and forth.
“We talk to each other pretty much
every day,” Horowitz said. “Every time
an idea comes in, I’ll instantly start writ-
ing, and then we’ll just go back and forth
with the idea. I’ll copy it and paste it to a
Google doc, which we’re now up to 300
pages of stupid ideas.”
It was Horowitz’s idea to revamp the
project in 2019, hoping that the podcast
medium would be perfect for listening
on road trips and commutes. By the time
“Potchki” hit its stride again in early
2020, people were no longer commuting
to work or going on road trips to visit
friends and family.
The project stalled, but because Palmer
and Horowitz were so used to com-
See Podcast, Page 39
obituaries
‘The Clock Doc’ Murray Moliken Dies at 84
JARRAD SAFFREN | STAFF WRITER
7, her father bought her a pony.
“He always wanted to make us happy,”
the daughter said.
But Moliken saved his most elabo-
rate gestures for the person who made
him happy: Anita, his wife of 59 years.
Th e husband would use everything from
Courtesy of the Moliken family
I n a death notice published on the
Jewish Exponent’s website on April
4, Dr. Murray Moliken’s family
wrote that Moliken “believed it was his
job to both cure people and make them
laugh.” Th ey were talking about his sev-
eral-decade career as a family physi-
cian in the Cherry Hill, New Jersey,
area, but they were also talking about
the rest of his life. Moliken, accord-
ing to his wife Anita Moliken, daugh-
ter Cheryl Marken and son Warren
Moliken, lived to cure people of what-
ever internal woes they may have been
carrying around, make them laugh and
remind them that life could be fun.
He used everything, from practical
jokes to dinner table jokes to letters, to
achieve his mission in life.
Moliken died on March 21 at home
surrounded by family. He was 84.
In the days around Moliken’s death,
family members grew to realize the grav-
ity of their patriarch’s impact.
“Everyone has a memory,” Anita
Moliken said. “Whoever we talk to.”
One of the doctor’s friends shared a
story about how his wife was dealing
with complications from a Caesarean sec-
tion. Moliken knew that his friend’s wife
would heal better at home with personal
care, so he told his buddy to bring her
home. Th e doctor went over every day for
two straight weeks and cared for her.
Right before the doctor’s death, a guy
came by to shampoo the carpets in the
family home. He told Marken that her
father was “the best doctor I ever had.”
“He said, ‘I could never fi nd a good
doctor aft er him,’” the daughter added.
Th e carpet cleaner probably felt that
way because of Moliken’s deep and abid-
ing concern for his patients.
In the 1980s and ’90s, family physi-
cians were selling their practices to big
hospital groups, and Moliken initially
did the same. But since he kept working
there as a doctor, he saw that the big
group was not giving his patients good
enough service, according to Marken.
Moliken bought the practice back
from the conglomerate, something other
doctors struggled to do aft er coming to
the same realization, Anita Moliken said.
At a diff erent point in his career,
string beans to bottles of nail polish to
lipstick on a mirror to form the words “I
love you.”
“It would pop into his head, and he’d
make it happen,” Anita Moliken said. JE
jsaff ren@midatlanticmedia.com
BUSINESS DIRECTORY
Dr. Murray Moliken
Moliken recognized another ineffi ciency
in the medical system. If his nursing
home patients fell and needed an X-ray,
they had to wait for an ambulance and
then wait again for transportation back
to the home.
But there was nothing in New Jersey
law forbidding a portable X-ray system,
so Moliken created one and began going
around to nursing facilities.
“And this was while he was practicing
medicine,” he added.
Th at wasn’t even his only side project.
At 60, the doctor reinvented himself as
“Th e Clock Doc.”
“Th e Clock Doc” was Moliken’s
moniker in his new nonprofi t orga-
nization, Kids Time, which “gathered
communities of school children” to
create “watch-adorned clocks,” with
“one watch face for each hour,” and
then deliver them to “sick kids in hos-
pitals across the country.”
When Marken lived in Florida, her
dad came down for a visit. One morn-
ing, he got up and said he was going to
a school to make clocks with students.
Marken had no relationship with the
school. “Everything about him was irrepress-
ible,” she said. “You could not put a lid on
his love and aff ection.”
Th is was as true at home as it was in
public. Moliken was perhaps the fi rst dad in
town to buy a video camera and, like a
true dad, he started videotaping every-
thing — runs down the neighborhood
hill, his son’s wrestling matches and his
daughter’s marching band performances,
among other events.
He would also buy his children “any
kind of pet,” Marken said. When she was
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