Hershey Felder portrays the legendary composer in “George Gershwin Alone” at Berkeley Rep. Photo: Mark Garvin.

Hershey Felder may be channeling George Gershwin.

If that’s not what’s going on, he must at least be sensing the composer’s fascinating rhythms through the fingertips of both hands.

He also has a nuanced, carefully researched understanding of Gershwin’s colorful, truncated life.

The charismatic performer exhibits all that as he plays the musical genius’ melodies on a concert grand Steinway, and dramatizes tidbits of his bio, in a solo 90-minute Berkeley Rep show titled “George Gershwin Alone.”

The work is an outgrowth of five years of study (interviewing family members and biographers, perusing correspondence and checking out original manuscripts, listening to old audio recordings).

Felder’s been touring the show across the globe for 13 years (including a Broadway stint).

But he jokes that what came before this run was merely preliminary — practice sessions for his East Bay appearance.

He also claims he’s tired.

So many performances (3,000 and counting), yet to me he’s as fresh as if this were his world premiere.

My wife, a highly talented jazz pianist and “spoke-alist” who’s performed in countless senior venues in Marin, San Francisco, Sonoma and the East Bay, labels him a virtuoso.

I’m biased, of course, but, considering her skill level, I find the pronouncement high praise indeed.

Not to mention astute — and accurate.

She particularly lauds his flying fingers and classical flourishes, and calls him “a confident pianist, confident vocalist, confident raconteur.”

I’ll add “confident humorist.”

The show’s prime conceit of having Felder inhabit Gershwin’s persona works divinely, thank you, except for the moments he’s depicting the composer’s death at age 38 from an undiagnosed brain tumor. They’re awkward.

Thankfully, Felder doesn’t end the show that way.

He plays “Rhapsody in Blue” at length instead, then involves the audience in a boisterous, half-hour sing-along “encore” (which includes an “It Ain’t Necessarily So” call-and-response and an uproarious, unfamiliar novelty tune penned with Irving Berlin).

The bulk of the show, naturally, focuses on standards — in addition to excerpts from “Porgy and Bess,” “An American in Paris” and Gershwin’s concerto: “S’Wonderful,” “Embraceable You,” “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” “The Man I Love,” “I Got Rhythm” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

But the character study also pinpoints the composer’s flaring insecurity when berated by movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn for not writing tunes simple enough to whistle — a la Irving Berlin.

And his anger after being targeted by auto tycoon Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic rants.

Although Gershwin’s legend has outlasted such commentaries (probably because he wrote more than 1,000 tunes), his fame, according to some other critics, was mainly due to Ira’s lyrics — or stemmed from the luck of having superstar Al Jolson sing his first hit, “Swanee.”

This tour de force starts with poignant chord-less notes from “Porgy,” the composer’s jazz opera about poor Southern blacks that initially flopped and caused the affluent son of immigrants to lose his shirt.

And it glimpses a childhood in which Gershwin wandered “the streets of lower Manhattan with my hoodlum friends.”

Felder also touches on the composer’s tenure as a rehearsal pianist with the “Ziegfeld Follies” (“they used to call us piano pimps”), and he deftly performs duets with antique recordings of Gershwin and Jolson.

His anecdotes, for the most part, are extremely amusing.

Such as his recounting Gershwin’s father (a cutter of shoes) mistakenly believing “Fascinating Rhythm” to be “Fashion on the River.”

Felder, who created his own book for this show, is abetted by the smooth direction of Joel Zwick, who’d spearheaded the comedy film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,”

Scenic designer Yael Pardess also helps via a lean set that features blown-up covers of sheet music, a plush curtain implying wealth, and two chairs that enable Felder to get closer to the audience at either end of the stage.

He’s aided, too, by projections that capture images of George’s lyricist brother, Ira, and best friend/lover, Kay Swift.

The night I saw the show, the Berkeley crowd was more gray-haired, wrinkled and frail than the usual Rep audience.

Many, like a blissed-out woman across the aisle from me, were so familiar with the material they quietly sang or hummed along with Felder throughout.

Audience reaction to Felder approaches ecstasy.

I understand.

Because he’s that good.

“George Gershwin Alone” plays at Berkeley Rep’s 400-seat Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 7. Night performances, 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $14.50 to $77, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

Some things we should never forget.

Like, the Holocaust wasn’t limited to Jews. And, Jews did fight baWe certainly must remember the six million dead. But the Nazis also killed millions of non-Jews — Soviet prisoners of war, Polish citizens, Gypsies, the disabled, political and religious dissenters, gays.

Decades ago, my first day at the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, a man who’d survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and four other World War II camps pleaded, “No matter what else you do, don’t let anyone forget the Holocaust.”

Sonia and Paul Orbuch. Photo: Woody Weingarten

I never forgot him, or the slogan “Never forget!” — the rallying cry for Jews the world over.

But it was a while before I’d encounter anyone who’d joined the resistance.

They, too, bear scars — physical, emotional.

A month ago I met octogenarian Sonia Orbuch. She fought Nazis as a teen, part of a partisan unit whose mission was resistance and sabotage, including the mining of train tracks.

Mostly she was an impromptu field nurse, helping doctors amputate limbs, treating the wounded with skimpy supplies and blood-soaked bandages — and cradling the dying.

The Corte Madera resident can’t forget the nightmare, or a brutal winter hiding in a Ukrainian forest.

She lived fearfully “all the time” then, and knows she’ll never forgive. “Even when it’s a happy moment or a holiday, I cannot smile, cannot laugh,” she told me. “The pain is tremendous.”

In a book aimed at teenagers, Sonia said, “Every day my heart aches for the loss of my mother and two brothers, dozens of other relatives, and nearly all of my childhood friends.”

But she also knows it’s crucial to dispel the myth that Jews didn’t resist the Nazis.

Her son, Paul, a San Anselmo resident, actualized his legacy by co-founding the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, www.jewishpartisans.org. It, he noted, is “seeking 100,000 teachers, Jewish and non-Jewish” to inspire new generations by showing “the history and life lessons of the Jewish partisans.”

What’s it like being a survivor’s child?

“I always go back to what Sonia’s said, ‘You have to stand up early against tyranny, oppression, discrimination, anti-Semitism, whenever and wherever it occurs, and you have to teach the kids.’”

Yet even as his messages spread hope, others dispense hatred: The Associated Press reported a 30 percent worldwide surge in anti-Semitic violence and vandalism last year, economic nosedives again making Jews scapegoats.

Paul once told a Marin Jewish Community Center audience about hearing Sonia’s friends reminisce “about the war, their losses and their survival experiences. They did so with tears and sometimes with humor. And almost always there was anger and the refrain…of ‘never again.’”

His daughter, Eva, who lives in San Jose, subsequently recalled that she’d told her bat mitzvah tutor she “understood what my grandmother had gone through. My tutor challenged me…and I came to realize…I may never be able to truly understand or feel what my family and millions of others endured. I will only be able to ask questions and grapple with my past.”

Another resister, Paula Ross, lived in Fairfax since 1990 but just moved to the Veterans Home of Yountville.

Paula Ross outside Whistlestop in San Rafael. Photo: Yvonne Roberts.

The Vienna-born 92-year-old can’t forget either — how she fought with the resistance to retaliate: “They killed my uncles, aunts, cousins and friends.”

She still doesn’t “like to talk about it, because it was very traumatic,” but, despite misgivings, she returned to Austria two years ago “and taught teenagers about the Holocaust, telling them exactly what the Nazis did.”

Morgan Blum, a Tiburon native, is director of education for the Holocaust Center, part of Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco. She says a survivor once was defined as someone who’d been in a death camp but now signifies “anyone who was targeted for death and survived.”

That means they “may have been in an extermination camp, may have been a hidden child, may have been a Partisan, may have fled in 1936.”

Morgan recently gathered “600 students and teachers from 101 private, public and parochial schools to participate in our annual Day of Learning. About 95 percent were not Jewish. Over 70 percent had never heard a survivor before, but meeting one, they could make a connection.”

One attendee, after hearing about Rwandan, Cambodian, Bosnian, Darfur genocides, vowed “to prevent this from happening again, to not be a bystander.”

Another told Morgan it’s critical “to carry on this story because the next generation won’t be able to hear from a living survivor.”

Yes!