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How a new generation of comics is changing the face of Jewish comedy — and Judaism itself
Jewish comedy is, of course, a long and vaunted tradition: Joan Rivers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Larry David.
No one had to tell audiences that they were Jewish. Sure, there was Jewish content to some of their jokes — Bruce’s most famous bit is about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. But the literal mention of Judaism wasn’t what made their comedy feel so Jewish. It was their affect, their posture, their accents, their discussion of psychoanalysis or overbearing mothers. The self-deprecating, dry, kvetching tone. The test for whether comedy was Jewish was like the test for obscenity: You know it when you see it.
Today, though, everyone is in therapy. Everyone is anxious. Everyone can poke fun at their crazy families. Everyone — or plenty of people, at least — uses at least a few Yiddishisms. Schlep, klutz and mensch are hardly limited to members of the tribe.
Maybe that’s why a new crop of Jewish comics, many of whom have made their name posting their sets and crowdwork clips to YouTube, are so explicit about exactly what kind of comedy they’re doing.
Raanan Herschberg’s sharp new special is called Morbidly Jewish. Ariel Elias titles her YouTube special “A Jewish Star.” Josh Edelman’s latest act is “The Jew Rogaine Show.” “I’m Jewish btw lol,” reads the caption of a viral clip comedian Lucas Zelnick posted, talking about the names of various Jewish day schools. Gianmarco Soresi, an Italian Jew who talks about his Judaism in many of his viral clips, captions them with the hashtag #Jewish.
What it means to be Jewish in the U.S. has changed since the early days of Jewish comics on the Borscht Belt. We’ve assimilated, spread out across the country and the accent is fading away. You have to tell people you’re Jewish for them to know, most of the time. So, many Jewish comics are doing exactly that.
But beyond the label, what makes their comedy Jewish? For some, it seems like stolen valor, a way of claiming membership in a lauded tradition of comics, when mostly they’re just rehashing old jokes.
Josh Edelman — no relationship to Alex Edelman — spends much of The Jew Rogaine Show riffing about how, for example, his mother would brag about how many people he shot if he were a school shooter. “Thus concludeth the Jewish portion,” he says abruptly halfway through his set, as though Jewish comedy is limited to jokes that literally mention Jews, a switch that can be turned on and off.
But the best of the new, online Jewish comics, however, are birthing a new type of comedy — and with it, a new vision of Jewishness.
A Jewish comedy, divided
There are many comics who include some amount of Jewish comedy in their sets. In Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh, though largely focused on gross-out comedy about bodily fluids, S.N.L. star Sarah Sherman also jokes about Ashkenazi digestion and having a Jewish president. Iliza Shlesinger mostly jokes about being a millennial woman, but also talks about her encounters with Christians as a Jew in Texas.
But there’s a range of comics who lean much more into their Judaism these days, making it central to their comedy, and labeling it Jewish. And among them, there seem to be two genres: comedy explaining Jewishness to non-Jews, and comedy that affirms Jews’ Jewishness.
Raanan Herschberg’s newest special, Morbidly Jewish, is in the first category. Herschberg takes on rising antisemitism with surprising nuance for a set that also includes jokes about masturbation.
In fact, that bit is one of the most complex, in which Herschberg tries to find a porn star to watch whose politics align perfectly with his — after Oct. 7, he said he stopped watching Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese porn star because she wrote a tweet celebrating the deaths of civilians. But an Israeli performer he turned to instead didn’t believe Palestinians deserved a homeland, which he also found distasteful.
“How could I, in good conscience, continue masturbating to this woman?” he says. “I started looking for a pornstar with, you know, a more nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
It’s a brilliant bit, skewering the idea — an increasingly common one post-Oct. 7 — that there is political purity to be had at all times, in all moments of consumption, even the most base ones. It allows audiences a window into the internal battle of a certain cadre of progressive American Jews attempting to parse the post-Oct. 7 landscape. And, yet, the bit is not remotely preachy; it’s mostly a raunchy, funny joke.
Herschberg’s comedy is quite Jewish in content, sure, but it also has the je ne sais quoi feel of old-school Jewish comedy — the self-deprecation, dry wit and, not for nothing, some creative riffs about his mom — with an ability to bring audiences into the experiences of Jews, whether political purity tests or trying to decide what really counts as antisemitism.
Modi Rosenfeld, a gay Orthodox Jew, is firmly in the other category: Jewish jokes, by Jews and for Jews. In his special, Know Your Audience, he spends much of the time joking about intra-communal things, like the difference between prayer styles at Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues. He does explain, and act out, some of these jokes, but they aren’t all that funny if you don’t have the lived experience of, say, sitting through the speed-mumbling that defines so many Orthodox Ashkenazi services, or the lengthy warbling flourishes of Sephardic davening.
So much of the Jewish comedy of yore was pivotal in helping Jews assimilate further into American society. “See, look at us,” it said. “We’re funny and approachable.” Jewish comics became American stars. But Rosenfeld is not shooting for assimilation; he is helping fortify the in-group.
When Rosenfeld asks, at one point, if anyone in the audience is not Jewish, only a few hands go up. And he makes it clear his set is not for them, albeit in a jovial tone: “I don’t know how you got in here,” he says, laughing.
Innovation in Jewish comedy
Then there are Jewish comedians who, while being deeply Jewish, are doing something else altogether. Their comedy feels deeply Jewish, while spending little time talking about it. And, in the style of the previous generation of Jewish comics, they’re also inventing a totally new style.
Adam Friedland gained fame as one of a trio of men who hosted Cum Town, the nihilistic cult podcast of the so-called dirtbag left, and now sometimes does stand-up about his parents, Oct. 7 and Israel. But his real comedic innovation is his shockingly popular YouTube channel, where he interviews politicians and celebrities, ribbing them while also eliciting real revelations. He has interviewed such guests as Zohran Mamdani, Ritchie Torres, Mia Khalifa — yes, that’s the same Lebanese porn star Herschberg joked about — and extremist looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular.
In each interview, Friedland makes himself into a kind of clumsy fall guy who asks such bizarre questions that guests are often stunned into surprising revelations. But then he will pivot into such heartfelt earnestness that it’s disarming. In the episode with Torres, after a contentious exchange over Israel, Friedland turned surprisingly personal in tone, describing the year he spent living in Israel and his family’s connections to Judaism.
“Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my family,” he says, his voice cracking. “The world is seeing something that is terrible. And it’s being done in my name.”
For all Friedland’s deadpan awkwardness (“Have you seen a movie?” he asks musician and actress FKA Twigs, who responds, in confusion, “A movie? In my life?”) it is clear that he is, in fact, very smart and prepared for his interviews. He emerges as the master in every exchange, despite — or because of — his performance of clumsiness. It makes for a darkly subversive show, each episode poking such sly fun at his guests that they only sometimes notice and even less often know how to roll with any given riff. And it’s catchy enough that Friedland has become a kind of figurehead of a new paradigm in content; in the past year, he has been profiled by GQ, and covered in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker.
In a way, Friedland fits into a model outlined by Nathan Fielder, whose quasi-reality show, The Rehearsal, blurs the line between performance and reality, joking and earnestness, into something that is simultaneously funny and deeply unsettling. Even Alex Edelman, whose biographical comedy special Just For Us tells the story of his decision to attend a white supremacist meeting in Queens, toes a strange line of ambivalence over just how bad these racists are; he finds himself hoping they’ll like him.
The throughline here of this comedy is a destabilizing ambiguity. The situations can be funny in their absurdity, but they’re undergirded by a deep discomfort because they force the viewers, squirming, to ponder whether the joke or scenario posed by the comedian is, in fact, so outlandish and funny or if it’s actually completely earnest.
This form of comedy manages to touch upon truths that are hard to address directly, ones that are well-suited to our increasingly nihilistic, red-pilled society where earnestness is so often perceived as cringe.
It relies on comedians playing the role of an awkward outsider — willing to be weird or unattractive. It’s an inheritor to the self-deprecation that was so core to earlier Jewish comedy, and to a long Jewish history of outsider status, now remade into a truth-telling device.
This comedy might not be overtly Jewish. But something about this new cadre of comics’ ability to create a new genre, to define new boundaries, and to navigate a tightrope of nuance, feels, to me, almost Talmudic. It feels like these comedians so confidently own their Jewishness that they hardly need to mention it — but nevertheless, it’s foundational to who they are, and how they joke.
A splintered comedy for a splintered community
Jason Zinoman, the comedy critic at The New York Times, wrote a piece asking whether the Golden Age of Jewish comedy had come to an end, crumbling in the face of rising antisemitism.
Zinoman argued that it’s not, pointing out that Jewish comedy has always thrived in the face of fear. Political comedy, too, he points out, is having a moment, and much of today’s politics revolves around Jews, antisemitism and Israel — plenty of creative fuel. Navigating the intense political divides over Israel after Oct. 7, or when a “Free Palestine” comment on social media is antisemitic or not, has certainly fueled many a Jewish comedian’s set.
But in a way, the Golden Age of Jewish comedy is over, in the sense that there is no single sense of what makes comedy Jewish. There are so many kinds that appeal to so many audiences. Some, like Rosenfeld, have turned inwards, while others, like Herschberg, have used comedy to communicate the deep confusion many Jews feel about navigating their identity. And still more, like Friedman, have tried to create something new, a way of being Jewish that still feels completely identifiable as such without many of the obvious markers.
It’s a funhouse mirror of what’s happened to the Jewish community in general in the past few years as it has fractured over Israel and Zionism. Some Jews have become either outspoken Zionists or outspoken anti-Zionists. Others — including some synagogues and minyans — have tried to chart a middle course, navigating stormy waters without tipping either way. And others are trying to invent a new way to understand their identity and beliefs. But none of them have left their identity behind.
The same goes for the Jewish comedy — it’s all Jewish, even when it’s not doing it very traditionally. You know it when you see it.
The post How a new generation of comics is changing the face of Jewish comedy — and Judaism itself appeared first on The Forward.
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How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto
This is a revised version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.
On Both Sides of the Wall
Vladka Meed and Steven D. Meed
Citadel Press, 448 pages, $29.00.
“But surely by this morning we will learn something.” It was a sentiment that was going around the Warsaw Ghetto, overheard among the groups of Jews huddled on street corners. On occasion someone would muster up some hopeful words: “Jews, have no fear! You will all see. With God’s help, once more we shall survive the evil decree!” It was July 22, 1942: the first day of the Great Deportation. Any optimism was unfounded: On that day, the Germans led roughly 250,000 Jews to the death camps.
Thus begins the opening scene of On Both Sides of the Wall, Vladka Meed’s memoir of her life in Warsaw during World War II. Her story originally appeared in installments in the Forward shortly after her arrival in America, in 1946, under her real name, Feygele Peytel Miedzyrecki. A book-length edition was published by the educational committee of the Workers Circle in 1948.
In 1977, an English translation came out, with an introduction by Elie Wiesel. Now Meed’s memoir is available in an expanded edition, complete with an introduction from the historian Samuel Kassow and a foreword by the translator, Steven (Shloyme) Meed, Vladka’s son.
Vladka Meed takes the reader into the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, with its charged atmosphere of hope, terror and despair. She summons the cacophony of those last ten, tragic months of the Ghetto; we hear the voices of Jews, Germans and their Ukrainian accomplices.
Fortunately, Vladka managed to avoid the daily aktsyes (deportation campaigns) when the mundir forces (“Jewish police,” in the ghetto vernacular) would capture Jews for deportation. Vladka soon found herself alone: “My mother, brother, and sister have all been taken from me to some unimaginable fate,” she writes. Vladka was lucky to find a job in one of the workshops that served the Germans.
Following the second selektsye (separation of fit and unfit Jewish laborers) in September 1942, the Jews that remained in the ghetto began preparing for an uprising. Vladka remembers their calls: “If we are to die, anyway, let us die with dignity!” “The enemy must pay a heavy price for our lives!”
As a young girl, Vladka was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, an affiliation that helped keep her alive during the Holocaust. She spoke Polish well without a trace of a Yiddish accent, and had “good Aryan looks.” The leadership of the ghetto’s Bundist underground suggested that she become a courier between the ghetto and the Aryan side. That’s how the young Jewish girl, Feygele Peltel, was transformed into a Polish woman by the name of Wladislawa Kowalska, or simply — Vladka.
Step by step, she integrated into “normal life” among Christian Poles. At first she had high hopes. “I had expected to encounter a strong interest among our Polish neighbors about life within the ghetto,” she writes. But she soon realized that her neighbors preferred very much not to know what was happening on the other side of the ghetto wall.
Vladka and her comrades on the Aryan side were charged with obtaining weapons for the ghetto. But their relations with members of the Polish underground army were poor, and little came of their interactions: “As we travel about the city, trying and failing to get arms…we beg them: ‘Help us to obtain weapons. We are willing to pay well for them!’”
Most of their requests fell on deaf ears. Often they’d hand over payment and receive nothing in return — or worse, their Polish contacts would betray them to the Germans. Even when the Jewish ghetto fighters managed to get their hands on a revolver, another challenge remained: smuggling it into the ghetto.
The book is a gripping read. Vladka Meed is a skillful narrator, and she gives a detailed accounting of her dangerous missions. Any day could have been her last: she never knew if she’d live to see the evening. Vladka had many more failures than successes, and in many cases she was saved by a fateful coincidence.
Kassow’s introduction describes the greater historical context of that period, while Steven Meed provides personal details about his mother’s life before the Holocaust, based on her interviews in the American press.
In his translation, Meed includes bracketed phrases that provide brief, helpful contextual notes. He has also chosen to preserve Yiddish words from the so-called “ghetto language”, like aktsye (action), mundirn (police forces), and blokade (blockade). The choice to keep such vocabulary gives the text an authentic feel, even as Meed’s strategy occasionally raises questions. Why, for example, did he ‘translate’ the word kristin (Christian woman) in the Yiddish as “shikse” (an often pejorative term for a gentile girl) in the English? In general, his translations in the book occasionally veer far from the original.
In the United States, Vladka Meed dedicated her life to Holocaust education. This newest edition of her book carries this mission forward, and constitutes a significant addition to the ever-growing library of documents and research on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Unfortunately, the history of Jewish resistance to German occupation still hasn’t been properly integrated into American Holocaust education, even in Jewish day schools. At the University of Michigan, when I discuss the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with students in my course on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I often get this response: “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this in our Holocaust education classes? It’s so important!”
To this day we often view the history of the Holocaust with a focus on mass murder. Vladka Meed’s book, writes Kassow, “demonstrates [that] this battle to stay alive, against all odds, refuted the oft-made claim that Jews went passively to their deaths.”
The post How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto appeared first on The Forward.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.