Uncategorized
In ‘Jew,’ comic Ari Shaffir delivers a raunchy love letter to the religion he says he left behind
(New York Jewish Week) — “You never know how people are going to respond,” says Jewish comedian Ari Shaffir, referring to his new standup special, “Jew,” which has more than 3 million views (and counting) on YouTube.
The self-released, 90-minute showcase of stories and jokes goes deep into his life story, including his studies at a Jerusalem yeshiva. Shaffir, who eventually left Orthodoxy behind, balances Talmud lessons with the neuroticism of Jewish culture.
The show gives the entire backstory of Judaism, starting with Adam and Eve, interweaving tales about Hanukkah and Passover, going through customs and traditions. It’s an oral history of Judaism, told through a brutally honest comedic lens.
After it was released two weeks ago, the special has been praised by numerous comics in the podcast world, including Tim Dillon, Shane Gillis, Chris Destafano and Joe Rogan, whom Shaffir calls a longtime friend.
There are also over 25,000 comments on the special, most of them positive. One goes as far to say that it is “the best special of the century so far.”
Shaffir, who lives in the East Village, said he has not received much negative feedback for the special, which is rare for a comedian who once received death threats and had to cancel shows for joking about NBA player Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020.
“Jew,” which was shot and performed in Brooklyn, was released Nov. 2. The date, Shaffir told the New York Jewish Week, was set far in advance — but it arrived at a moment when antisemitism became a national conversation topic, thanks to recent tweets from rapper Kanye West and Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving.
“I was worried for a minute — I thought for a second it was going to derail it,” he said of the timing, adding that he “wasn’t looking for this kind of press” in regards to his special.
The conversation only grew more intense last week, after Dave Chapelle delivered a monologue on “Saturday Night Live” abut the West and Irving controversies that critics, including the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center, called antisemitic.
“They’re ready to say that, regardless,” Shaffir said. “The complaints were already written. Most people think it’s funny.” Jewish organizations, he said, are “not known as great comedy critiquers.”
“People don’t understand that we enjoy that,” Shaffir added, referring to the criticism. “I can speak for Chapelle on this. We’re only here to make people laugh, but we also enjoy when dorks get mad.”
Shaffir, 48, has made a career off of making dorks mad, weaving tales about drugs, sex and Judaism into world tours, a podcast, spots at the Comedy Cellar in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
While he’s known for his edgy humor, Shaffir appears more introspective and personal in “Jew” when compared to his previous work. On his Comedy Central show “This Is Not Happening,” which ran for four seasons between 2015 and 2019, he talks about planting weed for strangers and fans at sports arenas and shopping malls (the police weren’t amused). He also appeared in a sketch called “The Amazing Racist,” where he spoofs “The Amazing Race” by playing a character who constantly brings up offensive stereotypes.
With “Jew,” by contrast, Shaffir has channeled his persona into a hyper-focused, cohesive take on all aspects of Judaism, including mikvahs, Yom Kippur chicken rituals and the minutiae of when certain foods can be considered kosher. At the same time, he keeps the material palatable for a non-Jewish audience.
“You can make anything accessible,” Shaffir said. “It’s the same thing as saying, ‘My dad does this weird thing, or my country does this weird thing.’ You just explain it and you’re fine.”
Ari Shaffir holds the crown as my favorite j-w. He’s Moshiach in my eyes. pic.twitter.com/8kLFSaqgqp
— Adam Green – Know More News (@Know_More_News) November 14, 2022
While Shaffir may have turned away from religion as a young man, he said he has since found “a love for how interesting and cool it was.”
“I now see that Judaism leaves your kids with intelligence, where they value education and family,” Shaffir said. “It’s great stuff and I wanted to show that.”
When the special was released, Shaffir left a note on his web site saying that it is his “love letter to the culture and religion that raised me.”
He tells a story in the special about meeting with his rabbi from the Jerusalem yeshiva and telling him he was a standup comedian. “All he wanted to know was, ‘do you still use the teaching?’” Shaffir says in the special.
Shaffir then talks about how the rabbi gave him a lesson about Noah’s Ark, which he then turns into a bit about anal sex — all while leaving the audience with a positive spin on Judaism.
“Not all religion is stupid,” Shaffir says in the special. “It’s a good lesson, especially in this day and age.”
Shaffir was born in New York and spent most of his childhood in North Carolina and Maryland. He was “a Modern Orthodox Jewish kid” who attended the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington (now the Berman Hebrew Academy). After high school, Shaffir went to Bris Medrash L’Torah, an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, which he said was the “standard track” for a Jewish kid at his age, but eventually he had “a crisis of faith.”
“I just came home and really thought about it and I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Shaffir said. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Since then, Shaffir said he does not believe in God, but believes in the “shared history” of Judaism.
And while he’s had moments of Jewish jokes and stories in his previous specials, this is his full show on the topic, going deep within himself to find the humor within the religion, even in the darkest of places.
Shaffir’s father is a Holocaust survivor from Romania, who moved to Israel following the war. Shaffir said his story of survival was “a major part of our upbringing.”
“Their village got taken later in the war,” Shaffir said of his father’s family. “Most of the family was wiped out. I don’t know all the details exactly.”
He now has a good relationship with his parents and said they saw him perform the special live. “They liked it,” Shaffir said. “They probably liked it more than my other specials, where I was talking about [having sex with] chicks with herpes.”
While working on the special, Shaffir workshopped his material at the Fat Black Pussycat, the “sister showroom” of the Comedy Cellar in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, an audience member once asked him a question about “the pillow” that Jews carry.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Shaffir said. “But then it hit me: It’s tallis and tefillin,” the velvet bags containing prayer shawls and phylacteries that Jews carry to synagogue. “It looks like a pillowcase. You can look at it from an outside perspective, their point of view: It looks like a pillow. Their questions would get me to riff.”
He later took his special abroad, including Israel, where “it did not work,” he said. “They knew too much about it. All the exposition, they were like, ‘We know.’”
In contrast, he performed the material in places where there were few or possibly no Jews, such as Perth, Australia and Reykjavik, Iceland, where it went well. “Places where they are like, ‘I’ve never heard of [Jews],” Shaffir said. “I had to make sure it went well there because it’s gotta be accessible.”
He also performed a version of the show as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, which he said greatly inspired the special.
Another aspect of the Shaffir’s special is countering the narrative of Orthodox Jews as outsiders. “They work regular jobs,” Shaffir said. “There are ambulance drivers with yarmulkes. There’s just some weird stuff that they do. We would play basketball and we would have tzitzit [ritual fringes] and a yarmulke on, but we were on the courts with everybody.”
Shaffir has a joke in the special about using a yarmulke as a move to distract a defender during a basketball game.
This year, Ryan Turell became the first Orthodox player drafted into the NBA’s developmental G League
“I love it,” Shaffir said. “Hopefully it goes well for him and he loses his religion. That would be cool.”
—
The post In ‘Jew,’ comic Ari Shaffir delivers a raunchy love letter to the religion he says he left behind appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Jewishness found me on my European vacation
To visit Europe is to look at many old, stone churches. My recent trip was no exception, but a few things set our tour of Geneva’s Cathédrale Saint-Pierre apart.
The most obvious difference between it and your typical Notre Dames and basilicas is aesthetic: Saint-Pierre is a Protestant church at the hub of John Calvin’s ministry in the Old Town. There’s no crucifix or stations of the cross and the stained glass eschews biblical scenes, a rebuke of Catholic extravagance. An exception is a small adjoining chapel.
Our Swiss guide gave us the name of this alcove, the burial place of Cardinal Jean de Brogny: Chapelle des Maccabées.
I assumed she was giving some French term for “tomb” that shared a root with “macabre.” I was wrong. The chapel, whose gorgeous, 15th-century stained glass depicts the Evangelists, the Last Supper and Jesus seeming to teach what may be the first-ever CCD class, is one of the few Christian structures to boast an explicitly Jewish name. (The Book of Maccabees, replete with martyrs, is part of the Catholic canon, not the Protestant.)
As for that ghoulish word “macabre,” linguists believe it to be a cognate with the name of the Hasmonean rebels, perhaps a reference to many of their grisly fates.
I should say now that when I am on vacation I don’t seek out Jewish landmarks. A lot of times there isn’t much to see: a street sign clinging to the name of a ghettoized population long-since liquidated, an old cathedral built on top of an even-older synagogue, a museum in a basement in Barcelona.
When I arrived in Paris before setting sail on a Rhone river cruise, my
fiancée, her family and I paid a visit to the Shoah Museum there. English-speaking Chabadniks tried to get me to wrap tefillin while I waited in line at L’as Du Fallafel, the kosher-certified institution in the Marais. Nearby we found a Hellenic-themed juice bar — Temple du Jus — which boasts an ancient sandstone wall with inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew (next to a chintzy, fake Ionic column).
France boasts the largest population of Jews in Europe, mostly now from North Africa. There are synagogues in Avignon and Lyon, but on this trip, the less obvious markers were the ones that kept asserting themselves. There was the Rue Léon-Blum in Arles, named for the three-time prime minister of France. Geneva has Rue Albert-Cohen, for the Corfu-born Swiss novelist.
Montreux in Switzerland has a resplendent statue of the resort town’s longtime resident Freddie Mercury, arguably the world’s most-famous Zoroastrian. But when we visited, the construction workers building the Christmas village behind the Queen frontman were listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” (If you stop inside the shopping mall right near it, you’ll find Cohen’s name on the tiles, marking his 1976 performance at Montreux’s Jazz Festival.)
Our hotel breakfast had a version of chocolate babka, part of their “luxury collection,” with a posted explanation of the “sweet braided bread which originated in the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine.”
Our second evening in Geneva we went to a chalet-themed fondue restaurant called Edelweiss. There, a Swiss accordion player sang the establishment’s eponymous, invented folk song of Austria penned by a duo of Jewish Americans in English for The Sound of Music.
In the city hosting the UN’s base in Europe, and before that the League of Nations, such an international display was maybe unsurprising, but what struck me more is that it felt so natural.
For years now, watchdog groups have been fearing for the future of European Jewry amid increasing attacks and widespread pro-Palestinian protests. This assessment, rooted in valid concern, at times marches in lockstep with a far-right hostile to immigrants from the Muslim world. That alarm comes at times from the very same parties, and in the case of the National Assembly’s Marine Le Pen, the same family, that once leveled their xenophobia at Jews.
What I saw on my petit tour was a kind of cultural victory that will be harder to shake, even as French and British Jews continue to make aliyah in record numbers. It would perhaps shock those who lived through World War II that so much of the so-called national character, to which new arrivals are being labelled a threat, is now so casually Jewish. Emphasis on the “ish.”
For the most part, this Jewishness blends with the dominant culture, forming the soundtrack to builders putting up their Christmas market, giving the name to a Catholic tomb attached to a Protestant landmark or sitting on the buffet table a few stations away from cured ham. It is at times imported, at times native, like Serge Gainsbourg, or naturalized like Albert Cohen.
It’s not going anywhere, and if you’re paying even the slightest attention, it’s hard to miss.
The post Jewishness found me on my European vacation appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Christianity won in the midterm elections — but not Christian nationalism
The midterms saw the election of many new Jewish congressional representatives — Brad Lander in New York, Daniel Biss in Illinois, Scott Wiener in California, Zach Dembo in Kentucky. But another group was surprisingly well-represented in the Democratic wins: Christian pastors.
For decades, Christian clergy have usually been associated with the Republican party, thanks to evangelical groups like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. They have rallied Evangelical support for politicians around culture war issues like opposing abortion rights and gay marriage, and white Evangelicals have been one of the defining voting blocs for Republicans ever since.
In 2024, fundamentalist evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and they have been influential members of his cabinet and advisory team. Paula White-Cain, a charismatic Christian, is Trump’s personal faith adviser. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a member of an ultra-conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches founded and led by Doug Wilson, a pastor who has said women should not have the right to vote and that slavery was good; Hegseth has instituted prayer services at the Pentagon, something once considered a violation of the separation of church and state, and he and his preferred preachers often promote Christian nationalism in the services.
But in the 2026 midterms, the pastors and seminarians who won their races were overwhelmingly Democrats. And they were not Evangelical — they were mainline Protestants.
This includes James Talarico, a seminarian currently enrolled in the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, who defeated Ken Paxton for the Texas Senate seat; Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist minister who became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas since 1932; and Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, who won her House race in Iowa.
The shift in American Christianity that these wins represent, of mainline Protestantism over fundamentalist evangelicalism, may sound esoteric — both groups are, technically, Protestant, after all. And it can get confusing; Garriott’s mainline Protestant denomination is called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
But the difference between the two Christian movements is essential to understanding the appetite for, and power of, Christian nationalism in the U.S., and represents Americans’ changing relationship to Jews and Israel.
What is mainline Protestantism?
The term mainline — or, sometimes, oldline — Protestant emerged in the early 20th century, during a debate between an emergent fundamentalist church movement and more modernist denominations. It referred to a historical group of churches that were influential in earlier American history, known as the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism.
But more colloquially, the term refers to a broader set of churches that share a theologically liberal style of scriptural interpretation, a focus on ecumenism — or acceptance and understanding among different Christian movements — and, usually, a progressive-leaning politics focused on social justice.
While mainline Protestants do not vote as a liberal bloc, the theology is less focused on culture war issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights; instead, they center the Social Gospel — a form of theology oriented toward loving thy neighbor and serving the poor. Most mainline churches allow women to be pastors and are accepting of LGBTQ+ members.
For much of American history, these churches were also the mainstream of American Christianity; they were the churches associated with WASPs and with wealthy, influential families like the Rockefellers. In 1970, mainline denominations accounted for 30% of Americans.
But in the 1970s, with the rise of major political evangelical organizations and leaders like Jerry Falwell, the balance of power shifted, and conservative, fundamentalist churches began to gain power. By 2024, only 14% of Americans identified as mainline Protestants according to the Pew Research Center; 23% identified as evangelical.
But judging by the midterms, mainline Protestant progressivism might be making a comeback.
Mainline Protestantism squares off against MAGA fundamentalism
The battle between fundamentalism and progressive mainline churches was not an undercurrent in many midterm campaigns; religion was an overt theme of attacks from the right on the Democrat pastors, and Republicans repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Democrat’s Christianity.
In the race for Iowa’s second congressional district, Republican candidate Joe Mitchell jeered at the Christianity of the mainline Protestant ministers running for a variety of seats, including his opponent, Presbyterian minister Lindsay James, who ran as a Democrat.
“I call them PINOs,” Mitchell said at a conference; the term, he explained, means “pastors in name only.”
Republicans ripped Garriott, also a pastor, as “the wicked witch of Woke” and denounced her preaching as “fake.” Zachary Nunn, who lost to Garriott, took a similar tone in lambasting his opponent.
“I don’t need a lecture from someone who pretends to preach from the pulpit,” the Republican said in May during a Des Moines campaign rally with Republican Vice President JD Vance.
Talarico — who is not ordained but is a current seminary student, and who centered Christianity in his campaign — was meanwhile castigated by evangelical Republicans for statements they called un-Christian, such as saying God is “nonbinary.”
His rival, Paxton, castigated his theology, saying Talarico’s beliefs are “literally the opposite of Christianity,” while Texas’ Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, said he has “never seen anyone commit so much blasphemy against the word of God and the Bible” and that the now-senator-elect was “going to Hell.”
At a service in a CREC church — Hegseth’s ultra-conservative denomination — a night was devoted to preachers inveighing against Hamilton’s Christian bonafides. Pastors called on the Democratic candidate in Kansas, a preacher at a large United Methodist congregation, to “repent” for his teachings, including that non-Christians aren’t going to hell. Vance accused him of wearing Christianity as “a skin suit.”
The Democratic pastors’ voting records, such as James’ support for gender-affirming care for minors or Talarico’s support for abortion access, were also framed as damning evidence of fake Christianity by Republican evangelicals.
Meanwhile, the ordained Christian Democratic candidates were open about their hope to reclaim Christianity from Republicans. Talarico made similar accusations to his critics, saying that “Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process.”
Garriott even stated that the representation of Christianity in Republican politics upset her so much that it motivated her to run for office to offer a different Christianity. “Faith has something to say to politics. And what we are seeing labeled as the faith perspective is not faithful to me,” she said in an interview with Religion News Service earlier in her campaign.
A Christian repudiation of Christian nationalism
Numerous members of Trump’s administration are outspoken Christian nationalists. Hegseth has a Crusades tattoo, and his preacher, Doug Wilson of the CREC, opposes the right of non-Christian Americans to hold office. Numerous architects of Project 2025, which advocated for a government imbued with “biblical principles” are members of the administration. JD Vance has stated that “Christianity is America’s creed.”
For religious minorities in the U.S., however, the mainstreaming of open Christian nationalism has been worrying; the Christianity pushed by these Christian nationalist figures has roots in antisemitism and Islamophobia, and imposing a version of religion that does not allow for diverse beliefs feels dangerous.
For many of these conservative Christians, supporting Christian nationalism is synonymous with being a devout Christian; they equate biblical values with morality, and advocating for a moral country is simple obedience to their beliefs. Not all Christians believe this is part of their religion, however; the mainline Protestants who just swept the midterms preach a Christianity that is overtly opposed to Christian nationalism.
Garriott has preached about the topic directly, saying that “evangelicalism, from a Christian nationalist perspective, is trying to make the nation, the government, and everyone the same.” She argued that her faith requires a diverse republic founded on ecumenism.
Talarico has similarly argued directly against Christian nationalism: “I believe the separation of church and state is sacred. I think a nation with one supreme religion is not just un-American, I also think it’s un-Christian, given how Jesus taught about religious supremacy,” he told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it.”
This repudiation of Christian nationalism from within the majority religion of the U.S. is an essential defense for the minority religions of the U.S. And it comes from the ecumenism at the heart of mainline Protestantism. Though ecumenism historically focused on Christian unity, and acceptance of other denominations of Christianity, the theological bent toward nonjudgment — instead of conservative evangelicalism’s fire and brimstone — opens doors toward interfaith dialogue. Mainline Protestants are capable of antisemitism, of course, but the less literal theological interpretation that defines the movement helps keep minds open.
There is one detail of mainline Protestantism that may concern some Jews, however. Evangelicals have long been a source of stalwart support for Israel, thanks to the conservative movement’s eschatology, which focuses on the End Times when, it teaches, Jews must all return to the Holy Land in order for Jesus to return. In the past several decades, evangelicals who subscribe to this apocalyptic theology, including the current ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee and Texas senator Ted Cruz, have referenced their Christianity as grounds for supporting Israel unconditionally.
Mainline Protestantism has its roots in churches founded before this form of dispensationalism was popularized, and they are therefore less attached — at least theologically — to the state of Israel. And though most of the Democratic ministers are moderate on Israel, that’s far from the hawkish pro-Israel template for religious politicians that has previously been defined by evangelicals.
Still, in 2024, Americans voted for an evangelical, conservative, Christian nationalist government. That made for a government full of people defending their right to say that Jews killed Jesus, to post the Ten Commandments in schools, to make Christian prayer a part of military service. And in the midterms, the vision of Christianity the Republican party promoted couldn’t even accept other Christians, much less minority religions.
But that’s not what Christianity has to be. In 2026, Americans voted for a different Christianity: one that is tolerant of other religions, values and viewpoints. That can only be good for the Jews.
The post Christianity won in the midterm elections — but not Christian nationalism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Video: The queen of Yiddish cabaret
אַן אינטערוויו מיט דער אָנגעזעענער ייִדישער זינגערין, אַקטריסע און שרײַבערין עלענאָר ריסאַ איז לעצטנס אַרויפֿגעשטעלט געוואָרן אויף יוטוב.
אינעם שמועס געפֿירט פֿון אלי בענעדיקט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, דערציילט ריסאַ וועגן אירע ערשטע טריט אויף דער בינע, די מענטשן און פֿאָרשטעלונגען וואָס האָבן אויסגעבויט איר קינסטלערישן וועג, אירע אויפֿטריטן איבער דער וועלט, און דעם אופֿן ווי זי בויט אַ מוזיקאַלישע פּראָגראַם און קלײַבט אויס לידער. זי רעדט אויך וועגן איר בליק אויף דער צוקונפֿט פֿון ייִדיש־טעאַטער.
ריסאַ איז אַ געבוירענע ייִדיש־רעדערין פֿון פּויליש־ייִדיש, קאָן דער ווידעאָ אויך דינען ווי אַ גוטער לערן־מיטל פֿאַר ייִדיש־סטודענטן וואָס ווילן הערן אַ נאַטירלעכן ייִדיש.
עלענאָר ריסאַ איז אַן אַמעריקאַנער אַקטריסע, רעזשיסאָרין, דראַמאַטורגין און זינגערין, און ייִדיש איז איר מאַמע־לשון. זי איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן אין ברוקלין, די טאָכטער פֿון צוויי לעבן־געבליבענע פֿון פּוילן. אין משך פֿון לאַנגע יאָרן האָט זי געשפּילט, רעזשיסירט און געשאַפֿן סײַ אין ענגלישן, סײַ אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און איז געווען די קינסטלערישע מיטדירעקטאָרין פֿון דער פֿאָלקסבינע.
זי האָט אויך געשריבן, רעזשיסירט און איבערגעזעצט אַ ריי פּיעסעס און מוזיקאַלישע פּראָגראַמען. אין די לעצטע יאָרן פֿירט זי דעם פּאָדקאַסט “Those Who Were There” בײַם פֿאָרטונאָף־אַרכיוו אין יעיל־אוניווערסיטעט און אַרויסגעגעבן אַ בוך זכרונות, The Letters Project.
The post Video: The queen of Yiddish cabaret appeared first on The Forward.
