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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.”
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Why Israel Is Thriving Despite Years of War and International Attacks
The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
An October 2025 ranking of the world’s economies, using 2026 projections from the International Monetary Fund, indicates that in spite of two years of existential war against multiple enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis, Israel’s economy is performing surprisingly well.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to increase to nearly 700 billion dollars, ranking 27th in the world — impressive for a small country with a little more than 10 million people. Per capita, the situation looks even better. Israel’s per capita GDP ranking is 16th, edging out Germany (18th) and the UK (19th) and well above Canada (22nd) France (26th), and Italy (28th).
These numbers could not help but remind me of a column by Alistair Heath in the June 2025 Daily Telegraph on “Israel’s Divine Survival.” Heath starts by saying there is something about Israel that makes people uncomfortable:
A nation this small should not be this strong. Period. Israel has no oil. No special natural resources. A population barely the size of a mid-sized American city. They are surrounded by enemies. Hated in the United Nations. Targeted by terror. Condemned by celebrities. Boycotted, slandered, and attacked. And still, they thrive like there’s no tomorrow.
Is Israel thriving?
Well, besides economic measures, other indicators also defy expectations. For example, it was also recently reported that life expectancy in Israel increased by one full year, a significant jump, to 83.8 years, between 2023 and 2024. Life expectancy in Israel is now the fourth highest in the 37 member OECD, exceeded only by Switzerland, Japan, and Spain.
Israel also ranks near the top for measures such as low infant mortality and success in disease prevention. Israel is among the countries with the lowest mortality rate from heart disease. And this high level of care is delivered efficiently at relatively low cost. OECD-member states typically devote 11 to 12 % of GDP to health care. The value for Israel is only 7.6 %. (Health care expenditure in the US is about 17% of GDP.)
Then there is the “Global Flourishing Study,” a new study that asks the question “What makes people flourish?” Published In April 2025 in the journal Nature Mental Health, the study, headed by Tyler J. Vanderweele of Harvard University, is a multi-year survey of 200,000 people, across 22 culturally and geographically diverse countries, including Israel, the US, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
The domains measured included: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health (how healthy people feel, in body and mind), meaning and purpose (whether people feel their lives are significant), character and virtue (how people act to promote good), social relationships (both friendships and family ties), and financial and material stability.
Israel ranked number two (of 22 nations), behind Indonesia when financial indicators are included, and number four (after Indonesia, Mexico, and Philippines) when financial indicators are excluded. The primary finding of the study so far (the study will be completed in 2027) is that high income countries are not necessarily flourishing countries. Israel is the outlier.
The 2025 World Happiness Index also shows Israel is still high up the list of 147 countries, at number 8.
If you ask Google AI why Israel continues to thrive in conditions not normally conducive to success, you get a prosaic answer: Israel’s ability to thrive, in spite of regional challenges and limited natural resources, is due to the combination of an emphasis on higher education and research, a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, significant foreign support and investment, defense needs, and a democratic institutional framework that protects property rights and promotes a market economy.
But to Alistair Heath Israel doesn’t make sense unless you believe in something beyond the math. “There is no historical precedent for surviving the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust, and still showing up to work on Monday in Tel Aviv,” he wrote. Perhaps the secret to understanding Israel’s success is not any different from appreciating the resilience displayed by the Jewish people through the ages. Or, as expressed by a quotation attributed to the noted Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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The Palestinian Authority Once Again Says It Supports Terrorism and Hamas
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (C) alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (L) and former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, July 26, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Palestinian Presidents’ Office
Palestinian Media Watch has documented repeatedly that the Palestinian population embraces terror and that the Palestinian movements compete for popular support by arguing over who has committed more terror.
In a recent example, Mahmoud Abbas’ senior advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash bragged that the PLO/Fatah has been fighting Israel since 1964, whereas Hamas only “bore arms” in 1990.
Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “Since when did Hamas bear arms to say that its weapons are related to the existence of the occupation [i.e., Israel]? The occupation is 77 years old [i.e., since the establishment of modern Israel], or at least since 1967, and Hamas did not bear arms until 1990. On the contrary, it opposed the PLO, which has borne arms since 1964.”
[Mahmoud Al-Habbash, YouTube channel, Oct. 26, 2025]
That declaration is not an occasional slip. Al-Habbash and other senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials embrace violence as a political tool and insist that the “armed struggle,” a euphemism for terror, is a Palestinian prerogative. This latest statement simply restates — with pride — the PLO/PA’s historic role as the original Palestinian terror movement.
The Al-Habbash admission must be read alongside recent statements by another top Fatah official, Jibril Rajoub, who has publicly urged that the PA unite with Hamas under the PLO framework.
Rajoub said that the successor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh should both “maintain the unity of Hamas” and have “a strategic vision to integrate Hamas within the national framework”:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub:“One of the intelligence agency heads asked me after the Martyrdom of [Hamas Political Bureau Chairman] Ismail Haniyeh who I think might replace him. I told him: I want someone who, first of all, will be able to maintain the unity of Hamas, and secondly, who will calm the region and have a strategic vision to integrate Hamas within the national framework.”
[Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Sept. 11, 2025]
Rajoub went further in August 2025 and explicitly called on Hamas to partner with the PA:
Jibril Rajoub: “I say to our brothers in Hamas, we in Fatah tell you: Let us reach an agreement regarding the vision that will reap the fruits of the sacrifice that the Palestinian people have made from 1948 until today.
The Palestinian struggle did not start yesterday, two years ago, or 30 years ago. The Palestinian national struggle is the other side [of the coin] of the unilateral aggression that has been carried out against us for 77 years of struggle…
Sooner or later the Palestinian state will be established, and we will remain here, and they [Israelis] will go to the trash can of history.” [emphasis added]
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 21, 2025]
Those are the words of a leader openly planning a shared militant-national project with Hamas, rather than someone who is supposed to be representing the ruling party of a supposedly revitalized and Hamas-free Palestinian Authority.
This pattern reveals several dangerous messages from the PA:
- Hypocrisy toward the international community: On the one hand, the PA seeks international legitimacy and aid, claiming it fights terror. In reality, the PA’s senior officials publicly reaffirm and even boast of its terror history and a desire to ally with Hamas — the very organization the PA pretends to distance itself from in diplomatic settings. The statements by Al-Habbash and Rajoub together expose a dual strategy: feigning reform to cultivate international support while simultaneously supporting terror and strengthening ties with Hamas.
- Normalization of violence as statecraft: Al-Habbash’s factual framing (PLO “bore arms” since 1964; Hamas only from 1990) is presented as a point of pride. Rajoub’s public courting of Hamas — and his prediction that Israelis “will go to the trash can of history” — demonstrate that a long-term terror struggle plus the delegitimization of Israel are central to the PA’s strategy, not deviations from it.
- A strategic alliance, not actual rivalry: Where Western audiences and donors may imagine a Fatah-Hamas rivalry that favors moderation, Rajoub’s welcoming of Hamas shows that the PA does not really want to have Hamas destroyed. Rather, the PA seeks to have Hamas serve as a junior partner within the PLO as part of a Palestinian state that will fight to put Israel in said “trash can of history.”
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israeli Parliament Advances Death Penalty Bill for Convicted Terrorists
Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir walks inside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS
The Israeli parliament has advanced a bill that would mandate the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists convicted of killing Israeli citizens, with some lawmakers believing it would prevent future prisoner-release deals.
In a vote held late on Monday – the first of four needed for the measure to become law – the bill passed with 39 in favor and 16 against, out of 120 lawmakers.
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben–Gvir had called on all political factions to back the bill, which he has said was aimed at creating deterrence against “Arab terrorism.”
“This is how we fight terror; this is how we create deterrence,” he said in a statement after the initial vote. “Once the law is finally passed — terrorists will be released only to hell.”
SOME PARTIES BOYCOTTED MONDAY’S VOTE
The bill will now move to a parliamentary committee for further debate before a second and third vote. It is not guaranteed that it will become law, with several key political parties having boycotted Monday’s initial vote.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid was quoted by Israeli media as saying that he would not vote in favor of the bill.
The PLO, the Palestinian national umbrella political group, condemned the vote, with Palestinian National Council Speaker Rawhi Fattouh calling the draft law “a political, legal, and humanitarian crime”. The vote was also criticized by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Israel abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954, and the only person ever executed in Israel after a civilian trial was Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust, in 1962.
Ben–Gvir has argued that imposing the death penalty would deter anyone considering an attack similar to the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and resulted in 251 hostages being taken to Gaza.
Israel stopped its ensuing military campaign against Hamas last month, when a tenuous ceasefire was agreed that included the release of 20 remaining living hostages held in Gaza, plus the remains of deceased ones in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
PRISONER RELEASE DEALS
Israel has released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees since October 2023 in exchange for the release of the hostages that were being held by Palestinian terrorists.
Most of the hostages have been released except for the remains of three deceased Israelis and one foreigner.
Tzvika Foghel, a member of Ben–Gvir‘s Jewish Power party and chair of the parliamentary national security committee, where the bill will now be debated, said imposing the death penalty would mean no more prisoner deals.
Palestinians who have been released have included many convicted of serious crimes, including murder.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a mastermind of the October 2023 attack on Israel, was released in 2011 as part of an exchange of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Some Israeli politicians such as Ben–Gvir have, during the war in Gaza, opposed the release of Palestinians who were involved in the killings of Israelis.
Ben–Gvir handed out sweets to fellow lawmakers after the initial vote passed. Critics noted that, in Gaza, some Palestinian militants had handed out sweets to the public after the October 2023 attack.