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Before ‘SNL,’ there was Sid Caesar — and a roomful of Jewish writers
(JTA) — Sid Caesar once dominated American television so completely that it was hard to imagine Saturday nights without him. In the early 1950s, his live sketch-comedy program “Your Show of Shows” drew tens of millions of viewers. That show and its other iterations — “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” “Caesar’s Hour” and “Sid Caesar Invites You” — launched the careers of Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen, and helped invent television comedy as we know it.
Caesar and an ensemble cast that included Carl Reiner and Imogene Coca performed movie and musical parodies, domestic skits featuring warring suburbanites and bits highlighting Caesar’s knack for “speaking” foreign languages in convincing gibberish. A parody of the hit show “This Is Your Life” has often been called the funniest sketch in the history of the form. Caesar and Reiner’s “Professor” routine — featuring Caesar as a German-accented know-it-all who knows very little — is the often uncredited precursor to Brooks and Reiner’s more enduring “2000-Year-Old Man.”
And yet, as David Margolick recounts in his new biography, “When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy,” Caesar’s fame proved surprisingly fleeting. Caesar died in 2014 at 91. But well before then, his name had faded, even as his influence endured.
In a recent public conversation held as part of New York Jewish Week’s “Folio” series, Margolick — a longtime journalist and author — reflected on Caesar’s rise, his Jewish sensibility, the brutal pressures of early television, and why the man who changed comedy so profoundly all but vanished from popular memory.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
For people who may not even know the name Sid Caesar, why is he worthy of a biography?
That’s the problem Mel Brooks raised when I interviewed him, and it actually became the epigraph of my book. He said to me, “People are going to say, ‘Gee, this is really good and really interesting. Just one question, David: Who’s Sid Caesar?’”
For people who lived in the 1950s, American television comedy really started with him. There were vaudeville leftovers and radio shows early on, but Sid Caesar was the first true television comic — someone whose skills were suited to television itself. There was an intimacy to his comedy that wouldn’t have worked in a big theater but worked on a small screen.
And the influence is enormous. Mel Brooks wrote for him. Larry Gelbart [creator of the TV series “M*A*S*H”] wrote for him. Neil Simon wrote for him. Woody Allen wrote for him. Carl Reiner worked with him and went on to create “The Dick Van Dyke Show” [based on his experience on the Caesar shows]. The tendrils of Sid Caesar’s comedy reach into sitcoms, “Saturday Night Live,” Broadway and film.
One challenge of the book was to explain how momentous he was — and the other was to explain how someone so influential could fall into such obscurity.
Caesar is often associated with the Catskills, the upstate New York Jewish vacationland that was a proving ground for any number of Jewish comedians. How did his early life shape his comedy?
The Poconos [in Pennsylvania] were actually just as important as the Catskills in Sid’s case. The producer who really shaped his programs, Max Liebman, came out of Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, not the Catskills. That mattered.
Sid wasn’t a stand-up comic. He started as a musician. People noticed he was funny while horsing around during musical routines. His comedy was more sophisticated than wiseguy stand-up — it was sketch comedy, with music, dance and character work.
And then there’s Yonkers [Caesar’s hometown just north of New York City]. His family ran a restaurant where the workers sat by ethnicity — Germans at one table, Slavs at another. Sid bused tables and absorbed the sound of all those languages. He said he could listen to a language for 15 minutes and imitate its musicality.
He didn’t really speak them. He’d sprinkle in a few words — ‘like chocolate chips in cookie batter,’ he said — but it sounded convincing. Ironically, the languages he avoided were Yiddish and Hebrew, the ones closest to home.
What was happening in television when Caesar arrived in 1949?
Television was empty. It was the electronic corollary of the American frontier. They had hours to fill and no idea how to do it. That’s why people remember watching wrestling. Comedy was going to be central, but nobody knew what kind. Caesar’s early shows weren’t pure comedy — they were variety shows with comedy at the center. Television comedy was still gestating.
And like Hollywood earlier, television became an opening for Jews. The people running the country didn’t quite know what to do with it, and there was a void desperate for talent.
The shows weren’t overtly Jewish — yet they clearly resonated with Jewish audiences. Why?
They were very careful not to be explicit. The word “Jew” was never mentioned. Max Liebman bragged there was no Yiddish on “Your Show of Shows.” They wanted to lie low. But Jewish viewers recognized something. The irreverence. The skepticism toward authority. Rooting for underdogs. Making fun of pomposity and power.
As Sid Caesar said to me, “The Jews knew. The Jews knew what we were doing.” They were winking — communicating without saying it outright.
Food seems to be a recurring theme. I love a later skit when a famous bullfighter is on his deathbed and he and his entourage are putting in their deli orders.
Food is a leitmotif in Caesar’s comedy. There are sketches about wanting food, not getting food, getting less than the other guy, struggling with unfamiliar food. I wrote that his humor was Jewish “in its obsession, born of privation, with food in all its forms.” And they treated food with respect. No food fights. The food was always real.
I asked [food writer] Mimi Sheraton what distinguishes Jews and Italians around food. She said the Italians care about food every bit as much as Jews do — only without the panic. That captured it perfectly.
“Your Show of Shows” ended in June 1954, after five seasons and at the height of its success. Why?
Sid wanted control. He was making $25,000 a week in 1953 — roughly $300,000 a week today — but he was working under Max Liebman. He wanted to emphasize comedy, resented losing time to singers and dancers, and wanted to be the sole star. He was also competitive with [his co-star] Imogene Coca.
The pressure was enormous. Ninety minutes live every week, no margin for error. That stress began to eat him alive.
The legendary writers’ room, especially the one for “Caesar’s Hour,” where all seven writers were Jews, is often romanticized, in films like “My Favorite Year” and Neil Simon’s play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” What was it really like?
It was not a picnic. It was a room of incredible tension. These writers were fighting for their lives. They were working in the shadow of the garment district. Entertainment was an escape from a life pushing a cart on Seventh Avenue. They were desperate to survive.
Frank Rich once tried to write a book about them — his version of “The Boys of Summer” [Roger Kahn’s book about the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the 1950s]. He abandoned it and told me, “Instead of the boys of summer, I found the angry Jews of winter.”
What led to Caesar’s fall from the center of television and American popular culture?
As television spread into the hinterlands, the audience changed. Sid didn’t play well in Peoria. People thought he was elitist, talking down to them. Lawrence Welk [host of a variety show featuring anodyne pop music] crushed him. Caesar did devastating parodies of Welk — brilliant but futile. Television tastes were shifting.
At the same time, the pressure destroyed him. Drinking, pills, exhaustion. You can see it on screen — the faltering diction, the loss of confidence.
Your book shows a star who was often aloof, difficult to work with, and often addled by booze and drugs. What was Caesar like when you met him?
I interviewed him in 2008. He was very frail, confined to home, but mentally sharper than he’d been in years. One thing he told me stuck with me. He talked about success — that moment when he realized he could have anything he wanted: “Even sturgeon at Barney Greengrass, even if it was $5 a pound.”
That was success to him: never having to hold back. It came back, once again, to food.
What does comedy today owe Sid Caesar?
Larry Gelbart once said, “You want to know what’s missing from comedy today? Jews.” There are still Jewish comedy writers, of course. But in Caesar’s day, it was seven Jews working together, “working our brains out,” as Gelbart put it.
There was an unabashed Jewish essence to that comedy — a shared sensibility — that doesn’t quite exist anymore. Comedy is more variegated now. Something essential was diluted.
And yet, it all started with Sid Caesar.
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Why New York’s Sephardic Jews are more Zionist — and more wary of Mamdani — than their Ashkenazi neighbors
Differences between Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews have come sharply into focus since Zohran Mamdani became mayor. In the greater New York City area, 10% of Jews identify as Mizrahi or Sephardic, two groups that report stronger connections to Israel and more conservative political views than Ashkenazi Jews, according to a new national study.
Aaron Cohen, a Moroccan Jew raised in Venezuela, and a New York City–based financial adviser, said, “I think it will be hard to find Sephardic Jews who voted for Mamdani because of how important Israel is to us.” For us, he said, “there is no divide between being against Israel and antisemitism.” He added that many in these communities who escaped socialist countries are also wary of Mamdani’s democratic socialist policies.
Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews arrived in the United States between the 1950s and 1990s, often fleeing openly anti-Jewish regimes and socialist regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. While some were able to immigrate to the U.S., many found that their only viable refuge was Israel, under the Law of Return, which grants every Jew the right to Israeli citizenship.
“Sephardic Jews are very Zionistic, because the state of Israel changed our lives,” Cohen said. “A lot of Jews from Morocco were saved by the fact that they were able to go to Israel. The same was true for Iranian Jews, Egyptian Jews, and so on.”
According to the study, conducted for JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, 31% of Mizrahi Jews and 28% of Sephardic Jews in the U.S. hold Israeli citizenship, compared with just 5% of Ashkenazi Jews. And 80% of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews say they feel somewhat or very emotionally connected to Israel, compared with 69% of Ashkenazi Jews.
Mamdani has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel and identifies as anti-Zionist. He has repeatedly stated Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, but rather “as a state with equal rights.” An Anti-Defamation League report from December found that 20% of Mamdani’s administrative appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups.
Those positions land poorly in these communities where, for many, Israel functioned as a lifeline. Ralph Betesh, a 22-year-old Syrian Jew from Midwood, described the Syrian Jewish community in New York, the city’s largest Sephardic community, as “super, super pro-Israel.” Before the election, he said, “In every Syrian group chat, they were sending things like, ‘Please everyone, go register to vote. This is crucial. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime election,’” Batesh said. “Even in shul, they would urge people to go vote.”
The primarily Syrian congregation Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, one of the largest Sephardic synagogues in North America, sent a letter to congregants before the High Holidays stating that to attend services, one must show proof of voter registration. While the synagogue did not endorse a specific candidate, the letter warned of “a very serious danger that can affect all of us.”
Memories of persecution and socialism
For Yisrael Cohen-Vásquez, a 21-year-old Lebanese, Iranian, Spanish, and Moroccan Jew who grew up in Buenos Aires and moved to New York at 13, the intensity of the reaction is rooted in the proximity of persecution. “The pogroms that happened to us are as recent as the 1990s,” he said. “This is not generational trauma. This is my parents’ trauma that I grew up listening to.”
Michael Anwarzadeh, an Iraqi Jew from Manhattan, expressed a similar view. “We understand, Iraqis, what having someone who is anti-Jewish in power means,” he said. “I can say that because my parents lived through it. I grew up listening to them, and I learned those lessons.”
Cohen-Vásquez is particularly alarmed by Mamdani’s recent decision to revoke the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lift restrictions on boycotts of Israel. “All these policies that are being changed are exactly what was introduced to Mizrahi communities in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “These were the indicators, the litmus tests, for the beginning of the pogroms.”
Beyond concerns over antisemitism and Jewish safety, Cohen-Vásquez said his family’s experiences “whether Lebanese, Argentinian, or Iranian” have also made him deeply skeptical of Mamdani’s “socialist policies.”
That perspective, he added, has often left him feeling misunderstood when sharing his views with Ashkenazi peers. “I feel like I had to defend myself and explain my family story,” Cohen-Vásquez said. At the same time, he said he was heartened by conversations with non-Jews in New York who had immigrated from socialist countries and, as he put it, “got it.”
“I felt more seen and understood by the Dominicanos and the Puerto Ricans in Washington Heights, and by African American communities in Harlem and Queens, than by Ashkenazi Jews.”
While Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews emphasize their deep attachment to New York, many describe a relationship shaped by repeated displacement and hard-earned lessons about how quickly safety can erode. “When you talk to anybody in our community now, you say, ‘Okay, where would you go?” Aaron Cohen said. “What’s your plan B? What’s your plan C?’”
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She thought she knew her mother. Then she learned about the concentration camp
Marisa Fox always knew her mother Tamar Fromer-Fox had secrets. Tamar never shared the circumstances under which her family had left Poland for Mandatory Palestine, only saying that they avoided the worst of the Holocaust. But years after her mom’s death in 1993, while searching for family records in Dąbrowa-Górnicza, Poland, Fox learned her mom had spent four and a half years in Gabersdorf, a labor camp that became a concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia.
In the documentary My Underground Mother, Fox, who is also an occasional Forward contributor, tries to piece together her family history (such as that her mother’s birth name was Alta, not Tamar) and understand why her mother never admitted she was a Holocaust survivor.
Making the film took more than a decade. Fox’s search took her across the globe: Tel Aviv; Berlin; Melbourne; Malmö, Sweden; Silver Spring, Maryland. She tracked down and interviewed dozens of women who had grown up with her mother or survived Gabersdorf with her. Most of them, including Fox’s mother, were teenagers when they were taken.
Although the film starts with Fox’s mother, it quickly expands into a larger story about the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust. The narrative is primarily driven by the survivors’ interviews, which are particularly powerful given how few Holocaust survivors are left to tell their stories. At the film’s New York Jewish Film Festival premiere, Fox said that only a handful of the people she interviewed are still alive.
Among their memories of the labor camp are those of brutal sexual violence. The women recall being lined up naked and paraded for visiting SS officers, who would then choose which of the girls — many of whom were 16 or younger — they wanted to sleep with.
These organized assaults are an aspect of the Holocaust that have not received much attention, partially because they were not highlighted on the international stage at the Nuremberg trials. Benjamin Ferencz, a chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the trials, told Fox that the American lawyers thought it would be difficult to convice Russians to prosecute sexual violence as a crime against humanity, given that Soviet troops themselves committed mass rape in liberated areas (American soldiers were also known to perpetrate this offense).
But amid the horror, the women in the camp bound together. One woman, Helene, remembers teaching the other girls Hebrew songs. When Fox’s mother fell ill during a shift, one of her friends did her work for her when the guards weren’t looking. The women also documented their experiences in a shared diary and wrote about their hopes that they would soon be free. Miraculously, the diary survived the war and its owner, Regina, passed it onto her daughter. Fox was able to use excerpts from the diary in the film, including a passage her mother had written.
After the war, Alta was smuggled to Mandatory Palestine by the Haganah and joined the Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary organization, and adopted the name Tamar. She later immigrated to the United States where she started college at 30. She married a native Brooklynite and created a new life for herself.
While some of the survivors condemn Tamar’s decision to hide her past, others understand that it could be easier to invent a whole new identity than try to reckon with such a traumatic experience. One woman, Sara, tells Fox that she named her son Christian so that he wouldn’t be seen as Jewish. Fox herself was originally named Mary Teresa (she changed it as soon as she could).
Growing up, Fox always heard her mother say “I was a hero, never a victim,” and her secrecy may have been essential to keeping that narrative alive. But by shining a new light on the strength of female survivors, My Underground Mother shows that telling the hard truths can also be heroic.
My Underground Mother will be screening at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival starting and the Boca International Film Festival in February.
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Timothée Chalamet and ‘Marty Supreme’ net 9 Oscar nominations for Jewish sports fable
(JTA) — It was a “Supreme” Oscar-nominations morning for Timothée Chalamet and the heavily Jewish period sports comedy he stars in.
“Marty Supreme” picked up nine Academy Award nominations Thursday, including best picture and best actor for the red-hot Chalamet, the 30-year-old thespian who is seen as likely to nab his first Oscar for the role.
The film also earned nods for best director for Josh Safdie; original screenplay for Safdie and Ronald Bronstein; cinematography; editing; production design; and costumes.
“Marty Supreme” was also nominated in the brand-new category of best casting, acknowledging a supporting cast stacked with ringers, many of them Jewish — including Odessa A’zion, Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard and Isaac Mizrahi.
Elsewhere in the nominees, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a film about the death of a Palestinian child during the Israel-Gaza war told from the perspective of the Palestinian Red Crescent, was nominated for best international feature.
The film, submitted by Tunisia and co-produced by upstart pro-Palestinian distributor Watermelon Pictures, won a groundswell of support from the pro-Palestinian filmmaking community during the awards circuit. Jonathan Glazer, the British Jewish filmmaker behind the acclaimed Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” whose Oscars speech last year took aim at Israel’s conduct in Gaza, co-produced the film.
In addition, Jewish super-producer and director Steven Spielberg was nominated as a producer for best picture nominee “Hamnet,” which picked up eight nominations total.
A critical and box-office hit for distributor A24, “Marty Supreme” follows an aspiring ping-pong athlete in the postwar Lower East Side as he prepares to sacrifice everything for the chance to play in the world championships in Japan.
It is loosely based on the story of Marty Reisman, a real-life Jewish ping-pong champion and street hustler, though much of the rollicking tale — which includes detours into Auschwitz and the Pyramids of Giza — is fictional. Marty’s journey also puts his own American Jewish identity under the microscope as he tangles with an antisemitic businessman and a dog named Moses.
The film is the most evident Jewish rooting interest among the Oscar front-runners this year, especially since beloved Jewish actor Adam Sandler — who memorably starred in Safdie’s previous film “Uncut Gems” — missed out on a supporting actor nomination for his work in “Jay Kelly.”
“Blue Moon,” a biopic of Jewish songwriter Lorenz Hart, picked up two nominations: best actor for Ethan Hawke and best original screenplay. Other films with prominent Jewish angles, including the World War II drama “Nuremberg,” came up empty-handed.
By contrast, last year’s nominations brought a slew of Jewish-interest selections including “The Brutalist,” “A Real Pain” and “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic that also scored a nomination for Chalamet. Several of those films went on to win in major categories.
A few minor Jewish connections can be found in the year’s second-most-nominated film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s political-rebel action drama “One Battle After Another” (which picked up 13 nominations, second only to “Sinners” with 16).
The British composer and Radiohead band member Jonny Greenwood, who has faced backlash from some fans over his collaborations with Israeli musicians, was nominated for best score for the film. Israeli-American actress and musician Alana Haim, a frequent Anderson collaborator, also has a small role, and one of the movie’s storylines involves a secret cabal of white supremacists who restrict membership to the “Gentile-born.”
The Brazilian espionage drama “The Secret Agent,” nominated for four Oscars including best picture and best international feature, also notably features a cameo from recently deceased German actor Udo Kier. In one of his final roles, Kier plays a German Jewish refugee hiding out in Brazil whom the state’s fascist-friendly police force mistakenly believe is a Nazi.
The Safdies cast a longer shadow over the morning’s nominations. “The Smashing Machine,” a different sports biopic directed by Benny Safdie — Josh’s brother, his collaborator on “Uncut Gems” and other films — was nominated for best makeup. And “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” directed by Jewish filmmaker Mary Bronstein and produced by her husband Ronald — a Safdie collaborator nominated this year for co-writing “Marty Supreme” — picked up a best actress nomination for star Rose Byrne.
Diane Warren, the Jewish songwriter and erstwhile Oscar nominee, was once again nominated — for the 17th time — in the category of best original song. This time, Warren’s nomination came from writing a song for “Diane Warren: Relentless,” a documentary about herself.
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