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Comedians are just as capable of antisemitic incitement as political figures. So let’s take Dave Chappelle seriously.

(JTA) — Last week saw Dave Chappelle deliver a brilliant monologue on “Saturday Night Live” addressing the antisemitism controversies surrounding Kanye West and Kyrie Irving.

Unfortunately, “brilliant” doesn’t inherently mean “moral” or “good.” Chappelle’s monologue was a masterclass in how to normalize and embolden antisemitic discourse, delivered in plain sight and with just enough “wink wink, nudge nudge” plausible deniability — mixed in with a sprinkle of real commentary — that one would easily almost not realize that … wait, did Chappelle denounce anything exactly?

He opened the monologue by pretending to read from the kind of apology being demanded of Kanye West, the rapper who in recent weeks had exposed various antisemitic tropes. “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms, and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community,” Chappelle “read,” mocking the boilerplate apologies that often arise in these moments. At face value, it’s a great piece of satire. But then he follows up with the punchline: “And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.”

He isn’t holding West to account. He’s clearing the way and setting the stage for the finest bout of antisemitic dogwhistling probably ever featured on “SNL.”

There is legitimate commentary to be made about the often disproportionate and racialized vitriol directed at  Black Americans who engage in antisemitism, coming from a society that revels in Black pain and punishment. Jews of color, and especially Black Jews like me, have been addressing this reality across social media for decades, noting the lack of intensity and accountability when the shoe is on the other foot — when Jewish figures espouse anti-blackness.

But this monologue by a Black comedian is making no such argument. And it comes as more bold and brazen bad-faith actors are acting out in more and more violent ways. Comedians are just as capable of incitement as political figures.

Chappelle is wildly adept at structuring complex jokes. For years he deftly delivered biting, raw and real socio-racial commentary, from his standup routines to “The Chappelle Show,” and since the 2000s has positioned himself as an astute teller of hard truths. If you doubt the man’s intelligence, watch what he does late in the “SNL” routine when he talks about Donald Trump.

With backhanded praise, Chappelle attributes Trump’s popularity and appeal to his skill at being an “honest liar.” Never before, said Chappelle, had voters seen a billionaire “come from inside the house and tell the commoners, ‘Inside that house we’re doing everything you think we’re doing.’ And then he went right back inside the house and started playing the game again.”

Chappelle took notes on Trump’s knack for saying exactly what he means and telling people exactly what he planned to do.

When Chappelle says there are two words you should never say together — “the” and “Jews” — he’s not speaking against antisemitic conspiracy theories that treat Jews as a scheming monolith. He’s insinuating instead that there is a “The Jews” that should never be challenged. (Chappelle goes on to repeatedly use the phrase “The Jews” in his monologue.) The one time he uses “the Jewish community” is to introduce the straw man argument that Black Americans should not be blamed for the terrible things that have happened to “the Jewish community” all over the world — a declaration so baffling that only one person in the audience responds. After all, no one was blaming West or Irving, the NBA star who shared on Twitter a link to a wildly antisemitic film, for the terrible things that happened to Jews. They were just being asked not to promote the ideas of people who had done those terrible things.

Also on full display is Chappelle’s deft, almost “1984”-esque doublespeak. Chappelle notes that when he first saw the controversy building around West’s antisemitism, he thought “Let me see what’s going to happen first” — a strange and telling equivocation. Chappelle diminishes the significance of the film shared by Irving, “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” by describing it as “apparently having some antisemitic tropes or something,” but then jokes that Irving probably doesn’t think the Holocaust happened — a trope presented in said movie.

Chappelle is reluctant to call Kanye “crazy” but acknowledges he is “possibly not well,” but has no problem referring to Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker as “observably stupid.”

Ultimately and persistently, Chappelle suggests that Kanye erred not in being antisemitic, but in being antisemitic out loud.

Most insidious in this regard was his seeming rejection of the notion, promoted by West, that Jews control Hollywood. Said Chappelle: “It’s a lot of Jews [in Hollywood]. Like a lot. But that doesn’t mean anything, you know what I mean? There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri. It doesn’t mean we run the place.” He refers to the idea that Jews control Hollywood as a “delusion.”

And then, rather than let this necessary distinction set in, he undercuts it, saying, “It’s not a crazy thing to think. But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud in a climate like this.” The problem, Chappelle is suggesting, is not harboring dangerous delusions, but saying them in public and risking being called on it. The “climate” is not one of dangerous antisemitism, but the danger of speaking one’s mind.

Chappelle telegraphed this sentiment with an earlier quip: West, he said “had broken the show business rules. You know, the rules of perception. If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”

The “perception” is that only Jews can’t be spoken of in derogatory terms. Kanye wasn’t wrong for thinking antisemitic thoughts, Chappelle suggests, but, again, speaking about them.

There are lots of jokes made in Hollywood at the expense of Jews. This, however, was not a case of Jews being unable to laugh at ourselves. There’s a difference between laughing at ourselves and having someone who isn’t Jewish use “wink wink” antisemitic tropes. It’s not that Chappelle’s monologue wasn’t funny on its face, it’s that it was harmful. This isn’t happening in a vacuum: It’s happening in a specific context, particularly one in which antisemitism has already been riled up and emboldened by Kanye and Irving. (“Hebrews to Negroes” became a bestseller on Amazon after Irving tweeted about it.)

It just takes the wrong kind of person to hear this monologue for us to experience, God forbid, another Tree of Life shooting. I didn’t particularly relish the wake of the first shooting when, as the rabbi of a congregation in Rockland County, New York, I met with county officials and negotiated police presences, and discussed mass-shooter evasion tactics to ensure the safety of my congregants.

For anyone who thinks Chappelle’s monologue was “just jokes” or that I am reading too much into it, consider his last line — a bravura complaint about cancel culture and the unspoken forces behind it: “I’ll be honest with you. I’m getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support. And I hope they don’t take anything away from me. [ominous voice] Whoever ‘they’ are.”


The post Comedians are just as capable of antisemitic incitement as political figures. So let’s take Dave Chappelle seriously. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel?

The team behind Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 bares it all with the title of their documentary. It is, in fact, three and a half hours of footage about the conflict from the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television AB (SVT), stitched together in mostly chronological order.

SVT was founded in 1956 and held a monopoly on news broadcasts in Sweden until the early 90s, when the commercial channel TV4 was launched. The intention behind SVT programs was to present impartial news produced solely by Swedes.

In the two years since the beginning of the current war, there’s been a renewed interest in understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. For those well-versed in the region’s history, they likely won’t learn anything new here. For those who don’t know much, it’s a good crash course — if one considers three and a half hours to be succinct.

Sveriges Television AB reporter Vanna Beckman and Ghassan Kanafani. Courtesy of Icarus Films

The film, directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, documents many major developments that happened in Israel during those three decades, including big waves of American immigration in the 60s, economic growth, and, of course, the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Although the early footage focuses on Israel’s impressive agricultural projects and the modernization of the country’s major cities, as the years go on, the increasing focus is on the plight of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps and the Gaza Strip, as well as political unrest within Israel.

The film opens with the statement that archival material “doesn’t tell us what really happened — but says a lot about how it was told,” so the broader implications of the footage are left up to the viewer’s interpretation. Some may see a welcome, growing awareness of Palestinian suffering. Others may see overly harsh criticisms of Israeli policies that disregard the country’s security issues. With no elaboration or editorializing, it doesn’t feel like the film is helping clarify or challenge the audience’s preconceived notions about the conflict.

And although the footage is Swedish, it’s unclear what, if anything, that lends to the conversation. There is barely anything in the film about Swedish attitudes towards Israel, though we get a peek into diverging viewpoints during a 1964 debate between diplomat Gunnar Häglöff and political scientist Herbert Tingsten about the issue of Palestinian refugees. In a 1968 broadcast, two Swedish journalists question Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban about the Israeli government destroying Arab homes. There are also interviews with Swedish soldiers from the United Nations who were stationed at a former railway station on the border between Gaza and Egypt in 1975. They have little to say about the conflict, however, and are more interested in discussing how they can build a sauna, a luxury from home they can’t live without.

Conscripts for obligatory Israeli military service in 1967. Courtesy of Icarus Films

How the Swedish government or its citizens have felt about Israel over the years remains strangely obscured. Whatever impact this footage may have had on Swedish-Israel relations and how these broadcasts were received is never discussed. It’s especially unfortunate that the films offers no way to compare the countries’ past relationship to current diplomatic tensions around Israel’s treatment of activist Greta Thunberg

With the humanitarian crisis in Gaza growing more dire and the future of Israel’s democracy becoming an increasingly pressing issue, one wonders what can be gained from the rehashing of history on view in Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV. The documentary primarily underscores a point most people already understand by now: The situation in Israel and Palestine is complicated. It’s violent. It feels neverending. Most people probably don’t need to watch a three and a half hour documentary to tell them that.

‘Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’ opens at Film Forum NYC on October 10th.

The post It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.

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It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another?

18 years ago, America’s finest and most influential klezmer musicians gathered on the steps of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for a photograph.

The picture was organized by Yale Strom, a violinist and klezmer musician who, having watched ‘A Great Day in Harlem,’ a documentary about Art Kane’s celebrated 1958 shot of America’s best-known jazz musicians, sought to do something similar by assembling those responsible for America’s klezmer revival. Strom called the photo, which was taken by Leo Sorel, ‘A Great Day On Eldridge Street’.

Whereas most of the musicians in Kane’s photograph knew each other, and indeed were friendly, a good few of Strom’s klezmer musicians had never met. “It certainly brought together a lot of people who had never been together at the same place at the same time,” recalled Hankus Netsky, a founding member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a central figure in the klezmer revival.

For Strom, this remains the photograph’s abiding achievement. “I accomplished something no one had ever done,” he told me. “And most likely never will.”

Several of the 106 musicians photographed that day have since passed away, including Theodore Bikel, one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival; Elaine Hoffman Watts, the first female graduate of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; and renowned Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. But American klezmer has continued to grow in popularity, thanks to the contributions of Don Byron, John Zorn, Jake Shulman-Ment, and Pete Rushefsky, among numerous other performers.

‘A Great Day on Eldridge Street’ was partly a celebration of American klezmer’s New York roots, and of the Lower East Side’s historic Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, but since 2007, the klezmer revival, which began in the late 1970s, has taken on an increasingly international character. “There’s a lot more access to international workshops now, and klezmer’s presence in the global music scene is only increasing from year-to-year,” Netsky said.

“The music is larger and more varied,” Strom added. “More sounds, more venues, more academic study, and more global cross-pollination.”

And though the 2007 photo cannot be recreated, it is past time for a sequel, Netsky said — one that honors “the incredible dedication and virtuosity of the younger generation.”

The post It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another? appeared first on The Forward.

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Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan?

Is the Jewish joke on the verge of becoming extinct?  The Last Jewish Joke, written by the veteran Parisian sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and newly translated into English by Cory Stockwell, argues that in recent years, Jews began to seem less heimish for at least three reasons: The Holocaust receded from memory; Israel’s government became guilty of actions decried internationally as war crimes; and right-wing antisemites who were always present became more boldly vocal.

Reminiscing about when he heard certain jokes, the author compiles his own consoling self-portrait in an autumnal mood. Wieviorka will be 80 next year, and his prose has a tendency to poignantly deem things as the “last” or at their “end.”

English language readers may need to be reminded that, when Wieviorka alludes to family situations in which he first heard Jewish jokes, it is in the context of his distinguished family of overachievers. His sister Annette is an eminent historian of the Holocaust. Another sister, Sylvie, is a psychiatrist and academic, and a brother, Olivier, is a historian specializing in World War II and the French Resistance. The entire mishpocheh is inspired and motivated by the memory of their paternal grandparents, Polish Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, Annette Wieviorka recently published a “family autobiography,” which asked subtle, eloquent, and nuanced questions about her antecedents.

In a comparable emotional aura of reverence, Wieviorka characterizes Jewish comedy of the past as “never malicious” (though apparently insult comics like Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers never got the memo).

The notion that joking Jews had to be sympathetic victims to elicit empathy from non-Jewish audiences may be true of some raconteurs, but is also belied by historical examples of potty-mouthed rapscallions like Belle Barth, B. S. Pully (born Murray Lerman) and Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz), who startled nightclub audiences of their day with profanity.

Later Jewish shock jocks of the Howard Stern variety likewise chose to surprise, rather than charm, the public as a way to win notoriety. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, far from relying on vulnerable Jews as victims, presented characters screaming putdowns to elicit hilarity.

French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, seen here in 2016, is the author of ‘The Last Jewish Joke.’ Photo by Getty Images

To bolster his arguments, Wieviorka refers to the counterexample of Popeck (born Judka Herpstu), a demure, wry entertainer of Polish and Romanian Jewish origin, who at 90 still appears at French theaters with gentle monologues akin to those of the Danish Jewish wit Victor Borge. Popeck presents himself onstage as a grumpy Eastern-European immigrant speaking Yiddish-accented French.

Wieviorka values such exemplars of rapidly vanishing tradition; as a social scientist, he is convinced that because communal settings such as the Borscht Belt no longer exist, the comics who once flourished on hotel stages in the Catskills have disappeared from memory.

To be sure, American standups like Myron Cohen, Jan Murray, and Carl Ballantine, once familiar from TV variety shows, are rarely mentioned now, though  others like Eddie Cantor are periodically rediscovered by a new public, as Cantor was when he showed up as a character in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. But in his autobiographical deep dive, Wieviorka, who writes here more as a memoirist than a history of comedy, is naturally more concerned with things that he personally saw or heard, rather than any objective history of Jewish comedians through the ages.

Wieviorka also somewhat curiously refers to the “Yiddish-inflected” comedy of Groucho Marx. Apart from the word “schnorrer” which appears in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” a song written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, it is difficult to think of many other explicit Yiddishisms in Groucho’s verbal elan.

Wieviorka’s anecdotes tend to be hefty and hearty, like a family repast of kreplach that remains in the visceral memory for days after being consumed. Some of the quaintly old fashioned tales he refers to recall the precedent of Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, a dissection of pleasantries that reflects a sturdy Yekke approach to light-heartedness. Of course, in this optic of Jewish humor, there is no room for concise one-liners from the likes of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen). For Wieviorka, as with Freud, brevity was so far from being the soul of wit that it might almost seem non-Jewish.

Another of Wieviorka’s claims appears to conflict with Jewish tradition itself, such as when he states that funny Jews laugh at themselves, never at others, negating the othering of mocked and disdained people in Chelm, a legendary village in Yiddish folklore inhabited by fools who believe themselves to be wise.

To support some of his claims, the author discusses the 1970s French film The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a box office success, now somewhat frantic and dated-looking, starring the popular Gallic comedian, Louis de Funès disguised as a rabbi. More to the point, Wieviorka justly reveres the French Jewish comedian Pierre Dac for his still-fascinating wartime broadcasts from London for the Free French forces. Dac’s sense of humor simultaneously expressing Yiddishkeit and also undermining the enemy’s Fascist ideology is a subject that might have intrigued Freud himself.

To bolster the essentially serious messages of his book, Wieviorka mentions the writers Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart as well as the painter Marc Chagall, names rarely seen in books about humor.

Wieviorka’s elegiac, end-of-an-era tone might be cheered up by a glance at the Netflix streaming schedule or a visit to a comedy club. Of course Jewish humor is thriving, as Wieviorka himself admits; Le Monde headlined a relevant story about the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Israeli comedians are boosting morale in wartime.”

So, for all its methodical, highly intellectual analysis, The Last Jewish Joke might be best appreciated as a moving Kaddish for the demise of anecdotes that were once considered the height of drollery. It is very much a product of brainy French Jewish creativity, which itself deserves to be cherished and celebrated.

 

The post Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan? appeared first on The Forward.

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