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Deeply Jewish comedy is having a moment, even as antisemitism rocks pop culture
(JTA) — Two weeks after a Trump-supporting heckler threw a beer can at Ariel Elias at a club in New Jersey over her politics, the Jewish comedian’s fortunes took a turn for the better. A video of the incident went viral and she made her network television debut on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show.
She spent most of her five-minute set talking about her Jewish identity and how it clashed with parts of her upbringing in Kentucky.
“I’m Jewish from Kentucky, which is insane, it’s an insane origin story,” she said last month before getting to jokes about how Southerners mispronounce her name and how badly her parents want her to date Jews.
Even though the crowd found it funny, Elias’ tight five wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. In the world of standup comedy, discussing one’s Jewish identity in a deep way has become increasingly common on the mainstream stage over the past several years. Jewish comedians are going beyond the bagel and anxiety jokes, discussing everything from religiosity and traditions (and breaking with those traditions) to how their Jewishness has left them prone to awkward situations and even antisemitism.
Ari Shaffir calls his most recent special, which was released earlier this month and titled “Jew” — and racked up close to four million views on YouTube in two weeks — “a love letter to the culture and religion that raised [him].” In his recent one man show “Just For Us” — which drew widespread acclaim and a slew of celebrity audience members, from Jerry Seinfeld to Stephen Colbert to Drew Barrymore — Alex Edelman discussed the details of growing up Modern Orthodox (and infiltrating a group of white nationalists). In 2019, Tiffany Haddish released a Netflix special called “Black Mitzvah,” in which she talks about learning about her Jewish heritage.
At the same time, the current uptick in public displays of antisemitism — punctuated by a series of celebrity antisemitism scandals and comedian Dave Chappelle’s controversial response to them — is complicating the moment for comedians who get into Jewish topics. Jewish comics are even debating what kinds of jokes about Jews are acceptable and which cross a line.
“I find it ironic that at a time where more Jewish comedians feel comfortable expressing their Judaism (i.e. wearing a yarmulke, making Jewish-oriented content) and not hiding it (by changing their name for example), we also see an up-swelling of outright antisemitism,” said Jacob Scheer, a New York-based comedian. “I don’t think — and hope — those two things are not related, but I find it really interesting and sad.”
The two phenomena could be related. Antisemitic incidents nationwide reached an all-time high in 2021, with a total of 2,717 incidents, according to an April 2022 audit from the Anti-Defamation League. Those incidents range from vandalism of buildings to harassment and assault against individuals.
“Now that [antisemitism is] a headline, it actually helps me to do what I need to do, which is just be extra out and loud and proud,” said Dinah Leffert, a comic based in Los Angeles. “I was hiding who I am just so I can survive in this environment. But this environment is not worth it if I have to hide.”
Scheer said that “people who are Jewish with an emphasis on the ‘Jew’ are having a moment.”
“[The] ‘Jew-ish’ world I wouldn’t say is dead, but I don’t think the ‘Jew-ish’ world is producing that much,” he said.
By “Jew-ish,” Scheer clarified that he means comics like Seinfeld and Larry David, who often infuse secular, culturally Jewish material into their comedy. Their apex of fame came during a time when Jewish comedy was not nearly as mainstreamed — the “Seinfeld” sitcom team was famously told that their idea was “too New York, too Jewish.”
Some of Seinfeld and David’s Jewish comedic successors, such as Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, sprinkled in more explicitly Jewish jokes before 2010. But today, “you see more Alex Edelmans coming out,” Scheer said, referencing the increase in visibility for comedians with more observant upbringings.
Things have progressed to the level of “Jews doing comedy for other Jews about Jewish things,” Scheer added. In August, the first-ever Chosen Comedy Festival at the Coney Island Amphitheater in Brooklyn featured a lineup of mostly Jewish comics whose repertoires ranged from impressions of old Jewish women (who sound like bees) to breakdowns of the differences between how Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews say “Shabbat shalom.” Leah Forster, who also performed at the festival, uses her Hasidic upbringing as source material for her standup routines, creating characters and using accents and impressions. (In her early days as a comedian, Forster performed for women-only audiences while she was a teacher at a Bais Yaakov Orthodox school in Brooklyn.)
The festival, which was hosted by Stand Up NY (an Upper West Side club that Scheer says is known for being “the Jewish one”) welcomed a packed audience of about 4,000 guests, many of whom were Orthodox. A second Chosen Comedy Festival will take place in downtown Miami in December.
(The New York Jewish Week, a 70 Faces Media brand, was the media partner for the Chosen Comedy Festival but had no say in its lineup.)
The festival’s co-hosts, Modi Rosenfeld and Elon Gold, who frequently collaborate, both grew their audiences in the early days of the pandemic: Rosenfeld with his camera-facing comedic characters, like the esoteric Yoely who delivers news updates with a Hasidic Yiddish twist; and Gold with his Instagram Live show “My Funny Quarantine,” which featured guest appearances from other comedians. Both Gold and Rosenfeld work antisemitism into their material.
Some are finding the moment difficult to navigate. In late October, at the standup show she runs in Los Angeles, the comic two slots ahead of Dinah Leffert asked the room, “Is anyone still even supporting Kanye at this point?” The crowd responded with resounding whoops, claps and cheers, leading Leffert to feel like they did support Kanye West, the rapper who spent much of last month in the news for his multiple antisemitic rants.
Just a few jokes into her own 10-minute set, Leffert walked offstage.
“My body wouldn’t let me keep being inauthentic about what I was really feeling,” she said. “I don’t want to give laughter to people who are anti-Jewish.”
Leffert, who is openly Zionist, said she also observes a level of anti-Zionism in comedy clubs these days that feels to her like antisemitism.
“They’re not criticizing Israel,” she said. “It slips into antisemitism very quickly. And it’s just a really hostile environment.”
During the last large-scale military flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in May 2021, she felt inundated with Palestinian flag comments on posts about Jewish holidays, not Israel.
“You just get Palestinian flags underneath your Hanukkah posts,” she said.
In October, at a club in Omaha, comedian Sam Morril told a joke about how he hopes Jeffrey Epstein won’t be honored during Jewish Awareness Month.
“Can I ask why you chose to yell out ‘free Palestine’ after a Jeffrey Epstein joke?” he responded. When the heckler said she was making a “public statement” and was looking for “justice,” Morril answered: “A public statement? At the Omaha Funny Bone?”
Eitan Levine, a New York-based comedian known for his TikTok show “Jewish or Antisemitic” — on which he asks people to vote on whether objects like ketchup and mayonnaise, for example, are Jewish or antisemitic (in a loose comic version of the word) — said he receives similar comments online.
“This is a TikTok video about bagels,” Levine said. “What do you mean, you want me to take a stance?”
Though the response to his show has been largely positive and he has gone viral several times, Levine still receives all kinds of white supremacist comments on his videos — with backwards swastika, money bag or mustachioed man emojis evocative of Hitler, along with comments that say “jas the gews” as a spoonerism for “gas the Jews,” as a way to avoid TikTok censorship. Levine said he manually deletes these kinds of comments, but sometimes that’s not enough; one of the guests on his show had to cancel an in-person show due to online threats made against her.
“This stuff is clearly happening and it is dangerous and it is scary,” Levine told JTA.
Writer and comedian Jon Savitt, whose writing has been featured on College Humor and Funny or Die, and says he has often been “the first Jew that people have ever met,” recently launched an experimental web page called Meet A Jew, where users can connect with a Jewish person, much like a pen pal. His 2016-2018 standup show “Carrot Cake & Other Things That Don’t Make Sense” largely dealt with antisemitism — and its audience, he was surprised to see, was largely non-Jewish.
“Not only did I have people come up to me after the show, but I had non-Jews come up to me months later when they saw me and say ‘tikkun olam‘ [Hebrew for the Jewish principle of repairing the world] to me, or recite Hebrew,” Savitt said. “And to me that was the coolest use case because not only were they there, but they kind of retained something.”
Savitt says he isn’t trying to change any extremists’ minds with Meet A Jew, but he sees it as one step that could engage people who may be ignorant or unaware and give them a place to ask questions.
“Although it shouldn’t be on us to educate everyone or to have to constantly be standing up for ourselves, I think there are ways that we can bring other people into the conversation as well,” he said.
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Judea Pearl: What Reason I Find for Hope After October 7
Supporters of Israel gather in solidarity with Israel and protest against antisemitism, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas, during a rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nov. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
Judea Pearl’s new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002–2025, compiles the author’s writings on topics such as Israel, Zionophobia, antisemitism, the October 7 massacre, and his son, Daniel.
Below is an excerpt from the book, which serves as its epilogue:
Epilogue: The Crater of October 7
Science tells us that the extinction of dinosaurs occurred approximately sixty-six million years ago, when an asteroid struck the Earth, forming a huge crater in the Yucatán Peninsula. An enormous dust cloud blocked the sun, cooled the planet, and disrupted food chains, ultimately leading to the extinction of about 75 percent of all plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.
Science tells us much about disasters that occurred millions of years ago, but, sadly, it tells us almost nothing about how our lives will be shaped by the giant crater created by the blow of October 7. Looking into its depths, we find ourselves clueless and bewildered about what future might emerge from the dust cloud that still obscures our sun — and what species, movements, or ideas will perish or evolve from the darkness, winter, and confusion it has left behind.
Some say they were surprised by the brutality and hatred of October 7. Others were shocked by the scale of the operation and how close it came to its goal.
As a native Israeli, raised on the stories of the Hebron Massacre (1929) and haunted by the horrific images of the Ramallah lynching (2000), I was not surprised by the brutality and savagery of Israel’s enemies. Nor was I surprised by the depth of their hatred and inhumanity — a reality I painfully experienced in the murder of my son, Danny. Likewise, I already saw the early and deep infiltration of Hamas’ ideology into Western thought. Indeed, this book documents my premonitions about this process and the extent to which Hamas’ ideology mirrors the essential Palestinian mindset: “From the river to the sea.”
What, then, shocked me about the crater of October 7?
I was shocked by how swiftly Zionophobia — the absolute denial of Israel’s right to exist — became normalized, mainstream, and even respectable in Western discourse, precisely at Israel’s moment of greatest vulnerability.
I’ve witnessed many personal attacks on Israel before, but they always followed her victories and achievements. Those attacks I could understand; people instinctively side with the underdog. But the post-October 7 attacks were different. This time, they were driven by a wholehearted desire for Israel’s demise — with all its genocidal implications. The scent of blood, it seems, triggered a hunger for more. Hordes of predators emerged from their ideological tunnels, rushing to indict, sentence, and lynch Israel in the finest tradition of herd madness.
Can the Jewish people survive this madness? Can Western civilization endure the dangers rising from these tunnels?
Ideologies, once metastasized, are deadlier than the sword. We have heard Western intellectuals brand the Bibas family as “settlers,” thus, legitimate targets. Others went even further, labeling them “Nazi guards of a concentration camp.” A civilization capable of generating such images has lost all moral bearings and may not endure for long.
Yet I refuse to say that we are doomed.
Not because the threats aren’t real, but because alongside the spreading moral decay, I have also found islands of moral clarity, primarily among my fellow Jews, my students, and my academic colleagues. The crater of October 7 has created a deeper appreciation of Israel’s centrality in Jewish life, along with a sharper understanding of the outbreak of Zionophobia in its aftermath. This renewed awareness encompasses not only Israel’s historical, cultural, and spiritual significance to Jewish identity, but also its role as the embodiment of Jewish “normalcy.” In these islands of moral clarity, the existence of Israel is now understood to be essential to ensuring that Jews everywhere are treated as equals — not as a unique, tolerated, respected, or admired minority, but as equals. In short, no Jew can be truly equal in the family of man before Israel stands equal in the family of nations.
I cannot end without evoking the victims. I see them, the children of Western civilization, sons and daughters of Isaac and Prometheus: my son, Danny, Ilan Halimi, the Bibas family, the one thousand two hundred murdered on October 7. I imagine them standing up, waiting for me, for us, to say something meaningful. All I can say is Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah — the Jewish prayer of mourning recited in memory of the dead. A prayer that does not mention death or mourning, but glorifies God and expresses hope for a good life and universal peace. It is a humble confession of our inability to comprehend God’s cruel ways of playing with human lives and world order.
I sang this prayer at Danny’s funeral. I said to Danny: “I’ll sing it to you in the special melody that your great-grandfather chanted on Yom Kippur.” It’s a melody that rattles the gates of Heaven and pleads for mending our broken world order.
Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah
Judea Pearl is Chancellor’s professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
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He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him
“I have to tell you,” Bill Aron told me as he walked around The World In Front of Me, a retrospective of his photography at the American Jewish Historical Society. “My photography allowed me to walk into rooms I might never have otherwise walked into.”
We had just looked at some of his work documenting Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s: a sofer bent over a Torah scroll, a glowering rabbi with imposing eyebrows, a Hasidic wedding in the Bobover movement. Each photo begat the next; when he showed a reticent subject the results of his film, they would invite him back to take more.
Aron has become known for his work documenting Jewish communities around the world — his first book, From the Corners of the Earth, shows Jewish life in New York, Los Angeles, Cuba and the then-Soviet Union. His next, Shalom Y’all, was the result of a decade spent in the lesser-known Jewish communities of the American South.
His images are joyous and warm, portraits of resilience and invention, not dour investigations of poverty and antisemitism, offering respect to each subject he was able to meet through his work.
But his camera didn’t just change his access to the communities he documented. It changed Aron’s own experience of his Judaism.
A series of photographs shows scenes from the New York Havurah, a lay-led, egalitarian Jewish religious movement: A rabbi stands in reverent contemplation under his tallit in a misty forest, a child smiles from her father’s shoulders during a Shabbaton. Aron was a member in the 70’s, which is how he found himself in the middle of those scenes. But, he said, he didn’t grow up observant, and without his camera, while he might have been a member, he would have been “a much more passive one,” he said.
These photos are anything but passive. People smile or glower directly into the camera, and proudly present their life to the lens — a handful of shrimp from a Jewish man who built a business selling the shellfish to New Orleans restaurants, a woman showing off a bowl full of her famous chopped liver, a woman grinning as she carries a Torah on Simchat Torah. There is a clear symbiosis between Aron and his subjects, in which they each shaped and enlivened each other.
This, Aron said, was not the style of street photography at the time he came up. People were not supposed to document their own communities, nor were they supposed to engage with their subjects.
“It was frowned upon to study your own community — you were supposed to go out,” he said. “Street photography was supposed to be dispassionate.”
But of course people saw the camera and reacted to it, so he embraced that fact, spending hours talking to his subjects and learning their stories. Now that he has bequested his work to the AJHS, those stories are now preserved not only in images but also in a podcast accompanying the exhibit, in which Aron is able to preserve the memories behind each photograph.
The stories come through in the images alone, too; each shot is redolent of Aron’s affection for his subjects. An Israeli soldier in Jerusalem’s Old City makes flirtatious eye contact with a woman as his companions smirk. An elderly man on a bench dives in to kiss his wife on the cheek. Holocaust survivors beam out from full color photos, not reduced to the numbers on their arms but presented as “people who lived lives, lived beyond their nightmares, had families where they could, given back to their communities,” Aron said.
Not every image, on its surface, seems Jewish — there isn’t always a yarmulke or a lulav or a Torah scroll in frame. Nevertheless, Aron manages to find the sense of Jewishness that knits these images into the tapestry of Jewish life.
In a photo of a couple embracing at the liquor store they ran in Arkansas as part of the Shalom, Y’all series, Aron told me that only the husband was planning to be photographed, because his wife wasn’t Jewish. The photographer invited her anyway, and the couple ended up explaining that an Orthodox rabbi had performed their marriage ceremony. This seemed wrong to Aron — Orthodox rabbis don’t perform intermarriages — so they produced their marriage certificate to show him. As they pulled it out of the envelope, he recounted, another slip of paper fell out in which the rabbi had written that the wife had consented to become a member of the people of Israel and was now a Jew, a fact she was unaware of but delighted, Aron recalled, to discover.
“I loved interacting with people while I was photographing,” he said, “and the people became part of the portrait.” Aron did too.
The World in Front of Me is showing now through June 4 at the American Jewish Historical society. More information is available here.
The post He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him appeared first on The Forward.
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Prosecutors charge Capital Jewish Museum shooter with terrorism
Federal prosecutors added two terrorism charges to the indictment against Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of killing two Israeli embassy employees outside a networking event held at the Capital Jewish Museum last May.
The new indictment, filed on Wednesday, claims that Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, with the intent to both influence government policy through “intimidation” and that he sought to “coerce a significant portion of the civilian population” of the United States.
“These additional terrorism-related charges carry a mandatory life sentence under D.C. Code, while also reflecting the reality that this act was in fact an act of terror,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement.
Rodriguez, 31, who prosecutors say flew from Chicago to carry out the attack, allegedly shot Lischinsky and Milgrim repeatedly after they left a Jewish young professionals reception at the museum, hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
He then entered the museum and shouted, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
While prosecutors previously charged Rodriguez with national origin-based hate crimes, they have focused on the political dimension of the attack and the indictment quotes at length from social media posts and a manifesto that law enforcement sources attribute to Rodriguez.
“I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do,” the manifesto stated. “Free Palestine.”
Lischinsky, a German-born Israeli, worked as a research assistant at the Israeli embassy while Milgrim, who was American, worked in its department of public diplomacy.
It remains unclear whether Rodriguez, who has pleaded not guilty, intentionally targeted the young couple, who were planning to get engaged on an upcoming trip to Israel. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter initially said that Rodriguez had identified Milgrim and Lischinsky as embassy employees while mingling with attendees at the event and then waited outside for them to leave.
But other accounts say Rodriguez never made it inside the event prior to the shooting, and the Israeli Embassy later said that Leiter was merely floating “a theory that law enforcement officials are investigating.”
Prosecutors said at a September hearing that they had more than 1.5 million pages of evidence against Rodriguez, while one of his defense attorneys described receiving “trillions of gigabytes” of data from the government.
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