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How a new generation of comics is changing the face of Jewish comedy — and Judaism itself
Jewish comedy is, of course, a long and vaunted tradition: Joan Rivers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Larry David.
No one had to tell audiences that they were Jewish. Sure, there was Jewish content to some of their jokes — Bruce’s most famous bit is about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. But the literal mention of Judaism wasn’t what made their comedy feel so Jewish. It was their affect, their posture, their accents, their discussion of psychoanalysis or overbearing mothers. The self-deprecating, dry, kvetching tone. The test for whether comedy was Jewish was like the test for obscenity: You know it when you see it.
Today, though, everyone is in therapy. Everyone is anxious. Everyone can poke fun at their crazy families. Everyone — or plenty of people, at least — uses at least a few Yiddishisms. Schlep, klutz and mensch are hardly limited to members of the tribe.
Maybe that’s why a new crop of Jewish comics, many of whom have made their name posting their sets and crowdwork clips to YouTube, are so explicit about exactly what kind of comedy they’re doing.
Raanan Herschberg’s sharp new special is called Morbidly Jewish. Ariel Elias titles her YouTube special “A Jewish Star.” Josh Edelman’s latest act is “The Jew Rogaine Show.” “I’m Jewish btw lol,” reads the caption of a viral clip comedian Lucas Zelnick posted, talking about the names of various Jewish day schools. Gianmarco Soresi, an Italian Jew who talks about his Judaism in many of his viral clips, captions them with the hashtag #Jewish.
What it means to be Jewish in the U.S. has changed since the early days of Jewish comics on the Borscht Belt. We’ve assimilated, spread out across the country and the accent is fading away. You have to tell people you’re Jewish for them to know, most of the time. So, many Jewish comics are doing exactly that.
But beyond the label, what makes their comedy Jewish? For some, it seems like stolen valor, a way of claiming membership in a lauded tradition of comics, when mostly they’re just rehashing old jokes.
Josh Edelman — no relationship to Alex Edelman — spends much of The Jew Rogaine Show riffing about how, for example, his mother would brag about how many people he shot if he were a school shooter. “Thus concludeth the Jewish portion,” he says abruptly halfway through his set, as though Jewish comedy is limited to jokes that literally mention Jews, a switch that can be turned on and off.
But the best of the new, online Jewish comics, however, are birthing a new type of comedy — and with it, a new vision of Jewishness.
A Jewish comedy, divided
There are many comics who include some amount of Jewish comedy in their sets. In Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh, though largely focused on gross-out comedy about bodily fluids, S.N.L. star Sarah Sherman also jokes about Ashkenazi digestion and having a Jewish president. Iliza Shlesinger mostly jokes about being a millennial woman, but also talks about her encounters with Christians as a Jew in Texas.
But there’s a range of comics who lean much more into their Judaism these days, making it central to their comedy, and labeling it Jewish. And among them, there seem to be two genres: comedy explaining Jewishness to non-Jews, and comedy that affirms Jews’ Jewishness.
Raanan Herschberg’s newest special, Morbidly Jewish, is in the first category. Herschberg takes on rising antisemitism with surprising nuance for a set that also includes jokes about masturbation.
In fact, that bit is one of the most complex, in which Herschberg tries to find a porn star to watch whose politics align perfectly with his — after Oct. 7, he said he stopped watching Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese porn star because she wrote a tweet celebrating the deaths of civilians. But an Israeli performer he turned to instead didn’t believe Palestinians deserved a homeland, which he also found distasteful.
“How could I, in good conscience, continue masturbating to this woman?” he says. “I started looking for a pornstar with, you know, a more nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
It’s a brilliant bit, skewering the idea — an increasingly common one post-Oct. 7 — that there is political purity to be had at all times, in all moments of consumption, even the most base ones. It allows audiences a window into the internal battle of a certain cadre of progressive American Jews attempting to parse the post-Oct. 7 landscape. And, yet, the bit is not remotely preachy; it’s mostly a raunchy, funny joke.
Herschberg’s comedy is quite Jewish in content, sure, but it also has the je ne sais quoi feel of old-school Jewish comedy — the self-deprecation, dry wit and, not for nothing, some creative riffs about his mom — with an ability to bring audiences into the experiences of Jews, whether political purity tests or trying to decide what really counts as antisemitism.
Modi Rosenfeld, a gay Orthodox Jew, is firmly in the other category: Jewish jokes, by Jews and for Jews. In his special, Know Your Audience, he spends much of the time joking about intra-communal things, like the difference between prayer styles at Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues. He does explain, and act out, some of these jokes, but they aren’t all that funny if you don’t have the lived experience of, say, sitting through the speed-mumbling that defines so many Orthodox Ashkenazi services, or the lengthy warbling flourishes of Sephardic davening.
So much of the Jewish comedy of yore was pivotal in helping Jews assimilate further into American society. “See, look at us,” it said. “We’re funny and approachable.” Jewish comics became American stars. But Rosenfeld is not shooting for assimilation; he is helping fortify the in-group.
When Rosenfeld asks, at one point, if anyone in the audience is not Jewish, only a few hands go up. And he makes it clear his set is not for them, albeit in a jovial tone: “I don’t know how you got in here,” he says, laughing.
Innovation in Jewish comedy
Then there are Jewish comedians who, while being deeply Jewish, are doing something else altogether. Their comedy feels deeply Jewish, while spending little time talking about it. And, in the style of the previous generation of Jewish comics, they’re also inventing a totally new style.
Adam Friedland gained fame as one of a trio of men who hosted Cum Town, the nihilistic cult podcast of the so-called dirtbag left, and now sometimes does stand-up about his parents, Oct. 7 and Israel. But his real comedic innovation is his shockingly popular YouTube channel, where he interviews politicians and celebrities, ribbing them while also eliciting real revelations. He has interviewed such guests as Zohran Mamdani, Ritchie Torres, Mia Khalifa — yes, that’s the same Lebanese porn star Herschberg joked about — and extremist looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular.
In each interview, Friedland makes himself into a kind of clumsy fall guy who asks such bizarre questions that guests are often stunned into surprising revelations. But then he will pivot into such heartfelt earnestness that it’s disarming. In the episode with Torres, after a contentious exchange over Israel, Friedland turned surprisingly personal in tone, describing the year he spent living in Israel and his family’s connections to Judaism.
“Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my family,” he says, his voice cracking. “The world is seeing something that is terrible. And it’s being done in my name.”
For all Friedland’s deadpan awkwardness (“Have you seen a movie?” he asks musician and actress FKA Twigs, who responds, in confusion, “A movie? In my life?”) it is clear that he is, in fact, very smart and prepared for his interviews. He emerges as the master in every exchange, despite — or because of — his performance of clumsiness. It makes for a darkly subversive show, each episode poking such sly fun at his guests that they only sometimes notice and even less often know how to roll with any given riff. And it’s catchy enough that Friedland has become a kind of figurehead of a new paradigm in content; in the past year, he has been profiled by GQ, and covered in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker.
In a way, Friedland fits into a model outlined by Nathan Fielder, whose quasi-reality show, The Rehearsal, blurs the line between performance and reality, joking and earnestness, into something that is simultaneously funny and deeply unsettling. Even Alex Edelman, whose biographical comedy special Just For Us tells the story of his decision to attend a white supremacist meeting in Queens, toes a strange line of ambivalence over just how bad these racists are; he finds himself hoping they’ll like him.
The throughline here of this comedy is a destabilizing ambiguity. The situations can be funny in their absurdity, but they’re undergirded by a deep discomfort because they force the viewers, squirming, to ponder whether the joke or scenario posed by the comedian is, in fact, so outlandish and funny or if it’s actually completely earnest.
This form of comedy manages to touch upon truths that are hard to address directly, ones that are well-suited to our increasingly nihilistic, red-pilled society where earnestness is so often perceived as cringe.
It relies on comedians playing the role of an awkward outsider — willing to be weird or unattractive. It’s an inheritor to the self-deprecation that was so core to earlier Jewish comedy, and to a long Jewish history of outsider status, now remade into a truth-telling device.
This comedy might not be overtly Jewish. But something about this new cadre of comics’ ability to create a new genre, to define new boundaries, and to navigate a tightrope of nuance, feels, to me, almost Talmudic. It feels like these comedians so confidently own their Jewishness that they hardly need to mention it — but nevertheless, it’s foundational to who they are, and how they joke.
A splintered comedy for a splintered community
Jason Zinoman, the comedy critic at The New York Times, wrote a piece asking whether the Golden Age of Jewish comedy had come to an end, crumbling in the face of rising antisemitism.
Zinoman argued that it’s not, pointing out that Jewish comedy has always thrived in the face of fear. Political comedy, too, he points out, is having a moment, and much of today’s politics revolves around Jews, antisemitism and Israel — plenty of creative fuel. Navigating the intense political divides over Israel after Oct. 7, or when a “Free Palestine” comment on social media is antisemitic or not, has certainly fueled many a Jewish comedian’s set.
But in a way, the Golden Age of Jewish comedy is over, in the sense that there is no single sense of what makes comedy Jewish. There are so many kinds that appeal to so many audiences. Some, like Rosenfeld, have turned inwards, while others, like Herschberg, have used comedy to communicate the deep confusion many Jews feel about navigating their identity. And still more, like Friedman, have tried to create something new, a way of being Jewish that still feels completely identifiable as such without many of the obvious markers.
It’s a funhouse mirror of what’s happened to the Jewish community in general in the past few years as it has fractured over Israel and Zionism. Some Jews have become either outspoken Zionists or outspoken anti-Zionists. Others — including some synagogues and minyans — have tried to chart a middle course, navigating stormy waters without tipping either way. And others are trying to invent a new way to understand their identity and beliefs. But none of them have left their identity behind.
The same goes for the Jewish comedy — it’s all Jewish, even when it’s not doing it very traditionally. You know it when you see it.
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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