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How a standup show at a Chinese restaurant turned into a 30-year Jewish comedy tradition
(JTA) — Just a few years into her comedy career, Lisa Geduldig was invited to perform standup at the Peking Garden Club near Northampton, Massachusetts. She went to the gig assuming it was a comedy club.
It wasn’t.
“I just had the most ironic experience,” Geduldig remembers telling a Jewish summer camp friend on the phone in October 1993. “I was just telling Jewish jokes in a Chinese restaurant.”
As a Long Island native who was by then living in San Francisco, she was very familiar with the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas, a product of the neighborhood dynamics between Jewish and Chinese immigrant populations living in New York’s Lower East Side from the end of the 19th century.
After ruminating on it, she thought: why not start a Jewish comedy night on Christmas Eve?
She had enough time before the holiday to find other Jewish comics who liked the idea, write her own press release and partner with a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown with banquet room space open on Christmas Eve to organize the event, which she called Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. (Geduldig liked the alliteration, even though it doesn’t involve kosher food.)
It was an instant hit, with around 400 guests, and Geduldig said nearly 200 people were turned away at the door. The kitchen of the Four Seas Restaurant was completely unprepared for the volume, as Geduldig didn’t expect anything close to the turnout. The show received a heap of local press, and the next year it earned a three-quarter page spread in The New York Times.
Fast forward and this year marks the 30th Kung Pao Kosher show, and the first one back in person since the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the event has moved into a synagogue — the Reform Congregation Sherith Israel in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, one of the country’s oldest Jewish houses of worship. The Chinese banquet room at New Asia Restaurant, where the show had been hosted since 1997, became a supermarket in 2020.
Over the years, an impressive roster of comedians has performed, including names such as Marc Maron, Margaret Cho, Shelley Berman, David Brenner, Judy Gold, Gary Gulman and Ophira Eisenberg. Many of the show’s comedians return — Wendy Liebman, who has been doing standup for 38 years, has performed at Kung Pao four times.
Geduldig — who is now a publicist and comedy show producer, in addition to a comic — said the show that put her project on the map was when well-known Jewish comedian Henny Youngman headlined in 1997, at 92. Youngman — famous for his quick succession of clever one-liners and interludes from his favorite prop, a violin — died of pneumonia just two months after giving his final performance at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. For six months after Youngman’s death, Geduldig and other Kung Pao promoters and staff were convinced that they killed him. The SF Weekly published an article titled “The Gig of Death?” But Youngman’s daughter, Marilyn Kelly, exonerated everyone involved in the show, saying the travel was a strain on her father’s health, but he was “delighted to have done it.”
Ten years after Youngman’s final performance, Shelley Berman, then in his 80s, was scheduled to perform at Kung Pao when he called Geduldig complaining of chest pains.
“I go, ‘No! I can’t kill another one!’” she recalled.
It turned out to be just acid reflux, and the emergency room doctor told Berman he could go onstage. (The doctor was extended an invitation to the show, but did not attend.)
In keeping with the Jewish tradition of social responsibility and tzedakah, meaning “charity” or “justice,” Geduldig has given a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales each year to two different charities. Past beneficiaries include a variety of Jewish and secular organizations; this year, the charitable proceeds will go to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and The Center for Reproductive Rights.
The charitable aspect is part of what keeps Shelley Kessler, a long-time California labor leader, coming back to the show. She has yet to miss a single one.
“Given what’s going on in the world, this is a very nice way to manage the depression,” Kessler said.
At Kessler’s table, her core group of five always bring tchotchkes and booze — though the synagogue has asked this year’s guests to refrain from red wine, to avoid any accidents on the carpet.
“People bring all kinds of things,” Kessler said. “We once had a humongous menorah. Our table has fun, I’ll tell you.”
This year’s lineup of comics includes Mark Schiff (Jerry Seinfeld’s longtime opening act), Cathy Ladman and Orion Levine. Lisa Geduldig will emcee in her customary tuxedo, accented this year with a Cuban guayabera shirt.
Joining Kung Pao on the virtual stage for the third time is Geduldig’s mother, Arline Geduldig, 91, who will Zoom in from Boynton Beach, Florida.
“One of the silver linings of the pandemic was not only living with my mother, but getting to know each other, finding out how funny she was,” Lisa Geduldig said.
In March 2020, the younger Geduldig flew to Florida to visit her mother — and stayed there for 17 months. That was when she launched Lockdown Comedy, a monthly online comedy show where Arline got her start, thanks to some mentoring from her daughter. Arline’s routines are often centered around her fascination with handsome young firemen and the way she calls her husband, Irving, downstairs for dinner.
“I love people saying they like me,” Arline told the Los Angeles Times in 2021. “I have a swelled head already.”
In previous years, Geduldig said she tried to turn “a Chinese restaurant into a synagogue.” She brought inflatable dreidels, giant matzah ball pillows and “Happy Hanukkah” banners, when Hanukkah and Christmas overlapped. Things are trickier now, since she wants to avoid any cultural appropriation while still paying tribute to the show’s origins. For instance, she learned that red paper lanterns are symbolic of good luck in Chinese culture, so she wants to incorporate some into the room.
The restaurant that the show was held in became a supermarket during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Courtesy of Lisa Geduldig)
“This year, I’m turning a synagogue into a Chinese restaurant,” she said.
Although the food will still be provided by a local Chinese restaurant, the usual fortune cookies filled with Yiddish proverbs will not be included. The food isn’t kosher, but because the event is being held in a synagogue there are still restrictions: No pork and no shrimp, despite Geduldig’s 30-year streak of serving treif (or non-kosher) food at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy.
“I was like, ‘How about if I call it kosher prawns?’” Geduldig joked. “They didn’t go for it.”
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The post How a standup show at a Chinese restaurant turned into a 30-year Jewish comedy tradition appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Forverts is on vacation. Here’s how to access our content while we’re away.
From Thursday, Aug. 13, till Friday, Aug. 21, the Forverts will be on vacation.
During this time, you can continue to read our English-language articles here; our Yiddish articles here and our Tidbits column of easy-to-read Yiddish news briefs accompanied by audio here. You can also play Vertl (Yiddish Wordle) or view one of our many videos by clicking on one of the following:
- YIDDISH WORD OF THE DAY: Check out our playlist of Yiddish Word of the Day here.
- OUR COOKING SHOWS: Watch a variety of cooks make all sorts of recipes in Yiddish with English subtitles, including Rukhl Schaechter, Eve Jochnowitz, Sender Glasser, Gitl Schaechter Viswanath and Roza Jaffe here.
The post The Forverts is on vacation. Here’s how to access our content while we’re away. appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s enemies say it is anti-Christian. Jewish extremists are helping them make the case
One of the more damaging charges against Israel now circulating in the United States portrays the Jewish state as increasingly hostile to Christianity and Christians. The accusation has acquired considerable prominence in American media, where stories about attacks on clergy, harassment of worshippers, restrictions around Christian holy sites and violence against Christian communities have accumulated into a broader portrait of a country becoming inhospitable to one of the faiths born in the Holy Land.
The Washington Post recently devoted a major article to attacks on Christians in Israel and the government’s lackluster response, while other reporting has focused on Jews spitting at Christian clergy and pilgrims in Jerusalem, vandalism of Christian property and the April assault on a Roman Catholic nun near the Old City.
The nun’s case was particularly appalling: according to the subsequent indictment, a Jewish Israeli man chased the 48-year-old French Catholic sister, pushed her to the ground and kicked her after identifying her as a Christian nun. Israeli police arrested the suspect and prosecutors charged him with an assault motivated by religious hostility.
The Armenian Christians of Jerusalem have become another symbol of the phenomenon. Their community predates almost every modern political dispute over the city, with a continuous presence stretching back some 1,700 years. Yet Armenian clergy and residents have described repeated episodes of spitting, intimidation and abuse.
Israeli media in recent weeks described Israeli teenagers arriving at the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Old City and asking whether Christians were inside because they wanted to spit at them.
Scenes like these travel instantly around the world and provide ready-made material for anyone seeking to portray Israel as a place where Christians are despised. In fact, Israel’s Jewish extremists have no particular beef with Christians – but rather a conflict with, and often a hatred for, Arabs in general, of any religion.
Overall, the incidents are not representative of Christian life inside Israel. About 200,000 Christian citizens lived in the country at the end of 2025, most of them Arab Christians, and the community has continued to grow. Arab Christians have exceptionally high educational attainment and are disproportionately represented in Israeli higher education. Christians serve as judges, diplomats, doctors, academics and public officials, and their churches and institutions form a recognized part of Israeli public life. Moreover, the assault on the Catholic nun produced an arrest and indictment rather than tacit approval, and Israeli authorities regularly proclaim their commitment to Christian worship and the protection of Christian holy places.
Yet a radical Jewish fringe appears determined to furnish Israel’s enemies with the pictures, anecdotes and headlines required to transform an inflammatory accusation into a plausible story. The latest damaging example comes from Taybeh, the last predominantly Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank (and home to its only beer brewery).
Taybeh has endured months of tension and violence. In June, Israeli settlers obstructed Palestinians attempting to extinguish a large fire near the village, according to Palestinian firefighters and a local priest. Residents have complained of arson, vandalism, incursions onto private property and intimidation.
“The settlers can do whatever enters their heads,” said the Rev. Jack Abed of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox community. “And every now and then we have rioting from settler youth who come into the village. They bring sheep with them to graze in our fields.”
This week the Israeli military responded by closing the village to Israelis, saying the measure followed violent attacks by Israelis in the area and was intended to protect local residents and maintain order.
The order illustrates two realities at once. The Israeli army is using military power to protect a Palestinian Christian community from Israeli Jewish extremists. This tells a very different story from the sweeping claim that the Israeli state has embarked upon a campaign against Christians. At the same time, the necessity of such a measure shows the extent of the problem Israel has permitted to develop.
Indeed, Israel Radio this week reported that there have been 660 cases of “nationalistic crime” by Jews in the West Bank in the first six months of 2026 – a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. The report, citing military sources, said six Palestinians were killed and 140 injured in these attacks. There are rarely long-term arrests and no settlers have been convicted in the deaths.
I recently wrote in these pages about Jewish terrorists in the West Bank after extremists torched two mosques, burned cars and fields and attacked Palestinian motorists. One mosque in Qusra was burned and covered with revenge graffiti; another in Kur was set ablaze.
The violence belongs to a larger pattern of attacks on civilians, destruction of property and vigilante incursions into Palestinian communities. I described this as both a moral failure and a national-security disaster because every such episode creates another security problem for the Israeli soldiers and police who must contain the consequences, while simultaneously providing Hamas, Iran and Israel’s other enemies with propaganda more effective than much of what they could manufacture themselves.
The Christian dimension makes the strategic stupidity even more breathtaking. Israel depends upon deep reservoirs of sympathy among Christians around the world, especially in the United States, where tens of millions of evangelical Christians have provided some of the most consistent political support for the Jewish state. Christian attachment to Israel also extends far beyond evangelical politics to people who regard the survival of ancient Christian communities and access to the holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee as matters of profound spiritual importance.
Every video of an extremist spitting at a priest, every report of an Armenian Christian being harassed and every attack on a Christian Palestinian village chips away at that reservoir of goodwill. These extremists are weakening Israel’s security, staining Judaism and turning potential friends of Israel into skeptics and existing skeptics into enemies.
The military’s action in Taybeh is therefore welcome, and it is also woefully insufficient. Israel’s Oct. 27 election offers the possibility of a different approach. Should Netanyahu be defenestrated and a new government take office, a comprehensive crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank should rank among its first priorities. The task requires arrests, prosecutions and enforcement rather than declarations of concern after each fresh outrage.
The post Israel’s enemies say it is anti-Christian. Jewish extremists are helping them make the case appeared first on The Forward.
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A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor
(JTA) — Luke Bronin scored a decisive victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s Democratic primary Tuesday, marking another defeat for AIPAC which had backed the 14-term congressman.
The pro-Israel lobby group is increasingly viewed as politically toxic in Democratic primaries across the country, with several progressive candidates notching victories after making opposition to the group a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, were not at the forefront of the contest in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, reflecting a more nuanced picture regarding Democratic voters’ shifting sentiments toward Israel.
Bronin and Larson, the race’s two candidates with more traditionally pro-Israel positions, together won nearly 90% of the vote, with Bronin receiving 53% while Larson received 34%. The two progressive candidates in the race, Jillian Gilchrest and Ruth Fortune, who both accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, finished a distant third and fourth.
Bronin, 46, who has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, is the former mayor of Hartford and also served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. His campaign largely centered on affordability and emphasizing the need for new leadership in the Democratic party.
“If we are going to fix this mess that we are in, we need to build a Democratic Party that is bringing a whole new energy to this fight,” Bronin told supporters following his victory.
Israel was not entirely absent from the campaign. Larson, who first took office in 1999, split with Bronin during a primary debate last month when Larson defended his recent vote in support of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“Yes, I voted in favor of making sure that Israel, our ally, is going to get the aid from the United States that it needs. But the Palestinians need humanitarian aid, and Donald Trump has got to enforce the law,” Larson said.
Bronin pushed back at Larson, replying, “Trusting Donald Trump to do the right thing is a mind-blowing example of putting hope over all of the evidence in front of us.”
While Larson had long supported Israel during his tenure in Congress, he has been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians and vocally opposed the United States’ war in Iran.
Bronin, meanwhile, has said he is against taxpayer money going toward funding offensive military aid to Israel, though he supports “defenses for civilians that protect civilian life against rockets and missiles and drones.”
“I think it’s hugely important that Israel exists as a safe, secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Bronin said when asked about his views on Israel on The Lisa Wexler Show in May. He also spoke out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining that the premier had “done enormous damage to Israel’s security, Israel’s standing in the world,” adding that “we have an obligation as a country to say what’s happening is not okay.”
Bronin slightly outraised Larson on the campaign trail, receiving roughly $3.1 million largely from individual donations from billionaires and large firms, while Larson received $2.7 million and relied more on donations from PACs, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Larson received roughly $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations during the campaign cycle, according to the campaign finance database Open Secrets.
Bronin will now face Republican Amy Chai, a physician and mental health advocate, in the general election for the state’s first congressional district. The district, which spans Bristol, Hartford and Torrington, is home to 27,800 Jews, representing 3.9% of the total population, according to the Berman Jewish Data Bank.
The post A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor appeared first on The Forward.
