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How the Yonkers-born son of Jewish immigrants became the king of American comedy
When Caesar Was King
By David Margolick
Schocken, 400 pages $35
His comedic DNA is everywhere — The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, the riffs and routines of Johnny Carson and Larry David. His writers included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. Even so, when author David Margolick interviewed the 2,000 Year Old Man for his new biography of Sid Caesar, Brooks told him, “People are going to say, `Gee, this is really good and really interesting. Just one question, David: Who’s Sid Caesar?’”
Now the book is out, and Margolick, a longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer, has put the question to rest. When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy is a lively and thoroughly engrossing account of who Caesar was, why he was so important, and how he transformed American comedy with his short-lived (1950-1954) but influential TV program Your Show of Shows.
At the peak of the show’s popularity, Caesar was the most highly paid comedian in America. Some 20 million people tuned into NBC every week to watch the program that was broadcast live on Saturday night from a studio in midtown Manhattan two decades before Saturday Night Live. The variety show featured film spoofs, pantomime, and sketches in which Caesar played a beleaguered husband opposite the brilliant Imogene Coca with her rubbery, “wonderfully flexible face,” as one critic put it.
Despite their comedic hijinks, Margolick repeatedly makes the point that Caesar, who died at age 91 in 2014, was “the unlikeliest of comics: introverted, ill at ease, tongue-tied.” Larry Gelbart, a writer for Caesar who went on to create the hit TV series M*A*S*H in the 1970s, described his boss’ personality as “zero, non-existent.” According to Simon, he was “extremely smart but completely inarticulate.” Even so, he could bring down the house by impersonating everything from an imperious German general to a fly crawling on a piece of feta cheese. He had what another one of his writers, Howard Morris, called a “meshugana energy.”
Though nothing about Your Show of Shows was overtly Jewish, Margolick makes a convincing argument that Caesar’s humor was intrinsically Jewish and that Jews across America read it as such. Among other things, it was Jewish in its “literate, detached, irreverent” point of view, in its “resentment toward the establishment and sympathy for the underdog,” and “in its obsession, born of privation, with food.”
Caesar grew up in Yonkers, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, who ran a rooming house and luncheonette. Since the eatery catered to laborers, many of them foreign-born, Margolick speculates that Caesar, who didn’t learn to talk until he was 3, developed his uncanny ability to mimic foreign languages — his signature double-talk — by absorbing the “sounds and sensibilities” of the conversations he overheard while busing tables.
After a deadbeat boarder left behind a saxophone, young Sidney learned to play it, eventually offering him a way out of his straitened circumstances. Soon he was playing gigs in the Catskills, where he branched out into comedy to earn a little extra money. By the 1940s, Caesar was back in New York, where he had the great good fortune to meet the Viennese-born Max Liebman, who had been producing musical revues at a resort in the Poconos and thought Caesar was “the finest comic talent since Charlie Chaplin.” Liebman would go on to direct Your Show of Shows and, more than anyone else, make Sid Caesar a star.
But the toll of producing a 90-minute live show over 30-odd weeks for more than four years was tremendous. By its fourth and final season, Your Show of Shows couldn’t sustain the level of brilliance and innovation it had achieved during the so-called golden era of live television production in the 1950s. Audiences were changing as more and more Americans outside the big cities, mostly in the Northeast, were acquiring TVs, and their taste skewed more in the direction of the bandleader and accordionist Lawrence Welk.
Caesar turned 32 during the last year of Your Show of Shows and would go on to headline other shows including Caesar’s Hour and Sid Caesar Invites You, the latter briefly reuniting him with Coca. But by the 1960s, he was largely off the air, grappling with alcoholism, depression and an addiction to pills.
In what is overall a tender and sympathetic portrait, Margolick doesn’t shy away from showing Caesar’s dark side, offering a complex portrait of an enigmatic genius who seemed to be just as much of a mystery to himself as he was to others. Beautifully written and brimming with life, this book establishes Margolick as one of the ultimate mavens of an era of American Jewish history in the mid-to-late 20th century that has all but ceased to exist.
The post How the Yonkers-born son of Jewish immigrants became the king of American comedy appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas man charged with making antisemitic death threats to Jewish conservative pundits
A Texas man was arrested last week in Florida after he allegedly launched a volley of antisemitic death threats against several prominent conservative activists.
Nicholas Lyn Ray, 28, of Spring, Texas, allegedly made his threats between Oct. 8 and Oct. 10 on an X account named “@zionistarescum,” according to an arrest affidavit.
His alleged victims included far-right Jewish conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer and conservative Jewish political commentators Joshua Benjamin Hammer and Karol Markowicz. A fourth victim, Seth Dillon, is the Christian CEO of a conservative satire site The Babylon Bee, according to an arrest affidavit.
The @zionistsarescum account was created in September 2025 and the first posts visible on it after Ray’s arrest respond to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder whose killing spurred conspiracy theories about Israeli involvement. Several posts advanced that theory, while others amplify the white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who had feuded with Kirk.
In a message allegedly directed at Dillon, according to the affidavit, Ray accused him of “conspiring with Israel about Charlie Kirk,” the Turning Point USA founder who was murdered in September, adding that “these receipts are going to be perfect for display when you get hung bitch.”
The affidavit also describes a threat that Ray allegedly directed toward Markowicz, who was born in the former Soviet Union. Ray allegedly wrote, “Russian genocide jew whose family escaped prosecution in American you deserve to be hung.”
In another threat directed towards Loomer, Ray allegedly wrote, “why you asking this question as if you aren’t gonna soon find out Mossad agent? you gonna get hung from the capitol baby.”
Ray also allegedly referred to Hammer as a “F—t Israeli spy” and threatened to “hang you at the capitol and take turns beating you with a pinata bat,” according to the affidavit.
While the threats appeared to have been deleted from Ray’s X account, his most recent post dated Oct. 15 read, “When Israel is purged it will be biblical.” On Oct. 9, he referred to Loomer as a “f—ing kyk” and wrote “Israel are the biggest lying Satanist pedophiles on the planet.”
An investigation into Ray was launched by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on Oct. 12 after agents were alerted to his alleged posts.
Ray is currently facing four counts each of making a written or electronic threat to commit a mass shooting or act of terrorism, extortion or threatening another person and using a two-way communication device to facilitate a felony, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office.
According to another court document, Ray indicated to law enforcement that he had been “watching youtube when he became interested in anti-Israel content” prior to allegedly making the threats.
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The post Texas man charged with making antisemitic death threats to Jewish conservative pundits appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Cornell University Secures Deal With Trump Administration, Restoring $250 Million in Federal Funds
Cornell University students walk on campus, November 2023. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
The Trump administration restored $250 million in federal funds it confiscated from Cornell University earlier this year, following the New York-based institution’s agreeing to pay a $60 million settlement, half of which will be spent on agricultural research.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Cornell was cut off from significant taxpayer funds after the government determined that it declined to prevent or respond to egregious incidents of antisemitic discrimination and had enacted over many decades educational policies, such as racial preferences, which undermine merit. Following the move, Cornell received “more than 75 stop work orders” from the government. Later, the university cleaved its budget, telling the public in an announcement of the measure that “urgent action is necessary, both to reduce costs immediately and to correct our course over time.”
Friday’s settlement delivers respite and an offramp from further draconian fiscal measures which would have upended university operations.
According to the US Justice Department, the settlement calls for Cornell’s sharing admissions data with the government to prove that it is not practicing racial preferences in admissions and “invest $30 million through 2028 in research programs on agriculture, farming, and related studies.”
The latter provision noticeably expires in 2028, the year in which the US will hold its next presidential election.
“The Trump administration has secured another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies,” US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement, referring to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. “Thanks to this deal with Cornell and the ongoing work of the US departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Servies], US universities are refocusing their attention on merit, rigor, and truth seeking — not ideology. These reforms are a huge win in the fight to restore excellence to American higher education and make our schools the greatest in the world.”
Cornell University has seen a series of disturbing antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre perpetrated by Hamas across southern Israel.
Three weeks after the atrocities which ravaged Israeli communities, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to commit heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. He was later sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.
Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted then-school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
Cornell University and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) sparred all of last academic year, with SJP pushing the limits of what constitutes appropriate conduct on campus. In September, school officials suspended over a dozen SJP-affiliated students who disrupted a career fair, an action which saw them “physically” breach the area by “[pushing] police out of the way.” In February, the university amnestied some of the protesters, granting them “alternate resolutions” which terminated their suspensions, according to The Cornell Daily Sun.
The university took center stage in another campus antisemitism outrage in October, as its student newspaper published an anti-Zionist opinion piece which promoted Holocaust inversion by melding a Nazi symbol with the Star of David.
The article, titled “Thousand & One Eyes for an Eye” and written by indigenous studies professor Karim-Aly Assam, argued that Israel’s military strategy for the Gaza war against Hamas prioritized revenge for the Oct. 7 massacre over security “under the pretext of obtaining justice.” The article further accused Israeli officials of describing Palestinians as “animals” to justify “ruthless destruction and killing” — a distortion of former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s describing the Hamas fighters who murdered, raped, and maimed women, children, and men on Oct. 7 “human animals” two days after the atrocities transpired.
Assam’s article implied an equivalence of Israel’s military objective to eradicate Hamas from Gaza with the Nazi genocide of Jews across Europe during World War II, a trope which anti-Israel activists and antisemites traffic to foster negative public opinion against Israel’s efforts to secure its borders and quell jihadist activity in the Palestinian territories.
The tactic — Holocaust inversion — is one part of a triad of Holocaust-skepticism, the other two components of which are “denial” and “distortion” — used to defame Jews and deny that they are and have been victims of hatred. Once reserved to neo-Nazi media, Holocaust inversion, experts say, is being increasingly embraced by other more mainstream segments of society.
“As a result of securing this groundbreaking settlement between the United States and Cornell, applicants and students will receive fair and equal treatment as required by our civil rights laws, and American farmers will have expanded opportunity for agricultural development and productivity,” US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “The Cornell agreement exhibits this administration’s deep commitment to vigilantly enforce our federal civil rights laws on college campuses, and ensure that American universities manage taxpayer dollars responsibly.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Austria’s Broadcaster Calls Israel ‘An Inseparable Part’ of Eurovision Song Contest
Israel’s representative to the Eurovision Song Contest, Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the deadly Oct. 7 2023, attack by Hamas on the Nova festival in Israel’s south, holds an Israeli flag in this handout photo obtained by Reuters on Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: “The Rising Star,” Channel Keshet 12/Handout via REUTERS
Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) chairman Roland Weissmann recently visited Israel to express his unwavering support for Israel’s inclusion in the 70th Eurovision Song Contest set to take place in Vienna next year, despite calls to ban the Jewish state from the competition.
Weissman meet with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the Golan Yochfaz, CEO of the Israeli public broadcaster Kan, nearly one month before the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will hold a meeting to discuss Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision. Several countries – including The Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia – have already called for Israel to be banned from the competition because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip during its war with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Weissmann insisted that Israel “is an inseparable part of Eurovision” while meeting with Herzog and Yochfaz at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Kan reported on Sunday.
“There is no justification for excluding Israel from the competition,” added Yochfaz, who also noted that Kan complies with EBU regulations and will continue to do so. Kan said in a statement that ORF and Kan were working together to make sure Israel is included in the 2026 Eurovision, Ynet reported.
The EBU has been facing growing pressure to exclude Israel from the Eurovision taking place in May of next year, with some countries even threatening to withdraw from the competition if Israel participates. In October, Weissmann expressed clear support for Israel’s participation in the contest while Sepp Schellhorn, a senior foreign ministry official in Austria, called cultural boycotts “dumb and pointless.” Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger also criticized boycott efforts against Israel.
EBU members were originally scheduled to have in November a virtual meeting to vote on Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest next year. After the ceasefire and hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, the EBU canceled the vote and said Israel’s participation in the competition would instead be discussed at an in-person meeting in December.