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In ‘Jew,’ comic Ari Shaffir delivers a raunchy love letter to the religion he says he left behind
(New York Jewish Week) — “You never know how people are going to respond,” says Jewish comedian Ari Shaffir, referring to his new standup special, “Jew,” which has more than 3 million views (and counting) on YouTube.
The self-released, 90-minute showcase of stories and jokes goes deep into his life story, including his studies at a Jerusalem yeshiva. Shaffir, who eventually left Orthodoxy behind, balances Talmud lessons with the neuroticism of Jewish culture.
The show gives the entire backstory of Judaism, starting with Adam and Eve, interweaving tales about Hanukkah and Passover, going through customs and traditions. It’s an oral history of Judaism, told through a brutally honest comedic lens.
After it was released two weeks ago, the special has been praised by numerous comics in the podcast world, including Tim Dillon, Shane Gillis, Chris Destafano and Joe Rogan, whom Shaffir calls a longtime friend.
There are also over 25,000 comments on the special, most of them positive. One goes as far to say that it is “the best special of the century so far.”
Shaffir, who lives in the East Village, said he has not received much negative feedback for the special, which is rare for a comedian who once received death threats and had to cancel shows for joking about NBA player Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020.
“Jew,” which was shot and performed in Brooklyn, was released Nov. 2. The date, Shaffir told the New York Jewish Week, was set far in advance — but it arrived at a moment when antisemitism became a national conversation topic, thanks to recent tweets from rapper Kanye West and Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving.
“I was worried for a minute — I thought for a second it was going to derail it,” he said of the timing, adding that he “wasn’t looking for this kind of press” in regards to his special.
The conversation only grew more intense last week, after Dave Chapelle delivered a monologue on “Saturday Night Live” abut the West and Irving controversies that critics, including the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center, called antisemitic.
“They’re ready to say that, regardless,” Shaffir said. “The complaints were already written. Most people think it’s funny.” Jewish organizations, he said, are “not known as great comedy critiquers.”
“People don’t understand that we enjoy that,” Shaffir added, referring to the criticism. “I can speak for Chapelle on this. We’re only here to make people laugh, but we also enjoy when dorks get mad.”
Shaffir, 48, has made a career off of making dorks mad, weaving tales about drugs, sex and Judaism into world tours, a podcast, spots at the Comedy Cellar in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
While he’s known for his edgy humor, Shaffir appears more introspective and personal in “Jew” when compared to his previous work. On his Comedy Central show “This Is Not Happening,” which ran for four seasons between 2015 and 2019, he talks about planting weed for strangers and fans at sports arenas and shopping malls (the police weren’t amused). He also appeared in a sketch called “The Amazing Racist,” where he spoofs “The Amazing Race” by playing a character who constantly brings up offensive stereotypes.
With “Jew,” by contrast, Shaffir has channeled his persona into a hyper-focused, cohesive take on all aspects of Judaism, including mikvahs, Yom Kippur chicken rituals and the minutiae of when certain foods can be considered kosher. At the same time, he keeps the material palatable for a non-Jewish audience.
“You can make anything accessible,” Shaffir said. “It’s the same thing as saying, ‘My dad does this weird thing, or my country does this weird thing.’ You just explain it and you’re fine.”
Ari Shaffir holds the crown as my favorite j-w. He’s Moshiach in my eyes. pic.twitter.com/8kLFSaqgqp
— Adam Green – Know More News (@Know_More_News) November 14, 2022
While Shaffir may have turned away from religion as a young man, he said he has since found “a love for how interesting and cool it was.”
“I now see that Judaism leaves your kids with intelligence, where they value education and family,” Shaffir said. “It’s great stuff and I wanted to show that.”
When the special was released, Shaffir left a note on his web site saying that it is his “love letter to the culture and religion that raised me.”
He tells a story in the special about meeting with his rabbi from the Jerusalem yeshiva and telling him he was a standup comedian. “All he wanted to know was, ‘do you still use the teaching?’” Shaffir says in the special.
Shaffir then talks about how the rabbi gave him a lesson about Noah’s Ark, which he then turns into a bit about anal sex — all while leaving the audience with a positive spin on Judaism.
“Not all religion is stupid,” Shaffir says in the special. “It’s a good lesson, especially in this day and age.”
Shaffir was born in New York and spent most of his childhood in North Carolina and Maryland. He was “a Modern Orthodox Jewish kid” who attended the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington (now the Berman Hebrew Academy). After high school, Shaffir went to Bris Medrash L’Torah, an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, which he said was the “standard track” for a Jewish kid at his age, but eventually he had “a crisis of faith.”
“I just came home and really thought about it and I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Shaffir said. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Since then, Shaffir said he does not believe in God, but believes in the “shared history” of Judaism.
And while he’s had moments of Jewish jokes and stories in his previous specials, this is his full show on the topic, going deep within himself to find the humor within the religion, even in the darkest of places.
Shaffir’s father is a Holocaust survivor from Romania, who moved to Israel following the war. Shaffir said his story of survival was “a major part of our upbringing.”
“Their village got taken later in the war,” Shaffir said of his father’s family. “Most of the family was wiped out. I don’t know all the details exactly.”
He now has a good relationship with his parents and said they saw him perform the special live. “They liked it,” Shaffir said. “They probably liked it more than my other specials, where I was talking about [having sex with] chicks with herpes.”
While working on the special, Shaffir workshopped his material at the Fat Black Pussycat, the “sister showroom” of the Comedy Cellar in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, an audience member once asked him a question about “the pillow” that Jews carry.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Shaffir said. “But then it hit me: It’s tallis and tefillin,” the velvet bags containing prayer shawls and phylacteries that Jews carry to synagogue. “It looks like a pillowcase. You can look at it from an outside perspective, their point of view: It looks like a pillow. Their questions would get me to riff.”
He later took his special abroad, including Israel, where “it did not work,” he said. “They knew too much about it. All the exposition, they were like, ‘We know.’”
In contrast, he performed the material in places where there were few or possibly no Jews, such as Perth, Australia and Reykjavik, Iceland, where it went well. “Places where they are like, ‘I’ve never heard of [Jews],” Shaffir said. “I had to make sure it went well there because it’s gotta be accessible.”
He also performed a version of the show as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, which he said greatly inspired the special.
Another aspect of the Shaffir’s special is countering the narrative of Orthodox Jews as outsiders. “They work regular jobs,” Shaffir said. “There are ambulance drivers with yarmulkes. There’s just some weird stuff that they do. We would play basketball and we would have tzitzit [ritual fringes] and a yarmulke on, but we were on the courts with everybody.”
Shaffir has a joke in the special about using a yarmulke as a move to distract a defender during a basketball game.
This year, Ryan Turell became the first Orthodox player drafted into the NBA’s developmental G League
“I love it,” Shaffir said. “Hopefully it goes well for him and he loses his religion. That would be cool.”
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IDF Reports Steep Drop in Palestinian Terrorism but Threat of West Bank Violence Remains High
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Terror attacks in the West Bank — and the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists — fell sharply in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to a new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report, even as security officials warn the threat remains volatile.
The IDF’s Central Command on Monday released an annual security assessment showing Palestinian-perpetrated terrorist activity in the West Bank fell significantly in 2025, with overall incidents — including stone-throwing and firebomb attacks — down 78 percent from the previous year.
According to the data, Palestinian terrorist activity spiked in 2023 with 847 attacks that killed 41 Israelis, declined in 2024 to 258 incidents with a death toll of 35, and then fell sharply in 2025 to just 57 attacks resulting in 20 Israeli fatalities.
These latest figures mark the lowest level of West Bank Palestinian terrorist attacks and fatalities since the war with Hamas began, even though violence remains far higher than in 2021, when just three Israelis were killed.
As Israeli intelligence and security forces intensified operations across the West Bank, the military said the drop in attacks followed the launch of Operation Iron Wall — a large-scale January 2025 campaign aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure — along with continuous operations throughout the year, including a sustained IDF presence in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps.
According to the newly released report, Israeli forces confiscated over 17 million shekels intended for terrorist activity, seized more than eight tons of dual-use materials, shut down 17 weapons-manufacturing sites, and confiscated 1,370 weapons components.
During a major operation last year, the IDF dismantled a Hamas network in Hebron that was preparing attacks across the West Bank and Israel, with members trained in weapons use, improvised explosive device fabrication, and intelligence gathering on potential Israeli targets.
Even while noting positive trends, however, the military cautioned that it remains on high alert under a “war tomorrow” scenario, warning that terrorist groups could attempt to trigger a wider uprising in the West Bank.
Last month, the IDF raised alarm bells over a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, warning that Iranian-supplied weapons in the hands of Palestinian militants could enable an Oct. 7-style attack and prompting Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
The latest IDF report also highlights a surge in attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2025, recording around 870 incidents — a roughly 27 percent increase from the previous year, with a notable rise in serious cases.
In the wake of this surge in violence, the Israeli government has formed a joint task force — comprising the IDF, police, Border Police, and Shin Bet intelligence agency — to prevent and investigate attacks against Palestinians and the wider Muslim community.
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Qatari Money Corrupting Georgetown University, New Report Says
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Georgetown University’s suspect relationship with the country of Qatar is the subject of another report which raises concerns about what the Hamas-friendly monarchy is getting in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on the institution for ostensibly philanthropic reasons.
Titled, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” the new report, by the Middle East Forum, describes how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report says. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a newly launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education.
The federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
MEF executive director Gregg Roman added, “Georgetown is Ground Zero for foreign influence peddling in American higher education. It has not only abandoned its mission to educate future generations of diplomat and scholars to represent US interests at home and abroad, but is working actively to undermine the foundations of American government and policy. No doubt they’re eager to get the money, but at base this evinces an ideological hostility to Western civilization.”
Georgetown’s ties to Qatar’s have aroused suspicion before.
In June, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” a 132-page document which revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explained, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Another recent Middle East Forum (MEF) report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continued. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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France’s National Assembly Advances Bill to Combat Modern-Day Antisemitism
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
France’s lower house of parliament has advanced legislation targeting what it describes as “renewed forms of antisemitism,” including anti-Zionism and Holocaust minimization, drawing applause from Jewish leaders and sharp criticism from opponents who claim it could undermine free expression.
On Tuesday, the National Assembly’s Law Committee narrowly approved, by an 18-16 vote, a bill — introduced by Jewish MP Caroline Yadan — aimed at combating modern-day antisemitism and Israel-hatred amid growing hostility toward Jews and Israelis across France.
“Strong and decisive measures to send a clear message to our fellow citizens: France unconditionally protects everyone on its soil, guided by the force of the law, steadfast principles, and loyalty to its history,” Yadan wrote in a post on X.
Fière et émue de l’ADOPTION
, aujourd’hui en Commission des lois, de ma proposition de loi visant à lutter contre les formes renouvelées de l’antisémitisme.
Renforcement du délit d’apologie du terrorisme ;
— Caroline Yadan (@CarolineYADAN) January 20, 2026
With support coming largely from the governing majority and the far right and opposition from the left, the bill is now set to advance to the full assembly for further debate.
The new legislation seeks to strengthen existing law by punishing both explicit and implicit praise of antisemitism, equating praise of perpetrators with praise of antisemitic acts, and treating the downplaying or trivializing of terrorism as a form of support.
It would also reinforce laws against glorifying terrorism, establish a new offense for inciting the destruction of a state, and crack down on the trivialization and denial of the Holocaust.
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred in our country is fueled by an obsessive hatred of Israel, which is regularly delegitimized in its existence and criminalized,” Yadan said. This hatred, she continued, is “disguised under the mask of progressivism and human rights.”
“Antisemitism is never an isolated phenomenon,” the French lawmaker said. “It is always a warning. It is the first symptom of a violence that, sooner or later, spreads, expands, and strikes more broadly.”
“When it flourishes, it is our collective responsibility that falters. That is why we must act,” she added.
Debate over the bill comes as France continues to experience a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — welcomed the legislation, highlighting the importance of safeguarding freedom of expression while ensuring that hate speech threatening public safety is properly regulated.
“CRIF welcomes this initial adoption and underscores the importance of fighting hatred and discrimination within the Republic, whether antisemitic, racist, or in any other form,” the statement read
On the other hand, opponents of the bill warn that it could threaten free speech by blurring the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, potentially criminalizing ambiguous statements, irony, slogans, or political commentary.
“Turning public speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a penalized arena risks deepening divisions rather than easing them,” Socialist MP Marietta Karamanli said during the parliamentary debate.
La France Insoumise MP Gabrielle Cathala, representing the far-left political party, also opposed the legislation, arguing that it does little to effectively combat antisemitism.
“It does not protect Jews. It protects a policy – that of the State of Israel and its criminal leaders – a policy of apartheid, a colonial enterprise, and genocide of the Palestinian people,” she said.
According to experts and civil rights groups, anti-Israel animus has motivated an increasingly significant percentage of antisemitic incidents, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which resulted in the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.