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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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New York Mayoral Race: Jewish Rabbis Who Ignore History Are Still Doomed to Repeat it
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
When more than 1,000 rabbis across the political spectrum and from all denominations came together to write a letter opposing New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for failing to condemn calls for violence against Jews, denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, accusing Israel of genocide, and more — it seemed only a matter of time until an opposing action letter penned by agenda-driven radicals would emerge.
Indeed, a group of far-left rabbis calling themselves “Jews for a Shared Future” has come forward with a letter of their own. In the letter, they defend Mamdani, mainly by claiming to know what is in his heart and mind rather than confronting the things that he has said and done.
The letter attempts to gaslight legitimately concerned and frightened New Yorkers of all religions, divining to somehow know that Mamdani’s positions and beliefs “stem not from hate but from his deep moral convictions.”
Abhorrently, and with no evidence provided, the letter goes on to accuse New York Jews expressing concern for their community’s safety as being “built on Muslim vulnerability.”
It is telling that the Jews for a Shared Future letter could muster only around 30 signatures from New York City area rabbis, while the self-described “The Jewish Majority” rabbis who authored the initial letter includes well over 100 NYC rabbis, all clearly concerned for the well-being of their Jewish constituencies.
And well they should be.
While Jews for a Shared Future focuses on unfounded, uncited, and libelous claims that accuse Jews of putting Muslims in harm’s way — and claiming to know what is in Mamdani’s heart — the Jewish Majority letter provides links to uncontested public statements and positions taken by Mamdani that raise well-founded and serious concerns for all New Yorkers, including Jews.
Mamdani’s resistance to condemn language including “Globalize the Intifada” and his continued use of false antisemitic tropes that refer to Israel as an “apartheid” and “genocidal” state are well documented and raise sufficient concern. These blood libels and calls for violence have repeatedly led to harm and attacks against Jews across the country.
Recently, though, video has re-emerged from a 2021 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Zoom meeting, in which Mamdani revealed much greater detail about his political intentions.
In the video, Mamdani proudly refers to bringing “radical legislation” to the fore and of working to bring the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to New York. He speaks in detail of his goal to “overturn” New York’s anti-BDS executive order and about his “fight to stop the study abroad at universities in Israel.”
He even boasted of his involvement with the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group while in college, and of his desire to “dismantle” the US relationship with Israel.
Mamdani has been clear that “it was Palestine that brought me into this movement.” This statement leaves little doubt as to how his expressly stated agendas will be implemented as mayor, and that it is likely to cause harm and discrimination against the overwhelming majority of NYC Jews who support the existence of Israel.
Mamdani’s pledged support for BDS and his promise to overturn anti-BDS laws could very well lead to the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and to all sorts of discrimination against Zionist Jews, horrifyingly reminiscent of what happened in 1930s Germany. The Jewish Majority letter is right to warn the public of Mamdani’s language and agenda. Never again must mean never again.
Mamdani’s grotesque threat to block Jewish students from studying in Israel also raise serious concerns. Furthermore, in a public school system already rife with antisemitism, Mamdani has only compounded these concerns by hinting that former Congressman and anti-Israel activist, Jamaal Bowman, could be his choice for NYC’s next schools chancellor. Along with his lengthy resume of anti-Israel activity, Bowman has referred to Israel as being founded on “White Supremacy,” leading many Jews to shudder at how curriculum based on such tropes could forge not only misinformation and pedagogical dereliction, but poison a generation of children against Jews and Israel. This, too, has already been a serious problem in the city’s public schools.
Jews for a Shared Future apparently shares none of these concerns about Mamdani, his expressly stated agenda, his antisemitic tropes, or the already fragile state of Jewish people in New York City. “Don’t believe what he says or does,” they tell you. Instead, believe what they purport to know about what is true in his heart.
The sad irony of this is that so many Jews simply refuse to learn from our shared history. The discriminators, harassers, and attackers of Jews who become radicalized under Mamdani will not care one bit about whether you are one of the Jews who supported Mamdani’s antisemitic vision or not. To them, even a Mamdani-supporting rabbi is, after all, just another Jew.
Jeffrey Lax is a professor of law and chair of the business department at CUNY, and a co-founder of S.A.F.E. Campus.
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Trump calls on Orthodox Jewish voters in NJ to vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate
President Donald Trump on Sunday urged Orthodox Jewish voters in Lakewood, New Jersey, to vote for the Republican candidate in the state’s gubernatorial race.
“I need ALL of my supporters in the Orthodox community in Lakewood and its surrounding towns to vote in HUGE numbers for Jack Ciattarelli,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social. “Jack needs every single Vote in the community, including all the Yeshiva students who turned out to vote for me last year.”
Ciattarelli received a joint endorsement last week from Orthodox Jewish leaders in Lakewood as well as the neighboring towns of Jackson, Toms River, Howell and Manchester, according to the Lakewood Scoop.
But Ciattarelli also faced backlash from his opponent, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, last month after his Muslim relations advisor said he wasn’t “taking money from Jews” at a campaign event.
In his post, Trump also touted his fierce backing in Lakewood, a center of haredi Orthodox life in the United States, during the 2024 presidential race. He boasted that Lakewood was “one of our biggest Wins anywhere in the Country with more than 90% of the Vote.” In fact, 87.8% of voters in the town cast their ballots for him.
Democrat Kamala Harris won New Jersey in 2024 with 52% of the votes, Ciattarelli is currently hoping to flip the governor’s mansion red. Sherrill is leading in polls, but some show a very tight race, according to an aggregation published by the New York Times.
Several top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, visited campaign events in New Jersey over the weekend to rally behind Sherrill, in a sign that the party is concerned about the possible outcome of the election.
“Your Votes in this Election will save New Jersey, a State that is near and dear to my heart,” wrote Trump, before exhorting everyone to the polls in all caps.
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Moral Clarity Is Missing From the Discourse on the War in Gaza
Red Cross transports the bodies of two deceased hostages, kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, after they were handed over by Hamas militants, in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, October 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Here is my one regret from the last two years of commentary on the October 7 War: we let ourselves get sucked into arguing the running death toll coming out of Hamas’ Health Ministry in Gaza.
In some ways, it was inevitable. Global outlets put those figures in every headline and chyron, so someone had to meet them on the field. Nevertheless, it was still a strategic mistake. We allowed Hamas’ daily ticker to become the global yardstick for morality in this conflict.
Start with a simple truth about war reporting: immediate casualty numbers after explosions are guaranteed to be wrong.
These are not fog-of-war errors from Hamas; they are straight-up lies. The Al‑Ahli explosion is a case study. Within minutes, the “500 dead” claim circled the world. Subsequent assessments from Western intelligence agencies put the likely death toll in the low hundreds, yet the first number did its work; it framed the narrative for days. We have seen this ruse time and again, and we fall for it each time it happens.
I am not saying the numbers do not matter at all; every innocent death matters infinitely to the people who loved them. But the “numbers game” — the breathless, running tally — turns a legal and moral analysis into a horse race graphic. It incentivizes speed over verification, from a single unverified source with a clear propaganda motive, and it collapses complex questions into a single, unreliable metric.
Even organizations and reporters who regard Gaza Health Ministry figures as broadly useful acknowledge the limits of instant counts and the likelihood of later revisions when conditions improve or bodies are recovered from rubble.
Here is the broader point. If the tally is 40,000, 68,000, or 100,000, the fundamental question remains unchanged: In no other conflict do we treat a running counter as the dispositive test of conduct.
Afghanistan’s war killed roughly 176,000 people through direct violence by 2021 — civilians, Afghan forces, insurgents, and others, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Iraq’s direct-war deaths from 2003 to 2021 total 275,000–306,000, including 185,000–209,000 civilians. Those wars are debated on strategy, aims, and legality, not by a daily, decontextualised ticker. Nobody alleges those wars were genocides.
Look around the world right now. Amidst the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Sudan, famine has been formally identified, with the UN-backed IPC system projecting expansion absent major relief. In the worst-case scenario, up to one million people could die in Sudan through war, famine, and pestilence. There are no mass marches in Western capitals keyed to that potential number, and no live tickers on cable news.
Even in the Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran legs of the same post-October 7 War, where thousands were killed over the past two years, death tallies were barely reported, and even then, only as background noise, not the central moral metric.
Why did Gaza become the exception?
Partly because Hamas and Gaza’s authorities understood the media economy and fed it a constant stream of numbers, which major outlets treated as the default baseline (sometimes with caveats, more often without). These figures were the central pillar of Hamas’ propaganda and information strategy, with a willing queue of allies and useful idiots ready to push the numbers and “verify” them through arcane and speculative twisting of formulae and surveys.
Partly because critics of Israel made the tally itself the argument: more deaths equals more wrongdoing.
And partly because many of us on Israel’s side took the bait. We tried to rebut, refine, and reclassify: are these militants or civilians? Does the ratio favor the IDF? In doing so, we validated the premise that Hamas’ death ticker was the thing that mattered most.
It is not. Not even the much‑vaunted “combatant-to-civilian ratio” decides the question. International humanitarian law asks something different and more exacting: did the attacker distinguish between combatants and civilians? Were feasible precautions taken? Was the expected collateral harm not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated?
These are the only metrics of proportionality. These are the standards commanders must apply in real time, and investigators should scrutinize on a case-by-case basis. A cumulative body count, especially one compiled in real-time under combat conditions, can neither prove compliance nor establish violations. It can only signal the scale of suffering (which we should never minimize), but it cannot, by itself, answer a single legal or moral question.
Yes, specific false claims must be corrected. When an immediate number is demonstrably wrong or wildly implausible, you challenge it with evidence and move on. But you do not let that back‑and‑forth define the whole conversation.
The lesson, as we advance, is simple. Do not play on the enemy’s turf when you do not have to. Engage where it matters: the law of armed conflict and the campaign’s purpose. What was the target? What was the necessity? What precautions were taken? What intelligence informed the strike? Those are hard questions, but they are the right ones. They do justice to the gravity of each loss without turning human life into a scoreboard.
Numbers should inform; they should not rule. Let us stop pretending a running death tally is a moral compass. It is not. The more we argue over the ticker, the more we concede the frame that Hamas designed to trap us.
Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer. Recent senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Masters study in Middle Eastern strategy and Psychology. Now a think tank research fellow focusing on Defence, the Middle East and Disinformation. Read more about Andrew on his website. Follow Andrew on Substack. A version of this article was also published by The Investigative Project on Terrorism.