Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post In ‘Jew,’ comic Ari Shaffir delivers a raunchy love letter to the religion he says he left behind appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The Hardest Thing in Philanthropy Is Saying ‘No’
An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
When people ask what the hardest thing about working in philanthropy is, they expect to hear about challenges related to raising money or dealing with difficult donors or recipients in various situations.
In actuality, the answer is significantly more painful: The hardest thing in philanthropy is saying “no.”
We know when there is money available and when there isn’t. At the end of the day, someone needs to make decisions.
I recently looked into the origin of the word philanthropy. The word is derived from an ancient Greek word “philos,” which refers to love, and “anthropos,” which refers to people. Basically, philanthropy literally translates to the love of humanity.
Note that there is no mention of money or donations in this definition. This shows something profound: the basic necessity of philanthropy is having a genuine desire to help other people. Money is simply a tool.
Imagine two cases that come up on the same day: One person needs an urgent financial grant for food. The second person requests support for studies that will allow him to earn a decent living and become independent, helping him stand on his own two feet. The budget is only able to help one of them. Which would you choose?
What needs to be considered: Is it better to give someone a fish, or teach them how to fish? I believe that it’s better to invest in someone who will be able to stand on their own two feet tomorrow and potentially even help others in the future. True, we have to say “no” to someone else, but that’s part of the decision.
I’ve been working in fundraising for more than 40 years in the United States, Canada, and Israel. The money we transfer is not ours — it’s the money of other people who have trusted us. We are the faithful messengers, which means we must ask: What will the effects of this money be?
It’s also a matter of professional responsibility. Every dollar is scrutinized — is the organization legitimate? Does it comply with tax laws on both sides? Just a month ago, I had to explain to a donor that donations to military causes do not meet the definition of charity under US tax law. That’s the kind of guidance an intermediary organization should give — even when it means saying “no.”
At our foundation, we work as a bridge between donors in North America and nonprofits in Israel. A donor in Toronto or New York wants to help in Israel, but they need someone on the ground to check and verify their potential projects. True philanthropy begins with loving people, but continues with the understanding that you can’t help everyone. And when the moment comes to say “no” — and it always will — you have to remember that it’s part of the mission. Because if we say “yes” to everyone, it would prevent us from helping anyone.
Chaim Katz is the founder and CEO of the Ne’eman Foundation, which helps Israeli non-profits receive donations from North America.
Uncategorized
UC San Diego ‘Guardian’ Journalist Unfairly Attacks Study Abroad Program in Israel
The San Diego skyline. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Following the announcement of the UC San Diego study abroad program in Israel and Jordan this winter, some students — including UCSD Guardian senior staff writer Jaechan Preston Lee — expressed outrage at the Anthropology department’s decision to host the trip.
The critical article that Lee published in the university paper last month parades misinformation as truth, and exacerbates the already fragile climate on campus.
His article conveys Israel as a militaristic, vengeful, malevolent, and hateful state. And his argument promotes exclusion and discourages students from gaining a comprehensive understanding of perspectives they may not agree with.
Accepting Lee’s call to cancel the trip would undermine our school’s commitment to academic freedom, further demonize pro-Israel and Jewish community members, and allow his deeply distorted worldview to continue bullying its way into wider acceptance.
On Oct. 5, the UCSD Anthropology Department sent an email to all undergraduate students offering the opportunity to learn about the region’s “ancient and recent past” by “meeting people of very different religious and ethnic backgrounds.”
Two weeks later, Lee argued that the trip is “unethical and reckless” because it is “a form of American and Israeli soft power influence on the West’s perception of land rights and indigeneity in the Middle East.” He justifies his position in a number of ways, all of which collapse under even modest scrutiny.
First, it’s important to address his false claims. The characterization of Israel as an “apartheid state” and the current conflict with the Palestinians as a “genocide” are easily disproven.
Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel enjoy full and equal rights. They serve in every single level of society — from the Supreme Court and Knesset to all levels of civil life — and policies regarding the disputed territories are either temporary or a response to constant terror threats.
The genocide accusation is equally false. First, there was no intention to commit genocide — which is legally and morally required for the term to ever apply. Israel was fighting a war of self defense after the Oct. 7 massacre. Second, any arguments about population decline in Gaza cannot be proven — because the death tolls released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry have been falsified and also debunked.
The genocide accusation is also a complete insult to populations that have undergone an actual genocide — since no “genocide” in history has included protective actions such as leaflet distribution to encourage evacuation, nor has it ended immediately after hostages were released. Israel had the fire power to kill hundreds of thousands, if not a million Gazans. If genocide were Israel’s true aim, why were none of these capabilities ever used?
What’s more, all of the sources that Lee offers have faced widespread criticism for being incredibly dishonest and systemically biased against Israel for decades.
The UN report Lee hyperlinks was co-written by a rapporteur who is so antisemitic that she is being sanctioned by the US government. Lee also cites Hamas-allied Qatari state media Al Jazeera to suggest that Israel attacked its neighboring countries unprovoked, without mention of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, or jihadist activity in Syria.
Lee’s work follows a pattern in biased discourse where the lie of Israel’s unique evil is repeated until nobody questions if it’s true. Regardless of intent, Lee has become a mouthpiece for the propaganda that he claims to oppose.
One revealing argument targets Israel’s archaeological work, which Lee portrays as a means for the state to exert control over disputed land. By acknowledging Jewish artifacts beneath the soil, he implicitly affirms the deep historical Jewish roots in the region, yet dismisses that history as irrelevant to Jewish claims to the land. He also overlooks concerns that, under full Palestinian control, many of these sites and artifacts would risk neglect or destruction. The very existence of this debate underscores the importance of students seeing Israel’s archaeological realities firsthand.
Lee also fails to mention that the trip will include excursions in Jordan. The program is clearly designed to provide a balanced regional perspective rather than promote any single narrative.
At its core, the article is an excuse to attack Israel and isolate Zionist students. To deprive students of the opportunity to visit Israel is to attack our community’s freedom of choice and academic strength.
If the mere exposure to opposing perspectives derails your cause, perhaps it isn’t an honest one.
The campus culture at UCSD has been divisive and exclusionary towards Jews and Israelis since Oct. 7, 2023. Harmful narratives shut out anyone whose experiences do not align, and Lee’s piece will likely contribute to this trend.
By hosting this trip, the Anthropology Department takes a step toward changing that. It demonstrates a commitment to fostering global citizens and critical thinkers who inform their opinions through conversations with real people rather than 60-second videos on TikTok feeds.
I hope that the trip’s participants will show our campus what it means to engage rather than alienate. Maybe they will open the door for a generation of students who choose curiosity over banishment, and have the courage to see one another as people, not as sides of a centuries-old geopolitical conflict.
Uncategorized
The Netherlands Shows Her True Colors Once Again
A view shows the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, Netherlands, April 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
I never thought I would write these words, but I have lost respect for my own country. I say that with sadness, not anger. For years, I believed in the Dutch reputation for fairness, nuance, and moral clarity. Today, that image has crumbled. The way Dutch media covers Israel is not just biased; it is intellectually lazy, historically empty, and socially dangerous. Worst of all, it fuels a rising wave of antisemitism in a nation that should know exactly where that road leads.
The most recent example came from Trouw, a newspaper that once claimed to value journalistic integrity. It published an uncritical article praising the views of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who labeled Israel an “apartheid state.” That accusation was presented to readers as if it were self-evident truth, not an opinion. No context. No history. No pushback. No mention of equal rights for all Arab citizens. No mentions of terrorism, of facts on the ground, of the repeated rejection of peace initiatives, or of the lives Israelis have been forced to defend from relentless violence. It was a piece of writing that replaced journalism with activism, and knowledge with slogans.
If Dutch journalists insist on making comparisons, then honesty requires them to explain what real apartheid actually looked like. South Africa enforced legally defined racial categories, stripped millions of their citizenship, banned interracial marriage, separated schools, hospitals, beaches, toilets, buses, universities, and neighborhoods. Black South Africans were barred from voting, from certain jobs, and from owning land in most of the country. They were forced into impoverished “homelands,” denied freedom of movement, and subject to routine torture and violence by the state. None of this resembles Israel. Not even remotely.
But the truth no longer seems to matter in Dutch newsrooms. Nuance has disappeared. Context has vanished. Emotion has replaced evidence, and ideology has replaced inquiry. Israel is guilty by default, while its critics are treated as prophets whose words require no verification.
The Dutch media’s relentless one-sidedness reveals something deeper and more troubling than mere ignorance. It reflects a renewed comfort with blaming Jews for the world’s problems, a habit with a long and ugly history in Europe. When articles like the one in Trouw are circulated without challenge, they do not educate the public; they radicalize it. They normalize anti-Jewish hostility. They transform a complex conflict into a morality play, where Israelis are cast as colonial villains and Palestinians as blameless victims, regardless of reality.
As a Dutch citizen, I am ashamed. Ashamed of the intellectual laziness in our press. Ashamed of the moral posturing that ignores Jewish suffering. Ashamed of how quickly we have forgotten our responsibility to truth after the darkest chapter in European history. And ashamed that my country, once known for moral clarity, now prefers fashionable outrage over honest reporting.
Israel is not perfect. No nation is. But the apartheid accusation is not journalism. It is propaganda. And when the Dutch media amplifies it, they are not holding power to account — but are helping to spread a lie with real consequences for Jewish communities and for the possibility of peace.
It is time for Dutch journalists to rediscover integrity. And it is time for readers to demand it.
It is also time, more than ever, to stand up for Israel, because truth still matters.
Sabine Sterk is CEO of the NGO Time To Stand Up For Israel.