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It’s getting more dangerous to be a comedian — but was it ever safe?
Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age
Jacques Berlinerblau
University of California Press, 256 pages, $24.95
Even in these polarized, politically turbulent times, Jacques Berlinerblau argues that the United States still agrees — mostly — on the importance of free speech, in all its complexity and messiness. He calls this the Pre-Digital Free Speech Consensus, and it’s the organizing principle of his attempt at sketching a sociology of comedy in Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age.
Berlinerblau, a chaired professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, describes this agreement as normative rather than legal, overlapping but not strictly identical with legal and constitutional imperatives. He short-hands the concept this way: “The suppression of human political, intellectual, and artistic expression, either by the government or by citizens, should be avoided to the greatest extent possible.”
But this view, never universally held, may be eroding — including in the United States, traditionally its greatest bastion. Berlinerblau, perhaps because of his deadlines, doesn’t cover the Trump administration’s recent assault on late-night comedy. Even so, he worries that the so-called consensus, “noble and highly imperfect, is coming undone.”
Written in clear prose, without much academic pretentiousness, Berlinerblau’s slim volume falls short of a definitive global account of comedic controversies and their aftermath. It offers instead a rudimentary framework for assessing changing norms in an era of ideological contention and internet virality.
It is not easy being a comedian, and now less so than ever. “The disturbing truth,” Berlinerblau writes, “is that humorists the world over are being assailed in all sorts of ways. They are called out and harassed online. They are boycotted and subjected to ‘cancellation.’ They are hounded in the courts through civil suits and federal investigations. They are menaced by vigilantes, religious fundamentalists, paramilitaries, and terrorist cells.” And in extreme cases, he says, they are “forced into exile, kidnapped, imprisoned, or even murdered.”
The danger varies by location and regime. Berlinerblau divides the book into three main sections. The first, on the United States, suggests that while “cancellation” is an ongoing threat (if often less total or permanent than it initially appears), the free expression consensus is holding. Part II, on other liberal democracies, finds that consensus “under siege.” The final section, on “non-democratic spaces,” depicts humorists operating with few, if any, safeguards and subject to persecution, prison or worse. Why they still risk challenging authority is a question for another, more psychologically focused book.
Berlinerblau begins with the slap heard round the world: the 2022 Oscars assault of Chris Rock by the actor Will Smith after the comedian insulted Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. He also mentions the shaming and (attempted) cancellation of Louis C.K., consequences not of C.K.’s transgressive comedy, but of his self-confessed sexual misconduct. “C.K.’s reputation took a hit,” Berlinerblau writes, but he “remains a profitable artist” — an example of the limits of cancel culture.
In the U.S. section, Berlinerblau focuses on four stand-up comics who have faced what he calls “the coalition of the outraged:” Dave Chappelle, who has mocked gay and trans people; Sarah Silverman, who has offended targets across the political spectrum and apologized repeatedly; Kathy Griffin, who was criticized for tweeting a fake image of President Trump’s severed head; and Shane Gillis, whose career revived after fallout from his anti-Asian American slurs.
Berlinerblau distinguishes between “punching up” and “punching down,” based on the power position of comedic targets, while admitting that those distinctions can blur. He also discusses comic personae (whose views may not align with the actual comedian’s) and meta-comedy. Lenny Bruce famously talked about his arrests; nowadays comedians riff on their social media travails. The results can be comedic gold, or a dead-end, with comedy devolving into complaint.
Another issue is just how gender plays into audience reactions. Did Griffin suffer more career damage than Gillis because she is a woman? Berlinerblau’s sample size, as he admits, hardly warrants firm conclusions, but his supposition seems reasonable. Self-deprecation traditionally has been more familiar territory for female stand-ups than insult comedy.
In other democracies, Berlinerblau shows, comedians face more difficult terrain. He seems to admire the satirist Vir Das, who implicates his audiences in attacks on the (arguably illiberal Hindu nationalist) Indian government and Indian society more broadly. The comedian was “frequently threatened with, but never tried on, charges of sedition,” Berlinerblau writes.
Berlinerblau also explores the incitements of the French right-wing shock comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, whose antisemitic jibes are a particularly tough test for free speech purists. From France, too, comes the most devastating fallout from untrammeled comedic license. In 2015, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad triggered an Islamist attack on its Paris headquarters that left 12 dead. Soon afterwards a gunman killed a police officer and four shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. More violence followed, including French intervention in the Middle East and deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice. For Berlinerblau, the tragedies raise the question of whether comedy should ever be silenced for the sake of public safety.
Outside of democracies, he notes, comedians are often endangered. Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s answer to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, was ultimately exiled from his native country. Samantha Kureya (known as Gonyeti), whose “subversive comedy was virtually guaranteed to infuriate Zimbabwe’s leaders,” was kidnapped and beaten. The brazen attack, Berlinerblau speculates, was an attempt to chill other critical voices.
He concludes closer to home, with the controversial 2014 film, The Interview, about the fictional assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Before its release, the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg project precipitated a massive hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment by alleged North Korean operatives. Here the free speech imperatives of the United States collided with North Korea’s paranoid authoritarianism — and the security vulnerabilities of the internet.
Berlinerblau wonders what would have happened if North Korea had issued a credible nuclear threat. More broadly, he frets that the provocations of comedians “imperil the free speech protections they claim to revere.” That’s a paradox that Berlinerblau admits he can’t resolve.
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
The post Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever appeared first on The Forward.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
The post ‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’ appeared first on The Forward.
