The JCC of San Francisco celebrated the opening of its newly renovated Kanbar Hall with a March 19 appearance by comedian Sarah Silverman, filling every one of the 438 plush seats and even drawing the mayor, who gave a little speech.

Mayor Daniel Lurie, introduced by JCC CEO Paul Geduldig as a graduate of the JCC preschool, started by joking to the audience. “I think I know all 438 of you,” he said, before going on to hail the $2.5 million, 18-month renovation and the promise of the JCC as a premier cultural destination for all of San Francisco and beyond. 

Silverman, 55, is a taboo-breaking, award-winning comic, actor and political activist who can easily charm any Jewish crowd. She chose a fellow Jewish comic to interview her onstage: Robby Hoffman, 36, who has gained national notice for her recurring role on the HBO show “Hacks.”

The event was billed as a “conversation” — one that Hoffman largely dominated with hyper, in-your-face comic quips, taking Jewish overtalking to new levels. Silverman, who is accustomed to that Jewish cultural tick, seemed fine with it.

After an hour of banter between the two, with Hoffman asking unserious questions — “Do you remember meeting me?” “What do you think heaven is?” “Shower or bath?” — audience members had a chance to ask their own questions, which produced some of the evening’s more interesting exchanges. 

One woman asked the comedian about her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman, who lives with her family in Israel. “My family is in bomb shelters five times a day,” Silverman said, her voice breaking. “It’s very hard.”

A man asked, “As a Democrat, how do you navigate feeling abandoned by your own party on antisemitism and Jewish concerns while still believing in democratic values?” (His question got enthusiastic applause.)

“It’s disheartening,” Silverman said, “because as liberal Jews we stand side by side with every ‘other-other.’ And when the other-others don’t stand with us, it’s very painful. I have friends who are posting things that just break my heart, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t say anything. And I’ve never been afraid to speak out. Never. There’s so much misinformation to combat, and there are so many truths to hold as true. It’s madness, and I don’t know what the solution is, and I don’t know exactly how to navigate it, other than to touch grass.”

Kanbar Hall is named after benefactor Maurice Kanbar, the late inventor and entrepreneur who gave generously to the JCCSF. His gifts total $10 million, including an endowment that just grew by $2 million after a new gift from Kanbar’s estate that was announced at the event. 

The upgrades, which the JCCSF calls a “generational investment in Jewish cultural excellence and pride,” include an immersive surround-sound system, a giant projection screen, improved acoustics, graded theater seating and cosmetic improvements.

The JCC also recently announced a partnership with the Jewish Film Institute, which will bring the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to Kanbar Hall from July 17 to 26 and run programs there throughout the year. The closing weekend of the San Francisco International Film Festival will also take place in the new theater in early May. 

What would it mean to bring a loved one back to life, especially if you’ve never met? That’s one of the questions that Amy Kurzweil, a New Yorker cartoonist and author of two graphic memoirs, has sought to answer while sifting through history, the future and Jewish identity.

In “Artificial: A Love Story,” published in 2023, she examined the attempt by her father, noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, to create an AI chatbot based on his own pianist father’s writings. Exploring tech, love and the nature of art, “Artificial” won several awards and made it onto “best book” lists by NPR, the New Yorker, the American Library Association and others.

Her first graphic memoir, “Flying Couch,” likewise told a personal story. Published in 2016, it documented her grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw Ghetto and what it means to be part of a family. 

Last month, Kutzweil joined the 2026 cohort of 10 local artists who will spend the year exploring the theme of “name” through Jewish texts with LABA Bay, the Jewish “culture lab.”

Kurzweil, 39, teaches cartooning in online classes and in-person workshops in San Francisco, where she lives. Her creative story-telling has also included a 2024 graphic op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “Op-comic: A Palestinian, an Israeli and a path to peace.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell me a bit about how your Jewishness intersects your work as a visual artist.

I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, thinking that half the world was Jewish. It tells you something about how ensconced I was in a Jewish community.

I was always curious what it meant to me to be Jewish, and the answer I came to in my work is just that I’m Jewish because my family’s Jewish. It’s the most simple answer. It’s like, this is the tradition that comes from your mother and her mother and her mother, and that’s just what it is. I am who I am because of that. A lot of my work has been exploring those inheritances.

How did you decide to write your first memoir, “Flying Couch,” about your grandmother?

I had a creative writing teacher once who told me: You’re just going to write two books for the rest of your life. One about your mother. One about your father.

My first book, which is what really got me into comics, was about my grandmother on my mother’s side and her Holocaust story, surviving the Warsaw Ghetto, told in her own words.

I was really, really focused on working with her own words, and that became — aesthetically, historically and ethically — important to my storytelling. I became so interested and appreciative of this primary document I had, which was her oral history testimony, and realized that our relationship to the past is mediated through documentation, and documentation depends a lot on technology.

When I finished my first book, which was my way of looking at my mother and her parents, I thought, OK, it’s time to turn to the inheritance of my father’s side.

And that was a whole new project. How did that start?

The amount of documentation I had of my grandparents, especially my grandfather, whom I’d never met, was enormous and overwhelming. My grandfather died in 1970. He came from Vienna and immigrated in 1938, a month before Kristallnacht [helped by an American benefactor who admired his music]. He got out because he was this gifted artist, and then made a life in America, which was characterized by frustration, with moments of artistic success. This woman saved his life because he was such a great artistic genius, and then that just became sort of the narrative — the way you thrive is through art. And I related to that a lot.

I had this gift of this enormous storage unit full of documents that related to my grandfather, and this was really the only way that I could get to know him.

There was a lot there. There was my father’s relationship to his father, to death, to preservation. And then all of these things kind of came to a head around this project that my father embarked on, which was to build a chatbot from the documents of my grandfather.

At the time, this kind of technology — large language models — was extremely young, and nobody knew what a chatbot was. This was 2018. Now, of course, everybody has very strong feelings about chatbots, but this was a sci-fi seeming project at the time that now, interestingly, feels really quaint.

The chatbot we built was so simple, in a beautiful way, very simple compared with what large language models can do today.

The book became a reckoning with technology and archives and the past and what we can preserve and what we can’t. That book took me seven years to create.

You’re participating in the LABA cohort this year, where artists come together to study Jewish texts and produce new artistic work. This year on the theme of “name.” How’s that going?

LABA is great because they put you in community and throw you at these interesting texts with super-interesting teachers, and then you see what happens in your brain, which I’ve really, really enjoyed. I wish it could be every weekend. So fun.

I thought that an encounter with Jewish texts about language and names would be interesting in helping me reflect on this book that I’m working on, which is a craft book about graphic memoir and about the process of using words and images to document experience and to document the past.

There’s a way in which understanding [graphic memoir] as a form is new-ish. It kind of goes back to “Maus” [by Art Spiegelman], which gained popularity in the ’90s. But there have always been people who’ve used words and images to tell personal stories. That’s not that new.

It’s such an interesting and suitable way to document personal experience and memory. For me, it has to do with the immediacy and directness of the mark on the page. It’s like when you see somebody’s handwriting and the way that you really feel that person’s presence, versus a typed letter.

You’re so interested in how we keep hold of the past. Why is that?

I think there is something in Jewish culture, that because we come from this history of annihilation, there is so much interest in documentation and the past. We’re a people of letters and texts.

It’s meaningful to learn about family members who had lives that seemed dignified — or there are all these interesting pockets of Jewish history where Jewish people are succeeding — and then there are these stories where they’re cast out. We have a lot of both registers in our history, absolutely.

March 11, 2013, was a prophetic night for Corey Rosen. It was when he got to perform at the first-ever San Francisco show of The Moth, national storytelling competition since 1996 and today also a popular podcast and radio program. 

The story he told was about his late 82-year-old cousin Norman, which he whipped up with less than a day’s notice, and it was a hit –– so much so, that he was soon invited to become an official host of The Moth’s StorySLAM shows in San Francisco and Berkeley. The open-mic nights feature people telling five-minute stories without notes, and on a given theme.

It was no random stroke of luck or creativity for Rosen, who has devoted his life to storytelling from a young age, attending a performing arts camp for many years and later studying radio, television and film production at Northwestern University. 

After college, Rosen moved to the Bay Area and secured his first job at the visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic. He initially worked as a “creature supervisor,” overseeing the development of animated characters for major motion pictures including the “Star Wars” prequels, a “Jurassic Park” sequel and “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

Over the past five years, Rosen, 52, has taken on another role, going from a storyteller to a storytelling educator. “Your Story, Well Told,” his guidebook of strategies for developing and performing engaging stories on and off stage, was published in 2021.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco resident and father of two came out with his second book, “A Story for Everything,” which functions as a companion to his first book, with expanded resources for more diverse storytelling occasions.

On Feb. 19, Rosen will host a storytelling workshop at Urban Adamah in Berkeley. 

Keep reading, or listen to the full interview below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your Jewish upbringing like?

I went to Sunday school, Hebrew school, I was bar mitzvahed. Weirdly, the stories in the Torah and the way we celebrate, interpret and reinterpret over and over those same stories is the thing that has always kind of hooked me. I mean, Jews are always telling stories.

I didn’t go to a Jewish summer camp, because I was in performing arts, which was my interest from a very young age. I was lucky enough to go to a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains called French Woods Festival. I was acting in musicals before I was 10 years old. I went there for nine summers.

Some of my closest friends in the world are the people I went to that camp with. Many of those friends are also creative professionals using their theatrical backgrounds in their lives, whether on stage or behind the camera, in different capacities.

You’ve had several creative interests. How have they all complemented each other over the course of your life?

As a kid, I wanted to be more of an actor. I wanted to be on stage, I like to perform, I like to be creative. But I also liked to make films with my friends, so I went to film school, and I loved it. Even after I started working in the animation industry, my happy place was on improv stages, where I could show up without a script, without the fear of doing it wrong, and I could make up scenes and characters and stories. I think that everybody should take an improv class at some point in their life. Improvisation is not just a theater or comedy skill, it’s a life skill.

For example, for the last 15 years or so, I have been part of the team that helps craft The Kitchen’s Purimspiel. One of the things that we did this year that was particularly enjoyable was figuring out what resources we had in the community, then and there. And we happened to have Barry Kendall, the former executive director of the San Francisco Circus Center. So we set Purim in the big top, and we had circus performers and clowns and acts. It was incredibly messy, but it was a resonant, humorous, but also deeply moving and powerful way of telling and retelling that story. 

The first job you had out of college at Industrial Light and Magic is listed as “creature supervisor.” What does that job entail?

To make special effects in the computer, it takes many specialists. People who are crafting and designing, people who are writing and voicing the characters, etc. But in between, there was this kind of nether region: how does it go from an idea and a drawing to an animation in a scene? That’s how the concept of a creature supervisor was born. I did a lot of helping and facilitating that creature through the pipeline, from its origin to its design, to showing up and looking correct on screen, being a sort of steward of a character in a movie.

You’ve had a lot of experience in developing both true and fictional stories. Any similarities between those two seeming opposites?

When I was a staff writer at Lucasfilm, I was looking at the themes that were emerging in the stories that I was writing. A lot of them were about being a young person, and discovering who you are. And I realized that these are my stories, I was just dressing them up with the adventures of a young character. Those fictional stories were about stepping out of your comfort zone and finding out who you are. So when you flip that on its head, the conclusion can be “Well, let’s just tell the real versions of those stories.” And The Moth is one of these platforms where anybody can get on stage and tell a true story.

These are true stories that are elevated beyond anecdotes. It’s not just a thing that happened, it’s a thing that happened for a reason.

When did you go from seeing storytelling as an artistic craft to seeing it as a skill that can be applied in many ways and places?

When I was hosting these story shows, one of the first things I realized is that the job of a host in that context was not to entertain per se. My job was to hold the stage as a kind of safe space for anyone to feel comfortable to come up and tell their story, because a lot of people are afraid of getting up and speaking in public. 

While I was on tour promoting my first book, I was getting a lot of questions along the lines of, “Well, I’m not a storyteller, why should I learn about storytelling?” And I was like, of course you’re a storyteller! You have to write grant applications, or you’re applying for jobs, you’re going on dates, you’re giving feedback to your employees, etc. Whatever your job is, odds are you’re a storyteller, or at least you have to connect or communicate with other people. And what I’ve found is that doing it as a story is always better. If you can say not just what happened, not what the data is, but also frame it, and contextualize the “why,” the impact is really amazingly tangible.

Given 3,000 years of slavery, exile, Crusades, ghettos, blood libel and the Holocaust, few chroniclers of history would consider the story of the Jews a laugh riot. Meet Rob Kutner, who does.

Kutner, an award-winning comedy writer for late-night TV, is the author of “The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting,” a joke-a-minute romp through Jewish history. Kutner manages to find humor in every chapter of that history, even the parts that clearly aren’t funny.

The book came out in March, published by the Jewish imprint Wicked Son. As part of a national book tour, Kutner will appear Dec. 1 at Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and Dec. 2 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, on stage in conversation with the JCC’s CEO, Zack Bodner. During those events, he will no doubt recount how and why he wrote his latest book.

“For me it was a way to unload the Jewish history I’ve been learning all my life, to use my comic voice and skills,” Kutner, 53, said in an interview from his home in L.A. “It feels even more important now to present a factual and relatively balanced Jewish history.”

Like any proper history, Kutner begins in the beginning, recounting the Torah’s account of the origins of the Jewish people. Chief in his bag of rhetorical tricks, Kutner gives voice to the main characters, writing in the first person as the snake in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s wife Naamah (who dubs the ark “The Wooden Box of Stank”) and the dysfunctional clan of Abraham and Sarah, whom he imagines enduring a family therapy session.

“Putting them in the first person was to break up the format and keep it readable and engaging,” Kutner said. “Also, I had to figure out how to deal with the Bible. People know it pretty well.”

He goes on to portray King David as a “rock star,” the Maccabees struggling to market their new holiday of Hanukkah (“Our voices will also rise in glorious song — well, one or two songs that no one quite remembers every verse to”) and the sages of the Talmud, pictured in a series of trading cards.

“I find that appeals to young people,” Kutner said of his irreverent approach. “With kids you have to be a little dangerous. The other side of the argument is, I wanted a welcoming and warm tone, hoping this would be of interest to potential allies.”

As Kutner moves into more modern history, he wrestles with some darker episodes. His chapter about the pogroms of Russia is subtitled “It Takes a Village.” He includes a sequel to “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which the iconic song “Tradition” becomes “Expulsion.” He calls the Jews who steadily returned to the Holy Land starting in the 1800s “the worst colonizers ever.”

That last joke sprang from Kutner’s unapologetic Zionism, and an upbringing steeped in Jewish tradition.

He grew up in Atlanta in a Reform household. However, he attended a K-12 Christian school, an experience he said deepened his Jewish identity (he jokes that when the school published a list of the universities seniors were headed to, it said “Hell” next to his name). He was active with Hillel in college and later spent a year in Israel attending a yeshiva and the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Today, he describes himself as “Conservadox.”

As for his comedy education, Kutner said it started with his grandfather, “a nonstop jokester.”

“Both of my parents were very funny,” he said. “My dad was an ophthalmologist, often cracking inappropriate jokes. I grew up immersing myself in Monty Python, ‘Kids in the Hall,’ and after [Princeton University] I dabbled in stand-up.”

In time, he joined the writing staff of “The Daily Show” and “Conan,” scripted animated shows such as “Teen Titans Go!” “Ben 10” and “Angry Birds: Summer Madness,” and authored a series of humorous books, including “Apocalypse How” and “The Future According to Me.”

He also contributed material for the Oscars, the Emmys and two White House Correspondents’ Dinners. He himself is a winner of Emmy and Peabody awards.

In his latest book, Kutner brings Jewish history right up to the present moment, including the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and the subsequent tsunami of anti-Jewish hate around the world. When he surmises which way that may go in the United States, Kutner is uncharacteristically uneasy, writing, “Who knows?”

“It’s a bit of a Rorschach test,” he said of that cryptic comment, “a way of saying I don’t know what’s coming, but it doesn’t seem great right now. It was an economical way of saying to American Jews, ‘Don’t get too comfortable.’”

Comedian and author Rob Kutner, 7:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 1 at Congregation Beth Israel, 1630 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, and 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2 in conversation with Zack Bodner at the Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. $25 includes book; $20 admission without book. paloaltojcc.org/events 

Update on Nov. 18: Kutner’s city of residence and the name of publisher Wicked Son have been corrected.

Comedian Mordechi “Modi” Rosenfeld was on the last plane out of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, headed for four sold-out shows in Paris. The Hamas attack was already underway, but the country had not yet grasped its scale.

Though he was distraught and unsure of how to meet the moment, Rosenfeld knew he was going to perform no matter what. The challenge then, was to figure out how to make his largely Jewish fans laugh that week after the shockingly violent, deadly attacks.

First, he used comedy to give them a break from the horror livestreamed on their phones. Then, at the end of the show, Rosenfeld invited them to sing the Israeli national anthem together. It was a moment that fostered what the seasoned comic calls “Moshiach energy” — the positivity that will help bring the messiah.

Born in Tel Aviv, Rosenfeld lived in Ramat Gan until he was 7, when his family moved to Long Island. Like many Israeli families, the Rosenfelds were minimally observant, but Modi pursued a more observant path on his own accord, studying cantorial music at Yeshiva University. 

He began a career in investment banking, but it wasn’t for him. For the last 30 years, Rosenfeld, 55, built up his career in stand-up comedy, honing his act on the Catskills entertainment scene, where some Orthodox Jews still vacation at old Borscht Belt resorts, and at Manhattan’s Comedy Cellar. He soon gained prominence for his spot-on impressions of the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. 

In an interview with J., Rosenfeld marveled at the vibrancy of the Jewish community in San Francisco, where he’s performed at smaller venues, including at Congregation Emanu-El in 2024.

Rosenfeld will return to San Francisco on tour with his second hourlong special, “Pause for Laughter.” The Nov. 13 show is sold out, but tickets are still available for the Feb. 11 performance at palaceoffinearts.org/event/modi. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you give us a taste of what “Pause for Laughter” is about?

It’s not as Jewish as my first special, “Know Your Audience.” It’s more talking about me doing comedy for over 30 years, me being married to my [non-Jewish] husband, our relationship. I talk about me going to a cathedral and experiencing that as a Jew. I talk about Muslim men, interracial couples and interfaith couples. [Rosenfeld’s husband was raised Catholic.] We’re having fun with it, not judging anybody, and showing the similarities between different people.

On “And Here’s Modi,” the podcast you cohost with your husband, you sometimes share your interest in spiritual practices that are not inherently Jewish. For instance in the first episode, you talked about lighting sage in a synagogue to cleanse it. How do these other traditions inform your Jewish practice?

Whatever spiritual teachings out there that are positive and good and represent unity, and not anger and not judging, they are all somewhere within the Torah and the teachings of the books of Judaism. Sometimes people present it in a much clearer way. For example, I love [self-help author] Dr. Wayne Dyer, he’s one of the biggest inspirations in my life. And his book “The Power of Intention” is a life-changing book. For me, it took a lot of the things that I knew in Judaism and placed them in a way that I can use them.

One of the biggest influences in my life is the Lubavitcher rebbe. He teaches us that in order for you to succeed and have blessings, you have to help other people. Anything you do should be with the thought of helping other people.

In your act, you famously poke fun at the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. How about East Coast and West Coast Jews — have you observed any differences between them?

Not in particular, but I know that Jews who live in New York see Jews who live outside of New York as simply “out of town.” What I did notice in previous visits to San Francisco is that the communities are more tight-knit. Your comedy show becomes a community event. I hear people say, “Hey, this is what’s happening in the Jewish world, we’re having an event to raise money for United Hatzalah, and Modi’s coming, let’s all get tickets to Modi.” So that’s the energy in a city like San Francisco. That, to me, is Moshiach energy.

In early June, you had the opportunity to interview freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov for your podcast. How are you feeling now after seeing the return of the remaining living hostages? Is this another example of Moshiach energy?

A hundred percent. When I saw the footage of all of Israel united to welcome home these hostages, that’s Moshiach energy. Everybody’s in harmony and, for a moment, there’s no fighting. Everybody is just happy that the hostages are home. It’s pure. Hopefully it carries through. 

Omer, by the way, is unbelievable, the way he exudes so much resilience and happiness. And you could feel it from his parents as well. The way they were able to take the most horrible situation in the world and really create a vessel for Moshiach energy out of it, they just blew me away. 

Are you going to continue singing “Hatikvah” at the end of your shows?

I’m going to keep doing it. After doing an hour and a half of comedy, it was my way of saying, “Hey, we just laughed and had a great time. We had a pause from all that’s happening in the world, and so just to remind ourselves where our thoughts, our hearts, our prayers are, we’ll sing ‘Hatikvah’ together.” Now it’s more out of gratitude, and the fact that we have Israel, and the fact that we have the soldiers home and the hostages home.

“Pause for Laughter” with Modi Rosenfeld, Nov. 13 and Feb. 11, Palace of Fine Arts Theater, 3301 Lyon St., S.F. $62.84 and up. palaceoffinearts.org/event/modi

(JTA) — When critically acclaimed stand-up comedian Gianmarco Soresi introduces himself to a new audience, he explains that his father is Italian, his mother is Jewish, and that he identifies as a “cultural Jew.”

That, he says, “means I have all the gastrointestinal problems and stress and anxiety of regular Judaism — without the sweet comfort of God.” 

The line always gets a big laugh, and draws on a nuanced relationship with Judaism that he mines for laughs and which he elaborated on in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, discussing his family, his formerly Orthodox girlfriend, antisemitism and his disillusionment with Israel. 

The 37-year-old Soresi has seen his online popularity explode in recent years, as he joins a generation of comics finding audiences outside the comedy clubs. After amassing more than one million followers on TikTok, another million on YouTube, and 800,000 on Instagram, Soresi will debut his first full-length special, “Thief of Joy,” on his YouTube channel on Sept. 19. 

The special displays Soresi’s strong writing and storytelling skills and cleverly crafted punchlines: Variety, naming him one of “10 comics to watch out for in 2025,” described “his knack for filtering life through a dark prism.” (Deadline also named him to its “Future of Funny” list for 2025.)

Soresi’s fast rise, however, has largely been fueled by his popular crowd work videos, which feature lightning-fast improvisation with audience members, as well as what the New York Times described in 2023 as his “silkily feline physicality and frenetic gesticulation.” 

In a typical piece of crowd work, an audience member pipes up during a bit about people who are polyamorous. “I know you have a girlfriend, but you’re on the road all the time,” they ask. “Are you in an open relationship?” Soresi’s response: “Are you kidding? My girlfriend grew up Hasidic. I’m just lucky that she lets me mix meat and dairy products!” 

In a recent interview, Soresi shared more details about his Jewish background and experience. Raised in Potomac, Maryland, Soresi said his parents divorced before he was a year old. 

“My mom’s maiden name was Rothkrug, and she grew up in Great Neck, on Long Island. When she was 12 her parents told her she could either have a bat mitzvah or a Sweet 16 — and she decided to wait for the latter,” he said. There was no religious influence from his father, who Soresi describes as a “lapsed Catholic.”

Soresi himself did not have a bar mitzvah, but “I wouldn’t necessarily call my upbringing secular,” he said. “We did go to temple twice a year, we did Hanukkah, and we also did Passover — which was my favorite because it made the Jews seem cool.”

In addition, Soresi, a passionate “theater kid” who would earn a degree in musical theater from the University of Miami, got to perform during seders. “I really liked reading at the table,” he said.

While his mother married twice and his father was married and divorced three times, Soresi has been in a committed relationship for more than five years with Tovah Silbermann, who was raised in New Orleans in a Chabad community. After attending Yeshiva University, “she wanted to leave what I would call the strictness of that life and just gradually pivoted away, although her family remained Orthodox,” he said.

Soresi recalls an awkward moment when Tovah’s younger sister attended one of his shows, and he breached a rule of Orthodox etiquette. “Given my Italian side, I’m a hugger,” he recalled. “So I wrapped my arms around her and multiple people said, ‘no, no!’ It’s a horrible feeling to hug someone and have people shout ‘no!’” 

Silbermann — a talent manager who is listed on Soresi’s new special as executive producer, manager and muse — remains connected to her family and Judaism. “Unfortunately, I’m not in town a lot on Friday nights, which is sad for her, because she wants to do Shabbat dinner,” said Soresi. Shabbat dinner, he has said, “is like a standing date for Jews to get together every week.”

Silbermann declined to comment, but in a recent episode of Soresi’s popular podcast, “The Downside,” she offered a fairly lengthy primer on the kosher laws, the distinction between the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud and the laws of conversion. In the same conversation she acknowledged that in the beginning of their relationship she found herself missing the Jewish rituals and customs she shared with old friends. 

“That was a struggle for me,” said Silbermann. “It’s like, how do you integrate two lives?” In time, she added, she’s gotten accustomed to the choices she made, and said, “This is my thing.”

Soresi sprinkles references to their varied Jewish backgrounds throughout his appearances. “Tovah and I once got stuck in terrible traffic in Miami, and she yelled ‘Let my people go!’” He also picks up on antisemitism, intentional or not. During crowd work at a New Hampshire show earlier this year, he was speaking with a woman named Carol about whether she was raising her daughter to be religious. “Well, I did bring her to church,” Carol said. “But not Catholic; that’s worse than Jewish.” Soresi flinched theatrically, and the audience gasped before howling with laughter. “OK, let’s rank all the religions,” was his comeback. “What kind of Christian are you? Nazi?!” 

When he was 24, Soresi went on Birthright, the free trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults. “It wasn’t a particularly political trip, and I wasn’t necessarily paying the closest attention. But I had exposure to a lot of Jewish people that I hadn’t interacted with in my own life,” he recalled. “And the soldiers who joined us for a couple of days seemed to be on the left side politically, talking about how they believed in a two-state solution.”

These days, Soresi is an outspoken critic of Israel and its actions in Gaza, as well as its policies toward Palestinians in general. He’s incensed with American Jews who equate such criticism with antisemitism, and he often receives vicious comments online. 

“Jewish people have written me the most angry emails of late, like, ‘you’re just pretending to be Jewish.’” 

While many liberal Jews have been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition, Soresi goes further by declaring he’s not a Zionist. 

In a July appearance at Montreal’s “Just For Laughs” comedy festival, Soresi told the crowd he might be in favor of a three-state solution: one for Zionist Israeli Jews, one for Palestinians and one for secular, cultural Jews like himself. 

When a reporter reminded him of that, he said, “Let me be clear. That wasn’t exactly a real policy proposal!” As to whether he considers himself anti-Zionist (opposing a nation-state that privileges Jewish citizens) or non-Zionist (supporting a Jewish homeland for others but not necessarily a nation-state), Soresi said he would prefer not to “quibble.”

“I would say I’m extremely anti what is being done to the Palestinian people in this moment,” he said. 

As always, though, Soresi manages to create comedy from calamity. “I have an Israeli barber,” he recently said onstage, “and while he was cutting my beard, he asked me my thoughts about Israel and Palestine. And I noticed that the closer the blade got to my throat, the more I was getting pro-Israel.”

Soresi’s career has clearly hit a sweet spot. In addition to the YouTube special, his live shows, podcast and periodic acting roles, his recent international tour was a sold-out success. 

Soresi and Silbermann have just moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Brooklyn. After five years together, might there be an announcement involving a chuppah and a broken glass? 

“Um, did my girlfriend put you up to this?” he said, laughing. “I love her very much and we have an incredible life.”

Gianmarco Soresi’s special “Thief of Joy” debuts Sept. 19 on his YouTube channel.

Asked how the idea for his stage show “How Not to be Famous” bubbled up in his mind, actor Richard Kind responds in the manner of his good friend and golf buddy, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David. 

“Nothing bubbled up,” Kind said. “No bubbles.”

The two became friends when Kind became a regular on David’s long-running HBO comedy. Then again, Kind has worked with practically everyone in Hollywood — from Carol Burnett to George Clooney to Homer Simpson — with a list of credits a mile long, stretching back 35 years.

Anyone who watches TV, goes to the movies or ever caught a Sunday matinee on Broadway, should recognize his face. Kind, 68, has appeared in Oscar winners like “Argo,” co-starred in hit shows like “Mad About You” and “Only Murders in the Building,” and voiced characters in Pixar features such as “Cars,” “Toy Story 3” and “Inside Out.” 

But most people still don’t know him.

“I can walk down the streets of New York, and one person will stop me and say, ‘You’re a national treasure,’ and another 400 will pass me by,” he joked. 

He just might nudge that needle when he brings his new show to San Francisco. “How Not to be Famous: A Conversation with Richard Kind” plays for one night, June 13, at the Curran Theater. In the show, he gets personal, sharing stories, mostly humorous, spanning his life and career.

It’s called a “conversation” because the first half is a moderated dialogue, with the second half devoted to taking questions from the audience. Kind hopes to make the experience cozy and down to earth, like sharing an “open-faced turkey sandwich in a diner,” as he puts it.

No doubt his many credits will come up. He’s played an angst-ridden doctor on “Mad About You,” a ruthless furniture salesman on “The Goldbergs,” and a shlemiel press secretary on the Michael J. Fox comedy series “Spin City.” 

As for getting offered the recurring role of Cousin Andy on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” for nearly 20 years, Kind lauds the show’s creator and star. 

“I don’t understand how his mind works,” he said of David. “I once asked him if he’s a chess prodigy because he’ll always be three moves ahead of you.”

Aside from TV, Kind starred as Max Bialystock in a Broadway revival of “The Producers” and he is especially proud of his role in the Coen Brothers’ 2009 dark and very Jewish comedy, “A Serious Man,” in which he played the shiftless brother of the film’s main character.

Playing Jewish comes easy to Kind. A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he was brought up in a Reform household and had a bar mitzvah. His jeweler father hoped his son would go into the family business. Instead, Kind got the acting bug before he could legally drive and would frequently take the train into Manhattan, sometimes alone, to catch a Broadway matinee, have an early dinner, then take in a second show.

After graduating from Northwestern University, Kind stayed in Chicago to join the famed Second City improv troupe. That led to his breakthrough gig appearing in Burnett’s short-lived series “Carol & Company.” From there, he landed the role in “Mad About You,” and he’s never looked back.

Except once. 

In 2023, he was a guest on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the episode, Kind learned of relatives he never knew about. His great-grandfather immigrated to America from Ukraine, starting out as a Lower East Side peddler and later founding a successful crayon factory. That forebear was murdered by a business partner in 1933. Kind also discovered distant Polish relatives who were rounded up by the German army, sent to Treblinka and murdered.

The new knowledge further cemented his connection to his roots. “I was not overly Jewish,” he said of his upbringing, “but Judaism plays a part in my morality and how I lead my life.”

As for his acting bucket list, he said he’d love to play Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Tony-winning play “Angels in America,” though he knows revivals of the eight-hour epic are few and far between.

Instead, his latest venture is playing sidekick to comedian John Mulaney on the Netflix celebrity talk show “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney.” Becoming a 21st-century Ed McMahon is a role he never thought about, Kind said, but he’s having fun. 

In fact, he said, that’s the modus operandi of his entire career as a not-famous actor: “There’s not a thing I do that’s not fun.” n

“How Not to be Famous” 

7 p.m. June 13 at Curran Theater, 445 Geary St., S.F. From $72.

From an aggressive talent agent in Hollywood to a tap dancer with a chance to perform for Hitler, actor Jeremy Piven has taken on a wide swath of roles.

Now he’s coming to Northern California as himself, bringing his stand-up comedy for two nights, in Monterey on May 16 and in Napa on May 17.

His routines poke fun at the Hollywood world he’s been part of since the 1980s.

“Guess who the highest paid actor in Hollywood is,” he says in one routine. “The Rock, right. He’s never taken an acting class. Do I sound bitter? ‘Cause I am.”

Piven, who is Jewish, is known for TV roles such as playing Ari Gold in the HBO series “Entourage” and the title role in TV show “Mr. Selfridge.” He has also starred in films, including “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “Singles” and “Black Hawk Down.” He has earned three Emmy awards and a Golden Globe.

A career actor with hundreds of credits, he has been less visible since 2017 and 2018 when eight women accused him of unwanted sexual advances across decades. He denied the allegations, passed a polygraph test and described himself as “collateral damage” of the MeToo movement. No charges or lawsuits were filed against him. 

In 2018, he started to perform stand-up, launched a podcast and continued working in movies.

He starred in the 2023 film “The Performance,” based on a 2002 short story by Arthur Miller. Set in 1937, the film played as the opener of the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival in 2024.

In “The Performance,” Piven plays a Jewish American tap dancer who is offered the chance to perform for Hitler. The film, directed by Shira Piven, the actor’s sister, examines how far ego and self-interest can push a person to ignore evil. Variety called the film “impressive” and Piven’s performance “complex and compelling.”

Jeremey Piven Live

7:00 pm Friday, May 16, at the Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. From $50.

8 p.m. Saturday, May 17, at Uptown Theatre, 1350 3rd St., Napa, From $52.

Paul Magid, kingpin of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, describes his merry band’s blend of theater and juggling as “visual music.”

“Theater is the queen of all the arts,” he said from his home in Bologna, Italy, “because it encompasses everything: architecture, writing, acting, dancing and music. You have to be able to do pretty much everything.”

The Flying Karamazov Brothers will bring their show to the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto on April 26. It’s a homecoming for Magid, who grew up in the South Bay. He had his bar mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El in San Jose, graduated from Saratoga High School and earned a degree from UC Santa Cruz, where he co-founded the troupe more than 50 years ago.

Since forming, the group has toured the world, performed on Broadway, appeared in hit films, collaborated with major orchestras and had a memorable guest-starring role in an episode of “Seinfeld.” Over the decades, Magid has written and directed plays for other theater companies, and scripted 22 original FKB shows. Some are redolent of Grand Guignol and Commedia dell’Arte, others riffing on works by Igor Stravinsky or, obviously, the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In any given performance, the quartet unspools novelistic narratives while juggling bowling pins, telephones, Champagne bottles and Tonka trucks. They dress in tutus and tuxedos. They play tubas, ukuleles and fiddles. They deftly cook a breakfast on stage while juggling the pan and eggs. 

At 70, Magid is the oldest of the Karamazovs (he adopted the stage name Dmitri, after a character in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”) and is the last remaining original member. The troupe has gone through several iterations over the years; his current colleagues are much younger. Magid doesn’t try to keep up with them — he says they try to keep up with him.

“Right now I’m doing fine on stage, juggling as well as ever,” he says. “Some of it is genes. My great-grandfather lived to be 112.”

In the original 1973 lineup of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, all members were Jewish. Indeed there is a tradition of juggling and similar physical entertainment in Eastern European Jewish history. According to an article in Brandeis magazine, “‘tummler’ is Yiddish for a person ‘who makes a racket,’ a jester, entertainer and emcee all rolled into one.”

But Magid does not come from an Askenazi line. He is Sephardic. His ancestors were from Spain and were forced into exile in 1492, immigrating to Turkey. His 112-year-old great-grandfather was born in the Turkish town of Marmara. “They were fishermen,” he says. 

Once his family immigrated to the United States, the Magids turned their attention to tikkun olam, American-style. “My grandfather was in the IWW,” Magi added, referring to the radical labor organization Industrial Workers of the World. “He fought for justice. My father worked at Stanford, and was [farm labor organizer] Cesar Chavez’s doctor.”

Magid intended to become a scientist or a doctor. At UC Santa Cruz he studied English lit and medieval Muslim history. Everything changed when, on a whim, he auditioned for a role in a university production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” He got the part, and was hooked.

Not long after, he and his friend Howard Jay Patterson volunteered to come up with an opening act for a Commedia dell’Arte play coming to campus. It was to include juggling.

“We invented something in an hour, and we got a better reception than the play,” Magid recalls of the birth of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. “We made loads of money while having loads of fun. It fulfilled my theater thing. Then, when we graduated, we were pretty well known, so we said we’d give it a try, and in a few years we were on Broadway.”

Immortality for the FKB is guaranteed thanks to their role in the 1996 “The Friar’s Club” episode of “Seinfeld.” The troupe portrays the Flying Sandos Brothers, who borrow Jerry’s dinner jacket (loaned to him by the club) during a performance, then promptly make it disappear, which forces the Friar’s Club to deny Jerry membership when he cannot return the jacket. 

“I really liked everyone involved,” Magid recalls of the week they spent on the set. “They were big fans. I love the show, and Larry David was a great guy.”

Though he has a home in Italy, Magid does not consider himself an expat. He also has a home in Port Townsend, Washington, and he belongs to three synagogues: one in Bologna, one in Port Townsend and another in Seattle. 

While giving no thought to retiring from the FKB or theater in general, he does have one fascinating goal that has nothing to do with the arts, and everything to do with his family’s long history of expulsion and exile: He will soon obtain a Spanish passport.

And when Spain issues that proof of citizenship, he looks forward to an ironic next step. “I will,” he says, “then pledge allegiance to the same people that kicked us out.”

The Flying Karamazov Brothers

7 p.m. Saturday, April 26, at Oshman Family JCC’s Schultz Cultural Arts Hall, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. $50-$60. 

Before George Carlin named the “seven words you can never say on TV,” fellow comedian Lenny Bruce exposed inconvenient truths about sex, drugs, discrimination and hypocrisy that no one else dared mention onstage.

His edgy topics and racy language also repeatedly led to his arrest on obscenity charges.

Six weeks after what became his final performance — at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium in 1966 — Bruce died of a morphine overdose while sitting on a toilet in his Los Angeles home. That unglamorous end was also the beginning of Bruce’s posthumous road to canonization as a free-speech pioneer and comedy legend.

Today, Bruce has more fans than ever.

They include Los Angeles actor Ronnie Marmo, who has been portraying Bruce for close to a decade in his self-penned, one-man show called “I’m Not a Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce.”

The play recounts Bruce’s New York Jewish origins, his legal torments and his ugly death. It’s a comedy.

Marmo will perform the show at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto on Jan. 25.

“He really put his neck out there,” Marmo said of Bruce. “If you care about free speech, the First Amendment, if you care about comedy, he was the guy who was willing to put it all on the line so people can do what they do today. He was the last person to be arrested and charged with word crimes in this country.”

To bring his portrayal to life, Marmo — who was born in Brooklyn a decade after Bruce died — studied his comedy albums and video clips of his performances. Marmo read everything he could, including Bruce’s autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” published posthumously. He also had the assistance of renowned actor Joe Mantegna, who directs the show.

One key aspect of Bruce’s comedy was his unabashed Jewish roots. Born Leonard Schneider in 1925, Bruce peppered his stand-up with Yiddishisms and New York Jewish flavor. To nail Bruce’s Jewish flair, Marmo, an Italian American Catholic, had some homework to do, but not much.

“Different savior, same behavior,” Marmo jokes regarding the similar cultural personalities of Italian and Jewish Americans. “Lenny had this joke: ‘If you’re from New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.’ It was important for me to capture Lenny’s Jewishness and how he approached it.”

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Bruce slowly built a career in stand-up. By the late 1950s, he had earned a reputation for “blue humor,” salty language and then-unmentionable topics, especially regarding sex. He was branded a sick comic.

Bruce refused to soften his material, and by the early ’60s, the arrests piled up. Often busted on a stage, he had more and more trouble booking gigs. Eventually his act was dominated with rage about his legal predicaments. Bruce was convicted of obscenity in New York in 1966 and sentenced to four months in jail, but he died while out on appeal. He was pardoned in 2003 by George Pataki, New York’s governor at the time.

These days, Bruce would have landed a Netflix comedy special.

“He was very funny,” Marmo said. “The great comics are like this: They can look at a table and see something funny. But what made him very special — and dangerous to some — he also was trying to make a point. He used comedy as a means to hold a mirror up to society. You will see in the third act [of the play], even in his darkest moments, Lenny had a funny mind.”

He was the last person to be arrested and charged with word crimes in this country.

Ronnie Marmo, actor

Marmo’s own career has included dozens of roles on TV shows such as “Criminal Minds,” “Lethal Weapon,” and “General Hospital, where he played Detective Ronnie Dimestico for 150 episodes. He also founded Theatre 68 in L.A. and has served as artistic director for more than 20 years. 

This play isn’t Marmo’s first go-round playing Bruce. About 16 years ago, a friend and fellow comedian Charlie Brill told Marmo about a play titled “Lenny Bruce is Back and Boy is He Pissed.” 

Marmo eventually starred in the play and brought it to Theatre 68, where it  had a long run. Five years later, Marmo couldn’t get Bruce off his mind and set out to write a different sort of show — one that showcased more of Bruce’s routines and didn’t shy away from the darker elements of his life.

But first he needed permission from Kitty Bruce, Lenny Bruce’s only child and the executor of his estate and material. Marmo met with her, got her blessing and went on to finish the play under Mantegna’s direction. More than 400 performances later, it’s still going strong.

And no surprise, interest in Bruce has never let up. Dustin Hoffman starred in Bob Fosse’s 1974 film, “Lenny,” and Bruce was a major character in the Emmy-winning series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Marmo said Bruce’s work remains timely, nearly 60 years after his death.

“The country is so divided,” he told J. “People don’t want to hear the other side’s opinion. We have regressed in this country. But If you care about the freedoms in America, Lenny Bruce has touched on all of them. His voice, sadly, is more relevant than ever.”

“I’m Not a Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce”

7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 25 at Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. For ages 16 and up. $66. Students and seniors, $50. Lenny_Bruce_Jan25.eventbrite.com

Updated at 10:05 p.m. Dec. 16

Since her mother’s death in August, San Francisco comedian Lisa Geduldig has found it hard to hold back tears during performances. 

“I’ve been onstage five times since she died, and I’ve cried each time,” the “Kung Pao Kosher Comedy” show host told J. “It is comedy, but I’m human, and it’s such a Jewish thing to be able to draw comedy from pain.”

Geduldig has produced and hosted the annual “Kung Pao” show since 1993. She schedules it on and around Christmas at Chinese restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown — building on the great Jewish American tradition of eating out at the only restaurants that are reliably open on Dec. 25. 

For the past four years, her mother, Arline Geduldig, was part of the event’s guest comic lineup. This year’s production, with six shows running from Dec. 24 to 26 at the Cantonese Imperial Palace restaurant, is dedicated to Arline’s memory and her sense of humor. All of the shows — one with dinner and one with cocktails each evening — will take place in-person and on YouTube Live. J. is among this year’s “Kung Pao” sponsors. 

The 2024 lineup includes Ophira Eisenberg, former host of the NPR show “Ask Me Another,” and current host of the comedy podcast “Parenting Is a Joke.” Eisenberg has also appeared on CBS’ “The Late Late Show,” Comedy Central, HBO and “The Moth Radio Hour.” 

British comic host Matt Kirshen, who came to the U.S. as a finalist on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” in 2007, will make his “Kung Pao” debut. Kirshen has also appeared on Comedy Central’s “@Midnight” and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” He is a regular guest co-host of “StarTalk” with Neil deGrasse Tyson and hosts “Probably Science,” a comedy-science podcast. 

Becky Braunstein, who riffs on growing up Jewish in Alaska, will be onstage too. A cancer survivor, she has used her experiences to write and produce a scripted comedy pilot called “Cancer Culture,” a 2022 finalist in the Yes, And Laughter Lab showcase. Braunstein has appeared on “Trinkets” on Netflix, “Chad” on TBS and “Shrill” on Hulu. She has been featured at top comedy festivals including SF Sketchfest and the HBO Women in Comedy Festival.

Although Geduldig remembered her mother as quiet and reserved when she was growing up, she discovered Arline’s sense of humor while quarantined in her home in Boynton Beach, Florida, during the first 17 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two began making use of their mutual isolation by putting on a monthly show online called “Lockdown Comedy.” 

Lisa kept the show running for the next four years. The final “Lockdown Comedy” show in September featured a compilation of her mom’s greatest hits. 

“She was like my little wind-up doll in the last 4½ years living with her,” said Geduldig, who frequently returned to Florida to visit her mother after living there full time at the start of the pandemic. “My prized possessions these days are the videos of her. She was really funny. And she loved, loved, loved doing the show.” 

That wasn’t the first time Arline took the stage, virtual or otherwise. During the third “Kung Pao” show in 1995, Geduldig recalled bringing her mother up to sing a duet of her high-pitched “Irv calls,” Arline’s preferred method for calling her husband to dinner. 

As a result of her popularity on “Lockdown Comedy,” Arline returned to “Kung Pao,” starting online in 2020. Soon enough, Geduldig’s friends started calling her “mamaleh,” Geduldig’s term of endearment for her mother.

“Because on Facebook, I’ve posted about our relationship over the years… everyone refers to her as ‘mamaleh,’” she said. “I ran into someone the other day, and they said ‘I’m just thinking about your ‘mamaleh.’”

Similar to the recent tribute to Arline on the final “Lockdown Comedy,” “Kung Pao” will feature a clip of one of her past performances.

Since the second “Kung Pao” show in 1994, partial proceeds from ticket sales have been donated to local organizations and causes. This year’s beneficiaries are Shalom Bayit, a Bay Area nonprofit that seeks to prevent domestic violence in the Jewish community, and the Chinatown YMCA’s food pantry and grocery distribution programs.

“Last year, I realized that… even though I had been producing this event in Chinatown for 30 years, I wasn’t giving back to the community, except for supporting a Chinese restaurant,” Geduldig said. “So I decided to name the Chinatown YMCA food pantry last year [and] to support them again this year.”

“Kung Pao Kosher Comedy” 

5 p.m. dinner show and 8:30 p.m. cocktail show on Dec. 24, 25 and 26 at Imperial Palace, 818 Washington St., S.F. $71-$96 in person; $35-$81 YouTube Live stream. Reservations recommended. koshercomedy.com

Update: Ticket prices and sponsorship for the shows has been corrected.

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

You’d think stand-up comedian Moshe Kasher would feel a bit of bravado about returning to the Bay Area this month to headline San Francisco’s Punch Line. Instead, the former Oakland resident finds it “more stressful” to play local comedy clubs.

“I’m so conscious about what material I did last time and what’s new and fresh,” he told J. “I do love the Bay Area and in particular the Punch Line because it’s where I started.”

Kasher, 45, will return to the club for a string of shows from Nov. 20 to 23. He won’t be telling jokes about the differences between Hayes Valley and Noe Valley, though. Instead, he will focus on what he calls “crowd work,” engaging audiences in spontaneous —  hopefully, hilarious — back and forth. It’s risky business for comedians, comparable to pulling off a high-wire act without a net, but Kasher has long experience with taking risks.

His 2024 memoir, “Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six Scenes” offers proof, recounting his life-changing immersions in diverse realms, from plunging into the rave scene, Burning Man, professional comedy work and Alcoholics Anonymous to growing up as a hearing child of deaf parents who split up when he was a baby. His mother was a staunchly secular Jew while his father remarried into a Hasidic world.

“I knew I had these unusual gravitational pulls into [different] worlds and how these worlds don’t seem to fit together, like Burning Man and Hasidic Judaism,” he said. “The big revelation of the book was that they fit together quite perfectly —  in me.”

“Subculture Vulture” is a followup to his 2012 memoir, “Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16.” The new book eschews strict chronology and instead recounts periods of his life with long, deep commitments to various communities, each of which embraced him — mind, body and spirit.

“What’s interesting about subculture is that it’s … beneath the dominant,” said Kasher, who lives in the Los Angeles area. “I believe what always turned me on about the groups I fell in with was doing things outside of the mainstream, so in that way deafness and [Hasidic] Judaism qualify.”

Given that he was a teenage alcoholic who joined AA at 15, it’s miraculous he remained sober during his immersions in the rave scene, not to mention his years at Burning Man and comedy clubs. 

Even Kasher isn’t sure how he did it.

“I have no idea how I stayed sober through this,” he said. “By the time I was six months sober, I realized I could do anything; I have the rest of my life. The drugs were secondary for me. I was looking for a life, not for a contact high. The mission was to find a life outside this addictive cycle, so I got high enough on the art, the people, the weirdos.”

As for his Jewish upbringing, Kasher said he very slowly matriculated into understanding what Judaism was and is. For him, it turned out to be feast or famine. As a youth, he spent most of the year with his permissive, secular mother. But he spent summers on the East Coast with his father, who left the secular world behind when he married into the Satmar Hasidic community. 

His older brother, David Kasher, is a rabbi and West Coast director of the adult education nonprofit, Hadar.

“I had a profoundly more and less Jewish experience than all my friends,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I was not Jewish at all. I never went to Jewish summer camp, no Jewish day school. But when I was Jewish, it was hyper-concentrated. I’m grateful to have had this bizarro experience because it created me. I found a way to have a Jewish experience somehow through it all.”

Kasher avoided writing about Israel in the book, which he completed before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. When asked how would have cast his chapter on Judaism now, he said:

“I deliberately didn’t go into Israel and Zionism because it’s a giant Pandora’s box — not only for the reader but also for me. It was a complicated and conflicted feeling I had before Oct. 7, and more so after. I think the only sane feeling to have is to be conflicted and heartbroken.”

Kasher hopes to sustain his career as an author and has considered writing fiction or perhaps a food book. He does wonder, though, whether he will ever again plunge so deeply into any subculture.

“Has my time expired?” he has asked himself. “The journey of self-discovery is in some ways a  journey of the young. I realized your excitement about a thing wears off. I would love to get swept up by something, but the good part of aging is [that] now is enough. “

Regardless, Kasher remains committed to exploring new interests.

“I’m passionate about surfing,” he said. “It’s the first thing I have dedicated a lot of time and energy to in awhile. But I’m very Jewish at surfing.”

Moshe Kasher

Six shows from Nov. 20 to 23. Punch Line Comedy Club, 444 Battery St., San Francisco. $35-48.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

“Late Night with Seth Meyers” could have been called “Late Night with Seth Trakianski.”

Meyers’ great-grandfather was Moses Menachem Trakianski, but changed his surname to Meyers when he immigrated to Pittsburgh, where he became a peddler. Meyers discovered this family lineage in a 2019 episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS ancestry show hosted by Henry Louis Gates.

“I found out that I had descended from Lithuanian Jews,” the 50-year-old Meyers recalls in his new comedy special, “Dad Man Walking.” “Lithuanian Jews are famous for coining the expression: We’ve got to get the f— out of Lithuania.”

Meyers spends a good chunk of the special, which debuted this month on the Max streaming service, talking about Judaism — including his marriage to Alexi Ashe, a Jewish attorney.

“My wife argues that I should convert to Judaism,” he tells the audience at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, where the special was filmed. “Her argument is, everybody already assumes that I’m Jewish,” adding, “Every Jewish person I’ve ever met has said, ‘You’re Jewish, right?’”

The couple began dating in 2008 and got married in a Jewish ceremony in 2013. They have three children. “We have a tricky conversation coming up with our children,” Meyers said, “because my wife’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And obviously, that’s something we’re going to have to explain to them one day.”

Meyers’ second son, Axel Strahl Meyers, is named after his wife’s grandparents, whose last name was Strahl. “They met the day after they were liberated,” Meyers explained when announcing the birth in 2018. “They met in the hospital in Austria and, on days like this, when someone was born, you just have such an appreciation for everyone in your lineage who lived so that you could have this moment.”

It is perhaps this family connection, and the fact that he has Jewish ancestry himself, that fuels a series of jokes about Nazis in the special.

“Can we admit now that having to show a vaccine card to get into a restaurant during COVID was not, in fact, like living in Germany during World War II?” he asks and proceeds to tell a story about a waitress apologizing while asking for proof of vaccination.

“I’ve seen a lot of movies about Germany during World War II and I don’t remember a single scene where the Gestapo behaved that way,” Meyers said. “I don’t remember a single scene where the Gestapo kicked in the door and was like, ‘We demand to see your papers. And we are so sorry that we are still doing this whole “see your papers” thing. This is so irritating for us, too. This is like, for real, our least favorite part about being in the Gestapo. It’s just our boss is such a Nazi.’”

Jew-ish jokes

He also spends a lot of time in the new special talking about his wife’s family.

“When I was growing up,” Meyers said, “the rule at the dinner table was never speak unless spoken to. If you do speak, have it be relevant to the conversation at hand, and certainly never talk until the person who is currently talking has finished. Whereas, I feel like in my wife’s family, the rule was as soon as you think of something, say it out loud.”

After telling several such stories, he deadpans: “My wife’s family is Jewish, which I haven’t said yet, but I have told you.”

He added: “I really want to stress, these jokes are pro-Semitic. I love my Jewish wife, I love my Jewish children. I have incredible in-laws.”

This is not the first time he’s talked about his wife’s parents. “They were so excited when they first met me,” he said in his 2019 Netflix special, “Lobby Baby.” “They were so happy that their daughter had met a nice Jewish boy.” And then he had to break the news to them that “to be named Seth Meyers and not be Jewish is false advertisement.”

He said that over the years, he’s become “Jewish enough” for his in-laws. “And I believe that’s the only religion that that happens in. Which is why it’s great that it’s the only religion that ends with -ish.”

This story was originally published on the Forward.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

The recent uproar over right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist and sexist jokes at Donald Trump‘s Madison Square Garden rally may cost the Republican party some votes, according to political pundits. Insults directed at Jews, Palestinians, Blacks and Latinos were justified by Hinchcliffe who posted on his social media a clip of the Jewish insult comedian Don Rickles at an event celebrating Ronald Reagan.

The Jewish comedian Harry Shearer tweeted in response that Tony Hinchcliffe “is no Don Rickles.” Beyond this self-evident assertion, there is the recurrent impression that the American electoral arena has declined into a mix of children’s playground and professional wrestling ring where unrestrained jibes and invective replace anything approaching wit.

Forgetting or misinterpreting the legacy of supreme Jewish insult comedians like Jack E. Leonard, Rickles, Joan Rivers and others may be part of the problem.

The comedy roast was essentially a Jewish creation, invented well before the heyday of Don Rickles and his contemporaries. This Jewish performance medium first appeared just a few years after the full extent of the Holocaust in Europe became known.

Verbal slanging among members of the Friars Club, which was almost exclusively Jewish, was a retort to the prolonged insult and tragedy of Fascist Europe’s war against the Jews. In an era when a certain public decorum was expected, and indeed enforced by law, letting loose with naughty profane epithets was doubtless seen as liberating.

In this context, the targets or honorees were part of the mishpocheh and, as fellow performers, were flattered to be the center of attention. To be roasted by the Friars Club implied that a Jewish comedian had attained a certain level of eminence.

And so in 1950, the first-ever New York Friars Club roastee was Sam Levenson, a once-ubiquitous, perpetually grinning author of humorous memoirs of childhood travails in a Jewish immigrant family. Sentimental and ever-cheerful, Levenson doubtless relished good-natured taunts from his fellow Friars. In all likelihood, during his 15 years as a New York high school Spanish teacher, he had heard worse from some students.

The roast as an expression of affection was also seen the following year, when comedians Phil Silvers and Harry Delf were honorees. Delf was at one time considered so expert in his performance skills that he was entrusted with the job of teaching Fanny Brice (born Fania Borach, the original Funny Girl) how to speak with a Yiddish accent for a stage sketch.

In 1951, Mel Allen (born Melvin Allen Israel) the sportscaster and play-by-play announcer for the New York Yankees was roasted by the Friars. The tradition expanded through Yiddishkeit, with the trifecta of Jewish roastees in 1953 including Sophie Tucker, Milton Berle and Eddie Fisher. The following year it was the turn of comedian Red Buttons (born Aaron Chwatt), while at other roasts, the assailant-in-charge or roastmaster was Jack Carter (born Jack Chakrin).

Meanwhile, through the 1950s, Jews such as Jack E. Leonard (born Leonard Lebitsky) and Don Rickles honed their verbal aggression. Yet all of these entertainers hoped to flatter their audiences by focusing attention on them as they did on stars during roasts, albeit in a derisory way.

With time, roasts were televised, with varying success. The format became far less intimate than when it was shared among Jewish club members. Opened to the wider world, roasts could appear depersonalized, spotlighting protagonists for whom no real affection was felt.

The biographer Nick Tosches referred to the apparently random, disconnected famous people present at TV’s “Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts,” where an unconvincing laugh track added up to a “dais of despair.” Sometimes the actors or politicians who were given scripted lines to recite about the honoree were personally unknown to the latter. It was the opposite of the once-haimish community of the Friars.

“Comedy Central Roasts,” where the guests and speakers often expressed undiluted mutual hostility, represented a step further away from this sense of solidarity. Insults in the guise of jokes were routine. Jeff Ross (born Lifschultz), who frequently appeared on Comedy Central roasts, began to be hyped as the Roastmaster General.

Yet Ross’ blunt comedy stylings were not universally admired. In 2011, the venerable Jack Carter told an interviewer that he considered the roast of actor Charlie Sheen by Jeff Ross and others to be disappointing. There are “no roasters around anymore,” Carter kvetched. The elder comedian considered that Ross “stinks,” despite having published a self-laudatory book, “King of Roasts.”

Over the years, as the slanging became more extreme, politicians became increasingly dependent on writers, some of whom were Jewish comedians, for providing zesty put-downs of competitors. Even the stalwart Joan Rivers, who was never sparing in harsh words for fellow Jews like Elizabeth Taylor, expressed her dismay at the aggressive tone of a 2009 Comedy Central roast where Rivers was the central figure.

According to PBS and other news sources, one such 2011 roast might have motivated the current Republican nominee to run for the presidency. After Donald Trump’s relentless, although specious, accusations that Barack Obama was not American-born and therefore ineligible for the White House, President Obama responded with jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

This public putdown, however deserved, reportedly sparked a desire for revenge that led to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and all the tsuris that ensued. The nadir of these insults in the guise of entertainment might have been a 2016 Comedy Central show, ostensibly a roast of Rob Lowe, which turned into a serial excoriation of another guest, the conservative pundit Ann Coulter.

Although the bygone tradition of Jewish comedy roasts could be severe, a new level of cruelty was attained over the years. When viewed by humorless, and sometimes witless, right wingers who seek an audience response at any cost, these new spectacles of character assassination in the guise of comedy redefine the very concept of the roast.

In the minds of some observers, there may no longer be any tangible difference between the Jewish insult comedian and mere purveyors of insults. And so, the social and political fabric of America, which had once united groups of Jewish comedians, has unraveled.

Whether this societal cohesion can be reconstructed one day remains to be seen. Until that happens, the misconceived offering of barbs, purportedly as humor, will likely continue during electoral campaigns, betraying the original intent of past Jewish innovators in laughter.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

(JTA) — Alex Edelman won an Emmy for “Just For Us,” his comedy special about attending a white supremacist meeting that put a spotlight on contemporary antisemitism and the place of Jews in the United States.

Edelman took home the Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety special on Sunday, in the latest accolade since “Just For Us” premiered on Broadway last year following an off-Broadway run. The Emmy was for the show’s move to HBO and Max, where it premiered as a comedy special in April.

The show centers on Edelman’s experience attending a meeting of white nationalists in Queens, New York, and weaves in autobiography and Edelman’s ruminations about Jewish identity, assimilation and whiteness in the United States. Edelman first performed the show in 2018, and it has found ever-larger platforms as antisemitism has continued to rise in the United States and beyond, coupled with a broader Jewish communal reckoning after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7.

INTERVIEW: ‘Just for Us,’ Alex Edelman’s Broadway show about his run-in with neo-Nazis, comes to S.F.

For his win on Sunday, Edelman beat out nominees including Mike Birbiglia, the standup comedian who produced “Just For Us”; Jacqueline Novak, another Jewish comedian; and the writing team behind The Oscars. The Emmy comes following a Special Tony Edelman received for the show in June.

In his acceptance speech, a breathless Edelman paid tribute to his close friend and collaborator on the show, Adam Brace, who died shortly before “Just For Us” opened on Broadway. (Last month, Edelman wrote in an essay in The New York Times that performing the show after Brace’s death “felt painful but appropriate, like reciting Kaddish, the Jewish daily mourning prayer.”)

“Look, this is really, really beautiful, and I really miss Adam,” he said in his acceptance speech. “This is the end of a seven-year journey with the show, but I got to make something really funny with my friend.”

The ceremony was hosted by the Jewish father-son comedy duo Eugene and Dan Levy. Among the other winners was Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” which he returned to host after a nine-year hiatus and which took home the Emmy for best talk show. “You have made an old man very happy,” said Stewart, who had previously won more than a dozen Emmys with the show.

For most of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic was easily the worst of times. But for Bay Area comedian Lisa Geduldig and her mother, Arline Geduldig, it was also the best. 

Quarantined together in Florida by force of circumstance, they closed a breach from 40 years of living on opposite coasts. They also created delightful routines together for “Lockdown Comedy,” a virtual show that Lisa launched during the pandemic.

Arline died Aug. 7 at the age of 93. Lisa is putting together one final episode of  “Lockdown Comedy” on Sept. 19 as a tribute to her mother, who made her comedic debut at age 89 on the show after Lisa realized just how funny she was. 

“I really had no idea till I started living with her,” Lisa told J. this week on the phone from her mother’s home in a Boynton Beach retirement community.

It was there on a visit that Lisa got stranded in March 2020 as the pandemic swept the world and led to extended lockdowns. Months later, Lisa was still there. For the comedy producer whose annual “Kung Pao Kosher Comedy” show was still months away, necessity became … well, the mother of invention. And “Lockdown Comedy” was born.

During her gigs on “Lockdown Comedy,” the Brooklyn-born Arline became a beloved figure to hundreds of audience members. A widow since 2022, she made light of quotidian errands and revealed her interest in studly firefighters. As Arline’s public persona grew, along with her appreciation for what Lisa’s work entailed, their relationship developed new dimensions.

“She had Post-It notes with ideas for new material all over the house,” Geduldig said. Sometimes they would argue about whose ideas were whose.  

“The pandemic was horrible — a million Americans died and how many millions around the world. But my mother and I got to know each other,” Geduldig said. “It wasn’t always rosy. But every single night, I would lay with her in her bed. We would talk and tell stories. And then I would kiss her goodnight on the forehead — like she did to me when I was a child — and end the day by saying ‘I love you.’”

After nearly a year and a half in Florida, Lisa came back to the Bay Area. She returned frequently to Florida over the next three years and was with her mother when she died.

“I always thought she was going to be immortal,” Lisa said. “I wouldn’t trade the time I had with her for anything.”

The Sept. 19 show will include clips from Arline’s past appearances. Comedians Wendy Liebman of Los Angeles, Scott Blakeman of New York and Eve Meyer of San Francisco may work stories of the elder comedian into their performances, while Lisa hopes to rise to the occasion because her mother would have wanted it that way. Lisa has plenty of memories to work with.

When she returns to the Bay Area, Lisa plans to start work on a documentary about her mother and “Lockdown Comedy.” The working title is “Arline and Me: A Pandemic Love Story.”

“Lockdown Comedy: The Last Show”

7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19. Online. $17-$28.50.

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Updated June 24 at 6:25 p.m.

Phil Witte sees things in black and white. 

The Piedmont resident is a cartoonist who specializes in the single-panel gag cartoon — the kind that appears in every issue of the New Yorker, where James Thurber and Charles Addams pioneered the artform in the 1930s.

Witte has had more than 1,000 such cartoons published in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, Barron’s and Reader’s Digest. “Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons,” his upcoming book co-written with his friend Rex Hesner, reverse-engineers the process of cartoon creation and includes 100 top-notch examples by Witte and other masters of the craft.

“For me, it comes down to the gag,” Witte, 67, told J. earlier this month. “People often ask me how I come up with ideas. I usually say it’s where everyone gets their ideas: your experience, your dreams, your childhood, what you ate for breakfast.”

Gag cartoons are distinct from comic strips, graphic novels and political cartoons on op-ed pages. They boast their own rules and quirky humor. From cavemen contemplating the meaning of art to dogs and cats conversing to couples in bed examining their sex lives, the best gag cartoons cleverly pair archetypal scenes with skewed takes on life.

“Funny Stuff,” which is set for release on July 16, covers topics such as humor styles, visual and caption incongruity, idea generation and how women and people of color have expanded the art form. The authors also interviewed several A-list cartoonists to get their take on how they do what they do, including Roz Chast, Bob Mankoff and Bruce Eric Kaplan.

If those names don’t ring a bell, there’s a reason.

“Roz Chast is at the top of her game,” said Witte, who worked as a lawyer before making a later-in-life career switch. “She’s a bestselling author. She’s in museums. She gives talks. Does the average person know her? No. She’s well known in the cartoon world, but [cartoonists] labor in obscurity.”

Mankoff is another key player in that world. Not only was he the longtime cartoon editor at the New Yorker, Mankoff is founder of Cartoonstock.com, a website devoted to the art and the source of most of the examples in Witte’s book. Mankoff is also the master cartoonist who came up with one of the best-known New Yorker cartoons: the businessman standing at his desk while on the phone and consulting his calendar. The caption reads, “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?”

That classic is found in Witte’s book. So is Eric Lewis’ rendering of an old man on his deathbed whispering to his wife, “I should have bought more crap.” And Julia Suits’ depiction of two savage Vikings approaching a supermarket checkstand, with one saying, “We made a bit of a mess in Aisle 2.”

Witte, who is Jewish, said Jewish humor and the gag cartoon style intersect nicely.

“There is a New York Jewish Seinfeldian humor among certain cartoonists,” he said. “Mankoff, Roz, Eric Bruce Kaplan. The New Yorker cartoonist assumes a certain sophistication, a knowledge of the culture we’re living in, so you can skewer it. It’s making light of or criticizing it but finding humor in our foibles, and that’s kind of a Jewish thing.”

Witte grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His family belonged to a Conservative synagogue, where he went to Hebrew school three times a week. He graduated from Princeton University and University of Chicago’s law school. As a newly minted lawyer, he moved to the Bay Area in 1983, settling in Piedmont and working for a major San Francisco law firm.

He and his wife joined Oakland’s Temple Sinai and have been members for nearly 30 years. Witte has served on the Reform synagogue’s board for multiple terms.

As for cartooning, the Baby Boomer grew up adoring the Three M’s: Mad Magazine, Monty Python and the Marx Brothers. 

“We all had that mentality,” he said of himself and his high school posse. “The cartooning came out naturally. I absorbed a sense of irreverence and satire, and it carried over to adulthood.”

He started drawing as a child and later created caricatures of teachers and fellow students. In college he delved into creative writing, an effort that paid off later in life. His 1999 joke book, “What You Don’t Know About Turning 50: A Funny Birthday Quiz,” and the sequel about turning 60 together have sold more than 175,000 copies. He also decided to try his hand at freelancing gag cartoons.

“I started sending out cartoons, and they started selling,” he recalled. “I got better. That went on for 15 years, got to the point of selling a lot of cartoons for major publications, and then I said goodbye to law.”

Naturally, he draws on his Jewish roots for inspiration. “Moses is my go-to guy” for Jewish-themed gag cartoons, he said.

Fortunately, Witte doesn’t need to rely on his drawings to pay the bills. He said no one gets rich creating gag cartoons. The competition is fierce, even among the best in the business.

Typically, the New Yorker receives around 1,500 submissions for only 14 spots per issue. Even Mankoff had to submit 2,000 cartoons before the New Yorker accepted one. (Witte has never had a cartoon accepted, but he did come up with the gag for two cartoons by another artist that were published in the magazine.) That shouldn’t stop any aspiring cartoonist from giving it a try, he said.

“If you have a humorous or twisted view to reimagine things, you can come up with cartoons,” he said. “I never sit down and think, ‘I gotta come up with an idea.’ Once your antenna is up, it’s a process that becomes very natural.”

“Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons” by Phil Witte and Rex Hesner (Prometheus Books, 150 pages). Witte and Hesner will attend a book launch event at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 16, at Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the New Yorker has published cartoons by Witte.

(JTA) — Israelis have long taken pride in two things: the long arc of Jewish history, and their relentlessly dark humor in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

For about a decade, the synthesis of those two qualities has been “The Jews Are Coming,” a sketch comedy show now in its sixth season on Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster.

Nearly every sketch in the show satirizes an event from millennia’s worth of Jewish and Israeli religious texts and history. Its guiding principle is irreverence.

So the show’s catalog includes spoofs of the story of Purim and the invention of the mezuzah, but it also features joke after joke about the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, the Yom Kippur War, the destruction of the Second Temple in ancient times and any number of other lachrymose episodes of the Jewish past. In the opening credits and between sketches, the show displays the tools used in a ritual circumcision.

(Because it is, after all, a comedy show, he adds, “Past generations are watching too, but that’s because there’s nothing better to do. We don’t have Netflix.”)

Still, he ends on a hopeful note: “I know this is a tough time, but remember, I got past Pharaoh — you can get past this.”

Whether the message of Jewish endurance will register in today’s Israel and around the world is unclear. But online, where the segments took off as soon as they were posted, in part because of the addition of English subtitles, there were signs that they were hitting their mark.

“I love the way your team have made us laugh,” one commenter wrote on YouTube. “Now you deserve also my gratitude for your tribute to our reality.”

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Jerry Seinfeld, promoting his new film about a fictive arms race to invent toaster pastries, says they don’t make sitcoms like they used to.  

On “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” the comedian lamented the bygone days of network monoculture, where people would flip on “Cheers” or “M.A.S.H.” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” And, it goes without saying (it’s the subtext) that you couldn’t make “Seinfeld” today.

Somehow, in Seinfeld’s calculus, those sorts of shows didn’t die out because of  a glut of cable channels or the advent of streaming (Seinfeld’s “Unfrosted,” along with his latest stand-up special and his eponymous sitcom are all on Netflix) but because of the “extreme left and P.C. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

Whenever Seinfeld — who kvetched about playing college campuses because of a bad response to a joke featuring a simile about a “gay French king” — wades into the culture war it’s more than a bit bizarre.

Let me repeat for emphasis: Seinfeld was promoting a film that imagines the development of a rectangular pastry stuffed with processed strawberry goop as a breakthrough equivalent to the Apollo mission when he went on this, his latest rant against the cult of woke. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, he admitted that satire and social commentary is not his metier — consumer crap is, and crap like Pop-Tarts has a Proustian Madeleine quality for him.  In other words, he’s never been one to channel Lenny Bruce, much as he liked the biopic.

Watching Seinfeld navigate these latest junkets, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Gary Gulman’s 2023 HBO special “Born on 3rd Base,” which has its own Pop-Tart bit that very capably delivers a social message. 

While Seinfeld’s 2020 Pop-Tart bit, from whence his forthcoming feature film was drawn, imagines men in white lab coats splitting the atom of a balanced breakfast, Gulman, who was a poor kid in a school meal program when he first encountered Pop-Tarts, speaks far less glowingly of the product. 

“The Pop-Tart was just a complete F-you to the poor kids who were eating it,” Gulman said. The school served one Pop-Tart (he knew they came in twos). Beyond that, the Pop-Tart frosting was not spread all the way to the edge. He imagines a factory worker suggesting they ice to the outer limits, to which a boss objects “Do you want these kids to ever stop sucking on the government teat?”

“Everything about the Pop-Tart they did to screw with poor kids,” Gulman said, with the folks at Kellogg gaslighting the disenfranchised into believing their product in any way resembled a real tart while only having a “suggestion of a rumor of a whisper of fruit flavored artificially-colored schmutz.”

Gulman explained that “pop” stood for “populist” — the “poor man’s tart.” Meanwhile, Seinfeld celebrated the genius of its inventors, who he says reasoned that “They can’t go stale, because they were never fresh.”

Many now finding Seinfeld’s whinging about political correctness to be yet another manifestation of his privilege, would perhaps be interested in hearing Gulman’s more direct takedown of Seinfeld’s net worth. In a bit about income inequality Gulman wonders to his crowd if Seinfeld, valued at a billion dollars, is really “$999,911,000 better” than he is at comedy.

This last salvo could read like sour grapes, but if offense should be equal opportunity, Seinfeld can claim no exemption, even as his own solo comedy remains anodyne if occasionally tone-deaf. 

To his credit, it doesn’t seem like Seinfeld is too bothered by Gulman’s act (at least he hasn’t commented on it publicly), but at least in this instance Gulman advanced the art, seeing in the humble Pop-Tart a bread of working class affliction.

Gulman brought a real grievance. And unlike Seinfeld’s, it hasn’t yet gone stale.

This article was originally published on the Forward.

(JTA) — In his new comedy special full of jokes about an Orthodox Jewish ambulance corps, DNA test results and an elevator that is configured to accord with traditional Jewish Shabbat observance, comedian Modi Rosenfeld says he hopes plenty of non-Jews will tune in.

“I think one of the best ways to end antisemitism is not educating people on what’s happening. It’s more just — laugh with us,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Much of the crowd at the hour-long special, filmed at New York’s Gramercy Theatre last April, appears to be Jewish. But throughout the special Modi, as he’s known professionally, continuously picks on one non-Jew in the audience — and presents himself as a guide to explain the Jewish unknown.

“For people who are Jewish, it’s just a moment to be like, ‘Yes, yes, thank God, someone’s got it. Yes, this is what we go through and we’re laughing at it,’” Rosenfeld said of the special. “For people who aren’t Jewish, it’s literally a portal into the Jewish world through laughter and pride.”

Rosenfeld’s husband, Leo Veiga, directed the special, which is now available on 800 Pound Gorilla, a comedy distribution and production platform that has carried specials for names like David Cross, Claudia Oshry, Sasheer Zamata and Tim Heidecker.

The title of the special, “Know Your Audience,” is a reference to a principle Rosenfeld, a mainstay comedian in Orthodox circles who frequently performs at charity benefits for Jewish causes, has followed in his own career: Last January, he publicly revealed in an article in Variety that he is gay, but added that he tends not to discuss being gay when performing for Orthodox crowds.

“Even though some religious organization has brought me in and people are coming to see me, I understand I’m under the umbrella of a certain demographic that I need to respect and know the audience,” Rosenfeld told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “If you put me in front of an audience, I give them what they need. And they don’t need gay material — they need the material for this audience.”

“But when I’m on the road doing my material, I can do whatever I want,” he added. “They came to see me.”

The special explores Veiga and Rosenfeld’s significant age difference, COVID-19, antisemitism and the logic of Shabbat elevators, which automatically stop on every floor so that those who observe the day’s practices — including a prohibition on using electricity — don’t need to press buttons.

The special was filmed nearly a year ago, before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza transformed the Jewish world. Asked about whether the material still feels relevant without discussing the war, Modi gave an answer reminiscent of the special’s title: He said that now, when he’s on tour, he will often ask people to sing Israel’s national anthem at the end of his show.

But he added that not every performance ends with a focus on Israel: “Obviously at the Comedy Cellar, I’m not asking them to stand up and sing ‘Hatikvah,’” he said, referring to one of New York’s top comedy clubs.

He said that generally, although he’s a standup comedian, the war is “in the back of your head” during his shows.

“Even though we just completely left the war for an hour and 20 minutes, we have to remember what’s happening and that there’s hostages and that Israel is going through it,” he said.

But at the same time, for his audience members, he said, the shows are often an escape from reality.

“People come up to me afterwards, they literally say to me, ‘I just haven’t laughed in so long,’” he said.