Dear Sarah,

By now you have probably received, if not read, Liel Leibovitz’s letter detailing the various ways in which you have personally disappointed him, so I figured I’d follow up with a note of my own. Imagine it’s like one of those emails which is directly followed by a second email with the subject line, “DISREGARD LAST EMAIL.” Or maybe it’s “MITIGATE LAST EMAIL.” There’s some mitigating to be done.

This isn’t the first letter I’ve written you. The last one was a post-it affixed to my headshot in the painful days when I was taking the drama-school orthodoxy of “reach out to anyone you think might be able to help you” a wee bit too seriously, and you were quite right not to reply. Yet even now, it’s hard to explain what seeing you meant to me in those days, or how much I unconsciously modeled myself in your image: There you were, unashamedly Jewish; unabashedly pretty; utterly scornful of appealing to the mainstream “amirite, ladies?” audience by shying away from matters blatantly and disturbingly sexual (I can’t even count the number of times some interviewer worriedly asked me “what my parents thought” of something I had written, and the mere thought of you gave me the strength to reply, “Honestly, I don’t fucking care”); eager to expose the dark, unflattering side of being a woman, particularly a Jewish woman.

But wait! Women, Liel confidently tells us, never really thought you were funny. Obviously, being a woman, he’s entitled to his opinion, except he forgets that for a very long time it was men who had the biggest problem laughing at your jokes. During Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Rodeo Cowboy Testicle White People Comedy Tour (that’s what it was called), Vince Vaughn himself I recall told you that nobody wants to see a pretty girl do blow job jokes—nobody, of course, meaning men, because if a pretty girl can joke about a blow job, that means she doesn’t necessarily find it demeaning, which ruins the act for a certain kind of guy. That you have managed to convince an overwhelmingly male audience otherwise is nothing short of a miracle, but Liel refuses to give you much credit for this, instead dinging you for doing little more to further the cause of women in comedy than inspiring “young girl comedy nerds to say filthy things in a funny voice so that boys think they’re hot.” This he follows with a spectacularly miscalculated analogy to Daria, which could have been remedied by watching a single episode of Daria.

And then, Tina Fey. Of course. The comparison that inevitably occurs in every profile of any remotely funny woman. The Great Unmasking, in which the writer unwittingly reveals a sexist bent of the most insidious kind—the kind that doesn’t even realize it’s there, or, more insultingly, disguises itself as feminism. Tina Fey has done so well for herself! Why can’t you be more like Tina Fey? Maybe because Tina Fey is the exception to the exception that proves the rule: You’d be hard-pressed to find a single comedian, male or female, who is currently as successful and highly lauded and ubiquitous as Tina Fey. You might as well tell your daughter you’re pissed off she didn’t become the first female president.

Besides, other than the facts that you are 1) both ladies and 2) both the kind of ladies whom guys who would never admit to jerking off to Minka Kelly in Maxim are nonetheless proud to sexually objectify, you two have virtually no comedy DNA in common. Tina’s comedy revolves around her obedience, her dogged sense of duty, her perceived failures at typical femininity, including sex; you are blithe, anarchic, and impishly and unabashedly sexual. Tina Fey represents—and lampoons from the inside—everything your work rebels against. Tina is Apollo; you are Dionysus. You might as well compare Bob Newhart with Bill Hicks, except nobody ever does that, because they are men.

Finally, Liel’s major beef seems to be that you had a chance to change the world but somehow haven’t been influential enough. I would argue precisely the opposite: that if your work, your “shtick,” seems to pack a little less punch nowadays, it’s because you’ve been too influential. The comedy world is awash in Sarah Silverman copycats, although none that have managed to successfully ape the whole clever package: As Liel notes, the likes of Whitney Cummings and Chelsea Handler have latched on to the sex stuff but have forsaken your conceit of endearingly myopic B’nai B’rith incredulity that you could ever be deemed a slut, since that’s for shikses and poor people. And in the other corner, we have Ricky Gervais and his acolytes gleefully cracking Holocaust/racism/retarded-people jokes whose ultimate emptiness belies a lack of actual knowledge of suffering, psychic or otherwise. (For the record, the only people who ever seem to make Holocaust jokes funny are Jews and Germans, e.g., the victims or the perpetrators. English people, who seem to view Hitler as a kind of jovially evil Saddam Hussein-type figure with an equally silly mustache, do not qualify. I’m talking to you, Prince Harry.) If your jokes don’t land quite the way they used to, its because you’re currently screaming into a vast echo chamber of penises, Nazis, and mongoloids.

Like Liel, I would like to see you stake out brave new territory. Unlike him, however, this is not because you have anything to prove. It’s because I want you to show these Whitneys and Chelseas how it’s done. I want you to show all these closet sociopaths and anti-Semites how to tell a real Holocaust joke. Remember what Tina Fey said in Bossypants: You’re not just competing with the other girls. You’re competing with everyone.

Love,
Rachel

P.S.: That thing about Jewish girls enjoying rape fantasies? Yeah, I’m not even going to touch that one.

Obscenity Charges

Dear Sarah,

The letter thing works for me because, for some reason, I’ve always had strange feelings toward you, feelings I don’t usually reserve for entertainers, especially ones whose career highs include Greg the Bunny and School of Rock. That’s because ever since I first saw you play Wendy, the disgruntled new writer on The Larry Sanders Show, sometime in the mid-1990s, I thought you had a great chance of becoming one of those very rare and truly important comedians who not only deliver killer lines but also produce the sort of work that is insightful and devastating and that matures, and in special cases can even change the world. Lenny Bruce talked about race when the rest of America was terrified by it, and America laughed and passed the Civil Rights Act.

I was sure, Sarah, that you would grow up and become America’s first female comedian who was powerful as well as sexual and utterly hilarious. Lucy tried, and got spanked. Elayne Boosler tried, and wound up sad and alone in a bar in Chicago, or at least that’s how the comedy industry treated her. Roseanne tried, but being overweight and unattractive cushioned even her meanest and most meaningful blue-collar jokes. All Roseanne could do to really make us mad was grab her crotch while singing the national anthem, and we never really forgave her.

But you had another thing going. You were beautiful and intensely clever, which allowed you to construct this repulsive persona of a privileged, vile woman who distrusts anyone and anything except for her own self-worth. The critic Sam Anderson called this character a meta-bigot and placed you in the company of other mock-ignorant intolerants like Ali G and South Park’s Eric Cartman. He also noted that “unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn’t insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself.”

Anderson is right. And that’s a big problem. As I watched you perform on stage, in movies, and on television these past two decades, I noticed you retreat further and further into shtick, your powers depleted, your promise gone. Jews didn’t find you funny anymore. Women never really found you funny. Post-civil-rights-era comedians are funny because they channel the forbidden Id of the group. So, whose Id are you, anyway?

Consider the following two jokes. Here’s one from earlier on in your career: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” So much violence in so few words against so many sacred markers of identity politics, even if many Jewish girls of my acquaintance actually don’t find rape fantasies funny; they enjoy them.

Women didn’t like you, and you knew it. Men wanted to screw you, and you knew it. You were nasty but confused, and your act lost whatever focus it once had. In a recent comedy concert, you had this to say (I’m paraphrasing here, but only mildly): “What’s the worst thing about the Holocaust? The cost!” At best, this can pass as some weak attempt at sarcasm, but, more accurately, it’s a pun, a verbal non sequitur whose sole purpose is to convert uneasy emotions into easy laughs.

And that, I’m afraid, is your true legacy. Rather than open the door to women comics who wanted to be just as depraved as the boys, you created a new category of stereotype, one that urges the attractive and witty female comedian to retreat as far as she can into mock-cutesy unlikability, to mitigate her libido by laying on the bitterness and the bile, to abandon complex jokes that do real violence against real ills and adopt instead a sort of facile, sophomoric humor that reeks of years spent backstage smoking blunts. This is how you end up with an album filled with song titles like “Will We Eat Each Other’s Doodies?” and “Trimming Your Bush.” This is also how you end up with even blander, more put-together comics like Whitney Cummings, who currently has two network sitcoms and who seems to have begun her career already as a latter-day Silverman, all bark and no bite.

I’m not saying, of course, that you alone are to blame. You work within the system, and it’s not easy undoing decades of discrimination. But Tina Fey’s career is much, much more luminous than yours. Rather than flip the finger at Saturday Night Live for not getting her jokes, she fought uphill until she was the boss and could make cute kissy-faces at her vanquished rivals who once called her “Herman the German.” When she was offered the opportunity to write a memoir, she titled it Bossypants and produced a smart and funny and poignant essay on being a female comic in a male-dominated industry. It’s a book you can imagine may inspire real health-care reform, or at least help a few young girl comedy nerds to overcome their fears and get up on stage and maybe someday become the female Richard Pryor.

Your memoir, on the other hand, was called The Bedwetter. It included a fictional eulogy by God, who mourns your passing by saying: “She loved dogs, New York, television, children, friendship, sex, laughing, heartbreaking songs, marijuana, farts, and cuddling.” It’s the kind of book you can imagine may inspire young girl comedy nerds to say filthy things in a silly voice so that boys will think they’re hot. Daria did it first, and she was edgier and funnier than you are. And she was a cartoon.

These are harsh words, Sarah, but I’m only writing because I hope that there’s a project somewhere in the future, a script or a book or a stand-up show, that would bring back that same brilliant, fearless comic I fell in love with two decades ago, and that you’ll emerge from your scatological skunk-weed haze to once again tell the kind of jokes that people remember long after the fact and that leave us happy and horny and agitated. That, after all, is what comics do, and few can do it better than you when you are on your game, which last happened sometime before George Bush invaded Iraq and Steve Martin became a writer for The New Yorker. Sarah, I still think you’re hot, but I’m begging you: Please try harder.

Love,

Liel

Anyway, presenting the top 10 Jewish Twitterers (in terms of most followers). Hint: number one is a pop star. Second hint: @tabletmag is not among them, but clearly should be, so follow us!

10. Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself). Followers: 1,661,114.

9. Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack). Followers: 1,679,102.

8. Biz Stone (@biz—you get a handle like that when you helped found the thing). Followers: 1,803,648.

7. Jeremy Piven (@jeremypiven). Followers: 1,862,550.

6. Larry King (@kingsthings). Followers: 1,979,506.

5. Ben Stiller (@redhourben). Followers: 2,099,376.

4. Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman). Followers: 2,304,757. Location: “Palestinian Territories.”

Honorary Mention. Lenny Kravitz (@LennyKravitz) Followers: 2,614,596

3. Drake, nom de Twitter Drizzy (@Drake). Followers: 4,118,836.

2. Chelsea Handler (@ChelseaHandler). Followers: 4,192,844.

1. Pink, nom de Twitter P!nk (@Pink). 5,799,175.

Top 100 Twitaholics Based on Followers [Twitaholic]
Related: Web Jew.0 [Tablet Magazine]

In fact, on paper (that description) aside, the movie sounded appealing. The plot (the four Meyerowitz siblings prepare for their father’s 70th birthday dinner in the wake of the just-published-by-youngest-son-family-tell-all) seemed new and different enough to sustain a funny, lively narrative. And the cast! Rainn Wilson (of Dwight Schrute fame), Dexter star Michael C. Hall, and sharp-tongued comedian Sarah Silverman play variously troubled siblings dealing with the aftermath of youngest brother Nathan (charming-even-though-his-character-is-a-total-jerk Ben Schwartz)’s bestselling book, Peep World. Sadly, the characters fall flat in four individual, divergent story lines that aren’t fleshed out enough. On the bright side, at least the problem isn’t the Jewish thing!

Sarah Silverman’s character, Cheri Meyerowitz, is the most stereotyped, and “Jewish,” of the ensemble, and she goes all out—as perhaps only she can—to embody middle-child Cheri in all her bratty, obnoxious whininess. It is truly irritating, as I imagine Silverman thoroughly intended, to watch her failed-actress character shriek at her mother and demand back-up her in her libel lawsuit against Nathan. In Cheri’s defense, the film adaptation of Peep World (the film based on the novel within the movie, all with the same name—got that?) is filming outside her window, and the actress playing the film version of Cheri is her father’s new girlfriend. Tough times.

But aside from the stereotyped Cheri (and her inexplicable Jews for Jesus pal, played by Steven Tobolowsky), there is little reference to Judaism throughout the film, and I don’t think any mention at all that the family is Jewish, save for their surname. Cue sigh of relief.

Also worth mentioning is the stellar supporting cast, who play characters more realistic and dimensional than the Meyerowitz siblings. Judy Greer, whose sidekick presence alone makes any film worth seeing, is one of the highlights. Plus, her character is married to Michael C. Hall’s: Awesome couple alert. Taraji P. Henson and Kate Mara shine as Wilson and Schwartz’s unlikely dinner companions.

While I took solace in the fact that not every character in the film (directed by Barry W. Blaustein, who directed The Ringer and wrote Coming to America) was a Jewish stereotype, I wish Peep World had stepped up its narrative game and developed the main characters more fully.

Peep World Trailer

After the picture is taken, Babette, who flew to New York to interview me, takes me to a café and asks what has made me decide to give up the comfort of Dutch theaters do a comedy show in a second language. So, I explain to her that most all my comic heroes are from the United States: Larry David, Garry Shandling, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Doug Stanhope, Jon Stewart,  Sarah Silverman—comedians who not only make you laugh but make you feel uncomfortable in the process. What I wanted to do is see if my stand-up would work in the country that most inspired it.

“They’re all Jewish,” Babette notes.

“Doug Stanhope and Richard Pryor aren’t,” I say, trying to steer the interview away from where I fear it is going. But it’s too late. Once again I am the Jewish comedian, asked to explain why Jews are so funny. It’s a topic that has come up in every interview since my career in the Netherlands began. Every time I explain that I don’t think being Jewish matters that much to who I am and that I am not so sure Jews are that much funnier. The way I see it, Jews being funny is a stereotype, one that’s only made more dangerous because so many Jews choose to believe in it themselves.

“When Israel bombs a village in Gaza, for example, you never hear how funny the Jews are,” I say, hoping to shock her a little. But Babette doesn’t let me get away that easily. She wants to know how I explain it, then, that there are so many good Jewish comedians. I reply that there are even more horrible Jewish comedians, but most people have never heard of them, precisely because they are so horrible. But that, she says, still does not explain why there are so many good Jewish comedians. Yes, I think, and those good Jewish comedians must be really tired of being asked whether it’s being a Jewish that made them funny.

“Maybe,” I say, “that’s why I came to New York—to experience what is feels like to be just a comedian, not the Jewish comedian people make me out to be in the Netherlands.”

“So, you did come to New York because you are a Jew,” Babette parries.

“Well,” I say, “if my comedy is about one thing it’s about being suspicious of people who claim they have an identity. When I was growing up in Maarn, a small village in the center of Holland, the only Jews I knew were my parents. Naturally, I thought that everything that set us apart from them could be attributed to our being Jews. So, when our neighbor had a fever blister, something I had never seen before, I was convinced it was not a very Jewish thing to walk around with.”

Only when my parents were on sabbatical and took us to live in New York did I realize that I had just as little in common with the Jewish children in my New York public school. It’s a lonely feeling to realize you have little in common with anybody. But when you accept it, it’s actually not that bad. You are, after all, not the only one who knows he is alone.

“So, is that the reason you called your show Amsterdam Abortion Survivor?” Babette asks.

“Yes,” I say, knowing full well that she actually never asked me this question, but for the purposes of this little story it’s just too good a question not to answer. “I just love the idea that Holland has this image as being such a liberal country. Just like Jews aren’t necessarily funny. The Dutch, actually, have quite a terrible track record when it comes to being open-minded. With the recent success of the Islamophobic populist politician Geert Wilders a new chapter of conservative bigotry was added to our country’s history. It’s one of the things I’ll be talking about in my New York show.

“And the ‘survivor’ bit?” Babette proceeds not to ask me.

“Well, if there is only one thing I find more dangerous than people choosing an ethnicity to hide behind, it’s the identity of victimhood. More and more people seem to define themselves as victims. It sometimes seems that to some people there even is a romantic side to being a Holocaust survivor. That to me is so obscene, it begs to be satirized.”

After the interview is over, I go back to my sublet to discover that five more tickets have been sold, bringing me to a grand total of 13.

To comfort myself I start reading Sarah Silverman’s hilarious new autobiography. I am elated to read that, just like me, she grew up in a town almost without Jews, she loves farts, and, just like me, owes her fame partly to a national controversy sparked by someone who refused to see a joke for what it was. “Wow,” I think while turning the pages, “if only Sarah would come to see my show.”

And then in the last chapter, Sarah tells the reader she is single! Sarah Single Silverman! By now I am sure we would hit it off right away. Why? Obviously we’re both Jewish.

Micha Wertheim’s one-man show, Amsterdam Abortion Survivor, is being performed as part of the New York International Fringe Festival, tonight through August 27.

But her new memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which arrived in bookstores last week, has pushed me over the edge into genuine fandom. And although I’d prefer to let the fact of Silverman’s religion exist in the background, passively enhancing my enjoyment of her bits on sex and “scatological matters” (her phrase), she makes a pretty good case in The Bedwetter for considering her in a less superficial way.

Silverman is known for telling jokes that make Jewishness (among other not-so-sacred cows) a punch line, and I expected The Bedwetter—a comedian’s memoir, after all, that was in the first place someone else’s idea to write—to be as blithely self-deprecating in this regard as she tends to be elsewhere. I figured it would be a breezy read, with text just slightly larger than what’s found in the average book, some gratuitous photos, a digression or two (or 20), and a few genuinely hilarious moments. I was right about all of that. She describes her career highs and lows with humor that is predictably off the wall and cheerfully rehashes the humiliations of her youth with just enough solemnity to let you know that while it may be a scream for her to title her probable bestseller after a problem that killed her self-esteem until she was 16—she’s nearly 40 and has her own show on Comedy Central—at the time, it was miserable. Silverman is a professional funny person, and it’s plain entertaining to read about her teenage traumas, her experiences as a struggling comic in New York, and the shenanigans of various writers’ rooms—even if what she tells us (and for the most part, how she tells us) isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is to find that Silverman is at her best when she’s dropping some version of the word “Jewish” into an otherwise unrelated conversation, as she does relentlessly throughout the book. It’s so frequent it’s unsettling, and that’s refreshing. In a recent email to the first guy she ever slept with (which she wrote as a way to fact-check her own memory of the event) she nonchalantly uses “I’m Jewish” as a sign-off. She explains that when she first moved to New York, people assumed she grew up here because she was outspoken and visibly Jewish. (“My dark features and name both scream ‘Jew’ like an air-raid siren,” she writes, and made her stand out in the place she actually grew up, small-town New Hampshire.) She says she really wanted to call her book “Tales of a Horse-Faced Jew Monkey.” (To say that her publisher was underwhelmed by this idea, she writes, “would be like saying that Hitler was underwhelmed by the Jews.”) She describes herself, accurately, as a “Jewy comedian reputed to have an unhealthy obsession with penises, vaginas and farts.” In total, she drops variations on the word “Jewish” 151 times in 240 pages, plus the jacket flap. (I counted.)

Given this, the final chapter—which contains the bulk of those 151 mentions and is titled, simply and unambiguously, “Jew”—feels like what the whole book has been building, or at least meandering, toward. “To be honest,” Silverman writes,” I would like to go about my life exploiting the subject of Jewishness for comedy, and not be saddled with the responsibility to actually represent, defend, or advance the cause of the Jewish people.” It’s an honest desire, and an understandable one—and she openly wrestles with it for the following 15 or so pages (amid jokes about her parents’ divorce and her belief that the Vatican should be sold to feed the hungry, of course).

Judaism is a pretty good religion, she concedes; she approves of how Jews don’t nag other people about their religion, that they “don’t make a habit of sexually violating their youngest and most vulnerable congregants,” that women can be rabbis (as one of her three sisters is), and that they don’t believe in hell. Still, she writes, “I talk about being Jewish in my act more than I’m really entitled to, considering that I’m an agnostic at best who has no background of participation in Jewish traditions other than nausea.”

Over the years, though, Silverman developed what she came to understand as “a mutually beneficial relationship” with Judaism. For a comedian, having an identity to play with like this can be a real gift, and she welcomed it. She appreciates how her Jewishness translates to a disarming “differentness,” which she can then use to make fans shift in their seats. She knows the feeling of awkward reassurance that comes with seeing a Jew in an unusual place: “When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, I wasn’t happy that our president had an affair, but I was kind of tickled to bits that it was with this sassy, chubby Jewess.” And she accepts that Jews embrace her because of the simple fact of her own surface-y Jewishness. “I have been deemed ‘good for the Jews,’ and from that there seems to be no going back,” she writes with some bewilderment, reflecting on the 2008 video she filmed to encourage young people to go down to Florida and convince their reluctant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.

That video, for The Great Schlep, isn’t straightforwardly “pro-Jew,” she points out, since she was bluntly taking older Jews to task for their hypocritical prejudices (notably, as only an insider can). The many Jews who loved it may have gotten the message, but, she figures, they “ate it up because what they saw was a visibly Jewish, somewhat familiar woman saying words like ‘schlep’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘grandparent’ in a loving manner.” Silverman’s Jewish identity may not involve any of its more traditional elements, but she understands how the game is played. She knows how to strategically deploy Jewishness to make a point, to play off the idealized picture many Jews have of themselves, and to provoke them—sometimes all at once.

It’s no shock to learn that Silverman has spent time thinking about the identity that she makes the butt of so many jokes. But she’s crafted a remarkably earnest little essay about it here—essentially, a stream of consciousness rant about how being Jewish has affected her life and career, which I suspect a talented editor or two then shaped into coherence—embedded in a book that ostensibly cares more about the comic potential of genitalia. These final pages (they’re followed only by an afterword, purported to be written by God, and her acknowledgments) feel cathartic—both for the woman who wrote them and for admirers. I didn’t realize I wanted her to say these things until I was reading them, nodding along in agreement, and laughing so hard I risked having even more in common with her than I’d like.

Compared to the other notorious sins committed recently by American Jews, Eliot Spitzer’s paying women to sleep with him seems like a rather minor offense: He’s a hypocrite and a bit freaky between the sheets, sure, but unlike Bernie Madoff, the only family he managed to damage through his misdeeds was his own. Two new books, Lloyd Constantine’s Journal of the Plague Year (Kaplan, April) and Peter Elkind’s Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Portfolio, April), run down the details of Spitzer’s dramatic story, from his moralistic crusading as Attorney General to the $100,000 tab he racked up with about 10 of the women employed by the good folks of Emperor’s Club V.I.P. Constantine, a former adviser to Spitzer, offers an account of the turmoil within Spitzer’s office as the scandal broke, while Elkind—Fortune editor and, as co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, a practiced hand at this sort of “rise-and-fall” page-turner—surveys the scandal’s sordid details and raises the key question of what exactly piqued the Justice Department’s interest in a minor prostitution ring with a single influential client.

***

Spitzer isn’t the first Jewish political leader to have disappointed his followers, of course. Norman Gelb’s Kings of the Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Nation (JPS, April) introduces the 52 monarchs who ruled during the millennium that ran from 1020 BCE to 70 CE, including Menahem, the ruler of whose kingdom the prophet Hosea wrote, “There is no honesty and no goodness and no obedience in the land,” naming “adultery” as one of the particular signs of the social decay. Gelb recounts the histories of such lesser-known ancient kings, and queens, as Ahaz, Asa, and Athaliah: great material for Biblical novelists eyeing a piece of that sweet Red Tent market.

***

This spring is a healthy one for dark comedy. Sam Munson’s debut novel, The November Criminals (Doubleday, April), follows a D.C. high school pot dealer with a taste for Holocaust humor as he investigates the murder of a classmate. The novel takes the form of this stoner’s personal essay for his application to the University of Chicago. Like some college applications, the novel has perhaps benefited from its author’s “legacy” status: Munson is the grandson of the neoconservative kingpin Norman Podhoretz, and he got his precocious start as a book reviewer at the moment of his college graduation, writing for Commentary—that formerly great Jewish magazine that has come to resemble a monthly newsletter for Munson’s extended family: His mother and father have contributed frequently, and the current editor is his uncle.

Witz: The Story of the Last Jew on Earth (Dalkey Archive, May), by Tablet’s critic-at-large Joshua Cohen arrives with no such pedigree, but it has been highly anticipated nonetheless. An impressive brick of fiction totaling upwards of 800 pages, Cohen’s novel—in which all the world’s Jews but one have died of a mysterious plague—brims with allegory, irreverence, and the wordplay in which Cohen has proven himself an adept. Whether or not it earns itself a place on the shelf of gargantuan postmodern epics, the novel possesses at least one quality too rarely seen in the contemporary fiction written by and for American Jews: genuine literary ambition.

***

No one tells jokes about the murder of Europe’s Jews—or about racism or abortion or pedophilia, for that matter—with quite the verve and intelligence of Sarah Silverman. In a memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (Harper, May), Silverman recounts her childhood in New Hampshire and her twisting path to celebrity, including as much humor as she can while also demonstrating her self-consciousness about the persona she has developed and how it allows her to be political without getting preachy.

***

Silverman started using obscenity for laughs early—at 3, when her grandmother offered her brownies, she told the old lady to “shove ’em up your ass”—but, fortunately for her, she was never prodded into becoming a child performer. Not so lucky is Bethany Rabinowitz, the preteen pressed by her ambitious mother into showbiz in Diane Hammond’s novel Seeing Stars (Harper, April). To make Bethany irresistible to casting directors, her manager changes her name from Rabinowitz to Roosevelt—even though in Hollywood, the disadvantages of ethnicity are hardly clear. “I can be Jewish,” Bethany explains at one point, “I just can’t be, you know, Jewish.”

***

As a Beverly Hills pediatrician, Dr. Scott W. Cohen probably encounters his fair share of Bethany Roosevelts, not to mention all the aspiring Shirley Temples and Macaulay Culkins. Cohen wrote Eat Sleep Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby’s First Year (Scribner, April) during his daughter’s first 12 months of life. While the book targets a general readership, he does come out mostly in support of the one practice through which a pediatrician can define a child’s Jewish identity (“Although the data are divided, I feel that there are some legitimate benefits to circumcision, and I would consider it for my own son”). New Jewish parents seeking advice tailored more directly to them can consult Secrets of a Jewish Mother (Dutton, April), co-written by Jill Zarin, one of The Real Housewives of New York with her sister Lisa Wexler, along with their mother—though the real classic in that particular field is Dan Greenburg’s How to Be a Jewish Mother.

***

Dr. Cohen is only the latest in a long line of American Jewish doctors; a few of his influential predecessors figure in Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America (Scribner, April). Himself a surgeon and a medical historian, Rutkow offers insights into the development of contemporary medical practices, including in his narrative the interventions made by Abraham Flexner and Morris Fishbein, among many others. The son of German Jewish immigrants who settled in Kentucky after losing their wholesale hat business in the panic of 1873, Flexner studied education and revolutionized the teaching of medicine, while Fishbein—“a short, portly man with an unmistakable Hoosier twang”—grew up in Indianapolis, where his father retailed glassware and later set the course of the medical profession for over 20 years as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. While modernizing medicine and refining the standards for health care in the United States and around the world, these men, at the same time, helped give Jewish mothers everywhere an ideal to dream about: a doctor in the family.

Predictably, stodgy viewers found Silverman’s approach offensive (come on, people—“house that is a city”—is sheer! comic! gold!). Among the scolds is Catholic League president Bill Donohue, quoted in an article in America, a Catholic weekly. He says Silverman is being anti-Catholic and that her “filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.” Really? Donohue’s obviously not following the comedian on Twitter, where she spares nobody, least of all her own kind, from insult. To wit: “Saw A Serious Man last night — a disgusting yet accuate portrait of us grossy jews down to, like our thicker-ish saliva.”

Sarah Silverman: Sell the Vatican? [America]

Now, it seems to us that if Obama wants to win over the dubious bubbes and zaydes who don’t share Clifford’s view, he should think about calling in his secret weapon: their grandchildren. Last year, a small army of them, responding to a video request from comedienne Sarah Silverman, schlepped on down to Florida (or at least made nice phone calls) on behalf of Obama’s presidential campaign last year. Maybe Silverman is interested in an encore performance?

Where Elderly Back Obama, Health Bill Anxiety [NYT]

Meantime, comedian Ivor Dembina takes aim at Larry David and Sarah Silverman, who “have updated the public’s taste for Jewish people externalising their anxieties, but they both stay well clear of topics like Israel’s ethnic cleansing, its appetite for apartheid, and its penchant for dropping phosphorous bombs on innocent people.” Well, yes, phosphorous bombs on innocent people don’t always go over so well on Comedy Central. His screed is part of a critique of Shtick Shift: Jewish Humour in the 21st Century by Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, whose book, Dembina says, omits all references to current Middle East events. One tiny problem with Dembina’s analysis—he admits he has not actually read the book in question.

City Lifts Ban on Life of Brian [BBC]
Avoiding the Issue [Chortle]

Collected on stage, the band resembles the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment during a particularly crowded party. But there must be some Nightmare Before Christmas-like magic that makes everything turn out perfectly at the last second. The violinist in the knee-high cowboy boots is perfectly in time with the drummer, for whom Animal the Muppet is probably not only a musical guide but a fashion icon.

Through it all, lead singer Ahron Moeller—who sometimes wears a junior high school gym uniform, and sometimes dresses as Alec from A Clockwork Orange—acts as a barely-in-control MC, introducing the numbers with random stream-of-consciousness thoughts as well as occasionally kicking a rhyme or a hip-hop verse.

Blanket Statementstein

The band’s self-titled album documents Blanket Statementstein’s particular brand of insanity. Some of their quirks just don’t translate to disc (Moeller’s wardrobe, for example), but the musical flightiness, the barely-held-together jams, and the shouted group choruses more than make up for it. I’m not going to lie: this is a weird record. Each of its 14 songs is different from the others, and not just a little—due in part to which musicians happened to show up for recording sessions, but also to the band’s eclectic sensibilities. Take, for instance, the song “Ancestor, which starts with a testimony to the singer’s girlfriend’s, uh, grandmother (“I fell in love with her ancestor/I know it’s crazy but it’s all I got/and it’s creepy how she shakes and rocks ) and builds up to the typically juvenile chorus: “Grandma love/grandma love/give me peace from above. Lyrically, Moeller plays it straight, spouting verse after verse without double meaning or irony. The jam that’s going on behind him—guitar, organ, drums, and accordion—is tight and melodic, like the Grateful Dead on a particularly poppy day, or Wilco in a free-spirited mood.

The rest of the album is just as quirky. “Empathize Your Thighs” has an ’80s big-beat vibe with ’70s disco falsetto vocals. “Hippies Need Money for Weed,” while it probably won’t actually get anyone money for weed or anything else, has a slow simmering beat that would be perfect for a lazy late-night tango. “Never Stress” features guest vocalist Shir Yaakov freestyling with the Blanket singers to a hip-hop loop, and “G-Chulent” is a funked-up ode extolling the virtues of everyone’s favorite slow-cooked bean stew.

Listen to “G-Chulent” by Blanket Statemenstein

Listen to “Ancestor” by Blanket Statemenstein

Jewish support for Obama came in many forms during his campaign, ranging from Sarah Silverman’s viral video comparing old Jews to young black men to 300 rabbis who started a Web site to get positive press for Obama (by soliciting press for themselves).

The Orthodox rapper Y-Love has never minced words about his respect for the president-elect. Y-Love is hard to pin down to a single agenda—he’s both a staunch supporter and critic of the state of Israel, Haredi in his social values, and liberal as a political thinker—but always has a cleanly thought-out reason for his stances, hinted at in his songs, and enunciated at length on his blog. His new single, “Change,” doesn’t directly celebrate Barack Hussein Obama; however, its title and its planned release (on Inauguration Day, with a logo and font that are suspiciously reminiscent of the president-elect’s campaign posters) are a good indication of his sympathies.

“The idea of the Obama-themed song actually came to [Y-Love's manager] Diwon, not to me,” Y-Love confesses. “The song ‘Change’ originally struck me as being a song more about the messianic redemption than anything going on in American politics.”

The collaboration solidified with the inclusion of DeScribe, an Australian MC and singer, who performs the first verse and the chorus. On his full-length album, last year’s This Is Babylon, Y-Love’s rhymes are brilliant, but at times loaded with too much discourse and not enough hooks; here, DeScribe breaks his words up nicely, and keeps the track from staying in one place for long. The MCs’ use of vocoder can be excessive, but a swift, gyrating club beat make “Change” an ideal sing-along. Hey, if even the Washington Post used Obama’s election to sell papers, then why shouldn’t some indie rappers cash in, too?

Listen to “Change” by Y-Love and DeScribe

“For a middle class white Jewish boy, I had fairly authentic initiation into hip-hop,” says Nosson Zand. “At 11 or 12 years old, I started hanging out with a friend who lived in the projects [in Boston, where Zand was raised]. He would bring me back to his place and we would play basketball and listen to music all day.” While in college, Zand became a baal teshuvah while honing his hip-hop skills. In 2006, he played the lead role in Song of David, a film about a yeshiva student who writes lyrics in the margins of his Talmud and freestyles on the roofs of buildings.

Nosson Zand

Now, at 27, Zand has just finished three months on the road performing with Matisyahu to support his own first official album, a five-song EP called The Return. He released the record at the suggestion of Matisyahu, who told Zand that he should have something for people to walk away with (this turned out to be good advice: “Matis told me that I was selling even more CDs than he was”). Last week, Zand entered the studio to start on his first proper full-length.

The beats on The Return are run-of-the-mill samples, overdramatic and head-nod-worthy, but Zand transforms them into actual songs. He matches the melody and the rhythm with rhymes that are staccato at times, fluid at others. On the title track, Zand’s flow bounces so naturally that it’s easier to dance to his words than to the beat. “The Fortress” is scaled-back, musically bleak, and lyrically aggressive, dispensing with vocal tricks in favor of straight rhymes. It doesn’t resemble pop-influenced artists like, well, Matisyahu, so much as alternative rappers like Atmosphere and Sage Francis who are more purely about the word.

On”Eye I Eye,” Zand tells the story of becoming religious—”For 23 years I was in and out of trouble/Taught my soul how to struggle, now I know how to struggle on a whole other leve”—in a way that’s not self-laudatory, neither denying nor glamorizing his former life.

Listen to “The Return” by Nosson Zand

Listen to “The Fortress” by Nosson Zand