Julie Geller Lights the First Chanukah Candle - "Shine With Me"

Tonight we light the first Chanukah candle, and we can't think of a better way to get the eight-day holiday off to a happy start than to share with you another new, original song by Julie Geller.

Julie, raised in Colorado where she now lives with her family, also spent time in Boston, San Diego, and Israel. She has taken on a mission to bring love and healing into the world through her music. 
  
Julie is a graduate of Harvard University and the New England Conservatory of Music. She studied at Bar Ilan University and Midreshet Lindenbaum in Israel. 

Last year Julie gave us new, original songs that she composed for Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and I Believe in Miracles for Chanukah. Now she's done it again with another new song for this year's Chanukah celebrations called Shine With Me.

We hope it enhances your Chanukah experience. Enjoy.

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A Joke to Start the Week - "Sylvia's Going Deaf"

 

It's Monday again, and you know what that means. Time for another joke to get the week off to a funny start.

This week's joke is another gem from the archives of Old Jews Telling Jokes. The joke teller is Marty Adickman, a 65-year-old dentist and keyboardist for "The Alta Rockers."

Here's the setup: The guys are playing cards, and during a break in the action, one guy leans over to the other guy and says "I don't know what I'm going to do, I think Sylvia's going deaf." And then...

Enjoy!

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Maccabeats Come Up With Another Hanukkah Hit - "All About That Neis"

 

In 2010 The Maccabeats, an a cappella group from Yeshiva University, released their first Hanukkah music video, Candlelight, and every Hanukkah (and other holidays) since then we've seen many more videos by them and lots of other groups.

Originally formed in 2007 as Yeshiva University’s student vocal group, the Maccabeats have recently emerged as both Jewish music and a cappella phenomena,  with a large fan base, more than 20 million views on YouTube, numerous TV appearances, and proven success with three albums, 2010′s Voices From The Heights, 2012′s Out Of The Box and 2014′s One Day More.

Many of the songs are parodies of pop hits and The Maccabeats' latest is no exception. Using the pop song All About that Bass as a basis, they sing about the neis (miracle) of Chanukah.

Enjoy!

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The Real Story of the First Circumcision - As Told by Satiric Israeli TV Show "The Jews are Coming"

So you think you know the story of how Abraham carried out the first circumcision of Isaac and Ishmael? Think again. 

The new (and controversial) satire now playing on TV sets in Israel, Hayehudim Ba'im (The Jews are Coming), has a different take on what went on behind the scenes. Just like all the other sketches in the series, it's funny and irreverent.

Here's the episode in Hebrew with English subtitles so you can see what really went on near Abraham's tent. We'll bring you other episodes as soon as they are released with English subtitles.

Enjoy!

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Comedy Flashback: Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G. Leads Religion Roundtable with Rabbi Barry Freundel and Others

For years, English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen adopted the persona of Ali G, an unorthodox journalist who asks absurd and ridiculous questions to seemingly unsuspecting guests on his interview show.

After a year of doing the show in England, it came to the USA for two years. One of the episodes was a "religion roundtable" in April 2011 during which Cohen asks downright offensive questions to the four guests representing Judaism, Catholicism, and religion in general. 

They included Rabbi Barry Freundel of the Georgetown Synagogue in Washington, Dr. Francisca Cho of Georgetown University, Bobbie Kirkhart of Atheist Alliance International, and Father William Byron, a Catholic priest.

Watching the episode, it's hard to believe that these serious guests didn't realize that they were pawns in an elaborate put-on and put-down of religion for the sake of comic relief. But Cohen, as we later saw in his movie role as Borat, can be very funny.

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Lively Hanukkah Mashup Hits the Streets of Chicago

Elliot Dvorin and the Key Tov Orchestra are at it again. The Chicago-based wedding band likes to use the large plaza in front of a Chicago office building as a stage for their musical productions.

We have featured them before, performing a flash mob version of Hashem Melech in downtown Chicago, and with the Kol Ish a cappella singers in a bluegrass version of Yigdal.

Their latest production is a mashup of Chanukah songs old and new, sung by Dvorin and danced to by an ensemble of dancers in the streets of Chicago. The songs included are Adam Sandler's Chanukah Song, Sevivon, Ocho Candelas, Candlelight, and Chanukah oh Chanukah.

Enjoy!

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Quasi-Jewish Roots of Paddington Bear Revealed as New Movie Debuts

Remember the childrens' books about Paddington Bear, the bear who arrived unaccompanied at Paddington Station in London wearing a raincoat, rain hat, and a tag that said "Please look after this bear. Thank You."?

Now that Paddington, a new film featuring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Bonneville, and Sarah Hawkins has been released in the UK and is coming to the USA in January, Michael Bond, the 88-year-old author of the books has revealed the quasi-Jewish roots of the stories.

As Rachel Shukert wrote in The Tablet, 

Bond revealed his inspiration for the kindly bear: the Jewish evacuee children he remembered seeing in the train stations of London during the Kindertransport of the late 1930s. “They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on,” a recent article in The Guardian quotes Bond as saying, “and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions. So Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.”

Paddington wasn't really a Jewish bear and his family wasn't persecuted. But when his Aunt Lucy moved into the Home for Retired Bears, he became a stowaway to London with his aunt's handwritten note on his tag. His refugee status resonated with many parents who became attached to the stories of his adventures.

Speaking of the Kindertransport, in 1988 the BBC aired a program that included a surprise encounter of Sir Nicholas Winton, the organizer of the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia to London, with many of the children, now grown up, that he saved. It's a very moving video, just below the trailer for the new Paddington film

Last October, Sir Nicholas, now 105, was awarded the highest honor of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion, by Czech President Miloš Zeman.

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week - "A Very Special Dog"

Another Monday, and another joke to get the week off to a funny start. Once again we dip into the archives of one of our favorite websites, Old Jews Telling Jokes, to come up with a "walk into the bar" joke,

Today's joke teller is Julie Lokin, a 71-year old semi-retired concert promoter.

Here's the setup: A man is walking his dog. They go into a bar and the bartender says "Sir, you cannot bring a dog into the bar." And then...

Enjoy!

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Here Come the Chanukah Videos...Starting With the Residents of Jewish Care Victoria (Australia}

Only nine days until we light the first Chanukah candle. The new Chanukah videos have started to arrive, and from now until the end of the holiday, we'll bring you the ones that we think are the funniest, cleverest, and most entertaining.

It's not going to be all Hanukkah, all the time at Jewish Humor Central because we have lots of other funny and interesting video clips to share with you in the next few weeks.

Whether you spell it Chanukah, Hanukkah, or whatever, let's get started with a delightful video from the residents of Jewish Care Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.This video is one of a series called A Bissel...

It covers predictable differences of opinion on how to spell the name of the holiday, the candle lighting sequence, what should go into the sufganiyot (doughnuts) and the right way to make latkes.

Enjoy!

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Comedy Showcase: Cathy Ladman Does Standup Comedy at Montreal Just For Laughs Festival

As a standup comic, Cathy Ladman draws laughter from exposing personal neuroses. She has appeared on The Tonight Show nine times, and was the only female comic to appear on the last to of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show Anniversary shows. 

She's made four appearances on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, did her own HBO One Night Stand comedy special and was awarded the American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand Up Comic.

We've featured Cathy's comedy before in 2011 with two routines on being too Jewish and on growing up. She's one of the rare comedians who put on a generally clean show.

Here's her performance at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal a few years ago.

Enjoy!

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Jewish Traces in Unexpected Places: Sharon Brauner Gives Yiddish a Whole New Look in Berlin Nightclubs

Berlin isn't the first place that comes to mind when thinking about Yiddish cabaret. And isn't a Yiddish nightclub act an oxymoron, at least in today's world?

But Yiddish nightlife in Berlin is hopping, and Sharon Brauner deserves a lot of the credit for these Jewish traces in an unexpected place.

Born in West Berlin in 1969, she attended a musical school and took a job as a bouncer, bartender, and go-go dancer in Berlin's trendy clubs. Then she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg institute in New York while singing jazz standards at night in various clubs.

Returning to Berlin as an actress, she appeared in more than 50 films, TV movies, and TV series playing roles of street girl, princcess, drug addict, stripper, secretary, thief, commissioner, Pakistani asylum seeker, German folk musician, Turkish cleaning woman, and loving psycho godmother.

Brauner launched a singing career, and dedicated herself to popularizing Yiddish classics that she knew from her childhood. She reinterpreted the songs, some of which are centuries old, in swing, jazz and pop, Balkan polka, Arab arabesques, South American rhythms, reggae, waltz, country, and tango elements. The songs captured the joy and the soul of the music.

The two videos below show the wide range of Brauner's Yiddish renditions. The first is a medley of Love Story and My Way, and the second is a lively version of Di Grine Kuzine (The Greenhorn Cousin), a major hit in 1921 in the Yiddish music halls on Second Avenue in New York. Greenhorn was a common tag for newly arrived, un-Americanized, and unadapted immigrants.

Enjoy!

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Introducing "Schlep" - The First On-Demand Car Service Using Jewish Geography (Parody)

Have you heard of or used the new on-demand car services such as Uber, Hailo, Lyft, Gett, and Whisk?

If you have, you're ready for a new service with a real heimishe touch. It's called Schlep. Too bad that it's not real, but a parody created by Tyler Gildin of Elite Daily.

Run by Jewish mothers and based on Jewish geography, Schlep provides a nice Jewish mother as an entertaining chauffeur who, in exchange for driving you, will offer her daughter's hand in marriage, ask you to pick up her dry-cleaning, offer you a free lunch (straight out of her grocery bags), and have you squeeze in the backseat in between two pre-bar-mitzvah kids screaming the lyrics to pop songs.

Enjoy!

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Remembering Claire Barry and The Barry Sisters

For almost half a century, from the 1930s to 1976, The Barry Sisters, Claire and Merna, were the voice of Jewish jazz in recordings, nightclub acts, and television appearances on The Jack Paar Show, The Tonight Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show.

Claire Barry died last week in Aventura, Florida, at the age of 94. Her sister Merna died in 1974, but Claire kept performing until 2009.

Born in the Bronx to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Kiev, Clara and Minnie Bagelman started out in show business using their real names as The Bagelman Sisters, but after awhile, Clara became Claire, Minnie became Merna, and Bagelman became Barry. They performed songs in nine languages.

Looking glamorous and sparing no expense for their orchestrations, they sang to a full house at the Concord and other Catskills resorts.

The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation reissued The Barry Sisters’ last album, 1974’s “Our Way,” in 2008. As the liner notes for the album put it,

If adapting Jewish music to the rhythms and contours of the American pop landscape can be considered one of the dominant aesthetics of early twentieth century popular music, then the Barry Sisters ought to be considered crucial bi-cultural pioneers, part of the same treasured artistic genealogy that usually starts and stops with the Tin Pan Alley likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. They didn’t turn America Jewish, they made Jewish sound more American.

Here is an audio clip (videos of the sisters in actual performance are virtually non-existent) of The Barry Sisters singing Chiribim.

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week - "It's Chuck"

It's the Monday after a long Thanksgiving weekend, and it's time for a joke to start the week.

Today's joke teller is 77-year-old Catherine Goldberg, a retired registered dietician. The joke is from the files of Old Jews Telling Jokes. 

Here's the setup: A woman is seeking inspiration for dinner. She wanders into a butcher shop. A man comes up and says "Lady, may I help you?" And then...

Enjoy!

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"The Jews Are Coming"-- A New Controversial Sketch Comedy Series -- Hits TV Screens in Israel

Israeli satire on TV has taken a bold step forward with the airing of a new series of sketches called HaYehudim Ba'im (The Jews Are Coming). 

After a year of controversy over its content after a promotional clip was released, it was finally cleared for showing on the country's public station, Channel 1. The first episode appeared on November 7.

Written by Natalie Marcus and Asaf Beiser, the show asks questions about everything, from the Bible to Ben Gurion to the Ashkenazi leadership. Their approach is to  go into the texts and make you think. They say that they give all their subjects a critical look, but they're not attacking, just giving the story a fresh, modern look.

As Esther Kustanowitz wrote in The Jewish Daily Forward,

As of press time three episodes have aired; more than a year after the promo brouhaha, the content of the show continues to stir the pot, satirizing everyone from Abraham to Eichmann and skewering Jewish historical events ranging from the giving of the Ten Commandments to the raid on Entebbe. And if a sketch about a terrorist hijacking seems subversive, just wait until you see the sketches about Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. (These sketches are not currently available with English subtitles.)

But beyond the sensational aspects of these sketches, there is a deep passion for uncovering tradition and taking ownership of Jewish history. “Traditionally, there is a separation between the secular and religious,” Marcus says. “They [the religious] have the ownership on this story, but they are our stories as well. This is our heritage and no reason we can’t deal with and dig into the material of what made us, our DNA. It’s time for secular people to own the stories and tradition again.”

This call for secular reclamation of Jewish identity and heritage is part of a national trend in Israel. In Jerusalem, the New Spirit youth movement is working to transform Jerusalem into a pluralistic and creative community. Tel Aviv, the stronghold of secular Israeli life, now offers beachside Friday night services by Beit Tefillah Israeli and course offerings at Alma, a secular yeshiva (founded by now-Knesset member Ruth Calderon). In these and other spaces, today’s young secular Jews reclaim their identity, and see Judaism as part of their heritage, even if their mode of connection would never get an Orthodox stamp of approval.

Here is one of the episodes that have been released with English subtitles. In it, Moses has just delivered the Ten Commandments to the Israelites in the Sinai desert.  As might be expected from a nation that later produced many talmudic commentators and eventually lawyers, the people aren't accepting the new laws without asking for clarifications and pointing out contradictions and inconsistencies in them. You may have to watch it a few times to grasp all of the nuances, but it's worth doing, and it's really funny.

Enjoy!

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The promo that started the controversy is 50 seconds long, and it's Hebrew without English titles. We're including it below for our readers who speak Hebrew. Even if you don't, it will give you some understanding of why it was considered controversial.

Hasidic Comedian Mendy Pellin Anchors "Jewbellish the News -- Thanksgiving Edition"

Thanksgiving Day is over, but it's turned into a two day holiday with most of us off from school and work. 

So looking at it as a two-day Yom Tov, we're sharing just one more Thanksgiving video -- the Jewbellish newscast of oddities related to the holiday this year.

For example, did you know that this year it will be the first time in 365 days that Thanksgiving doesn't fall out on Chanukah? 

Hasidic Comedian Mendy Pellin takes the anchor's chair at Jewbellish the News to preside over a little newsy narischkeit after getting some major notice on The Wall Street Journal's front page last week. His co-anchor, Dave Earl Jones, adds an unusual weather report to round out the news.

Enjoy!

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An Animated Recollection of Larry David's Brooklyn Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day is such an important occasion in America that it triggers special memories of previous encounters with family and friends traveling great distances and consuming more than we should.

Most of us keep these recollections to ourselves or share them within a small circle. Entertainers such as writer-actor Larry David have access to media that encourages them to share their funny Thanksgiving moments with a wider audience.

Here's an animated look at Larry David's recollection of a typical Thanksgiving dinner that he had with his family in Brooklyn many years ago. It was posted on Funny or Die,  the Emmy-winning comedy video website.

Meanwhile, across the miles, we're celebrating Thanksgiving Day in Jerusalem, from where we'll be blogging until the middle of Chanukah. Yes, it's possible to celebrate Thanksgiving in Israel, where we suspect that most of the fresh turkeys ordered last week and picked up today are going to wind up on the dinner tables of American expatriates and tourists.

Enjoy, and have a happy Thanksgiving Day.

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Jackie Mason Reveals the True Origins of Sushi and Cajun Food

One of Jackie Mason's approaches to comedy has always been making fun of sophistication and pretentiousness, particularly if it involves puncturing a snobbish attitude assumed by people who are rising on he social ladder.

All the better if the subjects of his ridicule are people who, before hearing of sushi and Cajun cooking, would have been content with gefilte fish, brisket, and other examples of East European cooking.

In this routine, Jackie reveals his theories about the true origins of Sushi and Cajun foods. They're funny, but they make you think.

Enjoy!


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Mike Nichols and Elaine May - At the Hospital

Last week we posted a few skits that Mike Nichols,  the late director, producer, actor, and comedian performed with Elaine May on TV shows in the 1950s. 

We had so many positive comments and requests for more of the skits  that we're running another one today.

This skit takes place at a private hospital in New York. Nichols enters the emergency room with a broken arm, having just being run over by a car. Before he is examined by a doctor, he has to get past the admitting nurse, who is more interested in completing paperwork than getting care for this accident victim.

As with all of their skits, the timing is impeccable, and the laughs come from the recognition that this preposterous reaction to a person in need is sadly close to reality, or at least it was in the 1950s.

There is a bit of background noise for a few minutes in the middle of the clip, but we feel it doesn't detract from the story line and the laughs.

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week - "Community Center"

It's another Monday, and we're taking a break from our series of Mike Nichols and Elaine May comedy skits to bring you a joke to start the week. It's another one from the files of Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Today's joke teller is 85-year-old Archie Barkan, a Yiddish professor and former Catskills MC.

Here's the setup: So they opened up this big Jewish Community Center in an area where there had not been much Jewish activity. And this senior citizen suddenly sees this tremendous senior citizen program. And then...

Enjoy!

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