Behind the Velvet Curtain: Antisemitism in the Comedy World

Headlining a show is every comedian’s dream: commanding the stage, sparking laughter and trading jokes with an engaged audience. But when that boundary-pushing banter crosses into antisemitic territory, it’s no laughing matter. 

In late March, Mike Glazer, a Jewish comedian based in Los Angeles, headlined at Lucky’s Club 224 in Sioux Falls, SD, when his dream quickly turned into a nightmare. While making a joke about loving the Taylor Swift Era’s Tour movie, a man stood up and yelled “Jew pig!” followed by “Jew f***!” Glazer asked him to leave multiple times. “We support Donald Trump in this country,” the man responded. “F*** you, Jew lover.” 

Glazer remembers having a momentary fight-or-flight response. Everyone in the audience froze, and he regained control. “I feel like I’m in my Instagram right now. This is crazy,” Glazer told the audience after the man left. “You never see them [in real life]. Then once you do, you’re kind of like ‘That’s about what I thought.’” He then said he hoped that the rest of the audience felt safe and checked to make sure they were comfortable with the show continuing. Although Glazer didn’t feel nervous at the time, he says he later realized how unsafe he felt walking alone to his car after the show. “It’s midnight and I’m alone in Buffalo Wild Wings eating spicy chicken nuggets, and that’s when it hits me—That just happened. I am not okay. I got sweaty. And it wasn’t just because of the buffalo wings.” 

Sioux Falls Comedy, which compiles a calendar of comedy events in the area, released a statement apologizing to Glazer for the incident, saying they don’t know the identity of the verbal assailant and that he is not connected to the Sioux Falls comedy scene. Jayson Weihs, an organizer and booker with Sioux Falls Comedy, told KELOLAND News that the man had been banned by the venue. Lucky’s Club 224 did not respond to Moment’s request for comment. 

“This [incident] had nothing to do with stand-up. This felt like it came from a deep, real place. And it’s probably not the first or last time that whoever they are is going to make those choices,” Glazer says, adding that this was the first time that he experienced antisemitism at one of his live shows. And once the incident went viral, he was first met with sympathy but was then bombarded with hateful remarks online. People commented that the man was a plant, claiming that Glazer was victimizing himself and just trying to gain attention. Moment viewed these hateful comments before they were deleted from Instagram and Reddit. 

This was not the first time the comedian was the victim of antisemitic attacks online. About a month before the comedy show in Sioux Falls, Glazer posted a satirical video reaction to Kanye West’s swastika shirts, noting that as a Jewish man he was at first furious and checked the website to see if the shirt was real. “And then I saw that they were only $20 and I was like, oh god, that’s a really good deal.” West reposted Glazer’s video on X, and soon after the megastar rapper’s account, with over 30 million followers, was deactivated. This was after a string of hateful posts over the course of several days, but West fans blamed Glazer. Some even sent him direct messages with death threats, provided his family’s home address and threatened them, also claiming that if they ever saw Glazer, they would burn down his synagogue. 

Glazer is certainly not the only Jewish stand-up comedian who has experienced antisemitism at a live show. Ellen Sugarman, a Boston comic now based in San Diego, CA, was caught off-guard when she was headlining a show in Santee, a town east of San Diego, about four years ago. The producer and host, (Sugarman does not want his name on the record), got on stage and said that someone from behind the bar had told him to tell the intro to a joke that everyone would know. “How high does the grass grow in Santee?” the host asked. The crowd then raised their arms in a Hitler-like salute and responded, “This high!” Baffled, Sugarman told the woman next to her backstage that she didn’t understand the joke. The woman clarified, “You know, like, ‘Heil Hitler.’” And then suddenly the host was saying, “Are you guys ready for your headliner, Ellen Sugarman?” She recalls feeling uncomfortable from the moment she got on stage, especially because some of her jokes were about being a Jewish woman. After the show, some of the people in the audience told her how great she did. “I don’t think they realized that it was something that could bother or hurt anybody,” Sugarman says. “It was such an ignorant group of people that they thought, ‘It’s a joke. How can you not think that’s funny?’” 

Sugarman called the host the next day to talk about what happened. She says he is a very nice and smart guy, but she was disappointed by his response. He said that he just thought it was a funny joke and that one of the other performers, who is Black, didn’t seem to mind. Sugarman says facing antisemitism has been rare in her ten-year comedy career, and that she will never forget this experience. 

Prejudice doesn’t always come from the crowd either—sometimes Jewish comedians find themselves confronting antisemitism from fellow performers and industry professionals, whether through offhand remarks, exclusionary attitudes or jokes that cross the line from edgy to offensive. Eli Leonard, an American comedian and writer who worked on Curb Your Enthusiasm, has been in comedy for over ten years and got into stand-up about three years ago. He recalls performing at open mic nights where other comedians who heard him making jokes about his Judaism or saw him in the room would make jokes about Jews being cheap or powerful. One performer, who didn’t know Leonard personally, went so far as to say in a joke to the audience that they knew that one of his relatives worked as a jeweler. After another open mic night performance, a stand-up comedian who was also a caricature artist drew him on stage and showed the drawing during her set. “It was just this insane caricature of me with the huge nose and leaning over, you know, [with] the little hands that are being greedy for money,” Leonard says. “It’s very common, at least for me, to face antisemitism, especially in mainstream comedy spaces.”

But after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, the challenges facing Jewish comedians only intensified. Menachem Silverstein, an Orthodox Jewish writer, comedian and ordained rabbi who has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, says that since October 7, while he has been asked on multiple occasions to perform in shows, producers have refused to include his name and photo on promotional posters. He recounts one time when he was asked to perform and promote a show that included Judd Apatow and Nikki Glaser. “I was on the show, and they were really happy to have me on the show, but they didn’t put me on the poster, and that was very crushing,” Silverstein says. 

Jewish comedians have also clashed with one another, as differing opinions—or even indifference—toward the Israel-Gaza conflict has sparked tension. This was particularly the case for Elon Gold, an American stand-up comedian with a popular Netflix comedy special, and Ari Shaffir, another Jewish American comedian. Shaffir had Canadian comedian Russell Peters as a guest on his You Be Trippin’ travel podcast some six months ago. About 40 minutes into the podcast, Peters made a claim that Israel was dropping poisoned candies on schools in Gaza and said that “Israelis have always been doing that dirty kind of sh*t.” Gold recently saw the podcast and was left flabbergasted, leading him to message Shaffir, whom he views as an old friend. He expressed criticism over Shaffir’s failure to challenge Peters’ statements, which Gold considers to be blood libel. “[Shaffir] just let this guy promulgate a lie that is going to incite violence against Jews. You can’t just let that go unchecked,” Gold says. “It is your duty as the host of a podcast and, more importantly, as a Jew to say, ‘Whoa, Russell, I don’t think that’s true. Where’d you hear that?’ Just question it.” Gold says Shaffir responded that he doesn’t care about this—that all he cares about are the Yankees. Shaffir did not respond to Moment’s request for comment.

Gold’s experience with antisemitism did not start with the recent Israel-Gaza war and has also touched his personal life. Over ten years ago, Gold wrote an article for the Jewish Journal in which he detailed an incident that happened to him and his family. After a Friday night dinner at a friend’s house, they were walking home, dressed for Shabbat. An SUV pulled up beside them, and someone inside rolled down the window and yelled, “Free Palestine!” Gold turned to face them when a man stepped out of the vehicle. “[He] yelled at me, my wife and four young children: ‘I hope your children die! Just like you are killing children in Gaza!’”

The American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America 2023 Report reveals that antisemitism online and on social media continues to be the place where American Jews experience antisemitism the most. Silverstein gets direct messages from people who send him photos of Hitler, and Leonard has a running joke with a collaborator of his that their videos aren’t successful until they get antisemitic comments. “Once the antisemitic comments start rolling in, it means that a lot of people have seen it, so it’s gone viral,” Leonard says, joking that “it will just sort of happen very naturally on any videos where my nose is featured prominently.” 

Most of Silverstein’s clashes have been online fights and arguments with other stand-up comedians over the Israel-Hamas war. He has been criticized for defending Israel and accused of supporting a genocide. He has been blocked on social media platforms and has blocked others. Silverstein is especially hurt over losing his friendship with Nina Kharoufeh, an Arab-American Muslim stand-up comedian and amateur boxer, who at one of her shows was repeating “F*** Israel” to the crowd. Before October 7, the two comedians would get coffee, do shows together at the Laugh Factory (a chain of comedy clubs)—she had even been to his house. Silverstein claims that whenever Kharoufeh was accused of being an antisemite, she would post a selfie of them together to show she has Jewish friends. The photos are no longer on her social media platforms. “I didn’t love being her [token] Jewish friend,” Silverstein says. “At the same time, I was always like, if fixing a [77] year-old-conflict [means] being the scapegoat a couple of times, sure.” After Hamas attacked Israel, Kharoufeh unfollowed Silverstein on social media and eventually blocked him. Kharoufeh did not respond to Moment’s request for comment.

After the incident in Sioux Falls, Glazer says he reached out to Mordechi Rosenfeld, an Israeli-American Jewish comedian and actor who goes by MODI for encouragement and support. MODI, who has a large Jewish following, says that for both Jewish and more general audiences, he tries more than anything to take people’s minds off what’s troubling or stressful. “They need that hour and a half to completely just zone out,” he says. “They didn’t come to hear about your political opinion. They want you to make them laugh.” 

Antisemitism in comedy isn’t confined to hecklers or history—it’s a present-day reality that Jewish comedians face on stage, online and within their own circles. From subtle digs to explicit threats, these moments reveal just how pervasive and insidious this hate can be. Yet through it all, many comedians continue to perform, using humor not just as a coping mechanism, but as a form of resistance—reminding audiences that laughter can exist, even in the face of hate.

Top image: Elon Gold (credit: Elon Gold); Ellen Sugarman (credit: Jen Vesp); Menachem Silverstein (credit: Elizabeth Viggiano); Eli Leonard (credit: Ell Delorso); Mike Glazer (credit: Storm Santos).