Is ‘Jew/Not a Jew’ Anyone’s Game?

It’s a question most Jews can relate to: Is that athlete/actor/rock star Jewish? If the answer is yes, it’s hard to suppress a little pride.

In 1988, back when he was a writer for Saturday Night Live, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Al Franken turned this near-obsession into a hilarious sketch—a game show called Jew, Not a Jew—but with a twist that turned out to be crucial for many Jewish viewers: the show’s non-Jewish host asks gentile contestants to identify whether a famous person is Jewish or not.

NBC censors initially scratched the bit. “Some of the censorship that we’ve had this year and in the last couple of years has really been silly,” Franken told NPR’s Terry Gross in 1988. At the time of the interview, the Jew, Not a Jew sketch still hadn’t aired. “Our censors said, ‘No, you can’t do this because some people will take it the wrong way,’” he told Gross, noting it wasn’t intended to be antisemitic. “I wrote it. I’m Jewish. This is what we used to do at home,” Franken said, calling the decision not to do it “stupid.”

The censors later relented, and the sketch ran in October 1988, featuring a 32-year-old Tom Hanks as game show host Bob Tompkins who poses the titular question to dueling couples. In a recent interview with Moment, Franken says he told Hanks and the SNL cast members to “be very gentile.”

“Our first famous personality is Penny Marshall, the star of television’s Laverne & Shirley,” Hanks says, before asking: “Jew or not a Jew?”

A contestant played by Victoria Jackson gets it wrong by answering yes; Marshall is Catholic. But when New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s image flashes on the screen, her partner, played by Kevin Nealon, doesn’t even wait for Hanks to provide his name. “He’s a Jew, Bob!” Nealon says, a little too excitedly.

The sketch also features a fake TV commercial for “Feldman’s Kosher Pickles,” narrated by Franken, who asks viewers to “make the call” in identifying whether Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax is Jewish or not. The ad ends with Franken declaring, in an old-fashioned dramatic sportscaster tone: “Sandy Koufax: Baseball Great. Jew.”

Franken says he can’t remember what caused the censors to change their minds. But it turned out there were people who took it the wrong way.

“We did get some blowback from the ADL,” he says, recalling that when he and his writing partner, Tom Davis, got into the office after the sketch aired, there was a message to call a top official from the Anti-Defamation League. They spoke by phone, and the official told Franken they had gotten a lot of complaints.

“Have you seen it?” Franken asked him. The man said no. So Franken described the sketch.

“He said, ‘We used to play that at home.’ I said we still did at my house. He laughed. He understood the comedy.”

But later that week, Franken adds, “We got a scathing letter from him that a lot of people were offended, asking, ‘How dare we do this?’’’

“I called him back, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, we had to do that, because people complained. By the way, my brother-in-law is coming in from Pittsburgh this weekend, can we get two tickets?” Franken says he left tickets for the ADL guy.

In his 2003 book, The Jews of Prime Time, David Zurawik described how the late president of NBC Entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff, received a host of calls the morning after the show from colleagues—including many who were Jewish. He also got an angry call from his mother, who told him: “I’m embarrassed to call you my son. This ‘Jew / Not-a-Jew’ sketch was the most antisemitic thing I’ve ever seen.”

Then, according to the book, which the Baltimore Sun excerpted, there was silence on the line.

“Besides,” she finally said, “I always thought Penny Marshall was Jewish.”

Tartikoff writes about his decision to give the sketch the green light, noting that while he thought the sketch was funny, he did wonder:

…was it antisemitic? All week long, I agonized over that question. Since I’m Jewish, I wondered if I was being too sensitive—or maybe I wasn’t being sensitive enough. If this was about Italians, would I think it should be kept off the air? Finally, a few hours before airtime, I took a deep breath, conferred with the (network censors), and we decided to air the sketch.

Could it run in today’s more sensitive era? 

Franken, who went on to become a Democratic United States senator from Minnesota, is confident it could.

“I don’t think there’d be a problem today,” he says. “Any Jew knows that’s the game you played at home. My parents would always point out who is a Jew: ‘Danny Kaye—he’s a Jew!’” And yet, the 1988 SNL skit featured non-Jews playing the game, which could be what some Jewish viewers took issue with. 

Consider Adam Sandler’s famous “Hanukkah Song,” performed on SNL in the 1990s. In the beloved bit, Sandler gives shout-outs to fellow famous Jews, including these lines:

David Lee Roth lights the menorah
So do Kirk Douglas, James Caan and the late Dinah Shore-ah
Guess who eats together at the Carnegie Deli?
Bowzer from Sha Na Na and Arthur Fonzarelli.

More recently, Jewish publications have gotten into the act online. For example, since 2018, the pop culture site Hey Alma has offered a “Jew, not a Jew” game on Instagram, and earlier this year Moment launched its “Celebrities: Jewish or Not?” page. However, in 2011, a group in France that fights racism, SOS Racisme, threatened to sue Apple over the iPhone app available on the Apple French Store called “A Jew or Not a Jew?” Anyone who downloaded the app could try to determine whether celebrities and other figures were Jewish.

This all begs the question of whether the appetite for “Jew, not a Jew” has less to do with the game than its players. When Jewish identity essentially goes from an inside joke to fair game, is it no longer funny?

Frederic J. Frommer is a writer and historian, whose books include You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals. Follow him on X and Bluesky.

Top image: Saturday Night Live skit Jew, Not a Jew.