Broadcast Jews

You would think with 65,000 new videos a day, trying to find popular YouTube videos aimed directly at Jewcy’s sweet spot wouldn’t be an arduous task, but the vast majority is about as original, thought-provoking and funny as a 2 Live Jews tribute band. They all tend to involve the same tired formats (parodies of movies, ads, hip-hop, and TV shows) with the same tired material: Rabbis, Hebrew slang, circumcisions, the Holocaust, bagels, guilt-inducing mothers, Hank Greenberg, Juice Newton. Researching what’s out and about in the YouTube world helps prove a hypothesis I’ve long held: Ethnic humor, by and large, sucks. Or, to put it ...

Louis Schwadron, the 28-year-old actor, writer, and musician—he used to play French Horn in the robe-wearing choral band the Polyphonic Spree—imagines himself an arty Peter Parker, bringing social justice to Metropolis with the help of an alter ego and a latex mask. Schwadron’s heroic double is Rabbi Yoni Goldfarb, the wrinkled, Fu Manchu-sporting host of Jewcy's new "Two-Minute Mitzvah" series of online videos, in which he performs good deeds with menschy abandon. The Internet can be a wild, amoral place; with Rabbi Goldfarb, Schwadron hopes to inject some altruism and kindness into the wilderness. The rabbi’s beneficent aphorisms—“No matter what pair of slacks you’re wearin’, there’s always a pocket of time to make nice in da woirld” —recall NBC’s “The More You ...

In the first of his “Two Minute Mitzvah” video series, former Polyphonic Spree French hornist and latex impresario Louis Schwadron transforms himself into Rabbi Yoni Goldfarb, the people's rabbi, with morsels of everflowing kindness in the murky webstream waters of today. See Yoni Mitzvah. Mitzvah, Yoni, Mitzvah. See Jewcy's interview with Louis Schwadron

Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide may be one of the best books about the Middle East published in recent years. (Full disclosure: As a member of our editorial board, Goldberg is also Jewcy family.) The New Yorker staff writer’s new memoir chronicles his transformation from a teenaged Jewish Long Islander tormented by “wild-eyed Irish pogromists” to an IDF prison guard who develops a profound, poignantly tenuous relationship with a Palestinian prisoner. Goldberg’s nuanced study of that friendship—forged in vicious conditions, enduring through the dashed hopes of the Oslo Accords and two bloody intifadas—produces no saccharine revelations, no tidy reconciliation of Jewish nationalism and universalism. And yet, despite all the ominous strategic realities and political adversities, Goldberg’s riveting narrative suggests there is hope to be found in the ...