Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner: The Duo Who Helped Bring the Jewish Comic Sensibility to America

March 5 2020

Few people did more than Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner to introduce the raucous Jewish humor of the borscht belt to the American mainstream; although the resorts and hotels where they began their careers are long gone, the two—at ages ninety-three and ninety-seven, respectively—have not lost their comic verve. Hadley Freeman describes an interview with the pair, who have been fast friends since the days when they began performing their 2,000-Year-Old Man routine together:

The 2,000-Year-Old Man is the revered comedy sketch Reiner and Brooks [created] in the 1950s, in which Reiner—always playing the straight man—would interview Brooks, the titular old man, about his life. Despite coming from the same time and place as Jesus, the 2,000-Year-Old Man talked an awful lot like a Jewish guy from 1950s Brooklyn: “I have over 42,000 children and not one of them ever visits me!” was a typical kvetch from Brooks. When Reiner asked what the plague was like, Brooks improvised back, “Too many rats, not enough cats.”

Brooks and Reiner were both born in New York, second-generation Jewish immigrants. America was made by immigrants, but it was these children of immigrants who helped to define Jewish-American comedy, with its mix of joyful silliness and whaddaya-gonna-do shrugs.

“I think Jews were naturally funny because they were low on the totem pole, so they made fun of the people higher on the pole,” says Reiner.

They met working on Sid Caesar’s TV variety show, Your Show of Shows. Other writers who worked for Caesar included Neil Simon and, later, Woody Allen, both of whom also played no small part in the [shaping] of Jewish-American comedy.

Read more at Guardian

More about: American Jewry, Borscht Belt, Jewish humor, Mel Brooks

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023