Richard Belzer, proud Jew.

Seha might have fit in in Chelm.

And why his comedy matters.

“What’s purple, hangs on the wall, and whistles?”

Before Groucho Marx and Henny Youngman, there was Broka Ḥoza’ah.

Jews, power, and jokes.

The almost-one-hundred-year-old men.

“I am a Jew. What about it?”

Ironic inversions unite two narratives of redemption.

The Tractate of Drunkards.

And its theology of laughter.

Trapped in a cycle of naïveté and doom.

A comedian who embodied a Jewish stereotype from which the sting of prejudice had been leached.