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Comedian who says get er done11/17/2023 ![]() “Just For Us” obviously addresses Jewish identity directly. I hate you! Because every old person… they’re like, ‘My house is worth $2 million, but when I bought it in 1981, I paid 11 raspberries for it!'”Įdelman’s previous work touches on his Judaism, including his first two comedy specials: “Millennial,” about his generation and “Everything Handed to You,” about his family. “How is any young person ever gonna own a home?” he says in an exasperated tone, almost yelling to the audience. Edelman’s “most resonant joke,” he said, is about how hard it is for people of his generation to buy a house. On stage he can be more bombastic and intense. That tone - patient and thoughtful - is how Edelman comes off in person. “I have lots of patient conversations with people about Jews and Judaism because I am, to some people, the most Jewish person they’ve ever met… I don’t view it as part of my job but I do view it as part of my personhood.” “Is it frustrating to have to do a documentary for the BBC where you explain that Jews are people?” he said. In 2019, Edelman made a four-minute documentary about antisemitism for the BBC, in which he manages to cover an impressive amount of ground - from summarizing historical tropes about international Jewish conspiracies to describing the discomfort Jews often feel when they’re buttonholed by people asking their opinion on Israeli policies. He’s also performed the show in Berlin, which was weird, he said, “only because they don’t speak a ton of English.” He got his big break in 2014, when he was named Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and has done a fair amount of work since then in the U.K., which has seen an ongoing antisemitism controversy plague its political system for the past several years. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t think antisemitism is ever going out of style.”Įdelman is also excited to perform the show in front of an audience that will presumably have a substantial number of Jews, which is a rarity for him. That is a huge part of the show, and that has not changed,” he said. “At the core of this show is the conversation about Judaism and, in particular, my Judaism and its relation to whiteness. Tellingly, he feels that the show is just as relevant after three years in which the experience of antisemitism has changed significantly - from the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to the antisemitic rhetoric that accompanied the 2020 election to, most recently, antisemitic tropes in debates over COVID vaccines. ![]() He’s excited to perform “Just For Us,” which premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2018 and later, he said, “took a nap” for the pandemic. The relative ubiquity of good smoked fish isn’t the only reason Edelman is happy to be back in New York. Brown’s cream soda and a decent tuna sandwich, and I’m all for it.” But when you’re on the road, you take what you can get, and they’ve got Dr. “You can find a deli almost in any city,” he said. But Edelman said that he tries to visit delis in every place he performs, whether it’s Denver, L.A. the “Jewish rye bread” sold at the counter and a menu heavy on both smoked fish and pastrami). We met at Sable’s, a classic New York City deli on the Upper East Side that probably qualifies as one of the most Jewish places ever (cf. On a video of the performance, you can hear an Israeli in the crowd yell “Good for you!” in Hebrew.)Įdelman has managed to make food a recurring theme in his exploration of what it means to be Jewish in a country and world that is overwhelmingly not. (“Jews either love that joke, or they’re upset by it,” he told me. I’m that kind of Jew… I’ve tried cocaine but I’ve never tried bacon.” Appearing on the late-night show “Conan” in 2018, Edelman told the crowd, “I’ve never had bacon. Negotiating the boundary between Jews and non-Jews has always been an undercurrent of life for Edelman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who attended Jewish day school in the Boston area and studied for a year in an Israeli yeshiva. They are entirely secondary to me talking about how I feel about myself.” Maybe this is revealing, but the show’s about me. He added later, “Everyone focuses on the white identity people at the center of the meeting, these racists. “Broadly, it’s about, What does it mean to be a Jew in a space that’s not Jewish?” he said. But even as the show tells the story of that meeting, Edelman emphasized that “Just For Us” isn’t about antisemitism - it’s about what it’s like for Ashkenazi Jews to navigate whiteness in America. That hobby led him to attend a meeting of white nationalists in New York City in 2017 - a story that forms the core of his latest solo show, “Just For Us,” which opens off-Broadway on Dec. Edelman, a comedian who has appeared on late-night TV and recently opened for the musician Beck, is also an amateur tracker of online antisemites in his spare time.
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