Jamie Elman, YidLife Crisis:
Creating Comedy While Reclaiming Yiddish
Exhibit by Patrick Stinebaugh and Sophia Schilb
YidLife Crisis’ Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion are Jewish comedians from Montreal, Canada. Jamie, who we interviewed for this assignment. Elman comes from a traditional Jewish family, and he attended a Jewish day school for the first seventeen years of his life. Language has always been a major part of Jamie’s life; aside from learning English and French as a result of living in Montreal, he learned both Hebrew and Yiddish as part of his education at the day school, albeit not to an entirely fluent level, as he did not speak either at home. In high school Jamie met Eli Batalion, his eventual partner in the creation of the YidLife Crisis series. Eli’s relationship with language is similar to Jamie’s in that he learned Hebrew and Yiddish at school, but they were more integrated into his life as he also spoke some at home. When Jamie and Eli came together to make YidLife Crisis, their comedy series about two Canadian Jews, they decided that the series should take place primarily in Yiddish. They believed that the language of the show could make it feel fresh and would only amplify the comedy. Both of them are huge fans of Jewish comedic creations such as Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live. They believe those comedies, while not in Yiddish, are influenced by Yiddish in their cadence and “musicality,” and that making their own series in Yiddish could achieve a different version of the same effect. Sam, our Jewish American respondent, found YidLife Crisis to be a fun exploration of the Jewish identity through language. His family is Ashkenazi, and although he did not grow up speaking Yiddish fluently he has fond memories of his older relatives who spoke it well and found YidLife Crisis to be accurate to his encounters with Yiddish and his experiences with the Jewish stereotypes that are often used for laughs by Jamie and Eli.
Chaimie and Leizer spend Christmas Eve at a Chinese restaurant.
YidLife Crisis Season 2, Episode 2, “Chinese Food + Christmas + Jews = Yingl Belz,” invites us to sit down at a Jewish Christmas dinner. It of course takes place in a Chinese restaurant, which plays on the stereotype that Jewish people eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve since they are the only restaurants that remain open during the Christian holiday of Christmas. One of the characters in the episode even compares this Jewish-American and Canadian tradition to be as important to his Jewish identity as lighting the menorah. The entire episode takes place in the restaurant where we can see a Chinese restaurant filled to capacity with middle-aged and older Jewish people who the main characters find to be loud and somewhat annoying. However we come to find out that it has been our main characters who have been annoying their server by assuming he cannot speak English because he is from China, when in fact he not only speaks Chinese but English and Yiddish as well!
The entire episode – except for some small bits at the beginning and end – is spoken entirely in Yiddish with English subtitles. This format allows the audience to be fully immersed into what we believe is a private conversation between the two main characters. We can see how they share their candid opinions with each other in Yiddish but become more formal and switch to speaking in English when their server arrives. This will only add to the language comedy of the show when we find out that their server has understood them the whole time. YidLife Crisis takes advantage of our language ideologies surrounding Yiddish – that it’s only spoken by Ashkenazi Jews – to give a surprise ending that will keep the laughs coming.
The comment section of “Chinese Food + Christmas + Jews = Yingl Belz '' features the diverse audience this show reaches and the impact it has on the Yiddish language. Many comments are like this one shared by Eva Schweber, who says, “Once again, a great episode! And thank you for teaching me mazel kichel.” Schweber refers to a new Yiddish word she learned from the episode: “mazel kichel,” which is Yiddish for “fortune cookie.” Another comment, from Meena la Regina, shares her love for the show and her own language of German. She writes, “Hallo! Ich heiße Meena. Ich mag Ihren Witzen und ich verstehe Yiddish, viel ich Deutsch kann. Wünderbar!”, which translates roughly to, “Hi! My name is Meena. I like your jokes, and I can understand the Yiddish as much as I can German. Wonderful!” The comedic duo even respond to comments with Jewish centric and Yiddish centric puns and jokes. One woman thanks them for their work on the show and calls them "two lovely gentlemen," to which they respond, “Please... call us Yentlemen.” This highlights how this series has had such a positive impact on the spread and language awareness of Yiddish.
Chaimie and Leizer argue over the value of fat: where does it belong, where doesn’t it belong?
YidLife Crisis Season 1, Episode 2, "The Schmaltz," focuses on Jamie and Eli’s fictional characters, Chaimie and Leizer, essentially discussing the significance and importance of fat, or “shmaltz,” in multiple aspects of life. The conversation begins with Leizer in outrage of Chaimie ordering him a smoked meat sandwich without fat on it, and over time transforms into a conversation about Leizer’s own body weight and health, and even further into a debate over what the two believe a woman should look like. In the end the discussion circles back to food as Leizer breaks his “Rosh Hashanah resolution” to eat healthier and indulges himself in a fatty sandwich.
In “The Schmaltz,” YidLife Crisis’ utilization of Jewish language in their comedy is unique in that they are essentially speaking entirely Yiddish with a number of English loanwords, as opposed to many other Jewish comedians and even other YidLife Crisis videos that typically use either entirely Yiddish or English with a few Yiddish loanwords. This usage of language serves the comedy in that, at first glance, it plays into the entire comedic premise of the series – seeing two Jewish-Canadian men speaking Yiddish in locations one would not typically expect to hear Yiddish. The randomly-placed English, such as “smoked meat,” “shrink,” and “badonkadonk,” serves to periodically remind the audience that the entire video takes place in a restaurant in Montreal, heightening the comedic nature of their employment of Yiddish. However, a reveal at the end of the video turns the premise on its head once again in a manner that heightens the language-based comedy of the entire video.
In the last ten seconds of “The Schmaltz,” Chaimie orders a fatty smoked meat sandwich after seeing how much Leizer is enjoying his (an allusion to the famous deli scene in When Harry Met Sally), only he makes his order in Yiddish. This instantly changes one’s perspective on the rest of the video; what the audience believed to be a typical Canadian restaurant based on the establishment’s signs at the start, which are in English and French, is revealed to instead be a restaurant where others may speak Yiddish. Previously the audience had perceived the comedy to be the idea of two men speaking in public about an obscene topic without anyone else understanding them. The ending’s reveal reframes this notion in the opposite light; the two men were in fact speaking about such an obscene topic when others could understand them. The constant subversion adds layer upon layer to the comedy, with each layer only serving to add to the metalinguistic comedy. All throughout “The Schmaltz,” YidLife Crisis turns their use of language itself into a comedic factor, as opposed to making the comedy exclusive to what they use the language for.
The YouTube comments about “The Schmaltz” not only highlight the effectiveness of YidLife Crisis’s usage of Yiddish for comedic purposes, they also highlight the importance of that usage of Yiddish in the context of a greater linguistic discussion. While a number of comments focus on the obviously intended comedy of the episode, such as Pam Miller’s “OK... This is THEEE FUNNIEST thing on film I think I have EVER seen… and I AM including Mel Brooks,” several of the comments take it one step further and discuss how the video connects them to their own experience with Yiddish. One example is Joy Tuc’s comment “Ah, brings back memories of my parents, grandparents, & all the yentas of Brighton Beach, my hometown! Shame they never taught me Yiddish, but I assimilated a few words here & there.” For Joy, the video’s Yiddish stands for her family and all of the cultural experiences of her youth. Another example is Daniel Rende, who states “These are all hilarious and it's really helping with my yiddish lessons! Gezunt!” For Daniel, the video’s Yiddish is actively helping shape his experience learning and connecting with the Yiddish language. These comments throw a new angle into YidLife Crisis’s usage of Yiddish, demonstrating how even the comedic use of the language carries with it all of the cultural and linguistic weight of the community the show represents. YidLife Crisis doubles as representation of Yiddish as a part of Jewish culture in the media and as a tool and catalyst in the revitalization of Yiddish.
Not every comment takes a positive stance on YidLife’s use of Yiddish, however. Russell Mollot, for example, shares his gripe, “This is blasphemous! FUNNY ... but oy! a 'shandeh'. Gevalt!” “Shandeh” refers to an action taken by a Jewish person or group that shames the entire Jewish community, and “gevalt” is an expression of alarm. Essentially, Russell takes issue with the content of the episode, presumably the discussion between Chaimie and Leizer around women and some of the Yiddish euphemisms employed during said discussion, and believes it reflects poorly on the entire Jewish community. So for some, the Yiddish is a way for them to connect or reconnect to their Jewish culture, while for others it is in poor taste and is shameful considering the topic of the discussion.
Respondent interview
Sam is a student at the University of Southern California’s film school, and Denver, Colorado, is where he calls home. He self identifies as an Ashkenazic Jew and traces his Jewish roots back to Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. Although he celebrated his bar mitzvah, he considers himself to be much more culturally Jewish than religiously. Sam shared that growing up he only spoke English; he doesn’t consider himself to be fluent in any other languages, but he added that it was common in his family to use Yiddish words in conversations with each other to make emphasis on something and when just joking around. Both his great-grandparents and his grandmother spoke Polish and Yiddish, however those languages were not passed down to his parents’ or his generation. One language tradition that has been passed down, however, is learning to read Hebrew for religious traditions. He said that everyone in his family had to learn to read Hebrew at one point in order to partake in the coming of age tradition known as the “bar mitzvah” for boys and “bat mitzvah” for girls.
Sam’s experience with Yiddish has led him to feel that Jewish people love to use language to emphasize their points. He loves that Jewish people have a special way to communicate and relate to one another. He said fairly confidently that he feels he can identify other Jews by the way they talk, by their vocal tones, and their vocal patterns. In his opinion he has found that it can sometimes be a harsh way of talking, but that he has many fond memories of Jewish language in his life. When asked if he found the YidLife Crisis videos potentially offensive he simply joked, “Judaism is like a little club. If you’re in it, then you can make fun of it.” He acknowledges and respects the self-deprecating and self-aware humor styles in the Jewish community. “If the writers weren't Jewish, then it would’ve crossed a border and become antisemitic,” he said. Another thing he mentioned could have made it offensive would have been the use of an inaccurate accent, which is used to make the speaker the butt of the joke. This is also known as the “deauthentication of social and linguistic identities” (Chun, 2004). Ultimately, he felt that the display of Judaism and of Yiddish was accurate to his experience as a Jew. He also feels that these types of jokes extend to comedians, writers, and creators who are culturally Jewish as well, and his sentiments did not change after finding out that the creators of the show don’t speak Yiddish fluently. He reiterated his stance that their being Jewish was enough, and because they used Yiddish to make jokes and not as the joke, he wouldn’t consider it offensive or antisemitic.
Comedian interview
Patrick: It does seem like Yiddish was a major part of the series, a major part of your life and work going forward. So what drew you to making Yiddish – or just language in general – a major part of your comedy?
Jamie: When Eli first got in touch and was like, “Hey, so they’re offering this grant, we could do this web-series together if we get the grant, let’s do something funny together…” he basically pitched the idea of “we should do it in Yiddish, whatever it is… because it’ll be new, it’ll be fresh.” He knew we could pull it off because we learned it in high school… I was like “oh, that’s interesting,” because we didn’t know of anybody else doing anything like that… We both love comedy, and we both love Jewish comedy, and we love American comedy – which is not Jewish per se, but in fact much of the great American comedy that we were raised on is Jewish comedy…
Jamie discusses the importance of Jewish comedy to him and to American comedy as a whole.
Jamie: The sort of go-to example we always used was Seinfeld, which, that is like our Torah, that’s like our Talmud… and the idea was that we felt that Seinfeld, like many other Jewish-written comedies out there, are not in Yiddish but are heavily influenced by Yiddish – the cadence, the musicality of the comedy... it wasn’t Yiddish but it was very Jewish, and there was a certain cadence to the Jewish comedy, so we thought, “Well instead of just doing Jewish comedy, why don’t we do it in Yiddish?” The original idea was that we would take Seinfeld episodes and translate them into Yiddish… we realized that we were capable of writing something instead of just translating Seinfeld, and as we were talking about what it could be we realized it would be interesting to talk about what it’s like living “Jewishly” as secular Jews who were very well-educated in Jewish things but are not orthodox and do not live our lives very “Jewishly.” All of the Jewish questions come up in your middle age about, “How should I be Jewish?” and when you move away from home and don’t have to do all the things your family grew up doing, it’s different. Then when you get older, you get to the questions of, “How do I raise my kids Jewish?”, or “Should I marry a Jewish girl?”, and “Should I give my kids a Jewish education?” and all of the complicated questions that come in. We thought, “we should talk about those things in Yiddish.”
Jamie: The other interesting thing about Yiddish is that it’s primarily spoken in the world today only by ultra-Orthodox Jews. The world of secular Jews speaking Yiddish ended in the Holocaust. But Yiddish lives on with the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who continue to speak it in a daily way, including where I’m from. What we found interesting about that is that those ultra-Orthodox Jews, Hasidic Jews, “Black Hats,” tend to use Yiddish as a way of separating themselves from the rest of the world. Even in Montreal or New York, where they’re right on top of the non-Jewish world, they’re speaking this other language that non-Jews can’t speak, and even we as fellow Jews sometimes wonder if they think of us as Jewish, realize that we are Jewish, or realize that some of us can speak Yiddish, which is very rare – Yiddish isn’t even taught anymore at my high school. We thought it’d be interesting to address questions of how to live in the secular Jewish world while using the language that most people associate with the ultra-orthodox, as a way of maybe “reclaiming” Yiddish for secular uses, even though it was always a secular Jewish language.
Jamie discusses how people of varying connections to Judaism can understand and relate differently to YidLife Crisis
Jamie: We would embed, into the episodes, Jewish education. So that if you’re Jewish, you could watch the show and get all the jokes, and there are things in there that we called “J-for-Js,” Jokes for Jews. It means there are certain lines that you might not realize are necessarily a joke or get the full meaning of the joke if you don’t have the Jewish education, but you’d still get most of the show. And I think you or non-Jews who’ve seen the show will tell you they get it, and they know that they might not get every part of it but they get most of it. There’s even jokes in there for Yiddish speakers, meaning if you’re watching the show and you’re reading the subtitles and you don’t speak Yiddish, you’ll get it and you’ll find the laughs, but if you’re [not] also a Yiddish speaker there’s jokes that you won’t have gotten; in other words, we said things in Yiddish that we didn’t translate exactly, but if you’re a Yiddish speaker you’ll get the double-joke, or the nuance we’re doing. All that to say that there is an element of the show that was always meant to be demystifying Judaism, demystifying Jewishness, demystifying Jews, educating non-Jews about what Jews are.
Patrick: You mentioned that you were sort of realizing what you were doing with the Yiddish language as you were writing and producing the show – is there anything that’s changed about your use of or regard towards language as you’ve gone through the experience of making this show?
Jamie: What we learned quickly is: there’s no two Yiddish speakers in the world that speak the same Yiddish. It’s one of those languages. What we tried to do in the first season with the Yiddish was write the show in English, since people would be reading the subtitles – the people who speak Yiddish fluently will likely not ever see the show. We tried to imagine a conceit about the show that was, “What if Jamie and Eli grew up in Montreal like normal, only instead of speaking English to each other they could also speak Yiddish with one another.” If that were the case and we spoke Yiddish, it would be a “Montreal Yiddish,” a Hasidic style of Yiddish from the ultra-Orthodox community. We knew that that Hasidic style of Yiddish was not exactly the same as the academic style of Yiddish that we were taught in high school. We also knew that, being from Montreal, we were also influenced by French, which is part of the Montreal linguistic tapestry. So we were also trying to pepper French into our Yiddish, the same way we would with English. We put this all together by translating our English script, and we had the translation done by Eli’s parents, who are native Yiddish speakers, and a 19-year-old kid who left the Hasidic community, whose first language was Yiddish. What we found out quickly when we put out the Yiddish was that the Yiddishists of the world, the academics of the world, did not appreciate our Yiddish. Some hated it. Some thought it was completely broken and faulty. To this day I kind of disagree with them… but once we realized that we had offended many actual Yiddish academics, we realized that the show was going to get seen by Jews around the world, by linguistic cultural hobbyists around the world. It was brought to our attention that we had a responsibility to make the Yiddish better linguistically. So we went to a hardcore Yiddish academic, Rivka Augenfeld, who did the subsequent translations for us of seasons two and three. We worked with her, and it was a painstaking process of making sure every line is bulletproof to Yiddish academics. What did we find? Other people still managed to say that Yiddish was wrong, and we’d go “No, this woman is a native Yiddish speaker and a professor of Yiddish for the last forty-five years. You’re going to tell us that her Yiddish is wrong?” So yeah, no two speakers in the world speak the same Yiddish. So we realized that we can never make Yiddishists happy, and decided to go ahead and put in our bits of English, French, and Yiddish slang where we wanted.
Jamie: Also, some people might give you this vibe that Yiddish is itself “funny.” Yiddish “sounds funny.” Certain words, because of the sounds of the words, come across as funny in English – that is true. We agree that there are Yiddish words that sound funny. What we had to make sure that people also understood is: Yiddish is not a “funny language.” Yiddish is a colorful language, a thousand-year-old language with lots of expressive expressions, dirty, colorful street language, f*cking horrible insults that you could say to your worst enemy that you couldn’t think of in English, that I love. “May all your teeth fall out except for one, for a toothache.” These are Yiddish insults from hundreds of years of history. Some people thought that we were making fun of Yiddish, or that we thought Yiddish was “just funny,” which is not true. What we will say is that Yiddish is definitely a more expressive language; on “Breaking the Fast,” we didn’t know if we could pull it off, if it would be funny, if people would get it. So when we shot it, the first thing we did was shoot it in English, just as an insurance policy. We performed it, and the crew and people that were there found it “okay.” Then we performed it in Yiddish, and everybody was laughing. We immediately found that our performances were keyed up – we were louder, our hands were moving – and even French-Canadians on our crew who were there shooting for us and didn’t speak Yiddish or English were there laughing at our performances. We asked them in French why they were laughing at it when they didn’t even understand what we were saying, and they said, “It just sounds funny. It sounds like Seinfeld.” They recognized a Seinfeldian cadence even though they don’t speak English or Yiddish. When they told us that, we knew we were onto something; the performance immediately got louder, and our gesticulations got bigger and broader as soon as we did it in Yiddish. We knew there was something comedic about that, but it was comedy that the language was bringing out of us, not that the language itself was funny.
Patrick: You mentioned that some people have gotten offended by you and your use of Yiddish. When do you believe language use or accent imitation crosses a line from funny into offensive territory?
Jamie discusses the importance of intention when considering if a work is offensive or not
Jamie: Intention matters. If you’re putting on what they call “Jew-face,” like Bradley Cooper being cast to play Leonard Bernstein or different non-Jews playing Jews, and they’re doing some kind of “Jewy New York thing”... it could be offensive, but it’s a very fine and nuanced line here about when is it okay and when is it not. This is a very 21st-century question… when is it okay, when is it not okay? I mean look, we had in our episodes, in our Season One episodes we had two characters who our two characters are making fun of, and those two guys that we’re making fun of are ultra-Orthodox Black Hat guys, and those two guys are not Black Hats, they were actors… And we had them making gestures… Why was that okay? Because we were Jewish? Because the intention behind it was actually in the end to be making fun of ourselves…? That’s a delicate and nuanced thing, I think intention does matter, and I think representation matters. I think it’s fine if it happens sometimes. The problem is if every time there’s a Jewish character, it’s a non-Jewish actor putting on the whole show. Intention matters, nuance matters, representation matters. When we see Jewish characters on screen and they get the Hebrew wrong, or get the Judaism wrong, it’s f*cking infuriating. You go, “Aren’t there enough Jews in Hollywood that you could have called and asked someone how to pronounce this word?” It’s a tricky thing, and I think it’s good that people are thinking about it. Too much “wokeism” may be the death of comedy, but at the same time, Jews are tired, tired of antisemitic portrayals of Jews that are not being controlled by us. The feedback we got on YidLife was that it was okay because we knew what we were talking about, we were clearly knowledgeable about Judaism. All that said, it’s still a nuanced topic.
Implications
The subjects tackled in the YidLife Crisis series focus generally on western life as the show takes place in Montreal, and they keep their focus on the Ashkenazic traditions and culture, which makes sense because the ultimate focus of their series is the Yiddish language which was traditionally spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. This matches the migration patterns of the Jews who immigrated to North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the case of this web series most of its viewers aren’t going to be fluent or native Yiddish speakers, so it’s going to be approached in a postvernacular way. “As it implies, the term postvernacular relates to Yiddish in a manner that both is other than its use as a language of daily life and is responsive to the language having once been a widely used Jewish vernacular” (Shandler, 2005). Even the comedians who act in and created the show do not speak Yiddish fluently, and YidLife Crisis focusing on Yiddish even though the comedians aren’t fluent show the larger trend that is happening in certain Jewish communities – the revitalization of Yiddish.
Contemporary North American Jewish language practices and language ideologies are unique and diverse because of the many distinct historical Jewish languages across the globe. Our findings regarding language ideology in our interview with Elman were focused specifically on his perspective as a secular educated Jew in Montreal towards the Jewish ultra-orthodox/Black Hat community in Montreal. Elman believes that the Jewish ultra-orthodox community has used Yiddish to separate and isolate itself from the rest of the world, which is not how he believes Yiddish should be used. Instead he wanted, as a goal of YidLife Crisis, to help reclaim Yiddish for the Jewish secular community.
This goal reflects other contemporary language practices we have learned about, in particular the infusion of Hebrew into American Jewish life through summer camps. Similar to how YidLife Crisis does not intend to teach Yiddish to any viewers or even give the viewers any tools to learn Yiddish but rather intends to build an interest in Yiddish that an individual could be inspired to act upon, American Jewish summer camps infuse Hebrew into activities with the goal of building interest in Hebrew among campers instead of teaching it to them for communicative purposes (Benor et al., 2020). Jamie’s experience learning Yiddish in his education is also similar to the issues encountered teaching Hebrew in American education; while the institution sets language proficiency as their goal, they often find it unattainable in the amount of time they have, which relates to Jamie’s experience of having been taught Yiddish throughout school but never gaining a true mastery of it, having to study on his own as an adult to be able to perform in YidLife Crisis (Benor, 2018).
This web series is an important example of language contact in the modern day through its format on a free website and app, so that almost anyone can come into contact with Yiddish. It shows an effort to revitalize and destigmatize Yiddish because the Yiddish language itself isn’t the butt of the joke. They use Yiddish in a way that celebrates it. It highlights how the Jewish community interacts with Yiddish to express a Jewish and Ashkenazic identity. In many of their video clips Yiddish isn’t the only language featured, and YidLife Crisis highlights the powerful effects of translanguaging. According to Sara Vogel and Ofelia García, “all users of language, select and deploy particular features from a unitary linguistic repertoire to make meaning and to negotiate particular communicative contexts” (Vogel and Gracía, 2017). Although the actors themselves do not speak Yiddish fluently, their characters do, and at times they are translanguaging, drawing from Yiddish, English, and French. In short, in this series, characters could choose to express themselves in English but find that they can be their most authentic self in Yiddish.
Bibliography
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Shandler J. 2005. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture. 1st ed. University of California Press. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1ppkmf.
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Vogel, Sara, & Ofelia García. 2017. “Translanguaging.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Chun, Elaine W. 2004. “Ideologies of Legitimate Mockery: Margaret Cho’s Revoicings of Mock Asian.” Pragmatics 14/2-3: 263-289.
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Benor, Sarah Bunin, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni. 2020. “The Building Blocks of Infusion.” In Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps. Rutgers University Press.
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Benor, Sarah Bunin. 2018. “Hebrew Infusion in American Jewish Life: Tensions and the Role of Israeli Hebrew.” In Sokoloff, Naomi B., and Nancy E. Berg, eds., What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). University of Washington Press.