2 min read
When comedian Alex Edelman discussed being Jewish on Radio Four he was hit by a flood of antisemitic tweets.
“There’s something about discussing Jewish identity that really rankled with people,” he tells me on the phone from Edinburgh where he’s preparing for his Fringe show Just for Us which (book now, people) is likely to be a sell-out.
He started looking at the tweets of the people abusing him and discovered that some of them seemed to be connected — and one was promoting a meeting for people “not ashamed of their whiteness.” So Edelman decided to go along, and found himself at a White Nationalist meeting on Long Island, in a flat that was “well-furnished in a boring way, a little hoardery, looking like it had been quickly tidied up.”
There were about a dozen people there, “They were intense. They felt very aggrieved. I almost felt sorry for them if they hadn’t been, you know, Nazis.” It was frightening, but also “exhilarating,” he says, “I was driven by curiosity.”
To find out what happened next, make sure you catch Edelman’s show. If it’s anything like his others, you’re in for a treat. He won the Fringe’s Best Newcomer award for his first show Millennial – about very traumatic stock photos and young people. The follow-up, Everything Handed to You — about identity and the availability of plug sockets in airports— got rave reviews and sold out its entire Edinburgh run. (You can see it in full on Netflix)
Jewish identity is at the core of his comedy because it’s been at the core of his life. Brought up in a Modern Orthodox home in Boston (in a “really good, lovely family”) he spent a year at yeshivah in Jerusalem, where he set up a comedy club which has only just closed after ten years. His father is a doctor, his mother’s a lawyer and Adam, one of his younger brothers represented Israel in the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country’s only skeleton racer. Edelman’s very proud of his brother and the Olympian’s story is part of the show.
Edelman cites a long list of Jewish comedy influences, from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Mel Brooks, pointing out that in the US “comedy is Jewish, it has its foundations in the vaudeville, the Catskill comics.” Things are different in the UK, he says where people are “a little less religious than the US”. He likes the way British people question him about his beliefs with “a healthy sense of atheism”.
He still identifies as Modern Orthodox, “although I do eat in places without a hechsher, and I sometimes do shows on Friday nights.”
When I speak to him, he’s grabbing a vegetarian lunch with Ari Shaffir, another American comedian who grew up Orthodox and went to yeshiva (Shaffir’s show, entitled , starkly Jew is at Heroes @the Hive), before rushing off to tech his show.
Edelman talks about his love of community, whether it’s the Jewish one he grew up in, the yeshiva in Jerusalem or the world of comedy. “That’s why I love festivals like this. I get to speak to my peers, see their work and push myself to be better.”
One last question, why does his promo picture show him tied to a chair? “Err...the PR lady thought it would be a good idea!”
Alex Edelman: Just For Us is at the Pleasance Courtyard Bar, August 4 to 26 (exceptAugust 13)
www.edfringe.com