Reform rabbi defends the "right to offend" after Jimmy Carr genocide joke

A leading Reform rabbi has defended Jimmy Carr's right to make offensive jokes about the Holocaust, but called the comedian "tasteless."

In a letter to the Times newspaper, Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead synagogue said that while he "deplored" aspects of Jimmy Carr's humour, he believed the right to make offensive jokes was "sacrosanct."

Rabbi Romain, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, was responding to outrage at a clip from Mr. Carr's recent standup special on Netflix where he implied that the deaths of thousands of Roma and Gypsy people were a positive of the Holocaust.

In the show, he said, “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of gypsies that were killed by the Nazis."