Name: Theo Talks to a Rabbi About Anti-Semitism
Uploaded: 2024-08-06T15:00:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Talks to a Rabbi About Anti-Semitism' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Talks to a Rabbi About Anti-Semitism' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-06. Transcript available.

and so many of my jewish friends are so like uh they're complex i never i jewish
people are super
complex you know the whole system it's really fun like fun to joke around with
a lot of my jewish
friends if you think up a good joke they like it um i have a i have a theory
about why that's true
okay so here's my here's my theory about why jews are the way they not all but
i mean there's a
variety always but there are two things about jewish history that actually i
think gave jews
certain cultural tendencies one is that our tradition is very book centered
right if you go
into a church you see an image of jesus you go into a synagogue you see a torah
you see a book
we don't have a perfect life in judaism we have a perfect book that makes it
different so you have
to know like literacy based literacy was huge and then the other thing is when
you have to wander
from place to place to place you have to start learning all sorts of different
cultural cues
or you won't make it and so you have to be like intellectually agile because if
you're not
the host country is not going to have any use for you and they're not going to
be able to use you
wow so both those things jews learned and that's why you have so many jews in
comedy and so many
jews in music and so many jews in literature and so they learned the cultural
cues of wherever
they had to wander um which is you know good and bad good and bad well let's
talk about anti-semitism
then yeah if we can is that all right absolutely okay i talk about it all the
time oh you do i do yeah
um yeah because we had it so we had an episode um what a what a weird let's
talk about anti-semitism
is that all right um we had well sometimes i'll be honest with you you get
scared to even
say the word jewish or to say like israel like like it's you feel scared
sometimes like you feel
like like well we had a podcast like roseanne barr was on right and she said
she made a sarcastic
comment she goes yeah she goes yeah and six million jews didn't die in the holocaust
right it was
obvious sarcasm right it was obvious i think if you and me listen of course but
youtube they banned
us for two weeks wow and they took our episode down because they said that we
promoted um
holocaust denialism something like that right and i and so it kind of it
affected me i was like well
shit you know like she is jewish it was like you know it made me kind of angry
kind of not against
jewish people but it made me angry that there was this like that felt like
there was a parade another
parameter where you couldn't speak about things you know so look anti-semitism
is a very it's called the
oldest hatred um it's extremely difficult and there are lots of factors why i
think anti-semitism exists
but at least a big part of it is because judaism and christianity look christianity
came from judaism
and so so judaism was first judaism was first by a couple thousand years oh
damn then they and they
probably were then yeah um and that's why jesus was born jewish saul oh he was
jewish turned to paul
paul's original name was saul oh really yes he was jewish um and and the what
happened was the
believers in jesus were all jews the early disciples were all jews and the
other jews disagreed with
them and i don't know about you but in my experience family fights are
sometimes the worst fights and this
was a family fight it was like they all knew each other they all grew together
it was a very small
community they were all jews together and now they disagreed about this huge
thing it's like you know
the fight over the thanksgiving dinner table between the democrats and the
republicans
unfortunately the family fight got put into a book called the new testament
that lasts forever
and so for thousands of years christians would read this not with a sense of oh
that's my jewish
brother and i'm fighting him but that's the person who killed and denied the
god that i believe in
and that's a very powerful thing to i mean the history of christian anti-semitism
is long and
very ugly they've had a lot of beef and christians and then muslims have their
own history of anti-semitism
not from most of history as bad as christian but still and when you put that
together and then jews
aren't allowed to own land in almost any land in medieval um europe so what do
you do if you don't don't
own land you become a money lender it's the only other job you can do you can't
farm the land you
can't grow so jews were money nobody likes a money lender because then you owe
them money and jews
every time people owed too much money you know what they would do they would
kick the jews out of the
country then they don't owe money anymore and so jews got kicked from land to
land to land to land
um and and because they lived in all these different lands it became easy to
develop conspiracies about
them that land spain or not spain actually spain kicked his jews out in 1492
but let's say that land
x or y that we kicked the jews out now they're attacking us it must be the jews
that did it and
it's always always great to have someone to to blame your own problems oh yeah
everybody wants an enemy
everybody wants somebody to point the finger so you put a lot of these things
together
and you get um this enduring hatred and this very selective like people don't
go on the internet and
say you know what jonas salk gave us the polio vaccine and and einstein gave us
modern relativity
and freud gave us psychology and and proust gave us the greatest modern novel
no they say jeffrey epstein
gave us pedophilia and you can do that with any group the difference is of
course people don't do
it with any group they don't look and say okay what white anglo-saxon protestants
have done terrible
things let's make a huge chart of all of them and put it on the internet and
say you see white anglo-saxon
protestants are terrible no but they do it with jews yeah that's interesting
man that's one way of
thinking about it i mean it's it's unfortunate too sorry yeah no no no so i'm
saying it is weird
sometimes it's like yeah i'd never thought about it no of course why i mean it's
not like and i think
some of maybe like i don't know if like i don't notice i mean i grew up in a
place that was like
racial division and stuff we didn't have any jewish folks my mom dated a jewish
guy actually for a
little bit named and he would drive so far to get gas that was a little cheaper
but we just thought
it was funny and he got us tickets to like our first football game we ever went
to and you know uh nice
guy um and he was black and jewish i didn't even know that he could do that yes
and then um well
that's the other thing is that jews are white to the left but they're not white
to the right
it's weird like the clan doesn't think of jews as white right but all those
kids on campus were
saying jews are white colonialists well if you go to israel more than 50
percent of the jews in israel
are what are called jews of color some from ethiopia the others from arab lands
wow so jocs baby yeah
that's cool yeah they got some beautiful jew jewish uh ladies i've seen on the
internet probably men
too i haven't looked at them but i believe that there are some we got to get
you to israel yeah hey look
dude i could end up over there a jewish lady asked me to marry her one time but
she only gave me like
seven hours to decide and i was like that's a little that's a little bit of a
deadline there oh dude i
asked for more time and she's like i've had enough of you i'm like then this is
too much i think that
you probably made a wise decision anybody gives you seven hours to decide yeah
i was like yeah this
marriage wouldn't last um why did you jewish people have so much success is
that a fair question to ask
you sure sure because a lot of my jewish friends are successful it's like dude
the more places i go
where it's like i see like oh this is a jewish business owner or a jewish thinker
facilitator you
know it's almost like sometimes i think of them as like glue-ish right it's
like they're kind of the
like they're they're they're just they find ways to like create value you know
like um so what i would
say to you yeah i think first of all what i would go back to what i said before
about there's a
tradition of literacy and they had to learn the cultural codes but remember
that this is now and and
yes that's true that certain jewish groups in the past have had but they're i
mean like if you think
about the jews of eastern europe the ones who were killed by them they were
poor as dirt i mean they
lived on farms they like barely eked out a living they were in there but that's
true even now even now
there's like i think 10 to 12 percent of jews live under the poverty line they're
always but the
people that you know of course are the people who are successful and there are
a disproportionate to our own
proportion successful jews like i think it's like 20 to 22 percent of all the
nobel prizes in the
world have been won by jews even though we're 0.1 percent of the world damn
dude which is amazing
fucking pull it somebody's got to start a comeback but here's the question in
reaction to that if you
knew that about another group would you automatically think well of them or
think badly of them the
weird thing is that people look at that at jews and they think badly of them if
i told you for example
which is true the highest ethnic or racial or religious earning group in america
is do you know
hold on give me 30 seconds okay um the highest racial or ethnic earning group
in america is
i would probably say uh persians nigerians no way because of this email is not
wild no no not the i'm
talking about in america oh living here living here nigerians which is amazing
and yet nobody says
those damn nigerians yeah they take all our jobs they do all these terrible no
there's it's because
there are these ancient prejudices that then people turn against the jews i
would think if people i mean
look the people who took their money from harvard and penn and so on their
grandparents weren't wealthy
right i mean these are people who made tremendous success and then turned
around and turned
philanthropic and then people say look at those dirty jews yeah and i think
what what do you want what
do you want from us how do you want from the world what do you do exactly i
mean nobody looks at bill
gates again and says dirty wasps yeah they look at mark zuckerberg and say
dirty jew what does wasps
mean white white anglo-saxon protestant oh they do yeah wasps yeah yeah you
know it's interesting
it's interesting to think about i appreciate you talking about it with me too
because it's like
i always just get afraid like sometimes i think in hollywood like you know like
there's just a lot
of jewish folks it's been you know yeah and it's i don't have any thoughts
about it except that
sometimes you like so at that point you you build stereotype you build like you
know you wonder like
oh well do they have something against me if i'm not having successes or so i
can see how some people's
schools of thoughts are like um in hollywood well also we we really we have a
tendency to group groups
together so people will say this about the blacks and this about the mexicans
and this about the jews
and this about on and on about the hicks about the you know it doesn't matter
right exactly freckles
irish jesus christ i know and so and so that's also something that that
everybody is just normal
some of it is normal but it's also we know like we know that it's not really
that it doesn't really
work like do some groups loosely have characteristics yes but not enough that
like yeah you know this
group is good and this group is bad and also those characteristics change i
know that this shocks
people but when jews first came in the early 1900s they didn't want to let them
in for immigration
because they had low iqs no that was what they said because we don't realize
how quickly cultural
stereotypes change from one thing to to another um it's interesting yeah
sometimes it feels like like
because there's so many successful jewish people in the u.s it feels like that
america kind of has
become just like a um like a llc or something you know do you feel like that
that israel like owns america
now is that a crazy question yeah it is actually okay um i i mean there's never
been a jewish president
there's never been a jewish vice president have we ever tried to have we ever
as any have a jewish
president ever run did bloomberg almost won was he jewish or not yeah bloomberg
yes bloomberg is
really run that hard he ran well he ran as hard as he could but the point is he
didn't he didn't win
um the majority of people who own wealth in america are not jewish if you look
at the top 20 families
there are a number of jews on them but the majority aren't so the idea again
maybe that's a stereotype
it's not a stereotype it's conspiracy thinking okay which is actually more
dangerous in some ways
than a stereotype no group runs america you hear all the time that like this
group does or that group
does or are you those kinds of conspiracies no no no i actually i'm really glad
you asked i think it's
really important a little like i think it's really important conspiracy
theories are almost always
based on some previous prejudice that people have or would you even say in the
beginning what was
the first thing we said we've almost gone full circle here conspiracy theories
are based sometimes
on there well conspiracy theories are a desire to to do two things one is to
explain a world that's
inexplicable why did these things happen i know there are complex causes but i'd
like a simple one
right and the other thing is it relieves you of any responsibility everything
that's bad that
happens it's those other people that are doing it yeah but i gotta tell you i've
been a rabbi now for
decades i know many of the most successful and powerful jews in the world some
of them i know very well
they haven't let me in on the conspiracy and i i mean and i would love to know
okay no that's cool to
know because sometimes you're like yeah you just i think um i think sometimes
that's some of that's
hollywood it's like you just feel like that since so many people are jewish
sometimes you feel like oh
they all kind of work together and that you if you're not jewish sometimes you
feel like they don't
care or that you're an outsider and some of that could be your own thinking it
could be and and there
certainly is a function that every group works that way but if you go to most
of america farm and it's a lot of
farmers right and it's a lot of like baptist farmers they're gonna but also
behaviors also you see you
see jews if you go to la new york chicago miami yeah but you know like growing
up in louisiana
yeah we had two maybe two jewish people maybe yeah and one guy i don't think he
was somebody just
wrote jewish person on his back or whatever so um um it's uh but i know i think
it's great actually
it's much better to ask even the really difficult questions the questions that
might be offensive and
let somebody answer them than to leave them unasked because then you know you
think ah he he had no
answer for that one that's why he didn't say that yeah um i don't ever think
like that i think like
okay what am i maybe a little bit scared to ask right now or how or what it was
like well that's
the other thing i was going to say is when you talked about how it's hard
sometimes to talk about
jews it's like every group is so sensitive now so sensitive yeah um that yeah
you used to be able
to make fun of like i know i think it's coming back a little bit listen don rickles
i don't know if you
remember he was a member of my con he was a member of my congregation and he
would you saw him there oh yeah
he was merciless first time he met me okay i'm the rabbi first time he met me i
was young obviously
the first time he met me i have i've never and i'm introduced don rickles i'm
like very intimidated
he looks at me for a second he goes don't worry your skin will clear up that
was the first thing
the first thing just yeah right and i just and of course i cracked up yeah but
but it's like
it's a shame that people can't i think we're getting back to it i think a lot
of it has just been
it's just some of society on sorry some of society sir just like of um yeah
like every like i don't
know we got into this crazy stuff in the media things used to be able to be funnier
now live comedy
i think is still very good i think it's the stuff that you you know that one
person can object to
and put on social media or two people i mean obviously there are things you can
say that are
truly objectionable it's not i'm like i'm a rabbi i take things seriously but
you have to be able to
laugh at yourself you really do if you can't then you'll just find that other
people do it for you
and when it comes to like different it's like in the end your your thought
always has to be when
it comes to different groups whether it's jewish people black people uh illiterate
people chinese
or whatever women men we all have to live together in the world right and so it's
like
like i think when i was younger i was probably maybe like a little more dumb
about stuff or
whatever we all were but yeah we all were right but then as you know you're
like well the only way
this all it either yeah goes left or it goes like straight it kind of conjoins
more you know the world
is a boat yeah and you know you can't you can't drill a hole only under your
seat if it goes down
it goes down for everybody yeah that's interesting and that kind of keeps us
all having it should
keep us all making sure that our neighbor has a life vest in a way yeah exactly
nice you know because
that's really important if it goes down for one of us it can go down for all of
us yeah yeah
Thank you.

Theo Talks to a Rabbi About Anti-Semitism

and so many of my jewish friends are so like uh they're complex i never i jewish
people are super
complex you know the whole system it's really fun like fun to joke around with
a lot of my jewish
friends if you think up a good joke they like it um i have a i have a theory
about why that's true
okay so here's my here's my theory about why jews are the way they not all but
i mean there's a
variety always but there are two things about jewish history that actually i
think gave jews
certain cultural tendencies one is that our tradition is very book centered
right if you go
into a church you see an image of jesus you go into a synagogue you see a torah
you see a book
we don't have a perfect life in judaism we have a perfect book that makes it
different so you have
to know like literacy based literacy was huge and then the other thing is when
you have to wander
from place to place to place you have to start learning all sorts of different
cultural cues
or you won't make it and so you have to be like intellectually agile because if
you're not
the host country is not going to have any use for you and they're not going to
be able to use you
wow so both those things jews learned and that's why you have so many jews in
comedy and so many
jews in music and so many jews in literature and so they learned the cultural
cues of wherever
they had to wander um which is you know good and bad good and bad well let's
talk about anti-semitism
then yeah if we can is that all right absolutely okay i talk about it all the
time oh you do i do yeah
um yeah because we had it so we had an episode um what a what a weird let's
talk about anti-semitism
is that all right um we had well sometimes i'll be honest with you you get
scared to even
say the word jewish or to say like israel like like it's you feel scared
sometimes like you feel
like like well we had a podcast like roseanne barr was on right and she said
she made a sarcastic
comment she goes yeah she goes yeah and six million jews didn't die in the holocaust
right it was
obvious sarcasm right it was obvious i think if you and me listen of course but
youtube they banned
us for two weeks wow and they took our episode down because they said that we
promoted um
holocaust denialism something like that right and i and so it kind of it
affected me i was like well
shit you know like she is jewish it was like you know it made me kind of angry
kind of not against
jewish people but it made me angry that there was this like that felt like
there was a parade another
parameter where you couldn't speak about things you know so look anti-semitism
is a very it's called the
oldest hatred um it's extremely difficult and there are lots of factors why i
think anti-semitism exists
but at least a big part of it is because judaism and christianity look christianity
came from judaism
and so so judaism was first judaism was first by a couple thousand years oh
damn then they and they
probably were then yeah um and that's why jesus was born jewish saul oh he was
jewish turned to paul
paul's original name was saul oh really yes he was jewish um and and the what
happened was the
believers in jesus were all jews the early disciples were all jews and the
other jews disagreed with
them and i don't know about you but in my experience family fights are
sometimes the worst fights and this
was a family fight it was like they all knew each other they all grew together
it was a very small
community they were all jews together and now they disagreed about this huge
thing it's like you know
the fight over the thanksgiving dinner table between the democrats and the
republicans
unfortunately the family fight got put into a book called the new testament
that lasts forever
and so for thousands of years christians would read this not with a sense of oh
that's my jewish
brother and i'm fighting him but that's the person who killed and denied the
god that i believe in
and that's a very powerful thing to i mean the history of christian anti-semitism
is long and
very ugly they've had a lot of beef and christians and then muslims have their
own history of anti-semitism
not from most of history as bad as christian but still and when you put that
together and then jews
aren't allowed to own land in almost any land in medieval um europe so what do
you do if you don't don't
own land you become a money lender it's the only other job you can do you can't
farm the land you
can't grow so jews were money nobody likes a money lender because then you owe
them money and jews
every time people owed too much money you know what they would do they would
kick the jews out of the
country then they don't owe money anymore and so jews got kicked from land to
land to land to land
um and and because they lived in all these different lands it became easy to
develop conspiracies about
them that land spain or not spain actually spain kicked his jews out in 1492
but let's say that land
x or y that we kicked the jews out now they're attacking us it must be the jews
that did it and
it's always always great to have someone to to blame your own problems oh yeah
everybody wants an enemy
everybody wants somebody to point the finger so you put a lot of these things
together
and you get um this enduring hatred and this very selective like people don't
go on the internet and
say you know what jonas salk gave us the polio vaccine and and einstein gave us
modern relativity
and freud gave us psychology and and proust gave us the greatest modern novel
no they say jeffrey epstein
gave us pedophilia and you can do that with any group the difference is of
course people don't do
it with any group they don't look and say okay what white anglo-saxon protestants
have done terrible
things let's make a huge chart of all of them and put it on the internet and
say you see white anglo-saxon
protestants are terrible no but they do it with jews yeah that's interesting
man that's one way of
thinking about it i mean it's it's unfortunate too sorry yeah no no no so i'm
saying it is weird
sometimes it's like yeah i'd never thought about it no of course why i mean it's
not like and i think
some of maybe like i don't know if like i don't notice i mean i grew up in a
place that was like
racial division and stuff we didn't have any jewish folks my mom dated a jewish
guy actually for a
little bit named and he would drive so far to get gas that was a little cheaper
but we just thought
it was funny and he got us tickets to like our first football game we ever went
to and you know uh nice
guy um and he was black and jewish i didn't even know that he could do that yes
and then um well
that's the other thing is that jews are white to the left but they're not white
to the right
it's weird like the clan doesn't think of jews as white right but all those
kids on campus were
saying jews are white colonialists well if you go to israel more than 50
percent of the jews in israel
are what are called jews of color some from ethiopia the others from arab lands
wow so jocs baby yeah
that's cool yeah they got some beautiful jew jewish uh ladies i've seen on the
internet probably men
too i haven't looked at them but i believe that there are some we got to get
you to israel yeah hey look
dude i could end up over there a jewish lady asked me to marry her one time but
she only gave me like
seven hours to decide and i was like that's a little that's a little bit of a
deadline there oh dude i
asked for more time and she's like i've had enough of you i'm like then this is
too much i think that
you probably made a wise decision anybody gives you seven hours to decide yeah
i was like yeah this
marriage wouldn't last um why did you jewish people have so much success is
that a fair question to ask
you sure sure because a lot of my jewish friends are successful it's like dude
the more places i go
where it's like i see like oh this is a jewish business owner or a jewish thinker
facilitator you
know it's almost like sometimes i think of them as like glue-ish right it's
like they're kind of the
like they're they're they're just they find ways to like create value you know
like um so what i would
say to you yeah i think first of all what i would go back to what i said before
about there's a
tradition of literacy and they had to learn the cultural codes but remember
that this is now and and
yes that's true that certain jewish groups in the past have had but they're i
mean like if you think
about the jews of eastern europe the ones who were killed by them they were
poor as dirt i mean they
lived on farms they like barely eked out a living they were in there but that's
true even now even now
there's like i think 10 to 12 percent of jews live under the poverty line they're
always but the
people that you know of course are the people who are successful and there are
a disproportionate to our own
proportion successful jews like i think it's like 20 to 22 percent of all the
nobel prizes in the
world have been won by jews even though we're 0.1 percent of the world damn
dude which is amazing
fucking pull it somebody's got to start a comeback but here's the question in
reaction to that if you
knew that about another group would you automatically think well of them or
think badly of them the
weird thing is that people look at that at jews and they think badly of them if
i told you for example
which is true the highest ethnic or racial or religious earning group in america
is do you know
hold on give me 30 seconds okay um the highest racial or ethnic earning group
in america is
i would probably say uh persians nigerians no way because of this email is not
wild no no not the i'm
talking about in america oh living here living here nigerians which is amazing
and yet nobody says
those damn nigerians yeah they take all our jobs they do all these terrible no
there's it's because
there are these ancient prejudices that then people turn against the jews i
would think if people i mean
look the people who took their money from harvard and penn and so on their
grandparents weren't wealthy
right i mean these are people who made tremendous success and then turned
around and turned
philanthropic and then people say look at those dirty jews yeah and i think
what what do you want what
do you want from us how do you want from the world what do you do exactly i
mean nobody looks at bill
gates again and says dirty wasps yeah they look at mark zuckerberg and say
dirty jew what does wasps
mean white white anglo-saxon protestant oh they do yeah wasps yeah yeah you
know it's interesting
it's interesting to think about i appreciate you talking about it with me too
because it's like
i always just get afraid like sometimes i think in hollywood like you know like
there's just a lot
of jewish folks it's been you know yeah and it's i don't have any thoughts
about it except that
sometimes you like so at that point you you build stereotype you build like you
know you wonder like
oh well do they have something against me if i'm not having successes or so i
can see how some people's
schools of thoughts are like um in hollywood well also we we really we have a
tendency to group groups
together so people will say this about the blacks and this about the mexicans
and this about the jews
and this about on and on about the hicks about the you know it doesn't matter
right exactly freckles
irish jesus christ i know and so and so that's also something that that
everybody is just normal
some of it is normal but it's also we know like we know that it's not really
that it doesn't really
work like do some groups loosely have characteristics yes but not enough that
like yeah you know this
group is good and this group is bad and also those characteristics change i
know that this shocks
people but when jews first came in the early 1900s they didn't want to let them
in for immigration
because they had low iqs no that was what they said because we don't realize
how quickly cultural
stereotypes change from one thing to to another um it's interesting