History Hyenas with Chris Distefano and Yannis Pappas - 139 - Moshe Kasher is WILD!

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Moshe Kasher is in with the Cuzzies to talk about the authenticity of Unorthodox on Netflix and how he half grew up in the Orthodox community! Get a look behind the silver line in a first hand account from this screwed in kid!Want more Hyena content? Check out www.patreon.com/bayridgeboys where things get really WILD!Follow us!: 🙆🏼‍♂️🐕🙆🏻‍♂️🙆🏼‍♂️Chris Distefano on Instagram, Twitter, website🙆🏻‍♂️Yannis Pappas on Instagram, Twitter, website🐕History Hyenas on Instagram, Twitter, website Subscribe to the poddy woddy on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and HH Clips

ស្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែលាប់ប្រូវតែល Okay, welcome to another episode of the History Hyenas. Closeted Chrissy, Yanni Yahya here. We're going to be talking today about the Netflix show we watched, Yannis and I watched, called Unorthodox. It's something I don't know. I don't even know. It's just about Hasidic Jews running wild, and then one of them escapes and gets to Germany, and we thought the perfect person to talk about this would be someone

who escaped it himself, the great Moshe Kasher, who we know for a fact has got a circumcised penis, and I heard it's pretty big. Who'd you hear that from, Giannis? Yes. Yes, exactly. I'm sorry about that, but you know in these hard times, I told him on Patreon for money for our fans, and he slipped and just did it for free.

No, listen. If you're going to spread rumors, that's a good rumor to spread. Yeah, it's big, it's cut, it's thick. It's really great. Yeah, and I wanted to wear these glasses to feel more Jewish, but they don't have frames, just FYI. By the way, your producer, when they emailed me, called me Moishe, which I thought was a little bit anti-Semitic.

But probably in tone with what we're about to do here. Well, listen, we'll get her. We'll fucking burn her alive for you. Yeah, her name is Venetia. She's a black girl from the Bronx. Oh, she did her best. She's trying her best. But you know what?

She still wears Uggs, and she's upset because your job at Applebee's and Fulton mall, Brooklyn is on hold right now. So Moshe, babe, so let me ask you this. So when we watch, cause Giannis is the one who told me about it.

He goes, you got to watch this show on Orthodox fucking wild. And then I watch it. I couldn't stop watching it because I grew up and Giannis and Giannis, I both grew up in Brooklyn, a few train stops away from Williamsburg, which is now all Whole Foods and Gentrified. But we, I would see the Hasidic Jewish people, you know, going like crossing the street and stuff. And, you know, my grandpa, you know, again, my grandpa's, you know, old school guys. So he would say, hey, like,, hey, the Hasidic Jewish community locked the doors. If you hit one of them, you get points or whatever. But we wouldn't. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

But my grandfather does not eat sushi because he fought in World War II. They fought in World War II as well. They just didn't win. Yeah. That's true. That's a good point. Well, listen. Well, listen.

You know what I mean? That's part of losing guy we don't eat your fucking food anymore so no but my question to you is because i'm just obviously i'm kidding but i i thought that i understand it's a very closed off community but like because i've been around them so much and seen them i'm like i know what's going on and then as soon as the show started there was a a silver line that was broken that would go around the neighborhood and nobody could leave. And I was like, what the fuck is that? I drove up and down these streets my whole life. I've never noticed the line. What's the line? What's it called? You both live in Manhattan? No, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn. We're from Brooklyn. You might live in an era of and not even know it because it's this weird kind of legal fiction, right? Like, basically, you're not allowed to carry out things outside on Shabbat because that makes God angry for obvious reasons, right? That's clearly, if there is a God, that is definitely something that would piss him off, right? Right.

So then they started to,aism is nothing if not arguments about little teeny tiny details about what they really mean by a law right so the so the the law is don't carry things outside on shabbat but do they mean don't carry things into my courtyard because i got a whole wall around my courtyard is if i walk out of my house into my courtyard am i really outside or finds a of my art of my and so they took it a step further and they're like well what if there's like a what if there's a walled city what jerusalem is a city that's covered there's a wall around the entire city they're like okay you can carry things in jerusalem and then they took it a step further it's called a legal fiction where they're like well if we could make a little unbroken line of material from you

know from uh from telephone towers to light poles to traffic signals to buildings to you know if we could make a circle just a thread around the whole neighborhood well then that's kind of like a wall and then we could carry inside of that so when that thing gets broken which is a constant thing that happens those things get broken because of like the disrespect of the gentile coming around breaking our lines you know what i mean those bastards yeah yeah it's unholy phil throwing their sneakers on top of the line or whatever it is then some like you know big task force has to like like you know the navy seals has to jump in and tie the line so when that thing was broken she couldn't walk outside of her front door with a bag

but she did it anyway she did it anyway in the show so so but they were saying because she didn't have the baby she was allowed to walk outside even though that thing was broken well it's not that she didn't have because she didn't have a baby it's that she didn't have a baby to carry. Come on. It's all about carrying. And so she couldn't walk outside with all of her accessories, so she had to stuff some money into her pocket,

which she shouldn't have been touching on Shabbat anyway. So if you're just going for a jog, you can run when that thing's broken. You're not carrying anything. If you're going for a jog, you can't put your key in your pocket. You can't do that. But they have belts for that. They have key belts. A lot of Hasidic Jews have a belt with a key built into the buckle so that they can go out for a walk. So they find loopholes in their own laws. Well, that's Judaism 101, is finding loopholes. They wouldn't consider it a loophole. They would

consider it analyzing it to the point where they figured out oh actually this is acceptable right i got a question for you you you're from this particular sect you got out of the hasidic jewish community at what point in your life did you realize that this was just fucking stupid well that's disrespectful uh and i won't answer it. It's a complicated answer. I'm not like the person in that show. I didn't escape from that life. I grew up secular nine months a year.

I'm from Oakland. I grew up in public schools. I grew up a completely secular kid. And three months a year, I would fly back to New York, to Brooklyn, and spend my summer vacations on the set of Fiddler on the Roof, basically. So I don't have that internalized trauma that a lot of those people that have actually escaped have. I was already a regular kid. I have different kinds of trauma from trying to fit into that social world,

but I wasn't religious most of the time. I would just go in like, you know, like an alien visiting this culture. So that's allowed? Yeah, I was going to say, how is that even allowed? Was it your parents who got out and then like were half out? How did you end up in that situation? Oh, it's a little bit of a complicated situation and a little bit of complicated story. Anytime you start asking about my family, it's a long story.

So cut me off if you get bored. No, dude, go do it, dude. This is what I'm going to jerk off to. Go ahead. That's actually not allowed, except if there's a line around your dick. So basically my parents, first of all, my parents are both deaf. So that's actually a kind of significant detail in how my family history in terms of Judaism came about. So both of my parents are deaf. My dad, my family's actually not from the Satmar Hasidim. My family is from actually, if you can believe it, a more hardcore sect of Hasidic Judaism up in upstate New York called New Square. They're called the Skverer Hasids. And in that neighborhood, the women don't drive. A hundred percent of them

voted for Hillary Clinton for Senator. One hundred percent, without one exception, because that's how lockstep they are. Like the rabbi said, we're voting for Hillary Clinton. Everybody in the population voted for him. Yeah, well, they got that one wrong. Yeah. Well, she did win, but they're so—what's she won once? She's so religious, that side of my family, that my Satmar family, and I'll explain how they came about. When I had my bar mitzvah, the people in the show that you just watched were the most hardcore Hasidic Jews you could imagine did the catering and real family from the square wouldn't eat the catering because it wasn't

enough for them. They brought their own bag lunches to my bar mitzvah. So that's how hardcore they are, right? They got out koshered. Yeah, they got out kosher. So my dad, my great-grandfather moved here in like 1912, and he sent for my family, for his family, like 15 years later, leaving my grandmother behind in Hungary. And by the time he sent for her, she was like, fuck, she was what Yanis was asking about. She was like, this is stupid. My father abandoned me to this bullshit religion. I'm out of here. So my grandma, the mother of my father raised my father in Brooklyn, totally secular, not religious at all. But his grandfather was in this square chassid world, right? So long story short, my dad was like a weird beatnik artsy, you know, death painter in the Lower the lower East side in the, in the late fifties and sixties.

And in the late sixties, my parents met, my mom wasn't religious to, um, they got married. They were weirdo beat Nick artists, blah, blah, blah. They had a tumultuous relationship. 10 years later, they got a divorce. My mom moved us to California where we were to be not religious at all. And my dad became religious again. He got born again, went away, went the way of his grandfather, got born again. And but now remember, he's like a deaf divorcee that wasn't religious for the first half of his life. So he's not exactly a hot commodity in that world. But at that point, did you try to sign to him that that this might be just a midlife crisis i was four dude i love i love that he's like a deaf fucking painter once was a cynic jew if he was alive today to have a comedy special on netflix yeah it could be his own little yeah they just give that shit out now but he so he was looking

for a religious woman to get married to. And there's very few religious Orthodox deaf women that, and if they were, they weren't divorced and probably didn't want to marry divorced. My stepmother happens to be a divorced deaf woman from the Satmar community. And in any other universe, a woman from the Satmar community wouldn't have been allowed to marry a man like my father because she was deaf and he was deaf they thought this is as good as it'll be they married them together and then my father moved from uh forest hills uh he was living at the time in forest hills he moved us uh his family neighborhood in brooklyn called seagate you

guys know seagate yeah yeah sure i describe it my act. If people don't know where it is, I say you take it to the F train for the last possible stop. You get off, walk past Coney Island, past the projects, past the people of color, through a gate, through a time portal

to pre-Nazi Europe. You will then arrive. It's true. It's true. That's actually as accurate a description as you could say. Yeah. And that was what my summer vacations were like,

is I would fly to New York from my secular life. I would go to the Hasidic Jewish barbershop. He would attempt to give me as close of an approximation to a religious haircut as possible. He would throw up, my dad would throw a yarmulke on me and a pair of slacks and a dress shirt. And I would go to a Yiddish speaking neighborhood for six weeks. And I didn't even know he, I didn't know the Hebrew alphabet.

I didn't know anything. And I would just kind of like sit there in in agony for six weeks a year. So why did you do it? Why? Why? Why couldn't you just like I don't want to do this? We want to hang out with his dad. That's exactly right. Spend time with his dad. When I was a little kid, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say I want to be a baseball player or a rabbi. And a rabbi. Neither of those things. I wasn't into baseball or Judaism.

I was just trying really hard to find acceptance in two different communities, the athlete community and the Jewish community. Neither of which wanted anything to do with me. Now, did you see the show? Did you watch the show? Yeah, I'm like four episodes in. Yeah. How realistic, I mean, you obviously are not, were never full in it, but from what you've observed, I mean, and what you know, how accurate is the portrayal? Because there's never really been a

look inside that world like that. Yeah, I would say that of anything I've ever seen, Unorthodox is probably the most accurate portrayal of a Hasidic community that I've ever seen, unorthodox is probably the most accurate portrayal of a Hasidic community, but that I've ever seen on screen. But it's important to say, like, also, that the Hasidic community isn't one thing. Like, you know, the Satmar, there's a story I always tell about this, which is like, my brother was in college in Israel. And this Hasidic outreach guy came to speak to the college. And he was telling these kids about how great Hasidic Judaism was, how nice it was. And my brother's getting angrier and angrier. And he finally just stands up. He's like, this is bullshit. I grew up in this community. And these people, they were mean to me. They were judgmental.

They were cruel. They were gossipy and the the outreach guy goes can i just ask very gently very sweet guy he goes can i ask what sex of hasidic judaism you grew up in and my brother was like well square and satmar and the guy kind of winced and he's like i don't know how to tell you this but like from the two shittiest sex of hasidic judaism you could have possibly grown up in really so it's not really a picture of what Hasidic Judaism is like, period. It really is a picture of what the Satmar community is like. I don't mean to say that they're shitty, but they are severe. They're the most severe, hardcore, almost, I would say, my personal experience, completely unfriendly group of Hasidic Jews

you could meet. And they're getting in a lot of trouble in New York right now because like, especially just yesterday or two days ago, there was, I guess it was the Sant Mar community that would be in Borough Park. Would that be that community? That sounds right. They were having like a 500 person funeral in the middle of the street with all like the social distancing laws and the cops were just playing loud music over their music to try to get them to disperse and they didn't disperse so governor cuomo today the governor of new york went from a five hundred dollar fine to a ten thousand

dollar fine now so now you get fined ten thousand dollars if you're not socially distancing and unfortunately like all over like you know where, like where I live in Bay Ridge, it's a very conservative neighborhood. And like the councilman here just wrote like a post, like, hey guys, you know, social distancing, like didn't mention anything. And all the comments like, it's the fucking Hasidic Jews.

And they're spelling it like J-O-O-S. They're being like H-A space S-I-D-I-C-K. It's just like the antisemitism now is going to this extreme extreme and i want to be like hey it's not that's not all jews and and even because my whole thing was like do the hasidic jewish people do they not speak english do they not know maybe they can't understand what social distancing is or are they just being so you know fucking being like fuck you guys we don't apply by your laws well i want to

say first of all that to the people of bay ridge the good news is there's nothing that's going to motivate my people to uh do anything like a hefty fine so i think that's probably going to change pretty rapidly but but there's something there's something important to understand about the hasidic jews period uh but, but specifically the Satmar community, which is the community that you're interacting with is not the same community that left Europe. It's a community that's been, that's completely the engine of the Hasidic Judaism and specifically the Saat Mar Chassid, is fueled by the Holocaust. And the community is so shattered and so almost completely, literally destroyed that the group that you're interacting with now,

they all have this intergenerational trauma and memory, generational trauma and memory of this, which is part of the, their ideological reason for being so, for being so, I don't want to say unfriendly, kind of isolated, separated from everybody else.

After the Holocaust, they literally said, listen, let's just build a wall around our community. The world is shit. No one likes us. They're going to kill us. I mean, can you imagine what you would think of the non-Jewish after the Holocaust?

You know? And they just said, all that's holy is what we've got here. So fuck the world. Let's build a wall around our community and save what little we have left of our society. So now you've got a group that lives in, in New York that they're still living in Hungary from a hundred years ago,

who doesn't necessarily listen to or laws around. I mean, they follow the law, but they also are much more concerned with their own internal. Yeah. I felt as that show went on in the, when she went to Berlin, the main character, the woman goes to Germany to escape her sex. She goes to Berlin, where her mother is. And when they find, when her husband from the acidic community goes to follow her, her and his henchman, whose name is Moshe, in the show. Yeah, finally a gangster named Moshe. I was so thrilled, man.

I fucking love it, dude. You earned it. And I felt like all they kept doing, anything that this girl said, Moshe and her husband would say, you know, that's where all the, that's where the Germans decided that they were going to kill the Jews. This land right here, you think it's just a playground, but it's where all these Jews died. And everything was like, remember, remember, remember all this pain. And there was a part of me not being a part of that religion, be like, not that you forget that ever, but at what point are you just like, hey, that was so long ago, let's try to be happy and move forward.

And that was one. And then the second thing, because I was like, why do they have so many children? You always see Hasidic, where my daughter was born in my mom and his hospital is a large amount of the city community gives birth there and um and uh they have so many children women have so many children and they said in the show they were like because they want to repopulate the six million jews that were lost in the holocaust and i was like oh so there's like it's not mindless like they're not just

fucking like jackrabbits and they're not just you know they're not just not talking to me because they don't like me it's there's have reasons for it that i saw in the show well i mean it's like human development um what doesn't work in in in straight lines? It's like something happens and it pings your destiny into another direction. And so then all of a sudden, you find yourself a hundred years later in a community where you're not friendly to your neighbors and you maybe have made a lot of choices that don't bring you into the modern world

and you're not really with the times and you've got serious problems with equity between men and women but it all started a hundred years ago with a decision to try to save yourself from the devastation of the holocaust so it's like yeah from your perspective my perspective it's like hey stop it just don't be like that anymore from their perspective they're already they're locked down this you know trail of of decision making that started a long time ago how many sects are there do we know they're of hasidic judaism there's a lot yeah i think there's really yeah go ahead you see the most often are are actually pretty friendly they're the ones that

are on the street janice you look you look oh yeah pretty jewy i can probably ask yeah they say are you jewish right those guys are from Chabad Lubavitch. And the Chabad Lubavitch are the biggest organization of Assyric Jews. And they're very nice. They're very friendly. They're very in the world.

They're very religious, but they're cool. And they decided, I'm going to go into the world to like bring joy into it and stay here. The Satmar are the second biggest. And they were like, fuck that.

Let's withdraw into our city within a city. How do they feel about each other? Do they acknowledge each other? Do they fight with each other? Well, Chabad in particular has some problems with the other Hasidic Jewish people because at one point they had a big leader. The main rabbi of the Chabad movement, which is the guy that kind of started them out into the street.

He was like the charismatic leader. He's the reason you see them so often because he's like, look at the world. Let's go save all the Jews, whatever. That guy, they thought he was the Messiah. They were all convinced he was the Messiah, like they were 100%. And then he died, which presents a pretty peculiar problem when you think he's the Messiah, and he doesn't declare himself to be the Messiah, he's dead. So then a lot of them, about half of them, but maybe even more when he died, were like,

actually, he didn't die, he's still here, and he's going to come back. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Yes. That sounds like a familiar story. Yeah. That's right. So that idea, Isaiah's still alive,

he's coming back, was so much like Christianity to people that a lot of the surrounding Hasidic Jewish groups were like, these guys are fucking crazy. We can't fuck with them. And eventually that all calmed down. But yeah, they beef. They do beef.

How do you think the Hasidic community would feel about Ari Shaffir's Twitter? About... Wait, wait, wait. I'm going to tell you... would feel about Ari Shafir's Twitter? Wait, wait, wait. I'm going to tell you my strategy for when a media personality asks me about something like that. Ari, Louis.

So ask me again, and I'll give you my... This is what I... So here's a question we have from our listeners. How do you think the acidic community would feel about Ari Shafir's Twitter? You know, actually, that's a topic that deserves a lot of consideration, and it's one that I haven't thought enough about to

really feel qualified to answer. I think the important thing is to let the Hasidic community speak to that themselves, rather than me weighing in on this one. That's fucking long. Shalom, bitch. What do you think? Yo, let me tell you something, Moshe. I gotta be honest with you. Here's a couple of Yo, let me tell you something, Moshe. I got to be honest with you. Here's a couple of things that I know, you know, because I said my daughter was born

in Mamadi's hospital and we had a doula, right? So the doulas, they're fucking, they're the Jewish wizards that they could just, the babies, they just know how to do everything with babies. It's like un-fucking-believable. And they told me, they were like, you know because my my kid's mom she um she we were they were supposed to be born like may 15th wasn't born to may 19th so like two days later it's like you know the the past the due date she's in so much pain blah blah blah and the doula says well have you tried swallowing the semen and we said excuse me like just little just you know

religious woman really doula religious doula in the hospital she was like yeah she goes there's properties in the semen that relax uh the vaginal walls and will cause dilation but it's only got to be swallowed so that we were like that's that actually tracks um there's yeah there's a a pretty um we don't like to talk about a lot but like jews we love to drink cum it's like a big part of our religion. Like gallons and gallons, the more the better. I mean, yeah, you guys are sucking dicks in the circumcisions, right? The priests, don't they do that? You know, that's a topic that I've given a lot of consideration to, and I really haven't thought about it enough to be able to speak to it.

But, no, actually, the line around the neighborhood, the line around the neighborhood, one long straw, like, you remember in Brazil, the movie Brazil, where it was all two people? One long straw, and there's a guy at the other end of it just, like, furiously. It's a line. It's like a fireman line, and it's just a bunch of civic Jews ejaculating into it so the whole community can get a sip. I don't want to give all of our secrets away, but, yeah. Fucking great, dude.

Cum dumpers. Is this a true story? 100% accurate, yes. Chris, is that true? What's that? Chris, is that a true story? That's a true story? 100% accurate, yes. Chris, is that true? What's that? Chris, is that a true story? That's a true story. That and then also I told you my Aunt Colleen.

What did she mean by that? What did she mean by that? I don't know. That's what she said to do. And then, you know, I got a very angry BJ about two hours later, and my baby was born about six hours later. It worked. Wait, were you in the hospital

or were you at home at that time they told us to go home and then you know i was so excited i was driving home i was trying to get roadhead for my nine months pregnant you know but wasn't working because well yeah because the angle's difficult exactly because i have a i had a toyota and the goddamn console was in if i would have had a newer car like a test or something like that or push the start would have been great your uncle would have been so upset to see you driving a toyota right i know dude i know i know well thank god the coronavirus killed him so so so yeah so but then but then but then but then a few but then yeah we did it we did it swallowed it i had a fucking nice juicy load you know ready to go ready to pop

i've heard i've heard about that and then it was and then it was perfect and then the baby was born that's one of the beautiful things about like folk remedies like that it's like a a woman is nine months pregnant she's gonna give birth so the folk psychic person is always gonna be right like sure she she gives you a blow job and then the baby comes you like i told you all you got to do is drink the cup but i kept told you anything asidejob, and then the baby comes. You're like, I told you. All you got to do is drink the cup. She could have told you anything aside from kick her in the stomach, and it would have worked. Yeah.

My dad was like, slap her in the back of the head and yell, Trump 2020. Your kid will be born in minutes. And he was right. Bayridge, bitch. Bayridge. But I thought when you told the story you were still in the hospital, I kept picturing her in the hospital bed waiting to give birth the woman comes in you're like could you give us a minute and then you're straddling one yeah like moving well no you press the bed up and down i mean it kind of does the work for you well no i started pushing the head down of

the doula because i just thought she meant anybody's coming i'll tell you for you do why do they shave the heads and put the wigs on when they get married all right so that's okay now we're getting into the specifics of satmar and how severe they are right so the the the reason orthodox women cover their heads is that there's something in the bible or the talmud or something that says that the beauty of a woman should only be observed by her husband, right? And for some reason, it's some biblical shit, they thought that the beauty of the woman was their hair, right? And probably that same idea is the reason that Muslim women cover their faces for the same kind of reason. Oh, I thought they were covering it because of COVID-19. I thought it was a social distancing thing. do look like geniuses now they do like

they were ahead of they were ahead they were up front in front of everybody um so that's the reason that orthodox women all over cover their hair right and at some point um they started wearing wigs which i don't quite see the difference, but whatever. But the Satmar, for some reason, the Satmar in particular, are like actually shave your head underneath the covering, which takes away the original reason to be covering your head. And the first is that when you take it off, your husband's going to get like a big old hair boner, right? Which we all do when we see a woman's uncovered hair. Now they, I don't know how they got there.

But like I said, Judaism is nothing but a like weird argument, you know, like maybe it meant this, maybe it meant that, maybe it meant this, until you get to a weird conclusion that doesn't even make sense. So that's Satmar. Most Hasidic Jewish women don't shave their heads. That's particular to that sect and I think Jewish women don't shave their heads. That's particular to that sect, and I think maybe one other sect. You were asking about English, whether they speak English. It reminded me of a story from my childhood. But I will say, first of all, that in New Square, the people would speak Yiddish until they were 13. And then when they were 13, they would start learning English. And they all, they all would work at the same place.

So the level of English wasn't really necessary. You know, you didn't, it didn't have to be sophisticated English, whatever. The point is, I go there and one of the rabbis in Seagate was, he was a very nice guy. And he took shine to me. He probably felt sorry for me because I wasn't religious and I didn't know what I was doing. And he could you please get your fucking daughter out of... Unfortunately, you can't come any closer. There is

a Jew on the computer. So you have to stay over there. Wait, your daughter? Wait, what? Okay, okay, baby. Okay, thank you thank you i'm gonna be right out okay baby daddy's talking to his landlord right now go back in yeah sorry yeah at any rate uh this rabbi he was the leader of the community he for some reason felt sorry for me and he would give me lessons in Hebrew.

After his work, I would come to his house, and he would teach me the alphabet, which is like way, way, way below the pay grade of a local rabbi. He shouldn't be teaching some random kid the alphabet. And I was struggling with it because I wasn't good at it, and I was embarrassed, and I was always embarrassed in that community. A hundred percent of the time, I was trying to be invisible I was it was just humiliating to be around them all all the time like they spoke Yiddish as a first language I didn't even know Hebrew I was and Hebrew is like a baseline right everybody knows that it was so

embarrassing he was very nice to me and I was trying to get the alphabet and he saw that I was struggling and he was like you know don't be embarrassed you're embarrassed hold on and he called his son and he's like you know schmudly or whatever he's like come in here and this like 12 year old kid walks in he's like do the alphabet in english this is a kid born and raised in amer. He goes, do the alphabet. A 12-year-old kid. He goes, A, B, C, G. He didn't know the fucking alphabet.

Jesus. Oh my God. Holy fuck. That's how insulated... That's his version of kindness, too. He was like, hold on. You embarrassed? Let me humiliate my son. He sounds Dominican. of kindness too as he was like hold on you embarrassed let me humiliate my son he sounds sounds dominican wow wow that's fucking wild i mean yeah i mean honestly man it's just so now mosh now you have you know obviously got a wife got a kid and your kid no religion for your kid

now just whatever they want to do no we're jew. We're still Jews. I'm still a Jew. I mean, I think I got lucky in that. I think I got lucky in that I didn't get, like I said, I didn't get a lot of the trauma of that community. Like, I mean, I did get some trauma, but it was so temporary. It was so like, I was an escape that I never, I never had to like, really, it didn't internalize in me so it's like now yeah I celebrate the holidays I have a very loose affiliation you know I wear it like a loose garment I get I get what I get out of it are you still catholic at all I am so you want to talk about trauma I mean yeah try being an altar boy under father bill who's one of the fucking hall

of fame you've never seen a hall of Famer with sex crimes with Father Billy Boy. Well, no, I remember him from the end of the straw. He would come by once in a while in the Jewish neighborhood. I bet he would. Yeah, yeah. Anything that didn't land on my face would go to the straw. I had a, I grew up, you know, a lot of my friends were Jewish in

Park Slope, Brooklyn, but also on the corner, and they were all Reformed Jews, they all had Christmas trees, whatever, secular trees. But on the corner of my block was a Hasidic Jewish rabbi and his family, and he started like a preschool up there, and they were always really super nice. So they must have been from one of the friendlier sects because they would build the shack outside. What is it? The Sukkah.

They would build a Sukkah. They would invite us in and give us cookies and milk and stuff like that. And I would always be like, this is nice. But I mean, come on, cookies and milk. Where's the ice cream? Let's, you know, let's step it up a little bit. So they were nice, but. But they were frugal.

They were frugal. Well, frugal. I mean, the cookies and milk. It was like, where's the ice cream? I'm 12 years old. No, I'm joking. They were super, super nice, super open, super friendly. They let us come in.

They let us play baseball. That's, I think, an important point to make about unorthodox. I know you guys are all about historical accuracy and never making any mistakes. It's important to note that unorthodox is a picture of the Satmar community. And I don't know if it's even a, it's a TV show. So it's a dramatic picture of the Satmar community. It happens to line up with my personal experience with that community pretty well,

that they weren't very friendly, but there are friendly Satmar Jews and there are many very friendly Satmar sects. I mean, but again, it's Holocaust trauma, a lot of that unfriendliness. I'll tell you guys another story. This is one of the worst memories of my childhood life. Can't wait. Although it was so bad, you almost couldn't help but enjoy it a little bit.

At my stepsister's wedding, she was getting married. It was a big Orthodox affair. And we had this, my stepmother's mother, so my step-grandmother it was a big orthodox affair and we had this my stepmother's mother so my step grandmother was a holocaust survivor and you know that's one of the things about the holocaust survivors that nobody likes to talk about if you we always think of them as like oh because you see the ones on tv they're these very like serious thoughtful sweet people that are warning us about repeating the sins of our path but the truth is that a lot of them they were in the fucking holocaust so they came out pretty fucking awful

personality wise you know what i mean like they didn't like bounce back into a sweetheart like a santa claus like you know actually there's a book called called man search for meaning by victor frankl uh it's a it's a he He's a psychiatrist that survived the Holocaust himself. He has a really chilling line in that book. He's like, basically, what needed to take place in the concentration camps in order to survive was ruthlessness, survival of the fittest, and making sure that you made it no matter what happened. And so there's a line in there that he says, you made it no matter what happened. And so there's a line in there that he says, everybody that made it out of the concentration camps lives with the fear, the shame, the knowledge that the best of us perished in the camps, because the people that were giving away half of their rations

to save their neighbor were the people that starved to death. And the people that were trying to be kind, not to say nobody was kind that made made it but really what it took was you had to make it out of there whatever wow wow that's something uh that's that is thank you for sharing it that is something that is kind of like right in front of your nose if you think about it but nobody ever talks about that that that that seems like it makes sense when you think about it like wow like i never even i never that never even crossed my mind it's pretty powerful you know if you guys are interested in that sub category we're talking about there's a really amazing movie on a documentary series on netflix called the devil next door yeah chris did you see it oh absolutely i saw it i i want yeah it was great to me that shows you

real community that was shattered. I mean, you just can't wrap your brains around what it is like to be in a community that is still alive and remembers when they were almost completely destroyed and shattered. I mean, maybe we'll all remember that 50 years from now from the great COVID debacle that we were going through. That's what it is, yeah. Finish off the juice. So my step-grandmother. I'm just kidding... I got it. My step-grandmother, it would be crazy if you weren't

kidding. That would be a wild... I was like, finish off the Jews. Moshe, where can they catch you? Where are you next? Well, they've taken away my livelihood. I'm performing nowhere, and that will finish me off. It's like a new Holocaust for you. It's my life for us okay but anyway um my step-grandmother was one of those people that didn't come out sweeter than when

she went in surprise surprise so the consequences there you go so we're at this wedding and they're doing the photos the family photos of the whole family and it's me and my dad and his new kids uh and his wife and and it's his wife. It's a big picture. It's like 20 people. And then my step-grandmother, she steps in, and she goes, okay, let's do one more picture, just the family. Moshe, David, could you step out of the picture? And they took the same picture with like 18 people in it,

but me and my brother were asked to step to the side. It's so great. I remember in part of that movie, the devil next door, I remember someone saying like, yeah, like the other Jews, like the ones who were testifying saying that that was him.

The other Jews were going like, Hey, what did you do? What did you have to do that? You survived. other Jews were going like, hey, what did you do? What did you have to do that you survived? Like, they were skeptical, like thinking they did something highly unscrupulous or they collaborated with the Germans in some way, you know, in the camp to save themselves and not others, and they kind of lived with that, right?

Well, that's what's so complicated about, and, you know, now we're finally at the point in history where there's almost no holocaust survivors left and so so that direct line to trauma is getting slowly pruned but but that was what was so complicated for jews in the last you know 50 60 70 years was that everybody that made it out not only felt guilt because people that they knew and loved were were gone but also other people that they knew and loved were gone, but also other people that were looking at them were like, who were you in the camps that you were able to make it out?

Everybody had this trickle-down trauma. And I just say it again, if the Holocaust had never happened, the Satmar community would not be that community. The unfriendliness that you may have experienced in the streets of New York, you wouldn't have experienced it in the same way. In Europe before the Holocaust, they're not friendly to me either. You know, it's like when I walk down the street and I see a Hasidic Jew, there's a part of me that wants to give him like a black eye nod, you know,

like because I'm like, oh, that's my dude right there. But he looks at me, he would never, I mean, never want to give me a nod. But you know, again, people aren't monoliths either. You know, there's a lot of people in all of these communities that are cool, chill, friendly, awesome people. It's just that the hierarchy, and it is hierarchy, it's one rabbi telling everybody what to do all the way down. That's what Hasidic Judaism is. And that they have made different decisions. And if you were lucky enough to be born into a Chabad family, then the decision they make is to give you the little Greek boys in the neighborhood milk and cookies. And if you're

unlucky enough to be born in one of the more severe communities, then they say, don't ever talk to non-Jews. They want to kill us. Okay. Well, you're not going to be very friendly if that's the message from on high. Right. Right. I mean, this is fascinating, dude. Thank you so much for coming on. I mean, Jan, do you have any more questions? Because I'm fucking, that was great. I mean, this is unbelievable. I got one more question. How did the rabbis become rabbis? Is it an election process? Is it you're born into a family? Is it you're appointed by a council? How does that work? Well, okay. So there's a difference between a rabbi and a rebbe. That was the thing I said I wanted to be in the beginning. Every Hasidic Jewish sect is led

one mega rabbi. That's what it means to be a Hasidic Jew, is that you have a mega rabbi at the top who's in charge of everything. And there's an interesting quote my brother was telling me about yesterday when I was talking about this podcast and that I was going to be talking about Satmar. He said that every Rebbe, so that's what a Rebbe is. A Rebbe is the mega rabbi that leads the community. A rabbi is like the guy that was teaching me the alphabet. He's a community leader. He leads prayer services. He's a direct contact to the people. The Rebbe is much more, it's like senator versus the president, right? The Rebbe is the president of the Hasidic sect. And he said that there's a saying in Hasidic Judaism that every Rebbe is either a saint or a general, right? And the saints

are like holy men that are sweet and lead by being that kind of like, you know, the Dalai Lama type. And the generals are the people that are like, this is what we do. We are in lockstep. Here are the rules. Follow me into the battle. And the Satmar Rebbe, the famous Satmar Rebbe, was definitely the general of generals. That is what he was. But to become a regular rabbi, you know, it really depends on what kind of rabbi you are.

My brother's a rabbi. He went to school. He basically went to like graduate divinity school went to school for years and years and then he he got what's called sneak which is the ordination process it's much more like being a catholic priest where there's a very specific kind of thing that you have to do you have to like make out with a kid or something like that and then you become absolutely yeah okay and like there's a process with the hasidic Jews, it's a little bit more like getting a black belt in a martial art.

It's like one of the big dogs says, okay, you're a rabbi now. It's like getting passed at the comedy cellar. Yeah. I wouldn't know, guys. I wouldn't know what that's like. This is amazing, man. Thank you so much.

For sure. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Do you got a podcast or a website that people can check out let me plug some shit i have a brand new comedy album out if you're sitting around and with nothing to do it's a good thing to do it's called crowd surfing volume one it's an all crowd work album i'm super proud of it it's super good and then uh natasha my wife and i have a netflix special and a podcast that we do together called the Endless Honeymoon Podcast, where we do live relationship advice.

People call in, and we give them relationship advice. So check out any of those things. Beautiful. If you're really interested in my Hasidic upbringing and my weird life, I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Casher in the Rye. Like, catcher in the rye. Great name.

Fucking 10 out of 10 name. Sweet. You guys guys thank you alright bubbers thank you Rabbi bye and where's the rent pay the fucking rent

seriously I agree to do this podcast but I want my money alright Thank you. Bye.