Comedian Menachem Silverstein kept his phone off for the duration of Rosh Hashanah, as he always does. He’s a father of two children, an ordained rabbi and weekly performer at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. When he turned his phone back on after Rosh Hashanah, over 40 text messages were waiting, and even more direct messages on social media. One came from a former friend who stopped talking to Silverstein after Oct. 7 and had blocked him.
“If he’s unblocking me to message me, something happened,” Silverstein told The Journal. Silverstein opened a link with a caption that said “comedian Menachem Silverstein makes a joke about Israel and walks a crowd.” The video came from the Chicago Laugh Factory and had 2 million views, Silverstein said.
There was one problem. The comedian onstage was someone else. Silverstein said his last appearance at the Chicago Laugh Factory came during a May tour. There’s even a video from 20 minutes into the set showing a packed audience laughing. “Everyone loved my set [in Chicago], it was really fun. I didn’t do anything specifically about Israel. I definitely did things about antisemitism and how it’s a problem, and I also did jokes about me being Jewish and my experience being Jewish, but nothing about Israel.”
As the video continues, Silverstein said, “you see it’s clearly not me on stage. And I’m all of a sudden scratching my head. I’m like, ‘What the hell is happening?’ And I look at the view count, the video has two million views.” Silverstein said the source footage came from an unrelated comedy prank at the Laugh Factory in Chicago. One comedian was blindfolded, given earmuffs and sent onstage. The crowd was told to exit while the comedian performed. After about five minutes, the performer took off the blindfold and found an empty room.
“Now, someone takes that clip and tags something like, ‘when a comedian says he stands with Israel and walks the crowd,” Silverstein said. He had used a joke about Israel for one or two months after Oct. 7, 2023, and said he had not used it since then: “My name is Menachem and I stand with Israel. That’s not political. They’re just the only people that could pronounce my name,” Silverstein said.
Silverstein said the earliest post he found came from an X account called TruthSeeker. The false story then spread far beyond. “Then I type my name into Twitter and I see that this video has been re-shared over and over and over and over. And each one of the videos has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. I type my name into Google. There’s articles, there are Instagram videos, there are Facebook videos. This thing is everywhere,” he said.
Silverstein dove into various AI systems and saw that the false story is now being taken as fact. The Journal did its own searches and found the same. “Grok is now perpetuating it, Gemini is now perpetuating it, ChatGPT, Claude, every AI is saying that this is Menachem, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, ‘What the hell’s happening?’ So I look into it a little bit deeper. I do 30 seconds of research that answers everything,” Silverstein said.
The claim reached conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show the next day. Silverstein estimated that posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had combined for nearly 10 million views. Less than five hours after Silverstein spoke with The Journal, he learned that the claim had been picked up by Al Jazeera. On Sept. 13, Al Jazeera published an article that identified Silverstein as the comedian in the clip and said audience members left after he announced support for Israel. The article used a photo of Silverstein and said the supposed walkout left him in front of empty seats. It described the audience’s departure as a protest against Silverstein’s position and included social-media posts that praised the supposed walkout.
The article then used the supposed incident as part of a broader discussion about pro-Israel speech, entertainment and the war in Gaza, including whether political positions can affect an artist’s relationship with an audience. The page listed its source as “SOCIAL MEDIA.”
Silverstein’s account contradicts the event Al Jazeera described. “In the past, trolls would have to clip videos of comedians out of context to cancel them. Now it’s not even taking me out of context, it’s completely fabricating every element of this. There was no statement of Israel made. They didn’t walk out because of Israel. I had no association with the show. I wasn’t on the show,” Silverstein said.
For Silverstein, “walking the crowd” carries a separate problem inside the comedy business.
“A comedian who ‘walks the crowd’ means, you’re not funny and the crowd walks out on you,” Silverstein said. He worries that the insinuation that he has ever had a crowd walk out on him could hurt bookings when clubs outside Los Angeles search his name.
“Unless the record has been set straight, I won’t get booked.” Silverstein worries that a booker unfamiliar with him could search his name, encounter the false story and decide that any potential controversy is not worth the trouble. “Even if they’re pro-Israel, it’s just like they don’t want a controversial figure who will cause people to demand refunds,” Silverstein said.
Silverstein said Instagram users have sent comments and DMs, his account has been reported for terms of use violations, TikTok videos have been removed for violations and required him to submit appeals, and his Instagram’s reach has dropped, despite having more than 53,000 followers. Silverstein also said he has received death threats, “Things like, ‘you stupid Jew, I’m going to kill you,’ that kind of unfortunately normal banter,” Silverstein said.
“The biggest concern, is not even for me, the biggest concern is that people now have a pathway to shut down Jewish voices through complete falsities that people will believe,” Silverstein said. “For the future of Jewish entertainment, it’s very scary.”
He remains hopeful and optimistic that the tides will turn and people will catch on to how insane it is that Jewish entertainers are being targeted and for things they had nothing to do with. “I hope that people will now start posting and hopefully news outlets will pick it up to point out how insane and ridiculous the story is and then flip it to, ‘I was attacked, they tried to silence me and I won’t stay silent,” Silverstein said. “Tonight I’m going to the Laugh Factory [in Hollywood], I’m going to do a set, I’m going to bring it up, I’m going to talk about it.”
He wants to fight the false story in the same place the trouble began for him: with a joke. “I think that the lesson, what I’m trying to do is Tikkun Olam, the Or Olam, and the Jewish outlook on the situation, which is we are going to dispel the darkness with light, and I’m trying to push the truth, and I feel like the truth always floats to the top, and I think trying to sue and trying to crush is not going to work. If anything, it can make the controversy worse, but if we can spread the truth and spread the light and the love and the joy and turn it into a big joke and show how ridiculous it is, I think that’s what’ll ultimately fix it.”
