February 8, 2023

Chosen Comedy Festival Ready to Rock Los Angeles

The Chosen Comedy Festival, (February 14 at 8 pm at The Orpheum Theater) hosted by Elon Gold and Modi Rosenfeld, is one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles. Asked if an iconic athlete might be invited and — if they were traded to a local basketball team — would another player be welcome, Gold told the Journal, “LeBron James gets a free pass to come … I will proudly be wearing my LeBron sneakers.” On the other hand, he said “Kyrie has to purchase a ticket.” (The Lakers are off that night; Irving was traded to the Dallas Mavericks after this interview took place).

The festival is the brainchild of Dani Zoldan, owner of StandUp NY, a prominent Manhattan comedy club. I attended the first event in Brooklyn and was still laughing so hard as I left, I almost got into the wrong Lyft.

The festival is the brainchild of Dani Zoldan, owner of StandUp NY, a prominent Manhattan comedy club. I attended the first event in Brooklyn and was still laughing so hard as I left, I almost got into the wrong Lyft.

The numbers show there was great demand for such an event that combines the best of Jewish comedy and music. “The Brooklyn and Miami show sold out and we expect this one to as well,” Zoldan told the Journal.

During difficult days of the pandemic, Zoldan organized a comedy show on a truck for a handful of customers on the street. When conditions improved, Zoldan had an extra motivation to make up for the joy people had been missing. “I felt like I wanted to give back and make thousands of people laugh,” Zoldan said. “I spoke with Elon (Gold) and Modi and it was clear that we could go from there with the first show in Brooklyn and do cities across the country and, eventually, in Israel.”

The lineup for L.A. includes Jeff Garlin of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame, Dan Ahdoot of “Cobra Kai,” comedians and podcasters Moshe Kasher and Natasha Leggero, who married in 2016, as well as Moshav, one of the best Jewish rock groups of all time.

“For me, I don’t look at it as just a show and it’s done,” Zoldan said. “I know that with Elon, Modi, and other amazing performers, there are great memories that people will take with them forever.”

”A Jewish audience must eat to attain maximum happiness. Kvetching sets in when hunger pains are there, and we don’t want that. So, the more you eat, the better.” – Elon Gold

Zoldan said there will be more than enough food with several vendors, including La Gondola. “The difference between a Jewish audience and a non-Jewish audience is a non-Jewish audience will drink to achieve maximum happiness,” Gold said. “Hence, a two-drink minimum at clubs. However, a Jewish audience must eat to attain maximum happiness. Kvetching sets in when hunger pains are there, and we don’t want that. So, the more you eat, the better.”

Gold and Rosenfeld appeared on HBO Max’s “Crashing” and have great chemistry. While they play at the best clubs across the country, they cornered the market on Orthodox fundraisers and events with their ability to riff on intricacies that only Orthodox Jews would know. But their versatility means that anyone will enjoy their comedy.

Gold recently released a YouTube special “Sets In The City: Elon Gold’s Favorite People” that showcases his prowess doing impressions of people from different countries, as well as his great Donald Trump impersonation.

Gold is mostly laid back-on stage, while Rosenfeld is often high-energy, at times shouting. How does he have such stamina? “I’m super-low-energy off stage,” Rosenfeld told the Journal. ‘That’s my secret.”

The comedian, who dishes on everything from the difference between Sephardim and Ashkenazim to an impersonation of an angry Lufthansa flight attendant, was recently featured in Variety and The JTA, said his husband and talent agent Leo Veiga has helped his career in many ways, including his online presence. Veiga can be seen with comic Periel Aschenbrand who cohosts the podcast “And Here’s Modi” with Rosenfeld.

While I have seen Rosenfeld perform more than 20 times, my family saw him perform once, at The Raleigh Hotel in the Catskills more than 25 years ago. My mother laughed so hard, I thought she might fall over. The only other person who could make her laugh like that was Jackie Mason. Were she still alive, she would love Rosenfeld’s characters of an Israeli named Nir and a Hasidic man named Yoely, who may run for president in 2024. Rosenfeld showed his ability to riff when the festival was in Miami, when he joked to the DJ about his loud shirt selection. As for giving up his Wall Street career for comedy, Rosenfeld said that “everything is bashert.”

Dan Ahdoot gave up a possible career as a doctor to be a comedian. The man who plays a coworker of Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso at a car dealership in “Cobra Kai” said his parents weren’t exactly thrilled when he announced his change of plans. “I think they wanted to disown me,” Ahdoot told The Journal. “They escaped Iran to give me a better life. I got into medical school and then decided to tell jokes.” The writer, producer and actor who moved from Great Neck, New York, to Los Angeles, said people used to ask him things he had no way to answer. “They used to ask if I knew if Iran was getting a nuclear bomb, but with what is happening now, it has turned to a general concern for the people,” he said. As to whether he ever tried the crane kick on Macchio, he said he had not, and in a scene, he got beat up by Johnny, played by William Zabka.

Ahdoot has a popular food podcast called “Green Eggs and Dan,” which recently featured Ilan Hall, a Jewish winner of Bravo’s “Top Chef.” He co-wrote the film” Public Disturbance” and there’s a scene where he is a Jewish cab driver and it marks the first time some Australian teens have ever seen a Jew.

Garlin, who plays Jeff Greene on “Curb” played the father, Murray Goldberg, on “The Goldbergs” and recently appeared as a movie producer in “Babylon,” doesn’t often do standup. I saw him perform once at Caroline’s on Broadway and he battled through a throat issue and was very funny.

Kasher and Leggero can be seen in “The Honeymoon Stand Up Special” on Netflix. They roast four couples in the third episode so it will be interesting to see if any couples are called up to the stage at the festival. In his routine, Kasher often lets the audience know he is the son of deaf parents and when he grew up, his family was on welfare. He and his wife are both authors and Leggero often jokes about the challenges of being a mom and how she and her husband differ in parenting styles.

The show will also include Leah Lamarr, a Los Angeles comic, who during a performance at NYC’s The Stand, joked that “a toilet is my favorite chair because it’s the only seat you sit in where you lose weight.”

Zoldan said this is a big moment for Stefanie Yunger, who debuted at his club about a year ago, and someone he said has a bright future. Yunger speaks Hebrew, Russian and Spanish and in one funny YouTube video jokes about the difficulty of ordering regular milk in L.A.

Dan Levy, who joked on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” that he drinks coffee like a homicide detective and said people confuse him with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, will also perform.

Moshav, featuring guitars and vocals by Yehuda Solomon and Duvid Swirsky, will get people’s feet tapping. Both men lead services at Los Angeles synagogues. Will Solomon tell a joke? “If one of the comedians will sing a song in between jokes, I’ll say something funny in between one of my songs,” Solomon told The Journal.

Gold said he expects it to be a show to remember.

“It is going to be a night of great Jewish comedy, music and Jewish pride,” Gold said.

The Jewish Journal is a media partner for the event.

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Rosner’s Domain— Fear, Regret and the Legal Reform

There is of course no comparison: Benjamin Netanyahu is not Vladimir Putin. Israel is not Russia. The purpose of this article is not to imply that anyone in Israel is doing something remotely similar to what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Its purpose is to examine the dynamics of decision-making, against an available example. It’s interesting to compare what happened to Putin when he decided to go to war, and what happens to Netanyahu following his decision to go to war over the structure of the legal system. Why interesting? Because there are things in which the similarity is evident.

Without going into the question of whether the proposed legal reform is necessary or not, when a decision was made to promote it, it was based on at least the following three assumptions: 1. There is a need for it (this is the coalition’s assumption). 2. The government has enough power to implement it (a coalition majority). 3. The cost will be lower than the benefit to the country and the coalition (because there is no point in a move that has little benefit and high cost).

These are the three assumptions that can also be attributed to Putin when he launched a war in Ukraine. He thought the war was necessary, even if we strongly disagree with it. He thought he had the power to win. He thought that the benefit would exceed the cost involved, and Putin knew that war would have some cost. Hence the similarity: Putin was wrong in at least two of his three assumptions. The Netanyahu government also seems, at least now, to have made a similar mistake.

Of course, it is not yet possible to make a definitive judgment. Can Russia conquer Ukraine? Only time will tell. The war is not over yet. But it already seems clear that Russia cannot do it as efficiently and quickly as Putin expected. It is hard to assume that Putin chose to go to war knowing in advance that he would be dragged into its second year of battle, when he is isolated, bruised and seemingly much weaker than he was a year ago.

Which of course also undermines Putin’s other working assumption: that the benefit is greater than the cost. At least now, there is no benefit at all, and the costs are real: Economic isolation, international hostility, fleeing citizens, erosion of deterrence. Russia is a wounded country. Putin is a leader in trouble. The world is openly talking about the end of his era, and even if talk is cheap and the reality is that Putin still rules Russia, such talk has meaning.

Is it already clear that the cost is greater than the benefit? Since the war is not yet over, it is difficult to say such a thing with complete confidence. We have to see what Russia will get in exchange for getting off the tree. But the possibility of high cost, little reward, is definitely there. So, even from Putin’s point of view (he believes that the war is just) at least two out of three assumptions may turn out to be wrong.

A recalculation may lead some of the ministers and Members of Knesset to the realization that even if the move is necessary, it is too risky, or too costly.

Now let’s turn to Israel (with a reminder, just in case, that there is no similarity). It is hard not to notice what is similar: a new government thought there was a good reason to make a dramatic move. The new government thought it had the power to go through with it. The new government thought that the benefit would exceed the cost. Was the government wrong? It is too early to say. But we can already say that it may have been wrong. It is possible that it embarked on this move under the assumption that it could go through with it – when in fact it can’t. Yes, the coalition has the necessary votes in the Knesset, but it was not prepared for the fierce persistence of the opposition to its move. It did not anticipate the determination of the opposition. Therefore, it could not make an accurate calculation of cost and benefit. A recalculation may lead some of the ministers and Members of Knesset to the realization that even if the move is necessary (their view), it is too risky, or too costly.

Of course, there is no certainty that such a conclusion would materialize. Psychological dynamics create a paradox that Prof. Gadi Heimann of Hebrew University describes beautifully in his book “Fear, Regret and Wishful Thinking.” It is the tendency of leaders to take risky gambles so as not to lose. That is, when they encounter a challenge that they did not expect, and which may lead them to a loss, they do the opposite of what’s logical. Instead of giving up, they double down. Heimann cites as an example the decision of Germany to launch submarine warfare during the First World War. For all the risk involved, he writes, this was “the only alternative that gave Germany any chance of victory.” In retrospect, it is obvious that this was not a wise decision, but in real time the leaders managed to convince themselves that the chance of success worth the risk.

Luckily, this does not happen with every crucial decision. But it often does. And if it happens in Israel this means that amid warnings of economic harm, fear of social rupture, boiling blood of supporters and opponents, the possibility of harmful countermeasures – the government is still going to insist on implementing its plan.

Netanyahu’s record proves that he is not a risk taker. Which brings me back to Heimann’s book. There were cautious German generals in WWI, but, as Heimann writes, “the high probability of suffering a loss turned the Germans from risk-averse to risk-loving.” For Israel today – that’s the worrying scenario.

Something I wrote in Hebrew

New poll numbers made me write the following analysis:

Why shout “democracy, democracy”? Not because someone in Israel wants to abolish democracy and for Israel to be an undemocratic state, but because there is a debate on the question of what democracy is … even on the right, a majority of respondents say they want a democratic country, in which there is a right to vote as well as tolerance and human rights. On the other hand, the right is the only group in Israel that has a fairly large subgroup, between one-third and one-half, who say that in their view a democratic country is “a country that has free elections and the right to vote” — and that’s it.

A week’s numbers

And here are the above-mentioned findings.

A reader’s response:

Elaine Herold asks: “Do they still talk in Israel about the issue of Women of the Wall?” Answer: not really, we currently have bigger fish to fry.

Shmuel Rosner is senior political editor. For more analysis of Israeli and international politics, visit Rosner’s Domain at jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain.

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Chosen Comedy Festival Ready to Rock Los Angeles

Rosner’s Domain— Fear, Regret and the Legal Reform

Something I wrote in Hebrew

A reader’s response:

Jewish Journal