By Sara Ogince
As the spring festival of Purim approaches, editors of Jewish news outlets are gearing up to produce articles rife with satire, inside jokes and quotes from fictitious, suspiciously named sources.
“Coming up to Purim, we’re looking around to something that’s in the news that’s not too serious but might take people in,” said Keren David, managing editor at the London-based Jewish Chronicle, which produces Purim shpiel stories every year.
“It will be obvious to us that someone called Esther HaMalka being quoted isn’t real,” David said, using the Hebrew for Queen Esther. “But then it will get picked up and circulated. That’s a sweet spot for us.”
The holiday starts the evening of March 13 and lasts through the next day. In Jerusalem, Shushan Purim, which is celebrated in walled cities, is on March 14 through Sunday.
A relic of the full-scale satirical Purim editions, complete with fictional classified ads once produced in print by Jewish newspapers nationwide and around the world, Purim news has become less common in the digital age and even discontinued, in some cases, due to the risks — some news-oriented spoofs have been misappropriated as fodder for online anti-Semitism.
In an age steeped in artificial intelligence deepfakes and rampant misinformation, intentionally fake news might seem like the last thing Jews need.
But for some editors and readers, the insanity of the current moment is all the more reason to double down on the tradition.
“The vicissitudes of Jewish history can sometimes result in, well, bad news,” says Jeremy Dauber, professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, as well as author of Jewish Comedy: A Serious History.
“Satirizing and parodying it in those forms demonstrates one of humor’s best, though hardly only, functions — a way of showing a kind of strength over and above those events,” Dauber added.
A festival of masquerade and merrymaking, Purim has traditionally been an opportunity for satire. The Purim shpiel, a theatrical skit or play often loosely based on the “Scroll of Esther”, emerged in 19th-century Eastern Europe and quickly migrated to America.
At the Commentator, a student newspaper of Yeshiva University, the Purim shpiel collided with another, American tradition — and a new genre was born, says Zev Eleff, president and professor of American Jewish history at Gratz College in Melrose Park, Penn.
“Harvard had a strong tradition to create an annual quarterly lampoon journal that came out April Fools’ Day,” he said.
It made sense for the editors at the Commentator to flex their satirical muscle, and they would almost anticipate the others by bringing it out in early March.
The Commentator began publishing a satirical Purim edition soon after its founding in 1935. (A headline from the early years announced that the evangelical Baptist minister Billy Graham had been appointed president of the university). From there, the spoofing spread.
“MESSIAH ARRIVES!” declared the 1979 Purim edition of the Jewish Press, which it claims is the “largest circulation of any Anglo-Jewish parody in the world.”
The full-scale paper included a long story detailing the redeemer’s near collision with an Egged bus on his way into Jerusalem, numerous shorter news items, ads, classifieds and letters to the editor.
While the Jewish Press tailored its satire for its mostly Orthodox audience, it didn’t hesitate to poke fun (“Yeshiva boy suffocates in polyester suit” read one headline). And as other papers jumped on the bandwagon, the satire became more edgy.
“The Backward,” a Purim supplement put out by the Forward, took aim at the first Trump administration, and the New York Jewish Week’s “Jewish Weak” occasionally found itself on the wrong side of readers’ approval.
Most of the satiric supplements were discontinued with the end of these two papers’ print editions (or the end of their editors’ nerve). Among the survivors, however, the Jerusalem Post continues to publish the “Jerusalem Roast” every year. So does the IJN — when its editors find the time to recover from the weekly streak of discombobulating news. (This year’s Indigestible Jewish News can be found on Page 10 of our March 14 print edition.)
Producing satire is doubly fraught in Israel, where opinions and tempers run hot, noted David Brinn, senior editor at the Jpost.
“‘The Roast’ is modeled after National Lampoon, magazines I grew up with in the ‘60s and ‘70s that were kind of biting and had their own take on current events, but did it in a way that was acceptable, that was making fun of everyone,” says Brinn. (One “Roast” article reported that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is known to be slight, had been appointed IDF chief of staff and promptly lowered the height requirement for soldiers.)
“The goal is to make someone laugh, whatever their political views,” he said.
Although some Jewish news sites opted to skip their Purim satire in the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the “Roast” went ahead with it, avoiding the most sensitive issues of the war. “I think everyone realized it is something that we all need,” Brinn said.
[dropcap]Good satirical news aims to fool readers — at least for a minute or two. But in the age of social media, that’s a luxury few editors can afford. Online Purim news tends to be well-labeled, usually with multiple disclaimers. Even so, it sometimes goes awry. In 2019, the British Jewish News published an article by “Mordy Chai,” claiming that Israel was planning to replace Britain in the European Union, prompting an anti-Semitic backlash on Twitter.
“It’s something from a more innocent age,” said Keren David at the Chronicle. (That storied British paper was duped last September by one of its contributors who fabricated stories.)
Still, Brinn is not ready to give up on the tradition, fondly recalling one successful Purim article asserting that wearing a kippah prevented male pattern baldness.
“I think we should be able to have a bit of fun,” she said, “and not take everything so seriously.”
