Saturday, April 21, 2007

Being jewish Yair Nitzani (thanks to tessa)


The segment is called “We Explain Things to Foreign Workers,” and it’s pretty much a shot at how Israelis see their own society. He does the thing in English with Hebrew subtitles and if you follow the subtitles you can see pretty clearly that he’s making fun of the way most Israelis speak English. For example, he calls them “strange workers” instead of “foreign.” The word in Hebrew zarim means both and the joke is how Israelis commonly go with a literal translation instead of actually knowing the word in English, as if they’re just reading out of a Hebrew-English dictionary.
And of course his “Three Kinds of Jews”—simple Jews, medium Jews, and Really Really Jewish—is mocking the sharp division in Israel between the religious and the secular. If you’re religious, you’re Really Really Religious, and if you’re secular, you’re intensely secular. Very little is in-between(more from Rabbi Mark Ankcorn)

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