Jewish Comedy Turns Sane

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

Once an institutionalized mental patient, the comic Moshe Kasher unleashes his psychological self-abuse in the new memoir Kasher in the Rye

By Josh Lambert for Tablet Magazine

Moshe Kasher introduces one bit on his 2009 debut comedy CD, Everyone You Know Is Going to Die, And Then You Are, by saying the words, “I went to college.” Which, given that Kasher is a 32-year-old American Jew, would seem a little like his saying that he breathes oxygen.

Except that for Kasher, picking up a bachelor’s degree was anything but inevitable. In Kasher in the Rye, his new misery-lit memoir, the comedian explains that he was, for most of his teenage years, headed in a very different direction. His father, a deaf baal teshuva who found his place among the Satmar Hasidim in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, would have preferred him to train as a Talmud scholar, but even before his bar mitzvah, Moshe had discovered a passion for illegal drugs. “I was 12 years old and I found my calling,” he recalls. “Stay high, stay drunk, at all costs.” He fulfilled this program throughout his adolescence in Oakland, Calif., during which—according to his literary testimony—he was drunk or high every day, stole from grocery stores and from his mother, hung around with homeless junkies, racked up thousands of dollars in phone-sex charges, and was booted from one therapist and teenage rehab program after another. He robbed kids on the street, wrote graffiti, urinated all over the floor of his bedroom, and, at one particularly low point, was accused along with his friends of gang-raping a teenage girl.

Kasher grew up in the home of his divorced mother, who, being deaf like his father, could not hear him sneaking out of the house at night, or blasting Too $hort on her car’s stereo, even when she was sitting in the seat right next to him. But he doesn’t blame his troubles on growing up in a family doubly destabilized by divorce and deafness. How could he, when his older brother sailed through a fancy liberal arts college and onward to a progressive Orthodox rabbinical school so as to return to his hometown and serve as the senior Jewish educator at the U.C. Berkeley Hillel?

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