Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
You’d think stand-up comedian Moshe Kasher would feel a bit of bravado about returning to the Bay Area this month to headline San Francisco’s Punch Line. Instead, the former Oakland resident finds it “more stressful” to play local comedy clubs.
“I’m so conscious about what material I did last time and what’s new and fresh,” he told J. “I do love the Bay Area and in particular the Punch Line because it’s where I started.”
Kasher, 45, will return to the club for a string of shows from Nov. 20 to 23. He won’t be telling jokes about the differences between Hayes Valley and Noe Valley, though. Instead, he will focus on what he calls “crowd work,” engaging audiences in spontaneous — hopefully, hilarious — back and forth. It’s risky business for comedians, comparable to pulling off a high-wire act without a net, but Kasher has long experience with taking risks.
His 2024 memoir, “Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six Scenes” offers proof, recounting his life-changing immersions in diverse realms, from plunging into the rave scene, Burning Man, professional comedy work and Alcoholics Anonymous to growing up as a hearing child of deaf parents who split up when he was a baby. His mother was a staunchly secular Jew while his father remarried into a Hasidic world.
“I knew I had these unusual gravitational pulls into [different] worlds and how these worlds don’t seem to fit together, like Burning Man and Hasidic Judaism,” he said. “The big revelation of the book was that they fit together quite perfectly — in me.”
“Subculture Vulture” is a followup to his 2012 memoir, “Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16.” The new book eschews strict chronology and instead recounts periods of his life with long, deep commitments to various communities, each of which embraced him — mind, body and spirit.
“What’s interesting about subculture is that it’s … beneath the dominant,” said Kasher, who lives in the Los Angeles area. “I believe what always turned me on about the groups I fell in with was doing things outside of the mainstream, so in that way deafness and [Hasidic] Judaism qualify.”
Given that he was a teenage alcoholic who joined AA at 15, it’s miraculous he remained sober during his immersions in the rave scene, not to mention his years at Burning Man and comedy clubs.
Even Kasher isn’t sure how he did it.
“I have no idea how I stayed sober through this,” he said. “By the time I was six months sober, I realized I could do anything; I have the rest of my life. The drugs were secondary for me. I was looking for a life, not for a contact high. The mission was to find a life outside this addictive cycle, so I got high enough on the art, the people, the weirdos.”
As for his Jewish upbringing, Kasher said he very slowly matriculated into understanding what Judaism was and is. For him, it turned out to be feast or famine. As a youth, he spent most of the year with his permissive, secular mother. But he spent summers on the East Coast with his father, who left the secular world behind when he married into the Satmar Hasidic community.
His older brother, David Kasher, is a rabbi and West Coast director of the adult education nonprofit, Hadar.
“I had a profoundly more and less Jewish experience than all my friends,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I was not Jewish at all. I never went to Jewish summer camp, no Jewish day school. But when I was Jewish, it was hyper-concentrated. I’m grateful to have had this bizarro experience because it created me. I found a way to have a Jewish experience somehow through it all.”
Kasher avoided writing about Israel in the book, which he completed before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. When asked how would have cast his chapter on Judaism now, he said:
“I deliberately didn’t go into Israel and Zionism because it’s a giant Pandora’s box — not only for the reader but also for me. It was a complicated and conflicted feeling I had before Oct. 7, and more so after. I think the only sane feeling to have is to be conflicted and heartbroken.”
Kasher hopes to sustain his career as an author and has considered writing fiction or perhaps a food book. He does wonder, though, whether he will ever again plunge so deeply into any subculture.
“Has my time expired?” he has asked himself. “The journey of self-discovery is in some ways a journey of the young. I realized your excitement about a thing wears off. I would love to get swept up by something, but the good part of aging is [that] now is enough. “
Regardless, Kasher remains committed to exploring new interests.
“I’m passionate about surfing,” he said. “It’s the first thing I have dedicated a lot of time and energy to in awhile. But I’m very Jewish at surfing.”