For links to the videos mentioned in this story, click here.
The scene: A fat, white Jewish boy wearing a backward baseball cap, pink sunglasses and a snarl, walks down the street to the tune of “Baby Got Back.”
But instead of the infamous opening line “I like big butts and I cannot lie,” he’s rapping these words:
Dawgs, I like matzah balls and I’ll tell you why
If I don’t get ‘em it makes me cry.
When the smell rolls in and I imagine the taste, and around them in your face
You get Tums!
Wanna eat that stuff — cuz one just ain’t enough!
My clothes they keep on tearing, I’m fat but I’m not caring …
It’s “Matzah Ball Rap,” one of the many Passover videos spreading around YouTube this season. Since the Passover seder is the most attended Jewish ritual of the year, the Jews of YouTube have lots to say about it, with videos ranging from the satirical to the educational.
In other words, it’s a perfect medium for today’s younger generation of Jews looking to connect to their heritage.
There are the rap songs, like the animated hip-hop video by Smooth-E (comedian Eric Schwartz) called “Matzah: Hip Hop Fo’ Jews” (“I feel like a freak/because every time I pull out something to eat for this week/I can’t do it/because I’m Jewish/and I can’t eat bread/and my rabbi said only/MATZAH!”), which was featured on the “Tonight Show.”
Then there are the melodic spoofs, such as Michelle Citrin’s “20 Things to Do With Matzah” (“Passover’s over and wouldn’t it be neat/if you could use all the matzah you didn’t eat/Catch it like a Frisbee with your friends in the park/or jump in the water and pretend you’re a shark”), which in the last year registered almost half a million hits.
There are the cute ones, like Sam Apple’s “Who Let the Jews Out,” to promote his book “Schlepping Through the Alps,” and the utterly ridiculous ones, such as the movie preview “I Know What You Did Last Seder” (four Jewish teens are in great danger when a rabbi discovers they have been eating leavened bread during Passover).
Others are more substantive, such as “Let My People Grow,” an animated sketch by Stephen and Joel Levinson, based on their seder skits growing up on Dayton, Ohio. This one frames the Jews’ desire to leave Egypt as a breakup. (Jewish Slave Girl: “We think it’s time to move on, you know, get a place of our own.” Egyptian master: “But you can’t leave now! I mean, things were going so well! Listen, this pyramid is almost done — just finish it up … ”)
Just as the Internet and its blogs have upended traditional media like newspapers and television, YouTube has changed the way many young people think about religion. The Passover videos are just one example of how the Jews of YouTube — usually 20- and 30-something comedians, musicians and writers — are using their culture and creativity to redefine the tradition.
“Being Jewish is a part of me — it’s not the only part of me, but it’s part of my story,” said Smooth-E, a comedian who has made dozens of YouTube videos, including Jewish ones like “Crank That Kosha Boy,” which has generated more than 3 million hits, perhaps because it spoofs SoulJa Boy’s popular hip-hop song “Tell Em (Crank That).”
“As a Jewish artist, I’m telling my story. I kind of have a skewed view — I look at matzah and think that I love the tradition, but matzah stops you up like traffic on the 405 at rush hour,” Smooth-E said, referring to the Los Angeles freeway. “It’s not disrespectful, but we can all relate to it.”
Some Jewish YouTube videos are of the inadvertently funny variety, like “Seth’s Bar Mitzvah,” which features a family singing karaoke horribly off-key. Others are serious affairs, like castigating the United Nations for its stance on Israel, or explaining Jewish rituals such as the seder.
But the ones that gain the most traction are the scripted, funny videos. They promote Judaism, but in a more subtle — and timely — way.
Take Citrin’s “I Gotta Love You Rosh Hashanah,” a parody of the “Barack Obama Girl” video (“Yom Kippur leaves me feeling empty inside/Passover reminds of the tears that we cry/but I don’t want to think of our tragic history/cuz I’m comin’ home for Rosh Hashanah”).
“The crazy part was the response I got from people — ‘You make me proud to be a Jew’ and ‘You’re so cool,’ ” Citrin said, noting that she heard from children, grandmothers, even a Holocaust survivor. Hebrew school teachers told her they use it in their curriculum.
Jewish organizations need to connect with their audience “where they hang out,” said Matt Dorf of Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications, who worked with the people behind Sarah Silverman’s “The Great Schlep” voter campaign and Birthright Israel, which has hired artists like Citrin to make videos and holds video contests for program alums.
“[YouTube is] where their people are,” Dorf said of Birthright’s target age group. “You’re not going to speak to them with a full-page ad in the New York Times.”
Birthright and Jewish dating site JDate recently hired Brandon Walker, the songwriter for the video “Chinese Food on Christmas,” which was viewed 1.6 million times. For Birthright, he wrote a Passover song, “Get Down Moses,” and for JDate he wrote “February’s Here” (“Never thought I’d be the type to use a dating site online/but February’s here and I don’t have a Valentine”).
“Jews love to have a voice in pop culture,” Walker noted. “We’re a minority and been through so much, but we’re so vocal and prevalent — I think that’s why we love stuff like this.”
With YouTube, Walker said, Jews get “to make our presence known in a positive, lighthearted way, which is not always the case.”
As YouTube becomes the place to get “discovered,” many Jewish filmmakers are using the site to gain exposure for their work.
“We get broader exposure on YouTube than through the film festival route and working our way up through Hollywood,” said filmmaker Oren Kaplan, 29, who produces videos such as the controversial “Hardcore Jewish Girls” and “Modern-Day Jesus,” which has been optioned by Comedy Central. “It allows us to throw stuff out there and see what people like and don’t like, and it allows us to entertain.”
What about people who don’t get the joke?
“A lot of those involved with kiruv [religious outreach] seem to me overly concerned with how others think of the Jews,” Kaplan said.
“I have been socialized in a much more secular world. I don’t really see a need to be extremely careful what I put out there,” he added. “I know it bothers a lot of people, but then [I say] don’t watch it and don’t talk about it.”
For links to the videos mentioned in this story, click here.