April 30, 2004
by Ben Karp

Knock, knock - Jew's there!
So have you heard the nine words that define every Jewish holiday?

“They tried to kill, us, we survived, let’s eat.”
And have you heard the one about the rabbi that walked into the bar?

Oy.

Over the past few years, a spate of Jewish humor websites has been shpeiling jokes all the yidden can get all meshuga about.

all photos courtesy bangitout.com

One popular site, Bangitout.com, proclaims itself to be a place “where Jews can laugh at themselves” and contains “Kosher comedy for the circumcized [sic].”

Brothers Isaac and Seth Galena began Bangitout in 2001 with the intent of creating a humor website for people working in offices. The Galenas grew up in the modern Orthodox Jewish community of Lower Marion, Penn. and attended an Orthodox Jewish day school in Philadelphia.

Isaac describes the origin of the website’s name as coming from “a big cliché in the office” used, for example, when someone would “bang out some copies.”

Eventually, the brothers, as Isaac puts it, found they did not know how to write office humor, so they began “writing fun stuff about Judaism.” Their jokes were intended for close friends from Yeshiva University.

Over time, people began to forward the articles to their friends and the Galenas began receiving top ten lists and “funny articles about Yiddishkeit.”  

Recent lists have included “Top 10 things you don’t want to hear from a guy at the mikvah.”  (“9. Two words: Marco Polo.”)

The website also expanded to include sections, such as its popular “eventguide,” created specifically for the Jewish community of New York City, where the Galena brothers currently reside.

The website’s popularity has now grown to 2 million page views per month from only 60,000 unique visitors and receives three or four article submissions each day.

Bar Mitzvah Disco (BMD), another Jewish humor website which is based at barmitzvahdisco.com, was popular enough to receive a mention in The Washington Post in January.  

BMD was created in April 2003 when three friends from New York found themselves laughing at their bar mitzvah pictures.
The website consists of photographs and bar and bat mitzvah stories that visitors have submitted. The site has averaged about 100,000 hits a month since its inception.

The website has garnered a slew of submissions of bar mitzvah-related paraphernalia ranging from t-shirts to thank- you notes from people like Mikhail Gorbachev and Richard Nixon and are compiling their collection into a book.

The only thing missing, it seems, is the photograph of your partially-inebriated cousin waving a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz while dancing the hora.

Website co-creator Nick Kroll, who in his telephone interview sounded as though he might just have woken from a Manishewitz-induced slumber himself, explained that the ‘positive bar mitzvah sentiment’ is in the bar mitzvah parties.

“Specifically, [they] have been like a snapshot into American pop culture, and also, its dealing with adolescence,” he explained. “It’s really a marker of a period in people’s lives that, you know, that age, being 13. Y’know, slow dances and whatnot.”

The websites have different intended audiences. Galena says that although non-Jews can tell something funny is there, “they don’t understand most of the jokes.” He explains that although he receives occasional praise (from non-Jews,) “the whole site is like an inside joke among Jews from all spectrums.”

Kroll’s site, however, has no religious concerns, and is intended for “whoever’d get a kick out of looking at bar mitzvah pictures” and “sort of, urban, Jewish and non-Jewish ... [people]”  

Regarding BMD’s widespread appeal, Kroll explains, “Non-Jews love it. They’ve been to bar ‘n’ bat mitzvahs, they identify with the pictures and the t-shirts, and everything that goes into it as much as the Jewish kids do.”

The creators of the websites have opposing religious mindsets. When asked how he considered himself religiously, Kroll answered with a sarcastic “awesome.”

Bangitout, on the other hand, is very conscious of its religious impact. In addition to the humor articles, which make up most of the content, there are serious religious discussions. One such discussion deals with shomer negiah, the traditional prohibition against physical contact between members of the opposite sex outside of marriage, in a modern context.

Although Bangitout receives a vastly greater volume of appreciative letters from those who have, for example, used their content in sermons, the website has garnered concern from some rabbis due to what they view as risqué or inappropriate articles.

Galena notes that they take comments from “rebbe’im” very seriously and usually respond personally. He adds that they have removed content that some perceive as offensive. “It’s written with a little bit of sharpness, a little harifness, but it’s writing out of admiration for their religion,” he adds, noting, “You can only laugh at something if you love it.”

Additionally, Galena “hope[s] that people understand that the site is really made out of admiration for Judaism and not necessarily any cynicism at all. It’s supposed to be looking at the Jewish community’s idiosyncrasies and trying to point them out [in] a humorous way.”

Other forms of Jewish humor, such as jewschool.com, online clothing stores selling “Jewish Girl” and “Shabbat Shalom Motherf–er” t-shirts, and 50 Shekel, a Jewish rapper who “shpiels” about “shiksas” (and who referred to this reporter as a “Hebrew homie”) have all been successful in attracting an online audience, albeit in their own ways. 

Kroll speculates that this is because “a lot of Jews feel very much like cultural Jews, as opposed to religiously based in their Judaism ... I think it’s creating communities ... virtual communities [where they can] participate on their own time.”

Galena offers his own interpretation: “all of these things, like these t-shirts, these Jewish rappers, these Jewish bands, it’s awesome. But the best part about all of them is that it really just brings Jews together, and that’s really something that’s lacking in today’s society.”