The "Jewsploitation" craze

Kesselman takes a final bite of the very treyf sausage on his breakfast plate. Canter's Deli is like Kesselman himself: Jewish in style, but decidedly un-kosher. "I had a bar mitzvah and then I was pretty much done," he says. "It wasn't for me."

What was for him, though, was "being culturally Jewish," which he says he's long flaunted. Raised in a diverse community in the San Fernando Valley, Kesselman found his ethnic identification not a handicap but a neat little accessory, one that his black friends had, too. He and his multicultural posse tossed racial epithets at each other in jest. "That racial discrimination stuff wasn't for us," he says.

Being the product of a comfort zone in which "that racial discrimination stuff" supposedly doesn't apply is precisely what makes Kesselman -- and other artistic Jews of his generation, most of whom come from cities where Jews abound -- comfortable marketing Jewish insider jokes to everyone. That non-Jews might not get the joke isn't really an issue; neither is the line between a joke and a slur, or the fact that outré jokes -- especially when they trickle down to the masses -- can be taken the wrong way.

Howard Stern might be over-the-top funny as Howard Stern, but not when he's reborn as some little kid trying, without finesse or comic chops, to imitate Howard Stern -- and just being racist, sexist and unfunny. Much as I hate to embody the Jewish joke in which Jews can't take a joke, or in which we spot anti-Semitism in a sneeze ("ahh-Jew!"), I have to admit that while comedy can diffuse, yes, it can also add flame to the fire. It takes an optimistic Jew not to think about jokes and their context -- not to see "Reuben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer" (by the performers of "What I Like About Jew") as potential ammunition and not just a laugh.

Kesselman's brief stints in white-bread American college towns -- San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Steamboat Springs, Colo. -- gave him a fleeting sense of otherness: He was a little more, well, New York Jew than his laid-back, college-cap-wearing fraternity brothers. But he noted it, they noted it and he moved on.

"I started to embrace my neurosis," Kesselman explains, and life as a Jewish other has been fun and games ever since. "It's my little club," he says of being Jewish. "Ed Pressman [the executive producer of "Hammer"] says that Jews are the new blacks, and I think that's true."

I don't. Eschewing compare-and-despair contests -- yes, both Jews and blacks have suffered -- it's obvious that though both groups share a legacy of discrimination, Jews are now firmly ensconced in the middle and upper classes. Jews are not now, as blacks and Latinos have been in the past, on the cusp of becoming mainstream; they've long been as close to mainstream as any American ethnic group can be. Today's Jewish tastemakers lust not after inclusion but the edginess that comes from exclusion. Trendy and creative contemporary Jewishness is -- as it has been at least since the Jazz Age, but more so in hip-hop America -- about the coolness factor that its players associate with being black.

What's new about "new" Jewish comedy like "The Hebrew Hammer," then, isn't its jokes or the black-Jew buddy fantasy it indulges, but the way it has recast these things: Jewishness -- otherness -- as a trendy accessory that can be taken on and off at will. This sort of identity-making is in line with today's "big fat [insert ethnicity] wedding" trend, in which ethnicity is both particular and universal at the same time. It's also of a piece with the triumph of the nerd, whose pop-culture poster children include director Spike Jonze and N.E.R.D. über-producer Pharrell Williams. Otherness is cool, as long as it's as kooky, funky and freely styled as the latest trend in Brooklyn's hot Williamsburg neighborhood (the hipster, not Hasidic, section).

The next accessory in this boutique might be more "Hebrew Hammer": An animated series is potentially in the works at Comedy Central, and Kesselman himself is, half in jest, promoting his friend's cocktail concoction: the "Hammer" is one part vodka and one part Manischewitz. I can't resist riffing on Kesselman's shtick: Garnish with a cherry and it's a "Shiksa Hammer." Add a shot of crème de cacao and -- voilà! -- it's the hip-hop Hebrew's drink of choice, the coolest accessory this side of New York: the "Baadasssss Hammer."

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