It’s a challenge to do a spiel in ‘fake news’ era
As the raucous festival of Purim approaches, editors of Jewish news outlets are gearing up to produce articles rife with satire, inside jokes and quotes from fictitious, suspiciously named sources.
The holiday starts after sundown next Thursday, March 13.
“Coming up to Purim, we’re looking around to something that’s in the news that’s not too serious but might take people in,” said Keren David, managing editor at the London-based Jewish Chronicle, which produces Purim spiel stories every year.
“It will be obvious to us that someone called Esther HaMalka being quoted isn’t real,” David said. “But then it will get picked up and circulated. That’s a sweet spot for us.”
A relic of the full-scale satirical Purim editions, Purim news produced by news organizations has become less common in the digital age and even discontinued, in some cases, due to the risks — some Purim spoof news stories have been misappropriated as fodder for online antisemitism.
In an age steeped in artificial intelligence deepfakes and rampant misinformation, intentionally fake news might seem like the last thing Jews need. But for some editors and readers, the insanity of the current moment is more reason to double down on the tradition.
“The vicissitudes of Jewish history can sometimes result in, well, bad news,” said Jeremy Dauber, professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University, as well as author of “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History.”
“Satirizing and parodying it in those forms demonstrates one of humor’s best, though hardly only, functions — a way of providing resilience, of showing a kind of strength over and above those events,” Dauber added.
A festival of masquerade and merrymaking, Purim has traditionally been an opportunity for satire. The Purim spiel, a theatrical skit or play often loosely based on Megillat Esther, emerged in 19th-century Eastern Europe and quickly migrated to America.
At the Commentator, a student newspaper of Yeshiva University, the Purim spiel collided with an America tradition — and a new genre was born, said Zev Eleff, president and professor of American Jewish history at Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pa.
“Harvard had a strong tradition to create an annual quarterly lampoon journal that came out April Fools’ Day,” he said. “It made sense for them to flex their satirical muscle, and they would almost anticipate the others by bringing it out in early March.”
The Commentator began publishing a satirical Purim edition soon after its founding in 1935. (A headline from the early years announced that the evangelical Baptist minister Billy Graham had been appointed president of the university). And from there, the spoofing spread.
“MESSIAH ARRIVES!” declared the 1979 Purim edition of the Jewish Press in Brooklyn, which it claimed is the “largest circulation of any Anglo-Jewish parody in the world.”
The full-scale paper (which, unlike many others, was clearly labeled as a parody) included a long story detailing the redeemer’s near collision with an Egged bus on his way into Jerusalem, ads, classifieds and letters to the editor.
While the Jewish Press tailored its satire for its mostly Orthodox audience, it didn’t hesitate to poke fun (“Yeshiva boy suffocates in polyester suit” read one headline). And as other papers jumped on the bandwagon, the satire became more edgy.
“The Backward,” a Purim supplement put out by the Forward when it was still a print publication, took aim at the first Trump administration, and the New York Jewish Week’s “Jewish Weak” occasionally found itself on the wrong side of readers’ approval.
Most of the satiric supplements were discontinued with the end of the papers’ print editions (or the end of their editors’ nerve). Among the few survivors, however, the Jerusalem Post continues to publish the “Jerusalem Roast” every year.
Producing satire is doubly fraught in Israel, where opinions and tempers run hot, noted David Brinn, senior editor at the Post.
“‘The Roast’ is modeled after National Lampoon, magazines I grew up with in the ’60s and ’70s that were kind of biting and had their own take on current events but did it in a way that was acceptable, that was making fun of everyone,” said Brinn. (One “Roast” article reported that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is known to be slight, had been appointed IDF chief of staff and promptly lowered the height requirement for soldiers.)
“The goal is to make someone laugh, whatever their political views,” he said.
Although some Jewish news sites opted to skip their Purim satire in the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the “Roast” went ahead with it, avoiding the most sensitive issues of the ongoing war. “I think everyone realized it is something that we all need,” Brinn said.
Good satirical news aims to fool readers — at least for a minute or two. But in the age of social media, that’s a luxury few editors can afford.
Online Purim news tends to be well-labeled, usually with multiple disclaimers; even so, it sometimes goes awry.
In 2019, the British Jewish News published an article by “Mordy claiming that Israel was planning to replace Britain in the European Union, prompting an antisemitic backlash on Twitter.Chai,”
“It’s something from a more innocent age,” said Keren David at the Chronicle. (That storied British paper was duped last September by one of its contributors who fabricated stories.)
Still, David’s not ready to give up on the tradition. She fondly recalled one successful Purim article asserting that wearing a kippah prevented male pattern baldness.
“I think we should be able to have a bit of fun,” she said, “and not take everything so seriously.”
