How Did Chelsea Handler ‘Nazi’ It Coming?
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
How did Chelsea Handler ‘Nazi’ this coming?
July 14, Chelsea did a Hitler parody on her E! talk show, “Chelsea Lately.” Two days later came the Anti-Defamation League’s condemnation.
During the parody, Chelsea’s sidekick, Chuy, dressed up as Hitler. When asked why, he told the audience it was in response to Germany’s World Cup victory. Various Nazi jokes were tossed around, continuing past the skit and into the program.
One panelist said, “I’m a Jew, but I’m still glad that Germany won. It’s nice for them to have something gold that they didn’t pry out of my grandfather’s mouth.”
How far is too far?
Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said, “While we try to give comedians leeway and do not believe that Nazi jokes should be completely off-limits, this was an instance of taking a Hitler parody to the extreme” and that “Chelsea Handler’s references to it throughout the program and her connecting it with Germany’s World Cup victory took the joke way overboard.”
He continued to say that it was “offensive and hurtful to Holocaust survivors and their families, and to members of the German team and all Germans.”
Germany’s World Cup victory in general has kept the ADL very busy, as Handler’s denouncing follows the ADL’s criticism of all the Nazi jokes that spread like wildfire on Twitter following the match.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
