Jordan Peele Once Made A ‘Get Out’ Skit About Jews and Blacks. We Deserved It.

Jordan Peele. Image by Getty

By Jenny Singer March 7, 2018

Ah, Jews — my absolute favorite type of people. We have suffered centuries of racial and religious discrimination. We have a long history of doing social justice work with other minority groups. And still, like any other group whose majority identifies as white, we have a racism problem.

How do you tackle racism within a group that has experienced so much discrimination, without being discriminatory yourself? The answer is in a sketch entitled “Gefilta Fresh and Dr. Dreidel” made by Key&Peele in 2012.

Six years before the landmark race satire “Get Out” made Jordan Peele the first black person to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the comedian turned his attention to race relations between Jewish people and black people. As half of the Comedy Central duo Key&Peele, Peele and Keegan Michael Key wrote and shot a three minute mockumentary that starred the pair as “the number one bar slash bat mitzvah party motivators in Nassau County.” The very, very funny sketch aptly satirizes the way individuals from wealthy, insular Jewish communities tend to treat black people. As one mother of a bar mitzvah boy says, “When you see black people at a bar mitzvah it’s very exciting, it’s like a scary ride.” Adds a proud father, “Jews are like black people but we were black people before there were black people. Though I guess that’s not true, they were just in a different part of the world…”

Laugh, try not to get too offended, and look for yourself in this video, which manages, incredibly, to criticize some Jews without criticizing Judaism. Gefilte Fresh and Dr. Dreidel love simchas like bat mitzvah parties, after all. They tell the camera, “We find them spiritually intoxicating, culturally fascinating, and monetarily exhilarating.”

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO