Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

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

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

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.