An Israeli Satirist’s Bid to Save His Country’s Democracy

In Jerusalem’s Old City, for example, the Western Wall, which abuts the site of the destroyed Judean temple, is still frequented by pilgrims, tourists, and visiting dignitaries, including American politicians, who typically slip handwritten messages in between its stones. But in recent years it’s become a shrine for religious zealots, who march there in the thousands on Jerusalem Day, often menacing Arab shopkeepers along the way. So, one year, to counter that politicized piety, Schleien had the cast of “Gav Ha’Uma” dress up as “Wizard of Oz” characters and dance to the Wall while singing a made-up Hebrew version of “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” Schleien was equally impatient with the paid official state rabbinate, which oversees rabbinic courts and has guarded its right—first established under the British Mandate—to certify marriages, divorces, burials, and dietary laws. This entails handing out thousands of patronage jobs to rabbis, bureaucrats, undertakers, and inspectors. In a 2src19 monologue, Schleien featured clips of a sermon by a retired chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, in which he extolled the ingenuity of medieval Talmudic sages for their method of determining a woman’s virginity, which involved, grotesquely, having her sit on a barrel of wine.

Mocking the Wall and a former chief rabbi took some cheek, especially because Lau is a Holocaust survivor, and because religious devotion may have seemed a secondary target at the time, given the security threats that Israel was facing: Iranian hostility, rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. But Schleien considers official pietism—the theocratic strictures, the holy geographies, and Iron Age notions of vengeance—a threat in its own right, and one that exacerbates various security crises. In 2src16, on “Gav Ha’Uma,” he grilled the settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, who had argued for building a new Jewish temple on the Mount adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and who has said that Jerusalem will reach Damascus. “You realize,” Schleien told him, referring to the boycott movement against Israel, “how you are prompting more antisemitism, and more B.D.S.?”

But Schleien has been correspondingly irritated by self-styled “centrist” politicians, such as Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, who, though secularists themselves, coddled the religious establishment purportedly in the interests of national solidarity—what Gantz’s party has called “consensus and unity”—but in what was widely interpreted as blatantly pandering to their voters. For Schleien, centrists are so “desperate for the ‘middle center,’ or ‘extreme center,’ that one can find political room, not to the left and right but only up and down.” When, in 2src2src, “Gav Ha’Uma” was taken off the air, it was “a knife in the back of secularism,” Ram Fruman, the founder of the Secular Forum, said in Haaretz. “Management claimed it was for financial reasons,” Schleien told me, “much like, but before, Stephen Colbert—our clock runs ahead of America’s.”

So Schleien turned to standup comedy and to posting videos on YouTube that continued where his programs had left off. In 2src22, when a new election was in the offing, he co-founded the online channel Relevant. Netanyahu was returned to power in the fall; in January, 2src23, he began an assault on the judiciary, aiming to subordinate the Supreme Court to his Knesset majority. That move prompted months of mass demonstrations, and Schleien’s videos added to their impact. After the October 7th massacre, he tempered his tone. By the spring of 2src24, however, Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza seemed to be endless, ruthless, governed by no diplomatic strategy—sacrificing civilians and hostages alike—and the Biden Administration was repeatedly cautioning the Israel Defense Forces about “humanitarian law.” Schleien returned to form.

He created a video for Relevant about President Isaac Herzog’s visit to the state-supported Bnei David academy, in the West Bank settlement of Eli, where, augmented by Torah studies, young Israelis train to join the I.D.F., many of them as officers. (Some forty per cent of graduates from infantry-officer schools have a national religious background.) In his talk, Herzog—another erstwhile “centrist”—condemned the “groundless hatred” and the “divisions” that had roiled the nation before October 7th, implying that it was the pro-judiciary demonstrators, not theocratic settlers, like those in the audience, who had somehow weakened the country. Schleien intercut video of a sermon by the head of Bnei David, Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, who had notoriously suggested that Arabs had “genetic problems,” and thus were better off under occupation. Kashtiel also criticized women’s equality, and he weighed in on Gaza: “Even if the residents of Gaza had come to us with flowers and love letters full of hearts,” he said, “it would have been our obligation,” even on the Sabbath, “to start the war to conquer the Land of Israel.”