Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor. As one of the key actors in the formation of New Hollywood, Hoffman is known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and emotionally vulnerable characters. He is the recipient of numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Hoffman has received numerous honors including the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1997, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2012. Actor Robert De Niro described him as "an actor with the everyman's face who embodied the heartbreakingly human".
Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly, and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Maus, often published with the subtitle A Survivor's Tale, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Jason Matthew Biggs is an American actor and comedian. He is best known for playing Jim Levenstein in the American Pie comedy film series, Leonardo in the first two seasons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), and Larry Bloom in the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black. He also starred in Boys and Girls, Loser, Saving Silverman, Anything Else, Jersey Girl, Eight Below, Over Her Dead Body, and My Best Friend's Girl. Biggs initially gained recognition from his role in the soap opera As the World Turns, for which he was nominated for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actor in a Drama Series in 1995.
The tradition of humor in Judaism dates back to the Torah and the Midrash from the ancient Middle East, but generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal and often anecdotal humor of Ashkenazi Jews which took root in the United States over the last hundred years, including in secular Jewish culture. European Jewish humor in its early form developed in the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, with theological satire becoming a traditional way of clandestinely opposing Christianization.
Daniel Okrent is an American writer and editor. He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, and for writing several books. In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history. His most recent book, published May 2019, is The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.
Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Todd Susman is an American actor.
Arie Kaplan is an American writer and comedian. He is the author of the book Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!, and a writer for Mad magazine. He lives in New York City.
Norman Stiles is a television writer best known for his work on the show Sesame Street. Stiles worked on the show from 1971 until 1997.
Shalom Auslander is a prominent American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He grew up in a strict, Orthodox neighborhood in Monsey, New York, where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal", a reference to his strict religious upbringing. His writing style is notable for its existentialist themes, biting satire and black humor. His non-fiction often draws comparisons to David Sedaris, while his fiction has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Groucho Marx. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and are published around the world.
Peter Gethers is an American publisher, screenwriter and author of television shows, films, newspaper and magazine articles, and novelist; the author of several books, including the bestseller The Cat Who Went to Paris, published in the UK under the title A Cat Called Norton, the first of the Norton the cat trilogy about his Scottish Fold, Norton. He lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
Marilyn Roberta Sokol is an American actress, musician, comedian, and producer, perhaps best known for her roles as Lulu Brecht in Can't Stop the Music (1980) and as Ma Otter in Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977). She has received an Emmy Award, Obie Award, and a Bistro Award.
Sidney J. Kimmel is an American businessman, philanthropist, and film producer. He is ranked number 2141 in the Forbes list of the richest people alive in 2021.
Joshua Ostrovsky, known professionally as The Fat Jewish, is an American entrepreneur, social media influencer, author and plus size model.
Amir Shmuel Blumenfeld is an Israeli-American comedian, actor, writer, television host, and member of the American comedy duo, Jake and Amir. Born in Israel, he moved to Los Angeles when he was two, and was hired by the New York City-based CollegeHumor in 2005. As well as contributing to its books and articles, he has written and starred in original videos for the comedy website—appearing in series such as Hardly Working and Very Mary-Kate—and was a cast member on its short-lived MTV program The CollegeHumor Show.
Sam Hoffman is a producer, director and writer who has created content in film, television and on digital media. Hoffman wrote and directed the film Humor Me, starring Jemaine Clement, Elliott Gould and Ingrid Michaelson. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Ashley Blaker is a British comedian and television producer. Blaker is a writer for TV and radio and a longtime collaborator with Matt Lucas: he was producer of Little Britain and Rock Profile. He also co-created and wrote The Matt Lucas Awards, and appeared in one episode. Lucas, amongst others, has described Blaker as "the UK's only Orthodox comedian".
There are several major aspects of humor related to the Holocaust: humor of the Jews in Nazi Germany and in Nazi concentration and extermination camps, a specific kind of "gallows humor"; German humor on the subject during the Nazi era; the appropriateness of this kind of off-color humor in modern times; modern anti-Semitic sick humor.
