Eddy Portnoy, at The Blogs

Feb 24, 2023, 1:23 AM

Richard Belzer was a Jewish comedian. Why didn’t his obituaries say so?

A caricature of Richard Belzer and his dog from "Even More Old Jewish Comedians," by Drew Friedman. (Courtesy Drew Friedman/Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)

Belzer did a routine about Bob Dylan's bar mitzvah and he knew his fleishig from his milchig

About Me

Eddy Portnoy is academic advisor and exhibition curator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward and others. He is the author of “Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from te Yiddish Press” (Stanford University Press).