The World Says You're a Jew. Now What?
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Al Jazeera, Alex Jones and AI chatbots all spread the story of a crowd walking out on Orthodox comic Menachem Silverstein. Here's what actually happened.
Rabbi Menachem Silverstein spent Rosh Hashanah leading his small Los Angeles synagogue in prayers. Little did he know that while he prayed and celebrated with his family, vile lies were being spread about him online.
In addition to being an Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Silverstein is a successful standup comic with frequent tours and a regular weekly show in a Los Angeles comedy club.
He grew up in New York’s heavily Orthodox Jewish Crown Heights neighborhood, one of seven siblings. Being from such a large family “helped with being funny,” he quips. “I had to stand out somehow.” He became a scriptwriter and, even though he loved standup comedy, assumed that someone who looked like an Orthodox Jew would never be able to build a career in comedy.
That changed a few years ago when he was pitching a comedy show to executives. One Israeli producer loved his ideas and said that he wanted one of the comics in the show to be Orthodox. While that particular show never got made, the producer encouraged Rabbi Silverstein to record some test footage. “It turned out really well,” he found, and he decided to do standup professionally. (Rabbi Silverstein also has a huge following on the Jewish children’s streaming service Toveedo.)
The atmosphere of Rabbi Silverstein’s shows began to change after Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. He recalls that a week after the brutal rampage which left over 1,200 Israelis dead and over 250 kidnapped, he was scheduled to perform his regular weekly show. Anguished by what had taken place in Israel, he wrote a new comedy set about antisemitism. “That’s what I thought my opening should be,” he said in an Aish.com interview.
He started using an opening line that is now part of the online slander against him: “My name is Menachem and I stand with Israel. That’s not political: they’re just the only people that can pronounce my name.”
It worked well for a time, garnering laughs, but he noticed that within a few weeks “the applause died out.” During one show in December 2023, only one girl in the audience applauded the line. “I realized that joke wasn’t uniting the crowd any more,” Rabbi Silverstein reflects. “It was making the crowd uncomfortable.” He retired the joke, but the anti-Israel sentiment during some shows only continued to grow.
Occasionally audience members shout “free Palestine” during his act. One night another comic told the crowd she was Israeli, only to be met with boos. Some of his fellow comedians stopped speaking with him, going so far as to block him on social media. He found it difficult to book some comedy clubs when he toured.
Yet Rabbi Silverstein persisted in finding the funny side of life. He has three goals in his shows, he explains. “To make people laugh. Deeper than that, I’m really trying to educate people on antisemitism and how silly it is and what it’s like to be a Jew facing antisemitism. But the most important message I want to get across is that Jews are normal people just like you.”
After Rosh Hashanah concluded, Rabbi Silverstein saw scores of online messages, including one from a comedian who’d broken ties with him after October 7 who now sounded very concerned and asked if everything was okay. Clearly something was very wrong.
“Comedian Menachem Silverstein makes a joke about Israel and walks a crowd,” said a viral post, linking to a clip of a comedian (who doesn’t look anything like Rabbi Silverstein) standing on a stage as his audience walks out. “Walking a crowd” means that an audience walked out of a show in protest or disgust, and it can spell the end of a comedian’s career. This fabricated post already had 2 million views.
A malicious actor had posted a clip of a September 10, 2026 show at the Laugh Factory comedy club in Chicago. It was part of their regular gag series “What Could Go Wrong?” which saw pranks played on comedians. A comic named Kieron Harrell was blindfolded and given headphones to wear on stage. As he stood there, oblivious, club staff escorted the entire audience out of the room. The joke was supposed to be on Harrell when he’d lost his audience. Instead, someone posted it saying that the comedian was Rabbi Silverstein.
“I type my name into Twitter and all I see is me,” Rabbi Silverstein recalls; “I was like, whoah!” The false video was going viral. Al Jazeera aired the false story on both their Arabic and English sites. (It’s since been taken down from their English site but remains up in Arabic.) AI assistants like Grok and Gemini were parroting the false story as truth. Soon a twist emerged: Rabbi Silverstein had supposedly told his joke about Israelis being the only people who could pronounce his name and that is what - according to the internet - triggered the mass walkout of his audience.
On September 14, 2026, disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones devoted 7 minutes to the story on his show. “It’s got one guy in a yarmulke,” Jones erroneously told his millions of followers; “He literally says, ‘If you don’t support what Israel is doing with this war, leave.’” Within weeks, the false clip had amassed about 100 million views worldwide.
Rabbi Silverstein found the earliest mention of the lie came from an X account named TruthSeeker. It was reshared and reshared; major outlets like Al Jazeera and Alex Jones gave it further boosts and helped it spread far and wide. This follows a troubling pattern in which antisemitic and antizionist content - often produced with AI tools - is increasingly going viral.
One 2026 study found that the number of false videos, including deepfakes and AI-generated content has exploded between 2025 and 2026, targeting Jews using age-old antisemitic tropes. B’nai B’rith Canada recently issued a report documenting an “unprecedented rise in antisemitic images and videos which have been created or doctored and falsified using AI.”
These false videos and other propaganda normalize antisemitism by making it seem as if large numbers of people share similar antisemitic beliefs and rhetoric. Today’s viral video alleging that an American audience walked out after a single Jewish joke spreads the false ideas that Zionism is toxic, that most people are antizionist, and that Jewish artists are routinely being met with hostility. It teaches people to behave in antizionist and antisemitic ways.
For Rabbi Silverstein, the current false video smearing his name is causing real-life harm. He worries that club owners will look up his name, believe the false stories about his audience walking out on him, and refuse to book his shows. He’s also faced harassment. “Everyone who didn’t get to walk out on me on purpose is now trying to walk out on me virtually.” Social media users keep flagging his comedy account, getting it temporarily shut down.
Before the viral video smearing his name, Rabbi Silverstein posted a funny reel that reached 700,000 views. Now his social media reach - through which he spreads his brand and name recognition - has been severely curtailed. He’s been bombarded with vile antisemitic DMs. The hostility has been unrelenting.
“It’s so scary for a bunch of reasons,” he explains. “This could happen to me again, it could happen to anyone, to any Jewish creator.”
Rabbi Silverstein is working to get the word out that the viral video about him is a fabrication. “I want to bring awareness that if this could happen to me it could happen to anyone.”
Despite the pain, he hasn’t lost his humor. “On Rosh Hashanah I davened (prayed) for health and a career boost - I wanted to go viral - just not like this.”
