Jerry Springer was Jewish. Someone tell The Times.

This is a weird pattern that someone needs to explain for me.

The great Eddy Portnoy recently wrote an essay for Jewish Telegraphic Agency titled, “Richard Belzer was a Jewish comedian. Why didn’t his obituaries say so?” It’s a great piece. I recommend it. Here’s a bit of it:

Ever hear Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” sung in Yiddish dialect? It used to be a regular bit performed by comedian and actor Richard Belzer, who died this week at 78. He also used to do a routine about Bob Dylan’s bar mitzvah in which he recited a Hebrew prayer in the singer’s distinctive tone. A similar Elvis bar mitzvah bit was also part of his routine. 

Surprisingly, Belzer performed these niche routines in numerous comedy venues and even on the nationally televised “The Late Show with David Letterman.” In addition to a variety of other Jewish references embedded in his act, Belzer also performed Yiddish-inflected parodies of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry.” …

Which is why it’s been strange to read obit after obit in outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian and The Hollywood Reporter, among others, that didn’t bother to mention that Belzer was Jewish — even when, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency pointed out, the character for which he was best known, Det. John Munch on “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” identified as Jewish. Obituaries, after all, are meant to be the final stock-taking of a person’s life. They should include the basics of who they were. And one of the basics of Richard Belzer is that he was a Yid. …

To call Burt Bacharach an “American composer” or Barbara Walters a “pioneering woman newscaster” is accurate, but misses a significant ethno-cultural aspect of these people, one that was integrally responsible for making them who they are and influencing their creative choices. The notion that “Jewish” is something more than a religious denomination—that it’s a wide-ranging culture that includes art, literature, music, food, folkways and languages—is terribly difficult to grasp for some people.

The piece is really smart, and it goes into obsessive depth. I love it. Also, he links out this amazing Belzer bit:

I love obituaries, but boy do I get mad when a newspaper that would definitely mention if a deceased were Native American, Asian American, or most anything else ethnic fails to mention the Judaism of a deceased. At the Times, it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Jews whom the Times has failed, in death, to identify as Jewish have included—in 2023 alone—British TV dude Len Goodman, photographer Jessica Burstein, and cartoonist Edward Koren, among others—and now, most ridiculous of all, Jerry Springer.

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I mean, Jerry Springer. TV pioneer Jerry Springer. Former mayor of Cincinnati Jerry Springer! “Jerry” is often Jewish, and “Springer” is, in my experience, always Jewish, as in the case of my high school friend Shira Springer—

—and then, to top it all off, there was this subtle, blink-and-you-miss-it bit of evidence in The Times of Israel:

[Springer] was born in a London tube station in 1944 during a German bombing raid to parents, Richard and Margot Springer, who were German-Jewish refugees from the Nazis. They escaped from what was then Prussia (now present-day Poland) and arrived in Britain in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II. Twenty-seven other members of Springer’s family were killed in the Holocaust.

So, you know, his Judaism wasn’t incidental to his life. It was the central fact of why he came to America. Without Springer’s Jewishness, no Jerry Springer Show. No America as we know it.

I wrote to one of the obit writers there a few weeks back:

Dear Mr. Sandomir:

Greetings from an admirer! I am writing something about how obituaries identify subjects' ethnicity—and I am curious why, to take one example, this subject is not identified as Jewish? What is the thinking? Especially as it would seem highly relevant to her work.

Regards,

Mark Oppenheimer

If you clicked through, you saw that the obituary in question was of Margot Stern Strom, who “started an organization whose curriculums challenge teenagers to understand the roots of the Holocaust, racism, apartheid and other human injustices.”

Again, this was not someone who was incidentally Jewish. I’d say she was crucially Jewish.

I’m tired right now—been solo parenting all week—and I have important TV to watch and very important summer fashions to browse on the web. So I’ll come right out and say that I have no theory of this. I don’t think it’s about the Times (or other newspapers) hating Jews, and I don’t think it’s only bad reporting. But I don’t know what it is. Theories welcome.

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