Mordechi Rosenfeld knew the joke about Grindr would crush if it included a Holocaust survivor.

Sitting at a center table at Reserve Cut, an upscale kosher steakhouse in Manhattan, Rosenfeld was unpacking his performance earlier that evening at an outpost of the Comedy Cellar, the club where he has been performing stand-up for more than three decades.

He had been trying some new material, including an extended riff about a personal experience on that gay dating app. Years earlier, he had unwittingly corresponded with someone who had an unexpected interest in the bedroom: World War II. Specifically, the German military.

The man who he had been messaging showed up at his apartment door in Nazi uniform. At that exact moment, Rosenfeld’s neighbor, a Holocaust survivor with dementia, exited his own apartment for a nighttime jaunt. The situation was understandably awkward: Rosenfeld acted as his neighbor’s caregiver and was frequently called on to collect him from the lobby or a hallway.

“Excuse me,” the man said, “I must have walked into the wrong room.”

Then came the punchline, energetically delivered in Rosenfeld’s Long Island accent with ever-so-slight Israeli inflection: The neighbor never again wandered away after dark.

The room, dotted with men wearing black velvet yarmulkes and observant Jewish women in wigs, exploded in laughter. The joke was a little edgy for some, Rosenfeld acknowledged, but worked because it was deeply Jewish.

“What we were talking about was not, ‘They’re hooking up and having sex’ — it’s how a Jew sees it,” Rosenfeld said. “Many comedians are comedians that happen to be Jewish. I’m a Jewish comedian.”

For 30 years, being a Jewish comedian meant working comedy clubs and the synagogue circuit, making a living performing for Jewish organizations from Borough Park to South Florida. He developed a loyal following, fans who knew him by his nickname, Modi. But the markers of mainstream comic success eluded him.

Now, in the two years since the attacks of Oct. 7, which brought the war in the Gaza Strip and rising antisemitism around the world, Rosenfeld, 55, is packing theaters by the thousands from Las Vegas to Atlanta, and Paris to Tel Aviv, Israel.

It’s an anxious and divisive time for American Jews. It’s arguably a great moment to be Modi.

His bits and clips from his podcast are reposted by hundreds of thousands on social media. Plans are underway to tape a comedy special in December — his second — and for a show at Radio City Music Hall in April.

Alex Edelman, the award-winning comic who’s been a fan since childhood, described what he called Rosenfeld’s “renaissance” in reverential terms.

“I’ve seen him do comedy in Yiddish. I’ve seen him do comedy for Hasidic crowds and for crowds where there’s not a single Jew,” said Edelman, who owned a DVD of Rosenfeld’s stand-up routine as a modern Orthodox teenager. “There’s no one like him.”

Rosenfeld’s ability to blend the contours of his identity — or “bubble hop,” as he calls it — has been integral to his recent success. He mines his Judaism for material, cracking jokes about family trips to Israel and the cultural differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews — often with punchlines delivered in Hebrew and Yiddish. He ends many of his performances with a collective singing of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.

But now, he also mines his marriage to Leo Veiga, a 33-year-old who was raised Catholic.

At a New York show, and on the road in Ohio later in the summer, he asked if anyone in the crowd wasn’t Jewish. Just a few hands shot up.

Rosenfeld knows that is his current audience. But he is trying to expand — to figure out how to reach a more natural Grindr-joke crowd, while keeping the deeply resonant Holocaust-survivor punchlines. He wants, as he puts it, the “Goyim, gays and theys.”

Comedy as a Holy Mission

On a sunny morning, Rosenfeld stands in gym shorts and a T-shirt, filming himself on his sun porch. He takes out a yarmulke and puts it on, kisses the corners of his prayer shawl and takes out his tefillin — the leather boxes worn on the forehead and upper arm during weekday prayers — to embark on his morning routine, whispering Hebrew prayers into the camera.

When he posted the video to social media, he titled it “ASMR: putting on tefillin.”

Rosenfeld sees comedy as a holy mission, he explained on a Sunday afternoon sitting in his second home, in western Connecticut, which he bought last year.

At the pool in the manicured backyard, Veiga was entertaining a group comfortable socializing in Speedos. Inside, Rosenfeld was diving into Talmud, the millenniums-old collection of rabbinical discussion.

The son of Israelis who immigrated to the United States when he was a child, Rosenfeld discovered his faith as a teenager on Long Island.

After school and a stint at a yeshiva in New Jersey, Rosenfeld accepted a job as an investment banker where he was, according to his husband, a “personality hire.” Dyslexic and diagnosed with ADD, Rosenfeld struggled with the details of finance.

He was, however, great at imitating the secretaries in the office.

A friend persuaded him to try stand-up and Rosenfeld was hooked. He caught the tail end of the Catskills scene, began performing at the Comedy Cellar and worked clubs across the country. He called his rabbi for a blessing before every show.

‘Orthodox Ellen DeGeneres’

For much of his career, Rosenfeld followed a simple principle: “Know your audience.”

In a literal sense, Rosenfeld prides himself on being “an audience’s comic,” tailoring his set for his crowds rather than the critics and comedy nerds. But the phrase is also a spiritual double-entendre, referring to an order inscribed above the Torah scrolls in many synagogues: “Know in Front Whom You Stand.”

“Am I standing in front of God? A hundred percent,” Rosenfeld said. “God is one. Oneness. So my audience and me, when we are laughing together, geez, that’s God.”

Word spread over the decades. Rosenfeld performed before former Vice President Mike Pence at a Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas, cracked jokes before groups of Hasidic men in Brooklyn and thousands of Jews at suburban synagogues.

Then 2020 rolled around and, during the pandemic, live shows ground to a halt. But the organizations that hired Rosenfeld still needed to keep their members and donors engaged.

“Everybody calls up, we need Zoom shows — the UJA, RJC, CJC, RJJ, JJJ, all the J’s — and I figured out how to do Zoom shows that I was great at,” he said of suddenly performing for thousands of Jews online.

Veiga, who became Rosenfeld’s manager, suggested posting some of the clips on social media. Rosenfeld developed characters that went viral: a windbag Israeli named “Nir, not far,” and Yoely, a Hasidic Jew who offered his take on secular television shows.

He saw his role as making people laugh, but now also welcoming gay people into the observant community, letting “people who are Jewish, who are gay, know that it’s OK.”

Edelman called him the “Orthodox Ellen DeGeneres” for his role opening up the observant community to LGBTQ+ couples.

Really Knowing Your Audience

Linda Shaw had never been to the Funny Bone, a comedy club tucked between a Legoland store and an Auntie Anne’s pretzels in an outdoor shopping mall in Columbus. But when Rosenfeld scheduled a show, she drove from her home in Cincinnati along with a pack of girlfriends and several of her cousins.

Shaw, 56, was raised as a conservative Jew, the daughter of two parents from Europe. She married a non-Jewish man but raised her daughters as Jews.

So much Jewish humor “puts a negative light on Jewish life, and being an observant Jew,” Shaw said. Then, there’s Rosenfeld.

Rosenfeld delivered a 90-minute set that included many of his recent greatest hits, material his fans say helps them feel seen by him at a moment when they feel lost in the wider world. There were jokes about the popular “mission trips” to Israel sponsored by American Jewish organizations and Israeli tour guides.

He described being in Israel on Oct. 7, hearing the air raid sirens and watching pop singer Bruno Mars evacuate the hotel in a platoon of cars.

Even in that life-or-death moment, Rosenfeld knew his audience.

“I said, ‘Leo, thank God they got Bruno Mars out of there,’” he recounted. “I said, ‘If a bomb hits this whole place and me and Bruno Mars both die, I will get zero press.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

https://www.courant.com/2025/10/11/hes-gay-hes-an-observant-jew-his-comedy-career-is-booming/