Over the past few years you may have noticed a Jewish-themed comic popping up in your social media feed. The often funny clips come from Modi, a category-flouting gay Orthodox Jew and former Merrill Lynch trader who is now playing some of the country’s most prestigious venues.
Now Modi is getting the next feather in his media cap: a documentary.
Filmmakers Seth Kramer and Daniel A. Miller, Emmy nominees who have specialized in outsider performers and their effect on an in-audience, are directing the movie, with The Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik (and self-confessed Modi superfan) serving as both onscreen commentator and executive producer. The filmmakers have finished principal photography and are editing now with hopes for a 2027 sale and release.
“We didn’t know Modi personally before but he’s all over our Facebook feeds, so we thought it would be great to make a movie about him,” Kramer said, half-kidding, in a phone interview with his co-director.
The resultant indie-financed film centers on two Radio City Music Hall performances last spring while tracing the arc of the 55-year-old (full name: Modi Rosenfeld) from a childhood cutup on Long Island (where his family immigrated from Israel when he was seven) to New York venues like the Comedy Cellar to his current status as both viral star and last of the Catskills comedians.
Much of Modi’s comedy centers on differences between various kinds of Jews, a friction that elicits knowing laughters from his (largely, but not wholly) Jewish audience. At his shows he likes to pick a non-Jew to explain various cultural idiosyncrasies to, which is has the effect of both broadening the tent and giving a more clear-eyed perspective to those already inside it. (You can see some examples at his special here.)
While many comics are Jewish, very few contemporary performers make Jewish subculture and its deep nuances the subject of their material.
“Modi sees it as his mission almost to bring people together to provide a kind of community,” says Miller. “He calls it ‘Moshiach Energy,”’ referring to the Jewish concept of Messiah as a savior from scatteredness and division.
“His shows bear a resemblance to a spiritual revival from the 19th-century — people laughing like you’ve never seen because they feel seen in a way they’ve never been, especially in a time like this,” says Kramer.
Inspired by a childhood of watching Jackie Mason on Broadway (and with a dose of George Carlin and Louis C.K. thrown in), Modi will veer from the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazic customs to to the personalities presiding over a Jewish fundraiser to the motley crew on an El Al flight. He will occasionally dabble in antisemitism-related themes, such as “When someone says something bad against Jews the worst that can happen is they make them visit a Holocaust museum. Which is the stupidest idea in the world. You’re taking someone who hates Jews into a Holocaust museum. They come out of there ‘Wow! That was amazing! I want a T-shirt!'” Also: “Antisemitism — that’s hating Jews more than you’re allowed.”
More often than not, though, he addresses antisemitism by not talking about it at all. Instead he simply showcases a demographic with many different flavors and foibles, laughing at the bully instead of pleading with him.
For all is cultural insiderishness, Modi deftly stays away from most politics both Israeli and American, and even will ask audiences not to cheer or jeer when he’s making, say, a Donald Trump joke, preferring to go for an equal-opportunity vibe. Though clearly proud of his birth country, he rarely jokes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He closes his shows with Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, but more in a way of general hopeful peace and coexistence. (The title means “The hope.”)
Bialik, who is known as both a traditional Jew and comedy nerd, has been a fan of Modi’s for years. When the filmmakers contacted her, Kramer says, she instantly had a lot of thoughts about what made Modi’s comedy tick and soon came on as an executive producer.
Modi’s fame has been increasing, going beyond his often Jewish-centric events to shows at the Beacon, a podcast and an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier in the year, though he notably worked non-Jewish material at that gig.
Kramer and Miller, who were nominated separately for Emmys for WWII related films on PBS among other projects, have done a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish work through the Ironbound Films banner they founded with a third partner Jeremy Newberger. They include Fiddler on the Moon: a cheeky/serious piece featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson about Judaism in space that aired on PBS last year and the well-received pair of environmental films The Anthropologist and The Linguist. They are perhaps best known for the 2012 Sundance and CNN hit Evocateur, about the proto talk show shock-jock Morton Downey Jr., which as with Modi looked at a frank and deft media personality who became a hero to a dedicated audience.
“Morton Downey also spoke to a put-upon group that felt passionate about him because they felt seen,” Miller said. “But seen in a very different way. Modi really is trying to galvanize with positivity.”