For those of you who don’t watch The Late Show, (or, you know, YouTube highlights the next day), you need to see part of Monday’s episode. beginning Republican National Convention coverage. You have to watch this. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you’ve witnessed that bit of comedy splendor, you can join me in missing the heck out of Jon Stewart.

I do find it adorable that in his self-imposed exile, Stewart seems to have become a zeyde, still the same Jewish comedian, but older, fussier, and even more fed up with the world than he was before (nice joke about kippot there, too). I know he’s only 53, but I almost expected him to be wearing his pants up to his chest in traditional grandfatherly fashion.

After all, a large part of what made Stewart a great presence on late night TV was his uniquely Jewish attitude towards the absurd politics unfolding in front of him: There was frustration bordering on righteous anger, and a wit, and with a cynical candy-coating from a man whose people have seen it all. “You’re not crazy,” Stewart seemed to urge us, “It’s the world that is upside down.”

Years ago, I went to a taping of The Daily Show, and when the audience was given a chance to ask questions, I trotted out my then stock-prompt for Jewish celebrities about the impact of their identity on their work. Stewart told me that that it’s a part of his genes (I believe he made up a component of DNA he called “Jew-nine,”) and said that it related to his fear of being kicked out of whatever country he was in. Clearly, this Jon Stewart hiding out in a cabin in the woods still has such a genetic neurosis. And while his departure from The Daily Show wasn’t the death of comedy, it left a Jewish-sized hole (whatever that means) that’s still unfilled.

Yes, Trevor Noah has Jewish ancestry.  But regardless of how he feels about his own identity, there have been enough think pieces explaining why he’s failed to sustain The Daily Show‘s legacy. He’s no longer a substantial part of the political comedy equation.

This isn’t to say that the landscape is barren; John Oliver and Samantha Bee do fine jobs, fitting different niches in the political comedy sphere. And Bee even mentioned Sheldon Adelson on her most recent episode (though, oh, imagine how Jon Stewart might take him to task as only a member of the Tribe can). So now, we can only hope that with the release of this video Stephen Colbert’s conservative alter-ego (who then stuck around for an additional segment) will return again and again for the next several months, like a comedy Golem, called out to serve the people in our time of need.

Stewart should also come back in a more substantial way. Remember when Trump announced his candidacy, shortly before Stewart was scheduled to retire from The Daily Show? Stewart joked that the news was so absurd that he was tempted to stay. Even he couldn’t imagine then how much more surreal the campaign season would become.

Colbert teased more appearances of Stewart on his show this week, and we’ll see what that looks like. It won’t be like having him back at his old desk, but maybe he can supply us a little more of his unique, Jewish style of catharsis.

UPDATE: Oh, God. Thank you, God.

Image via YouTube

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Let it be known that nothing, not even Hanukkah, gets in the way of Stephen Colbert’s Thanksgiving. What was meant to be a silly, hyper-patriotic Thanksgivingukkah condemnation became more ridiculous than expected. Watch Colbert accidentally draw on himself a Hitler mustache after attempting to make a two-handed menorah turkey with a sharpie dangling from his mouth. It sounds crazy because it is. Enjoy the madness.

(Photo by Jason LaVeris/Getty)

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The unstoppable Tavi Gevinson dropped by The Colbert Report last night, wearing an extremely festive sweater for the occasion. The 16-year-old Rookie editor talked about her high school English class (she hasn’t read the assigned Robert Frost poems yet, oops) and the mysterious world of teenage girls.

Colbert suggests he write a column for Rookie called ‘You’re Not Wearing That’ (which would actually be hilarious), and then Gevinson offers the 48-year-old dad some One Direction-themed fashion advice. The best part is when she explains that his show is a ‘cool dad show,’ and that she watched it last night with her very own cool dad.

He doesn’t really understand, so she breaks it down for him: “Other Capital C Capital D ‘Cool Dads’ like your cool dad show.” She rules.

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• Jon Stewart took some artistic liberty with the plot of A Christmas Carol in response to Fox News’ War on Christmas coverage. [Mediaite]

• Novelist Jami Attenberg—star of yesterday’s Twitter Book Club—discusses the creation of an obese literary character with playwright Samuel D. Hunter. [NYT]

• Joan Rivers has some advice for the Australian radio DJs who prank called the hospital Kate Middleton was staying in, who have been vilified after the nurse who took the call killed herself. [Mediaite]

• Why do classic Rankin-Bass Christmas animated specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman look so…Jewish? [Tablet]

• Jewcy favorite Mandy Patinkin tells Stephen Colbert it takes eight to 10 weeks to get his beard to its full glory, then schools Colbert on the roots of terrorism. Saul Berenson FTW. [Colbert Report]

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• Mayim Bialik was badly injured when a car of tourists from Chile hit her Volvo yesterday. Her husband later posted on her Twitter account that she wouldn’t lose any fingers.

• Israeli physicists basically swept the 43rd Annual International Physics Olympiad in Estonia. Mazel!

• In the New York Times, Dwight Garner explains why book critics should be critical—and gives a nice shout out to Jewcy columnist Jacob Silverman

• Happy 89th birthday, Israeli President Shimon Peres.

• Jake Gyllenhaal will star as a down-on-his-luck gambler in the upcoming flick Mississippi Grind.

• Stephen Colbert gets some new interns, and one of them is Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman.

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Maurice Sendak, beloved illustrator and children’s book author, died this morning of complications from a stroke. He was 83. Sendak was likely part of your childhood, having written Where the Wild Things Are, Chicken Soup with Rice, and In the Night Kitchen, proving that children’s stories needn’t—and shouldn’t—be sugar-coated and neatly packaged. From his New York Times obituary:

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

In the wake of Sendak’s death, tributes have surfaced and old memories have resurfaced. His deeply moving 2011 interview with Terry Gross for NPR’s “Fresh Air” is certainly worth another listen, taking on a new, eery prescience after his death. “There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die,” he explains, “but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

There is the wonderful story of Sendak responding to a child’s letter, only to learn the child loved the response so much he ate it. There’s President Obama reading Where the Wild Things Are to children at the White House in 2009, and BuzzFeed’s list of the outspoken Sendak’s greatest quotes. On the Scroll, Marc Tracy writes of the Jewish kid from Brooklyn who would go on to collaborate with Carole King, Tony Kushner, and Art Spiegelman:

Sendak’s life and work are pretty inseparable from his Jewishness, and particularly his dark, cynical inflection of it. “The Holocaust,” he once said, “has run like a river of blood through all my books” (he was born in Brooklyn, but many relatives died in the Shoah).

Image: catwalker / Shutterstock.com

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