The concept of Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal has nothing to do with his Judaism. It’s a show about practicing difficult personal scenarios over and over again until they’ve been mastered. But what makes The Rehearsal so great is how, as Nathan emotionally manipulates the “characters,” they reflect his own ethical dilemmas and internal conflicts back onto him. In season one, Nathan practises raising a child with born-again Christian Angela, forcing him to question what role he wants Judaism to have in his and a potential future child’s life. He starts by taking his fake son to a Jewish tutor instead of swimming practice, spraying him with water afterwards to conceal the truth from Angela. When Nathan eventually reveals this to her, they are unable to reconcile their differences, and Angela leaves. The season ends with Nathan, his fake son Adam, and the Jewish tutor celebrating Hanukkah together.
Season two picks up with Nathan explaining his new big rehearsal concept- he wants to use the method to help prevent plane crashes. By training first-officers to speak up to their captains, he believes that many commercial airline crashes could be prevented. Nathan recognizes that attempting to solve a huge real-world issue through a comedy series may come off as insincere. But that has never stopped him from trying in the past. In season 3 episode 2 of his Comedy Central show Nathan For You “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” Fielder creates an outdoor apparel line/Holocaust education advocacy non-profit called Summit Ice and tries to convince a store to display the jackets inside of an over-the-top depiction of Auschwitz. Summit Ice has subsequently donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits to Holocaust education in Western Canada and California. Their online store appears like any other outdoorsy clothing shop, except for a button to learn about the Holocaust right next to an image of a male model posing in a black hoodie. It links to a page titled “The Holocaust” that explains it in a few simple bullet points and directs those who want to learn more to Wikipedia. It’s a cringeworthy combination of absurdist comedy and real tragedy.
In Season 2, Episode 2 of The Rehearsal, while training pilots to deliver bad news by crushing singers’ dreams in a fake aviation-themed re-creation of the singing competition TV show Canadian Idol, Nathan is reminded of an event where he was unable to assert himself in his professional life. He reveals that the Nathan For You episode featuring the creation of “Summit Ice” was removed from the Paramount Plus streaming service (it’s still available on Max if you want to watch it). Nathan has his actor doppelganger revisit the correspondence between him and Paramount to help him understand why he failed to adequately express his anger at the episode being taken down at the time.
He shares the response that he received from Paramount where they simply told him that they had to take the episode down due to “sensitivities.” When he pushed for a clearer explanation he was told, “A decision was made by Paramount+ Germany to remove the episode in their region after they became uncomfortable with what they called anything that touches on antisemitism in the aftermath of the Israel/Hamas attacks.” This decision spread (which Nathan depicts on a map as Paramount Germany’s ideology taking over the world), “eliminating all Jewish content that made them uncomfortable.” Furthermore, he bashes Paramount Plus for having fifty search results on their streamer for “Nazi,” ten for “Hitler,” and zero for “Judaism.” “We’ve been erased,” he deadpans.
To rehearse a confrontation, Nathan creates a “replica” of the Paramount Plus Germany office that resembles a Nazi war room adorned with huge logo banners and surrounded by uniformed soldiers wearing Paramount Plus armbands. Nathan tells the Nazi “Paramount executive,” “Look, I know you guys probably feel a lot of shame about what you did in the past, and now you’re trying to overcompensate by being the world leaders in fighting antisemetism. But when it comes to art, I think you have to know your place. And you have to let us Jews express ourselves, because honestly, the way you’re approaching this whole thing, people might get the wrong idea about what you actually stand for.”
Nathan is aware that this bit might, once again, come off as insincere. The fake Paramount executive rebukes him, saying, “You’re just a man with a grudge using his television show to smear us, instead of trying to understand us.” Some critics have interpreted this sequence similarly, as a petty move to punish Paramount for removing the episode by comparing them to Nazis. However, writing off these scenes as a dig at Paramount ignores the genuine fear that lies behind the jokes. Or rather, not behind. The jokes and the fear are one. The unique genius of Fielder’s absurdism is how the sincere and the insincere work together. You can never know where one ends and the other begins. And don’t we as Jews have the right to be a bit insincere about our pain? That’s the question Fielder asks Paramount, and the audience, in this episode.
Americans often don’t know how to respond to the Holocaust when mentioned casually. They see it as this big, abstract tragedy of long ago, the product of a world that no longer exists, and certainly not in America. Comparisons to Nazis have become cliche, partially because of the toxic kind of anti-anti-Semetism that Fielder criticizes in this episode. After Elon Musk seemingly heiled during a speech on Inauguration Day, he tweeted in defense, “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Generations out from the loss of six million lives, we must ask ourselves how we have found ourselves in this position. What is it about the way we commemorate that is allowing us to be spoken over? The defenses we have constructed over the years to prevent the normalization and trivialization of the Holocaust — that it was singular and unique, that it was simultaneously the worst of humanity and completely inhuman, that invocations of it are almost never okay — are the very things now preventing our warnings about spikes in right-wing populist extremism from being heard. But, Nathan pushes us to ask, maybe allowing Jews to approach these topics in their own way is the key to broader empathy and understanding. Maybe allowing Jewish people to define Judaism and antisemitism for themselves instead of issuing blanket, iron-clad definitions is what will give the words meaning. Maybe commemoration can look like a lot of different things. As a Jew, I personally want the ability to laugh as well as to cry.
