Lori Schneide, Israel Insider, November 2006.

We're laughing so hard, we're crying. Audiences at Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," reach for the tissues following the film's comedic climax ? a naked wrestling scene in a cheap motel room between the modern day Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy ? Borat, and his side kick, Azamat. The film, a send-up from the classic comedies of Laurel and Hardy and the road-trip films of Jerry Lewis, is the latest contribution in mocumentary antics from Mr. Cohen, known mostly in the U.S. for his HBO series, "Da Ali G. Show." And while the film does not discriminate, as it mocks not only Jews, but all Americans -- from fraternity brothers at USC to feminists -- it is, at second glance, a film about Jewish hipster identity.

The English-bred son of a Welsh father of Jewish descent, a Jewish mother of Israeli and Iranian descent, and nephew of renowned British professor of psychology at Cambridge, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sacha Baron Cohen might also be considered the descendant of the tradition of Jewish minstrel, dating back even beyond the first talkie, "The Jazz Singer". There, the idea of Jewish minstrel in vaudeville was popularized when it blended the image of Jewish and Black minstrel in order to comment on the Jewish American experience. Jakie Rabinowitz, nee Jack Robin, flees his observant Jewish home on the Lower East Side for his career singing in black-face on the vaudeville circuit. Jack's journey across America eventually returns him back to his hometown, albeit with his new non-Jewish wife. "The Jazz Singer" was a mirror for the Jewish experience of its time. Mr. Baron Cohen's film, itself a collection of vaudeville bits - his minstrel black face painted only by his crowbar mustache - is an innovation of this earlier genre.

Before the Holocaust, the Jewish minstrel celebrated its own popularity, albeit not without the weariness from some of its Jewish contemporaries. The greatest criticism of its genre, by even professional rabbinic associations, was that Jews were drawing a bulls-eye on themselves. As the ADL has recently criticized Mr. Baron Cohen's Borat that "some people may not be in on the joke" the greatest fear to consider, perhaps even more ominous than encouraging new waves of anti-semitic behavior, is that Jewish communities themselves may be guilty of not being in on the joke, and not even recognize Mr. Baron Cohen's complex serving of Jewish humor and social-commentary. Baron Cohen, himself fluent in Hebrew and active as a teen in Habonim Dror, the Jewish Youth Group, is not only literate in his Jewish humor, but Jewish heritage as well. His informed use of Jewish humor, at face value graphically self-deprecating of his Jewish identity, also contains within it a sobering message.

As Mr. Baron Cohen employs ignorance as his primary comedic vehicle, taking everyone in his path as a punch-line, the greatest gag of all might be this fact: his self-mocking of his own Jewish identity has gone so far that most Jews in the theatre don't even recognize it. From the opening scene of the mocumentary in Borat's "hometown in Kazakhstan" (which was actually filmed in what looks to be the last remaining shtetl in Romania), to the language Mr. Baron Cohen uses for Borat - a mixture of identifiable Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish -- the underlying message of the film is clear ? Jews, once again, with the 20th century now a millennium in the past, live in a new era of Jewish discrimination ? and consequently, humor.

And covertly, like the black minstrel make-up masking the Jewish face of Jolsen's Jackie, Baron Cohen's Muslim-mustached veneer hides a deeper trial of Jews in America today than even anti-Semitism or intermarriage ? the blaring self-consciousness of our Jewish cultural illiteracy and religious ignorance. Jewish members of Gen X and Y, the cultivators of the "Jewish Hipster, anti-religious movement" are not only the primary target-audience for "Borat," but are also the primary targets.