A Little Holiday Something for Jews and 'Psycho-Semitics' Alike

Do you think Hanukkah music will overtake Christmas music sometime during this millennium?

God, no. I think that when we get too big and powerful, they're going to put us on transport trains and send us to Canada.

Catholics make fun of nuns. Funny to me, but maybe not funny to you. Do you have to be Jewish to enjoy "Good for the Jews"?

There's a point early in the show where I address the crowd and ask who is Jewish and who isn't. And usually at least 25 percent of the crowd is not Jewish. But if you've lived in a city long enough, you've acquired a certain quality that I call "psycho-Semitic." It means even though you're not a Jew, you think like a Jew and you act like a Jew.

Why do you do the show?

For the middle-aged Jewish women who say, "You single? You should really meet my Shirley." No, I do it because it's important to me to have some sort of sense of still being Jewish. I'm the sort of Reform Jew that religious Jews would refer to as, like, "Christian." What a show like this does for me is give the feeling of being in temple because I'm surrounded by other Jews and we're together, we have a sense of community, we're laughing and we're celebrating. But we can also drink a beer, which is sort of frowned on in synagogue.

Planning any material just for the Beltway crowd?

I'm sure that we'll find a way to talk about Sen. [George] Allen. I'm finishing up a song about Mel Gibson. It took a little while because my first instinct was to write a song called "Mel Gibson Is a Stupid Anti-Semite." But that's just too easy. So I wrote a song that is sympathetic to Mel Gibson. And then halfway through it takes a turn, and then it turns out that he actually is an anti-Semitic idiot.

As unpleasant as these Gibsonian incidents are, I assume it's good for material.

Oh, yeah. They're bad for the Jews, but they're good for "Good for the Jews."

You'll be performing on Sen. Allen's home turf. What do you expect the reaction to be?

I'm hoping he's going to come. We've sent him an invitation, and we've told him if he'll come up on stage, we'll teach him the words to "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel." So far we've not heard back from him. Which is a surprise.