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Carol Leifer Says a Dirty German Word

Maybe by accident

by
Allison Hoffman
September 04, 2009

So, a month or so ago we drew your attention to the fact that former Seinfeld writer and co-producer Carol Leifer had outed herself as Jewish, lesbian, and vegan (in that order). Today, we noticed she’s featured in Ha’aretz, which ran an interview from this week’s Forward about her new memoir, When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win. The interview, by Michael Kaminer, runs through several of Leifer’s favorite lines—one about hiring a rent-a-rabbi for her father’s funeral, another about Hanukkah being the also-ran December holiday—with the plaint that they fall flat. “You find yourself wishing she’d take her foot off the brakes,” Kaminer writes. But he missed a trick: Leifer, who recently did an ad for PETA, jokes that fake chicken should be called “ficken”—a word that also happens to mean, in German, well, exactly the same thing as its closest English cognate. See? There’s always a sex joke somewhere with those Seinfeld alums.

The Queer Jewish Queen of Comedy [Forward, via Haaretz]

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.