Why does the chareidi street love Bardak (which in Hebrew slang means chaos or turmoil), even as their very world is being lampooned?

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Bardak archives

The gravelly voiced Yerushalmi protest organizer and wheeler-dealer Eisenbach is carefully counting his wad of cash as he loads up a minibus of paid demonstrators off to their next location, threatening “Gevalt!” “Milchumeh!” and “Tustus lo yaavor (even a moped won’t get past us)!” But no disgruntled citizens or action-seeking bochurim are actually following this fresh icon of the Israeli chareidi world to the Kikar Shabbos or Rechov Bar Ilan intersections for the latest anti-government demonstration or violent clash with the police.

They can’t — because the ginger-bearded, zebra-clad fellow with the unfiltered Time cigarette dangling from his mouth and the arthritic hip is actually the fictional invention of two young men out to make people laugh. As creators of the wildly popular Bardak comedy clips, Efi Skakovsky and Meni Vakshtok have produced a lovable cast of characters reflecting the quirks of chareidi society and its interactions with the bigger cross-section of Israel today.

There’s Mr. Goldblum (played by Meni) — the American gvir with three factories in Detroit who’s eager to support any yeshivah that will accept his son. Then there’s Efi in multiple roles: as litvish avreich Reb Duvid, as a self-important rosh kollel with a frock and Homburg hat, as a yeshivah administrator with a forehead-covering helmet-sized yarmulke, and of course, as Eisenbach, the funny and flawed kanoi who takes the easy way out when his passionate ideals get a little too impractical.

But it’s mostly fun and very little judgment, even as Eisenbach leads his men onto the light rail to transport them to a demonstration against the light rail, incites a riot so that he can dump his garbage since the night before he torched his own building’s dumpster, and volunteers his services to Putin and Zelensky for a peace summit in the Zupnik mikveh, offering all of his secret weapons — including 200 trays of eggs, a sack of rotten tomatoes, a ton of dirty diapers, a container of marbles to slip up the tanks, and a support team shouting  “Utzu Eitzah.”

Efi and Meni hit the ground running when their first video clip (Eisenbach Part I) came out in the fall of 2020. Since then, they’ve masterminded over 50 clips with nearly 16 million views online (and the actual number is nearly doubled, between social media sites, their own email base and dozens of their WhatsApp groups and thousands of private groups), as they address many of the current tensions between sectors with a fresh, funny, unashamed directness. They are unabashed and incisive, expertly digging down to the egos, vulnerabilities and inconsistencies in the characters and demographics they represent, sparing almost no one as they slaughter many societal sacred cows.

So why does the chareidi street love Bardak (which in Hebrew slang means chaos or turmoil), even as their very world is being lampooned?

Maybe it’s because while the team is funny, they’re not mean, angry, agenda-driven, or attempting any kind of social engineering. It’s very easy for comedy to cross those red lines, especially comedy that is also social commentary, but the Bardak duo doesn’t go there.

Most of all, you can sense that these guys are having a great time creating their clips, transferring our society’s secret language of religious nuances and communal conventions to the medium of the screen. They might make fun of the yeshivah setup and the “let’s look shtark when the donor comes” frenzy (frantically getting everyone out of bed and into the beis medrash, and quickly sticking up the donor’s plaque with Scotch tape), but there are no nasty or bitter undertones in their clips. Because after all, it’s their world too.