Welcome to “The Pitt,” Moshe Kasher!
Adding to the growing list of reasons why “The Pitt” is a very Jewish show, last week’s episode featured the 46-year-old Jewish comedian and author in a guest-starring role. In a brief scene, Kasher is introduced as an ASL interpreter for a deaf patient named Harlow.
Up until this point, the Pitt has failed at accommodating Harlow. First, the administrator in the waiting area called Harlow’s name to attempt to notify her it was her turn to see a doctor — which she obviously could not hear. Then it took ages for Video Remote Interpreting services to get set up, only for tech issues to render it useless.
“Between us they tried that VRI bullshit and it was trash,” Harlow signs furiously to the interpreter upon his arrival. “Happy to be here,” he signs back. And then the scene ends and that’s all we see of Kasher in the episode.
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But, never fear! This is just an introduction for Kasher’s character. “Thus begins the saga of Jacob the interpreter,” Kasher wrote on Instagram after the episode aired.
It’s a role that is naturally within Kasher’s wheelhouse. Case in point: Kasher is a CODA, or child of deaf parents, which resulted in him becoming a certified ASL interpreter in real life. “Every CODA — that is child of deaf adults — has essentially the same experience, which is a 15-year non-consensual sign language interpretation internship training program,” he once said in an interview.
It’s a lived experience that has long been a part of his art, from his stand-up to his two memoirs “Kasher in the Rye” and “Subculture Vulture.” In the former book, Kasher details his whirlwind childhood growing up in Oakland in the ’90s with his mom and brother. He covers being in therapy from age 4, visiting his ba’al teshuvah Hasidic father in New York, becoming addicted to drugs at 12, drifting from therapy to rehab to jail and finally getting sober at 16.
His second memoir expands on the subcultures that have shaped his life, which include deaf culture, rave culture, Alcoholics Anonymous and Hasidic Judaism. (As an aside, Kasher has said that if he didn’t go into stand-up, he considered becoming a professor of Jewish history.)
It seems unlikely that all of Moshe Kasher’s identity will go into Jacob on “The Pitt,” but here’s hoping some Jewishness might inform his character. Either way, we cannot wait to see more of Jacob and Harlow.
