Ep 599: Ordinary Heroes with Bernie Furshpan and guest Robert Klein on hmTv

In this powerful episode of Ordinary Heroes, host Bernie Furshpan welcomes legendary comedian, actor, singer, writer, and storyteller Robert Klein for a wide-ranging conversation about comedy, Jewish identity, history, memory, antisemitism, and the fragile state of democracy.

Robert reflects on growing up in the Bronx as the son of Frieda and Benjamin Klein and the grandson of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He shares how his early experiences in the Catskills introduced him to live stand-up comedy and to Holocaust survivors whose stories left a lasting impression on him.

The conversation turns deeply historical as Robert discusses his extensive reading of Nuremberg testimony, the dangers of propaganda, the “Jewish problem” language used by antisemites, and the way ordinary people can be manipulated into silence, complicity, or cruelty. Bernie and Robert also explore the lessons of the Holocaust, the importance of museums and education, the rise of modern antisemitism, and the dangerous speed at which misinformation spreads today.

With honesty, humor, and remarkable historical insight, Robert Klein reminds us that comedy can reveal truth, history must be remembered, and silence in the face of hate is never an option.

Transcript

Ep. 599 — Ordinary Heroes

Host: Bernie Furshpan

Guest: Robert Klein

hmTv at HMTC

Bernie Furshpan:
Hello, Bernie Furshpan here, host of Ordinary Heroes on hmTv at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. Thank you so much for joining me.

Ordinary Heroes is the place where we speak with people whose lives, voices, and experiences help us understand the world with a little more honesty, a little more courage, and hopefully a little more humanity.

Today, it is my honor to welcome the legendary Robert Klein — comedian, actor, singer, writer, storyteller, and one of the most original voices in American comedy.

Robert grew up in the Bronx, the son of Frieda and Benjamin Klein, and the grandson of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. His story is deeply connected to the Jewish immigrant experience in America, to the rhythm and humor of New York, and to a generation that learned how to survive through resilience, family, laughter, and memory.

Robert has spent a lifetime using comedy to tell the truth, challenge people, and reveal the absurdities of life. And now, he is taking on another kind of witness: reading through thousands and thousands of pages of Nuremberg testimony, confronting the words, evidence, and memory of one of humanity’s darkest chapters.

Today, we will talk about comedy, memory, Jewish identity, the Holocaust, the rise of antisemitism, and what we can still do to build hope for the future.

Robert Klein, welcome to Ordinary Heroes.

Robert Klein:
Well, thank you very much.

I should say that I did not work early in my career in the Borscht Belt as a comedian. I worked as a lifeguard, a busboy, and a counselor in the hotels. That is where I first saw live stand-up comedy, with people like Bernie Burns, Lou Menchell, and Larry Deutsch.

One of them would say, “You two bald-headed men in the front row — you put your heads together, you make an ass of yourself.” But seriously, I thought it was a great way to make a living. They would show up in their Cadillac and make people forget their troubles for 35 or 40 minutes — their marriage, their health, their children, whatever it was. I thought that was a high calling.

Another thing is, I was born in 1942. So I do not remember the war per se, but I really am a war baby. In my extensive reading about 20th-century wars and 20th-century history, I understand that at the time of my birth, the world was not in a very good place.

People today say, “Oh my God, what is happening in Iran?” and other places. But nothing compares to more than half the world being occupied by fascists and totalitarians — the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in much of Asia.

So I met Holocaust survivors. I remember they were prosperous enough to go to these small hotels for a month or so. I said to one man, “Louis, why do you keep those numbers on your arm? You have a Cadillac. Why do you keep those numbers?”

He said, “Robert, if ever I forget where I came from, I want to look at my arm and remember where I came from.”

To me, that was very moving and meaningful.

Bernie Furshpan:
That is how they stayed humble, and how they appreciated the little things. They were so grateful just to be alive.

Robert Klein:
The problem with just about everything today — certainly in the United States with respect to education — is that no one knows history, much less civics. People do not know.

I have a trainer I have worked with three times a week for 35 years. He is a college graduate and has never voted in his life. He mixed up World War I and World War II.

I operate from the assumption that everyone knows Israel was created in 1948, and everyone knows about the Holocaust. But no. For many people, the Holocaust is just a word.

The dilemma I find myself in, like so many American Jews who feel they are progressive, is that Israel is a must. There is no doubt. Some people talk about one country with Arabs and Jews in it, but that idea has sailed.

Yes, the Palestinians are very unfortunate people. They have a lot in common with the Jews. If the fighting stopped, it could become an economic dynamo. I think they are among the best-educated of the Arab people. But do you know how often borders have changed all over the world overnight?

Poland and Germany went back and forth. France, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia — countries formed, broke up, and changed. It is unfortunate, but that is history.

Hitler was the main causal factor in the creation of Israel. The world voted for it, except for some Latin American countries and the Arab countries. Israel was immediately attacked by five different countries. No one knows that. No one has seen Exodus anymore. That is old.

If people knew history, they would also know about the ship St. Louis — the famous ship carrying Jews who were trying to escape Germany. No country would accept them, including the United States and Cuba. No one defended us. No one.

Ken Burns did a wonderful documentary series showing how antisemites in the State Department and around the world really did not want Jews here.

A real sticking point for me in reading Nuremberg is the constant use of the terms “Jewish question” and “Jewish problem.”

There is a wonderful book I read called Europe Against the Jews, 1880–1945. The original causes of antisemitism were more or less, “You killed Christ,” and “You are different from us. You do not eat the way we do.” But in the late 19th century, it became much more about envy.

For example, about 30 percent of medical school students in Warsaw in the 1920s were Jews, and the government thought that was a problem. So they limited the number of Jews.

In the Nuremberg testimony, one of the defendants said, “I have never been an antisemite. Of course, I realize there was a Jewish problem, that there were so many of them in government.”

So what? They got there because they were qualified. This whole idea that there are “too many Jews” in medicine or law — so what? They got there.

We are also not monolithic, like any other ethnic group. Black people are not monolithic. No ethnic group is.

That is my opening gambit: the so-called “Jewish problem.” It shows that even when people claim they are not antisemitic, they still say, “Well, there was a Jewish problem. There were too many of them.”

Eleanor Roosevelt could not have been more of a friend to the Jews in her career as the president’s wife and after the war. Yet when she was 17 years old, she wrote a letter to a friend about a party and said, essentially, “It was a good party — too many Jews there.” It was accepted.

My doctor was a hero to me because I wanted to be a doctor. A few things got in my way: calculus, physics, biology, zoology, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, reading, spelling, comprehension.

Where is the laugh, Bernie?

Anyway, this doctor was my hero. Catholics in the neighborhood in the Bronx lit candles for him. Jews lit candles for him. He made house calls and delivered everyone’s babies. He could not go to the medical school he wanted, even though he had great grades, because he was a Jew. He had to go to Creighton in Nebraska.

So it has been an accepted thing. After World War II, things certainly improved, but now we are seeing the same thing again, where Israel is conflated with antisemitism.

Bernie Furshpan:
You have such wisdom and so much insight. I had no idea that you made this such a priority — to investigate and learn about the Holocaust, and to understand human history and world history.

It is mind-blowing to me that you are so well-versed in all of this, including the St. Louis. Most people do not even know what the St. Louis was. Most people do not know there were Jewish refugees with visas who were turned away from Cuba, and that the captain reached out to the United States while they were near Miami Beach, asking to be allowed in. And of course, they were told no.

The majority of the world turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the Jewish problem, and they only made it worse.

That is why we have Holocaust museums — to educate people about the lessons of the Holocaust. What have we learned from it? Number one, not to be silent. Number two, how easily humanity and society can be swayed by propaganda and hate. Ordinary people can do some awful things. Right, Robert?

Robert Klein:
Yes. There is a wonderful book — I sometimes forget names and nouns at 84 years old — called Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It completely rejects the notion that the people who did the murdering were all tormented by it.

The German government was very sensitive to soldiers who were upset by shooting babies. They could get out of that duty. It was not as if, “If you do not shoot that baby, you are dead.”

The excuse by every Nuremberg defendant was that Hitler ultimately made the decisions, along with Himmler and Goebbels, all of whom were conveniently dead by the time of Nuremberg. Ordinary people became monsters.

There is a famous study — I think it was at Yale or Stanford — where normal people were brought in, and there was a person on the other side of the glass. They were told to ask that person a question. If the person answered incorrectly, they were to press a button that gave the person a mild electric shock.

They said, “Really?” And then they did it.

If the person continued to answer wrong, the shocks became more painful. The person behind the glass would scream in pain. Most people kept doing it.

Of course, it turned out that the person was not actually being shocked. The person was acting. But it showed that you can take an ordinary person, tell them to do something they would never ordinarily do, and they will do it.

There was another book where a Jewish scholar went to Germany and interviewed ten ordinary German men after the war. He did not reveal that he was Jewish. These were just ten ordinary Germans.

For most of them, until they were bombed, the Third Reich did not affect them negatively. They had jobs. Yes, they saw their Jewish neighbors disappear. In some cases, they saw them being taken away. They did not necessarily like it, but they did not say anything. They looked the other way.

The remarkable thing is that even Hermann Göring denied knowing anything about the killing factories. Hjalmar Schacht, who was in charge of finances, also denied knowing. But they were building extensive, highly engineered factories for murder — gas chambers and other things that cost money. And they claimed they did not know what it was for.

It is true that the full murder process was a fairly well-kept secret from much of the German public, but the public knew the Jews were no longer in public life, and they did not care.

One million Jews were murdered by bullets by the Einsatzgruppen when Germany invaded Poland and the Soviet Union. There are photos of it. The Jews had to dig their own ditches, then stand at the edge while they were shot. There is a photo of a woman holding her baby. Human beings did this to other human beings.

They did not tell the general public everything, but the general public knew Jews had disappeared from public life. That is the steep slope.

Bernie Furshpan:
Young people today often consider social media a news outlet, but it is not. They are not always investigating or using critical thinking to find out what the truth is. Unfortunately, young people today are easily swayed.

It took Hitler years to convince the German population to vote in his party and believe his theories about eugenics and the Jews being responsible for their economic problems and Germany’s loss in World War I. It took years of propaganda to convince people.

Today, it can take minutes to sway young minds around the world. Unfortunately, we can see very clearly how quickly people can turn on each other.

I want to get back to the Nuremberg testimony you are reading. You are presently reading through the testimony?

Robert Klein:
Yes. But I wanted to say that the ten ordinary German men interviewed after the war did not pay much attention to eugenics. Mein Kampf was forced on people. Every married couple had to buy a copy at their wedding. Nobody read the whole thing. It is awful. I read it. It is just nonsense.

They did not necessarily care about eugenics or all the material about Jews. Communism was definitely a thing. When Hitler made a pact with the communists, communists all over the world had to change their message. By the way, that is a whole other subject, but Stalin was right there in the same class as Hitler.

As for Nuremberg, I belong to something called BookBub. I have given up holding the New York Times in my hand. I read it every morning on my iPad, and I read books on it too. I have so many books in my house that I cannot fit any more.

I saw something about Nuremberg and Wilhelm Keitel. General Keitel was often at Hitler’s right hand. Anytime you see a picture of Hitler, Keitel is often there. He was a field marshal, and he was disliked by many of his fellows.

I bought his testimony, and then I saw the full Nuremberg material. In my font size, it is over 66,000 pages. That is another thing about the iPad — you can adjust the font.

It became a page-turner. It was like watching the O.J. Simpson trial. These people were asked questions, and they made long speeches. They would never be allowed to go on like that as witnesses in an American or British court, but Nuremberg operated under different rules, so they let them talk and talk.

You learn a lot of personal details. They do not always lie when they talk about meetings with Hitler, but they all deflect blame. They were just doing their jobs. The cliché is, “I was following orders.”

They also all put in a little story about how they helped a Jewish family here or there. They had a Jewish friend they helped. They were trying to get brownie points.

But from the beginning, they backed this. They knew what Hitler’s ideas were, and it led to genocide.

The horrible casualties of war, like in Gaza, for example — where the enemy infiltrates among civilians and treats civilian casualties as part of the price — are terrible, but that is not genocide. The Armenians experienced genocide. Pol Pot’s Cambodia involved genocide. Six million Jews, out of a population of about 14 or 15 million, is genocide.

Casualties of war are not genocide.

Hitler started the bombing of civilians by bombing England, and we bombed Germany, including the over-bombing of Dresden, which was a tragedy. I was a friend of Kurt Vonnegut and a fan of his work. He was a POW there. It was hard to get him to talk about it.

Bernie Furshpan:
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five at a very young age.

Robert Klein:
He had to deal with charred bodies and bury them. It was awful. Dresden was a beautiful city and not that strategic. The Russians insisted we bomb it, and we did.

That is not genocide. It is total war, where civilians are just as vulnerable and are hit as hard as the military. That includes Hiroshima. I do not like that kind of revisionism where people say Japan was ready to make peace. The war was going on forever. The Japanese would not give up, and Truman did the best he could.

More people were killed in firebombings than in the atomic bombings. Was it terrible? Of course. It was the worst thing of all time. But if you were a soldier about to be transferred from Europe to invade mainland Japan, you would not argue about the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Bernie Furshpan:
That is so true. You know a lot of history, Robert. I am impressed.

We are kind of winding down in this conversation, and I am so grateful.

Robert Klein:
I am just getting started, Bernie.

Bernie Furshpan:
Oh my God. Okay, we can continue if you would like. I do not want to take too much of your time.

In this divided moment, what can we do to fight hate right now? How do we teach humanity and give young people some kind of hope for the future?

Robert Klein:
It is very hard to combat misinformation, especially now with AI. I saw a picture of my nephew and his wife throwing him into the water. If I did not know better, I would think he had actually been thrown into the water. That is how realistic it looked.

I think we are going backwards in knowledge and education. COVID did not help, but American students — and I am generalizing tremendously — are incurious. We have the lowest voter turnout in the Western world. People take democracy for granted.

That is disturbing. You and I, especially because your family was subjected to the Holocaust, operate from a different perspective because of our age and where we come from. Many younger people are operating from complete ignorance. To them, World War II is distant. They do not know anything about it.

That is why I am glad Tom Hanks is doing a series on the History Channel. It is historically accurate, though not complete, but I am happy it exists because young people need it.

The other thing is the movie Nuremberg. Have you seen it?

Bernie Furshpan:
Yes, I have.

Robert Klein:
It is not fully historically accurate, but I am glad it is out there. Russell Crowe is unbelievable. They show footage that nobody wants children to see — stacked bodies weighing 50 pounds, mouths open, eyes looking at the sky. They show that.

Justice Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice, made a great opening speech at Nuremberg, but he was a terrible interrogator. I am reading this testimony, and the Russians were awful too. They lied about the Katyn massacre in Poland, where thousands of Polish officers and civilians were massacred by bullet. The Soviets tried to blame it on the Germans. Now we know it was done under Stalin’s orders.

So I am watching lies even on our side.

One of the most depressing things I have read is that approximately 50 percent of young people do not think democracy is necessarily the best form of government. They talk about socialism, but they do not know what socialism is.

The purest form of socialism I have ever read about was the early kibbutzim in Israel, where young people shared everything: from each according to ability, to each according to need. That is pure socialism.

Then there is the moshav, which is a cooperative. You own your own land, but share tools and tractors. Who produces more — the people who share everything, including land, or the people who own their own land? You can guess. It is the people with their own land.

There is great value in capitalism and ingenuity. What there is not great value in is another Gilded Age, where some people become so unbelievably rich.

Democracy, as has been said so many times, is extremely delicate. We are finding that out now.

Bernie Furshpan:
I think you missed your calling. Maybe you should have been a history teacher. You know so much about history, it is unbelievable.

But I am also glad you became a comedian because you influenced me and so many others. I love the things you say.

The film I am the subject of, The Weight of Memory, talks about the Einsatzgruppen that killed my entire family. My father was the only survivor in a family of eight people. They killed my four-year-old uncle, my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, and my other uncles.

Robert Klein:
Where were they at the time?

Bernie Furshpan:
They were in what is now Ukraine. The town was called Ludwipol; today it is called Sosnove.

There were about 1,500 Jews in this village. When the Gestapo entered, followed by soldiers, they surrounded it, built a ghetto, forced the Jews to work for a full year, and then marched them into the forest.

My father was hiding in the forest. I tell that story in the film.

The point is, the things you are talking about — I can totally relate to them. I appreciate you making the time to discuss this with me. I am completely blown away. I had no idea how much you actually know.

Robert Klein:
I was a history and political science major. There you go.

I did not know, for example, that Fort Bragg was named after a Confederate general. Let me ask you something: How is Robert E. Lee any less of a traitor than Benedict Arnold?

Benedict Arnold had made an oath to the British Army. He was a British officer, then decided the Patriots were a good cause, joined them, became unhappy, and switched sides again. Robert E. Lee took an oath to the United States of America.

All those Confederate generals had been trained at West Point. This romanticizing of the Confederacy is nonsense.

The Civil War was the greatest tragedy in American history. Six hundred thousand young men were slaughtered. Most people in the South were not slaveholders; they were troops.

By the way, the treasurer of the Confederacy was Jewish, and there were Jewish slaveholders. That is another book I am reading now, about Jews on the frontier. It is very interesting — Jews all over America in the 19th century, in the West and South, and how they could not find kosher food, so they figured God would forgive them for eating pork because that was all they had.

I am less religious now, if I ever really was religious. I fasted once after my bar mitzvah, went to shul, and fainted. My head fell on an old man who was davening.

But I am more Jewish than ever before. The two can be mutually exclusive. I know tradition, matzah, not eating pork, and all that, but we are more than that. We are a people.

For the tiny numbers we have in this world, so many Jews have had positions of influence and power in creative fields, music, art, medicine, and other areas.

People say Hollywood is run by Jews. There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, but not because someone said, “Are you Jewish? I will hire you to head Paramount.” The people who started the studios were pushcart guys. They built it because they earned it.

If they happened to be Jewish, maybe their parents pushed them to read and go to college. I also know plenty of stupid, poor Jews. We are not all perfect by any means.

There is a play called Leopoldstadt. Did you see it?

Bernie Furshpan:
No, I have not.

Robert Klein:
Oh my God, it was fantastic. The playwright is British, and for much of his life he did not know he had Jewish ancestry connected to the Holocaust.

The play begins around 1900 in Vienna with prosperous Jews who look like you and me. They do not have payos or hats. Many of them converted to Christianity, and it did not save them.

A lot of people think of Holocaust victims as visibly religious Jews, but that was not the majority of people who were murdered. Many were lawyers, doctors, and ordinary assimilated people.

It is almost incomprehensible what happened. I do not think new generations will ever feel it the same way our generation does, and certainly not the way someone whose parents were survivors feels it.

Still, you have to keep going. In some ways, Jews are doing better than at any time in history. There was a time when Jews were never in positions of influence. My doctor could not go to the medical school he wanted. I could not get into many fraternities in college, and I will never forget that.

Bernie Furshpan:
That is the story of Hollywood. Because Jews were not allowed into certain sectors, they created their own industry. That is how Hollywood was born.

Robert Klein:
Exactly. There are reasons ethnic groups are overrepresented in certain fields. A lot of Greek diners. A lot of Jews in psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. Can you explain that?

Bernie Furshpan:
Well said. You did good. Thank you, Robert.

Robert Klein:
All right, I got a chuckle out of you. Bernie, you are impossible. Unless your producer told you no laughter because you have to edit.

Bernie Furshpan:
No, no. That is okay. I am the producer, so I can do whatever I want.

Robert Klein:
That reminds me of an old Borscht Belt joke. A comedian says, “I went to a hospital and performed for these sick people. At the foot of this guy’s bed, I am doing my best material, and he does not laugh. Nothing. So I said to him, ‘I hope you do better.’ He said, ‘You too.’”

Bernie Furshpan:
You mentioned that you retired, so one final question: What is the most memorable moment you have had in your career as a comedian?

Robert Klein:
It is hard to say. Filling Carnegie Hall in 1973. Sitting next to my parents on the White House lawn while they sat next to President Carter and his wife. Being nominated for a Tony, though I did not win. There are too many moments.

I performed for four presidents. I have three honorary degrees, which do not mean anything because I did not work for them, but I still feel honored.

I used to work with symphony orchestras. No stand-up comedians work symphony orchestras. They thought I was good enough, important enough, or maybe sophisticated enough.

I never wanted to do a show that people could not understand. I worked for 4,000 people at Six Flags Over Georgia in the daytime, with off-duty cops in the front row holding their three-year-olds on their knees. I could not do all my material there, but I adjusted.

It has been wonderful. I had such a great time.

And now I have a granddaughter who is three years old. I see her twice a week. My son and I are very close. He is my only child. So I think everything worked out well, except my marriage. I have been divorced for 39 years.

Bernie Furshpan:
You left quite a legacy for your son and your granddaughter. You are a living legend as far as I am concerned. I am grateful that you carved out the time to spend with me today and talk about so much. Your knowledge is incredible.

Robert Klein:
I would love to say I only did this because I did not know about your documentary, but I did this because I always liked you, and my son liked you. My son gave stand-up a try. He certainly had the talent for it, but not the heart for it. You were very supportive of him.

You are a nice man, and I did not know this other element of you — the work you are doing now — which I admire. I do not know how much good it does, but it does not hurt to keep plugging away.

Bernie Furshpan:
We have to do what we have to do. We certainly are not going to be silent. That is one of the lessons of the Holocaust: silence is not golden when it comes to hate.

We have to stand up, rise up, push back, and educate young people.

Robert Klein:
I think Goebbels — even though he murdered his children — deserves a... no. I decide no, he does not deserve anything.

Bernie Furshpan:
I totally agree with you.

Robert Klein, thank you for carving out the time. I am truly grateful and appreciative, and we will be in touch.

You are truly a living legend, incredibly well-versed, brilliant, and eloquent. I appreciate you.

I want to thank my listening and watching audience here today on hmTv. I am Bernie Furshpan, host of Ordinary Heroes at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center.

Until next time.