Julie Rothschild Levi has five children, two grandchildren, and three aliyah stories. Oh, and one shtick.
Creating comedic content on social media as “Julie Shtick,” this Minnesota transplant to Rehovot has become what she calls “an accidental influencer” with about 35,000 followers.
Blessed with huge green eyes, a voice made for the media, and an expressive freckled face reminiscent of her comedic idol, Carol Burnett, Levi produces hilarious reels, often riffing off the cultural divide.
She pokes fun at Americans’ fractured Hebrew (a shopper asking the butcher for “chicken bras” instead of “chicken breasts” or a student apologizing for being “ugly” rather than “late”) and Israelis’ fractured English.
She dramatizes the differences between American and Israeli styles of parenting, cooking, and emoting. She takes on the role of made-up characters, such as Jolene Rochel, a Southern belle ba’alat teshuva (“recently religious”) trying to be a balabusta (“traditional homemaker”).
'Israel got into my blood'
Levi grew up in a Reform family and made her first trip to Israel at age 20, between the two halves of her college career. On the advice of the kibbutz aliyah desk in Minnesota, she signed up for several months at a northern kibbutz ulpan, and ended up staying for 10 months.
“I learned Hebrew. I became a Zionist. Israel got into my blood, and I knew Israel was going to be in my life somehow,” she says.
After graduating with a degree in sociology, she did a six-month fellowship at the American Jewish Committee in Washington, DC, and then worked at the Israeli Embassy for the consul for interreligious affairs.
When the Oslo agreement was signed, she was part of the local staff assisting Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. “I was asked to edit Rabin’s speech that he delivered at the White House. It had already been written in English, but it needed fine-tuning. Less than a year later, they came back to Washington, and I was assigned to edit the speech of then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.”
In 1995, she moved to Jerusalem with a work permit from the Jewish Agency and worked at the International Convention Center. The following year, she went to the Interior Ministry and formalized her citizenship. She married a native Israeli in 1998, and they moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where her husband studied for his master’s degree in business administration.
Over the course of seven years there, they gradually became more religiously observant. When they returned to Israel in 2005, with three kids in tow, they settled in Ra’anana. That only lasted four years.
“We moved back with four kids to Minnesota for personal and work reasons,” says Levi. “We planned to come back to Israel; we just didn’t know when.”
Two and a half years later, they settled in Rehovot to be near family and within easy commuting distance of Tel Aviv for her husband’s job.
When Levi was pregnant with her fifth child, she saw an ad for a medical clowning course and signed up. For four years afterward, she performed her shtick at birthday parties, nursing homes, and battered women’s shelters. She also volunteered at a Sheba Medical Center outpatient clinic, entertaining nervous children and their parents in the waiting room.
“I let that side of myself come out, and in a way that was therapeutic – both for the people I was clowning for and for myself. Bringing joy to people, making them laugh, is why I’m here,” she says.
It wasn’t obvious that she would go into comedy. Her professional experience up to that time was in public relations, book editing, and health and nutrition journalism. But she’d always harbored a taste for theater.
“The first time I went on stage was in sixth-grade for an operatic production of Cinderella, where I won the title role. That was when I realized I had the entertainment bug.” She continued participating in musical theater throughout high school and college.
Returning to the stage after a 20-year hiatus, she performed in some English-language productions in Israel. When COVID put an end to that, she tested the comedic waters by posting song parodies on the Kol Isha (Women’s Voice) Facebook group.
Soon a friend suggested she open an Instagram page, right around the time it rolled out the Reels feature. Several years ago, she began doing more original material and opened her @julieshtick page on Instagram.
“When Oct. 7 happened, it didn’t feel right to make any comedy content,” she says.
“So my content changed more to showing what life looked like in Israel. We live near a lot of schools in Rehovot, and some of them were converted into quarters for reservists. I showed how we were making meals for the soldiers, [and] doing their laundry. And I would try to add a little comedic twist.”
Seeing that at least half her followers are in the United States and wanted to help somehow, Levi set up a project where people could sponsor flowers or a catered meal to be sent by local Israeli businesses to reservist families. She raised $30,000 over the course of three months, mostly from her Instagram followers.
This endeavor led her to realize that “my platform is empty without hessed,” good deeds. “I feel like I’m an accidental influencer. It’s an amazing outlet for who I am and for my shtick.”
Despite the ongoing war, Levi received feedback that people “really needed laughs,” so she eventually returned to entertaining content. Now she’s also building an online store branded Shticky by Julie Shtick and is writing a one-woman traveling show.
“The show will be a culmination of all my dreams, a show that is funny but also serious, contemplative… based on my characters and stories from my life,” she says.
Considering that her fans (she calls them her “Bubbalehs”) in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Israel are mainly women in their 30s and 40s, “my main thing is showing middle-aged women that it’s never too late for anything. I really came into my own once I hit 50. There are a lot of misconceptions about middle-aged women, and I’m here to bust those myths.” ■