This passage resonates especially well with today's times: Audiences hoping for safe spaces—especially Jewish audiences—can be rudely jostled by Brooks’s wilde

This passage resonates especially well with today's times: Audiences hoping for safe spaces—especially Jewish audiences—can be rudely jostled by Brooks’s wilder moments. The musical number “Springtime for Hitler,” first unleashed in the movie version of The Producers (1968), of course turned Nazism into merry choreography—boys and girls singing and dancing in S.S. uniforms and regalia. The joke was something more than a joke. Those who had seen Broadway shows in the ’50s and ’60s knew how closely Brooks adhered to the shape and sound of Broadway style. The audience for musical comedies was heavily Jewish, so the wit was partially aimed at them and at Jews in general—an audience inclined to feel itself a victim of history.