Some people might argue there’s nothing funny about what’s happening in the Middle East. But try telling that to Eric and Ryan Turkienicz, the brothers who created the Jewish parody news website The Daily Brine after Oct. 7. Some sample headlines: “Hamas’ Work-From-Tunnel Policy Absolutely Ruining Office Culture.”
“US Proposes Letting Hamas Rule The Country On Weekends Plus Every Other Thursday.”
“Jewish Voice For Peace Excited To Decolonize Shavuot Just As Soon As Someone Explains To Them What Shavuot Is.”
The Daily Brine started off as a side gig, an outlet for Eric Turkienicz—a lawyer by day—to leverage the time he spent performing and writing comedy at The Second City, while Ryan, who works in real estate investment, handled half the writing, the graphic design and social media. Now, with more than 20,000 followers across Instagram and Twitter, the Canadian brothers have grown their passion project to the point that the president of Israel invited Ryan for an in-person meeting last week.
On today’s The CJN Daily, host Ellin Bessner meets the Turkienicz brothers to discuss the real meaning behind the project: to provide uplifting, biting and sometimes amusing pro-Israel content that punches up at antisemitism among the powers that be.
Show Notes
Related links
- Follow The Daily Brine on their website, or on Instagram, Facebook and X/Twitter.
- Learn more about buying their merchandise, including T-shirts.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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Transcript
Ellin Bessner: That’s the sound of a video from mid January showing several Red Cross ambulances driving through sand dunes somewhere between Gaza and Israel. And the caption reads, “Red Cross finally shows up to inspect hostages after 67,884,990 wrong turns”. Well, as you can tell, it’s not from CNN or a mainstream media outlet, although with some of the real anti Israel headlines these days, you might have to check just to be sure. It’s actually a post on The Daily Brine, a Canadian satirical news website created after October 7th by brothers Ryan and Eric Turkienicz of Toronto as their way to comment on the very unfunny circumstances facing the Jewish people right now in Israel and around the world. That post is one of hundreds. And here are some of their other headlines. “Jewish Voice for Peace excited to decolonize Shavuot as soon as someone explains to them what Shavuot is.” They’ve talked about the exploding pagers too. They’ve even made awards for the celebrity who hates Israel the most. But behind the absurd comedy of some of their headlines, the brothers tone also turned solemn when they mourned the kidnapping and murders of the Bibas children and their mother. Their posts go on Their Daily Brine website and also on Instagram, where they’ve amassed over 18,000 followers. They’re on other social media platforms too, which is why they have put a disclaimer on the material to explain that it is satire, not the truth. Although their posts sometimes say what some of us dared to think in private.
Eric Turkienicz: We’re wearing it on our sleeves. We’re not pretending like we’re saying real things. And then like some people do when they get called out, they go, oh, it was satire as a defence mechanism. No, we’re out there at the beginning saying, this is satire, this is made up. These are exaggerations with the understanding that it is. But there’s truth behind it. There’s a comment, there’s an opinion, there’s a point of view behind it that we hope you get out of it.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Thursday, March, 13, 2025. Welcome to The CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish news and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Jews around the world are marking the annual festival of Purim beginning Thursday evening, where folks dress up in costumes, make merry, read the Book of Esther and perform hilarious skits, all to remember how the Jews were saved from genocide in Persia 2,500 years ago. And so we thought it was a perfect time for you to meet the two creators of The Daily Brine. Eric Turkienicz is a lawyer by profession. He does half the writing, using his comedy skills honed as a graduate of The Second City Comedy Academy. Ryan works in real estate investment and he does writing, all the graphics and the social media posting. Their website is called The Daily Brine because it sounds like a newspaper, like The Onion or The Beaverton, but also brings a Jewish flavour like Jewish style kosher pickles, because their motto is “Salty like the Dead Sea, Sweet like the Jordan River. “They do do hard news, but they also put U.S. President Donald Trump issuing an executive order outlawing sweet gefilte fish. Now, with more than 20,000 followers across Instagram and Twitter, the brothers have grown this part time hustle to the point that Ryan was invited to meet the President of Israel Isaac Herzog just a few days ago. Eric and Ryan Turkienicz join me now.
Ellin Bessner: And they join me now. Welcome to The CJN Daily, guys.
Eric Turkienicz: Hi, thanks for having us.
Ellin Bessner: Thank you for coming on our show, and congratulations on The Daily Brine. Our listeners may not have heard about it, but I was very lucky to have a little relative who told us about it, one of your members of your Turkanitz [Uncertain] clan, who is our rabbi at my synagogue in Toronto.
Ryan Turkienicz: Yeah, thank you. You know, I hear that story a lot, that someone told them about what we’re doing and, like, that organically. Word’s getting around.
Ellin Bessner: Well, you’re up to 18,000 followers on Instagram. So what were you when you started, besides you two and your friends and mom and what have you?
Ryan Turkienicz: And our 18,000th follower was none other than Elon Levy, the former spokesperson of the state of Israel.
Ellin Bessner: So that is a good sign. A little late, but better late than never, right? Because you probably followed him like a year ago.
Eric Turkienicz: It’s fashionably late. Everyone knows you don’t join an Instagram page until they hit at least 15,000.
Ellin Bessner: So who is the group who follows you? Is it mostly the Jewish community echo chamber? And I say that in a—uh—but, yeah, who. Who does follow you?
Ryan Turkienicz: I think it’s a good mix, and that’s actually why a lot of people have taken notice, because even in a small way, we have broken out of the echo chamber. It’s obviously mostly Jews. You know, I would—I’d imagine even up to 80%. I often get messages from people from the Indian community, from the Christian community, even some Arabs. You know, I had a Jordanian fellow message me, saying, like, thank you for doing this. You know, you’re bringing some levity to the situation. And we really do agree with what you’re saying. So where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You know, we’re breaking out of the echo chamber a little bit, and we want to keep that going.
Ellin Bessner: But that’s amazing, isn’t that what you want to do is create some connection as opposed to all the yelling.
Eric Turkienicz: You know, one of the things that inspired this thing to begin was seeing what was out there already. And a lot of it was very divisive. You know, you would have—even among the Jewish voices out there—you’d have people out there going to one side or the other at a very extreme point where it didn’t matter what the point of view was. It doesn’t matter. We’re right because we’re right, because we’re right. And then you just have yelling and name-calling, and, you know, you’d side with people that you might not want to side with because of all that. And there was room for a voice of, like, hold on, let’s take a step back. Let’s talk at a kind of light level about why we think we’re right about this stuff and why we think the other side might be wrong. And people again outside that echo chamber have clued into it because they didn’t like seeing the ‘I’m right, yeah, you are right,’ and then swear words and things like that. They liked seeing honest takes about it and insightful takes on it.
Ellin Bessner: Are there other competitors or, I guess, people that are doing this kind of work in the Jewish field and also in the non-Jewish field? I mean, I know The Beaverton, you write for The Beaverton, but I’m talking about specifically October 7th type stuff around the world and not like the Israeli Saturday Night Live show, which is a whole other thing.
Ryan Turkienicz: Well, should we start with just like a basic description of what it is? We’re essentially a satire news page, making satirical, made-up headlines in the vein of The Onion or The Babylon Bee, but specifically to fight antisemitism or promote a pro-Israel point of view or even just promote confidence in the Jewish community by talking about our holidays and our culture and having our people be seen. So it existed in fits and starts, but we felt not from the same perspective that we have. Yeah, so people were already doing it, but we felt that a lot of what was happening, especially on the Hasbara side of things, was not as effective as it could be. You know, we felt it could be made simpler, it could be made punchier, and it also could be made funnier. And so that’s, I think, where our secret sauce came into it.
Eric Turkienicz: There was an unfortunate pattern, especially immediately after October 7th for sure, but before as well, where the Hasbara movements or the pro-Israel movement or however what you want to call it—some of the voices were mean. I don’t know how else to say it, but they would go to an extreme length to target people who perhaps didn’t need to be targeted simply as an effort to prove that they were right. And some of the voices out there were like that. And we thought there was room for a slightly more centrist voice that took some of the volume out of it. And in comedy, there’s a concept of punching up or punching down. And we didn’t want to punch down. We didn’t want to start writing all these things blasting people who were suffering in the Palestinian territories. We didn’t want to blast people who were suffering on any side of the equation. We wanted to target the people who were in power, the people who had the loudest voices in the room, and approach the hypocrisy that they were putting into things. The politicians, the loudest voices in the progressive movements, people like the UN, people like groups like Hamas, of course, and say these are the targets we need to focus on. Celebrating a Jewish victory because they’ve bombed a place was not helpful and frankly, is not right. Talking about these are the people who are actively causing the suffering and these are the people we should be focused on. That’s the approach we wanted to take.
Ellin Bessner: Is that the more polite Canadian brand that you can add to the conversation? Because, for example, there are Michael Rappaport, Tiffany Haddish, there’s all other Jewish comedians doing, quote, hasbara. But they’re American or, you know, and you guys are, I think, maybe the only ones.
Ryan Turkienicz: I think it’s part and parcel more of the news voice rather than the Canadian voice, where if we maintain our objectivity, where everything we say is backed by a verifiable story or a defensible opinion, that’ll allow our own people to trust us and people on the other side to at least engage with what we’re trying to say.
Ellin Bessner: But your site says, hashtag, total satire, like warning, do not. This is not a news site. This is not fake news. Almost so explain why you just said that it’s a news when it’s not.
Eric Turkienicz: I mean, the underlying stories, of course, are real stories. We’re not making up a story and then making fun of a made-up story. There’s no goal in that, there’s no satire in that. So underlying it, there’s a real event. What the satire is, what the made-up part is, our take on it. We’re either exaggerating something that really occurred, which of course, the exaggeration is not correct, or pointing out some hypocrisy in it in the hope of bringing the attention to the original story and either how absurd it is or how untrue it is. And readers, whether they agreed with us at the beginning or not, are at least thinking that there’s another point of view and one that is based in rationality as opposed to just shouting and screaming and yelling.
Ellin Bessner: Right. Like, for example, the one we’re talking about a week after the first hostage release of this year. The post you did about how the Red Cross got lost six million times before it could actually find the first hostages was brilliant but also sad. It’s what the Jewish world has been complaining about with broken hearts for years. Can you walk us through how that particular post came to be and how you decide the tone of that so quickly after the actual release?
Eric Turkienicz: I think it’s an example of what I mentioned before, which is, who’s the target here? You have a hostage release, and with some points of view, it’s a wonderful thing that’s happening. Everyone loves seeing them return, but it’s bittersweet because of things that are surrounding it. In the midst of it, you had the Red Cross show up, and they’re prominently in the photos, and their symbol is there. And we knew that throughout, there were a lot of criticisms about, “Hey, where were you guys?” This is the classic guy shows up at the last minute to take credit for something in which they had absolutely no real role.
Ryan Turkienicz: But their Uber rating is sky high. I think it’s 5.0, if not, you know, 4.9, something.
Ellin Bessner: They’ve only done two rides, though.
Eric Turkienicz: Small sample size, but that’s an example. How did that come to be? We had to have a point of view of what was going on. This is a big story, and you didn’t want to bash the positive side of it. But who are the people worthy of criticism? Perhaps the people who swooped in after the time was appropriate for them to have swooped in.
Ellin Bessner: And would you say that that was trolling or satire? How do you define the levels?
Ryan Turkienicz: Trolling is when you’re just straight up mocking somebody to just show that you hate them. If you’re going to mock the Red Cross’s appearance or just something about them, whereas satire is when you’re criticizing their action or their point of view. And I feel this was more on the side of satire.
Eric Turkienicz: I mean, my perspective on trolling is you’re trying to make the target angry or upset by calling out or insulting them or whatever. That wasn’t the purpose of this. This was us calling out to the wider world, “Hey, look, the Red Cross, who is trying to take credit for a lot of this, wasn’t there all that time.” We’re not trolling; we’re trying to make a point. You know, we can have a different comment about people out there who are simply doing things for the laughs or to get a rise, or “owning the libs,” or whatever the language a lot of people are trying to use. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to get our jabs into specific people. We’re trying to make a point, particularly in a landscape where the pro-Israel voices are often diminished or made to feel of less value than the anti-Israel voices.
Ellin Bessner: Right. It’s hard to argue when someone calls you a baby killer. It kind of cuts the conversation off right there.
Eric Turkienicz: Yeah.
Ellin Bessner: It came to mind the Roberto Benigni film “Life Is Beautiful” about the Holocaust or the Anne Frank Instagram stories that came out maybe two, three years ago, where people were like, “It’s too soon. You can’t do that. You can’t joke about something so traumatic.” What guidance or self-guidance do you have in your work so that you’re sensitive?
Eric Turkienicz: Yeah. I’ve thought about this a lot because I’ve been involved in comedy for the better part of 26 or 27 years. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “too soon.” It’s a thing that’s used a lot, but from an event perspective, there’s no such thing as too soon. What is possibly too soon are certain points of view about the event. It is often harder to find a funny point of view immediately after it happens, so much so that maybe it’s not worth trying. That doesn’t mean something is verboten; there may be something you can say about it in certain circumstances when we’re…
Ryan Turkienicz: Talking about the Holocaust…
Eric Turkienicz: Sure.
Ryan Turkienicz: Given what we’ve gone through as a people over our history, our sense of humor can sometimes skew darker. A joke we make towards ourselves is sometimes okay, whereas someone else doing it to us is not. Like even yesterday, Elon Musk came up with a whole list of Nazi puns that, in context, was unacceptable. But my comment about it, saying that it’s out of my “comfort zone”—well, that’s kind of funny because it’s a Jew saying it, and it’s our voice about a trauma that happened to us. So I think there is a little bit of nuance.
Ellin Bessner: So maybe if I could respond. You’re taking ownership of this rather than letting somebody else define it. You know, you called him “Lefty Sinwar,” and that was crazy. It was funny. If you’re a Palestinian who thinks he’s the hero, they’re not going to like that. But I just thought that it was funny. Why wouldn’t you want to punch up on him instead of punching down? We want you to punch down. He’s dead, and he’s a murderer.
Eric Turkienicz: Well, in my perspective, you can’t punch down on the leader of a terrorist organization. This is a person whose entire existence has been to project power and project superiority and dominance over both his own people and other people. You can’t punch down on someone who is claiming a high status role.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, so you have different rules for different politicians or whatever?
Eric Turkienicz: Yeah, you know, there are some people who, regardless of what it is, are fair targets for mockery and satire and whatever you want to call it.
Ellin Bessner: Have you taken on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or of the other one?
Ryan Turkienicz: But at the beginning, there was just total solidarity even within the government, and there was pretty much an agreement not to attack each other because the threat from outside was existential. I think that’s even continued up until now. So we’ve done some light jabs against him, but we haven’t gotten involved in the more divisive internal politics quite yet, just because the war was still ongoing. We also got into this to be a bit of a unifying voice. We have a dual goal of getting our points across to the other side but also building confidence and common culture within the Jewish people. So that’s another reason why we haven’t taken on internal politics.
Eric Turkienicz: Not that it’s not a valid target. It’s absolutely a valid target, and there are certain things that even the most die-hard supporters would criticize them for doing. In the meantime, however, the world has provided us with many other targets we thought were more worthy.
Ellin Bessner: What’s your best biggest successful, I guess, viral story that you’ve done? Do you know?
Ryan Turkienicz: Yeah. So early on we posted one. I think the headline was “UN Condemns Hamas for Lack of Handrails,” and it was a picture of a Hamas tunnel descending into darkness. And it looked very hazardous, like you could fall and hurt yourself,
Ellin Bessner: And so it’s health and safety rules type of thing.
Yeah, it was just at that moment where, you know, the UN had done nothing, had said nothing, and was borderline supportive in their inaction to Hamas. It struck a nerve, and it really started circulating on all the group chats, all the forums, all the different Jewish message groups. That was, I think, where the broader community took notice of us.
Eric Turkienicz: Like, you know, and still to this day, it boggles the mind what the UN is doing and saying about certain things.
Ryan Turkienicz: There was another one that went semi-viral and also kind of made people think it was a real news story. It was when Israel had rescued the Bedouin Arab hostage, and the headline Eric came up with was, “CNN requires reporter to find most cynical angle possible on hostage release,” or something like that. I made a mock CNN breaking news headline that says, “Israel puts Arab man in hospital,” and it’s a photo of the rescued hostage smiling with his son. But that’s the headline, and it went semi-viral on Twitter because people thought it was an example of what CNN would really do.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s what happened, so it’s brilliant. Has this work changed your views at all, or have you, and I’m going to use the word journey because I think that’s true, started to do this about what it’s like to be Jewish in this time of our lives?
Eric Turkienicz: October 7th made me angrier as a Jewish person than I have felt in a very, very long time. I struggled myself with how to deal with that because I found myself just, you know, in a normal work day or out socially, and I couldn’t get certain things out of my mind months and months after. This is something that stuck and still sticks with me. I wrestled with how to handle it. This, of all things, has been an outlet for dealing with some of those emotions because I didn’t know how to process it. I wasn’t the kind of person who would post 20,000 inspirational quotes on Facebook. That’s not how I dealt with it, nor was I someone who would get into online arguments with people. That wasn’t me. But I’d been in comedy for a long time, and that became a good outlet for me to express my feelings about it in a way that felt good and productive.
Ellin Bessner: Has that helped today? I mean, it’s 15 months now, and it’s become the reason to get up in the morning and keep doing this.
Eric Turkienicz: When I look at some of the stories and see 150 comments on them, most of which are from people who say, “Thank you,” and “I’m feeling the same way,” or who riff on the joke, it makes me feel good.
Ryan Turkienicz: To layer on top of that, it was also a wake-up call for me to realize that Jewish life is in our generation’s hands now. If we don’t step into those shoes, things might get worse. People talk about October 8th Jews, but I don’t see it that way. I think it’s just regular Jews who realize it takes work and effort to build culture, community, and an actual nation and country. People are stepping up to get activated and do whatever work they can in support of that. That’s kind of how it worked for me.
Ellin Bessner: And you’re doing this when a lot of Jewish artists are being canceled in the artistic world, in comedy, in the show world, in comic book writing—Miriam Libicki you know, all the same names we’re going to discuss. It’s difficult now for being Jewish in the arts. So, I mean, how does what you do fit in, if at all?
Eric Turkienicz: It’s hard to navigate. Anyone who is in that sphere has heard people they’ve probably been associating with for years, or friends, say things that have taken them aback. Sometimes you feel like you can’t say certain things because that industry or professional sphere might suddenly turn against you in a way you don’t want. So people have to keep things on the down low. The goal we’re trying to achieve is to normalize a pro-Israel, or even better, an anti-anti-Israel voice out there, and say, “Okay, we see you guys dominating the media with all that stuff about how evil Israel is.” Well, here is the respectful dissent, and we want to normalize that. You can say that stuff, even disagree with other people, and still exist without being—I don’t like the word canceled—without being targeted or ostracized.
Ellin Bessner: Can you discuss the merch that you have? Especially the—I’ll say it, and I’m going to get an explicit rating now, but whatever. It’s in Hebrew. It’s FAFO—F around and find out—in Hebrew lettering. Tell me about that security patch. Who buys it? Is it really for the military? These are all the things that I saw. I would buy it, but it’s…
Ryan Turkienicz: We call it a morale patch. In a very simple way, it’s also Israel’s foreign policy: if you cross this line, you’re going to find out the full force of the IDF. People liked it, and it went semi-viral among soldiers, both Israeli and American. Once they found out what it means—and most people can’t decipher what it means—there became an appetite for it.
Ellin Bessner: You don’t know if anybody’s actually wearing it in battle, though?
Ryan Turkienicz: Well, yeah, I don’t think it’s approved by the actual IDF. I think it’s more for in the barracks, just to have fun with the boys. But I did hear a rumour that somebody gave one to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and he has it up on his wall of military patches. I don’t know if they explained to him what it means—I assume they did—but that’s the rumour I heard.
Eric Turkienicz: That was when I was in D.C., and that’s sourced from one of our articles. The origin was one of the posts that had that as the official policy.
Ryan Turkienicz: Yeah, no. “Israel appoints new Minister of FAFO to explain foreign policy to neighboring militants,” you know.
Ellin Bessner: Okay. And you’re going to Israel for the world, the first-ever annual meeting of the Voice of the People.
Ellin Bessner: Will that change what you’re doing? Or it’s a separate thing.
Ryan Turkienicz: It’s separate but connected because, you know, through what we’ve been doing with The Daily Brine, I’ve met like-minded comedians and just funny people on social media. That’s evolving into a quasi-activist group that I’m calling Ironic Dome. And so, it feels like we’re slowly uniting, we’re slowly building institutions, and we’re slowly figuring out what the next phase of advocacy, if you want to call it, is going to look like. So it’s an open question, but things are moving in a positive direction.
Ellin Bessner: Well, we’ll check back in with you when you get back because obviously, Israel needs all the help they can get in Hasbara. They haven’t succeeded so far. So if they can get some Ironic Dome people to figure out a better way, Kol Hakavod, all power. Thank you. It’s been great to chat with you guys. Thank you so much for what you do and for coming on the CJN Daily.
Ryan Turkienicz: Thanks so much, Ellin.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily. Thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable foundation. Our show is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman, the managing editor, Mark Weisblott, and the music by Dov Beck Levine. Wishing everyone a Happy Purim. And thanks for listening.
