Although Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson‘s Broad City characters took a flight to Israel, they never quite made the birthright trip they imagined.
Amid the country’s ongoing conflict with Palestine, Glazer recalled that she and Jacobson “were actually going to film in Israel” before deciding to “pull the plug” at the last minute, detailing what would have happened in the hour-long Season 3 finale of their Comedy Central series.
“There was violence happening between Israelis and Palestinians,” she explained to The Daily Beast. “And I don’t think either one of us had taken our journey into understanding the situation there to the degree that we do now, but it was just a bad vibe. And we were promised all of this army protection, you can film and there will be soldiers there with guns, and we were like, wait, what are we doing? We have to fully pull the plug. This is not appealing and that’s not what safety sounds like. And yeah, we pulled it.”
Glazer added, “It just got really scary at the last minute. Our director, Lucia Aniello, one of the creators of Hacks, was literally walking to the door with her suitcase to go location-scout when she got the call that we were like, ‘We can’t do this, dude. This is freaking us out.’”
The Emmy winner said it’s “unfortunate” the two-part episode never got made, as it was “really funny.”
Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson in the ‘Broad City’ Season 3 episode ‘Jews on a Plane’. (Comedy Central/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“It included the Red Sea curing my bacne. It had one of the few very famous Black Jews—like, perhaps Zoë Kravitz—representing Jesus in a mirage on the desert. It was really funny, but we just were like, we have to rewrite this,” said Glazer.
The Season 3 penultimate and finale episodes ‘Getting There’ and ‘Jews on a Plane’ aired on Comedy Central in 2016, the first half featuring the duo in a rush to get to the airport after oversleeping, forgetting a passport and getting stuck in the subway. The second part reveals the pair is going to Israel for their Birthright trip, which is cut short when their mile-high search for a tampon leads to a diplomatic scare.
Ultimately, Glazer is satisfied with what they made in place of the Israel episode. “I’m very glad, and I actually feel like our values now are related to why we pulled the plug then. It’s just kind of funny how things unfold,” she said.
After launching the show as a web series from 2009 to 2011, Broad City caught the eye of executive producer Amy Poehler and landed a five-season run on Comedy Central from 2014 to 2019.
