The following is the abstract for my chapter "Heil Honey, I'm Home Again: The Evolution of the Hitler Satire" for Armed Farces: Essays on War-Themed Film and Television Comedy, which was released in May 2026.

     Richard Brody, in his New Yorker article, argues that the satire in Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit backfires. This common negative criticism involves a central confusion about the film’s purpose. While the goal, according to Waititi, is that it attempts to highlight the humanity of Jews and ridicule the absurdity of the Nazi regime, some have, somehow, read the opposite: that the film is trying to have us empathize with Nazis and, in turn, laugh at Jews. In this essay, I will discuss the trajectory of Hitler satire in film spanning the decades between Brooks’ mockery of Hitler The Producers in the '60s and Waititi’s 2019 film, highlighting the way filmmakers have tried to situate Hitler as an absurd figure to laugh at rather than fear. My focus will be primarily on the still-mostly-lost 1990 sitcom Heil Honey, I’m Home! featuring Hitler and Eva Braun as next-door neighbors to a Jewish couple that was cancelled immediately after the pilot aired. It prefigures Waititi’s Hitler in ways that have not yet been explored, and reworks Brooks’ style, serving as a bridge between these vastly different eras. In the end, I hope to show that there is in fact a multitude of reasons why we need to examine Hitler still, to laugh at the absurdity while condemning the hate, to remember that though long dead, his ideologies still pose a threat in today’s world and laughter and satire, however messy it may be, might help us survive it.

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. “Heil Honey I'm Home Again: The Evolution of the Hitler Satire." Armed Farces: Essays on War-Themed Film and Television Comedy, McFarland and Company, 2026, pp. 61-73.

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection on Philip Roth and Empathy. More info concerning the press and release date will be coming soon. 

     Philip Roth is a writer who is steeped in baggage and controversy; we might be used to thinking of him in this way now, but whether he was at the height of his success or the beginning of his career, his work was always under fire. Portnoy’s Complaint, for example, published in 1969, angered readers due to its complicated subject matter: sexuality and Jews. Dara Horn, in her piece written upon Roth’s death, argued that “one could generously say that jokes” like the many in Portnoy’s Complaint that make fun of the various female characters “haven’t aged well, yet they were just as cruel in 1969—and the misogyny isn’t really the problem. After all, if one policed literature for bigotry, there would be little left to read. The problem is literary: these caricatures reveal a lack of not only empathy, but curiosity” (Horn). In this essay, I wish to push back on the claim that Roth’s novel lacks empathy, and explore just how empathetic it really is. In doing so, I will also try to piece together why, both then and now, readers are insistent that there is little to no empathy to be found in its pages. 

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection on Philip Roth film adaptation. More info concerning the press and release date will be coming soon. 

     Both starring Richard Benjamin, Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) received vastly different reactions from critics. Columbus was well-reviewed, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning other awards despite its messy and human portrayal of postwar Jewish characters, while Portnoy was critically panned. Most notably, Roger Ebert called the film a “true fiasco” and claimed that “the movie has no heart and little apparent sympathy with its Jewish characters” (Ebert), a similar reaction some had to the novel just a few years before. When Roth was pressed about this issue, he explained that he wanted to portray Jews as capable of everything—both good and “repellent” (his word) acts. Some readers called for a “better” representation of Jews, but Roth insisted on his portrayals, as they were honest. In this paper, I examine both films to determine what went wrong adapting Portnoy for the big screen and why the reception for Columbus was so positive. Taken together, the reception of these films sheds important light on cultural shifts from the late fifties to the early seventies and make us reconsider what works, and what doesn’t, in Roth’s portrayals of his Jewish characters both on the page and on the screen. 

The following is an excerpt from my in press article "'This too will pass:' Recovering Perfection and Discovering Connection in Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers" in The Kentucky Philological Review, set to be published early this year. This article, based on a presentation given at the KPA conference in 2023, examines Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers and seeks to highlight some important, often missed themes, that bridge gaps in the novel that other scholars mark as reasons it fails to feel cohesive. Below is a short excerpt:

     Since The Puttermesser Papers’ release, scholars and critics have failed to treat it as a “novel;” most focus on one or two of the chapters, rather than dealing with it as a whole. This is problematic for many reasons, but most importantly is that qualms with the novel’s form hinge on the claim that the chapters are not interconnected, that there is no overarching theme, no character journey for Puttermesser. This does a disservice to Ozick’s vision and critique of Puttermesser (a Jew facing the modern world) longing for the recovery of some sort of lost, perfect, idyllic connection. She creates a golem child so that she may recover Paradise on Earth, invents an imaginary Uncle so she might recover some lost connection to her Jewish heritage, and more, all in the name of recovery and connection. In this presentation, I will offer a reading of the novel, not just its chapters, arguing that it is coherent and has a central purpose; that being Puttermesser’s longing for the recovery of, and her “demand” of, perfect connections with the past, people, and places, and further, how Ozick believes this is representative of, and even potentially dangerous to, Jewish culture.