Your Reactions to "Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish?"

On Friday, November 7, 2025, I finally gave an answer to a question that has haunted America for decades, one that many say is the question of our time: Is Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed little green dude from Monsters, Inc., of Polish or Ashkenazi Jewish descent?

I would say the post did pretty well!

Given that my thorough analysis and dazzling conclusion was the very first post I have ever made on Substack¹ and has thus currently driven nearly 100% of my readership, I will assume you have already read it. If you have read it, then you have also seen the uproarious reaction. Cheering in the streets, strangers embracing one another, tears of joy. America has been saved. My post did numbers. And almost all of you thought my conclusion was wrong.

Here are the top three reasons why you thought I was so incorrect.

3. There’s no difference between Jews and Poles

Thanks Gregor T, but I would strongly advise you not to go around saying that to Polish people. Most will take it in stride but a select few will react very poorly.

This was a pretty common sentiment in the replies. I would guess it came from applying the New World understanding of nationality, where membership in a nation is based on citizenship in a state and not at all correlated with a common ethnicity and culture, with the Old World understanding of nationality just as belonging to a common ethnicity and culture. If your parents moved to Canada from Poland, they’ll call you a “Polish-Canadian”. If your grandparents moved to Italy from Poland, and your parents speak Italian, and you speak Italian as a first language, and you went to Italian schools, and you have Italian citizenship, they’ll call you “Polish”.

What isn’t the difference? There’s a different language,² different food, different clothes… I will say that there is more cultural overlap than either side is particularly comfortable admitting, but thanks to a thousand years of legal and religious isolation from their neighbors the Jews of northern & eastern Europe and their descendants, aka Ashkenazi Jews, have a cultural and ethnic background that is very distinct from the surrounding nations. The exceptions are cases where Jews have been given full legal rights and the batei din (Jewish religious courts) have been stripped of their power to enforce Jewish religious law.³

One of these exceptions is… the UNITED STATES!!!!! USA #1 BABY!!! GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!! Mel Brooks! Irving Berlin! Larry David! Bagels! “Let it Snow”! Separate, shmeparate. What is Jewish, is American! THE MELTING POT IS UNDEFEATED!!!!!! 🗽🦅🤠🏈🫡🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

This will be relevant later.

2. Mike Wazowski is just so clearly Jewish

The second most common reaction to the piece was exemplified in this comment from Denise S. Robbins:

Look, I get it, I do. As many of you pointed out, there is a lot of Billy Crystal in Mike Wazowski, and Billy Crystal is nearly the platonic ideal of the secular American Ashkenazi Jew.

Several of comments along these lines focused on Wazowski’s demeanor and compared it to their own personal experiences. These were some of the most heated comments the article received.

Some said I just happened to do a very good job making the Jewish case. This was wise and the rest of you could learn from it. With me, flattery will get you everywhere.

1. The most common reaction

The most common reaction to the piece was exemplified in this comment, also from Denise S. Robbins:

Fuck, he’s a “cashew”!⁴ Why didn’t I think of this? It was such a common response too!

Elias Beamish 「 The Void 」 said “it needs more Hegel”. As someone who was really annoying in college, this was a dagger to the heart. That’s some shit I would say!

Because I did such a good job of demonstrating that his mother is Jewish, the specific formulation most people came up with is that his mom is Jewish and his father is Polish.

And you know what, I’m convinced. I’m revising my answer and saying that MIKE WAZOWSKI HAS A POLISH FATHER AND A JEWISH MOTHER. Case closed, we can all go home.

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Now, it is at this point that a worse writer, an inferior journalist, an overall lesser man, might say that he is completely floored by the attention his throwaway article has received. He might make such sappy and weak comments as:

• Holy shit, a thousand fucking likes? On my first post? Are you kidding me?

• Big shoutout to Klaus Zynski specifically, whose restack of my post gained traction very early on and was, I think, one of the reasons it did so well

• One commenter said they read my post as entertainment on a road trip, and I have been thinking about it since

• I genuinely thought my posting career would peak at Freddie deBoer posting a photo of his baby in reply to my offhand remark about how I’m sad he doesn’t post photos of his baby anymore

• Thank you all so much!

A lesser man would say all these things, but I am no lesser man. This is Sproutstack, the greatest publication on planet Earth, and I expect nothing less of myself than wild success.

1. Longform post, anyway, but even then I’ve only been on Notes for like a month, and I have never had a Twitter/X presence.

2. Here’s another personal anecdote: A much older relative, long since deceased, grew up in Poland until her early teens before arriving in the United States. Towards the end of her life, she moved into a nursing home. One of her neighbors in the home happened to be Polish. My relative mentioned offhand that she too was born in Poland, and her neighbor then began speaking to her in Polish, a language she did not understand because she was a Yiddish speaker from the shtetl. A verbal altercation ensued and she had to move to a different room.

3. You can thank Napoleon for many of these cases, but that’s a whole post by itself.

4. A friend’s term for herself. Not mine, but I wish I came up with it.