By Aaron Pomerantz & Mark Levy
Last Updated 24 September 2026 at 18:00
The Domain Shops at Austin, Texas: Folks are talking (and by “folks” we mean “us” and “whoever we can pull into our Four Dimensional Vortex of Lashon Hara“) in the Anglo-Israeli Community after Comedian Benji Lovitt was seen hawking Dead Sea Beauty Products in Texas. Mr. Lovitt, who recently left Israel after 20 years as an Oleh, was seen doing the hard sell of some Dead Sea Mud Exfoliant on a Texas Matron of a Certain Age outside the Starbucks at North Austin’s Domain Shopping Center.
Eyewitnesses claimed that Benji approached the local woman as she tried to find the nearby Whole Foods on Google Maps. Yet what struck passerby the most was the extent to which Mr. Lovitt’s spoken English had deteriorated after 20 years in the Holy Land. Benji had somehow forgotten key aspects of the English Language and communicated using Israeli tropes such as ‘Ehhhhm’ when he talked.
“Ehhhm….ziss is a beauty product, Madame. Believe me… You need a lot of it.” he admonished. As the woman’s husband arrived and tried to remove her from the sales ambush, Benji inquired “Ehhhh….Mah Koreh? What eez deh proh-blem?!”
As the man ushered his bewildered wife to safety, Benji seemed nonplussed, offering “chasers” of Arak to passerby. Later a University of Texas student narrowly evaded Benji’s high pressure sales pitch when the local Chabad Schliach interrupted Mr. Lovitt in order to nudnik him into laying tefillin, thus providing the young man a brief window of opportunity to escape. (Based on a True Story! Except it was in Salinas, California!)
Community members continued to note Lovitt’s transformation. A friend of Benji who wished to remain anonymous (it was Josh) noted that he saw Mr. Lovitt use the word “Kilu” 45 times in a single conversation about hummus.
Despite his distance from Eretz HaKodesh, Mr. Lovitt maintains a spiritual connection to Israel by way of his current living conditions. Benji now resides in some sort of absurd shared housing setup with 12 recently released IDF soldiers who are all saving up money for trips to India and Thailand which they say will be “Crazy” and “Magniv”.
Wishing to get both sides of the story, The Daily Freier attempted to interview Benji. But we couldn’t understand what he said because his mouth was full of sunflower seeds.
EPILOGUE: As the story went to print, Benji was rumored to have quit his Dead Sea Products job in order to become a locksmith and/or work off the books for a sketchy moving company.
EPILOGUE TO THE EPILOGUE: You can check out Benji’s real life projects at benjilovitt.com.
By Yuval Weiss