In ‘The Rehearsal,’ Nathan Fielder fights the removal of his Holocaust fashion episode

By PJ Grisar
April 27, 2025

While the newest season of Nathan Fielder’s docu-comedy The Rehearsal aims to fix an epidemic of airplane crashes, episode two takes a beat to rehash Fielder’s longstanding beef with Nazi Germany. Well, sort of.

As part of one of his elaborate rehearsals, focused on improving communication in the cockpit, Fielder observes a copilot in a simulated flight quietly navigating a captain’s inappropriate questions about her sex life. As he watches from a distance, he is reminded of a situation where he struggled to express his true feelings.

Fielder shares that his proudest achievement is his outdoor clothing brand Summit Ice. The line, which exists and that I in fact own apparel from, was launched as a form of teshuva on Fielder’s Comedy Central show Nathan for You, after he learned that Taiga, the maker of his favorite windbreaker, which he often wore on the show, published a tribute to a Holocaust denier in its winter catalogue.

The proceeds of Summit Ice, whose slogan is “deny nothing,” go to Holocaust remembrance. Its website includes descriptions of its water-resistant technology alongside details of the Nazi genocide and smoldering models quoted saying “6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.”

To launch the label, Fielder consulted with a rabbi (who seems to be mostly a mohel) and his pitch for the brand at a local sporting goods store included displays of an oven with fake human bones inside, swastika banners and a mannequin wearing a parka over striped pajamas. (The real-world pop up was toned down considerably, but still had plenty of swastikas.)

Summit Ice has, according to Fielder, raised millions for Holocaust awareness.

In a Nathan for You special, Fielder presented the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre a business-card-sized check for the large sum of $150,000. The brand became popular among celebrities, with Seth Rogen, Ellie Kemper (whose sister Carrie is a frequent collaborator of Fielder’s) and Rob Lowe seen sporting the fleece soft shells. For Fielder, this gag is proof that comedy can lead to positive change, a credibility he sorely needs if he’s to counter commercial airplane crashes.

But, in late 2023, Fielder found that the Summit Ice episode of Nathan for You had been scrubbed from the Paramount+ streaming service without explanation. (You can still buy it on YouTube.)

In Sunday’s episode, Fielder re-stages his correspondence with the streaming service using the actor who played him in the first season of The Rehearsal. The emails he sent asking why the episode disappeared were overly nice, and Fielder regrets not being more assertive.

He soon learned — and illustrated through a blue map of conquest emanating from Deutschland — that the German office of Paramount+ was uncomfortable with “anything that touches on antisemitism in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas attacks.”

All of Europe took their lead, Fielder says, and now you can’t get the episode in any Paramount+ territory, including the United States. Adding insult to injury, Fielder noticed that on the app you can get 50 hits for the word “Nazi,” 10 for “Hitler,” but none for “Judaism.” (Trying this myself, I got 30 hits for “Nazi;” 10 for Hitler; and one for “Judaism,” a short film about a Latina Jewish teen preparing for her bat mitzvah.)

“We’ve been erased,” Fielder says.

What Fielder does next is, predictably, over-the-top. Wanting his environment to look sufficiently “hostile,” he recruits an actor, dressed like a brownshirt, to meet him on a set that is palpably and Teutonically fascistic, featuring Paramount+ banners hanging between columns and a tabletop map of the world, with flags of various local streaming services planted on nations with their German-language names.

Speaking to his Aryan interlocutor, Fielder gets to what he believes is the root of the issue.

“I know you guys are, you know, probably feel a lot of shame for what you did in the past, and now you’re trying to overcompensate by being the world leaders in fighting antisemitism,” Fielder says. But, he adds, “you have to let us Jews express ourselves.”

Here Fielder is touching on a real tension in Germany. Masters of historical memory, Germany limits representation of Nazi imagery — something the Nathan for You episode is brimming with.

But the country sometimes overdoes it.

Recently, cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests, the government has caught some Jews in the dragnet over the ostensible aim of combatting antisemitism. In late 2024, Jewish artists and academics slammed an overly broad government resolution meant to preserve Jewish life in Germany that they said would, in a twist worthy of Kafka or Fielder, class Jewish and Israeli human rights groups — including Rabbis for Human Rights — as antisemitic.

Berlin-based Jewish visial artist Candice Breitz, who said she had a show cancelled in Germany over her criticism of the Israel-Hamas war, estimated to Haaretz that, since Oct.7, “over a quarter of those denounced and demonised for speaking out in solidarity with Palestinian civilians have been progressive Jews.”

Fielder says that in censoring Jews, people “might get the wrong idea” about where Germany stands on the issue of antisemitism.

It’s a trenchant critique, but as always, Fielder has stage managed it to a ludicrous degree. When his German actor is allowed to speak freely, he calls Fielder out for dressing him like a Nazi on a set like a war room.

“You don’t actually want to get the Paramount+ perspective, or the German perspective,” the actor says, “this is not sincere. You’re just a man with a grudge using your television show to smear us. Instead of trying to understand us.”

The charge is far from baseless and Fielder, who has been struggling to understand people throughout his entire oeuvre, seems at first to consider it.

Paramount+ Germany declined to share their perspective, but German sensitivities make sense, especially given the recent gains of a far right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AFD), which seems intent on moving beyond memory culture.

And as far as comedy goes: Even Mel Brooks didn’t go so far as to have a model crematorium with fake bones.

But Fielder still isn’t quite sold on the German point of view, later in the season describing Paramount+ as a company with some “questionable viewpoints.”

He ends his chat with the German by gazing out the window, observing men in SS uniforms drilling in the courtyard. (Of course, Fielder’s the one who put them there.)

“I’ve always felt that sincerity is overrated,” Fielder narrates, still smarting from the accusation that he’s not being serious.

For that reason it shouldn’t be surprising that Germans, achingly sincere in their guilt and hesitance to offend, would clash. They are probably a bit too in on the joke.

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