Julian Rose

Julian Rose (born Julius Rosenzweig; 6 September 1868–13 September 1935) was an American-born Jewish comedian. From the 1910s he lived and worked in Britain, where he was usually billed as "Our Hebrew Friend".

Biography He was born in New York City, the son of immigrant Austrian Jews. In early adulthood, he worked as an accountant for the New York and Philadelphia Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he amused his colleagues with his impressions of older immigrant Jews learning to live in America. Some sources state that he was raised and worked in Philadelphia. with Yiddish-inflected patter and dialect parodies, spoken at up to two hundred words per minute.

His most successful routine was the monologue, "Levinsky at the Wedding". He became popular among Jews and others, and he was one of the first Jewish comedians to record on phonograph cylinders, for Edison Records in 1903. He made recordings of "Levinsky at the Wedding" for the Columbia label in 1917, and from the mid-1920s appeared on BBC Radio, billed as a "Hebrew comedian" and later as "Our Hebrew Friend". In 1930 he presented his act at the Royal Variety Performance in front of King George V and Queen Mary. He appeared in the 1932 Gracie Fields film Looking on the Bright Side, and the same year took the lead role as Abe Pilstein in Money Talks, a comedy film about Jewish life in London.

Rose died in London in 1935, one week after his 67th birthday. The show debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, with further performances scheduled in 2026 across Australia.