On Sunday, as the Wimbledon men’s singles final unfolded under the watchful gaze of Prince William, Nicole Kidman, and a battalion of strawberry scented respectability, a figure in a gold chain, yellow tinted sunglasses, and a tracksuit emblazoned “Official Ganja Dealer” took his seat on Centre Court.

Ali G was back. And judging by the footage now circulating globally, so too was the gleeful pandemonium that Sacha Baron Cohen has spent nearly three decades perfecting.

The stunt was vintage Baron Cohen. Within minutes he was offering what appeared to be herbal remedies to fellow spectators, informing security that tennis as “a crap version of ping pong.” Police were summoned. Instagram exploded. The All England Club’s carefully curated decorum buckled in real time.

It was also, almost certainly, not spontaneous. Reports had already surfaced that Baron Cohen had secretly wrapped production on a new Ali G film, the first since 2002’s Ali G Indahouse. The Wimbledon stunt, part guerrilla marketing, part performance art, follows the playbook he refined through Borat and its 2020 sequel, in which the boundary between fiction and lived reality is erased so completely that even the participants are unsure which world they inhabit.

Yet for all the noise, very few commentators paused to consider the deeper story embedded in this moment. Behind the gold shoes and the motifs lies a family whose contribution to Jewish intellectual life, and to the understanding of the human mind itself, is as serious as Ali G is absurd.

Sacha Baron Cohen was born in Hammersmith to a Jewish family whose roots span London, Wales, Belarus, and Mandatory Palestine. His mother was born in what would become Israel in 1939 to German Jewish parents who........

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