While they were once seen as sages dispensing wisdom and even envisioning the future, there now are many jokes ridiculing rabbis, especially Reform rabbis, who, the jokes often suggest, act more today like oversexed bank branch managers or ignoramuses about Judaism. Much of this, of course, is exaggerated and untrue. You see a constant lampooning of rabbis in episodes of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm as well as in a number of the earlier, more comedic films of Woody Allen, and the fiction of Philip Roth. There are even jokes among Reform rabbis or their congregants about how soporific rabbis can be. One Reform rabbi I know tells me that he and his colleagues joke about the size of their congregations by saying, “I have one that sleeps eight hundred” or another saying, “Mine sleeps twelve hundred.” A Reform rabbi I know was actually presented by his congregation with a certificate making him a diplomate in the American Association of Anesthesiologists.
A few years back, I was in Las Vegas to play poker in a Texas Hold ’Em (minor league) poker tournament. I made it to the final table. At that table, with me and six others, is a man wearing a yarmulke. He tells me I look familiar and asks me if we have played poker together at the Venetian. I tell him I never played there. He asks about other casino venues where he might have seen me and I soon realize that this fellow is an inveterate poker player. I ask him why he wears a yarmulke. “Do you pray for better cards or try to make them holy?” I ask. “No,” he says. “I am a rabbi.”
“Well,” I say, “times have certainly changed with rabbis playing in Vegas poker tournaments.” I was about to ask the rabbi if he played on Shabbat because it was Friday morning and tournaments can run days on end, but at this point our conversation appears to have caught the attention of a few of the other players at the table. “Where is your congregation, Rabbi?” one of them asks. “Pittsburgh,” the rabbi says. Suddenly I am transfixed. One of my nieces lives in Pittsburgh. It jolts me into the sudden realization that this rabbi officiated at the bar mitzvahs of two of her sons, my great-nephews, both of which my wife and I attended. I say aloud the full names of both great-nephews. “You bar-mitzvahed both, didn’t you?” I say emphatically. The rabbi looks at me in disbelief. All of the other poker players are now looking at both of us instead of their cards. They know I live in northern California and they are trying to figure out this odd Jewish geography dialogue. I simply state, “I was there. At both. I’m their great-uncle.”
A young Jewish woman goes to see a rabbinic sage. She tells him that both Yankele and Yossel are in love with her. Then she asks the rabbi, “Who will be the lucky man? Who will marry me?” The rabbi strokes his beard and ponders, then answers, “Yossel will marry you. Yankele will be the lucky man.”
The rabbi is telling the young woman, who brags about the two men in love with her, that she is conceited and a future shrew. He is puncturing her self-inflation and lack of humility. This all has contemporary currency but is also a joke more out of a Jewish past when rabbis were more likely to be seen as fonts of wisdom. In times past, rabbis were even believed to be able to perform miracles and peer into the future. One thinks of the Baal Shem Tov, the mystical Ukrainian rabbi of the eighteenth century who is said to have been the founder of Hasidic Judaism. The closest modern equivalent to him would have to be Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of the Orthodox Lubavitcher sect, who founded the Chabad movement and was believed by his followers to have been a visionary, and by many of them, to have been the messiah the Jews had long been waiting and praying for. Despite his having had the rather mortal affliction of prostate cancer, the followers of the Rebbe, as he was and is still known, wait for his return from the dead.
A small synagogue in Venice, California, has a sign that reads: this Jewish religious house of worship is liberal and progressive and welcomes all people. A young Jewish man sees the sign and enters the synagogue.
A service is going on with a young woman rabbi conducting. The young Jew sees a few scattered congregants seated with their prayer books open. One of them is a highly attractive redhead. He is immediately strongly sexually attracted to her and sits down near her.
As the service continues the young man inches closer to the redhead until he is seated right next to her. He is clearly smitten and leans over close to her and says, literally in her ear, “I think you are by far the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on. I want you.” At this point, the rabbi races down from the pulpit and, with anger and apparent outrage, orders the young man to leave the temple immediately. The young man protests and reminds the rabbi of the sign outside welcoming all people and laying claim to being a house of worship both liberal and progressive. The rabbi says to him: “That’s true. But you don’t hit on the rebbetzin.”
Now, the patriarchal religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which once had temples with male rabbis’ names attached to them, has become the home of many female, and even a number of lesbian, rabbis.
Yes, Jewish marriage has changed with the times—and not only via same-sex nuptials. Jewish couples of my parents’ generation almost never divorced.
A rabbi I knew surprised me, in the early seventies, by confidentially telling me he was coming out of the closet as a gay man, at a time when that was unheard of, especially for a rabbi It brought out from me the knee-jerk response, “Are you sure?” Incidentally, he had asked me, before this disclosure, if I wanted to teach a course on Jewish writers at a JCC in San Francisco. I told him I was keen at the time on Yiddish writers but I suspected, especially in San Francisco, where Jews seemed to celebrate Christmas and to name their offspring after the living (complete with Roman numerals), that I doubted I could draw a minyan—the standard number of ten required in Judaism to hold a religious service. The rabbi told me to write a sexy or clever description of the course, and when I showed up for the first class in Yiddish fiction writers, I was, as we used to say back then, blown away by the turnout. There were at least a hundred eager-looking students. How could this be? I thought. How? Particularly because of what I had come to think of as the predominant number of yekkas in San Francisco—yekka being the name given to overly assimilated, secular German Jews.
A young woman tapped me on the shoulder. “Dr. Krasny,” she began. “I’m sorry to tell you, but there has been a mistake. You are, unfortunately, in the wrong room. This room was reserved for Dr. Melvin Krantzler, who is giving a course on Creative Divorce.”
I went across the hall. There were five older people signed up for my course in Yiddish stories, which included videos and was titled Yids and Vids.
Many of the themes in real-life stories, such as this one, obviously parallel motifs in Jewish jokes. Trying to preserve the past and its values in America, where, to draw from the seminal Jewish American novel The Rise of David Levinsky, you “leave your yichus behind,” is not an easy task. Yichus is the prestige that comes from learning, especially Talmudic learning. My experience wanting to teach Yiddish writers at the JCC was set against American trends or values—in this case, an overwhelming trend at that time of higher divorce rates.
Jewish-based anecdotes and Jewish stories can be nearly indistinguishable from Jewish jokes, and changes in mores and cultural standards can be the very essence of a joke, especially one tied to sex, as in Sarah Silverman’s line about her sister being with two men in one night and hardly able to walk. “Can you imagine?” Sarah asked. “Two dinners!”
A Jewish man is seated next to a gorgeous and voluptuous woman on an airplane. She is studying graphs and charts laid out across her lap. When the Jewish guy asks what she is studying she informs him that she is a sex researcher. “What,” he asks politely, “is the nature of your research?” “Well,” she responds, “I’m researching the size of male genitalia in different ethnic groups. I’ve discovered that Native American men have longer penises, greater in length, while Jewish men’s sex organs are much wider.” The Jew sitting next to her says, “I need to introduce myself. My name is Tonto Goldstein.”
In truth, jokes about male penis size ar
e more often identified with black men than Jews or Indians. Notwithstanding the joke about Jewish women loving circumcised penises out of an inability to resist anything with 10 percent off, Jewish women are more often portrayed as sex negative. This is particularly true in many of the unfortunately so-called JAP or Jewish American princess jokes. In contrast to male libidinousness, jokes about Jewish women emphasize their supposed lack of sexual drive. Woody Allen got in some trouble when he joked, early on in his career, that his then wife, Louise Lasser, of Mary Hartman fame, was given a ticket while driving. He claimed he knew it could not possibly have been for a moving violation. Don Rickles once claimed to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, in a joke that likely could not pass muster by today’s commercial television standards, that Jewish women cry out during sex. According to Rickles, they yell, “Gucci! Gucci! Gucci!” Despite the offensive characterization as frigid and overly materialistic, the emphasis in Jewish women jokes is on their differences from other women:
Question: What three words will a Jewish American princess never hear? Answer: “Attention, Kmart shoppers.”
A Jewish American princess is in Tiffany’s examining an extremely expensive vase, holding it up to the light and looking at it from a number of different angles, when it slips out of her hands, falls to the floor, and crashes into hundreds of pieces. She holds her hand up and says, “I’M All RIGHT.”
These jokes, including even more harsh ones, reveal similar motifs of so-called JAPs being greedy, loving shopping and money, and hating or not wanting sex. But, in these two examples—Kmart and Tiffany’s—there is an implicit sense of celebration. There is a sense of how far Jewish women have managed to come in contemporary life to be able to avoid (and thus maintain separateness or a kind of chosenness) a cut-rate shopping place like Kmart, and instead afford a place like Tiffany’s. A young woman being a princess or being treated like one, being vain enough (like the young woman at Tiffany’s) to think only she matters, are ways of saying—exclaiming, really—that our young women, daughters, and wives have made it. The jokes are celebrations of Jewish success and prosperity, of having only the best for the tribe’s young women, even if the jokes lean toward misogyny. Particularly when it comes to sex: What do you call a Jewish porn film? Debbie Does Nothing. OR: What is the difference between an Italian American princess and a Jewish American princess? With the Italian American princess the jewels are fake and the orgasms are real. OR: What do you call a water bed belonging to a Jewish woman? The Dead Sea. OR: What do you call Jewish foreplay? Twenty minutes of begging.
An old Jewish man is walking down the street one afternoon when he sees a woman with perfect breasts. He says to her, “Hey, miss. Would you let me bite your breasts for $100?”
“Are you nuts?!” she replies, and keeps walking away.
He turns around, runs around the block, and gets to the corner before she does.
“Would you let me bite your breasts for $1,000?” he asks again.
“Listen, you; I’m not that kind of woman! Got it?”
So the little old Jewish man runs around the next block and faces her again.
“Would you let me bite your breasts—just once—for $10,000?”
She thinks about it for a while and says, “Hmm, $10,000 . . . Okay, just once, but not here. Let’s go to that dark alley over there.”
So they go into the alley, where she takes off her blouse to reveal her perfect breasts. As soon as he sees them, he grabs them and starts caressing them, fondling them slowly, kissing them, licking them, burying his face in them—but not biting them.
The woman finally gets annoyed and asks, “Well? Are you gonna bite them or not?”
“Nah,” says the little old Jewish man. “Costs too much!”
Of course the joke is just another sex joke. But the Jew in the joke is old and still a lover of breasts who wants nothing more than a free go at a beautiful, “perfect” pair. Jews getting what they want for free can be seen in other jokes:
The biggest dilemma and catch-22 for a Jew? Free pork.
OR, Why do Jews have big noses? Answer: Because the air is free.
Are these jokes teaching us that Jews are cheap? No doubt. Cheap-Jew jokes are, alas, as old (if not older) than Jewish sex jokes. But wanting and managing to get things for free can be enterprising, especially if, unlike the air, they are difficult to come by.
The fact is, the old Jewish guy in the breast-biting joke is enterprising, even if he is also deceiving and manipulative, and the joke also seems to suggest the misogynistic notion that every woman has her price. Still, his sexual appetite and his shrewdness at getting something for nothing set him apart and are, in the joke at least, part of his Jewishness. The joke is imparting wisdom about human nature and the lure of money at the same time that it is saying something stereotypical about Jewish character being ingenious and entrepreneurial enough to acquire something for nothing.
An Israeli finds a bottle washed up on the beach. He uncorks it, and lo and behold, a genie emerges. The Israeli is startled but delighted, especially when the genie informs him that he can ask for any wish to be answered. The Israeli takes a map of the Middle East out of his pocket, hands it to the genie, and says to him, “I want peace between all of the people of this region.” The genie looks at the map, studies it with brows furrowed and a look of great concern and vexation. “This wish,” he finally pronounces, “I fear, is beyond my powers. Do you perhaps have a second wish I might be able to grant?” The Israeli puts the map back in his pocket and muses. Then he says to the genie: “How about getting my wife to give me oral sex?” The genie reflects, then says, “Let me have another look at that map.”
Yes, another joke highlighting the supposed lack of sexual largesse of Jewish wives. It does so by making a Jewish wife orally pleasuring her husband more impossible than peace between Jews and Arabs. The joke, like so many other Jewish jokes, evokes another. This one is about a man named Irv Weiss, who is dying of a terminal disease. All of the best medical doctors and specialists have told Weiss and his wife that he has, at best, a few weeks to live. But there is hope. Weiss’s wife gets word of a physician, known as a global leader in new research in the fight against the disease that is killing her husband. She immediately makes an appointment to see him and discuss her husband’s condition. The doctor, a kind and thoughtful man, tells Mrs. Weiss that he is reasonably certain that if she performs oral sex to orgasm on her husband at least twice daily over each twenty-four-hour period for the next few weeks, he will be cured. “I know it sounds strange and implausible,” the doctor adds, “but we have clinical trials that have proven this actually can save lives.” After dinner that same evening, Mrs. Weiss sits down with her husband and tells him she saw the world’s leading expert in his disease to find out about new clinical trials. “What did he say?” her husband asks eagerly. Mrs. Weiss: “He said you are going to die.”
Herschel the magician appeared to have the extraordinary ability to crack walnuts with his penis. He performed for many years in small circus tent shows in rural hamlets across the country, and even those who witnessed the act could not believe it was real. Most thought some illusion or sleight of hand must have been involved to make it seem as if he actually was cracking walnuts with his sex organ. How could anyone actually do that? Clearly it was impossible. Well, Sam Goldfine, an amateur magician, witnessed this feat in the late 1970s in a small town off of a highway in Nebraska and was flabbergasted. Sam was an expert at detecting tricks used by magic performers and knew, beyond a doubt, that there was no trickery or sleight of hand involved. Sam had never seen anything like it then or over the years that followed. Until he was traveling one day through a small town in Ohio and saw a circus sign with the words: see the amazing magic of herschel.
“Could it be the same Herschel?” Sam wondered. “Performing the same feat after all these years? No! It is not possible!” Yet after he paid his admission to the circus and went into the tent with Herschel’s name on it, Sam saw
a man who unmistakably was the same Herschel of nearly forty years before—a lot older, obviously, with hair turned gray—but wearing the identical, now ragged bathrobe he had on the first time Sam had observed him. Except this time, instead of walnuts, there was a large coconut in front of Herschel.
Herschel disrobes, takes his manhood in hand, and lo and behold, he slashes the coconut into two halves! The people applaud, though it is apparent to Sam they are doing so mainly out of politeness. Obviously they do not believe what they have seen was real and clearly feel there must have been a trick behind it. Sam Goldfine knows better. It was real!
Sam approaches Herschel, who now has his robe back on and is readjusting it. Sam introduces himself, shakes hands with Herschel, then says, “I saw you perform that same incredible feat nearly forty years ago with walnuts.” Herschel smiles and nods. “Yes. I used to use walnuts. Now my eyes aren’t so good.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 5