Jews have moved away from the shtetl and Yiddish and all the images of weakness and passivity they associate with them, and this joke gives us a picture of the tough, fully assimilated New York Jew. The joke essentially recasts jokes showcasing meek, passive shtetl victims or uxorious husbands, and celebrates a stronger, more militant contemporary Jewish figure—New York born and bred. The joke also, of course, shows that the tough New York Jew can also have the last word.
As Lenny Bruce said: you are “Jewish” if you are from New York. The toughness associated with New York is in the joke about the elderly lady who arrives from the Midwest and finds herself lost. She assumes she will be treated rudely and aggressively, so she conjures up her own inner New Yorker. She goes up to the first New Yorker she sees, and says, “Excuse me. I know I should go fuck myself, but I wonder if you would first kindly help me with directions.”
Not all tough Jews hail from New York. I would be remiss if I did not take note of the fact that, despite all of the jokes portraying weakness and meekness and husbandly docility, there were plenty of tough Jews (and not only the mobsters I learned about in a book called Tough Jews by Rich Cohen). I was educated about the Jews who fought back during the Holocaust from Yuri Suhl’s book They Fought Back. Later on, I read the amazing story of my friend Joseph Pell, who became one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most successful businessmen. As a kid, Joe escaped into the forest after his family was wiped out by the Nazis. He went on to fight with the partisans after the Germans invaded Poland; throughout the war, still just a boy, he blew up train tracks, bombed bridges, and took revenge against those who informed on his family to the Nazis.
Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, a class of students is undergoing instruction in a Russian War College in the then USSR. They are discussing how a war with China might be fought with an army of only two hundred million or so while the Chinese army would easily come close to a billion. The brightest student in the class asks the Soviet general in charge how they could possibly hope to win a war against so many Chinese. The general quickly points out to the student that Israel has just won a war with only two or three million soldiers, while their Arab adversaries had some hundred million. The student quickly responds: “Okay. But how are we going to get three million Jews?”
We can look to Israel, where toughness became the focus of a number of jokes, especially popular ones following the victory in the Six-Day War. With Israel, a new Jewish identity emerged, replacing images of weakness and passivity. Many jokes portray Israelis as tough and even invincible; others as rude and brusque.
With rudeness, too, comes a new type of Jew. Take the joke about the man with a clipboard who approaches an American, a Pole, a Russian, and an Israeli and says, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am taking a survey and I would like to know your opinion of the meat shortage.” The Pole asks, “What’s meat?” The Russian asks, “What’s an opinion?” The American asks, “What’s a shortage?” and the Israeli asks, “What’s ‘excuse me’?” Or the joke about the Israeli rowing team: one man rows while the others stand up in the boat yelling. Or the joke about the man who is flying on El Al, the Israeli airline, and is asked by the flight attendant if he wants dinner. He asks, “What are my choices?” The flight attendant says, “Yes or no.”
A Jewish immigrant is at Ellis Island entering the United States. He has, among his belongings, four sets of false teeth. All the sets are made of gold and are being examined by an immigration officer. The officer informs the immigrant that he cannot bring in all the gold. There is simply too much. Whereupon the Jewish immigrant tells the officer in English that he is Orthodox and needs all four sets for dietary purposes. The immigration officer looks skeptical. “I know some things about Jews and kosher eating. Why would you need four sets of gold teeth?” The Jewish immigrant responds, “I am very Orthodox. Extremely pious. I use one set for milk products and one for meat and a third for breaking the fast on Yom Kippur, the holiest of all days on the Jewish calendar.” “I see,” says the immigration officer, now looking less skeptical. “You are obviously a very religious man. But you only mentioned three religious occasions. What is the fourth?” “Oh,” the Jewish immigrant muses, “that’s just for when I want a ham sandwich.”
Why my father, Zaz Krasny, loved that joke, as well as others about religious Jews eating ham or pork, was in part that they point out the often hypocritical ways of the kashrut-enforcing Jews. That kind of joke carried a lot more power to a generation brought up observing or simply aware of the dietary laws than it does to the thousands of Jewish youth today who were raised on ham, pork, and shellfish. But it still holds up simply because most young Jews, even if totally secular, know ham is verboten to religious Jews and find humorous the obvious hypocrisy that the joke lampoons. According to Pew research, Orthodoxy continues to burgeon in America and elsewhere.
A lot of the Jewish jokes young people tell now are topical. A Jewish student of mine, knowing my love for Jewish jokes, came running up to me after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California asking me if I knew what you got when you crossed Arnold with a Jew. The answer was Conan the Distributor. Those kinds of topical, silly jokes, even though amusing, often seem superficial, yet younger Jews, unaware of Jewish history and adversities, are often more attuned to them. There is both pride and humor in hearing Adam Sandler rattle off his amusing lines, like the one in his Hanukkah song about putting together half Jews Paul Newman and Goldie Hawn and “getting one fine-looking Jew.” But most often such jokes lack a real, historical frame of reference.
Jewish jokes mostly tell us, as Scott Fitzgerald said about the rich, that Jews are different. As we get to a younger demographic, more removed from Old World Jewish values, differences are increasingly tied to stereotypes. Woody Allen took stereotypes of Jewish cheapness to another level in his line “I’m very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.”
One can discern, in a host of Jewish jokes, anxiety about assimilation and loss of Jewish identity. But also, as we have seen, in these jokes there is pride in being different and superior, or in being well off and successful, in contrast to the penury of the past—especially the poverty of the shtetl. Is a lot of this humor not also defensive? No doubt.
I end with a true tale of assimilation about the daughter of my friend and colleague Eric Solomon who decided one day that she wanted to be more Jewish. Though both her parents were Jewish by birth, Madeline and her brother were raised without religious affiliation and the family had a Christmas tree in their home each year. So when Madeline announced at age fifteen that she was staying home from school because it was Yom Kippur, her kid brother looked up from his cereal and asked his parents: “Is Madeline Jewish?”
V.
Celebration
“We won. Let’s eat.”
Two Texans are sitting on a plane going to Dallas with an old Jewish man sitting between them.
The first Texan says, “My name is Roger. I own 250,000 acres. I have 1,000 head of cattle and they call my place the Jolly Roger.”
The second Texan says, “My name is John. I own 350,000 acres. I have 5,000 head of cattle and they call my place Big John’s.”
They both look down at the little old Jewish man, who says, “My name is Lenny Leibowitz and I own only 300 acres.”
Roger looks down at him and says, “Three hundred acres? What do you raise?”
“Nothing,” says Lenny.
“Well then, what do you call it?” asks John.
“Downtown Dallas.”
A creature with green skin towers over all the other Bloomingdale’s shoppers and is conspicuously covered with fancy jewelry. An older Jewish woman walks up to him and exclaims, in disbelief, how tall he is and how his skin is so green and how much jewelry is covering him, and asks, “Where are you from?” He responds, in perfect English, “I am from Mars.” The woman sighs and says, “Ah. That explains your green skin.” She goes on staring
at him and her eyes veer up toward the ceiling, and she asks, “How tall are you?” Again, in perfect English and without missing a beat, he answers, “I am eight feet two inches tall.” The woman asks if all Martians have green skin and are as tall as he is, and he says, “Yes. We all possess green skin and are all within a few inches of each other in height.” “And do all of you wear so much jewelry?” she asks. The Martian responds: “Not the goyim.”
For years, Jewish jokes were looked at as repositories of self-hatred or masochism and despair. Freudian disciple Theodore Reik, in Jewish Wit, described them all as being about the “merciless mockery of weakness and faults and failing”; and psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn, in a book-length essay titled Psychoanalysis and the Jewish Joke, called them “masochistic aggression turned against the self” and said they were “derived from the prevailing Gentile view of Jews.” (Think Woody Allen seeing himself as a Hasid through Annie Hall’s WASP grandmother’s eyes.) Yet many of these jokes are celebrations of the ability to survive by whatever means are necessary. With mordant humor, they show a dogged resilience in the face of dreadful, even lethal adversity.
A Jew is told the earth will soon be flooded and all living organisms will drown and die. He says he will begin to study how to live underwater.
Such a joke is really a celebration of Jewish survival.
Perhaps the longest surviving of all Jews, Mel Brooks’s famous 2000 Year Old Man, claimed his longevity was the result of not eating fried food, not even touching it. He also took the idea of Jewish guilt to another level in his complaint to Carl Reiner that he had more than forty-two thousand children and not one had ever come to visit him.
Even the sometimes prescient Freud could never have foreseen the philo-Semitism that would temporarily emerge in the wake of the overwhelming sympathy for Jews engendered by the Second World War.
The source of Jewish humor has typically been located in a kind of masochism but also in suffering. It is self-deprecatory, and self-lacerating, and it sees Jews as outsiders, marginal people, victims.
Jewish jokes would become time capsules for the Jewish sense of being different and unique. And despite all the self-deprecation, there is a strain of celebration that often shows up, a healthy celebrating of escape from the oppression and prejudices of the past.
Jewish proverb: he that can’t endure the bad will not live to see the good.
However . . . “Isn’t Jewish humor masochistic?” an old joke begins, followed by the line “No. And if I hear that one more time, I’m going to kill myself.”
Think of early comedians like Henny Youngman and the one-liners he made famous.
My doctor says to me: You’re sick. I say: I want another opinion. He says: Okay. You’re ugly, too.
Or Woody Allen telling us, early on in his career, that after he was born, the obstetrician slapped his mother. Or later on, saying that his parents rented out his room after he was kidnapped.
And then there was Rodney Dangerfield telling us his mother wouldn’t breastfeed him. She only wanted to be friends.
He, too, had a tale about being kidnapped. The kidnappers sent his father a piece of his finger. His father, he said, wanted more proof.
The old axiom that Jewish parents walk closer to their children than non-Jews, suggesting their overprotectiveness, is turned on its head through the self-deprecatory joking of Youngman, Allen, and Dangerfield. They all seem to be saying: “I’m such a loser even my parents didn’t want me.” Joan Rivers claimed she knew she was an unwanted child because the bath toys her parents gave her were a toaster and a hair dryer.
But Jewish humor can also be celebratory. It celebrates what Jews have traditionally celebrated—food, family, wealth, success, and sobriety; sex and naches (joy); illustrious or heroic Jews; Jewish culture and Jewish mores; children; and, yes, even Jewish American princesses. All of these are, at times, stereotyped and ridiculed with sarcasm and aggression. Yet, notwithstanding even the darker and more acerbic side of Jewish jokes that poke merciless fun and make mincemeat of Jewish traits and Jewish neuroses, Jews celebrate that they are Jews and that they are alive.
Now, having a Martian use the word “goyim” is, in itself, a fairly funny punch line for a joke. But this joke, like a number of the so-called JAP (Jewish American princess) jokes, also celebrates difference and success. The joke is essentially telling us that a Jew, even if he is literally from another planet and 140 million miles from home, is still a Jew and not out of place at Bloomingdale’s.
Jews will celebrate even when their numbers are depleted or they are unsure where their next meal is coming from. That is what I discovered on a trip to Cuba.
I was invited to Cuba by the San Francisco JCC, a trip set up before relations were officially renewed between Cuba and the United States. The trip was designed to help bring much-needed supplies to the small number of Jews remaining on the island, where the poverty was widespread and Jews, though they maintained and practiced Cuban and Jewish traditions in a lively and spirited way, were few in number.
Our group met with Adela Dworin, who was president of the Cuban Jewish community, and who showed us photos of Fidel Castro’s visit to her offices in 2012 at the time that Pope Benedict VI was visiting the country and Castro had decided to mend fences with a number of Cuban religious leaders, including those of the Jews. I asked Señora Dworin in Spanish if she thought Castro might return and pay another visit. “Sí sí,” she answered enthusiastically, and went on to explain to me that in 2012 she had invited him back for a Hanukkah celebration slated to take place the year we were there. “El Commandante did not know,” she said, “what Hanukkah was,” and then added that she had informed him, “It celebrates a revolution.” Castro then, she reported, quickly snapped, “I will be there!”
We are in a kindergarten classroom. The teacher asks the class of five-year-olds to name the most famous man who ever lived and offers ten dollars to the child who provides the correct answer. A little Irish boy puts up his hand and says, “St. Patrick.” The teacher says, “I’m sorry, Sean. That is not correct.”
Then a little Scottish lad raises his hand and says, “St. Andrew,” and the teacher says, “I’m sorry, Hamish, but that is also incorrect.”
Whereupon a little Jewish boy raises his hand and says, “Jesus Christ,” and the teacher says, “That is absolutely correct, Max. Congratulations! Please come up here and collect the ten dollars.” As the teacher is giving Max the ten dollars, she says to him, “Since you are Jewish, Max, what made you say Jesus Christ?”
Max says to her, “In my heart I knew it was Moses, but business is business.”
A classic joke, but also a joke with some radioactivity in it. On the face of it, the joke appears to be just another one about the Jews’ talent for handling money. The implicit meaning of the joke lies in the fact that the Jewish kid understands how to play and adapt himself to a Christian audience (teacher and classmates), even in kindergarten, before children generally learn to read or write. But if we go deeper, the joke is also telling us that Jewish children, even at this rudimentary stage of education, have adopted an ethic that valorizes making money over expressing honest convictions and beliefs.
I had a strong personal reaction to this joke because, when I was a boy, my mother told me, “It’s business,” when I complained to her about my paternal aunt yelling at me for stacking baskets the wrong way in her husband’s factory during my summer job. I was fond of my aunt and couldn’t understand how someone who was always kind to me, whom my mother talked to daily on the telephone, and who sent me Hanukkah cards containing gelt (money) each year could yell at me. It was simple. To her there was no contradiction: her husband, my uncle, owned the factory. I was just another employee. My mother’s response embodied the ethic that privileged business and moneymaking. Much of that ethic emerged from the Depression, but even before it, Americans heard their taciturn and dubbed as silent but admired president Calvin Coolidge say, “The business of America is busine
ss.” And please, again, recall that Abraham Cahan’s Jewish character David Levinsky was told, “In America you leave your yichus behind.” That line, from The Rise of David Levinsky, the seminal Jewish American novel by the editor of the Yiddish daily the Forward, is a crystallization of the ethic I am describing here. Yichus refers to one’s pedigree or family background and was, in the old country, tied to scholarly prestige or Torah learning. This, David Levinsky is told, means nothing in the United States, where cash is king. Bottom line from my mother? If it is in any way connected to business, even your own blood can yell at you.
But, again, consider the fact that Jews can celebrate and ridicule the stereotypes that for centuries had been turned against them. Perhaps the joke about Max and Jesus is even intimating, and yes, celebrating, something deep in Jewish character: “We learn this from the womb!” A scary thought? Yes. But there is also a kind of naches in thinking Jewish children show money smarts early on in their development.
Henny Youngman joked about money ethics being reflected in a simple, single question. If a businessperson, by a mistake, is given twice as much money as he’s supposed to get, should he tell his partner?
A Jew who claims to have a talking and davening (praying in Hebrew) parrot (yet another davening parrot!) brags about the bird to all of his friends and fellow congregants, but no one believes him. They ridicule him until he takes bets that the parrot will daven at the next Friday-night service. He will show them the truth of his claims and collect his winnings. When the following Friday night rolls around, the man brings his parrot to shul, but despite much prodding, the parrot doesn’t even make a single squawk. The man is enraged, berating the parrot as they leave the shul together, laughter and ridicule in their wake. “Now I’ll have to pay off all those bets because you wouldn’t daven,” he says, in anger, when he and the parrot are by themselves. “Yes,” says the parrot. “But think of how much we’ll make taking bets on Yom Kippur.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 11