When I interviewed Vladimir Posner, one of the leading journalists in the then Soviet Union, I told him a joke on air that was set in contemporary Russia. Thanks largely to Ted Koppel and Phil Donahue, Posner became a celebrity in the United States, mainly as a Soviet propagandist engaged in what were hyped as Cold War issue-oriented debates and town meetings. Posner had a Jewish father and was a product of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; he was a smart, deft, and fluent speaker of English. I was with ABC at the time. I told him the joke on air, fearing he might be offended and balk at it, but it caused him to laugh hard and sparked a curious discussion between us about the plight of Jews in Russia.
A Jewish man with a pencil and a small tablet of paper is in a Russian supermarket. He goes over to the meat counter, sees no meat, and writes down on the paper, in capital letters, “NO MEAT.” Then he goes over to where the fish are supposed to be displayed, but there is only one piece of a somewhat frail-and rotten-looking fish. He writes down “ONE FISH.” A Russian officer of the law walks up to the Jew and belligerently asks him, “What do you think you are doing, Comrade?” The Jew nervously responds that he simply is taking stock of what is available in the supermarket and writing it all down as a personal inventory. The official grimaces, then says, “You realize, Comrade, that just a few years ago you could have been shot for what you are doing?” The Jew nods his head, then marks down “NO BULLETS.”
Jews have never had it easy in Russia. My paternal grandfather, who emigrated from that country, used to note that the Jews in Russia for centuries would say, “This czar is bad enough. Who needs a new one?”
There is a funny story, a kind of Conan Doyle tale of Talmudic reasoning, that takes us back to czarist Russia and reveals the constraints Jews were put under but also shows the close-knit nature of Jewish lives and communities and the ratiocinative powers of a Talmudic scholar.
The tale begins in Odessa with a Talmudic scholar who must go through long and tense negotiations with the authorities in order simply to be allowed to travel by train to Moscow. He is on board the train and it comes to a stop. The Talmudic scholar sees a young man board the train and the young man sits down across from him. The Talmudist can tell by the young man’s bearing that he is not a peasant and therefore must come from the district where he got on the train, which happens to be a Jewish district, and therefore the young man must be a Jew.
The Talmudist begins to wonder. If the young man is a Jew, where is he going? He, the Talmud scholar, is the only Jew in his district with permission to travel to Moscow. But, he thinks, outside of Moscow is a small village called Vlestok and Jews do not need to have permission to travel there. So the young man must be going to Vlestok and therefore why is he going there? No doubt to visit one of the Jewish families who live in the village! The Talmudist continues to reason that only two Jewish families, the Steingarts and the Friedmans, reside in the village, and the Friedmans are dreadful people. The handsome and respectable-looking young man must therefore be going to visit the Steingarts!
More reasoning proceeds in the Talmudist’s mind. The Steingarts have only two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel. Perhaps the young man is a son-in-law? But of which daughter would he be the husband? Rebecca Steingart, he had heard, was married to a nice lawyer from Budapest, while Rachel Steingart married a businessman from another village. So the young man must be Rebecca’s husband. Which means, the Talmudist thinks to himself, “His name, if I am not mistaken, is Alexander Cohen.” The scholar continues to reason that if the young man is from Budapest, he must have changed his name because of the rabid anti-Semitism there. The Hungarian equivalent of Cohen, he thinks, is Kovács. If he was granted permission to change his name, the Talmudic scholar deduces, he must have special status. “It must be a university doctorate,” he reasons. “It could be nothing less.”
At this point the Talmud scholar turns to the young man and says, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I open the window, Dr. Kovács?”
“No,” says the startled young man. “But how did you know my name?”
“It was obvious,” said the Talmudist.
The leaders of the United States, Russia, and Israel are drawn together to meet with God and are personally informed by God that the world will come to an end in twenty-four hours. The president of the United States goes on national television and tells his fellow American citizens that, yes, the world will end, but they can take comfort in knowing God exists because, like Moses, he, the president, spoke directly with him. The head of Russia tells his fellow Russians to prepare for the end and also informs them that, contrary to Marxist teaching and Communist dogma, God really does, in fact, exist because he, the Russian leader, learned of the impending doom from God himself. Finally, the Israeli head of state goes on television and announces to all of his nation’s citizenry, “I spoke to God directly. And guess what he told me? In twenty-four hours no more Palestinian problem!”
Israeli humor is different and is its own brand—often political. The humorist Ephraim Kishon drew upon what he highlighted as Israel’s “differentness” from the rest of the world. There is a whole catalog of Kishon statements to that effect.
Israel is the only country in the world, according to Kishon, where patients give doctors advice, taxi drivers read Spinoza and Maimonides, and small talk is defined as a loud and angry debate over politics.
Israel, Kishon wrote, is the only country where the ultra-Orthodox beat up the police rather than the other way around, or where the people are surrounded on all sides by enemies but their headaches are caused by their neighbors upstairs.
Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, had a wonderful sense of humor. When Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. secretary of state, declared that he was first an American, second secretary of state, and third a Jew, Golda Meir supposedly responded to him by saying, “That’s fine, Henry. But in Hebrew everything is written from right to left.” Also, when the then U.S. president Richard Nixon allegedly told Golda Meir that both his secretary of state, the German-born Henry Kissinger, and her foreign affairs minister, British-born Abba Eban, were Jewish, she said, “Yes. But mine is the only one who speaks proper English.”
A frog and a scorpion meet on the banks of the Jordan River. Both want to get over to the other side. The scorpion says to the frog, “I bet if we work together we can make it across.” The frog appears dubious. “You would just sting me and I would die.” “No! No!” says the scorpion. “If I sting you, I, too, will immediately die. Why would I do that? There is no reason!” So the frog reluctantly agrees. The scorpion gets onto the frog’s back and the two move forward with real progress as all of the frog’s four legs and the scorpion’s eight propel them through the rushing waters of the Jordan. When they are about halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog and both are suddenly dying. “Why?” moans the frog. “Why did you sting me knowing it would kill both of us? Why?” As he is dying the scorpion says, “Because. This is the Middle East.”
I have always assumed that story came from Israelis who saw themselves as the frog more than the scorpion. Except Arabs, as well as Israelis more critical of their own government, would likely view Israel as the scorpion. The story had more currency in Israel and suggests, from an Israeli point of view, how tenuous and impossible peace, especially lasting peace, seems to be in the region. It demonstrates specifically, once again, with grim humor, how peace is seemingly impossible between Israeli and Arab, and obviously has a distinctly Israeli feel and sensibility.
I went to Israel for the first time on a Koret Fellowship in 1994. On my way from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem I asked my wife if she thought perhaps I might have some sort of a mystical experience in the Holy Land. After all, this was the land of Abraham, the land supposedly granted by God to his people. But beyond that, Jerusalem was the city where mystical forces from the ancient Jewish past were said to operate and divine mysteries revealed. People of all faiths have been afflicted by what has come to be called the Jerusalem syndrome, a mystical-like
experience, often viewed as a form of madness, induced simply by being in the holy city. I told friends before I went, “If I am ever to have a mystical experience, it seems it will happen in Israel, most likely in Jerusalem.”
The car we were in stopped and the two of us got out on Ben Yehuda Street. No sooner had I stepped onto the street than I spotted him standing only a few feet from me. It felt like nothing short of an hallucination to see him there, literally right in front of me. We shook hands, and I said to him, “I was wondering if I would have a mystical experience in Israel, and here you are, the first person I see as I step onto the soil of Eretz Yisrael in Jerusalem. Do you perhaps still think you are the Jew’s Messiah?” He laughed and my wife and I proceeded on our way. When I returned home, friends were eager to know if I had had a mystical experience. “No,” I told them. “But as soon as I stepped onto a street in Jerusalem, I ran into Alan Dershowitz.”
A Jew, a Frenchman, and a Russian are stranded on a small island with sharks swimming all around and no other land in sight. Nor is there any food to eat or water to drink. After days pass, the agitated Frenchman, who envisions his end, howls at their fate. The Russian joins him with shouts of despair. The Jew? He tells the other two he has no worries. He is absolutely certain he will be found. “How can you be sure?” asks the Frenchman. “Yes,” echoes the Russian. “How can you say that?” The Jew says: “I made a pledge to the United Jewish Appeal. They’ll find me”
The implication of the joke, of course, is that Jewish charitable organizations will track down anyone who has pledged money. This, indeed, speaks volumes about the tenacity and resourcefulness of organized Jewish philanthropy. As a teen growing up in Cleveland, I was appalled at a tactic the Jewish Welfare Federation used one year to make sure those who did not meet their pledges were shamed. They printed a book listing amounts of money pledged and amounts actually received or not received.
Jewish children learn the value of tzedakah early, putting coins in blue boxes from the Jewish National Fund marked “keren ami,” or participating in a range of synagogue-run charitable drives and activities.
A teacher asks three children in the classroom, including a Jewish boy named Jonathan, to state their name, age, and hobby.
“I’m Petra. I’m nine. I like to roller-skate.”
“I’m Jimmy. I’m ten. I collect coins.”
“I’m Jonathan. I’m ten. I pledge.”
Jokes like these present Jews as having distinct and separate identities from others, extending back even to childhood.
A Chabadnik who lives in Massachusetts goes on a mission from his Chabad house in Boston to set up a Chabad house in the Deep South. He goes by train to Mississippi, where the hope is that he will serve communities of Jews and spread the Chabad message of Torah and traditional Judaism. The train takes him first to Memphis, where he waits in the station for another train that will take him to Tupelo. While he is waiting in the Memphis train station, a number of children surround him as he sits reading the Jewish newspaper the Forward. The children stare at him and murmur to each other about his strange clothes and his large black top hat. Adults are looking at him as well. The Chabadnik, a sweet-tempered man possessed of a good sense of humor, smiles, eyes twinkling, and says to the children and the adults who are now all staring fixedly at him, “Whatsa matter? None of you never seen a Yankee?”
It is not difficult to see much beyond the surface of this joke, especially since the Chabadnik is from the commonwealth of Massachusetts. But underneath the funny surface is a broader meaning: that even the most foreign-looking American, a Jew who looks like a throwback to the Middle Ages, can claim to be a Yankee, especially if he resides in New England. Jews like the Chabadnik don’t exactly trace their ancestry to the Mayflower—but as both U.S. citizens (Yanks) and Northerners, they can stand (or in this case sit) patriotic and proud. Yet a deeper meaning lies in the painful recognition of how Hasidim are often treated as strangers in a strange land in their own land. They often live apart from other Americans and, though citizens, continue, because of their alien-looking features and dress, to inspire curiosity, wonder, and xenophobia.
Chabadniks can feel utterly separate from secular and Reform Jews who, in turn, can and do feel utterly separate from Chabadniks and often view them as they might an alien species. All too many young Jews in California, where I live, or in many regions of the country other than the urban East, would not know a Chabadnik if they saw one (“Are those the Amish people?” a Jewish kid, seeing a bunch of Chabadniks, asks his parents).
Steve Stein goes back to his old neighborhood in Cleveland. He had served as a soldier in Vietnam and had not been back since. He is now a successful businessman and his travels take him to his roots. Everything has changed in the old neighborhood. Where Al’s Kosher Butcher Shop used to be there now is a Korean grocery store; where Sam and Bernie’s Dry Cleaning stood there is now a Burger King; and where Kaplan’s Creamery was there is now a Gap. All has changed except for Kleinman’s Shoe Repair, as poorly lit as ever and with the same narrow storefront, but still in business. Stein suddenly remembers that before he went to Vietnam, he left a pair of shoes with Mr. Kleinman that he never picked up. He wonders if they possibly could still be there.
He goes into the shop with its faint light and a small clanging bell rings.
Mr. Kleinman is bent across his work space in his leather apron with one eye nearly shut.
“Excuse me, Mr. Kleinman,” Stein says. “I used to live around the corner, and forty years ago I left a pair of shoes with you for repair. Is it possible you still have them?”
Kleinman looks at Stein and says, “Vas dey black ving tips?”
Stein remembers and says, “Yes. They were!”
“And you vanted a half sole mit rubber heels?”
“Yes,” says Stein. “That is exactly what I wanted.”
“And you vanted taps on the heels only?”
“Yes!” says Stein. “Do you still have them?”
Mr. Kleinman looks up at him, squints, and says, “Dey be ready Vendsday.”
Another sweet generational joke, this one points out how much things change in the New World, but also how much they stay the same, in the figure of the old shoemaker, a refugee and a vestige of the older shtetl world. The American Jew, now a businessman, goes back to the old neighborhood, once a kind of American shtetl, only to discover that all but the shoe repair place and the old shoemaker have vanished. What draws him back to the old neighborhood but memory? Only when he sees the old shoemaker’s shop, the last trace of his childhood, does a memory of the shoes he left return. The old shoemaker remembers everything about the shoes and will not deviate from the task or his dedication to getting the job done. The significance of the joke is not only in the shoes still being there but the fact that the job will be done and the shoes will be ready for pickup. The two Jews, so different from each other in generation and financial success, are united in being Jews, and the joke teaches that Jews whose memories are still working are fated to remember.
Conclusion & Outtakes
When I began to write this book I not only wanted to include a lifetime’s collection of Jewish jokes and stories, I also wanted to see if I could answer the question I had grappled with for years. Why are Jews funny?
I often think of much Jewish humor as being tied to the famous folk figure of the golem. The golem was the human-created power, like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fashioned to defend the ghetto of Prague from pogroms and violent anti-Semitism, to be both defensive and combative.
This book is by no means exhaustive. There is much I did not include. But let me add just a few more jokes that I still prize—like the outtakes or bits that follow a good, funny movie. I want to keep with the spirit of the book, which is to keep the jokes coming. For instance, the silly chauvinistic joke about how the Jews obviously invented air-conditioning. The names you see on every unit: Lo, Norm, Hi, and Max.
Or the Jewish American p
rincess line, delivered unwittingly, by a young Jewish woman to my niece Susan on a Birthright trip. The purpose of the all-expense-paid trip to Israel for Jewish youth is to instill a love for the Jewish homeland, perhaps even to inspire youth to make aliyah—a return from the Diaspora to live in the Jewish state. As the two traveled along with a busful of other young Jews, the young woman suddenly turned to my niece and said, out of the blue, “I would consider making aliyah, but the shopping here sucks.”
I continue to relish the gifted Canadian Jewish author Mordecai Richler’s true tale of a band of Jewish boys turning anti-Semitism on its head by stealing a sign on a Montreal beach that read no jews allowed, and then putting it back after crossing out “Jews” and writing “Litvaks,” the word for Lithuanian Jews that is also used for the Orthodox. Or, the brilliant comic bit of Woody Allen’s in which he plays the proverbial schlemiel shooting a moose; upon realizing it is not dead, he takes the moose with him to a costume party, where it gets furious after losing best costume prize to a couple named Berkowitz who are at the party dressed as a moose.
I have more encounters with great comics to invoke. Jokes often change and mutate, I remember telling the comedian Alan King before an interview the two of us did onstage. I had heard another version of his great line about the man who opens a Chinese fortune cookie and finds the message “Help! I’m a prisoner inside a Chinese fortune cookie factory.” In the version I heard, the message was inside a mezuzah and said “Help! I’m being held prisoner in a mezuzah factory.”
A quick non sequitur silly joke. I obviously can’t help myself. Alan King once performed at Buckingham Palace and was greeted by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip after the show. The queen welcomed him by saying, “How do you do, Mr. King,” and King said, “How do you do, Mrs. Queen.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 17