JEWS ARE FUNNY — BUT THEY’RE NOT A JOKE

STEREOTYPES ABOUT JEWS ABOUND. LIKE MOST, THE JEWISH HUMOUR ONE IS DOUBLE-EDGED.

What a lot of people think Jews look like.

I have hesitated to write about this. But what the hell.

This post necessarily deals in stereotypes and some unpleasant ideas that are required to illustrate my point. Fair warning.

I was at a very serious lecture a few years ago. It was put on primarily for lawyers, mostly non-Jewish professionals, and featured an expert speaker on how the Nazis subverted the rule of law. What the Nazis did, remember, was entirely legal. In a corrupted, degenerate legal and social climate, wrong is right and right is wrong in the eyes of the law. (Note today’s ICC decision as a modern example.) The lesson, I guess, is that law and justice are not always the same thing and the guardrails that are supposed to prevent a society from going off a cliff can themselves be manipulated to detour civilization over the edge.

But that’s not what this post is about.

At the event, a friend of mine who was introducing the speaker invited attendees to stay after the lecture, mingle, and enjoy kosher refreshments.

The room burst into guffaws. My friend was clearly taken aback.

“I’m not sure why that’s funny,” he said, momentarily at a loss.

A few years earlier, an almost identical thing happened. I was a student in Montreal and friends were seated around the dinner table for a potluck. A late arrival, possibly or probably the only Jewish guest that evening, came through the door, held up a bag and said, “I brought bagels!”

The room burst into laughter.

My recollection was that she responded exactly as my other friend did a few years later.

“I’m not sure why that’s funny.”

OK, the bagel thing I kind of get. The only Jewish guest shows up with the most stereotypically Jewish potluck item. Hardy-har-har. 

The other thing — the “kosher refreshments” setting off hysterics from a bunch of lawyers — that has nagged at me a lot.

I am a non-Jew who has been hanging around the Jewish community for 30 years or so. As a reporter for a Jewish newspaper, I have interviewed some of the greatest thinkers and doers in the Jewish world, famous and not, read and/or reviewed hundreds of books on almost every Jewish topic, attended hundreds, if not thousands, of lectures and presentations on every imaginable Jewish theme (or non-Jewish topics by Jewish experts) and on and on. I have been engaged, I like to imagine, in one of the longest Jewish Studies undergrad careers ever attempted.

The point is that I have been fortunate to see the breadth and depth of Jewish ideas, activism, literature, history and almost every other discipline — at least at a superficial level that allows me to write 750 or 1,200 words on the subject before moving on to the next topic. I have a pretty good handle on the diversity of Jewish experience.

What, on the other hand, do most non-Jews know about Jews?

I’m going to crudely say it as I see it: Holocaust. Seinfeld. Funny words like “chutzpah” and “shtick.” Circumcision. Cheap and greedy. Bookish. Powerful. Rich.

There are associations and stereotypes of every cultural group. The ones about Jews are especially powerful for a number of reasons. They are often double-edged. (Example: Jews are often ascribed “positive” stereotypes, like “smart,” which sounds nice. But smart often becomes “shrewd,” which in the wrong hands becomes “devious,” which becomes “can’t compete with those people.”)

Others are seriously problematic. Being assumed to be rich by dint of your ethnicity (even if you are barely scraping by) is problematic at the best of times. It is especially problematic in a time when race theory explicitly positions wealth and power (very problematically presumed based on membership in a collective) as the delineators of privilege, which is then cast as the wellspring of society’s foremost malady.

I could go on about each of the italicized “Jewish things” I mentioned above. And I may, in future. For our purposes now, I’ll just quickly divide them into categories and address one specifically.

There are three main subject areas here: Lachrymose Jewish history; Double-edged (or just plain nasty) stereotypes; and Funny Jews.

Our society has a seriously effed up problem with the first one. For decades, the world (except Jews) pretty much steadfastly refused to consider the Holocaust, the longer history of Jewish tragedy or their meanings for our civilization. More recently, the world has enthusiastically exhumed this topic — to rub it in Jewish faces. Despicable people have taken terms that were invented to describe the Jewish experience — “genocide,” “holocaust,” “concentration camps,” among others — and falsely accused Jews of perpetrating these most heinous crimes against humanity. I have written about this before and will again.

I quickly summarized above the double-edged stereotypes, and I may write about that more fully in future.

Combining these two themes — tragic Jewish history and double-edged swords — this seems like a good place to mention something I recently noticed. Some Canadian schoolkids apparently told a Jewish classmate to “go back to the gas chambers.” The silver lining of this, I suppose, is that we have been led to believe the kids don’t know anything about the Holocaust and — hey presto! — it turns out they do. Just enough to rub it in the faces of Jewish kids. I’m guessing they learned that from their parents in the “pro-Palestinian” movement.

The third theme is “Funny Jews.” Rather than give you a list of funny Jews — Google it; it’s vast — I’ll prove my point by giving you a list of non-Jews who are often mistaken for being Jewish just because they are funny: David Letterman, Tiny Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Bob Newhart, Nathan Lane, Steve Martin, Maya Rudolph ...

Then there is the dick thing. Even if someone knows nothing about Jews, they know there’s a tradition of circumcision. As any elementary school kid knows, dicks are hilarious. Therefore circumcision is a laugh. By extension, again, Jews are a joke.

Do I extrapolate too much?

Consider: Did you know that Muslims also circumcise? And there are more than 100 times more Muslims in the world than Jews. So why not laugh at them? (This is worth a dissertation. If we can generalize that “everyone” thinks Jews are funny, we can invert the stereotype and generalize that “no one” thinks Muslims are funny. That is a serious topic for another time and place.)

I return to the start of this piece. Why did a room full of lawyers burst out laughing at the mention of “kosher refreshments”?

Because kosher = Jews. And Jews = funny.

There is a difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them, in case your parents didn’t teach you this. And that is the issue here.

Jews may be funny. But they are not a joke.

And yet a huge number of people don’t get this differentiation.

There are lots of consequences from this phenom. When Jews say they are experiencing unprecedented racism, people might intuitively respond, I thought those people could take a joke. Maybe there’s a default that says, Comedians get heckled. Deal with it. Is there a tendency that says, simply, Jews are more an opening act than an ethnocultural group, so it’s not really racism?

Maybe.

There is another effect of this “Jews as a joke” motif that has profound outcomes, though.

That’s the topic of my next piece. See you Saturday.