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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The golden age of Jewish humour flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, enjoyed by Jews and non-Jews alike, but its twilight years are now in sight.
Telling jokes has the potential to reaffirm community once religion, political loyalties and victimhood are stripped away: from the 1960s on, a unique cultural dynamism bound up in these jokes reminded Jews around the world of what it means to be Jewish. Often, jokes pit one group against another, but Jewish jokes opted for self-deprecation instead, and in this case, laughing at the group reinforced it. They enabled Jews to live in harmony with others in full conscience of their differences and they safeguarded a desire for survival at the heart of Jewish identity. Moreover, absurd, larger-than-life characters such as Rabbi Jacob generated tolerance, empathy and tenderness among non-Jews after the horror and guilt of the Shoah. From the early 2000s, however, the space that allowed Jewish jokes to flourish began to shrink, due to a decline in the understanding of the Shoah, a less positive image of Israel and a waning of the importance of Jewish culture in American intellectual and cultural life.
This playful and personal book by Michel Wieviorka includes Jewish jokes but also laments the disappearance of the Jewish joke and eulogises its ability to allow the thriving of community alongside difference. It is an original and wide-ranging analysis of the evolution of the diaspora and its relationship with the State of Israel, its history and dramas as well as its cultural creativity.
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Seitenzahl: 225
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Instructions for Use
1 The American Invention of Jewish Jokes
The Jewish mother
When history goes beyond tears
Pioneers in the age of victimhood
Notes
2 Prolegomena
The watch
Winds from the east
A working-class genre
Notes
3 In France, in the 1960s and 1970s
Sale with receipt
Ashkenazim and Sephardim
Notes
4 What Counts as a Jewish Joke and What Doesn’t
Where do Jewish jokes end and anti-Semitic jokes begin?
The supposed “axiological neutrality” of the sociologist
What remains when nothing remains
Notes
5 The Heyday of Jewish Jokes in France
To the sources of Jewish humor in France
Jews and the Republic
A new sequence
A dynamic diaspora
Notes
6 The American Decline
Worries and perils
The inversion
Notes
7 In France, a Changed Situation
The rise of fear
Inversion, in France as in America
Notes
8 What About Israel?
A democracy becoming illiberal?
Stormy and painful identifications
Notes
Conclusion: The Last Jewish Joke
Life and death
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Instructions for Use
Begin Reading
Conclusion: The Last Jewish Joke
End User License Agreement
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The Last Jewish Joke
MICHEL WIEVIORKA
Translated by Cory Stockwell
polity
Originally published in French as La dernière histoire juive © Éditions Denoël, 2023. The text has been revised and updated by the author for the English edition.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine and funded by Albertine Foundation.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6466-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024949655
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my sisters Annette and Sylvie, as well as Alain Geismar and Régis Meyran for reading a first draft of this book: I benefited greatly from their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Dorothée Cunéo for her confidence and fruitful suggestions.
Instructions for Use
This book deals with a unique genre of humor and with the history of this genre: “Jewish jokes,” which should not be confused with anti-Semitic jokes.
The era of “Jewish jokes” has a prehistory, which goes back to the 1960s and originates, above all, in a movement from East to West and, in a very secondary way, on the shores of the Mediterranean – this is the first phase of its development. Its zenith, the second phase, takes place in the United States and France, and lasts barely a half-century. And finally, in its closing phase, it enters into a state of decline.
This book is interested above all in the content of these jokes, which it contextualizes, though it must sometimes (very rarely and only when necessary) hide the identity of a person or their surroundings. In doing so, it sheds a light that is broader than it may seem on Jewish sociology and history, and not only on the collective unconscious that they reveal.
Since its author is a researcher in the social sciences, this book also provides an occasion to reflect upon the way it was constructed – the path it took, the ideas and intellectual engagements it contains, and its specific approach, which essentially lies at the crossroads of political sociology and history.
1The American Invention of Jewish Jokes
The Jewish mother
There was a time when the cafeteria of the Maison des sciences de l’homme was a marvelous place, where students, CNRS researchers, professors, and lecturers from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales all crossed paths, not to mention guests from all over the world. You might run into Jacques Derrida or another living incarnation of “French Theory,” important sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Touraine, and many others, famous historians such as Fernand Braudel (leading light of the Annales School of historiography), François Furet, and Jacques Le Goff, and countless figures from the social sciences and humanities in America, Britain, and elsewhere.
I often had coffee there with the historian Gilles Veinstein, who had a neighboring office on the eighth floor of the building people called the “54” (because it was located at 54 boulevard de Raspail in Paris). Gilles, who died in 2013, and who was a noted specialist of Turkish and Ottoman history, had a dramatic experience in the second part of the 1990s. From the moment he entered the Collège de France as a professor, with the procedure still not complete, he was the target of a violent polemic because, in 1995, in the magazine L’Histoire, he had taken the side of Bernard Lewis, a world-famous specialist of Islam who, in the pages of Le Monde, had refused to classify the massacre of Armenians by Turks in 1915 as a genocide.
Along with several others, I defended Gilles publicly, because the controversy came to take the form of unacceptable ad hominem attacks, even though his arguments were those of a historian participating in a debate, not those of a politically motivated denier. My personal position wasn’t easy to maintain. I was on a knife edge, because, while I clearly supported him, it was also important for me to display, no less clearly, my support for the Armenian cause and for demands to recognize the genocide. Gilles and I often, and at great length, spoke about this affair, which deeply and lastingly wounded him. We also had other conversation topics, of course.
My mother would come to have lunch with me from time to time in the canteen of the “54,” in the basement, and nothing pleased her more than when she found herself, afterwards, seated at a table in the cafeteria on the main floor with me and one or another of my friends, including Gilles, who, reflecting one day on the relationship between my mother and myself (her eldest son), told us the following joke:
A bit of bad news, a bit of good news
Two Jewish mothers often meet over a cup of tea, and their conversations revolve, for the most part, around the respective merits of their eldest sons.
“Guess what? Something incredible is happening with my son,” one of them declares.
“What is it? I hope it’s good news,” exclaims the other, who obviously wants it to be bad news.
“Actually, there’s good news and bad news.”
“Start with the bad news.”
“My son is living with another man! They’re going to get married.”
“I’m sorry to hear! And the good news?”
“He’s a doctor!”
The invasive Jewish mother is no mere myth. I’ve come across several, including at the boundaries of my own family. In fact, we have distant Latin American relatives with whom I crossed paths in Argentina; I visited them at the end of the 1980s when I was passing through Buenos Aires. One of them, a cousin of my mother, lived with her husband in a luxury condominium where children were forbidden. The path they’d taken to get there was anything but commonplace. Her husband, after having left Nazi-invaded Poland in his youth, did business in the USSR in wartime. He then made his way to Palestine, where he met my mother’s cousin, before going to Italy toward the end of the war and working for the American army. They then migrated to North America, hoping to make money, and from there they finally opted for Argentina, where he had a few contacts.
They then made a fortune in the import–export business. When I visited, I was able to observe how my mother’s cousin kept a close watch on her two sons and two daughters-in-law. She bought each couple a superb house less than a kilometer away from her own home, one to the west, the other to the east. Clearly, both sons followed her wishes, and she intervened in many aspects of their lives. They all welcomed me warmly: family is sacred. But deep down I had the sense of an incommensurable distance; their world, heavily controlled by the mother of the family, dominated by money and very pro-Israeli, was foreign to me.
One day, in November 2022, I’m walking in a street in Paris with my sister Sylvie; we’ve just done our shopping together. I give her news from our own mother, whom, as a good eldest son, I phone every evening in her retirement care home, and all of a sudden, through an association of ideas, I share with her the joke about the two Jewish mothers told to me by Gilles Veinstein. It then turns out that Sylvie also had a good joke about a Jewish mother. Here it is:
A young Jewish man has decided to get married, and is hesitating between two women. He likes them both, but lacks confidence and can’t make up his mind. He confides in his mother and asks for her help. Finally, they agree that she’ll invite both potential spouses over to her home, one after the other, and then tell her son the right thing to do.
Immediately after meeting both women, the mother calls her son.
“My dear, I’ve seen your two friends, and I can tell you that I’ve made my choice, it’s clear and obvious.”
“So quickly?”
“Yes, yes, you have to marry the tall blond one.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I already hate her!”
This joke isn’t specifically Jewish, and could in fact apply to many non-Jewish mothers, except that the stereotype includes the complete submission of the son to the choice made by his mother, who is supposed to know what’s best for him. And therefore the role of the submissive son is also a stereotype – you can’t have one without the other.
The issue of the relationship between mothers and daughters-in-law is much broader. Here as well, if the joke touches me, or concerns me, it is above all because it pushes the caricature to the point of absurdity. What’s true in this joke isn’t solely or even particularly Jewish, and yet it needs to be qualified as “Jewish” to make me laugh.
Our own mother has nothing to do with this kind of character, whom she also laughs about. She brought up her three children in material conditions that were difficult, and, like many other mothers, she placed demands on us, but she was never invasive or overprotective; she didn’t get involved in everything. I think I can say with confidence that she didn’t turn me into a character comparable in any way to Alex Portnoy from Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, whom I’ll speak about below. My father dreamed of seeing me attend a top university, but only vaguely, without any real fervor. My mother was no more obsessed by success than he was, especially the way people imagined this obsession in the 1960s and 1970s, in the figure of the doctor; it’s true that her brother, Roger Perelman, embodied this success beyond all measure, as he was certainly one of the best French pediatricians of his generation and was recognized as such. The stereotype of the Jewish mother is that she crushes the father, or causes him to vanish; my parents functioned more like a balanced couple from the standpoint of the influence each exercised on their children.
I like these jokes about Jewish mothers precisely because they contrast with my own lived experience. I was able to laugh about them with my own mother, or with a friend like Gilles Veinstein, because in a way we have one foot inside them and one foot outside: our personal experience allows us to see what is excessive about them. I’ll just add that if the doctor appears as the highest symbol of success, including financial success, this doesn’t really apply to my family, because we placed the greatest value on intellectual life, and on morals or ethics – never on money. It certainly wasn’t to get rich that my uncle Roger and my sister Sylvie chose medicine.
But why, or how, has the Jewish mother become the main character of so many jokes? Why does she have to be “Jewish” when so many non-Jewish mothers are abusive, invasive, stifling, guilt-inducing, and excessively anxious about their children, above all their sons?
To understand, you have to consider the American context of the 1960s, when a stereotypical version of the Jewish mother appeared before a large audience in the United States, popularized in 1964 by Dan Greenburg’s bestseller How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual, a very funny book that was adapted for the theater. A study by Aldo Naouri, Sylvie Angel, and Philippe Gutton, entitled Les Mères juives n’existent pas … mais alors, qu’est-ce qui existe? [“Jewish mothers don’t exist … but then, what does?”],1 opens convincing lines of inquiry: the arrival of the Jewish mother on the stage of Jewish humor owes a great deal to Dan Greenburg, but also to Philip Roth and his novel Portnoy’s Complaint, in which, during a monologue in the office of his psychoanalyst, the narrator describes a caricature of a Jewish mother. The “Jewish mother” was wildly successful because it arose in a context of empathy for an increasingly visible Jewish culture and history, and at the same time evoked a development whereby women attained emancipation while paternal authority declined. Philip Roth’s book, an immense success in the United States and around the world, proved to be subversive in its raw treatment of sex, but also in dealing with how a Jew might feel a sense of belonging to American modernity, giving a jolt of sorts to the context of stifling puritanism. Alex, the blaspheming main character, is a sexual obsessive who spends his time dreaming of beautiful non-Jewish blonds. He’s at war with religious and familial constraints, but he never makes a complete break, never detaches himself from his Jewish identity.
Among the main figures of the trailblazing feminism of the 1960s, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem identified as Jews, and others as well, such as Bella Abzug, to the point that they were seen by the American far right as leaders of the “Jewish conspiracy,” the supposed plot against the Christian family and its values. On the other hand, feminism also exercised an influence at the heart of the Jewish world, which came up against resistance from the heritage of a traditional Jewish culture in which men studied and were breadwinners, while women managed family life.
The thrust of feminist modernity could also be found in France in the same era, and with the same effects where the Jewish mother is concerned. The actress Marthe Villalonga played the role of a Jewish mother who was very invasive toward her son, played by the comedian Guy Bedos, in two films from the 1970s, Pardon Mon Affaire and Pardon Mon Affaire, Too!, which, fittingly, spoke of the transformations of French society, its interrogations of masculinity, but also developments that owe a great deal to the women’s movement.
In this context, people felt perfectly entitled to import the American theme of the “Jewish mother” onto French soil, and to read with relish Jewish literature from the United States (above all from New York) which dealt with the traditional Jewish family, and Jewish life more generally, as they existed in the European past or in their contemporary American forms, where they were jostled by modernity and above all by the women’s movement. A global readership, which wasn’t necessarily Jewish, demonstrated broad empathy, conquered by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Chaïm Potok, and Bernard Malamud.
In its contemporary version, the character of the Jewish mother is similar to more general ideas about mothers-in-law, demonstrating the continued existence of a prior culture, but also the breaches being opened in this culture, including the Jewish world, by the contestation of patriarchy and the recognition of women’s rights and feminism. This stereotype holds less and less for the present day. Today’s mothers are certainly not indifferent to the sexual orientation of their children, but they are far less able to impose their traditional conceptions of marriage and family upon them than they were in the past.
The Jewish mother has lost – she is doomed. The joke that my friend Gilles Veinstein told my mother and me is dated: it belonged to a historical period that is ending, and only those belonging to aging generations – my generation, not that of my children – still laugh at it. These aging generations, however, nonetheless perceived and appreciated the importance of cultural mutation brought by new, or renewed, political struggles and demands, such as those of women.
The era of Jewish communities from Eastern Europe is over, and the Jewish mother is one of the last echoes of their decomposition, while at the same time it is enough of a caricature to also express a change, the entry into a new phase of modernity. But this caricature will not endure. In the Jewish cinema and literature of the United States in the 1970s – Woody Allen, Erica Jong,2 Philip Roth, and many others – the Jewish mother gave rise to neuroses and even (though this is debatable) psychoses; she created good clients for psychoanalysis, which at the time was beginning to play an important role in the lives of American Jews, especially those in New York, as illustrated by Portnoy’s Complaint. For in the end, there exists a paranoiac aspect to certain Jewish jokes, which sometimes display a sentiment of persecution, and a world in which right reasoning is built on false (or at least seriously twisted) premises.
Has this time really come to an end? It certainly seems like it, at least where mothers are concerned. But the Jewish mother can only be fully understood in her relationship with a hypochondriac son, at once sexually obsessed and vaguely romantic, a misfit who is nonetheless capable of success, etc. – this is a character that may indeed endure.
When history goes beyond tears
“Jewish jokes” haven’t been around long, but Jewish witticisms are an ancient genre, and are at the heart of an apparent paradox: while Jewish history, according to the historian Salo Baron, is almost always “tearful,” made up of tragic events that systematically call forth tears, which is something he criticized for a long time before moderating his point of view late in life, and while it is always heavy with suffering and drama – persecutions, expulsions, massacres – the Jewish people, including in the writings and pronouncements of certain of their religious representatives, also identify with a form of humor that is all its own. Indeed, the genre we know as “Jewish jokes” was only able to develop because these people refused to limit themselves to a history of victimhood and to the evocation of the Shoah, and instead foregrounded their culture and their positive contributions to the life of ideas.
Obviously, witticisms were already very present in Freud’s era, in the Vienna of the early twentieth century, and the father of psychoanalysis recounts an abundance of them.3 But the flourishing of “Jewish jokes” as a singular genre, which include jokes such as the one I’ve just related about the Jewish mother, originates to a great extent in the United States of the late 1960s. Their humor, at the heart of which the Jewish mother plays a decisive role, flourished considerably in this time and place, as testified to in particular by literature and cinema.
It must be said that, at this moment, the world of American Jews undergoes a considerable and indeed wholesale transformation. Certainly, we’re still speaking about a minority group, as the first research in the sociology of health demonstrates. The work of Irving Zola, for instance, which is seen as pioneering, compares the ways in which the members of various minority groups, including Jews, express their suffering when they are sick.4 Jews have a specific way of doing so, as do the Irish and the Italians, for instance; Blacks and Native Americans are not taken into account in the research of this period, as they do not yet belong to the public space of groups that count in the same way as the minorities stemming from European migration. Only later will they enter the fray of comparative work of this kind.
Broadly speaking, these studies claim that Jewish men who have taken ill moan and groan in a way that reinforces their power over the rest of their family, which is distinct, for instance, from Irish men, who grit their teeth without complaining. Furthermore, sickness and death are frequent subjects of American Jewish literature – it’s true, as Judith Stora-Sandor notes, that “Jewish humor finds its source in misfortune. If the highest value is life, the highest misfortune is death, which means that, more than any other theme, it merits an ironic treatment.”5 And hypochondria has been an important feature of male Jewish characters in American literature and cinema since at least the 1960s.
By that time, American Jews had already played a major role in the cultural life of their country for almost a century, in theater, music, publishing, and, more recently, television. They brought to these domains a humor whose origins lay in their own history, but this was usually not explicit because they didn’t present themselves as Jews. They were cautious to anchor themselves on the side of universalism, which, for them, meant masking or minimizing their belonging to a community, perhaps to favor their civic participation in collective life. It is thus that Hollywood, which owes a great deal to Jews, long avoided producing films with explicitly Jewish themes or characters, or featuring even the slightest Jewish specificity. And even though many Jewish democrats, mainly from northern states, had participated just a few years earlier in the struggle for civil rights and the defense of universal values alongside Black Americans, they hadn’t done so in the name of promoting this or that identity.
The philosopher Michael Walzer, who was an active participant in debates that once opposed communitarians (who place more value on specific identities) and liberals (who privilege political citizenship), says somewhere that most American Jews in the 1960s, at least the progressive ones, generally lined up behind “liberal,” i.e. civic, values. During this period, the discrimination from which Jews had traditionally suffered hadn’t yet disappeared, but it was in its death throes. As such, David Apter, a political sociologist respected around the world, especially for his work on the politics of modernization, told me that when he joined the faculty of Yale University in 1969 (later he would chair the sociology department), he was told that he was the first Jew to whom such a position had ever been offered. The end of more or less disguised quotas that prevented Jews from entering the university as students or instructors (and also kept them out of high-ranking government positions, the army, and the diplomatic corps) went hand in hand with the removal of restrictions on entering high-society clubs that had been the purview of WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]. In order to explain why he’d resigned from one of these, the Friars’ Club, Groucho Marx made this famous quip: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
While it is true that, in the 1930s, anti-Semitic violence exploded in the context of the New Deal (which anti-Semites called the “Jew Deal”), things had changed by the 1950s, when the “Jewish Renaissance,” as the sociologist Nathan Glazer called it, began. Glazer describes its religious and educational aspects (with the establishment of synagogues and schools), and views it as a result of the strong contribution made by Jews to the country’s growing prosperity. He also notes that anti-Semitism seems, in this period, to “have almost entirely disappeared,”6 though he also points to the appearance, at the heart of Black resistance movements, of worrisome expressions of anti-white radicalism, which could potentially take Jews as its target.
This “Renaissance” intensified at the end of the 1960s, with 1967 marking a turning point, according to Glazer, because of the Six-Day War: American Jews suddenly started to take an interest in the State of Israel, which developed not because they themselves felt insecure, but rather from the idea that a genocide of the Jews was once more possible. This fear was also fed by the fact that black and white extremists were hostile to Israel, which actively cooperated with South Africa’s apartheid regime. The risk that the Jewish state would be isolated suddenly
