The Upside-Down Joke |
In 1992, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book called Jewish Humor, exploring what Jewish jokes reveal about the Jewish people. It quickly became one of my favorite books. I memorized many of the jokes, but even more than the humor itself, I appreciated the way Telushkin contextualized them. Jewish humor has never simply been entertainment. For centuries, it has functioned as a coping mechanism, a form of resilience, and at times a quiet act of defiance.
As a people intimately familiar with struggle, Jews have long used humor to endure difficult realities. During periods of persecution, rising antisemitism, and even the horrors of Nazi Europe, Jews continued to tell jokes. In the 1930s, as fascist movements gained traction in America and Europe alike, humor became one more way to maintain dignity in the face of fear. Over the past week, I have found myself thinking again about one particular joke from that book:
In the late 1930s, a Jew is traveling on the subway reading a Yiddish newspaper, The Forward. Suddenly, to his shock, he spots a friend of his sitting just opposite him, reading the local New York Nazi newspaper. He glares at his friend in anger: “How can you read that Nazi rag?”
Unabashed, the friend looks up at him. “So what are you reading, The Forward? And what do you read there? In America, there is a depression going on, and the Jews are assimilating. In........