A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World 9780190646127, 9780190646134

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studies in contemporary jewry

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

A Club of their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World Studies in Contemporary Jewry an Annual XXIX

2016 Edited by Eli Lederhendler Guest symposium editor: Gabriel N. Finder

Published for the Institute by

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. [Insert Cataloging Data] ISBN: 978-0-19-064612-7

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Studies in Contemporary Jewry Founding Editors Jonathan Frankel (1935–2008) Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn (1940–2015) Editors Richard I. Cohen Anat Helman Eli Lederhendler Uzi Rebhun Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordechai Altshuler, Haim Avni, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Amos Goldberg, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Dimitry Shumsky, Yfaat Weiss Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary

Preface

The symposium in this volume, dealing with the Jewish cultural dimensions attached to the notion of humor (in its widest sense), follows upon a number of prior academic forays into this field. As has been the case with earlier volumes of Studies in Contem­ porary Jewry, our purpose is not so much to cap an emergent trend with a definitive round-table assessment, but rather to continue the discussion and perhaps advance it by bringing a host of new angles under consideration. Why should humor, in its various manifestations, matter to students of modern Jewish culture and social history? For one thing, humor may be seen as a counterpoint to “real” or observed reality—an improvised reflection upon something that exists, more than a representation of the “thing” itself. Humor is related to incongruity; almost by definition, it is an awareness of something being amiss. That would make of humor a secondary phenomenon, and although such things contribute to the social construction of the world as we see it, we might still be apt to relegate it to some marginal sector of the study of cultural consciousness. As post-Freudians, however, we cannot but be impressed by the logic of the sublimated aggression and other properties of cultural encoding that jokes are apt to embody and express. The artfulness and the usefulness of an ulterior weapon, deployed by those engaged in outmaneuvering their fate, is not to be underestimated. It is, indeed, in this regard that we accept, at least as an initial proposition, the very real significance of the marginal, the out-of-tune, the off-kilter, the mocking and casual warping of harmonious (“congruous”) perception as a matter worthy of serious consideration. Modern Jews have been known to claim this unhappy virtue, this belief in the rhetoric of comeuppance, almost as a rite of membership. This axiom brings to mind Groucho Marx’s most famous quip, from which this volume’s symposium takes its title. In his 1959 autobiography, Groucho and Me, Groucho recounts that he was invited to join a prominent theatrical organization. Harboring pretensions since his youth to high culture, he hoped to be able to talk about the giants of great literature with the other members. Instead, on his first visit he discovered that they were interested only in playing cards or philandering. He went again a few nights later and found himself seated next to a man who disparaged the organization’s newest inductees. When Groucho tried to engage him in a discussion about literature, the man changed the topic, denouncing barbers’ newfangled use of the electric razor. “The following morning,” Groucho writes, “I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”1 As Lee Siegel observes in his biography of Groucho, this witticism is not inspired by Jewish self-loathing, as others have interpreted it. vii

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Rather, what Groucho is doing is raining contempt on the façade of respectability from the position of a “Jewish aristocrat.” “If there is anything characteristically Jewish in Groucho’s famous line,” Siegel notes, “it is . . . in the way he negates the world around him to carve out a private freedom.” In this Groucho is in good company. “From Heine, to Freud, to Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen, Jewish humor has broken new ground in the realm of subjectivity.”2 This is the club to which Groucho rightly belongs. To underscore how crucial this notion—the Jewish jokester’s desire to distance himself from a group to which he feels superior and in this way to forge a path to emotional freedom—can sometimes appear to be, people often point out that Jews made jokes even under Nazi occupation—from Germany in the 1930s, to ghettos in Poland, to labor and concentration camps—mocking Nazi leaders, criticizing Jewish councils, and looking for momentary solace in humor from their terrible ordeals. Particularly telling is the discovery in the recovered Ringelblum archives of two prewar sketches by Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. Although the main objective of the clandestine archive was to record Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto and to collect evidence of Nazi crimes, it was deemed important as well to preserve artifacts of prewar Jewish life, including examples from the repertoire of this well-known comic duo.3 Yet these preliminary remarks do not really do justice to the conceptual breadth required for this topic. Although a number of the essays in this volume are rooted in the proverbial semantics of “laughter through tears,” it makes more sense to us to see this as only one filtering paradigm for the study of humor in Jewish life and culture. Fortune also smiles, so we are told; and, that being so, we might wonder whether Jews find comic flaws even in decent life circumstances. Are Jews funny only when in distress, only when they are marginal, “diasporic,” visibly and unsettlingly “other”? Or are parody, irony, and satire such irresistible devices for playing up any form of idiosyncrasy that even when being “Jewish” is not what is at stake, Jews, donning the role of jester, often desire to be and are funny? Here, we might point to the recent findings that about four in ten of all American Jews surveyed (42 percent) felt that “having a good sense of humor” was “an essential part of what being Jewish means to them,” on a par with caring for Israel (43 percent), and quite a good deal in excess of the importance to them of observing Jewish law (19 percent) and eating traditional Jewish foods (14 percent).4 There is little way of knowing what those respondents really had in mind: whether a “good sense of humor” is, for some of them, a mannerism that lends character and panache to a positive self-image, a humanizing trait that (hopefully) comes across as benign and attractive, or whether the fact that humor outranks religious practice simply means that the majority of respondents view Jewishness as a secular category. In this vein, we might consider what William Novak and Moshe Waldoks have written: “Jewish humor . . . has in some ways come to replace the standard sacred texts as a touchstone for the entire Jewish community. Not all Jews can read and understand a page of Talmud, but even the most assimilated tend to have a special affection for Jewish jokes.”5 Although Novak and Waldoks are describing Jewish humor in America, what they write here is probably relevant at least to all of the Jewish diaspora.

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The young Gershom Scholem was alert to this element, though from a different angle, when he confided in his diary: “Could it be that the Jewish joke developed through the systematic mix-up between the canon and the transmission of tradition? In which case the Jewish joke would conceal within itself an unmistakable symbolic reference to the deepest danger of what is Jewish, namely, the deep strata of selfaccusation. . . . What is certain, however, is that everyone who makes a joke puts himself in the dock.”6 Of course, Jews—like everyone else—have been producing and consuming humor forever. But Ruth Wisse makes a cogent historiographical point in No Joke: Making Jewish Humor: “Jews became known for their humor only starting with the Enlight­ enment. . . . [I]t [humor] responds to conditions of Jewish life, but only where it becomes the response of choice.”7 John Efron has made a similar point: “While the emergence of happiness as a conscious state of being is an eighteenth-century invention, the virtue of being humorous is of more recent vintage. . . . Jewish humor, then, should be linked to modernity and as modernity was seen to represent the triumph of civilization, humor and wit were deemed its hallmarks. To master humor was, in other words, to be regarded as urbane and civilized.”8 Jewish humor has served many functions in terms of “insider” speech. It has, inter alia, been used to ridicule certain Jews or types of Jews, such as Jewish overreachers for their pretensions, or Jews who try unsuccessfully to hide their Jewishness; to deflate the inflated piety of Jews who claim to be religious; to unite Jews (and occasionally Jews and non-Jews) in the face of their enemies; to challenge authority (in both the Gentile and the Jewish world); to deride Jewish politics and politicians and their wrongheaded policies; to turn warring elements in the Jewish performance of modernity into funniness; to pit Jews’ expectations of God against God’s expectation of Jews with no clear outcome, positing human beings as God’s equal rather than His subjects; in America, to ridicule conspicuous consumption, blatant and hasty Americanization, and putatively diminished American Jewish masculinity and masculine Jewish women; in Israel, to contrast expectations of political normalcy and bitter reality.9 It is noteworthy, however, that much of contemporary Jewish humor is not designed only or even primarily as insider speech, opaque except for Jews who are well versed in the intricacies of arcane topics. Rather, it is accessible to many non-Jews as well as Jews; it rewards all those who get the punch line. Jews may be the implicit basis of the comedy, but the Gentile audience is seldom confronted with any particularity that might impede an appreciation of the humor. The point of departure for several essays in our symposium (Patt, Slucki, Steitz, and Dardan) is the steady contemporary stream of attempts to inject humor into representations of the Holocaust. We would cite here Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s insightful remark: “Yes, life is beautiful. No, the Shoah cannot be funny. What is at stake in the reinstatement of laughter . . . after Auschwitz is not the fidelity of a comic representation of the Shoah but the reinstatement of the comic as building block of a post-Shoah universe.”10 Other essays in the symposium highlight the following functions in Jewish humor: in fin-de-siècle Vienna, to lay claim to common cultural capital while subverting cultural mores (Beller); to present the world and the precarious position of Jews in it  through a politically, socially, and culturally charged prism (Whitfield); to turn

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contemporary Jewish tropes into general funniness while using a Jewish (or talmudic) discursive style detectable only to insiders (Tanny); to affirm the inclusion of Jews in the (British) nation, warts and all (Berkowitz); to exploit religious tradition for social satire (Portnoy); to express through whispered jokes certain truths in symbolic subversion of a repressive (Soviet) political system constructed on a web of lies and deceit—but even then with great discretion and caution (Shternshis); to challenge the premises of political, social, and cultural hegemony or to puncture the pretensions of  certain Israeli political leaders while humanizing others (Shifman, Rotman); to challenge Jewish tradition through funny, unconventional images (Zemel); and to let non-Jews (Germans!) in on the joke, while turning the tables on history (Finder). By contrast, one essay (Slucki) demonstrates the adverse reaction of a Jewish community when dark humor whose theme is the Holocaust stumbles and offends. Whatever its various functions, Jewish humor attests to what Wisse calls “folk creativity.”11 Humor is probably the most prolific and most democratic manifestation of popular or mass culture among Jews across the globe—created, told, and retold both from below and by intellectuals and literati. Martina Kessel writes: “Using humor as a category of historical analysis allows us to see not only how humour entertained, but also how it worked as a cultural practice that both organized social order and revealed shared assumptions about society and politics.”12 This is the broader mandate we wish to bring to bear on the subject of Jewish humor—a genre that has already enjoyed a good deal of public notice and scholarly attention. We want to move beyond general theorizing about the nature of Jewish humor by serving a smorgasbord of finely grained, historically situated, and contextualized interdisciplinary studies of humorous performance and its consumption in Jewish life in the modern world. Although transnational in its intentions, the symposium is admittedly Euro- or America-centric in many ways. In part, we have attempted to cover our bases somewhat more inclusively by drawing attention to Israel, including the interethnic genre of humor associated in Israel with Mizrahi Jews and their social status. Yet we would be the first to admit that this is an initial gesture that requires a good deal more attention in future studies. As for now, we are mindful of Ruth Wisse’s suggestion that wit, though undoubtedly universal—and universally Jewish—has had a distinctive historical “career” as a peculiarity of Jewish stereotypes that germinated in Europe.13 At one remove from the European origins of this particularity stand all the other subcultures of the Jewish world, in which the immigrant experience and intergenerational dilemmas have provided further grist for the mill of Jewish humor in various guises. Contemporary appearances of Iranian Jewish comics in Los Angeles, for example, reiterate in a new key all the themes that are already in play, though clearly the coding of humor requires intimacy with a whole new palette of cultural recall and innuendo. This collection of essays, taken together, provides a comprehensive descriptive map of the most salient geographical foci and media in which Jewish humor flourished once, still thrives, and, in addition, is assuming new forms. *** As always, with the appearance of every new volume of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, it is our pleasant task to acknowledge the help and support from those who

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made this publication possible. We thank the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the Nachum Ben-Eli Honig Fund for their continued generous support. In this digital age, it is no small matter to conceive of the lasting and real value of a volume on a bookshelf where readers, students, and future scholars may peruse some or all of it at will. In this volume we include a moving tribute to Ezra Mendelsohn, one of the founding triumvirate of editors who shepherded Studies throughout its first decades, and who would surely have enjoyed reading this volume, given his own characteristically sardonic sense of humor. It is always a pleasure to thank Richard I. Cohen, Anat Helman, and Uzi Rebhun, co-editors of Studies, for their advice, friendship, and team spirit. The editors of the journal owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hannah LevinskyKoevary, a member of the team since Volume II (1986), who has reached her greatly merited retirement. Unsatisfied to allow the manuscript of this volume to go to press without first making sure she had done all that she had on her desk, Hannah soldiered on for several extra months, at no small sacrifice of time and energy. All of the authors, the volume’s academic editors, and most certainly Hannah’s stalwart colleague, Laurie Fialkoff, have reaped the benefit of Hannah’s dedicated work. To Laurie, of course, we owe not just the expected thanks for a job well done (again!), but also our heartfelt wish for continued satisfaction from her work with us, as we move ahead toward the production of future volumes. Gabriel N. Finder and Eli Lederhendler

Notes 1. Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (New York: 1959), 321 (emphasis in original). 2. Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence (New Haven: 2015), 120. The chapter in which Siegel incisively examines Groucho’s famous quip is titled “Groucho the Jewish Aristocrat.” 3. For examples, see “Akhdut [Akhdus],” Ringelblum Archives [Ring.] I/649; “A klang zum gelekhter,” Ring. I/1162, Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group M10. 4. Pew Research Center, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” (1 October 2013), online at www.pewforum.org. 5. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks (eds.), The Big Book of Jewish Humor: TwentyFifth Anniversary (New York: 2006), xlv. 6. Anthony David Skinner (ed. and trans.), Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: 2007), 286–287. 7. Ruth R. Wisse No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: 2013), 19–20. 8. John Efron, “From Łódź to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political Satire of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1 (2012), 50–79, quote on 52. 9. Wisse, No Joke, 116, 187. 10. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001), 287–313 (quote at 287). 11. Wisse, No Joke, 13. 12. Martina Kessel, “Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the Comical in the Twentieth Century,” in The Politics of Humor: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger (Toronto: 2012), 3. 13. Wisse, No Joke, 20.

Contents

Symposium A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World Steven Beller, “The Right Mélange”: Viennese Operetta as a Stage for Jewish Humor3 Edward Portnoy, Purim on Pesach: The Invented Tradition of Passover Yontef-bletlekh in the Warsaw Yiddish Press24 Stephen J. Whitfield, Jackie Mason: The Comedian as Ethnographer38 Jarrod Tanny, Decoding Seinfeld’s Jewishness53 Michael Berkowitz, “Humour Wholesalers”? Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s Anglo-Jewish Television Comedy75 Carol Zemel, Funny-Looking: Thoughts on Jewish Visual Humor90 Anna Shternshis, Humor and Russian Jewish Identity101 Avinoam Patt, “Laughter through Tears”: Jewish Humor in the Aftermath of the Holocaust113 Kerstin Steitz, And Hannah Laughed: The Role of Irony in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem

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Gabriel N. Finder, An Irony of History: Ephraim Kishon’s German Triumph141 Diego Rotman, The “Tsadik from Plonsk” and “Goldenyu”: Political Satire in Dzigan and Shumacher’s Israeli Comic Repertoire154 Limor Shifman, Humor and Ethnicity on Israeli Television: A Historical Perspective171 Asal Dardan, From Monsters to Pop Icons: The Use of Humor in Films on Nazis and Hitler since Der Untergang

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David Slucki, Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic: Humor and the Holocaust in Australia204

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Essay Richard I. Cohen, In Memoriam: Ezra Mendelsohn233 Review Essay Olga Litvak, The New Marranos245 Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide Esther Farbstein, Beseter hamadregah: hayahadut haortodoksit behungariyah nokhaḥ hashoah (Hidden in the Heights: Orthodox Jewry in Hungary during the Holocaust), Haim Genizi271 Amos Goldberg, Traumah beguf rishon: ketivat yomanim bitkufat hashoah (Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust), Omri Herzog273 Michal Shaul, Pe’er taḥ at ’efer: haḥ evrah haḥ aredit beyisrael betzel hashoah 1945–1961 (Beauty for Ashes: Holocaust Memory and the Rehabilitation of Ashkenazi Haredi Society in Israel 1945–1961), Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz275 Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, Ofer Ashkenazi277 Cultural Studies Joy Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, Yoel Greenberg280 Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe, Olga Litvak

245

Ernest B. Gilman, Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970, Jan Schwarz282 Rina Lapidus, Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union, Olga Litvak

245

Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia, Olga Litvak

245

Efraim Sicher (ed.), Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” in the Twenty-First Century, Mitchell B. Hart284 Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850–1950, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman286

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History and Biography Mordechai Altshuler, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964, trans. Saadya Sternberg, Olga Litvak

245

Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History, Hizky Shoham289 Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, Olga Litvak

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Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn (eds.), Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History, Eli Lederhendler292 Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation, Eli Lederhendler294 Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism and Orthodoxy, David Weinberg296 Yaacov Ro’i (ed.), The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, Olga Litvak

245

David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust, Olga Litvak

245

Lee Shai Weissbach (ed. and trans.), A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden, Gur Alroey298 Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Gideon Aran, Kookism: shoreshei Gush Emunim, tarbut hamitnaḥalim, teologiyah tziyonit, meshiḥ iyut bizmanenu (Kookism: The Roots of Gush Emunim, Settler Culture, Zionist Theology, and Contemporary Messianism), Tamar Ross301 Israel Bartal and Shimon Shamir (eds.), Beit Salomon: sheloshah dorot shel meḥ adeshei hayishuv (The Salomons: Three Generations of Pioneers and Leaders), Reuven Gafni304 Anat Helman, A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel, Jenna Weissman Joselit306 Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg (eds.), One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, Menachem Klein308 Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXX

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Note on Editorial Policy

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Symposium A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World

“The Right Mélange”: Viennese Operetta as a Stage for Jewish Humor Steven Beller (Washington, D.C.)

In the aftermath of the Anschluss of March 1938, Anna Freud turned to her father with a question. Given the desperate circumstances, she asked, should members of the family do what many other Viennese Jews had done and commit suicide? Sigmund replied: “Why? Because they would like us to?”1 It might seem surprising that such a serious figure, at such a tragic point, would make a joke. And yet Freud had authored a book devoted entirely to the subject of jokes. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) is known as one of the least funny books about jokes ever written, but it does have some good jokes in it. One of the best ones concerns “Herr N.’s” opinion of someone who was both praiseworthy and yet had many faults: “Yes, vanity is one of his four Achilles heels.”2 It is also notable that Freud’s book contains a large number of jokes about Jews, a fact that the author readily discusses in the volume.3 Even many of the jokes that are not obviously about Jews are jokes by Jews, or by individuals with a Jewish background. For instance, the “Herr N.” of the Achilles heels joke, one of Freud’s favorite sources for witticisms, was in all likelihood Josef Unger, one of Austria’s most prominent jurists, who served as president of the Austrian Supreme Court beginning in 1881. One might think that Freud would have had some objections to a Jew who had converted to enter public office, but in fact Unger was a political hero of Freud’s, regarded by him as a Jew who had achieved political prominence. In 1912, a note was added to the new edition of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that qualified “Herr N.’s” originality, attributing the same joke as a quip about Alfred de Musset by another hero of Freud’s, Heinrich Heine—but as Heine was another Jew who had converted to Christianity for career purposes, the point remains: even the jokes that are not about Jews are by them. Freud was not a great admirer of Viennese operetta. When it comes to Jews and Jewish humor in the world of operetta, however, there are similarities with Freud’s book. Not all the humor in operettas was Jewish, but much was—some even about Jews—because many of operetta’s composers, and most of the people who wrote the texts of operettas, came from the same background as Freud’s Jewish humorists, and Freud himself. That so many of the writers of the operetta world were of Jewish 3

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descent was largely a product of cultural and social factors; they did not think they were creating an explicitly Jewish artistic form, but their Jewish background did have a large influence on the character and content of this most characteristic of Viennese mass-popular cultural forms, especially with regard to its humor. Arguably, it shared the same Jewish humor as Freud, and it was also part of the pluralistic, critical modernity that we have come to know as “Vienna 1900.”

Better than Its Reputation? Many cultural historians and theorists have not found much to praise about operetta, and Viennese operetta, in particular, has rarely been taken seriously—more precisely, it has itself been accused of taking nothing seriously. Karl Kraus (quoted in Freud’s book), who was both Jewish and one of the most notorious wits of Vienna 1900, was one of those who detested Viennese operetta. Although he was an admirer of Jacques Offenbach, whose operettas satirized the hypocrisies of the French Second Empire, Viennese operettas, in his view, lacked a critical edge and were essentially supportive of the status quo. Thus, he dismissed them as frivolous entertainment, a commercial enterprise for making money rather than being a vehicle for artistic truth.4 In recent decades, however, operetta in general, and also its Viennese version, has received scholarly rehabilitation. Volker Klotz’s Operette: Porträt und Handbuch einer unerhörten Kunst (Operetta: Portrait and Handbook of an Unheard-of Art), first published in 1991, took an inclusive approach, with Parisian operetta, Viennese operetta, the “Savoy Operas” of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Spanish zarzuelas all placed under the same rubric. Klotz sees operetta as a critical, rebellious force in modern culture, much as Kraus regarded Offenbach’s works, and he stresses the ways in which the strategy of “inversion”—what W.S. Gilbert called the world of “topsy-turvydom” and others have called the “carnivalesque”—provided an upending of social hierarchies in which social norms and conventions could be (fleetingly) challenged. Klotz also distinguishes between “good” and “bad” operettas: his description of the latter as smug purveyors of “substitute happiness” that uphold the establishment and encourage “hurrah patriotism” echoes Kraus’ critique. His prime example of a bad operetta is Johann Strauss’ Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron; 1885), a classic Viennese operetta.5 Der Zigeunerbaron happens to be one of the operettas that the other prime revitalizer of interest in operetta, Moritz Csáky, showcases in Ideologie der Operette und Wiener Moderne (The Ideology of Operetta and Viennese Modernism). For Csáky, Strauss’ operetta is not so much a call to chauvinism as a plea both for national reconciliation between the German and Magyar parts of the Dual Monarchy and for an inclusive approach to ethnic diversity (in this case, for the Gypsies). Csáky acknowledges that Viennese operetta tended to be softer in its social critique than its Parisian counterpart. This, however, was partly due to its other cultural-political function, as Csáky sees it: that of offering a vision of the ethnically diverse Habsburg monarchy, which could be kept united through the very richness of its diverse cultural traditions. The fact that the classic Viennese operetta came to include not only waltzes but also polkas and czardases was itself a form of supra-nationalist cultural politics.6

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Csáky was also one of the first scholars of operetta to discuss the art form’s Jewish aspect, specifically as related to Jewish humor. His starting point is the traditional Jewish educational method of pilpul, a form of scholarly argument characterized by incisive and witty give-and-take. Transferred to the secular world, the Jewish tradition of witty response helped to shape Viennese literary humor, and hence the texts of operetta. In Csáky’s view, humor-by-response was one of the Jewish “cultural codes” of the Austrian cultural tradition.7 While this is an intriguing speculation, there are other, more concrete questions that can be asked about the Jewish aspect of Viennese operetta. How large was the Jewish presence in Viennese operetta in terms of the people composing the music, writing the texts, and making sure the resulting works were performed? Somewhat less concrete: what influence did the Jewish background of those individuals, whether grounded in Jewish religious tradition, the ideology of emancipation, or just the experience of being Jewish in a largely non-Jewish, Catholic, and antisemitic society, have on their artistic and cultural output in Viennese operetta?8 Then again, how did this Jewish background interact with operetta’s role as social critique, its “topsy-turvydom,” or its function of offering an inclusive vision of a diverse society? In other words: in what way was the humor of Viennese operetta specifically “Jewish” humor?

A Jewish Script Operettas are usually seen as primarily the creations of their composers, and on that score the Jewish presence in Viennese operetta’s “golden age” from the 1860s to the turn of the 20th century was not particularly noteworthy. Jacques Offenbach, operetta’s French (Alsatian) Jewish progenitor, did not have many contemporary Viennese Jewish counterparts. The greatest Viennese operetta composer, Johann Strauss the Younger, was, admittedly, of partial Jewish descent, and many of his close acquaintances, including his third wife, Adele, were Jewish. Strauss’ decision formally to marry Adele resulted in his ceasing to be either Catholic or Austrian; from 1887 to 1900, the great Austrian “Waltz King” was officially a German Protestant. This paradoxical situation is a comment on the nature of the liberal cultural circles in which Strauss moved, and on his (eventually) relaxed, “cosmopolitan” attitudes toward religious and patriotic norms. One might speculate whether such openness to changes in his formal identity regarding nation and faith was encouraged by his knowledge that he was part-Jewish. Beyond this, it is hard to read much more into Strauss’ “Jewish background.” It was a fact that the Nazi authorities did their utmost to cover up after 1938, but any significance for Strauss’ life and work is difficult to pin down.9 It was in the silver age of Viennese operetta, from the turn of the 20th century into the 1930s, that Jewish composers made their mark. To be sure, Franz Lehár was not Jewish (though his wife was), nor were other well-known composers such as Robert Stolz and Ralph Benatzky.10 However, many others were, among them Leo Fall, Emmerich Kálmán, Leo Ascher, Edmund Eysler, Paul Abraham, Bruno Granichstädten, and Oscar Straus. There was a similar preponderance of Jews among impresarios and theater managers, as, for instance, Wilhelm Karczag and Gabor

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Steiner, and among performers, including Louis Treumann (the first Danilo in The Merry Widow), Richard Tauber (of partial Jewish descent, but widely regarded as Jewish), and Karl Farkas. This impressive Jewish presence can be explained by the fact that the world of operetta was that of commercial theater—the closest that Central Europe came to a form of Broadway-style show business. Just as Jews were attracted to Broadway as a relatively open market for their talent, compared with more official and formal cultural institutions in which Jews were less “welcome,” so they were increasingly drawn to the opportunities presented by the “operetta industry.” The Jewish presence was most pronounced among the librettists and lyricists who wrote operetta’s words. Jews in Central Europe were, on average, more literate and better-­ educated than non-Jews, and there were many Jews on the Viennese literary scene. Indeed, a good number of librettists were journalists, writers, or even poets (such as Felix Dörmann); the derisive description in the pages of Kraus’ satirical journal Die Fackel of literary coffeehouses in Vienna as nothing more than an “Operettenbörse” (operetta [stock] exchange), where writers got their jobs as librettists, was not entirely false.11 The tradition of the Jewish librettist goes back to the golden age of operetta: Ludovic Halévy, one of Offenbach’s favorite librettists, co-wrote the play on which Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (The Bat; 1874) was based, and Strauss’ Der Zigeunerbaron had a text written by Ignatz Schnitzer. In the silver age, the Jewish presence became more noticeable. Victor Léon and Leo Stein, the two leading librettists of the turn of the 20th century, teamed up to write the first great hit of the silver age, Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow; 1905). Other prominent librettists of the age were Dörmann, Rideamus (the penname of Fritz Oliven), Fritz LöhnerBeda (the penname of Fritz Löwy, who, to add more confusion, also wrote under the name Beda), Robert Bodanzky, and Hans Müller. The leading librettist team of the interwar period was Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald, who wrote, among many other hits, Gräfin Maritza (Countess Maritza; 1924) and Die Zirkusprinzessin (The Circus Princess; 1926). By the interwar period, Jewish librettists were the norm: so large was the reliance of operetta on Jewish talent that the Nazi ban in Germany on performing works by Jews to non-Jewish audiences had, by the mid-1930s, effectively destroyed the business model of Viennese operetta.12 “Operettas” went on being performed under the Nazis, but the authentic world of operetta was destroyed by the silencing of its (mostly) Jewish creators.

Jews on Stage Given the large Jewish presence among their creators, the absence of explicitly Jewish characters in Viennese operetta is noteworthy. Claims have been made that the figure of Zsupán in Der Zigeunerbaron is a covertly negative antisemitic stereotype of the Jewish peddler, but there seems to be little actual evidence for this.13 It appears that, much as in American television, there was a certain reluctance among Jewish writers to include explicitly Jewish figures.14 In operetta, it was just after the turn of the century, in one of Lehár’s earliest hits, Der Rastelbinder (The tinker; 1902), that a clearly Jewish figure had a leading role, in a text authored by Victor Léon. What is quite surprising, given the conventional wisdom about Jews and Jewish humor in

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Vienna 1900, is that the character, Wolf Bär Pfefferkorn, is presented very positively. The Jewish humor that Freud discusses has been seen in terms of Jewish self-deprecation, even deflected anti-Jewish aggression against traditionalist East European Jews—almost a form of internalized antisemitism. Pfefferkorn, however, is depicted as both an urban sophisticate (in comparison with the Slovak peasants around him) and as a morally upright, God-fearing man.15 In addition, Pfefferkorn is a comic figure. He “yiddels,” that is, he has the accent and patter of a comic Jewish stereotype. This is made quite clear from the text of his “entrance song”: “Ä jeder Mensch, was handeln thut . . . ä Geschäft . . . Ich bin ä armer Jud!” (Any man who plies a trade . . . a business . . . I am a poor Jew).16 He also causes the plot complication that serves to part the lovers at the end of Act I, though even here, it is not as though he does anything wrong. Pfefferkorn merely takes seriously the traditional betrothal of two children in the Slovak village where he trades. When the children grow up, the boy, Janku, moves to Vienna, takes on all the accoutrements of Viennese culture (including its characteristic style of patter), and falls in love with a Viennese girl, forgetting about his earlier betrothal. Pfefferkorn is the one who brings Janku’s childhood betrothed, Suza, to Vienna, employing her as a domestic servant. Pfefferkorn, the Jew with the Viennese polish, teaches the Slovak peasant girl the ways of Vienna, including how to waltz: “The main thing at a ball / Is noble demeanor in the dance hall! / You have to be graceful /And aesthetically fine!”17 When he visits the house of the Viennese smith, Glöppler, he shows how Viennese he is by yodeling, not yiddeling (even though yodeling is Tyrolean, and not Viennese.). This is after he had pointedly introduced himself to Glöppler with the words: “I was born in Vienna / You can tell from my face.”18 Who, after all, was more emblematic of Viennese urban culture, this joke seems to be suggesting, than the city’s Jews, even the yodeling ones? Pfefferkorn tries to reunite Suza with Janku, but Suza, too, has forgotten her childhood betrothal and is now engaged to Milosch, another boy from the village, who is in Vienna at the end of his military service. Pfefferkorn’s error is to take the traditional ceremonies of Slovak society seriously, reminding the rapidly assimilated Slovak Viennese of their origins. For this he is beaten up and then, in the process of helping to resolve the crisis that he has innocently caused, he is mistaken for a member of the army reserve and has his head shaven—an act that could be seen as a symbolic punishment of the Jew for interrupting Slovak assimilation into Viennese society. Nonetheless, Pfefferkorn is welcomed back by his Slovak friends, and he gets the last word in the operetta. The plea with which he started, namely, that trust in God and benevolence brings “the right profit,” is also how the operetta ends.19 This was in 1902, when the antisemitic Christian Socials were the (municipal) rulers of Vienna. They were highly popular with the lower-middle classes who comprised much of operetta’s public, and Christian Social rhetoric assailed the “Jewish” worship of money—and profit. One might think that this context of political antisemitism would adversely affect the chances of an operetta in which a main character was a Jew praising profit, but this was not the case. There was some outrage in the press, with the liberal Neue Freie Presse highlighting the “surfeit of tastelessness” in Louis Treumann’s caricature-like (if sympathetic) portrayal of Pfefferkorn. This,

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however, did not damage box office returns, and Der Rastelbinder became Lehár’s first big hit.20 Lehár also wrote the music for Rosenstock und Edelweiss, from 1910.21 This piece is more of a cabaret act than a full operetta, although one song title, “Wer kommt heut’ in jedem Theaterstück vor? A Jud!” (Who Appears in Every Play Today? A Jew!) is noteworthy.22 The next operetta to feature a Jew in a leading role premiered in 1914. Edmund Eysler’s Frühling am Rhein (Spring/Frühling on the Rhine) (text by Carl Lindau, Beda [Fritz Löwy] and Oskar Fronz) was first performed in October, just after the start of the Great War, and its ostensible title, “Spring on the Rhine,” would suggest a tale of chauvinistic military derring-do.23 There are humorous songs aimed at, among other things, the perfidious British and the effete French, but the operetta is actually about a Jewish merchant, Moritz Frühling, who lives in a small town on the Rhine: hence the actual title is “Frühling on the Rhine.” The operetta presents the spectacle of a Jew deliberately deceiving others into thinking he is indeed the personification of the money-grubbing Jew, although this self-denigrating deception is all for the eventual triumph of good. At the heart of the plot is a relationship that might sound familiar to students of German literature: that between a Jewish merchant, Frühling, and his step-daughter, Therese, called Trendl by Frühling, who is actually the daughter of a German (Christian) nobleman, Baron Hartenstein. Her actual father gave Therese to Frühling to raise before he died, and one of his brothers had also left Therese a large inheritance—a million marks—that she will come into only upon her reaching her majority.24 Meanwhile, Frühling has raised Trendl as his own daughter—as a Jew—so that she appears as such, dressed in unfashionable clothes and speaking in the same “Jewish” accent and speech patterns as her “father.” A German Landrat (official) comments on her manner of speech: “That is like something from the Old Testament.”25 The servant of her uncle, the new Baron Hartenstein, criticizes her lack of refinement, which is easily discerned despite her beauty and education. Baron Hartenstein shares his servant’s aesthetic contempt for the “Jewish” niece, but he is prepared to overlook this and become her guardian—because of her money. He is broke, having followed an aristocrat’s usual spendthrift ways; by claiming Therese as his ward and then marrying her off to his son (her cousin), he plans to gain control of her fortune. By a trick, Frühling finds out about the baron’s dastardly intentions and, loving his foster daughter as he does, he is shocked that she might be forced to marry someone she does not love.26 So he has a “typically” Jewish response to the baron’s plan: he lies. He “admits,” untruthfully, that Therese is actually his own daughter. The nobleman’s daughter, he explains, died soon after she entered his care; in order to keep the inheritance, Frühling had substituted his own daughter, Trendl, in Therese’s place. With this revelation, Act II ends in a storm of social opprobrium heaped by the chorus on the Mammon-worshipping, mendacious Jew and his undeserving daughter. There is a celebration of the power of Jewish family love, but it is deeply sarcastic, full of antisemitic contempt for the pernicious lengths to which Jews will go in order to make life better for their children.27 In Act III, Therese has now reached her majority. After Frühling’s revelation, her uncle had ceased any attempt to become her guardian, but now that she has reached her majority, Frühling changes his story once more and proves that Trendl is indeed Therese,

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his noble friend’s daughter. Frühling admits that he had lied before, justifying his action by noting that, nowadays (in 1914), military deceptions are allowed.28 Baroness Hartenstein can now use her fortune as she wishes, and she can marry the man she loves, Heinrich Müller. “Heini” is the captain of the Rhine steamer Loreley, and the grand finale of the operetta occurs on board his boat. Frühling, basking in his success, his foster daughter’s love, and the praises of all, notes the obvious irony of all these names: Das haben wir fein gemacht! Wir fahren doch auf der Loreley, von der Heine sagt “halb zog sie ihn—halb sank er hin”! (This is fine! We are aboard the Loreley, of whom Heine says: “she half pulled him—and he half sank!”).

Therese replies to this shocking example of misattribution with a correction: Erstens ist das nicht die Loreley und zweitens ist das von Goethe! (First: that is not the Loreley; and second: that is by Goethe!).

Frühling, astonished, replies: Das ist auch von Goethe? Grossartig! Ich hab’ geglaubt, von dem ist nur “Nathan der Weise”! (That is also by Goethe? Remarkable! I thought he only wrote Nathan the Wise!).29

Freud would have appreciated this joke, because the parapraxis of mistaking Goethe for Heine is then compounded by mistaking Goethe for G.E. Lessing. The supposed mistake reveals the meaning of the operetta: it is an operetta version of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, with Frühling standing in for Nathan, a Jewish merchant with a Christian girl as a foster daughter. There would, in all likelihood, have been many Jews in the Bürgertheater’s audience, as Jews in the lower-middle and middle classes also comprised a large share of Vienna’s operetta-going public (although it is unclear just how large) and would have been attracted to the positive Jewish theme of this particular production. They would have likely guffawed at this sly reference to a classic of Enlightenment and emancipation. Frühling am Rhein combines this Enlightenment reference with the contrast between the aestheticist immorality of a German aristocrat and the ethical, if unrefined, intelligence of a Jewish merchant—and it is the Jew who justly triumphs. In contrast, several operettas featured a Jewish figure who was comic but not of such a positive cast. In Oscar Straus’ Nachtfalter (The Moth; text by Leopold Jacobson and Robert Bodanzky), from 1917, the impresario, Adolf Schmelkes, plays a central but quite negative role as the person pulling the lovers apart.30 Schmelkes represents the path to commercial success and fame that will take the female lead, Lona, away from her love, Gustl. Schmelkes is a figure of fun, but with a dark edge. The description of the character in the director’s book is indicative of the authors’ attitude toward him: Jobbertypus, übertriebene Eleganz, grosse Brillantnadel in der Krawatte, rotes Bändchen im Knopfloch. Bemüht sich schriftdeutsch zu reden, wobei ihm jedoch immer einige Entgleisungen passieren. Jargon ist nur im Klang erkennbar. (Jobber type, overdone elegance, a big diamond tie-pin in the tie, a red riband in the buttonhole. Tries to speak proper German, but keeps making slips. Recognizably Jewish only in the accent).31

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Schmelkes occasionally slips back into Jewish vocabulary, and when he presses Lona to make a decision, he claims: “Morgen habe ich ka Zeit! Morgen lass ich mich taufen” (Tomorrow I don’t have the time! Tomorrow I am getting baptized). But the humor has its limits, as does Schmelkes’ sense of security in the world of the “petty bourgeois” Viennese dance hall. Looking around the joint, he remarks: “It seems to me that here I am the only—” [breaks off; makes a hand gesture]: “Na! . . . ”32 Here, as a Jew, he is in enemy territory, whereas he is absolutely at home in the commercial theater: “Sold out!—Those are the most poetic words that our business possesses.”33 At the same time, he is not exactly at the height of his profession. When he triumphantly announces that he has signed up Lona for a tour, the list of venues serves as an occasion for bathetic humor: “We have offers the world over. From here to Buenos Aires, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Amsterdam, and in between we have a matinee in Lemberg—that’s Schmelkes!”34 This is a secondary or even tertiary tour, with a definitely Jewish tint—as Lemberg (modern-day Lviv) and Warsaw had two of the largest Jewish communities in East Central Europe. Yet it is a big enough opportunity for Lona. The operetta has a bittersweet ending, unusual for its time: the lure of modern show business—and Schmelkes—succeeds in parting Lona from her true love, Gustl, who remains both true to his art and stuck in the genteel poverty of the lower-middleclass dance hall. Although the Jewish theme in Dichterliebe (The Poet’s Love), first performed in late 1919, was more positive, the plot was similarly ambivalent.35 Although written by two of the most popular operetta librettists, Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald, this was a departure for them into more serious territory, a bio-drama of the life of Heinrich Heine, set to the music of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Why Brammer and Grünwald would take this detour (they later returned to their stock-in-trade of operetta libretti) is an intriguing question. It may be that they regarded it as a progression to something more serious, or else it was an attempt at emulating the success of other popular bio-dramas of cultural heroes such as Schubert. However, the combination of Heine with Felix Mendelssohn, both “non-Jewish Jews” who were nevertheless claimed by German Jews as cultural heroes, and the theme of Heine’s unrequited love for a potentially liberal Germany at a time when antisemitism had resurfaced but was counterbalanced by hopes for a new, democratic Germany, suggest a more ideological agenda. The plot consists of three scenes from Heine’s life: Act I, in which he is a young man in his uncle’s house; Act II, when Heine, a famous but persecuted German author, is about to be hounded into exile; and Act III, taking place in Parisian exile in 1849, with Heine on his deathbed. At each stage, Heine’s genius has to battle his oppressors: first, his uncle the Jewish banker, who has forbidden him to write; and later, the German authorities who want to arrest him for “state-endangering tendencies in his works.”36 Yet his genius is not left unrecognized. Act II is an idyll taking place in a small university town on the Rhine, where Heine, though pursued by the authorities, is beloved by students—and princesses. One such princess, Heine’s “blonde dream” (though she speaks in broad Swabian dialect to Heine’s High German), even protects him from the authorities. She predicts glory for him:

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Fahr wohl in den Exil! Das, was du schufest, bleibt bei uns, wird wurzeln, wachsen und ewig bleiben. (Farewell into exile! What you created will remain with us, will take root, grow and stay for eternity).

Heine is a national treasure: when a student, Silcher, sets Heine’s “Die Lorelei” to music, this is so successful that Silcher gains employment as a result. Yet none of this fame is recognized by the authorities for Heine himself; he is not given the position in Munich he deserves.37 The pathos of unjust persecution is heightened by his obvious, and unrequited, love for Germany, “my fatherland, that I should really call my stepfatherland.” Addressing the students who have restored him to their Burschenschaft (dueling fraternity), Heine exhorts them: Pflanzt die Fahne der Freiheit auf der Höhe des deutschen Gedankens; macht sie zur Standarte des freien Menschentums, und ich will mein bestes Herzblut hingeben für sie! ‘Westphalia’ heil! (Plant the flag of freedom at the summit of German thought; make it the standard of a free humanity, and I will sacrifice my best heart’s blood for her! Hail to Westphalia!).38

The pathos of this wish for a free, tolerant Germany is heightened to excess in Act III, where the bedridden Heine sets a caged bird free and then says: “Fly to the German homeland!” A stage direction states: “He has his arms spread wide, and in his voice trembles all of his desire for beloved Germany.”39 The characterization of Heine as emancipatory, liberal democratic hero for the new Germany (the first premiere was in Berlin, in December 1919) is clear. But the sense of this being part of German Jewish history might be questioned, were it not for two things: Heine’s story is paired with Mendelssohn’s music; and Heine is constantly tied back to his Jewish roots by having a chorus figure, Hirsch, a Jewish lottery ticket-seller and moneylender, periodically appear and comment on Heine’s life. Hirsch is the agent of fate, bringing Heine’s letter of rejection for the Munich position, and also bringing him the news, at the end, that Nathaniel Rothschild and Karl Heine have settled his debts and that Karl, his cousin, seeks reconciliation. It is thanks to Hirsch, along with Mouche, a young woman who is Heine’s Parisian muse, that the poet’s spirits revive at the very end, in a highly sentimental happy ending: “He raises himself transfigured, almost rejuvenated by her [Mouche’s] blooming youth, and slowly the curtain falls.”40 As a reminder of Heine’s Jewishness, Hirsch provides comic relief from the nationalist-liberal pathos of the play while at the same time delivering a pointed commentary on the German-Jewish symbiosis that Heine symbolizes. He is actually based on a famous comic character, Hirsch-Hyacinth, from Heine’s “Die Bäder von Lucca” (The Baths of Lucca). This character makes several appearances in Freud’s Jokes, most notably, perhaps, for the famous “Famillionairely” word-play.41 One might speculate that Brammer and Grünwald chose the Hirsch figure as Heine’s reminder of his Jewishness precisely as a result of his being highlighted in Freud’s book. Hirsch speaks in grammatically flawed Jewish German, and though he likes to display his Bildung by using Latin phrases, he invariably gets them wrong, often with quite acerbic humor. In Act I, he describes a figure in Hamburg society: “From the young, handsome, elegant, discerning Mr. John Friedland, vulgo recte formerly

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known as Jossele Friedländer. A fine man—a distinguished man—a gentleman cavalier!”42 So much for assimilation through name changes. In Act II, in the idyllic ­setting overlooking the Rhine, Hirsch is asked for a loan by a young German woman, Lorle, who assures him: “O Herr Hirsch, unser Lieb’s Herrgöttle von Biberach soll’s Ihnen zahle” (O Mr. Hirsch, our dear Lord Godkin of Biberach will pay you). Hirsch’s reply is quite abrupt, and revealing: “Ich will Ihnen was sagen—mein Herrgötten ist nicht aus Biberach.” (I will tell you something—my little Lord God is not from Biberach). Nevertheless, he makes the loan, and when Lorle and her love, Silcher, celebrate by kissing, Hirsch makes a hand gesture of blessing: “Massel und Broche, die ganze Mischpoche.”43 He may be comic, but like Pfefferkorn before him, he is honest: he charges the pair a reasonable five percent interest and explains: “Now, what do I get for this? / Only he who stays honest his whole life long / Only him does God reward.”44 Hirsch gives Heine the bad news about his rejection from Munich at the very moment he is being fêted by German students and princesses; this meeting occurs when Heine is on his way to see Ludwig Börne, another German Jewish literary hero. Speaking with “Harry” (Hirsch uses the name Heine was called by his Jewish family), Hirsch opines that “wise is sufficient” but misstates the Latin as “Sapienti salat est.” Heine corrects him: “Sat est, Herr Kandidat!” (Sat est, Mr. Candidate!) Hirsch’s response is a classic Jewish joke: “Sagt man jetzt so? Nu, ob Salat oder Spinat ist ja ganz gleich” (Is that how one says it now? Nu, whether salad or spinach, it’s all the same). Even when reassuring Heine, Hirsch cannot get it quite right: “you will become a genius of fame,” he insists, by virtue of Heine’s “Liederbuch”—by which is meant the immensely popular Buch der Lieder; the misspeaking is a deliberate indication by the authors of Hirsch’s faulty (Jewish) German grammar.45 Hirsch’s malapropisms show that Heine cannot escape his Jewish past, and the implication is that this is what lies behind his rejection by the authorities in his “step-fatherland.” Yet it is also Hirsch who brings the exiled Heine the good news of the payment of his debts and familial reconciliation. Hirsch still wants a small debt that Heine owes him repaid, and there is more disemboweling of Latin grammar: “oder, wie wir Lateiner sagen: Sit venia verbo mit Tachlis” (or, as we Latin-speakers say, sit venia verbo [pardon the expression]: with tachles). To which Heine replies: “Weniger Latein, alter Freund!”46 (Less Latin, old friend!). “Old friend” might be a sardonic expression, but it might also be truly felt, because Hirsch, Heine’s Jewish conscience, is with him at the end, when he is still banished from Germany. Heine is celebrated at his moment of transfiguration as a great German poet, but his fate is always tied to his Jewishness. Brammer and Grünwald never returned to such a direct discussion of the Jewish role in German culture. Instead they became the house librettists for Emmerich Kálmán, also writing for, among others, Lehár. The closest they came to a Jewish character was James Bondy, a millionaire’s secretary, in Die Herzogin von Chicago (The Duchess of Chicago) from 1928.47 Brammer and Grünwald did, however, employ indirect approaches to the questions they raised in Dichterliebe, as we shall see. At the beginning of the 1930s, Jewish characters re-emerged in two major operetta hits: Im weissen Rössl (The White Horse Inn) and Die Blume von Hawaii (The Flower of Hawaii) (both from 1931). In these two cases the Jewish figure represented a

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modernity that could both emancipate and rescue more traditional societies. The main composer of Im weissen Rössl, Ralph Benatzky, was not Jewish, but most of the others involved in the operetta were: Hans Müller and Erik Charell adapted the original comedy from Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, and several songs were from Robert Gilbert.48 The operetta became one of the most famous Heimatoperetten— homeland operettas that abetted Austria’s image as a tourist destination—though the inspiration for the operetta came from Berlin, where it premiered. Much of the operetta’s humor stems from the culture clash between the Austrian schmaltz of the Viennarized Salzkammergut in central Austria and its visitors from northern, Prussified Germany, represented by the family of the industrialist, Wilhelm Giesecke. In this Austro-German standoff, any Jewish aspect is secondary, and yet vestiges of Jewishness do appear. One of the comic foils to Giesecke is the son of a rival clothes manufacturer, Sigismund Sülzheimer. “Siggi” is comic: he is vain, and he lisps.49 Apart from these particular quirks, Siggi’s apparent Jewishness is suggested by his name (containing one umlaut too many) and the fact that he was played in the Viennese premiere by Karl Farkas, one half, with Fritz Grünbaum, of the most famous Jewish comedy duo in interwar Vienna.50 The main indication of Siggi’s implicitly Jewish identity, however, is his role in delivering the operetta’s punch line. Siggi’s father gives up the legal suit against Giesecke because the Sülzheimers have moved on from their current clothing item, a “union suit,” to something for ladies that is much more modern and likely to be very popular, a “Brautkleid mit Reissverschluss” (a bridal gown with a zipper).51 The combination of sexual innuendo with technological innovation would have confirmed Sülzheimer’s Jewishness to the Viennese and Berlin audiences. The character of another “modernizer,” Jim Boy in Paul Abraham’s Die Blume von Hawaii (text by Alfred Grünwald, Fritz Löhner-Beda, and Emmerich Földes) from 1931, was explicitly based on Al Jolson, the era’s most famous modern Jewish entertainer. Jim Boy is a jazz singer who portrays “Negroes” in blackface and who sings Negro songs. According to the stage directions, he is “a very sympathique, extremely elegant artiste. . . . Always in the best of moods, a heap of fun, with a healthy sense of humor.”52 He is a Hollywood star and a performer at the Folies Bergère in Paris; lover of the star Susanne Provence; very enterprising; and also a promoter and advocate of technology—for instance, he uses an “amoroscope” to tell him whether Susanne is being unfaithful to him back in France (she is, frequently). But he does not take umbrage, for he is on top of the world, always ready for new adventure and new ways to help his friends. He is also, deep down, still a Jewish momma’s boy: when his Hawaiian lover insists on their being married, Jim Boy says to her: “you talk with my mother—everything else will work itself out.”53 He is the ideal modern Jew—in operetta.

The Showboat Stratagem As will later be seen, Die Blume von Hawaii is not primarily about Jim Boy or his Jewishness. Indirectly, however, his falling for a dusky Hawaiian maiden, his helping a Hawaiian princess return to her islands, and his very career as a performer representing another oppressed race, African Americans, indicate that Die Blume von

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Hawaii, as with many operettas, was strongly influenced by the Jewish background of its creators. There was a basic affinity between the universalist pluralism of the ideology of Jewish emancipation in Central Europe and the structure and values of the operetta world. At the core of emancipation was the belief that Jewish individuals should both be able to remain Jews and be equal under the law with their fellow citizens of other faiths. In Central Europe, Jews might conclude that they had to earn their right to equality by proving they were worthy of it, reforming their religion and moral behavior, and acculturating to the German educational norm of Bildung; but they also thought they should be included as equal members of the nation (Germany) or state (Austria). At the base of emancipation lay the liberal model of the free individual in a society of “careers open to talent” in which anyone could progress. States that defended traditional order and hierarchies were deemed worthy of criticism by Jewish emancipationists, who saw their own battle for equal rights as part of the general cause of equality, freedom, and justice for all.54 Those previously shunned by society should be included, their humanity put before whatever had excluded them— whether religion, ethnicity, race, class, or gender. This was the liberal ideal that Jewish emancipationists shared. The world of operetta was fertile territory for this Jewish emancipatory worldview. Offenbach’s original social satires had embraced a critical approach toward (French) bourgeois society’s own fecklessness in supporting its liberal values. This critical attitude toward society was also present in Viennese operetta. For instance, Oscar Straus’ Die lustigen Nibelungen (The Merry Nibelungs), from 1904 (text by Rideamus [Fritz Oliven]), was a cutting satire of the Wagnerian pomposity and nationalist philistinism of Wilhelmine German society, very much in the spirit of Offenbach.55 The most significant way in which operetta showed an affinity to the values of Jewish emancipation was its “topsy-turvydom,” the traditional comic device of the world turned upside down, the “carnivalesque” situation in which traditional hierarchies and divisions were upended, with society transformed into a relationship between equal, often anonymous individuals—where the ultimate operetta relationship, love between a boy and a girl, could flourish unhindered by convention, prejudice, or economic calculation. One of operetta’s favorite plot devices, the “masked ball,” was akin to a Rawlsian “original position,” in which the anonymous protagonists do not know each other’s social rank and are thus free to transgress social rules and boundaries. The very structure of the operetta business, open and results-oriented, generated a sense that anyone with talent could make it, regardless of who he was or where he came from. At the core of Viennese operetta lay a prototype of what could be called the “ideology of show business,” and this often expressed itself in what went on in the “original position” of anonymity, whether a masked ball or an anonymous love letter. If a gypsy, a Muslim girl, a chambermaid, a lowly, poor lieutenant, an African American, a Chinese prince, or a Hawaiian dancing girl could “make it” and marry the person he or she loved, then everything was possible, also for Jews. Operettas have been deemed “good” or “bad” based on how critical their approach to the social status quo was, but as Csáky suggests, an equally significant criterion is whether the operetta includes or excludes: does it embrace diversity and bring different groups together, enabling lovers to bridge group divides, or does it do so only to drive them apart in the end? Die Fledermaus, for all its social satire and temporary

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embrace of the carnivalesque, has a conservative resolution in that all transgressive relationships are broken off and social order is restored. Die Zigeunerbaron has the more radical resolution, despite its pro-Habsburg chauvinism, because it includes the Gypsies within the family of Habsburg nationalities and validates the marriage of its Hungarian hero, Barinkay, to Saffi, an Ottoman pasha’s (Muslim) daughter.56 The oft-criticized softness of Viennese operettas concerning the established order, and their reveling in a lack of seriousness, appear in a different light if the result of all this lightheartedness is slyly, or not so slyly, to overcome the conceptual barriers to greater human inclusiveness. If, at the end of the drunken masked ball, the “unsuitable” couple are still together, and with the full sympathy of authors and audience alike, is that not a blow against exclusion—a triumph for the goals of Jewish emancipation and integration, if only obliquely? One operetta to raise such questions directly was Leo Ascher’s Bruder Leichtsinn (Brother Lightheartedness) from 1917–1918 (it premiered on New Year’s Eve 1917, at the Bürgertheater).57 Its librettists were Brammer and Grünwald, who had just had a major hit with Leo Fall’s Die Rose von Stambul (The Rose of Istanbul). In that operetta they had discussed women’s rights in Turkey; the main plot involved a progressive Turk courting his future wife with love letters purportedly from a Swiss author, but the secondary pairing had been between another Muslim girl and her German Christian lover.58 In Bruder Leichtsinn, Brammer and Grünwald went even further along the same lines, using the same plot device of a mystery love-letter writer and a main plot line that crossed racial boundaries in spectacular fashion. Bruder Leichtsinn is an operetta that serves as an ideological defense of operetta. In the depths of the First World War, it asserts that operetta’s frivolity is its strongest point. In its prologue, a dying French singer gives Musotte, her baby girl, over to the girl’s father, Count Fabrice Dunoir. She makes him promise that he will allow their child to marry whomever she loves, no matter how lighthearted (“leichtsinnig”) her choice appears to be. In order to keep him to his promise, she evokes the spirit of frivolity, Sylvester (New Year’s Eve in German), who appears in person. Frivolity is what had inspired the relationship between the couple, resulting in a love child, and now Sylvester, “brother lightheartedness” himself, will ensure that their daughter will be allowed to continue the tradition: If you love lightheartedness, give me your hand! And if you love cheerfulness, give me your hand! And if you give me your hand, Then the living will be easy, Joy will hand you her golden cup, Life will be like a dance café.”59 This point is drummed home repeatedly, there even being an appeal to local Viennese patriotism when Sylvester tells Nelly, a young Viennese woman visiting Brussels, “that you need a bit of frivolity for happiness—as a Viennese you should already know that.”60 Sylvester’s task here is to encourage Nelly to defy her father’s objections to her marrying Ernst Wondraschek, a lawyer with prospects who is unacceptable because he is Czech. This plays on a fairly common ethnic-national discrimination within contemporary Viennese society. Dealing with this anti-Czech prejudice is,

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however, easy compared to Sylvester’s task in overcoming another, much greater barrier. This more difficult task arises from the choice Musotte, the count’s “love child,” makes for the man she wishes to marry. She falls in love with an anonymous loveletter writer. Unbeknownst to her, but revealed to the audience in Act II, this is Jimmy Wells, who is described as follows in the director’s book: [E]r ist ein tadellos eleganter junger Mann—aber von schokolade brauner Gesichtsfarbe. Er ist Amerikaner, der Sohn einer Mischehe—spricht gebrochenen Akzent, zeigt gerne seine blendend weissen Zähne; hat absolut nichts “niggerartiges” an sich, sondern ist ein durchaus intelligenter, überaus liebenswürdiger Gentleman, Europäern gegenüber immer voll leiser Ironie—kurz ein Mann, der seinen Wert kennt. Bewegt sich als vollendeter Weltmann. ([H]e is a perfectly elegant young man—but with a chocolate brown colored face. He is an American, the son of a mixed marriage—speaks with a broken accent, readily flashes his dazzlingly white teeth; has absolutely nothing “nigger-like” about him, but is rather a completely intelligent, exceptionally charming gentleman, always full of a light irony around Europeans— in short, a man who knows his worth. He handles himself as a man of the world).61

In other words, despite appearances and racial prejudice, Jimmy is an exemplary human being, and the perfect match for Musotte. Jimmy himself is unsure whether he should pursue Musotte; his mother warned him not to fall in love with white girls, “Aber ich können nix für mein Herz” (but I can do nothin’ ’bout my heart). Again it is the spirit of frivolity, Sylvester, who steps in to encourage Jimmy to woo Musotte: “ein bisschen noire—ein bisschen blanche—das ist die richtige Melange” (A little noire—a little blanche—that is the right mélange).62 This is a humorous wordplay on a favorite Viennese coffee concoction, but the notion of racial miscegenation that it promotes is meant to be taken seriously. The authors are using it as an example to show that operetta’s frivolity, by defying prejudice, can produce results that are far superior to what appears to be socially sensible. The message is again driven home in the finale: Jimmy, having met Musotte and having “stepdanced” with her, reveals to her that he wrote the love letters she cherishes so much. They kiss, and it is clear that she has chosen Jimmy as her spouse. Her father, Count Dunoir, is aghast that his daughter would marry a black man, but Sylvester appears and holds him to his promise, forcing him to accept the pair’s union, so that the operetta ends happily. Sylvester/Leichtsinn predicts that Jimmy will be good for Musotte: “Jimmy wird sie hüten wie ein Juwel—er ist eine Perle” (Jimmy will guard her like a jewel—he is a pearl). Dunoir responds: “Muss es denn gerade eine schwarze Perle sein?” (Does it have to be a black pearl?). To this Sylvester responds, quick-witted as ever: “Das sind die teuersten!”63 (Those are the most valuable!). It might be seen as a piece of ironic Jewish humor that commercial considerations of the jewel trade are used to seal the happiness of the cosmopolitan, multi-racial pair of lovers.

How a Yellow Jacket Became a Land of Smiles The transgression of racial barriers was at the heart of Kálmán’s Die Bajadere (The Bayadere; 1921), another interwar operetta for which Brammer and Grünwald wrote

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the libretto. In this operetta, the cross-racial liaison is between a French singer and an Indian prince, and the happy ending has the Frenchwoman falling into her prince’s arms.64 A couple of years later, a similar cross-cultural relationship was the subject of Franz Lehár’s Die gelbe Jacke (The Yellow Jacket) from 1923 (text by Victor Léon), featuring a Viennese woman and her lover, a Chinese prince. In this production, the  coming together of two imperial cultures is marked by two marriages: that of Sou-Chong, the Chinese diplomat-prince and his Viennese lover, Lea; and that of Sou-­ Chong’s sister, Mi, and her aristocratic Viennese lover (and friend of Lea), Claudius. The operetta took the opportunity of its exotic locale (Act II is set in China) to stage lavish spectacles of supposed Chinese ceremonies. At the same time, the exotic is domesticated, in the sense that Lea goes back to Vienna at the end of Act II (she gets homesick, alienated by the strange customs in the “land of smiles”). All ends happily, however, as Sou-Chong cannot live without his love and so decides to return as well to Vienna, where all are reunited in the triumph of cosmopolitan, cross-racial love.65 The operetta was not the big hit that Lehár had expected. Partly this was because Léon and Lehár had overindulged in spectacle. The lavishness and length of the “Yellow Jacket” ceremony, in which Sou-Chong is rewarded for services to China with said garment, drove one critic to write: “Operettas that last as long as Götterdämmerung should be banned by the police.”66 Yet there was another, more troubling aspect: the Viennese audiences’ resistance to one of their own women marrying a Chinese man. The text itself had anticipated this. At one point, Sou-Chong complains of Viennese prejudices against the Chinese and avers: “We are quite civilized!”67 But such protestations were to no avail. As Lehár said in 1930 about the controversy surrounding the operetta: “At the time . . . it aroused disquiet in some circles that it could come to a marriage union between a yellow and a white person. I cannot agree with this attitude, for I have gotten to know many Chinese, who are exceptionally worthy human beings.”68 In 1929, another Lehár operetta about a Chinese-Viennese liaison premiered, this time in Berlin. Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles; text by Ludwig Herzer and Fritz Löhner-Beda) differed markedly from its predecessor, and set a new trend in operetta, by having an unhappy ending. The hero was still Sou-Chong, though his Viennese love was now called Lisa; his sister was still called Mi, but her love interest was now Gustl. The librettists had taken Léon’s original plot from Die gelbe Jacke and given it a tragic twist: instead of Sou-Chong and Lisa reuniting, the operetta ended with Lisa leaving both China and Sou-Chong for Vienna. Karl Kraus summed up what had happened: Viktor Leon ( . . . ) lässt die Liebesgeschichte mit einem Happy end enden! Das geht nicht, das ist seit ‘Friederike’ altmodisch geworden. Da müssen die Schöpfer Beda und Herzer heran, denen es schon gelungen ist, Goethe dem deutschen Volk nahe zu bringen. (Victor Léon . . . gives the love story a happy ending! That cannot be, that has become oldfashioned since ‘Friederike’ [Lehár’s previous operetta, from 1928, with text by Herzer and Löhner-Beda, about the young Goethe]. So the creators Beda and Herzer have to be brought in, after their success in bringing Goethe closer to the German people.)69

Kraus explained the change from comic to tragic ending as a change in fashion, but it was more an accommodation with contemporary racial politics. As one reviewer

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put it: “Love can no longer plaster over the chasm between East and West. . . . the exotic attraction of this connection does not withstand the alien law in a foreign land. That makes sense, one can go along with that.”70 As Martin Lichtfuss writes, Lehár and his new collaborators effectively gave in to their audience’s prejudices. In the process they created a classic of the new genre of tragic operetta, which reviewers saw as a radical break with Viennese traditions: “Gaiety, high spirits, and lightheartedness, all the fun-loving spirits of good, old operetta, appear to have been thoroughly banished from the sphere of this west-eastern play cloaked in tragedy.”71 Das Land des Lächelns became world-famous for the aria that Sou-Chong, played by Richard Tauber, sings to Lisa at the climax of the operetta: “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (My Heart is Yours Completely). Known as the “Tauber-Lied,” this was a heart-rending song of complete devotion, tragic in its foreshadowing of Lisa’s leaving her lover bereft. The odd thing was that not only did Land des Lächelns have the same basic plot as the comic Die gelbe Jacke; it was substantially the same operetta, only shortened. The new name of the operetta had been taken from the Spanish title for Die gelbe Jacke, El pais de la sonrisa. In order to change Léon’s comedy into a tragedy, Herzer and Löhner-Beda had simply left out Act III, leaving Act II’s finale as the new ending. Although they had also removed much of the spectacle and comedy, it was still largely Léon’s text and plot. Even stranger, most of the music was still the same. Lichtfuss relates how the librettists had recognized that Lehár’s music had not suited the comic text, so they reworked the text to fit the tragic music.72 As noted, the “Tauber-Lied” became a huge hit in the context of Das Land des Lächelns’ tragic ending; the same melody had been used by Lehár in Die gelbe Jacke in the aria “Duft lag in Deinem Wort” (There Was Fragrance in Your Words) but had not had the same impact with audiences.73 One verse from the original version of the aria, rediscovered by Lichtfuss, suggests the original message that Léon had intended to convey:     Lebt in der Seele uns               nicht Gottes Hauch?               Fühl’n wir nicht auch?     Lebt nicht in uns ein Herz,     das freudig schlägt     und schmerzbewegt?     Wann hört das Unrecht auf? Sagt doch, wo ist eure Menschlichkeit                 wenn gegen andre ihr nicht Menschen seid!” (Does not in our soul live / The breath of God? / Don’t we also have feelings? / Does not in us live a heart, / That beats with joy / and is moved by pain? / When will the injustice end? / Tell me, where is your humanity / if you in your treatment of others are not humans, too?).74 This message, redolent with the pathos of humanity and universalist pluralism of the Jewish ideology of emancipation, which librettists such as Léon shared, had not been well received in 1923; consequently, in the 1929 version of the operetta, it was dropped.

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The South Pacific Syndrome This did not mean that the pluralist message was dropped for all operettas. In 1931, Paul Abraham’s Die Blume von Hawaii once again explored the terrain of crossracial and cross-cultural love affairs, and it was made obvious where the sympathies of the authors lay. The text was written by none other than Alfred Grünwald, coauthor of Bruder Leichtsinn, and Fritz Löhner-Beda, co-author of Das Land des Lächelns and also of Frühling am Rhein, along with a Hungarian librettist, Emmerich Földes. The story, replete with comic twists, centers on the near-rebellion of Hawaiian natives against American oppressors, with the love story involving a Hawaiian princess who is distracted at the last minute from leading the revolt. The plot’s complexities allow the authors to make a mockery of racism. Despite the supposed racial disparity, the Hawaiian princess, Laya, is the spitting image of a white French singer; and racial considerations do not stop a white American, Captain Stone, from falling in love with Laya. It is true that by the end of the operetta the Hawaiian princess is paired with Lilo-Taro, the Hawaiian prince; Captain Stone with the French singer (and Laya’s double), Susanne Provence; and the governor’s daughter, Bessie, with his secretary, Buffy. Yet the comic confusions during the plot do result in one transgressive relationship remaining, that of Jim Boy, the Hollywood star, with Raka, the Hawaiian dancer. As with the Musotte/Jimmy Wells relationship in Bruder Leichtsinn, the whiteblack relationship is clearly meant to be regarded in a positive light. Initially this might not be obvious. That Jim Boy, the star who has made his name singing Negro songs in blackface, falls for a dark-skinned Hawaiian dancer could appear as an ironic joke at Jim Boy’s expense. The relationship initially appears to be based solely on lust and the attraction of the primitive—at least, so far as Jim Boy is concerned. In an early scene, Jim Boy calls to Raka: “Come here, you sweet chocolate bonbon. I want to get to know the inhabitants of this land better.” And when Raka asks him whether she should wear American women’s fashions, Jim Boy is horrified. With a possible allusion to the most famous black female dancer of the interwar years, Josephine Baker, he exclaims: “No! Oh God, no! You get a banana and that is it! Hawaii is in. Hawaii is the big fashion. That is what is beautiful about you!”75 Yet Jim Boy is not allowed to have his primitivist idyll of naked sensuality without the price of marriage; once married, Raka turns out to be quite different from her native image. She explains to Jim Boy that she had just pretended to be a primitive in order to snag a Western husband. Hawaiian girls, she avers, are just as civilized as Westerners, but they “pretend to be primitive children of Nature” to Americans in order to entice them. “Something exotic is what you want, mysteriously primitive, something that stirs your fantasy.” Jim Boy replies that it does not matter that her primitivist allure is just an act: “I would love you, no matter how cultured [gebildet] you are.” This is just as well, since, in reality, Raka, apart from adoring French fashion, is well-educated and speaks three languages—the very epitome of emancipation through Bildung. In other words, she is just the kind of woman that Jim Boy needs. He might call her “you sweet little chocolate piglet” but it is made clear that they are in love with each other.76

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That Jim Boy should marry a dark-skinned woman is not rough justice but rather poetic justice, as this Al Jolson surrogate is also the voice of anti-racism. At the beginning of Act III, which is set in a bar in Monte Carlo, Jim Boy gets to sing his signature hit, “Lied vom schwarzen Jonny” (Song of Black Jonny) which deserves being quoted in full in order to show the authors’ views on racism: Schwarzes Gesicht, Wolliges Haar, Grosses Saxophon; Kennt ihr mich nicht Dort aus der Bar? Applaus ist mein Lohn, Doch im Salon Oder beim Lunch Weicht mir jeder aus. Zähl’ ja nicht voll, Bin ja kein Mensch, Ich bin nur ein Nigger! Bin nur ein Jonny, Zieh’ durch die Welt, Singe für Monney, Tanze für Geld. Heimat, Dich werd’ ich niemals mehr sehn! Nimmermehr sehn! Dort in Kentucky Kenn’ ich ein Haus, Nachtschwarze Augen Schauen heraus. Bimba! Wann werd’ ich wieder dich sehn? Endlich dich sehn? Bin nur ein Nigger, Und kein weisser Mann Reicht mir die Hand; Aber die Ladys, Finden mich pikant! Sehr interessant! Bin ja der Jonny! Zieh’ durch die Welt Singe für Monney Tanze für Geld. Heimat! Dich werd’ ich niemals mehr sehn! Do-do-do-do. (Black face / Woolly hair / Large Saxophone / Don’t you recognize me / There from the bar? / Applause is my reward / But in the salon / Or at lunch / Everyone avoids me / After all, I don’t fully count / After all I’m no person [Mensch] / I’m just a Nigger! / Just a Jonny / I travel the world / Sing for cash / Dance for money. / Homeland [Heimat] that I shall never see again! Never again! / There in Kentucky / I know a house / Eyes as black as night look out. Bimba! When shall I see you again? Once more again? / I’m just a nigger, / And no white man /

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Reaches out his hand to me. / But the ladies / Find me piquant / And so interesting! / I am the Jonny. / I travel the world / Sing for cash / Dance for money. / Home[land]! I shall never see you again!)77 Set against this searing indictment, Jim Boy’s marriage with his “chocolate bonbon” Raka takes on added significance, as a challenge to racism not only in America, but also the world over—including Berlin and Vienna. The “white” man who throws down this anti-racist gauntlet is an avatar for Al Jolson, the greatest Jewish star of his time. Jews are not only preaching the overturning of social and racial barriers represented in “frivolous” operetta, they appear to be practicing it too, at least on stage.

From the Buchenwaldlied to The Sound of Music: The Jewish Legacy of Viennese Operetta Freud was ready with a mordant joke when the Nazis invaded Austria. I do not know if Alfred Grünwald or Fritz Löhner-Beda, the main authors of Die Blume von Hawaii, had a quip in hand when the Nazis arrived. Grünwald, after a brief detention by the Gestapo, fled Austria for Paris, Casablanca, Lisbon, and the United States. He died in New York in 1951. Löhner-Beda was not so lucky. He was arrested and sent first to Dachau, then to Buchenwald, where he co-wrote the Buchenwaldlied with the great Wienerlied writer, Hermann Leopoldi (who was also Jewish). Leopoldi was bought out by his wife, and spent the war in America. Löhner-Beda thought his friend Franz Lehár, one of Hitler’s favorite composers, would get him released, but this did not happen. (Lehár later insisted he “had not known” of his friend’s incarceration.) Instead Löhner-Beda was sent to a sub-camp of Auschwitz and beaten to death in December 1942. His world of Viennese operetta had already suffered severe body blows in the mid1930s from Nazi policies, specifically by the works created or co-created by Jews (most Viennese operettas) being banned from performance in the Third Reich. LöhnerBeda himself had continued writing libretti up until 1938, but his world of Viennese operetta effectively came to an end in March 1938. Although Nazi-approved operettas were staged during the war and some of those involved in operetta returned to postwar Vienna, what was left was a mere shadow of its former self. The real heir and successor to the world of operetta discussed here was that other form of light musical theater: the Broadway musical. Especially in the great musicals of Oscar Hammerstein II, Showboat, Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The King and I, the tradition of emancipation, the criticism of racism, and the transgressing of invalid boundaries found a very strong continuation, with sources of inspiration similar to that of Viennese operetta. In Vienna and on Broadway, the ideology of show business enabled Jewish individuals to take full part in commercial light theater, and that ideology was also greatly shaped by them, above all as librettists. In Vienna, operetta was never quite able to withstand the forces of prejudice, antisemitism, and xenophobia that swept over Central Europe in the 1930s; but in the United States and the West the spirit of the musical helped to further the cause of liberal, universalist pluralism in mass popular culture. A pair of New York Jews, Richard Rogers and the (half-Jewish) Oscar

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Hammerstein II, wrote the songs of The Sound of Music, including “Edelweiss.” This perhaps indicates who got the last laugh.

Notes 1. Quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (London: 2012), 362. 2. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: 1976), 57. 3. Ibid., 157. 4. Martin Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf (Vienna: 1989), 58. 5. Volker Klotz, Operette: Porträt und Handbuch einer unerhörten Kunst (Kassel: 2004), 15–57. 6. Moritz Csáky, Ideologie der Operette und Wiener Moderne: Ein kulturhistorischer Essay zur österreichischen Identität (Vienna: 1996), 78–88, 100–104; Ignatz Schnitzer, Der Zigeunerbaron (libretto) (Hamburg: 2012). 7. Csáky, Ideologie der Operette und Wiener Moderne, 112–118 (esp. 115), 211–213. 8. Cf. Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History (Cambridge: 1989), esp. 73–121. 9. Kurt Pahlen, Johann Strauss: Die Walzerdynastie (Munich: 1975), 33–34, 224–225, 245. 10. Benatzky was not of Jewish descent, despite the assumptions of many to the contrary. 11. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 52; Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 148 (2 December 1903), 24. 12. Kevin Clarke, “Jüdische Dudelei,” in Welt der Operette: Glamour, Stars und Showbusiness, ed. Marie-Theres Arnbom, Kevin Clarke, and Thomas Trabitsch (Vienna: 2011), 164. 13. Camille Crittenden, “Whose Patriotism? Austro-Hungarian Relations and Der Zigeunerbaron,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 251–278. 14. On this topic, see Jarrod Tanny’s essay in this volume, esp. 55–57. 15. Csáky, Ideologie der Operette, 119, 219–220. 16. Franz Lehár, Der Rastelbinder (libretto) (Vienna: 1902), 7–8. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Ibid., 28. 19. Ibid., 10, 41. 20. Csáky, Ideologie der Operette, 218–219. 21. Ibid., 219. 22. Online at www.allmusic.com/composition/rosenstock-und-edelweiss-singspiel-in-1-actmc0002602041 (accessed 13 March 2016). 23. Edmund Eysler, Frühling am Rhein (director’s book) (Vienna: 1914). Director’s books included stage directions and dialogue, as opposed to the usually much shorter libretti, which contained only song lyrics. Wherever possible I have referenced the director’s books. In instances in which a libretto is referenced, this was the only document available. 24. Ibid., 42. 25. Ibid., 46–51. 26. Ibid., 41–42, 68. 27. Ibid., 91–93. 28. Ibid., 119. 29. Ibid., 104. 30. Oscar Straus, Nachtfalter (director’s book) (Vienna: 1917). 31. Ibid., 42. 32. Ibid., 43, 51, 57. 33. Ibid., 71. 34. Ibid., 72. 35. Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald, Dichterliebe (director’s book) (Vienna: 1920). 36. Ibid., 57–58.

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37. Ibid., 57–59. 38. Ibid., 44. 39. Ibid., 69. 40. Ibid., 73. 41. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 47–53. 42. Brammer and Grünwald, Dichterliebe, 18. 43. Lit., good luck and blessings [for] the entire family. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Ibid., 47. 46. Ibid., 72–73. 47. Emmerich Kálmán, Die Herzogin von Chicago (libretto) (Vienna: 1928), 27–28. 48. Ralph Benatzky, Im weissen Rössl (director’s book) (Berlin: 1931). 49. Ibid., 46–47. 50. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 201–203. From 1926, Farkas and Grünbaum were the stars at the same Bürgertheater where Frühling am Rhein had played. Farkas was also the director of the Austrian premiere of Im weissen Rössl, which was so excessive in its boosting of the new, touristic Austria that it was suspected of parodying it (this was probably the intention). 51. Benatzky, Im weissen Rössl, 89. 52. Paul Abraham, Die Blume von Hawaii (director’s book) (Berlin: 1931), 36. 53. Ibid., 83. 54. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (Oxford: 1987); Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 122–143. 55. Oscar Straus, Die lustigen Nibleungen (director’s book) (Berlin: 1904); Klotz, Operette, 158–161. 56. Schnitzer, Die Zigeunerbaron, 76. 57. Leo Ascher, Bruder Leichtsinn (director’s book) (Vienna: 1918). 58. Leo Fall, Die Rose von Stambul (director’s book) (Vienna: 1916), 14–20, 28–33. 59. Ascher, Bruder Leichtsinn, 10–14. 60. Ibid., 65. 61. Ibid., 55. 62. Ibid., 57–59. 63. Ibid., 59, 72–73. 64. Jessie Wright Martin, “A Survey of the Operettas of Emmerich Kálmán” (Ph.D. thesis, Louisiana State University, 2005), 107–108, available online at http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/ etd-06142005-160600/unrestricted/Martin_thesis.pdf (accessed 13 March 2016). 65. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 210–211. 66. Review in Wiener Mittagszeitung (10 February 1923), quoted in ibid., 218. 67. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 220. 68. Neue Freie Presse (21 September 1930), quoted in ibid., 212. 69. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 820 (October 1929), 47, quoted in ibid. Lehár’s previous operetta, Friederike, from 1928, with text by Herzer and Löhner-Beda, was about the young Goethe. 70. Fred Heller review in Der Wiener Tag (28 September 1930), quoted in ibid. 71. Review in Neues Wiener Tagblatt (28 September 1930), quoted in ibid., 214. 72. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 218. 73. Franz Lehár, Die gelbe Jacke (arrangement for piano, with text) (Vienna: 1923), 120. 74. Lichtfuss, Operette im Ausverkauf, 217. 75. Abraham, Blume von Hawaii, 65, 79, 83. 76. Ibid., 159, 167–171. 77. Ibid., 141–143.

Purim on Pesach: The Invented Tradition of Passover Yontef-bletlekh in the Warsaw Yiddish Press Edward Portnoy (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

When the Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz began publishing yontef-bletlekh (holiday pages) during the mid-1890s, he could not have anticipated that he would be initiating a publishing tradition in the Yiddish periodical trade in the Russian-ruled Pale of Settlement (and later, in independent Poland). Yontef-bletlekh were conceived as a means of circumventing the Russian censor’s ban on Yiddish periodicals. The ruse, which took advantage of looser regulations on “one-time journals” (odnodnyevnye gazety), was premised on the fact that almost every month in the Hebrew calendar has a Jewish holiday. Hence, by publishing a one-time journal in relation to each holiday—each with a unique title—one could create a de facto periodical. Accordingly, from 1894 to 1896, Peretz and his colleagues published a small monthly magazine with a different title for each issue, each under the guise of being connected to a specific holiday. (This idea was not, in fact, their own, but rather that of a little-known publisher of annual, almanac-style calendars named Heshl Eplberg.)1 In spite of their religiously referential titles, Peretz’s yontef-bletlekh did not contain religiously oriented texts.2 Instead, these small-format, 16-page magazines contained mainly didactic material, short stories, and poems, some of which were both slightly satirical and slightly socialistic. Peretz’s yontef-bletlekh were recalled as being inspirational to a number of young radicals who were seeking new forms of national and political expression. As a result, they were regarded as an important phenomenon in Yiddish publishing at the time.3 According to Dovid Pinski, one of his colleagues on the project, Peretz ceased publishing his monthly bletlekh after a two-year run, in part because he was under the impression that he was about to receive permission to publish the first Yiddish daily in the empire, a plan that ultimately fell through.4 Publication of the yontef-bletlekh was never resumed; after an unexpected but brief stint in jail (on charges of “promoting socialism”) near the end of the century, Peretz went to work writing for Der yid, a new Yiddish weekly that was written mainly in Warsaw but was printed in Galicia, just outside of the Russian Empire’s borders—yet another method by which publishers were able to avoid the Russian censor. Neither Pinski nor Peretz’s other collaborator, 24

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Mordkhe Spektor, took up the mantle of the publications, and Eplberg never reclaimed his idea. Notwithstanding, the idea of publishing yontef-bletlekh did not die. This concept— namely, the creation of a one-time journal filled with secular content but labeled with a holiday-related title and published during holidays—would subsequently be appropriated by Yiddish humorists, who would begin publishing satire magazines on Jewish holidays on an annual basis. Submitted to Russian and, later, Polish government administrators as odnodnyevnye gazety and jednodniowki, respectively, this mainly Warsaw-based humoristic-journalistic subgenre included hundreds of publications and comprised nearly a quarter of all Yiddish journalistic endeavors in the Pale and in Poland from the turn of the 20th century until the Second World War. Indeed, it accounted for a significant proportion of Yiddish periodical titles as a whole. Although Peretz’s intended audience was secular, Yiddish satire magazines generally appealed to a very wide audience, not just secular Jews. In fact, traditional texts were referenced so regularly that readers had to be knowledgeable in order to understand the material. While there were a few early 20th-century attempts to publish literary-oriented yontef-bletlekh, these did not last. It was only in the realm of humor and satire that this invented tradition gained traction.5 One may ask why. For one thing, humor publications in general were popular among Yiddish readers in the Russian Empire: one can count, for example, at least a dozen joke books among the dozens of publications put out by the popular Yiddish writer Isaac Meyer Dik during the 1880s. Moreover, the general tenor of Yiddish literature during this period was satirical in nature. This tendency, which was especially noticeable among maskilic writers, could be found in the stories of Y.Y. Linetsky, Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Abramovitsh), and Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh), among others. It heavily influenced the growing field of fiction and, ultimately, Jewish journalism as a whole. Because of the aforementioned ban on Yiddish periodicals, fewer than half a dozen Yiddish humor magazines appeared during the second half of the 19th century (though this was not for want of trying). Their later success as a genre had much to do with the explosion of satire journals that appeared throughout the Russian Empire in the wake of the 1905 revolution. From the end of 1905 through 1907, more than 400 humor and satire journals were published in a variety of languages throughout the empire, during a period in which press restrictions were at first ignored and then officially relaxed. These journals contained acerbically satirical poems, stories, parodic news reports and—their most recognizable feature—caricatures, all of which bitterly mocked the tsarist regime. This period marks the beginning of a serious Yiddish satire press in the Russian Empire and the point at which the concept of humorous yontef-bletlekh begins to take shape.6 Although Yiddish satire journals appeared at about the same time as similar magazines in Russian and Polish, the Yiddish variant had some distinct differences. One of the more obvious differences concerned the titles of the magazines. The names of Russian- and Polish-language journals of this period are clearly reflective of the horrific violence that was occurring in the streets. Some examples of the Russian titles include Bombi (Bombs), Bortsy (Fighters), Dikar’ (Savage), Iad (Venom), Molot (Hammer), Puli (Bullets), Shershen’ (Hornet), Shtyk (Bayonet), Taran (Battering

26Edward Portnoy

ram), and Vampir (Vampire). The names of the Polish magazines—among them, Lucyper (Lucifer), Piekło (Hell), Rabus (Marauder), Satyr, and Szczutek (Flick)— similarly evoke violent imagery, and they were frequently accompanied by equally violent cartoon images. In contrast, only a small number of Yiddish satire journals have titles that evoke violent themes. Instead of embracing the violent turn in co-territorial satire, Yiddish humorists turned to the recently invented tradition  of yontef-bletlekh and published holiday-related magazines with titles such as Der shoyfer (for the holiday of Rosh Hashanah), Kapores (Yom Kippur), Der esreg (Sukkot), Di likhtelekh (Hanukah), Homentashn (Purim), and Der afikoymen (Passover). Some of these titles are lifted directly from those Peretz gave to his own yontef-bletlekh.7 Even those Yiddish satire periodicals of the post-1905 era that did not have holiday-related names published liturgical parodies and cartoons that used holiday themes as metaphors, all of which points to the enormous significance of holidays as calendrical and cultural markers in Jewish life. As the Yiddish press continued to grow during the early 20th century, the publication cycle would be repeated annually, and liturgical parodies and cartoons would be replenished with the current news of the day. Within these humorous yontef-bletlekh, Yiddish humorists repurposed the liturgy of each holiday and created parodies that targeted contemporary political events and social matters. Although co-territorial satire magazines in Russian and Polish were similar in form and in content, neither relied on holidays and liturgy as a comic foil as did the Yiddish journals—a clear indication that this was a uniquely Jewish cultural phenomenon. Moreover, these parodies point to the significance of traditional texts in Jewish culture, even for s­ o-called secular Jews. Many of the newly secular writers of the Yiddish press made brilliant use of their yeshiva background, exploiting the framework of traditional texts in order to present satirical commentary on contemporary issues. The popularity of Yiddish satire magazines found expression in Karikaturn, a play written in 1909 by a young writer named Yitshak Katzenelson, which featured a secondary school student who refused normative reading material and instead collected and read only satire magazines. “In my library you won’t find one novel, not one story. . . . I hate poetry! . . .  My entire book shelf is made up only of humor magazines, just comics!” he explains to another character in the play.8 Another indication of their popularity was a critique offered by Aleksander Mukdoyni, a prominent advocate of Yiddish culture. “Beys-medresh jokes of the past were far bolder, more skeptical and had more bite than jokes today,” he wrote in a 1913 review. “Today’s jokes have only a beys-medresh-like form, but they are frightened, meager, and dumb. Our caricatures look the same way.”9 Mukdoyni’s criticism points to the fact that a core of clever and distinctly Jewish humor could be found in the traditional study hall (beysmedresh)—a matter that undoubtedly played a role in the widespread exploitation of traditional material in Yiddish humor. Yontef-bletlekh were not the only humoristic publications to contain material related to Jewish holidays. This was true as well of a small number of weekly humor magazines that came into existence during the interwar period in Poland, which typically published special holiday issues. Such material also appeared in the pre-holiday Friday humor sections of the Yiddish dailies. Indeed, by the first decade of the 20th

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century, engagement with Jewish holidays as a foil for contemporary humor and satire had become a standard and significant feature of the Yiddish press of Poland. This situation prevailed until 1939 and the wartime years that followed, which marked the destruction of the Polish Yiddish press. It is noteworthy that satire magazines were published for every major Jewish holiday—even Yom Kippur, which, due to its solemn nature, would seem to have been an unlikely candidate for a humor publication. At the same time, there was a fair amount of variance in the frequency of publications for specific holidays. One might assume that Purim would have been the most popular candidate for such publications, as the carnivalesque nature of the holiday lends itself perfectly to the kind of raw mockery proffered by the Yiddish satire journals. Moreover, as Marion Aptroot has shown, there was a precedent of Western Yiddish yontef-bletlekh published during Purim during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.10 Notwithstanding, while there were certainly a fair number of Purim-related yontef-bletlekh that appeared in Russianruled (and later, independent) Poland, a large majority of yontef-bletlekh were published in connection with Passover. In fact, according to Abram Kirzhnits’ and Yechiel Szeintuch’s bibliographic monographs on Yiddish periodicals in Russian-ruled and in interwar Poland, of the approximately 200 satirical yontef-bletlekh published between 1901 and 1939, more than two-thirds were specific to Passover.11 The large number of Passover-related humor magazines resulted in the production of a huge number of Hagadah parodies and other Passover-related comic works. In fact, the significant number of Passover humor publications, combined with the parodies that appeared annually in the humor sections of Yiddish daily newspapers, renders the Hagadah the most parodied Jewish liturgical text in history. The reason for the surfeit of Passover yontef-bletlekh and their Hagadah parodies is relatively straightforward. Publishers knew that most Jews took time off from work during the holiday, and since print was the dominant medium of this period, newspapers and magazines published bulked-up holiday issues in order to provide enough reading material for a week’s worth of leisure, just as the Friday Yiddish paper provided extra sections for Shabbos reading. In addition, the text of the Hagadah, read each year in the course of a mealtime ceremony in which the entire family was involved, was familiar to a much wider swath of Jews than other holiday-specific liturgical material. The text of the Hagadah thus lent itself to parody in a way that other holiday texts did not. Moreover, liturgical structures such as the Four Questions, the Four Sons, and the Ten Plagues could be used each year, with the parody offering new questions, new sons, and new plagues in accordance with current events and issues. Notably, the liturgical parodies produced by the Yiddish press were not parasitic, meaning they did not attack the text they exploited for their humor. Instead, they engaged liturgical texts as literary structures. The question comes to mind as to whether using liturgical text for humorous purposes was potentially offensive to the  broad Jewish audience, and, more especially, to religiously observant Jews. Apparently not, as no criticism of the phenomenon of liturgical parody appears in the Yiddish press. If anything, the numerous Hagadah parodies reified the significance of the original text, particularly in light of the secularization that was taking place during that period.

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As indicated, more Hagadah parodies appeared in Congress (and later, interwar) Poland than anywhere else. While North American Yiddish humor journals also published Hagadah parodies, these were mainly subsumed by the daily and weekly press; there were no yontef-bletlekh, apart from a small number of anti-religious Passover magazines published by those affiliated with the Communist movement. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a small number of Hagadah parodies of the 1920s were relegated to the realm of anti-religious propaganda. In addition, Hagadah parodies were published in many other Yiddish centers, from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg, making them a truly worldwide phenomenon. In Poland, Passover yontef-bletlekh were mainly the products of major press centers such as Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz, though they also appeared at times in smaller localities such as Bialystok and Grodno. Indeed, many hundreds—possibly thousands—of such parodies exist. It is of course impossible to deal with them all in the space of a single essay, and because they address such a wide variety of issues, it is difficult to provide a representative selection. There may be, in fact, no such thing, as examples come in all shapes and sizes. Some parody the entire Hagadah, though most tend to parody select sections of the text. Some comprise entire magazines, while others take up far less space, sometimes amounting to no more than a newspaper column. Finally, many Hagadah parodies contain cartoons. Following the failed revolution of 1905, cartoons became a visual mainstay in humoristic yontef-bletlekh and in Yiddish humor journals in general. In particular, the Four Sons and the Ten Plagues were commonly parodied Hagadah images. Although examples of Hagadah parody are known to exist as early as the 13th century,12 it was the maskilim who produced the first modern variants—those that engage the structure of the Hagadah liturgy in order to create critical commentary on a contemporary matter. Many of these appeared in the 19th-century Hebrew press and influenced members of the nascent Jewish labor movement of the 1880s to create their own parodies in Yiddish. The first of these appeared in Morris Vintshevsky’s Arbeter fraynd in London in 1887. A number of variations on it, including one by the Bund, were eventually published and republished as The Socialist Hagadah, and its anti-capitalist, revolutionary text remained virtually the same over a period of decades. Vintshevsky’s parody of the Four Questions, for example, begins as follows: Ma nishtane—why are we different from Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meyer the banker, from Zorach the moneylender, from Reb Todros the rabbi? They don’t work yet they have food and drink during the day and also at night at least a hundred times over, [while] we toil with all our strength the whole day, and at night we have nothing at all to eat.13

Here, the Hagadah becomes a revolutionary tract, the purpose of which is to awaken the working class to a recognition of its subordinate economic and societal status. At  the same time, unlike much of the socialist propaganda of the same period, it places the ideals of the movement firmly within Jewish tradition, exploiting the familiarity and power of the text to promote its concepts to a specifically Jewish audience. In contrast to the tendentious proletarian Hagadahs, parodies produced in interwar Poland address a broad variety of topics, relying on the maskilic policy of inserting contemporary issues into the liturgy. Examples include the following:

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• The tax burden levied on Jewish merchants in Warsaw (“The Gensha Street Hagadah,” 1924) • The trials and tribulations of those seeking to rent apartments in Warsaw (“The Renter’s Hagadah,” 1924) • Internal Jewish political activity (“The Kehile Hagadah,” 1927) • Jewish communal elections (“The Up-to-the-Minute Hagadah,” 1928, subtitled: “Seder for Running an Election Campaign”) • The phenomenon of borrowing at high interest rates (“The Little Hagadah,” 1928) • The “Miss Judea” beauty pageant (“Hagadah of Miss Judea,” 1929) (the subject of four different Passover yontef-bletlekh) • Unsavory business practices of Warsaw’s Jewish businessmen (“The Merchant’s Hagadah,” 1930) • The rise of the Nazi regime in Germany (“The Hitler Hagadah,” 1933) In sum, nearly every political and social aspect of Jewish society was subject to satirical barbs—Bundism, socialism, Communism, Zionism (in all its forms and factions), Folkism, Orthodoxy and, especially, assimilationism—so, too, were the leaders or perceived proponents of all of these movements. The satires reflect the vitality and intensity of a society in deep political, religious, and cultural flux. As such, they serve as valuable fragments of humorous social commentary on a wide array of issues meaningful to Polish Jewry in the first few decades of the 20th century, in addition to offering choice examples of current slang and the intermingling of multiple languages within a single text.

Examples of Interwar Hagadah Parodies The Peysekh-blat (Lublin) With its faux rabbinical authorization declaring it to be “kosher lemahadrin minhamadrin,” the Peysekh-blat of Lublin, circa 1925,14 has a cover that, at first glance, resembles a religious tract. The reader, however, quickly sees a notice below indicating that the booklet is actually a humor magazine: “This paper brings forth laughter by all.” Driving the point home even further is the subsequent notice that the Lodzborn Jewish strongman, Zishe Breitbart, will be “carrying the Yeshiva of Lublin to Jerusalem, and will bring the Hebrew University back to Warsaw.” Breitbart, an enormously popular circus performer who was in the midst of a major tour of Poland in early 1925, was an indisputably newsworthy figure during this period. The inclusion of his name bears no relation to the interior text of the magazine; it is rather a tip-off to readers that the anonymous author of the satire was up to date with current cultural matters in Poland. The target of the Hagadah parody comprising the booklet is bourgeois religious Jewry, and the framing device is Beys Yankev (Beis Yaakov), the network of schools providing religious and secular education for girls, as indicated by its title, “Do fregt di fir kashes a fraylayn fun beys-yankev-shule, frantsishkaner 6” (The Four Questions

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Asked Here by a Young Lady from the Beys Yankev School, Frantsishkaner [Street] 6). The piece begins with the Four Questions as asked by a student at the school. Upending the traditional Yiddish rendition in which the youngest son tells his father that he has four questions to ask him, here we have a gendered twist: “Mameshe, ikh vel dir fregn fir kashes” (Mama, I’m going to ask you four questions). The daughter’s subsequent query is a long, run-on question—it takes up an entire page. The subject at hand is the girl’s aunt. Why, the daughter wonders, does her aunt show her cleavage, put on makeup, wear stockings, and have long fingernails? The mother first responds with the traditional response (“’Avadim hayinu” [We were slaves]) but then adds her own commentary: “We women have been enslaved by the men, and what they demand must be fulfilled.” What follows is a satirical consideration of matters pertaining to the laws of family purity (taharas mishpokhe), in particular the obligation for a married woman to go to the ritual bath (mikve) a week after the end of her menstrual period, before resuming sexual relations with her husband. Instead of replies from four sons, there are responses by four daughters. The wise (married) daughter, able to deal with matters of family purity on her own, goes to the mikve without being prompted. The wicked daughter, ostensibly a secular girl who promotes modernity over tradition, argues that a modern bath is more hygienic than the mikve. The simple (naïve) daughter wonders what all the fuss about hygiene is—after all, her bobe (grandma) went to the mikve “under ice” and it was fine with her. Finally, the daughter who doesn’t even know how to ask a question is the one who gets seduced by young men. Her father has to explain to her that if “one takes another [as a mate], he’ll soon have two [that is, the two will become three].” Echoing the variety of responses in the original, these replies consider contemporary issues through the lens of a community in transition that must consider how tradition and modernity can co-exist. Like most Hagadah parodies, that which appears in the Peysekh-blat of Lublin contains only key portions of the text. Among these are the “Dayenu” (“It would be enough for us”) recitation, a portion of which reads: If women would wear wigs and men would wear a beard and peyes, dayenu. If women and men would dance together but not at Jewish weddings, dayenu. If Jewish daughters went naked but cut their nails, dayenu. If our aristocrats would put up a mezuza and not lay tfilin,* dayenu. * We gave out special pamphlets explaining the requirements regarding tfilin and mezuzes.

This particular text was produced by and for the Orthodox community, which makes it something of a rarity among the Hagadah parodies. The parody is well wrought. There is much humor and, as indicated by some of the “Dayenu” lines, great exaggeration and incongruity, all of which are typical components of satirical parody. At the same time, it addresses serious issues facing the Orthodox community—most significantly, the challenge of growing indifference to, and ignorance of, Jewish law (denoted by the explanation by the authors that they had disseminated a pamphlet regarding ritual use of tfilin and mezuzes). Such an explanation serves to temper the potential frivolity of the text and render it acceptable (even without rabbinic authorization) to an Orthodox audience.

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The Gensha Street Hagadah “An’hagode far gensha gas” (1924)15 is told from the point of view of an aspiring Gensha Street businessman (Gensha was considered the Fifth Avenue of Warsaw Jewry). It begins with a takeoff on the traditional search for leaven in which embezzlers and crooks are the ones being sought: “kol khamire vekhamiye—ale harbe ‘likhve’—breklekh, daykhe breshese—vos gefinin zikh in mayn gesheft” (All leaven—all the tough usurers—in my possession, who can be found in my business place). As is typical of most Hagadah parodies, it then makes use of the kadesh, urkhats, karpas, yakhets . . . mnemonic, applying each heading to what is occurring in the text. The kadesh, which normally refers to the kiddush (blessing) over wine, now pertains to someone who made deals before the currency revaluation (the blessing presumably refers to the profits he made). Urkhats (washing) becomes a slang term for Gensha Street shop owners cozying up to provincial businessmen visiting the street, who are pushed into the stores with a stalk of parsley (karpas) and then divided (yakhats) into those who can pay cash and those who leave an IOU. One such hapless businessman is then made “to sing and to say” (magid), a play on both magid—the “telling” of the Hagadah story and the old Yiddish folk expression “tsu zingn un tsu zogn” (the implication of which is that he will cause some sort of trouble); this is followed by a sale (moytsi), which is connected with the blessing of the matzo (since “bread” was a common slang term for money), and at the conclusion is taxes (maror), the bitter part of the transaction. The Hagadah continues with a discussion about how the Jews conduct commerce in Poland. The Four Questions ask why taxes are so high, while the section on the Four Sons elaborates on the onerous laws relating to commerce. In this case, the four sons represent Poles of various gradations: the wise son is a “patriot,” who informs the yidelekh (little Jews) that the laws are for them. The wicked son is a “Rozvoynik,”16 who asks the zhides (kikes), “how is it that you (Jews) arrive at commerce?” (The response is that “commerce is a decent thing, not for his potato-head.”) The simple son is the official in charge of the price list (cennik), and the son who is unable to ask a question is the tax collector. In addition to the commentary on the current economic and political situation of the Jews, there is, as is typical with humor and parody, a great deal of wordplay and bending of language. “An’hagode far gensha gas” is, in fact, an excellent example of what Chone Shmeruk termed the “Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish polysystem” in that it was written with the expectation that the reader would be able to understand all three languages (this expectation does not hold for most of the parodies).17 Take, for example, the parodic recitation of dover akher, “another explanation,” followed by the Ten Plagues, which are transformed here, in the mind of the Gensha Street businessman, into different kinds of taxes (in the text that follows, Hebrew is underlined, Yiddish is italicized, and Polish—transliterated as it appeared within the Yiddish text—is in boldface): Dover akher—men ken keyn khazer nisht zayn un men muz voynen un tsoln; Beyad khazoke—az nisht nemt men mit gvald. Shtayim—un men muz moykhl   zayn tsoln kara tsvey mol azoy fil. Eylu eser podatkes she’hevi grabski aleynu, vilu heyn:

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Mayantkove, dokhodove, miyeshkanyove, odekhove, spatserove, vodotsionove, esregove, shalekh-monesove, kneydlekhove . . .  (Another explanation [this is a Hebrew/Yiddish pun: Dover akher, literally “something else,” is a euphemistic term for pig]—one cannot be a pig and one must pay for where one lives; With a strong hand—if not, they take you brutally. Two—and one must apologize and pay a penalty that is twice as much. These are the ten taxes that Grabski brought upon us: Property tax, capital gains tax, apartment tax, breathing tax, walking tax, plumbing tax, etrog tax, Purim-gift tax, matzo-ball tax . . . ). It seems clear that the purpose of this section is both to criticize and to render absurd the heavy taxation and revaluation of currency that occurred during the Grabski administration, which was to collapse and be replaced the following year.18 The Hagadah continues with a hopeful version of “Ehad mi yodeye,” (Who Knows One?) a counting song of significant Jewish terms and objects, which in this case counts customers (“Who knows how much money one might make if five or six customers come into the store?”). It closes with the traditional “Khad gadye,” though instead of a little kid, the father buys a “pekele” (little package). A blessing is made on the forthcoming sfire,19 and the counting (of money) begins. One of the more well-thought-out and intricate of the Hagadah parodies, “An’hagode far gensha gas” successfully presents the point of view of a Jewish businessman seeking to ply his trade under the onerous burden of taxes and government regulations. The piece is signed by “Der koter” (The Tomcat), who was likely Pinkhes Katz, the editor of A malke oyf peysekh, the jednodniowka in which the parody appeared.20

The “Miss Judea” Hagadahs The year 1929 was particularly significant in terms of Hagadah parody in Warsaw. Whereas one or two Passover yontef-bletlekh were usually published annually, four separate satire journals were published for Passover of 1929, all of which were dedicated to two interconnected scandals that occurred during a three-week period prior to the holiday. The first scandal concerned the Miss Judea beauty pageant, a contest sponsored that year by the Polish-language Jewish daily, Nasz Przegla d̨ , to crown the most beautiful Jewish girl in Poland. The pageant attracted a great deal of publicity but was also roundly criticized by some as an imitation of the quasi-Catholic tradition of choosing a Mardi Gras queen. Notwithstanding, it was a popular success. As part of her tour of Jewish institutions in Warsaw, the winner of the pageant, Zofja Oldak, attended an official reception at the Kehile (Kehilla: communal board) building hosted by its president, Heshl Farbshteyn, leader of the religious-Zionist Mizrachi party. At the reception, Farbshteyn, evidently enamored of Ms. Oldak, praised her beauty and read from the Song of Songs in her honor. This act provoked much ire and outrage among the Agudas yisroel (Agudat Israel) members of the Kehile, who mounted a vigorous protest outside the Kehile building on Grzybowska Street, accusing Farbshteyn of both degrading the Kehile and of desecrating the Song of Songs. The following week, as the scandal was dissipating, Yeshaye Rozenboym, the vice president of the Kehile and leader of the Aguda, died. At the funeral, Farbshteyn—

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who rose to eulogize his colleague in the name of the Kehile—was shouted down by a group of angry mourners, who in turn were shouted at by others who thought he should be allowed to give his eulogy, since this was a funeral and not a political event, and since Farbshteyn had obtained permission from Rozenboym’s family to speak. As the argument escalated, pushing and shoving began. Fistfights broke out between two camps of hasidim (the partisans for and against Farbshteyn) and continued even after Farbshteyn was hustled away from the scene. The dais was smashed as a melee ensued. The remaining eulogies were cancelled and the burial was forced to take place while people were yelling and fighting around the gravesite and throughout the cemetery.21 The affair became the talk of Warsaw that Passover season and served to prolong the saga of Miss Judea as the main target of the Friday humor sections of the daily papers, as well as that of the seasonal satire journals. Haynt, the leading Yiddish daily, published a journal called Der afikoymen, which was subtitled: “Humorous Passover Journal for Politics, Art and Miss Judea.” Its cover showed a caricature of Farbshteyn “kashering” a doll-sized Miss Judea in a large pot marked “Kehile.” The image expressed the widely held opinion that the entire Miss Judea affair wasn’t proper (“kosher”) to begin with and that Nasz Przeglad̨ had sought a gesture on the part of the president of the Kehile to make the pageant more acceptable. The editors of Haynt were well aware that with such a juicy scandal, other Passover journals would appear. For this reason, their parody opens with the pronouncement that this is “the only authentic Miss Judea Hagadah . . . others should be burned along with the khometz [consumables not fit for Passover use].” “Di hagode fun mis yudeya” uses the original liturgical text interspersed with commentary in Yiddish and Polish, all of which appears underneath the mnemonic order of the seder (kadesh, urkhats, karpas, yakhets, etc.), which is incorporated into the text of the parody. The parodist was thus able to convey the idea behind the word or action of the seder, relying on readers’ knowledge of the mnemonic, and providing an abbreviated basis on which the parody would stand. Typically, the comments that follow the seder headings relate to the activities connected to them. Preceding the text of the Hagadah is the ceremony of bedikes khomets, the search for leaven. Here, the ceremony entails tying a photograph of the winner of Miss Judea onto a wooden spoon and burning it—but if Passover eve falls on the Sabbath, the khomets must not be touched, because it is “muktse makhmes miyes” (forbidden on account of its execrable, “ugly” character). The sarcasm of “Di hagode fun mis yudeya” was not limited to the beauty pageant scandal. For example, items on the seder plate are described as follows: the zroye, or shankbone, is “a piece of meat, not too cold and not too warm, like an article in Folkstsaytung.” Beytso [egg] is “a scrambled egg of modern poetry.” The commentary continues: “Instead of maror, one can substitute a fresh protest by a Gensha Street businessman. Kharoyses is a concoction of rotten apples, nuts from Jerusalem, cinnamon, and a little olive oil from one of Hillel Zeitlin’s articles.” In this short section, the author attacks the Bund, modern poetry as a genre, the doomed protests of Jewish merchants against high taxes, and Hillel Zeitlin, a popular columnist for Moment, a daily newspaper. Following these satiric digressions, the text returns to the pageant: “Instead of karpes, one can use a beauty queen, or some other green sprig. Kadesh: be careful not to complement one of the Miss Judea contestants

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because she might declare you her husband. Urkhats: before a contestant is viewed by the judges, she should probably wash beforehand.” Under magid, it is written that Jacob Apenshlak, the editor of Nasz Przegla d̨ , lifts his glass of wine and says “Ho lakhmo, what doesn’t one do for a little bread?”—a comment on the real reason behind the pageant, an attempt to increase the newspaper’s circulation. In addition to its value in evoking attitudes toward a number of issues of the day, “Di hagode fun mis yudeya,” like “An’hagode far gensha gas,” was written with the expectation that the reader would be able to understand three languages: Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish. (Most other parodies made use of two languages, Yiddish and Hebrew.) This is illustrated, for instance, in the following excerpt from the closing sections of the Hagadah: Shfoykh hamaskho al hagoyim Tut’s nokh di goyim, azoy vi zey hobn oyfgenumen zeyer mis, nemt’s oykh oyf undzer “mis.” Di mis shrayt: Ana hoshiyo no Gevald, helft’s aroys mit a nedove Nirtse Af der nakht farbet di mis di sendzhes oyf a “pshenshe” un zi zogt: Khasal sidur Tatush dopiero pshishedl z’ modlitvi v’ sinagodze un zi shrayt: L’shone habe beyerushelayim Pragne bitsh khalutsan i yekhatsh do grokhovo (Pour out your wrath on the Gentiles You imitate the Gentiles, as they entertained their Miss, you also entertain our “Miss.” The Miss screams: We beseech Thee, save now Help, help out with a contribution Acceptance At night, the judges invite the Miss to a sit-down dinner and she says: Concluded is the Seder Daddy just got back from praying at the synagogue and she screams: Next year in Jerusalem: I want to be a khaluts [pioneer] and take a ride to Grochow). This portion of the parody uses the original Hagadic text to accuse the participants of imitating Gentiles in holding a beauty contest and then parading the winner around town, an event which traditionally occurred in connection with Shrove Tuesday. It addresses the actual monetary situation of the winner, and how the judges swoon over her. The reference to her wanting to be a khaluts and go to Grochow refers to a photo shoot the editors of Nasz Przegla d̨ arranged on a pre-immigration kibbutz in a suburb of Warsaw. The ironic use of the traditional Hebrew text juxtaposed with the Yiddish and Polish reality, and the forced tension between the current scandal and the ancient hallowed events of the Hagadah, renders the piece bitingly satirical. Another of the yontef-bletlekh published that season, Der seder fun mis yudeya, featured a parody based on the activities surrounding the pageant. Conceived as

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instructions to the contestants, it first explains that the seder table must be draped in issues of Nasz Przegla d̨ . On one side of the table must be three matzos, representing the three top editors at the paper: Shvalbe, Apenshlak and Vagman. In the middle of the table sits the seder plate with the traditional items representing the judges of the contest: the shankbone (for Dr. Yitzkhok Leypuner, the medical correspondent for the daily Moment); the egg (for historian Yitzhok Shiper); and maror for writer Zusman Segalovitsh.22 Kharoyses represents the remainder of the judges, who were less well known than the preceding figures. Like the other examples presented here, this parody also makes use of the kadesh, urkhats ordering of the seder: Kadesh: Don’t make it seem like you have the face of an angel. Urkhats: Wash yourself clean of any suspicion that you’ve retained a trace of old Jewish piety. Karpes: Show how great you are at dipping yourself in powder and make-up. Yakhats: Wrap yourself in a dress with a plunging neckline. Magid: Put your smooth tongue to work. Rakhtso: Wash up [that is, “cozy up”] to one of the editors. Moytsi: And tell him that you are a real blessing. Morer: And when you see that your candidacy is not going well, it will be bitter. Koyrekh: You should wrap yourself around him even more. Shulkhen orekh: And bless him with your sweet buffet [both a sexual metaphor and a reference to the banquet at the Kehile]. Tsofen: And even hide yourself away from people’s eyes. Borekh: If you do this, your name will be blessed. Halel: All the newspapers will sing your name. Nirtse: And you will be an honored guest at Arnold’s.23 Because the Miss Judea pageant and the scandals that surrounded it had engulfed Warsaw’s Jewish community that year, it was natural that the city’s Yiddish satirists would focus on it extensively for that season’s yontef-bletlekh. The diversion created by Miss Judea helped provide a huge amount of material both for writers and readers of Yiddish satire in a period in Jewish life that was better known for political, economic, and cultural adversity.

Conclusion The phenomenon of Hagadah parodies in interwar Poland presents a jigsaw puzzle of referential material that requires close readings of the daily press during the time in which they appeared. The complexity of many of the parodies reflects a readership that was closely acquainted with the traditions of the original text as well as deeply involved in current Jewish communal and political life. The parodies address an array of issues from a number of differing perspectives. These cultural, social, and political differences are reflected in the way in which Hagadah parody was approached and utilized.

36Edward Portnoy

A central component of Passover yontef-bletlekh, the parodies were, in large part, the glue that held these holiday magazines together. Engaging traditional texts to create humorous cultural criticism was also a method of attracting a particularly broad Jewish audience, allowing writers and readers to blur the borders of what was secular and religious. In this respect, the yontef-bletlekh provide an unusual amalgam of traditional text and contemporary criticism. The parodies provide unique insight into interwar Polish Jewish life, reflecting interconnected communities in political and cultural flux and attesting to the vibrancy of Polish Jewish life. The satirists who created these parodies understood the cultural value of religious texts and thus filled the structures of Jewish liturgy with humorous and often biting satiric commentary. It was the enduring quality of the Hagadah that challenged them to do so. The absurdity and incongruity of combining pious tradition with modern reality achieved a forced accommodation between a glorious mythic past and the pressure-cooker present of interwar Poland, allowing Yiddish satirists the possibility of creating common ground between Jewish tradition and modern life.

Notes 1. The use of holiday names, customs or comestibles for titles was apparently first employed by Y.Y. Linetski for his miscellany, Yisrolik (1877); Shomer [Nahum Meyer Shaikevich] did the same in New York in 1893–1894. All this was before Peretz appropriated the idea from Heshl Eplberg. For more on Eplberg’s publishing activity, see Yankev Shatsky, Geshikhte fun yidn in varshe, vol. 3 (New York: 1947–1953), 273. For more on Peretz’s yontefbletlekh, see Dovid Pinski, “Geshikhte fun di ‘yontef bletlekh,’ ” Di tsukunft (May–June 1945), 321–387. 2. Ruth R. Wisse, I.L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: 1991), 41. 3. Ibid. 4.  Pinski, “Geshikhte fun di ‘yontef bletlekh,’ ” 323. 5. Holiday publications were fairly common in Jewish publishing, and there also exists an early 19th-century precursor to the modern yontef-bletlekh discussed here. Marion Aptroot notes that, despite vague similarities, there is no real connection between the early examples on which she focuses and those discussed in this article. See her article, “Western Yiddish yontev bletlekh: Facing the Future with Humor,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008), 47–67. 6. For more on the development of the humor and satire press in the Russian Empire, see the special issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 19 (2013). 7. Peretz’s yontef-bletlekh, which were published for holidays “from Passover to Passover,” included the following titles: Lekoved peysekh (Passover), Faylenboygn (Lag Ba’omer), Grins (Shavuot), Tanes (Yom Kippur), Treyst, Shoyfer (Rosh Hashanah), Heshaynes (Hoshanah Rabah), Likhtl (Hanukah), Shabes (Sabbath), Homen-tash (Purim). These titles are those of the 1894–1895 publication year. 8.  The phenomenon of Yiddish humor journals also made its way to a variety of locales in which Yiddish-speaking immigrants settled, most notably New York. Yoysef Tunkel, a seminal figure in the Yiddish humor industry, founded Der kibitser (1908), a popular magazine that would eventually morph into Der groyser kundes, which became the most successful and influential Yiddish humor publication worldwide. 9. Aleksander Mukdoyni [A. Kapl], “Unzere vits-bleter,” Der vokhnblat 22 (Warsaw) (7 February 1913), 2–4. Mukdoyni was one of the few to critique the publications. Despite their popularity, Yiddish humor journals aroused limited critical interest on the part of Yiddish

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intellectuals and journalists, although during the mid-1920s occasional critics would accuse such journals of vulgarity, and some would even attempt to have them banned. See Nati Cohen, “‘Shund’ and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-war Poland,” Polin 16 (2003), 189–211. 10. See Aptroot, “Western Yiddish yontev bletlekh.” 11. See Abram Kirzhnits, Di yidishe prese in der gevezener ruslendisher imperiye, 1823– 1916 (Moscow: 1930); Yechiel Szeintuch, Reshimat hayomanim ṿekitvei ha’et beyidish shepursemu bepolin bein shetei milḥ amot ha’olam (Jerusalem: 1986). 12. Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature (New York: 1907), 16–17. 13. Morris Vintshevsky (untitled Hagadah text), Arbeter fraynd (London) (4 April 1887), 2. 14. Though the Peysekh-blat is not dated, “1925–26” is handwritten on the cover. It is likely that it appeared in 1925, as indicated by the mention of Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart as if he were still alive. Breitbart died in October 1925. 15. A malke oyf peysekh, ed. Pinkhes Katz (Warsaw) (18 April 1924), 3. 16. Rozwoj was a far-right, antisemitic party involved in anti-Jewish boycotts. See Pavel Korzec, Juifs en Pologne: la question juive pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: 1980), 137, 169. 17. Chone Shmeruk, “Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,” in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Israel Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover: 1989), 285–311. 18. The government headed by Władysław Grabski passed strict tax laws and revalued Polish currency, causing panic and protest among Jewish businessmen. These tax laws sparked an increase in Jewish emigration from Poland (dubbed “’aliyat Grabski”) during a period in which immigration to Palestine had stopped nearly completely. See Joseph Marcus, A Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin: 1983), 233. 19. Sfire, or sefirat ha’omer (lit. “counting of the Omer”) takes place during the sevenweek interval between Passover and Shavuot (cf. Lev. 23:15–16). 20. Katz was a prolific contributor to the Yiddish humor press in Poland. See Chaim Finkelstein, Haynt, a tsaytung bay yidn (Tel Aviv: 1978), 223–224. 21. For more on the Miss Judea pageant, see Eddy Portnoy, “Move Over Miss Polonia,” Guilt & Pleasure 2 (Spring 2006), 80–91, and Eva Plach, “Introducing Miss Judea 1929: The Politics of Beauty, Race, and Zionism in Inter-War Poland,” Polin 20 (2008), 368–391. 22. The shankbone was probably assigned to Leypuner because, as a doctor, one of the items he worked with was “bones”; the egg for Shiper might have been a reference to “egghead.” The maror, or bitter herbs, was probably an ironic reference to Segalovitsh’s first name, Zusman, since zis means “sweet.” 23. This is a reference to Arnold Ginzburg, a major theater impresario in Warsaw.

Jackie Mason: The Comedian as Ethnographer Stephen J. Whitfield (Brandeis University)

Herman Wouk once imagined a poignant finale to Jewish life in America. In This is My God (1959), his best-selling elucidation of Judaic belief, Wouk, writing as a traditional Jew, ascribed the terminus of Jewish peoplehood to the allure of assimilation rather than the pressure of persecution and predicted that the process would occur so smoothly that no sense of heartbreaking loss would register. “The threat of Jewish oblivion in America,” he wrote, “is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs piled in the back.” As Wouk sardonically quipped: “Mr. Abramson left his home in the morning after a hearty breakfast, apparently in the best of health, and was not seen again. . . . When his amnesia clears, he will be Mr. Adamson, and his wife and children will join him, and all will be well. But the Jewish question will be over in the United States.”1 Two generations later, we have good reason to be skeptical of Wouk’s vision of closing time in the annals of American Jewish history. One way of measuring its inaccuracy can be ascertained in the career of Yacov Moshe (Jacob) Maza, another Jew who, like Wouk, stemmed from Orthodoxy. Only a year before the publication of Wouk’s book, Maza had earned his rabbinical ordination. Soon he was following in the path of his brother Gabe by serving congregations in towns such as Weldon, North Carolina, and Latrobe, Pennsylvania. However, as he later recalled, “I wasn’t comfortable being a rabbi. I wasn’t that religious, which is a handicap in that profession.”2 Moreover, Maza failed to meet expectations of solemnity. Asked to conduct a funeral, he looked at the body in the coffin and asked the undertaker: “He don’t look so bad, you sure this guy’s dead?” So irrepressible was his humor, he recalled, “I had Gentiles coming to hear the sermons, that’s how funny I was.”3 Nor could the weekly liturgy contain his talent for comedy. “I started telling jokes at bar mitzvahs and weddings. The jokes started getting better.” Finally, he quipped, “I decided to charge a cover and a minimum.”4 So began the career of Jackie Mason, who, more than any Jewish comedian in American history, would satirize the continuing differences between Jews and everyone else. Over the course of his long career, Mason has not seemed to care that 38

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Gentiles are far from homogeneous, that they can be Protestants or Catholics, or even Mormons, for that matter. What he underscores is that, whatever they are, they don’t resemble Jews. Gentiles may well like Jews, but they are not like Jews. Jackie Mason thus vindicates the sociological realization that, despite the incontestable extent of Jewish absorption into the United States, some distinction remains between Jews and their neighbors. America is not yet one nation, indivisible. Let’s look again at Wouk’s rather banal portrayal of disappearance, this time from the antic perspective of Jackie Mason. Take a “hearty breakfast,” for example. “Did you ever hear a Jew order breakfast?” Mason has inquired. Here’s how it’s ordered: “I want it once over light on this egg and on the other egg I want it under a quarter. This’ll be under a half and that’ll be under a minute. I’d like a slight, two-minute egg on the side. I want the bacon, but not on the same plate. I want the potatoes on a third plate and the toast on a fourth plate. I want the coffee not to the top, closer to twothirds, not less than half. I want the bread toasted, not very toasted, slightly toasted, not exactly toasted, but I want it brown. Not very brown, but it should look brown.” By contrast, he has contended that “Gentiles do not know about food. . . . They know only one thing, ‘Give me ham and eggs, that’s good enough.’ ”5 In 1959, car telephones had not yet been invented. But soon after such technology became available, Mason grasped that members of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie like Mr. Abramson had to possess these status symbols. Unfortunately, such instruments added to the danger of the nation’s roads and highways, Mason asserted: “The Gentiles are crashing from drinking, Jews are crashing from dialing.”6 And what happens if Mr. Abramson’s station wagon doesn’t crash, but simply breaks down? Utter helplessness, the makings of a fiasco. Jews find any sort of gadget or piece of machinery a challenge: “Watch a Gentile’s car break down. In two seconds, he’s under the car, on top of the car”; and it’s fixed. “There’s nothing happier than a Gentile with a broken car,” he adds. “On Sunday, you can’t find them, they’re all under their cars.” But when a Jewish car breaks down, the husband gets blamed: “It’s your fault.” The husband, of course, has an explanation: “I know what it is. I know what it is. It’s in the hood.” The wife—whom Mason calls “the yenta”— asks: “Where’s the hood?” Answer: “ ‘I don’t remember’ . . . [and then it] takes a Jew three hours to open a hood.”7 Mason is hardly the first comedian to tap into his own Jewishness for material, though not until the postwar era did so many of his co-religionists feel secure enough to accept and even relish the exposure of Jewish foibles. Before the 1950s there were plenty of Jewish comedians, but those who conceived of Jewishness as a subject were generally confined to the Yiddish theater or to the resort hotels of the Catskills. In the 1920s and 1930s no one was bigger than the Marx Brothers. But their injection of Yiddish, for example, was rare; and their most gifted scenarist, S.J. Perelman, also generally avoided references that might reveal his own ethnic origins. There were a few dialect writers, among them Milt Gross (Is Diss a System?) and Leo Rosten (H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N); secondary figures on radio such as Mr. Kitzel (Artie Auerbach) could get laughs on The Jack Benny Program. Recognizably Jewish comedians such as Sam Levenson and Myron Cohen were showcased in the postwar era on Ed Sullivan’s enormously popular variety show on television. Levenson spoke with a New York accent and laughed at his own gentle jokes; Cohen’s Yiddish inflections

40Stephen J. Whitfield

were delivered in so deadpan a manner that he seemed constitutionally incapable of even smiling. However different Levenson and Cohen were, however, they shared a reluctance to be explicit about their own Jewish sensibility. The change came with Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen. They grasped, as did Philip Roth in a couple of the short stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959), and then in Portnoy’s Complaint exactly a decade later, that widespread access to the in-jokes of an earlier era would not force staffers at the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to put in overtime. Nor, in capturing the differences between Jews and Gentiles, was Mason unique, or even first in line. No routine of Bruce’s was more famous than his effort to distinguish Jewish from “goyish.” The former category includes staples like chocolate, pumpernickel bread, fruit salad, and black cherry soda (why not for two cents plain?), plus Italians. The latter includes Kool-Aid, Drake’s Cakes, white bread, fudge, lime jello, lime soda, and instant potatoes, as well as baton-twirling.8 Thus Bruce reinforced the historic Judaic binaries between the Sabbath and the rest of the week, between the holy and the profane, and between food that is fit (kosher) and what is not (trefe). Of course the point of Bruce’s routine was to make Jewishness a free-floating signifier, utterly independent of the strictures of halakhah. Insofar as Bruce’s riff resonates, it fortifies a Jewish sense of self-congratulatory superiority, a proclivity for what is supposedly richer, deeper, and more genuine, whereas goyish taste is tainted with the meretricious, the impoverished, and the unsatisfying. Nor does the power of this dichotomy depend on any special insights into the American Jewish condition, about which Bruce knew little and cared even less. In “Religions, Inc.” (1958), for example, he mocks Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, but without exposing to comic criticism his actual character or career or attitudes. Wise could be any rabbi; he was picked simply because he was famous enough to join the ranks of clergymen, like the Pope or the Reverend Billy Graham, who made use of the theatrical and commercial possibilities of organized religion.9 Much closer to Mason’s orientation is a scene in The Front (1976) in which the Gentile girlfriend of Howard Prince (Woody Allen) recalls that, in her family, the worst sin was to raise one’s voice above a whisper. In his family, Howard counters, the worst sin was to buy retail. The line could well have been written by Allen himself (though the screenplay is credited to Walter Bernstein). Perhaps no scene in any Woody Allen movie is more memorable than the visit of Alvy Singer (played by Allen) to the parents, brother, and grandmother of the eponymous Annie Hall. There, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, Alvy certainly feels some estrangement; his response is to project antisemitic hostility onto “Granny” Hall, though he also tries a little too hard to ingratiate himself by praising “the dynamite ham.” Such scenes have a literary antecedent in Portnoy’s Complaint, in which Philip Roth records his narrator’s “longing . . . for those bland blond exotics called shikses.” These are blessed with “parents who are tranquil and patient and dignified, and also a brother Billy who knows how to take motors apart and says ‘Much obliged,’ and isn’t afraid of anything physical.” Such a romantic fantasy is incarnated in Kay Campbell (The Pumpkin), of Davenport, Iowa. When the seventeen-year-old Alex Portnoy visits her family during his freshman year at Antioch College, his disorientation is palpable. Such courtesy

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and such cheerfulness permeate not only the Campbells’ home on Elm Street but even their station wagon: “Everything I see, taste, touch, I think, ‘goyish!’ ”10 The narrator is both fascinated and bewildered by the obvious contrast with the home of Jack and Sophie Portnoy of Newark. It cannot be a surprise that much of the comic friction generated by these JewishGentile interactions revolves around food. Both in The Front and in Annie Hall (1977), the conversations take place over a meal; and of course Lenny Bruce’s routine is largely based on culinary contrasts. Such a focus upon food is surely a vestige of the traditional impediment that observant Jews have faced in sharing meals with Gentiles. “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you,” Shylock famously tells the merchant of Venice, Antonio. “But I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” Mason, well aware that most American Jews violate the laws of kashrut that Shylock honored, directs his powers of observation elsewhere: “You show a Gentile carrots and peas, he eats carrots and peas. You show a Jew carrots and peas: ‘Wait a minute. Why are there so many carrots compared to the peas?’ ”11 Mason knows that Jews can be tough and inquisitive customers. They did not learn the rules of politeness from Emily Post. What is noteworthy about Mason’s shtick is that differences within a pluralistic society do not sour into disagreements, much less into open conflict. His America is benign. His Jews escape the prejudice that might stem from the majority’s opposition to otherness; instead, the worst fate that Jews suffer is to be targets of satire. Then, too, Mason mocks everybody—Poles, Puerto Ricans, Italians, and blacks, in addition to Jews. Trafficking unashamedly in stereotypes, he draws his knack for ridicule from amateur sociological insights rather than racial or ethnic slurs. In this, Mason has differed from insult comedians such as Don Rickles (also born to Yiddishspeaking Jewish immigrants), whose humor lacks the saving grace of ethnographic insight. Antisemitism plays virtually no role in Mason’s material, though belligerence does—again, in the context of illuminating the difference between Jews and Gentiles. Thus, Mason notes that, for Gentiles, aggression is a source of pride: the motto on license plates in the Lone Star State is “Don’t Mess with Texas,” and the famous name of the football team at the University of Notre Dame is the Fighting Irish. But “did you ever see anybody afraid to walk into a Jewish neighborhood because he might get killed by an accountant?” Indeed, violence among Jews is likely to be verbal: “Every Jew comes one word away from killing someone. You hear it all the time: ‘If he says one more word. . . ’ ” But “what that word is, no one knows.”12 Moreover: “When Jews get angry, they say, ‘I almost hit him.’ There’s always the word ‘almost.’ ”13 Perhaps it is relevant that Mason is not physically prepossessing; he is only five feet four inches tall. Even Woody Allen is taller (by an inch). In 1978, when the New Yorker’s Kenneth Tynan ran a profile on Mel Brooks, the latter described himself as “a short little Hebrew man.”14 All three happened to have grown up in New York City neighborhoods that were inevitably prey to bullies. The boyhood experiences of such future comedians may have taught them the value of talk, which would have to be faster than their fists. As an ex-rabbi, Mason has occasionally claimed that Judaic wisdom influences his humor, or indeed Jewish humor itself. “The Talmud is the study of logic and truth,

42Stephen J. Whitfield

finding the answer to a problem, deductive reasoning,” he declares. “The kind of comedy I do makes a mockery of anything that’s false, any incomplete kind of thinking, any kind of behavior that is inconsistent or contradictory. I’m trained to see it . . . [There’s] so much phoniness and pretension and hypocrisy. Most every time a guy says hello to you, he starts lying to you.”15 Yet Mason, as has been seen, was not notably comfortable in the role of talmudic scholar. In this, he departed from family tradition: both his father, Eli Maza, and his three older brothers became—and remained—rabbis. Indeed, the family had moved from Sheboygan, Wisconsin (where Jacob, the first “American” child of the family, was born in 1934) to the Lower East Side of New York largely so that the sons could pursue a yeshiva education.16 Mason’s autobiography does not disguise the pain of his relationship with his father. Eli Maza could not make a good living, either in Sheboygan or in New York City, and the family (which ultimately included two daughters in addition to Jacob and his brothers) enjoyed few material comforts. Much of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that the father never adapted to the American model of organized religion in which clergymen were expected to be affable rather than scholarly. His relations with congregants were often troubled. Mason later described him as “a sad human being,” “a tragic figure,” an ill-adjusted man who could not overcome “the loneliness, the helplessness” of being an immigrant. In addition, Eli Maza was possessed of a volatile temperament, and he imposed intellectual demands that his youngest son found fearsome and even tyrannical. Yet he also appears to have educated his son in ethical ideals; Jacob’s bar mitzvah speech curiously anticipated a majestic trope that Martin Luther King, Jr. (another clergyman’s son) later articulated: “The Talmud teaches us that man has an obligation to lead a good life, not for any specific reward, not to win any specific goal, but for its own sake. We are obliged to lead a moral, good life because the universe inclines in that direction. Toward good. . . .” After the ceremony Rabbi Maza did something that he had never done before, and would never do again: he hugged and kissed Jacob. Mason claimed that this gesture of affection was a one-time occurrence of his boyhood; far more often, he was learning to live under the weight of paternal disappointment. What truly enthralled Jacob Maza was not the intricacy of Judaic learning but the excitement of American show business. He would frequent the Roxy Theater to hear and see the orchestras of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Harry James; like so many Jews of his generation, he was bewitched by jazz. At first such mass entertainment did not distract him from the vocational goals that a college degree might enhance. In 1953, when he graduated from City College with a double major in English and sociology, he would become one of the first major Jewish comedians to get a college degree.17 For many other Jewish comedians, the equivalent of higher learning was to be found in the “Borscht Belt” summer resorts in the Catskills. Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Red Buttons, Alan King, and Joan Rivers were among the baccalaureates of the Borscht Belt. Arriving in the prosperous mid-1950s to serve as a busboy, Mason observed how the hotels struggled to satisfy the enormous appetites of the guests. “You had four main courses for lunch?” a guest might boast. “We had eight and then we had the two-course snack before dinner.”18 Mason recalled that the guests “ate themselves into a coma so they should get their money’s worth.”19 (Writing in

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the 1970s, Milton Himmelfarb noted that accountants knew whether a country club was Jewish or Gentile by comparing the food bills with the liquor bills.)20 For the benefit of non-speakers of Yiddish, Mason later defined a zhlub as someone “still walking around by the food table when the bar mitzvah is over and eating scraps with his fingers. When he’s full he takes pieces of cake and puts them into his shopping bag.”21 At cocktail parties, he explained elsewhere, Gentiles rush to the bar while the Jews head for the table with the hors d’oeuvres: “You ever see how much food a Jew can hold on a cardboard plate?”22 But back to the Pearl Lake Hotel, where Maza worked. The owner, identified by Mason only as Harry, was “a difficult, cheap bastard” who delighted in cutting corners and pinching pennies. He made the new busboy a lifeguard. “We need a lifeguard and you need a job,” Maza was told. “Well, Harry,” he responded, “the truth is, I can’t swim.” Harry didn’t pause before replying: “Don’t tell the guests.” In this less than promising situation, amateur night proved to be a lifesaver, a first chance to envision the prospect of liberation from the religious calling for which Maza otherwise seemed destined. On stage he did riffs on his new duties. “Swim at your own risk” is how he described the sign at the pool. “Please don’t jump in the pool if you can’t swim because . . . you are also endangering the life of the lifeguard.” He also used the opportunity to release pent-up aggression; to revel in his sudden power over guests and clients to whom he otherwise had to be deferential; to tap into the psychology that enables a stand-up comedian to compel an audience to do his bidding. Mason’s later recollections of the impact of “a killer routine” need no Freudian to decode them. “I knew that if I got in front of an audience, there was no audience I couldn’t destroy,” he explained. That night in the Catskills, the busboy and “lifeguard” managed to transform himself into a jester who could feel “the jolt and power of making an audience laugh in spite of itself.”23 Indeed, he became so good at stand-up comedy that the Echo Hotel, down the road from the Pearl Lake Hotel, wanted him as well. There, too, he later boasted, “I tore the house down with jokes.” After the shows, Maza socialized with other Catskills comedians and tummelers (noise-makers) and listened to their summations of how their own acts went over: “I killed ’em! I killed ’em! I killed ’em!” Or there was a slight variation: “I murdered ’em!” Comic license was evidently a license to kill. Among these performers, he concluded: “No one committed less than murder.”24 On the Catskills circuit, Maza’s persona was undoubtedly crucial to his impact. The bags under his eyes, the morose manner, and the shrugs that seemed to make him the very embodiment of the lachrymose version of Jewish history—not even these attributes were as apt for the Catskills as his Yiddish-inflected manner of speaking. Throughout his career, a critic for Time wrote, Jackie Mason would speak to audiences “with the Yiddish locutions of an immigrant who just completed a course in English. By mail.”25 Maza’s accent established a rapport with Borscht Belt audiences, who were the progeny of the great wave of immigrants who had come from Eastern Europe earlier in the century. But could he make it into the mainstream? Was his manner of speaking “too Jewish” for the big time? To be sure, he could make fun of his pronunciation by providing superfluous information on the order of “I’m not from Alabama.”26 Yet how would his staccato delivery, arms slicing the air for emphasis, go over on the

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new medium of television? Was its mass audience ready for such an un-American accent? In the late 1950s, when the call for national unity at the height of the Cold War promoted acculturation—the answer was negative. Booking agents doubted the appeal of Jacob Maza; “too regional,” “too urban,” “too ethnic” were a few of the euphemisms. Maybe if he got rid of his accent. . . . But he knew the real reason: “Agents and managers, they’d hear me perform in the mountains, I would tear the house down,” he recalled. “But they would say it’s not for Gentiles, he’d never go over with an American audience because he’s too Jewish.”27 This argument had been around for at least half a century, ever since an editor at Harper’s Weekly had rejected a manuscript submitted by the promising young writer Abraham Cahan, on the grounds that “the life of the Jewish East Side would not interest the American reader.”28 Explicit Jewishness was still regarded as a barrier to mainstream success. The upshot was that the ex-busboy usually found himself stuck in the Catskills in the summer and at the synagogue bimah come fall. In that post-Second World War decade, when the struggle against international Communism accelerated the process of inclusiveness and homogenization, the parochial was easily stigmatized. Even references to Israel were oblique, as when Mort Sahl said of the burgeoning city of Palm Springs, California: “You’ve got to admire those people, carving out a nation in the desert.” Name changes were also common among the comedians of the era: Melvin Kaminsky became Mel Brooks, Allan Stewart Konigsberg became Woody Allen, Leonard Alfred Schneider became Lenny Bruce, Leonard Hacker became Buddy Hackett. Jack Cohen changed his name twice—first to Jack Roy, then to the somewhat ludicrous Rodney Dangerfield. In an era when difference was seen as divisive instead of a source of national strength, and when bigotry was commonplace, name changes were rarely seen as shameful. Indeed they were proof of an all-American desire to achieve individual autonomy, to pull away from the caprices of family origins and of ancestral claims, to be emancipated from the seemingly arbitrary circumstances of one’s birth. In Maza’s case, the name change had the additional function of concealing his double life from his father, who died in 1959.29 And persistence in his new profession of stand-up comedy soon paid off. A niche had long existed for Jewish comic performers, but the new decade also offered glimmers of appreciation for ethnic difference that Mason could exploit more easily than an earlier generation. He first appeared on national television in 1962, on The Steve Allen Show. Like other Jewish stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, who were voices of besieged and beleaguered middle-aged masculinity, Mason’s humor was streaked with misogyny. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was still a year away when Mason, oblivious to the impending revolution in gender relations, explained to the audience his status as a bachelor: “As soon as a Jewish woman gets married, she starts handing this poor jerk bags of garbage to take out. Where does it all come from? They never eat at home— it’s part of the deal. She brings home garbage so this jerk can take it out. I wouldn’t mind getting married, but I don’t want to go into the garbage business.” The self-pity of husbands that Youngman and Dangerfield projected conveyed grievances that might be only vaguely connected to the beleaguered condition that Jewish humor has

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often exploited. Mason inevitably gave such marital resentment an ethnic inflection, if only because his accent emitted exactly that signal.30 Soon Mason was making regular guest appearances on other television variety programs (The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Como Show, The Dean Martin Show, and The Gary Moore Show), and he was earning as much as $10,000 a week in nightclubs.31 And then disaster struck, on October 18, 1964, during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Airing every Sunday evening, the show typically reached 40 million Americans; no forum was more prized. But that evening, with the People’s Republic of China having just successfully tested a nuclear weapon, and with Alexei Kosygin having suddenly replaced Nikita S. Khrushchev as prime minister of the Soviet Union, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to pre-empt part of television’s primetime schedule to give an overview of American foreign policy. The producers of The Ed Sullivan Show suddenly had to revise the program and shorten some of the acts. Because of the gravity of the international situation, and because the comedian would be following the president’s speech, Sullivan told Mason to scrap his political jokes (for instance, one that poked fun at the fact that, with Lady Bird Johnson and daughters Luci Bird and Linda Bird Johnson in the White House, “we have government that’s for the birds”). To ensure that the show would end on time, Sullivan stood right behind the camera and to the side of the live audience. From there, he began giving Mason a two-minute warning by means of holding up two fingers. Telling a joke effectively requires timing as precise as an atomic clock. Getting to a punch line too slowly drains its impact; hitting the punch line too quickly muffles the explosion of laughter. Understandably, then, when Sullivan began holding up his fingers, Mason got distracted. He reacted by throwing fingers back at Sullivan—an index finger, and a thumb, though not (as Sullivan believed) a middle finger. The television host was infuriated. He subsequently banned Mason from future appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Because Sullivan was the nation’s unofficial Minister of Culture, this meant that Mason was suddenly toxic, contaminated with a reputation for undisciplined volatility and obscenity.32 Though Sullivan himself later apologized and invited him back for one more appearance, two years later, the comedian who was snickered at as “Goldfinger” remained damaged goods. Ken Gross, the journalist who collaborated with Mason on his autobiography, concluded that “Ed Sullivan had, indeed, thrown off his timing. By more than two decades.”33 Before his career had really taken off, Mason faced the prospect of becoming a has-been. By 1981, when the soon-to-become canonical Big Book of Jewish Humor was published, he had sunk so low that his name went unmentioned in the table of contents. Less than a decade later, his autobiography appeared, its text seething with resentments and slights. Jackie, Oy! (1988) painfully recounts Mason’s desperate, blunted efforts to raise money for a play or a movie that might display the distinctiveness of his talent, the gift he continued to believe he had. A play that he wrote and starred in, A Teaspoon Every Four Hours, closed after one night on Broadway in 1969. Three years later, a film that he starred in and produced, The Stoolie, bombed as well. The experience of trying to make such a movie was harrowing. According to his recollection in The World According to Me! (first performed on Broadway in 1986), just about everyone he met in Los Angeles presented himself as a producer, arranging deals and handing out cards. “That’s all they produce,” Mason

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glumly concluded. “Cards.” Such humiliations did not compel him to give up, however. He did not abandon his ambition to climb back to the top, even when he was reduced to the indignity of performing in seedy nightclubs (“If we turned the lights on, we could solve a couple of bank jobs”).34 “It took twenty years,” he later realized, “to overcome what happened in one minute.”35 In clawing his way back, Mason had the benefit of a manager (who later became his wife), Jyll Rosenfeld. He credited her with the realization that Borscht Belt humor might seem fresh if performed not in a night club but in a legitimate theater, elevated to a stage act on the West Side. And so, at the end of 1986, Mason opened a one-man show on Broadway, The World According to Me! Its second act was called “The Ever-Popular Gentiles and Jews.”36 Nobody would have expected him to get to Broadway except by taking the subway; as it turned out, The World According to Me! earned Mason a special Tony award and made him a millionaire. Frank Rich, the drama critic whose standards were so high that he was nicknamed “the Butcher of Broadway,” told readers of the New York Times how reluctant he had been to see Mason in action. But he yielded one evening, and concluded: “So sue me . . . Mason was very, very funny.” The reviewer conjectured that “the huge audience goes wild for this man because, in addition to his talent, he gives theatergoers something they’re not used to finding on a Broadway stage: the truth.”37 Larry Gelbart, a versatile comic writer for stage, film, and television, saw the show eight times. Mel Brooks saw it, too, and proclaimed: “Nobody makes me laugh harder.” Playwright Neil Simon saw the show three times. Joe Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, saw The World According to Me! four times. When the Festival mounted a production of Henry IV, Papp told the actor playing Falstaff to “do it the Jackie Mason way.”38 What the Bard would have thought of such an interpretation must remain conjectural, but The World According to Me! stirred such interest overseas that Mason eventually did his solo act in London half a dozen times, once before Elizabeth II herself. He became so popular there, he boasted, that she had begun “talking like me.”39 No one was more baffled by his success than the stand-up comedian himself. “It’s basically the same stuff that I’ve been doing for thirty years,” he insisted. “Nothing’s changed. Maybe it’s a little more structured, but essentially, it’s the same.”40 A takeit-or-leave-it reluctance to yield to fashion lent an air of bracing authenticity to his act. Only rarely did Mason indulge, for instance, in the profanity and obscenity that contemporary comedians have often relied on to get laughs. Nor did he risk mentioning the Holocaust, a topic that no stand-up performers then dared to touch (nor should they). In describing the nation’s majority as “Gentiles,” Mason carefully avoided a word like goyish, which Lenny Bruce had used. It can, after all, have a derogatory ring to it,41 even though both the Hebrew goy and the Latin gens simply mean “nation.” Bruce became increasingly uncomfortable in the role of comedian, and lost interest in trying to ingratiate himself with an audience. Mason by contrast was delighted to find a constituency without having to compromise a persona that seemed to blend an aptitude for truth-telling with an unaffected Jewish sensibility. Mason had to triumph simply as himself, though not as a pale version of himself. When Chicken Soup, an interfaith situation comedy that starred Mason and Lynn Redgrave, was presented on television in 1989, the show tanked after only two

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months.42 Except for a brief period in which Rodney Dangerfield supplied Mason with jokes (which he claimed he did not use), he has written his own material. Rather than relying on gag writers, Mason offers his own reflections and perceptions—those of an ordinary guy struggling to keep up with social and cultural change that seemed to strike at the not-so-young at a dizzying pace. Such instability and discontinuity certainly gave thrust to the upward trajectory of Mason’s own career. The momentum of multiculturalism, for example, made variety increasingly respectable and neutralized fears of forms of entertainment and creativity that were “too Jewish.” The exaltation of diversity made that sort of shame an anachronism. In 1996, the Jewish Museum in New York even mounted an exhibition of works of Jewish artists that mocked the very phrase, Too Jewish? By the 21st century, Jewish identity had become so legitimated that a pubescent Methodist in Dallas could tell her parents that she wanted to be Jewish, and was even willing to study Hebrew, “so that I could have a bat mitzvah.”43 In 2011, when U.S. President Barack Obama delivered an address to the biennial convention of the Union for Reform Judaism, he noted that his elder daughter, Malia, had reached the age “when she is attending a bar or bat mitzvah almost every weekend.”44 Another sign of the times could be perceived in the confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan, whom Obama nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senator Lindsey Graham was perhaps seeking to ascertain the nominee’s appreciation of the danger of terrorism. Accordingly, the Republican from South Carolina asked Kagan where she had been when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, popularly known as the “underwear bomber,” had tried to detonate a plane on Christmas Day, 2009. The relevance of the question to her judicial qualifications was unclear; in an earlier era, such curiosity might have been intended to signal that the candidate did not celebrate Christmas. But when Kagan replied, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” the senators laughed.45 That year a major sociological study of the nation’s piety revealed that, when religiously affiliated Americans are asked which believers they most admire (other than their own denomination), Jews ranked ahead of everyone else.46 That Judaism would become an admired faith in the United States was not something that historians of the diaspora could have anticipated. Mason’s basic stance has remained unchanged, perhaps because folly endures. In the name of common sense, Mason has professed to oppose “the stupidity and insanity of life.”47 The weather reports on television, for example, Mason finds aggravating: “You’re dying to know if it’s hot or cold, and instead they give you percentages. Eighty percent chance of rain, 30% chance of a cloud . . . What, are you going to buy 80% of an umbrella?”48 The meaning of shame had flipped: “It used to be you’d be embarrassed to get condoms, but buying cigarettes was okay. Now it’s okay to get condoms, but you’re embarrassed to buy cigarettes.”49 As global warming is expected to cause ocean levels to rise, Mason simply wonders: “Do we really need all this water?” and goes on to muse: “Maybe the Gentiles need it, but the Jews have a swimming pool.”50 Half a century or so after Wouk’s “Mr. Abramson” took off in his stationwagon, the suburban ambience targeted in this riff remains ripe for skewering. However, the new generation of Jews no longer patronizes Catskill resorts. Their preference is for Martha’s Vineyard, where they spend their vacation “shvitzing and walking down the street with an ice cream cone.” If they get thirsty, they insist on

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drinking imported bottled water, even though “all bottled water comes from a sink in Pittsburgh.” Again, the dividing line is drawn for all to see: “Did you ever notice that Gentiles on vacation are already running and jumping and leaping around? A Jew on a vacation is looking for a place to sit. A Jew sees a chair, it’s a successful vacation.”51 Such an insight is generational, likely to appeal to grandparents rather than grandchildren, and exposes—inevitably—the historically conditioned character of Mason’s humor. Politics is another topic that has inspired Mason to adopt the stance of an ordinary guy. From virtually the beginning of his career in show business, he has made wisecracks about the nation’s experiment in popular sovereignty. Here is his take on the landslide that President Johnson achieved in 1964 over his Republican opponent: “[Barry] Goldwater could have won but his timing was wrong. He ran at the beginning of November—just when Johnson was running.”52 Like Twain, and like Will Rogers, Mason has had little use for the legislative branch: “Congress . . . gets paid whether the country makes money or not. I say put them on commission” (which might be interpreted as an early version of the demand for term limits, an issue that enjoyed some appeal near the end of the 20th century).53 The Watergate scandal in 1972–1974 sparked a grudging, eccentric admiration for Richard M. Nixon: “I love a crook who knows his business. . . . Every week they caught him and every week somebody else went to jail.” Though a layman, Mason diagnosed Nixon’s post-White House illness as syphilis, because “you can’t screw two hundred million people and get phlebitis.”54 In The World According to Me!, he also called Ronald Reagan “a great president, it just so happens this is not his field.” Until the 1990s or so, Mason’s satirical targets tended to be Republicans. To be sure, he was also dubious about news media reports concerning the scandal that nearly drove Bill Clinton from office in 1998–1999. Mason had never heard of a Jewish girl being interested in oral sex—“in an oral surgeon, maybe.”55 The American public turned out to be much less puritanical than pundits expected, such that Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky did not seriously erode his popularity. Indeed, as Republican attacks upon him intensified to the point of impeachment, the president actually became more popular. “If he gets caught one more time,” Mason predicted, Clinton will “be emperor of Japan.”56 In his two races for the White House, Clinton got a staggering four-fifths of Jewish ballots. “Jews love him so much that if he shot a girl right here” on the West Side, Mason conjectured in 2008, “Jews would say, ‘Who lives forever?’ ”57 Unlike most Jews, however, Mason became a Republican. He contributed commentary to the conservative American Spectator and collaborated with the flamboyant attorney Raoul Felder, first on a syndicated radio show and then as co-author of a dyspeptic book titled Schmucks! (2007). Among the icons of American liberalism skewered in the book are Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The co-authors smirk at the pretensions of the Democrats; for example, “they’re going to . . . find Osama Bin Laden?”58 Actually, they did. (One measure of the caliber of this rancid and rather witless volume can be found at amazon.com, which offered used copies at a penny. The marketplace has spoken.) By installing himself so firmly on the Right side of the political spectrum, Mason became vulnerable to the criticism

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that playing favorites was inconsistent with a claim to having “always tried to puncture hypocrisy and sham. . . .  All my comedy is social and psychological commentary. I do it instinctively.”59 Surely liberal Democrats have exercised no monopoly in perpetrating “hypocrisy and sham,” and some of them might not find his political blinders very funny. Such asymmetry led one aficionado of stand-up comedy to wonder: “To what cultural purpose, to what alternative social vision does Mr. Mason invoke his Jewish voice?”60 Back in 1989, the candidates for mayoralty in New York City must have asked themselves that question as well. When Mason joined Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign, he landed in trouble by impugning the qualifications of the Democratic candidate, David N. Dinkins: “There is a sick Jewish problem of voting for a black man no matter how unfit he is for the job.” This was not funny at all, even though Mason had made a similar accusation against Reagan, in The World According to Me!—but that was within the charmed circle of stand-up comedy. Even worse, Mason referred to Giuliani’s opponent as a shvartse. In response, Mason was hurriedly dropped from the GOP campaign. The comedian apologized: “I learned a lesson in the last few days. What’s funny on the stage can be insensitive when it’s said off the stage and in the world of politics.”61 Mason’s tone-deaf remark during an emotionally charged political campaign inevitably sparked memories of his stumble on The Ed Sullivan Show more than a quarter of a century earlier. Mason’s criticism of Jewish voters is also rooted in ethnography. He regards them as sentimentalists, believing that most Jews remain loyal to the Democratic Party because their “conscience is still with the underdog” and that the policies aimed at helping the less fortunate constitute “a mitzvah.” The consequence, he argues, is that Jews can be easily exploited; they presumably lack the heartlessness of Gentiles. “When you hit the Jew over the head with a pipe,” he notes, “he wonders what your problem is and how to help you.” Mason adds that “a Jew wants to take you to a psychiatrist because you need help.” Hit a Gentile over the head with a pipe, however, and he “wonders how he could hit you back over the head with a pipe.”62 That sort of combativeness sounded like a case for Giuliani, whom Mason hailed as “a brilliant crime fighter. He puts people in jail whether they’re guilty or not.”63 (Perhaps that political endorsement wasn’t doing Giuliani any favors.) Whatever lesson a scarred Mason claimed to have learned from the mayoralty campaign of 1989 was forgotten two decades later. On stage and off, he increasingly exemplified the politics of petulance, lashing out with mean-spirited humorlessness at feminists, liberals, humanitarians, and others. Though Mason is far from his best when mounting a soap box, he decided to join the line of American comedians and comic writers who found themselves no longer satisfied with getting laughs, and who sometimes descended into misanthropy and bitterness as well. That list begins with Twain and extends itself through Ambrose Bierce, Ring Lardner, Morrie Ryskind, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, and Richard Pryor. What one author called “selfcontempt” could easily sour into “vindictiveness” and “despair.”64 Mason has not gone that far. But his right-wing acerbity and partisan affiliation also undermine his special contribution to the legacy of American Jewish humor. Such tendencies are likely to establish some distance between him and the American Jewish audience that has been integral to Mason’s unique career as an ethnographer.

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Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, who is both a practitioner of as well as an expert on Jewish humor, has posed the central dilemma that Mason’s half-century in show business raises: “Without marginality, will we have something worth saying?” Or to put it differently, no one has punctured more strikingly the pretentions of upper-middle-class Jews. Yet what if these Jews find the success of assimilation so smooth that their ethnic distinctiveness can no longer be located within the cross-hairs of satire? Mason’s humor has depended on the singularity of the Jewish people. But Waldoks has also asked: “Can there be a Jewish humor for a community that doesn’t know its culture? Is there still a Jewish culture to feed Jewish humor?”65 The answers are far from certain. At the least, Mason himself has kept in play the repudiation of the sort of universalism that obscures Jewish particularity. A line attributed to the novelist Bernard Malamud—to the effect that, because of the commonality of suffering, “all men are Jews”—probably makes little sense to Mason. Nor could he subscribe to Lenny Bruce’s line that “Negroes are all Jews,”66 because such fluidity of identity is precisely what five decades of Mason’s Borscht Belt routines reject. His humor has depended upon the specificity of a recognizable Jewish lifestyle that American openness and amnesia threaten to corrode. Admittedly, Mason lumps all Christians together as “Gentiles” and ascribes no religious pluralism to them. But by underscoring their divergence from Jews, and getting laughs from that divergence, his comedy still manages to testify in some fashion to the durability and even viability of a community that is still in touch with its culture. Mason has been transfixed by the continuities that have governed alterity, and above all by the abiding cluster of attitudes and mores that cleave Jews from their neighbors on native grounds. He has denied that those boundaries are porous. No stand-up comedian has done a better job of ethnography, or offered a more biting satiric extension of the historical process that was inaugurated in late antiquity with the theological division between Christianity and Judaism. The eight one-man shows that Mason performed six nights a week on Broadway secure his place in the  evolution of Jewish comedy. These shows bear such titles as Brand New (1990), Politically Incorrect (1994), Love Thy Neighbor (1996), Much Ado about Everything! (1999), Prune Danish (2002), Freshly Squeezed (2005), and The Ulti­ mate Jew (2008). But what has given his performances their historical significance, and what might make an even more apt title, reflects his stature as The Last Essentialist.

Notes Thanks are extended to Donald Altschiller, David Axeen, and Gary Fallick for their assistance. 1.  Herman Wouk, This Is My God (Garden City: 1959), 251–257, 281–282. 2.  Jackie Mason with Ken Gross, Jackie, Oy!: Jackie Mason from Birth to Rebirth (Boston: 1988), 76. Similarly, Mark Twain of Hannibal, Missouri gave up his hope to become a preacher upon realizing that he did not have “the necessary stock in trade—i.e., religion.” See Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: 1966), 14. 3. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 99, 103.

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4. Joanne Kaufman, “Back in the Big Time: Comedian Jackie Mason,” Wall Street Journal (17 February 1987), 32. 5. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 279–280. 6. Robert Brustein, “The Hit of the Building,” New Republic 197 (19 October 1987), 28. 7. Ibid., 28–29; also in Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 261; Jon Garelick, “Jew versus Jew: Jackie Mason’s Borscht Belt Minstrel Show,” Boston Phoenix (30 October 1998), 11. 8. Lenny Bruce, “Jewish and Goyish,” in The Big Book of Jewish Humor, ed. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks (New York: 1981), 60; David E. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity (Waltham: 2012), 123–124, 149–152. 9. Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!! (New York: 1974), 236–238. 10. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: 1969), 150–151, 215–228. 11. Stefan Kanfer, “Rabbi’s Son Makes Good,” Time (23 November 1987), 99. 12. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 185, 278; Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder, Schmucks! (New York: 2007), 6. 13. Lee Grant, “Jackie Mason: How Jewish Is ‘Too Jewish’?” Los Angeles Times (13 August 1978), 37. 14. Kenneth Tynan, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (New York: 1979), 200. 15. Gary Susman, “Talk Soup: How Jackie Mason Stays on Top of the Times,” Boston Phoenix (23 February 1996). In light of Mason’s explanation that the study of Talmud hones the capacity to search for truth and to display logic, it seems odd that Mason is the only satirist to have been a rabbi, or even the son of a rabbi. The only other candidate coming to mind is Zero Mostel, also the son of a rabbi, who did stand-up comedy early in his show business career. However, Mostel, though an enormously versatile clown, was not a satirist. 16. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 31–32; Jackie Mason, with Ira Berkow, How to Talk Jewish (New York: 1990), 1, 2. 17. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 60. Woody Allen (b. 1935), the favorite Jewish comedian of the intelligentsia, attended New York University around the same time. He did not graduate, however, though he later gave conflicting explanations for not earning a degree. In one version, he had been expelled for cheating in a philosophy class (when he had looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him); in another, he admitted to a more “delicate situation” in which he had been caught cheating—with the dean’s wife. 18. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 63. 19. Ibid. 20. Milton Himmelfarb, The Jews of Modernity (New York: 1973), 69. 21. Mason, How to Talk Jewish, 136. 22. Garelick, “Jew versus Jew,” 11. 23. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 5, 6, 61–65, 67. 24. Ibid., 68, 69–70, 95, 96. 25. Kanfer, “Rabbi’s Son Makes Good,” 99. Although Mason, as noted, was born in the United States, he grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family. 26. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 118. 27. Ibid., 9, 100, 108, 118; also in Ty Burr, “Up from the Catskills: You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Jackie Mason,” Boston Phoenix (14 October 1988). 28. Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Philadelphia: 1974), 495. 29. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 101. 30. Ibid., 126, 127. 31. Ibid., 4–5. 32. Ibid., 8, 14–15; Mark Jacobson, “Enough with the Resurrections, Already!” Esquire 114, no. 3 (September 1990), 222, 224, 226. 33. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 16. 34. Brustein, “Hit of the Building,” 29; Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 169. 35. Kanfer, “Rabbi’s Son Makes Good”; Donald Weber, “Jackie Mason’s Revenge: Can the Comic Overcome the Past?” Forward (31 December 1999), 11.

52Stephen J. Whitfield 36. Malcolm MacPherson, “Jackie Mason Arrives on Broadway,” New York Times (21 December 1986); Glen Collins, “Jackie Mason, Top Banana at Last,” New York Times (24 July 1988); Burr, “Up from the Catskills,” 7. 37. Frank Rich, “Critic’s Notebook: Finding Higher Values in Mason’s Low Humor,” New York Times (20 August 1987). 38. Collins, “Jackie Mason, Top Banana, at Last”; Stephen Holden, “Jackie Mason Returns to Catskills in Triumph” New York Times (9 September 1987). 39. Quoted by Masha Leon in the Forward (7 January 2000), 16. 40. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 287. 41. Mason, How to Talk Jewish, 55; MacPherson, “Jackie Mason Arrives on Broadway.” 42. Vincent Brook, “ ‘Y’all Killed Him, We Didn’t!’: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show,” in You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vincent Brook (New Brunswick: 2006), 300–303. 43. Elizabeth Bernstein, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Want a Bar Mitzvah,” Wall Street Journal (14 January 2004). 44. Howard Jaffe to Temple Isaiah membership list, Lexington, Massachusetts (e-mail, 20 December 2011). 45. David Von Drehle, “The Moment,” Time (12 July 2010), 17. 46. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: 2010), 505–506. 47. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 93, 140–141. 48. Kanfer, “Rabbi’s Son Makes Good,” 99; Mason and Felder, Schmucks!, 114–118. 49. Collins, “Jackie Mason, Top Banana at Last,” 14; Five years later the editor of the American Scholar made exactly the same point, but without crediting Mason. See Joseph Epstein, “My 1950’s,” Commentary 96, no. 3 (September 1993), 40. 50. Quoted in Brustein, “Hit of the Building,” 29. 51. Garelick, “Jew versus Jew,” 11; also in Kaufman, “Back in the Big Time,” 32. 52. Mason, Jackie, Oy!, 151. 53. Kaufman, “Back in the Big Time,” 32. 54. Quoted in Brustein, “Hit of the Building,” 29. 55. Quoted in Garelick, “Jew versus Jew,” 11. 56. Quoted in Brustein, “Hit of the Building,” 29. 57. Jason Zinoman, “He’s Telling You This for the Last Time,” New York Times (22 March 2008). 58. Steve Krief, “Mason, Jackie (1934– ),” in Encyclopedia of Jewish American Popular Culture, ed. Jack R. Fischel, with Susan M. Ortmann (Westport, Ct.: 2009), 281–282; Mason and Felder, Schmucks!, 56. 59. Collins, “Jackie Mason, Top Banana, at Last.” 60. “Jackie Mason: How Jewish Is ‘Too Jewish’?”, 36; Weber, “Jackie Mason’s Revenge,” 11. 61. Weber, “Jackie Mason’s Revenge,” 11; n. a., “No Kidding,” New York Times (1 October 1989); Don Terry, “An Earlier Jackie Mason Racial Slur against Dinkins Is Disclosed,” New York Times (2 October 1989); Jacobson, “Enough with the Resurrections,” 152–153, 228. 62. Mason, How to Talk Jewish, 95. 63. Mel Gussow, “Some New Barbs from Jackie Mason,” New York Times (18 October 1990). 64. Daniel Jeremy Brin, “Going Sour: The Problem of the American Humorist” (Senior thesis, Brandeis University, 1974), 4–6, passim. 65. Tamar Morad, “ ‘Funny 101’: Yiddish Center Confab Fetes Jewish Humor,” Forward (2 August 2002). 66. Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field (eds.), “An Interview with Bernard Malamud,” in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: 1975), 11; Bruce, “Jewish and Goyish,” 60.

Decoding Seinfeld’s Jewishness Jarrod Tanny (University of North Carolina Wilmington)

The hit series Seinfeld is widely regarded as one of the best situation comedies in the history of American television. During its nine-season run, it climbed the rating charts, reaching the zenith of popularity by the time its finale aired in May 1997. It brought fame and fortune to its cast and writers, who engendered a cultural phenomenon through quirky characters, deceptively simple storylines, and an endless spate of “Seinfeldisms”—stock phrases that found their way into the daily discourse of millions of viewers. Television critics and scholars also recognize the show to have been a watershed in the depiction of Jewishness in situation comedies. Before the 1980s, Jewish characters were few and far between, but following Seinfeld’s success, they began to surface on every network. Although Jewish executives, producers, and writers had always been the driving force behind network television, the “Jewish sitcom” was a new phenomenon. Yet the nature and extent of Seinfeld’s Jewishness remains subject to debate, so much so that William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, the editors of the canonical Big Book of Jewish Humor, concede that “the precise relationship of Seinfeld to Jewish humor is a complicated question that we are happy to avoid,” though “neither the quality of the product nor its Jewish flavor have ever been in doubt.”1 Indeed, there is little that is overtly Jewish about Seinfeld. Of the four principal characters, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, all of whom are thirty-something single New Yorkers, Jerry Seinfeld is the only one explicitly identified as Jewish; moreover, this does not occur until the 74th episode and only recurs on four occasions in the one hundred episodes that followed. A mere six episodes have what might be called “Jewish plotlines,” including a bris, a bar mitzvah, a Jewish singles night, and a dentist who converts to Judaism in order to tell Jewish jokes. The paucity of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish stories on Seinfeld coupled with the show’s patently “Jewish flavor” has not gone unnoticed. Consider the title of Jon Stratton’s essay, “Seinfeld is a Jewish Show, Isn’t It?” or Rosalin Krieger’s “ ‘Does He Actually Say the Word Jewish?’ ” or David Zurawik’s apt description of Seinfeld as “a too Jewish/not Jewish enough Jew for the ’90s.”2 This paradox may explain how the Washington Post’s TV critic, Tom Shales, could slam Seinfeld as “too selfhatingly Jewish,” while Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the AntiDefamation League, called the show “human” and “universal,” with characters who 53

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wear Jewishness “comfortably on their sleeves.”3 Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC, had in fact nearly vetoed the show because he viewed the 1989 pilot episode as “too New York Jewish.”4 But Seinfeld was granted a stay of execution thanks to another NBC executive, Rick Ludwin, neither a New Yorker nor a Jew, who liked the show, as it struck a chord with him.5 Seinfeld is a situation comedy infused with what may be called implicit Jewishness. It tacitly alludes to Jewishness at multiple levels and in a sophisticated manner: through comic strategy, narrative techniques, linguistic inflections, and dialogue whose immediate origins stem from Yiddish culture but extend further back into the talmudic discourse that had framed normative Judaism for centuries; through Jewish stereotypes, rooted in physical markers, gestures, movements, and behavior; and through the selective use of explicitly Jewish characters, plotlines, and vocabulary on a few but carefully chosen occasions. To borrow Henry Bial’s term, Seinfeld is “double coded,” written and performed in a way that could be read as Jewish by those who recognize the signposts and idioms.6 Seinfeld’s creators did not invent implicit Jewishness. Rather, they inherited a blueprint that had shaped American Jewish entertainment, techniques that had gestated on New York’s Lower East Side, and then reached maturity in theater, film, television, and stand-up comedy. The encryption of Jewishness was a necessary strategy at these sites of cultural production, even though these sites came to be dominated by Jews, the former pariahs of Christendom, who after centuries of legal exclusion could now enjoy mobility and success through the creative professions. Jewish hegemony in 20th-century American entertainment meant unprecedented visibility among a public that was ethnically diverse but still nominally governed by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. What materialized was an ideology of subdued Jewishness, one that stigmatized anything that appeared to be “too Jewish” but simultaneously sought to harness the vast output of creativity and talent these new arrivals brought to the table. Much had changed by Seinfeld’s time, with the preceding decades having witnessed a veritable explosion of Jewish films, novels, and comedians. But the centralized oligarchic television industry clung to an ethos of “write Yiddish, cast British.”7 The executives demanded “Jewish flavor” without any Jews. As the first successful Jewish sitcom since the cancellation of The Goldbergs in 1956, Seinfeld marked an important transition. On the one hand, the series represents the apogee of implicit Jewishness, the culmination of a century of surreptitiously injecting yiddishkeit into popular entertainment. On the other hand, Seinfeld’s unexpected success eliminated the “too Jewish” barrier from network television; it brought the revolution in Jewish visibility into prime time, the last bastion of cultural puritanism in America. Until the 1920s, the public performance of Jewishness had flourished in America. Jewish entertainers first made their way into vaudeville, where crude portrayals of ethnic minorities (often by other ethnic minorities) were commonplace.8 From vaudeville they entered film, which in its early years continued the practices of vaudeville. But the end of the 1920s marked the onset of what Irving Howe famously called “de-Semitization” and what other scholars have called “whitening”—the disappearance of the visible Jew from film and other realms of popular culture.9 There were several factors behind this shift, including the rise of nativism, the fear of an

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antisemitic backlash against the disproportionate presence of Jews in Hollywood, and self-censorship by the Jewish executives who ran the motion picture business. Some of these “Hollywood Jews,” writes Neal Gabler, claimed that “no one else wanted to see a movie about a Jew,” while others contended that they “didn’t want to ruffle the goyim.”10 With a few notable exceptions, the visible Jew did not return to the American scene until the late 1950s, when, as Patricia Erens puts it, a veritable era of philosemitism began: in literature, with Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth; in stand-up comedy, epitomized by Lenny Bruce; and a decade later in film, exemplified by Woody Allen.11 Enjoying national acclaim, these artists had no qualms about being too Jewish: through the manipulation of stereotypes, through the unabashed use of Yiddish inflections to pollute Anglo-linguistic respectability, and through direct references to their Jewish heritage as a source of discomfort within white Christian America. They were iconoclasts, often branded as self-hating Jews who aired their dirty Jewish laundry in public. But they were immensely popular and they were funny.12 They signified a turning point in American Jewish humor, bringing to national audiences the shtick that had been confined to exclusively Jewish milieus such as the Borscht Belt. Not so with television, where Jewish executives continued to employ self-censorship and act as the gatekeepers of televised ethnicity.13 To be sure, TV operated under certain unique constraints: it was a centralized industry monopolized by three networks; a medium that had to be family-friendly because it pervaded nearly every American living room; and there was a continual need to appease advertisers.14 Yet it is striking how Jewish sitcoms remained all but nonexistent into the 1970s, even after All in the Family shattered the erstwhile ethos of conformity that had kept race, sexuality, violence, and politics out of prime-time comedy.15 Although ethnic sitcoms subsequently saturated television, and several featured recurring Jewish characters, network executives still contended that nobody wanted to watch “people from New York, men with mustaches, and Jews.”16 At the same time, de-Semitization did not imply invisibility. Throughout the years of constrained ethnic comedy, Jewish writers, actors, and musicians embedded markers of Jewishness into their work. The Marx Brothers were adept at using what anthropologists call “ethnic signaling,”17 semi-concealed nods to Jewish audiences, such as this memorable scene in the 1929 film The Cocoanuts: Groucho: Now all along here—this is the riverfront—those are levees. Chico:  That’s a Jewish neighborhood. Groucho:  Well, we’ll passover that . . . 18 Encrypting Jewishness also occurred through the playful use of stereotype. Groucho often starred as an inveterate schemer who ensnared others into his machinations through imposture. Elaborate scams were also the hallmark of Sergeant Bilko, the head of a motor pool on an army base in Kansas on The Phil Silvers Show (CBS, 1955–1959), who commanded his troops through a philosophy of shirking duty and the fraudulent acquisition of wealth.19 Jack Benny was famous for his cheapness, but he also exuded effeminacy, wore glasses, and played the violin, which are Jewish stereotypes of European origin.20 Although such traits were often the fodder of

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antisemites, the de-judaized Jewish comic clandestinely exploited them, communicating, as Henry Bial puts it, “one message to Jewish audiences while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences.”21 Encrypted Jewishness was primarily achieved through language, as Judaism is a textually grounded and linguistically driven religion. Groucho’s debates with himself over the infinite possible outcomes of an imagined scenario evoke talmudic pilpul (sophistry), but also bear the imprint of Tevye’s unidirectional conversations with God—monologues filled with second-guessing, objection, and resignation. Allan Sherman’s musical parodies may be devoid of Yiddish words, but convey Yiddish through syntax (“Sarah Jackman, how’s by you?”).22 Bilko’s machinations habitually follow the narrative of the classic Jewish kvetch: the expression of entitlement through complaint, argument, and justification. His tendency to gesticulate when speaking with his heavy New York accent marks him as an outsider, but one who, like the Marx Brothers, dexterously inveigles his way into white Christian America, only to subvert its hierarchical social order. By the 1970s, encrypting Jewishness had become a sophisticated practice on television, particularly once the elimination of some taboos had expanded the boundaries of the permissible. The writers of All in the Family used Jewish characters on few occasions, but nonetheless encoded Jewish discourse within their scripts. A case in point is the third episode, in which the prejudiced Archie Bunker, after being in a car accident, solicits the services of a Jewish law firm, having bought into the myth of the shrewd Jewish attorney.23 When the lawyer arrives and asks the ostensibly injured Bunker if he is comfortable, Bunker replies, “I make a living.” Taking this as a joke, the lawyer laughs hysterically. But the joke is on Bunker, since the law firm of Rabinowitz, Rabinowitz, and Rabinowitz has sent over their “token goy,” having assumed that Bunker would not want a Jew in his home. Although this episode playfully deals with antisemitism, its Jewish flavor is rooted in dialogue, not plot, for when Bunker responds to the lawyer’s query with “I make a living,” he is unwittingly telling a classic Yiddish joke.24 The incident makes for an ironic twist because it is two non-Jewish New Yorkers—one a confirmed antisemite—who are “speaking Jewish.” Perhaps Bunker’s encoded yiddishkeit signifies what Lenny Bruce had in mind when he quipped that anyone who lives in New York is Jewish by definition.25 Although he was describing the fluid ethno-cultural boundaries of the post-Second World War era, Bruce was also debunking the myth of the invisible Jew in American culture: Jewishness was discernible, if you possessed the tools to decode it. Brandon Tartikoff possessed these tools and he knew their history, which explains his dismissive “too New York Jewish” assessment of Seinfeld. And like Lenny Bruce, Tartikoff also knew that “too New York” in itself meant “too Jewish.” In 1989, when “too Jewish” as dogma and encrypted Jewishness as strategy were still entrenched in network television, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were on the brink of co-creating a sitcom destined to be a defining moment in American entertainment and the history of Jewish humor. They did so by perfecting a formula for implicit Jewishness that was built upon the complex interlacing of language, ritual, and stereotype that stemmed from the history and culture of Ashkenazi Jewry. Implicit Jewishness on Seinfeld emerges most noticeably through physical, behavioral, and familial stereotypes that are often found in antisemitic discourse and in the

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satirical work of allegedly self-hating Jews such as Philip Roth and Woody Allen. Although Jerry Seinfeld and his family—the only principal characters defined on occasion as Jews—display some of these stereotypes, they are far more developed in Jerry’s best friend, George Costanza, and his parents, Frank and Estelle. TV critics have noted George’s seeming Jewishness; the decision to give him an Italian family name was likely the product of the persistent self-censoring of “too Jewish” among the Tartikoffs of network television. And, as Vincent Brook argues, “for media watchdog groups concerned over offensive Jewish portrayals, George’s miserly misanthropy becomes tolerable” once he is portrayed as ostensibly Italian.26 In similar fashion, Abraham Foxman could refer to Seinfeld’s Jews as comfortable, because the Jew who radiated perpetual discomfort claimed an Italian pedigree. And yet David and Seinfeld undoubtedly envisioned George as Jewish, basing the character on David himself.27 Although Jason Alexander initially played George as if he were Woody Allen, Alexander maintains that he gave little thought to George’s background “until they cast his parents. . . . Estelle Harris played George’s mother. And she can’t be anything but Jewish. So I thought his folks must have had a mixed marriage.”28 Estelle Costanza’s ethnicity is never mentioned, but her refusal to buy a Mercedes because “I won’t ride in a German car,” is in all likelihood an allusion to a post-Holocaust revulsion against German products.29 Jerry Stiller, the Jewish actor who plays Frank Costanza, once told a reporter that “we’re a Jewish family in the Witness Protection Program under the name Costanza.”30 There is more than humor behind Stiller’s quip: Hollywood had a history of using the Italian as a stand-in ethnic for the unwelcome Jew. Chico Marx often played a generic immigrant with an Italian accent. Frank Capra’s A Hole in the Head (1959) featured the Manettas, though the title was a literal translation of the Yiddish expression “a lokh in kop” and Arnold Schulman had adapted his script from his Broadway play about a Jewish family.31 On Happy Days, Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli, the iconic sitcom rebel of the 1970s, was presumably Italian, yet he had been raised by his Grandma Nussbaum. And on The Golden Girls, Dorothy and Sophia Petrillo (played by Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty, both Jewish actors), spoke with a discernible New York Jewish inflection. “The Irish and Italian Catholics,” Patricia Erens argues, were minorities that “counter the dominant WASP image” yet, as Christian, were more acceptable on screen than Jews.32 Italians migrated to the United States during the same era as East European Jewry, and both groups were labeled as “inbetweens” and “conditionally white” for their purported lack of Anglo-Saxon civility.33 They were interchangeable in Hollywood’s climate of constrained ethnicity. But the limits of ethnic interchangeability are revealed with George Costanza, who embodies the stereotyped misery, misfortune, and anxiety historically imputed to East European Jewry, a shlimazel who succeeds best at failing. He oozes Jewish affliction, believing he was destined for such a fate yet paradoxically professing an entitlement to more. “Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise,”34 he kvetches to Jerry, bewildered that his best (Jewish) friend could be so satisfied: George: There’s gotta be more to life than this. What gives you pleasure? Jerry: Listening to you. I listen to this for fifteen minutes and I’m on top of the world. Your misery is my pleasure.35

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George represents the Ashkenazi Jew in exile, confirming the Jewish proverb that reprimands God for having “chosen us from among the nations—what, O Lord, did you have against us?” (“atah beḥartanu mikol ha’amim—vos hostu zikh ongezetst oyf undz?”).36 George’s misery is inscribed on his body through stereotypes rooted in antisemitic discourse that are European in origin but surface as humor in post-Second World War America. The Jewish body, argues Sander Gilman, is culturally constructed as the sickly antithesis of the healthy Gentile body; it exudes a pathological effeminacy engendered by circumcision, the “symbolic substitution of castration.”37 The damaged penis, writes Nathan Abrams, came to represent the Jewish “nub of suffering,”38 allegedly provoking insatiable sexual perversions and mental disorders generally associated with women, such as hysteria and neurosis.39 Jewish writers also adopted the trope of Jewish pathology, though they often added touches of irony to capture the agonies of assimilation. For Heinrich Heine, there was “no healing for this sickness”; it was “the Jewish sickness of the centuries.”40 For Philip Roth, it served as the raw material for Portnoy’s Complaint, whose hypersexual protagonist incessantly masturbates yet suffers from impotence, living in perpetual fear of genital disease and feminization. “What if breasts began to grow on me,” Portnoy agonizes, “what if my penis went dry and brittle, and . . . snapped off in my hand? Was I being transformed into a girl?”41 Roth and his comedic successors established the damaged Jew as an American cultural archetype, with George Costanza emerging as the most perfectly realized damaged Jew in the history of network television; he suffers from Heine’s incurable “Jewish sickness,” in everything but name. George’s effeminacy and dysfunctional sexuality are recurring themes on Seinfeld. In one episode, a group of kids call him “Mary” for leaping over a puddle like a ballerina; in “The Outing,” he expresses concern to a journalist recording their conversation because his voice “always sounds so high and whiny” on tape; in “The Hamptons,” George is mocked when seen naked after swimming because the cold water caused “significant shrinkage,” thus exposing his symbolic castration; and in “The Doorman,” George discovers his father’s large breasts and fears he has inherited “the bosom gene.”42 His dread of sexual inadequacy is often revealed through a discourse of catastrophe: George:  I don’t like when a woman says, “make love to me,” it’s intimidating. The last time a woman said that to me, I wound up apologizing to her. Jerry: Really? George:  That’s a lot of pressure. Make love to me. What am I, in the circus? What if I can’t deliver?43 George’s sexual pathology manifests itself in an imagined state of infirmity and sterility. Upon learning that he may have accidentally impregnated a woman, he responds with elation: “I did it! My boys can swim!”44 For George, triumphing over sexual dysfunction is far more important than the burden of unexpected fatherhood. George exhibits other well-known Jewish stereotypes, including cheapness, which Jack Benny earlier used to great effect. When he suspects his girlfriend is bulimic, George sees it solely in financial terms:

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Elaine: So you’re concerned. George: Elaine, of course I’m concerned. I’m payin’ for those meals. It’s like throwing money down the toilet. Jerry: In a manner of speaking. George: Let me digest it. Let me get my money’s worth.45 But George’s cheapness is rooted in principle rather than stinginess, and he justifies it through flawed logic and genetics: George:  I can’t park in a garage. Elaine:  Why? George:  I don’t know, I just can’t. Nobody in my family can pay for parking, it’s a sickness. My father never paid for parking; my mother, my brother, nobody. We can’t do it. Elaine:  I’ll pay for it. George:  You don’t understand. A garage. I can’t even pull in there. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?46 The family has been a theme in Jewish humor at least since the 19th century, when the Jewish mother emerged as an iconic figure who smothers and manipulates her children. According to Joyce Antler, the late 1950s marked a transition in the Jewish mother’s depiction. Humorists began to project their own postwar anxieties over assimilation and loyalty to tradition onto her, constructing a fierce matriarch who “pushed and prodded her offspring to succeed but relegated them to a clinging dependency.”47 On Seinfeld, both Jerry’s and George’s parents bear familial markers of Jewishness, though George suffers from his mother’s damaging influence far more than Jerry. Perhaps this is because Jerry’s parents retired to Florida, whereas George’s stayed in Queens. “You have no idea how your life is gonna improve,” Jerry tells George when the Costanzas consider moving south, “food tastes better, the air seems fresher, you’ll have more energy and self-confidence than you ever dreamed of.”48 Or perhaps it is because George’s unemployment forces him to move in with his parents, who even ground him for having had sex in their bed. Or perhaps it is because in rendering the Costanzas nominally Italian, Seinfeld’s writers enjoyed greater license in marking George as an implicit Jew with suffocating parents, whose home movies include a tour of a highway restroom where they change a seven-year-old George on camera. Estelle Costanza’s Jewishness is captured through her simultaneous adulation and denigration of George: the Jewish son is imagined as a perfect being, but the real son can never live up to her expectation. Her reaction to George’s engagement to the WASPish Susan Ross is a case in point: George:  Ma—guess what! Estelle:  Oh, my god! George:  No, it’s nothing bad. I’m getting married. Estelle:  You’re what? George:  I’m getting married!  . . .  Estelle:  Frank . . . Georgie’s getting married.  . . . 

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Frank:  To a woman? Estelle:  Of course, a woman. . . . Let me talk to her  . . .  Susan:  I just want you to know that I love your son very much. Estelle:  Really? [ . . . ] May I ask why? Does Estelle’s “may I ask why” imply suspicion that no woman is good enough for her precious Georgie? Or is she baffled that anyone would marry her idiot son, whom she forces into therapy “so that someday,” muses George, “I might be able to walk up to a woman and say, ‘yes, I’m bald, but I’m still a good person’ ”?49 There is no escape from the Jewish mother, neither through psychotherapy nor through flight into the arms of a shiksa. Alexander Portnoy knows this. And Woody Allen’s protagonist in “Oedipus Wrecks” discovers this when his mother, Sadie Millstein, ends up surrealistically hovering in the sky, where she continues to badger her son over trivialities in front of a million Manhattanites.50 George discovers this, too, when his fiancé moves her doll collection into his apartment, including one that strikingly resembles his mother. Like the colossal Sadie Millstein, the miniaturized Estelle compounds George’s neuroses, rebuking him (in his own mind) in public for his poor eating manners and clothing. “I almost threw it down the incinerator, but I couldn’t do it,” George admits to Jerry, because “the guilt was too overwhelming.” George’s hesitancy is not the shame of committing surrogate matricide, but is rather due to Susan’s intense attachment to the doll, which she even brings into their bed. When Susan attempts intimacy, George crumbles. Alexander Portnoy’s obsessive masturbation is his refuge from his mother, and perhaps as a nod to Philip Roth, George’s mother makes her first appearance on Seinfeld in a celebrated episode about a masturbation contest, when Estelle catches George “treating his body like it was an amusement park,” as she colorfully puts it.51 But whereas Portnoy’s auto-erotic compulsions engender a fear of disease, Estelle’s shocking encounter with her exposed son causes her to collapse and lands her in the hospital. Both instances imply a fundamental link between sexual deviance, the smothering mother, and disability. They suffer from Heine’s “Jewish sickness,” a disorder rooted in their common pedigree. Portnoy’s Complaint begat Seinfeld, and the child inherited the parent’s Jewish afflictions: a damaged body, sexual dysfunction, and neurosis. But unlike Philip Roth, Seinfeld’s writers encoded their heritage, purging explicit Judaic content from the structure of Jewish performance and discourse. And to achieve this they needed to harness Jewish humor’s greatest asset: the linguistically driven culture imported from Eastern Europe. Although the assimilation of any minority group rarely results in the complete disappearance of its language, the fate of Yiddish was distinct for several reasons. As a dispersed people who needed to communicate with their Christian neighbors while simultaneously practicing a theology rooted in ancestral Semitic tongues, Europe’s Jews lived in a linguistically fluid environment. With its Germanic foundations and absorptive vocabulary, Yiddish embodied flexibility; it connected the sacred to the profane, the yeshiva to the marketplace. “There was a direct flow of expressions and discourse patterns and gestures between the two domains of life, study and home,”

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writes Benjamin Harshav.52 Yiddish was not merely a language; it was a porous yet resilient cultural container that facilitated the survival of a stateless people. Such linguistic plasticity also explains why the Jews were exceptionally skilled in adopting local languages on their own terms. European Gentiles viewed this phenomenon with anxiety, and they questioned the sincerity of their formerly heretical neighbors’ assimilation into modernity. Language emerged as a symbol of treachery; as Sander Gilman argues, antisemites accused the Jews of sounding “too Jewish” and, paradoxically, of speaking a “hidden language.”53 Whether overt or disguised, “the informed listener hears the Jew hidden within.”54 Speaking Jewish was conceptually nebulous, elastic in practice, and replete with historical baggage. The ability to traverse linguistic boundaries with ease (and on the sly) translated into cultural currency, particularly for Jews entering the relatively open creative professions. Observers noted the permeation of Yiddish into American English as early as the 1940s, which occurred through structure and style, not just vocabulary: through reduplication (“fancy-shmancy”), syntactical borrowings (“I should worry”), and literal translations of common expressions (“I need it like a hole in the head.”).55 “So much Yiddish is finding its way into TV usage at the very time when the tongue itself is losing ground,” wrote Lillian Feinsilver in 1957.56 Fifty years later, Jeffrey Shandler elaborated: “the atomization of Yiddish has also expanded the potential for reconceptualizing it as a semiotic system, in which its signifiers might be inflections, melodies, gestures, or objects,” such that “Yiddish culture does not require Yiddish fluency or, for that matter, any use of Yiddish at all.”57 Indeed, dialogue on Seinfeld is replete with Yiddishisms despite the almost complete absence of Yiddish words. In one episode, Jerry’s mother berates her son for not asking out a waitress, declaring that “I should drop dead if she’s not beautiful.”58 The statement, morphologically Yiddish, is actually one of the more transparent Yiddishisms. More often, these surface in the form of interjections and calques, including “enough with the . . . ”, “what’s with . . . ”, “again with . . . ”, and the use of “already” at the end of a sentence: Elaine’s friend:  Elaine. Move to Long Island and have a baby already. Jerry’s mother:  Enough with the comedy. George:  Enough with the bar already. Jerry:  What’s with the eyebrows? George:  What’s with this Russell? Jerry:  Again with the sweatpants? Frank Costanza:  Again with the pepper? Jerry’s Uncle Leo:  Ma, again with the ketchup? Japanese businessman [in Japanese with English subtitle]: Again with the oranges. Enzo the Barber:  Oh-fah, again wid-a Edward-a-Scissorhand. How can you have a hand-a-like-a scissor, eh? Show me one-a person who’s got a hand-a like-a scissor!59

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Jewish speech is often characterized as brash and argumentative, a stereotype reflected in a 19th-century Yiddish proverb, “God protect us from Gentile hands and Jewish tongues” (“Got zol op’hitn fun goyishe hent un yidishe reyd”),60 and given weight through the work of 20th-century American linguists.61 Deborah Schiffrin demonstrates that Jewish families tend to converse through debate and disagreement, regardless of the subject and its gravity. She concludes that “Jewish speakers use argument as a vehicle for sociability,” and what appears to be fighting is in reality “the tolerance of conflict . . . made possible by the take-for-granted level of intimacy of the relationship.”62 Deborah Tannen similarly infers that the stereotyped “pushy New York Jew” is merely conversing through a tenacious and diffuse convention brought from Eastern Europe and then absorbed by non-Jewish New Yorkers.63 To be from New York is to be Jewish, and to be Jewish is to converse through argument. Speaking Jewish on Seinfeld is rooted in the way discourse is structured, the way interjections and intonation bind seemingly abrasive dialogue through ironic repetition, the inversion of statements into questions, and the insertion of Jewish stereotypes that suggest intimacy. When Jerry and Elaine visit Jerry’s parents, Morty and Helen, in Florida, squabbling immediately ensues: Morty:  So, what took you so long? Jerry:  We waited thirty-five minutes in the rent-a-car place. Helen:  I don’t know why you had to rent a car. We would have picked you up. Jerry:  What’s the difference? Helen:  You could have used our car. Jerry:  I don’t wanna use your car. Helen:  What’s wrong with our car? Jerry:  Nothing, it’s a fine car. What if you wanna use it? Helen:  We don’t use it. Morty:  What are you talking? We use it. Helen:  If you were using it, we wouldn’t use it. Jerry:  So what would you do, you’d hitch? Helen:  How much is a rent-a-car? Jerry:  I don’t know, twenty-five bucks a day. Helen:  What? Oh, you’re crazy. . . .  Jerry:  God it’s so hot in here. Why don’t you put on the air conditioning? Helen:  You don’t need the air conditioner. . . . Where are you going with those? Jerry:  I’m gonna put Elaine’s stuff in here. Helen:  Don’t sleep in there. You can use the bedroom. Elaine:  I can’t take your bedroom. Helen:  I’m up at 6 o’clock in the morning. Elaine:  I can’t kick you out of your bed. Helen:  We don’t even sleep. Jerry:  Ma!

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Helen:  But this is a sofa bed, you’ll be uncomfortable. Jerry [to Morty]: What about you? Morty:  Why should I be comfortable? Jerry [to Helen]: What about him? Helen:  Don’t worry, he’s comfortable. Morty:  I’ll sleep standing up. I’ll be fine. Helen smothers Jerry, infantilizing him through argument. She imposes her conception of “comfort” onto him by ostentatiously sacrificing her own welfare and by claiming she knows what is best for everybody. But her words produce discomfort, revealed by Morty’s ironic interruptions, and the passing reference to an “unnecessary” air conditioner despite the oppressive humidity. The Jewish boy is asphyxiated by his mother’s linguistic domination and the stifling heat of a condominium complex filled with (implicitly) Jewish retirees.64 Seinfeld’s writers were hardly the first to construct comedic Jewish discourse through argument. One can find it, for instance, in the writings of Sholem Aleichem, Israel Zangwill, and Philip Roth. It was also a strategy used to mark certain characters as implicit Jews during the era of “de-Semitized” television. On the sitcom Bewitched (ABC, 1964–1972), the protagonists live across the street from a couple named the Kravitzes, a hysterical wife whose constant badgering of her husband provokes him to respond with insults characteristic of Borscht Belt humor: Gladys:  Abner, a wonderful thing has happened, guess what I’ve got! Abner:  Heartburn. . . .  Gladys:  Extrasensory perception . . . I was over at the Stephens’ house, now I know it’s hard to believe, Abner, but I moved all their pictures on their wall, without even touching them. Abner:  You moved their pictures, huh? Over here I’d be glad if you just dusted the pictures. Gladys:  You don’t believe me do you? Abner:  When is this all gonna stop? When? When am I gonna have peace? The last time it was yoga, before that it was karate . . . to protect yourself from strangers. To tell the truth I wish you’d go out some night and meet a stranger.65 On a sitcom set in tranquil suburbia devoid of explicit Jews, the intermittent appearance of the Kravitzes fundamentally ruptures the narrative structure of Bewitched with Jewish discourse. On Seinfeld, in contrast, argument does not break the narrative flow, because each episode unfolds through a chain of disputation. Sociable argument on Seinfeld is not merely normative; it is the rule of engagement, and the violation of this code signifies a breach of the show’s linguistic structure. Yet the boundaries of Jewish-speak are sufficiently elastic and nebulous to accommodate such ruptures, and they usually provoke an analysis of the dispute itself, at the “metacommunicative level,” as Deborah Schiffrin puts it.66 In “The Postponement,” George questions his engagement to Susan after she refuses to discuss toilet stalls:

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George:  I will never understand the bathrooms in this country. Why is it that the doors on the stalls do not come all the way down to the floor? Susan:  Well, maybe so you can see if there’s someone in there. George:  Isn’t that why we have locks on the doors? Susan:  Well, as a backup system, in case the lock is broken, you can see if it’s taken. George:  A backup system? We’re designing bathroom doors with our legs exposed in anticipation of the locks not working? That’s not a system. That’s a complete breakdown of the system. Susan:  Can we change the subject, please? George:  Why? What’s wrong with the subject? This is a bad subject? Susan:  No, fine. If you wanna keep talking about it, we’ll talk about it. George:  It’s not that I want to keep talking about it, I just think that the subject should resolve itself based on its own momentum. Susan:  Well, I didn’t think that it had any momentum. George [to himself ]: How am I gonna do this? I’m engaged to this woman? She doesn’t even like me. Change the subject? Toilets were the subject. We don’t even share the same interests. Although Susan does not share George’s (well-documented) obsession with toilets, his anxiety is the product of her ostensible unwillingness to “speak Seinfeld,” her attempt to rupture the flow of sociable argument. She—not George—is the one who is trapped, because her response spawns a debate about the nature of debate, which resurfaces later when George relates the conversation to Jerry: George: This is what she said to me, “Can we change the subject?” Jerry:  See, now that I don’t care for. George:  Right. I mean, we’re on a subject. Why does it have to be changed? Jerry:  It should resolve of its own volition. George:  That’s exactly what I said, except I used the word “momentum.” Jerry:  Momentum—same thing. George:  Same thing.67 Perhaps Susan’s unwillingness to engage in “speaking Seinfeld” stems from her being a shiksa. Her aversion is shared by another shiksa, Elaine, who declares: “I can’t spend the rest of my life coming into this stinking apartment every ten minutes to pore over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event.”68 Yet this is New York, where even the shiksas speak Jewish—even if they claim otherwise—and Elaine continues to participate in the ritualized debates that earned Seinfeld its reputation as “a show about nothing.” One hundred and seventy-six episodes of analysis, argument, and seeming indecision. One hundred and seventy-six episodes of talmudic discourse. It has long been recognized that an important relationship between the Talmud and Jewish humor exists, though the precise connection—in true talmudic spirit—

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is subject to debate.69 To modern eyes, the Talmud misleadingly appears funny because of its meandering discussions over seeming trivialities, digressions, and the lack of firm conclusions. The “hairsplitting” so often imputed to the Talmud has been a subject of ridicule since the Haskalah, coming to represent one of the sources of European Jewry’s backwardness and sickly diasporic condition.70 Humorists, however, have been exploiting the talmudic form for centuries, mimicking its disputational structure and ascribing comical dialogue to its sages, perhaps most notably with the 14th-century Tractate Purim (Masekhet Purim), and more recently with Gerson Rosenzweig’s Talmud Yankee, a satire of life in America.71 The fact that talmudic discourse served both as an object of ridicule and as a rhetorical device to engage in ridicule underscores its all-encompassing role in framing Jewish culture. What began as halakhic debate during the rabbinic era became the portable homeland of diasporic Jewry, trickling down to the masses, particularly in Eastern Europe. There, conversational Yiddish came to reflect the talmudic form, and, as Harshav puts it, “dialogue within dialogue within dialogue was the name of the game.”72 The weight of talmudic discourse in normative Judaism led to its penetration into non-halakhic spheres, including philosophy, literary criticism, folklore, and humor.73 Open-ended discussions are the backbone of Seinfeld, governing the overarching storylines and the multitude of little debates within each episode: Are there degrees of coincidence? Is it permissible to parallel park headfirst? Is it poor hygiene to “double dip” a chip? How long must you keep a greeting card before you can throw it out? Why does Jerry’s new girlfriend wear the same dress on every date? In the episode titled “The Good Samaritan,” the subject of discussion is the question whether it is appropriate to say “God bless you” to a woman who sneezes, if her husband has not said it. George does so, at a dinner engagement, and then inadvertently puts the matter to the test when he follows up his chivalrous gesture with an ill-conceived attempt at humor: pointing to Michael, the sneezer’s husband, he notes that “I wasn’t gonna say anything, but then I could see that he wasn’t gonna open his mouth.” Michael explodes with rage; subsequently, Robin, the sneezer in question, decides to have an affair with “Mr. Gesundheit,” as Elaine sardonically dubs George. “The Good Samaritan” appears to be driven by a linear plot, typical of sitcoms, with humorous dialogue having a descriptive function. But it is the dialogue that produces plot; the discursive deconstruction of what may be called “the sneeze event” is the episode’s core, and the course of its analysis drives the story forward. The initial sneeze event is followed by an intense debate between Jerry and George over what transpired: George: I said “God bless you.” Was that so wrong? Jerry:  The question is, did you allow a space for the husband to come in with his “God bless you”? Because as the husband, he has the right to first refusal . . .  George:  Yes, yes, I definitely waited. But let me say this: Once he passes on that option, that “God bless you” is up for grabs. Jerry:  No argument. Unless, she’s one of these multiple sneezers, and he’s holding his “God bless you” in abeyance, until she completes the series.

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George: Well, I don’t think she is a multiple sneezer, because she sneezed again later, and it was also a single. George meets Robin for a romantic tryst, but it is the further deconstruction of the sneeze event—not the sex—that defines their encounter: George:  Oh my God. I must be crazy. What have I done? Robin:  Oh no, what’s wrong? George:  What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. I just committed adultery. Robin:  You didn’t commit adultery, I did. George:  Oh yeah. Robin:  If I didn’t do it with you, I would have done it with someone else. George:  Well, I wouldn’t want you to do that. You know there’s a lot of losers out there. Robin:  Maybe even someone who didn’t say “God bless you.” George:  Well, that’s a given. Robin:  In three years with Michael, not one “God bless you.” George:  Must be hell living in that house.74 Seinfeld is linguistically driven insofar as the plot is dependent upon debate, which often transpires in a manner reminiscent of ḥ avruta, the paired adversarial study of Talmud in the yeshiva, “an interactional language game which imposes a  set of conversational obligations on its players,” as Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Menahem Blondheim, and Gonen Hacohen suggest in their study of talmudic discourse in Israeli media.75 The Talmud’s rules of engagement shape Jerry and George’s daily ḥ avruta, which in turn produces the direction and delimits the boundaries of plot. Seinfeld is celebrated as “a show about nothing” for the same reason that the maskilim and their successors derided the Talmud: “It consists in eternally disputing about the book, without end or aim,” wrote Solomon Maimon in the 18th century.76 But talmudic argumentation is in fact a sophisticated tool, developed in the Babylonian academies where intellectual virtuosity was achieved through verbal confrontation, “the violence of debate,” as Jeffrey Rubenstein calls it, or, as the sages put it, the “wars of Torah.”77 Victory is attained by mastering argument, and this dynamic has found its way into Jewish humor just as much as the stereotype of talmudic sophistry. Jewish folklore is filled with tricksters who achieve their sordid ends through linguistic manipulation, among them the shadkhn, the shtetl matchmaker skilled in unloading shabby brides, and the shnorrer, the Jewish mooch who inveigles others into supporting him. Seinfeld’s characters are masters in manipulating language to attain their goals, justify their behavior, and destroy their adversaries. In one episode George discovers that he is losing a promised apartment to another tenant because the latter is a survivor of the Andrea Doria shipwreck. Upon learning that a mere 51 passengers drowned (“Fifty-one people? . . . That’s no tragedy! How many people do you lose on a normal cruise? Thirty? Forty?”), George confronts the survivor, determined to get the apartment he believes is rightfully his:

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George:  Ahoy! Mr. Eldridge. I understand you were on the Andrea Doria. Eldridge:  Yes, it was a terrifying ordeal. George:  I tell ya, I hear people really stuff themselves on those cruise ships. The buffet, that’s the real ordeal, huh, Clarence? Eldridge:  We had to abandon ship. George:  Well, all vacations have to end eventually. Eldridge:  The boat sank. George:  According to this [book], it took ten hours. It eased into the water like an old man into a nice warm bath—no offence. So, uh, Clarence, how about abandoning this apartment, and letting me shove off in this beauty? Eldridge:  Is that what this is all about? I don’t think I like you. George:  It’s my apartment, Eldridge! The Stockholm may not have sunk ya, but I will! George challenges Eldridge’s alleged suffering by deploying phrases (“Ahoy,” “It eased into the water like an old man”) that embed his argument within Eldridge’s discursive framework; he gains the upper hand by evoking, disparaging, and trivializing Eldridge’s narrative through linguistic infiltration and subversion. Yet there is another side to George’s linguistic manipulation, rooted in his own misery. Perceiving himself a victim, George demands restitution: George:  So, he’s keeping the apartment. He doesn’t deserve it, though! Even if he did suffer, that was, like, forty years ago! What have you done for me lately? I’ve been suffering for the past thirty years up to and including yesterday! Jerry:  You know, if this tenant board is so impressed with suffering, maybe you should tell them the “astonishing tales of Costanza”? George:  I should! Jerry:  I mean your body of work in this field is unparalleled. George:  I could go bumper to bumper with anyone on this planet! Accordingly, George presents his case to the tenant board, an extended kvetch about his miserable existence. He reduces them to tears, and a dejected Eldridge realizes he is sunk, much like the boat that failed to sink him four decades earlier.78 In professing entitlement through self-denigration, George exhibits the attributes of the shnorrer, whom William Novak and Moshe Waldoks define as “a Jewish beggar with chutzpah. He does not actually solicit help; he demands it, and considers it his right.”79 George persistently deploys the shnorrer’s discourse of victimhood to achieve ignoble ends, including the advancement of his career. In one episode, George gets a new job because his prospective employer mistakenly thinks he is handicapped: Jerry: You got the job? George: Jerry, it’s fantastic. I love the people over there. They—they treat me so great. You know they think I’m handicapped, they gave me this incredible office, a great view.

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Jerry:  Hold on, they think you’re handicapped? George:  Yeah, yeah, well, because of the cane. You should see the bathroom they gave me! Jerry:  How can you do this? George: Jerry, let’s face it, I’ve always been handicapped. I’m just now getting the recognition for it. Name one thing I have that puts me in a position of advantage. Huh?  . . .  Jerry:  Do you know how hard it’s getting just to tell people I know you? George:  I love that bathroom. It’s got that high, high toilet, I feel like a gargoyle perched on the ledge of a building.80 George is handicapped because his self-pity is rooted in an imagined state of disability, Heine’s “Jewish sickness of the centuries,” the disease of exile that damaged the Jew’s body and (halakhically) imprisoned his mind. But the diasporic Jew believes himself entitled to more—“restitution,” as George so often demands—because he is the chosen one whom God unjustly abandoned to a life of suffering. He expresses this dialectic of chosenness/abandonment (or, in the secular context, entitlement/victimhood) through linguistic manipulation stemming from a theology of ritualized argument. The archetypal shnorrer of shtetl folklore is the comical incarnation of the diasporic Jew, and George Costanza is his prime-time American descendent, a Jewish rogue who summons tradition to transcend his exilic condition. George is an impostor because linguistic deception is his modus operandi, and his charlatanism is symbolic of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s far greater act of imposture: the unprecedented encryption of Jewishness in an industry where the explicit Jew remained unwelcome. But this, talmudically speaking, raises a question: if they achieved high ratings without explicit Jewishness, why bother producing a handful of episodes that satirize Judaism, risking the ire of executives and the Anti-Defamation League? Indeed, critics responded harshly to a fifth-season episode, “The Bris,” for its portrayal of a neurotic and cantankerous mohel who slips during the ceremony and “circumcises” Jerry’s finger.81 Events seemed to repeat themselves two seasons later, when a gossipy rabbi violates Elaine’s confidence on his weekly television show. The Anti-Defamation League received more than a hundred calls from enraged viewers, far more complaints than NBC ever received over Seinfeld’s lampooning of masturbation, homosexuality, and the handicapped.82 Apparently there was a line of political correctness involving Jews that could not be crossed. Seinfeld’s portrayal of the mohel and the rabbi fits within the tradition of Jewish humor; it was just not kosher to subject them to satire on network television. But these were not the only instances of explicit Jewishness on Seinfeld. In fact, the few other examples are far more illuminating, insofar as they grapple with important aspects of Jewish identity in 20th-century America. In one episode, Jerry is caught making out with his Orthodox girlfriend in a movie theater during a showing of Schindler’s List. Although this may strike some as offensive, the episode lends itself to multiple readings. It may be a subtle critique of the sacralization and exploitation of Holocaust memory in America, which, as Peter Novick argues, is “used for the purpose of national self-congratulation . . . to demonstrate the difference between the Old World and the New, and to celebrate, by showing its negation,

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the American way of life.”83 Conversely, Jerry’s irreverence may be interpreted as a generational indifference to the historic suffering of the Jewish people. In another episode, Elaine attends the bar mitzvah of her former employer’s son, who, upon being told that he is “a man today,” grabs Elaine and gives her an open-mouth kiss. When she explains to him that he is hardly a man at age 13, he declares his bar mitzvah a sham and “renounces” his Judaism. But Elaine’s troubles persist: she receives invitations to more bar mitzvahs and is subjected to sexual advances from numerous Jewish men because, as George explains, “you’ve got ‘shiksappeal.’ Jewish men love the idea of meeting a woman that’s not like their mother.”84 Although this episode, like “The Bris,” may be interpreted as ridiculing Judaism, it could also be read as a critique of American Jewry’s superficial religious practices, which seem to define “Jewish manhood” as an entitlement to have sex with nonJewish women. Both the Schindler’s List make-out and the bar mitzvah make-out exhibit what Richard Raskin calls “interpretive margin, . . . an openness to alternate ways of understanding the point of the joke, coupled with the possibility of simultaneously holding positive and negative attitudes toward the embodiment of Jewishness in the punch line.”85 Even more revealing is Jerry’s relationship with his own Jewish heritage, mentioned only five times, and all but once indirectly, in an eighth-season episode that explores the murky boundary between ethnic humor and political correctness. After his dentist, Tim Whatley, converts to Judaism and proceeds to make self-deprecating Jewish jokes in public, Jerry becomes distressed, suspecting that “Whatley converted to Judaism just for the jokes.” Jerry’s distress turns into outrage when Whatley later makes a Catholic joke, which he defends on the grounds that he used to be Catholic. Jerry decides to report Whatley to Father Curtis, Whatley’s patient and presumably his former priest. But Jerry’s amiable conversation with Curtis leads to disaster after Jerry makes a “dentist joke”; Whatley finds out, and is offended because Jerry is not a dentist and has no business mocking “my people.” After the “offensive” joke circulates, Jerry is branded “a rabid anti-dentite.” The professional Jewish comedian has crossed the line, while his dentist is on the road to possessing “total joke-telling immunity” through identity fraud. “If he ever gets Polish citizenship,” Jerry ruminates, “there’ll be no stopping him.” Whatley’s quest for the right to offend with impunity cleverly problematizes the use of Jewish humor in America, where identity is more fluid than ascribed, where cultural and denominational boundaries can be negotiated, traversed, and abused with relative ease. But there is another layer to this episode, which is revealed when Jerry visits Father Curtis in his church’s confessional. The absurdity of a Jew entering a Catholic confessional to inform on his (Jewish) dentist is underscored by their dialogue: Father:  Tell me your sins, my son. Jerry:  Well, I should mention that I’m Jewish. Father:  Well, that’s no sin. Jerry:  Oh good. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley. I have a suspicion that he’s converted to Judaism purely for the jokes.

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Father: And this offends you as a Jewish person. Jerry:  No, it offends me as a comedian. But within this absurdity lies its hidden meaning. Jerry’s casual banter with Father Curtis belies the centuries of Jewish persecution by the Catholic Church: at least until Vatican II, to be Jewish was not only to sin—it made one complicit in deicide. Both Jerry and Father Curtis exhibit a lack of awareness of Christian antisemitism. Their encounter is double-coded, in that it covertly implies the convoluted history of European antisemitism, the agonies of Jewish integration, and the problematic place of Jewish visibility in American popular culture. It is implied by what is left unsaid on the sole occasion that Jerry says “I’m Jewish.”86 The 1990s marked a turning point in the representation of Jewishness on television. Between 1992 and 1998 alone, twelve series featuring explicitly Jewish characters premiered, with many more to follow.87 The shift was due to several factors, including changing demographics and the rise of independent stations and cable channels, which engendered the decentralization of the hitherto oligarchic television industry.88 Even if Seinfeld’s success was not the immediate cause, the new “Jewish sitcoms,” as Vincent Brook argues, bear the influence of the show subsequently labeled as decade-defining: “Jewish sitcoms had become not only ‘safe’ but also potentially lucrative commodities.”89 If Seinfeld abetted the elimination of the “too Jewish” barrier, it was Larry David who subsequently confirmed that what had transpired on Seinfeld was in fact the clever encryption of “too Jewish.” Much like Seinfeld, David’s hit HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm (which premiered in October 2000), is driven by debate, the violation of ritualized codes of behavior, and linguistic manipulation. Given that David was the creative force behind Seinfeld and that David based George Costanza on himself, the affinities should hardly be surprising. Indeed, Curb, Naomi Pfefferman writes, pushes “politically correct notions of Jewish identity and race to cringe-worthy and hilarious extremes.”90 “The Jewishness that is the subtext of much of ‘Seinfeld,’ ” maintains Jason Zinoman, “becomes the text of ‘Curb.’ ”91 A few examples underscore this relationship. Where George feigns disability to succeed, Larry misuses Judaism, even masquerading as an Orthodox Jew to dishonestly secure a kidney for his ailing friend. Both series parody the Holocaust’s sanctity, but Jerry’s unseemly behavior at Schindler’s List pales in comparison to the turmoil engendered on Curb when a Holocaust survivor quarrels with a contestant from the reality TV show Survivor over who suffered more and is thus a genuine “survivor.” Where George is humiliated through penile shrinkage, Larry ends up in the emergency room because a dog bites his penis, moments after he had an argument with a friend’s wife over “who has less of a Jew-face.” Both instances echo Sander Gilman’s “symbolic castration,” but Larry’s painfully ascribed Jewishness is embedded within an explicitly Jewish text.92 On Seinfeld, interfaith relationships are dealt with elliptically, as when George considers converting to Latvian Orthodoxy (from what, exactly, is unclear) to please his girlfriend. But Curb tackles the issue head on when Larry’s Christian sister-in-law

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gets engaged to a Jew who is converting for her. Chaos ensues when Larry inadvertently disrupts the baptism, mistaking the ritual dunking in the river for an attempted homicide. The bride-to-be confronts Larry, accusing him of feigning idiocy to mask a hidden Jewish agenda: Becky:  You happy about this, Larry, is this what you had in mind, you dick . . . what the hell is the matter with you? Larry:  I thought that he was drowning him, OK, I’m sorry. Becky:  Bullshit, you didn’t think he was drowning him, you just didn’t want him to convert. . . . Larry:  What do I care, I don’t care if he converts, what do I care. . . . Becky: You didn’t want to lose a Jew and you know it. Larry:  I don’t care if I lose Jews, take ’em all, I don’t need ’em. The Christians are not buying his excuse and neither are the groom’s Jewish relatives:  Jewish man:  Larry, you don’t know me, I’m the schmuck’s brother-in-law. What you did is a very gutsy thing . . . one Jew to another, it’s a gutsy thing to come in and step in on something like this. Jewish woman: A mitzvah for my family, thank you. . . . Jewish man:  You’re with us now. With his denials falling on deaf ears, Larry the shlemiel transforms himself into Larry the Jewish charlatan, embracing his ascribed identity: Jewish man:  The way you told them you’d never seen a baptism before . . . that was brilliant. Jewish man:  You’re a genius, a genius. Larry:  Well, you know I thought something had to be done, really. . . . Jewish man:  Whoever steps up and does something like this? Larry:  I feel good. Jewish man: Listen, I’d like you to talk at my daughter’s bat mitzvah. Curb confronts the problematic history of Jewish-Christian relations with irony on numerous episodes, treading on terrain that Seinfeld could never have approached.93 But the underlying message is the same, which Jerry’s casual confession of Judaism to Father Curtis demonstrates: the place of Jewishness in American entertainment can only be understood in its historical context. The bitter legacy of medieval antisemitism coupled with the astonishing success of Jewish acculturation and mobility in the modern era made Jewish visibility in popular culture problematic. Nevertheless, the Jewish upstarts transformed the cultural landscape of their host societies by drawing from the wellspring of their heritage. The linguistic foundations of Judaism and the performative nature of its rituals served as effective tools for infiltrating entertainment and for crafting humor that was ostensibly universal but implicitly Jewish and often subversive. Seinfeld is a historical milestone, because the extent of its covertly inscribed yiddishkeit was unprecedented, and because its popularity hammered the final nail in the coffin of “too Jewish,” a relic from a bygone era of constrained Jewish visibility.

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Notes 1. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor (Twenty-fifth Anniversary edition) (New York: 2006), xvi. 2. Jon Stratton, “Seinfeld Is a Jewish Sitcom, Isn’t It?,” in Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom, ed. David Lavery with Sara Lewis Dunne (New York: 2006); Rosalin Krieger, “ ‘Does He Actually Say the Word Jewish?’ Jewish Representations in Seinfeld,” Journal for Cultural Research 7, no. 4 (2003), 387–404; David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Lebanon, N.H.: 2003), 201. 3. Tom Shales, “So Long, ‘Seinfeld.’ Let Me Show You to the Door,” Washington Post (16 April 1998); Rebecca Segall and Peter Ephross, “Critics Call Show ‘Self-Hating’: Was ‘Seinfeld’ Good for the Jews?,” Jweekly.com (8 May 1998), www.jweekly.com/article/full/8208/criticscall-show-self-hating-was-seinfeld-good-for-jews/ (accessed 14 December 2014). 4. Quoted in Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 204. 5. Ibid. 6. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: 2005). 7. Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 53–54. 8. Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860– 1920 (New Brunswick: 1997); Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: 2001), ch. 2. 9. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: 1976), 567; Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: 1984), 135–138. 10. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: 1988), 300. 11. Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 198. 12. Susan A. Glenn, “The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred in Post-World War II America,” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 2006), 95–136. 13. Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 5–11. 14. Allan Neuwirth, They’ll Never Put That on the Air: An Oral History of Taboo-Breaking TV Comedy (New York: 2006), 1; Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick: 2003), 47–48. 15. Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 78; Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 67. 16. Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 77. 17. Susan A. Glenn, “ ‘Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish’: Visual Stereotypes and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity,” in Boundaries of Jewish Identity, ed. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff (Seattle: 2010), 79–80. 18. The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (1929). 19. Epstein, The Haunted Smile, 147–148. 20. Ibid., 59–60; Maurice Berger, “The Mouse That Never Roars: Jewish Masculinity on American Television,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Jewish Identities, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New Brunswick: 1996), 99. 21. Bial, Acting Jewish, 3. 22. Allan Sherman, My Son, The Folk Singer (1962). 23. All in the Family, “Archie’s Aching Back” (26 January 1971), CBS Network. 24. There are numerous variation of this joke, including this fairly typical one: Mr. Cohen falls and is laying in the road. A lady gets a pillow from her car and lays it under his head until the ambulance arrives. “Are you comfortable?” she asks. “Ah vell,” he says, “I make a living.” See “Jewish Humor and Joke Page,” The Jewish Magazine, www.jewishmag.com/111mag/ humor/humor.htm (accessed 22 January 2015). 25. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography by Lenny Bruce (New York: 1992), 5. 26. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 107.

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27. “Jason + Larry = George,” Seinfeld: Season 5, DVD, Disc 1 (2005). 28. “The Conversion: Notes about Nothing,” Seinfeld: Season 5, Disc 3. 29. Seinfeld, “The Money” (16 January 1997), NBC Network. 30. Bruce Fretts, “Cruelly, Madly, Cheaply: The ‘Seinfeld’ Parents—Jerry Stiller, Estelle Harris, Barney Martin and Liz Sheridan Discuss Their Roles,” EW.com: The Entertainment Weekly (4 May 1998), www.ew.com/article/1998/05/04/seinfeld-parents (accessed 14 December 2015). 31. Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 229–230. 32. Ibid., 138. 33. David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: 2005), 12; Krieger, “ ‘Does He Actually Say the Word Jewish,’ ” 394. 34. Seinfeld, “The Opposite” (19 May 1994). 35. Seinfeld, “The Old Man” (18 February 1993). 36. Shirley Kumove, Words Like Arrows: A Collection of Yiddish Folk Sayings (Toronto: 1984), 107. 37. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: 1991), 38, 119. 38. Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: 2012), 38. 39. David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: 1992), 205–210; John M. Efron, Medicine and the German Jews: A History (New Haven: 2001), 142. 40. Heinrich Heine, “The New Jewish Hospital at Hamburg,” The Standard Book of Jewish Verse, ed. George Alexander Kohut (New York: 1917), 712–713. 41. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: 1994), 39. 42. Seinfeld, “The Note” (18 September 1991); “The Outing” (11 February 1993); “The Hamptons” (12 May 1994); “The Doorman” (23 February 1995). 43. Seinfeld, “The Stranded” (27 November 1991). 44. Seinfeld, “The Fix-Up” (5 February 1992). 45. Seinfeld, “The Switch” (5 January 1995). 46. Seinfeld, “The Parking Space” (22 April 1992). 47. Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write! (New York: 2007), 11. See also Christie Davies, “An Explanation of Jewish Jokes about Jewish Women,” Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 3–4 (1990), 363–378. 48. Seinfeld, “The Shower Head” (15 February 1996). 49. Ibid., “The Shoes” (4 February 1993). 50. “Oedipus Wrecks,” directed by Woody Allen, in New York Stories (1989). 51. Seinfeld, “The Contest” (18 November 1992). 52. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford: 1990), 21, 91. 53. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 11–12, 19. 54. Ibid., 19. 55. Julius G. Rothenberg, “Some American Idioms from the Yiddish,” American Speech 18, no. 1 (February 1943), 43–48; Lillian Mermin Feinsilver, “Yiddish and American English,” The Chicago Jewish Forum 14 (1955–1956), 71–76. 56. Lillian Mermin Feinsilver, “TV Talks Yiddish,” The Chicago Jewish Forum 15 (1957), 231. 57. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: 2006), 195. 58. Seinfeld, “The Watch” (30 September 1992). 59. Ibid., “The Soul Mate” (26 September 1996); “The Little Jerry” (9 January 1997); “The Trip,” part 1 (12 August 1992); “The Fix-Up”; “The Pilot,” part 1 (20 May 1993); ibid.; “The Raincoats,” part 1 (28 April 1994); “The Kiss Hello” (16 February 1995); “The Checks” (7 November 1995); “The Barber” (11 November 1993). 60. Kumove, Words Like Arrows, 196.

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61. Deborah Tannen, “New York Jewish Conversational Style,” Journal of the Sociology of Language 30 (1981), 133–149; Deborah Schiffrin, “Jewish Argument as Sociability,” Language in Society 13, no. 3 (September 1984), 311–335. 62. Schiffrin, “Jewish Argument as Sociability,” 331–332. 63. Tannen, “New York Jewish Conversational Style.” 64. Seinfeld, “The Pen” (9 October 1991). 65. Bewitched, “Abner Kadabra” (15 April 1965), ABC Network. 66. Schiffrin, “Jewish Argument as Sociability,” 319. 67. Seinfeld, “The Postponement” (28 September 1995). 68. Ibid.; “The Bizarro Jerry” (3 October 1996). 69. See Hyam Maccoby, The Day God Laughed: Sayings, Fables, and Entertainments of the Jewish Sages (New York: 1978); David Brodsky, “Why Did the Widow Have a Goat in Her Bed? Jewish Humor and Its Roots in the Talmud and Midrash,” in Jews and Humor, ed. Leonard Greenspoon (West Lafayette: 2011), 13–32; Eliezer Diamond, “But is it Funny? Identifying Humor, Satire, and Parody in Rabbinic Literature,” ibid., 33–54. 70. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: 1986), 127, 151–152. 71. Peter J. Haas, “Masekhet Purim,” in Greenspoon, Jews and Humor; 55–56; Alan S. Cook, “The Sweet Satirist of Israel: An Annotated Translation of Gerson Rosenzweig’s Talmud Yankee” (Master’s thesis, Hebrew Union College, 2003). 72. Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish, 20. 73. See for instance, Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: 1982). 74. Seinfeld, “The Good Samaritan” (4 March 1992). 75. Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Menahem Blondheim, and Gonen Hacohen, “Traditions of Dispute: From Negotiations of Talmudic Texts to the Arena of Political Discourse in the Media,” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002), 1589. 76. Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray (London: 1888), 47. 77. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: 2003), 55, 59–60. 78. Seinfeld, “The Andrea Doria” (19 December 1996). 79. Novak and Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, 178. 80. Seinfeld, “The Butter Shave” (25 September 1997). 81. Neil Gabler, Frank Rich, and Joyce Antler, Hollywood’s Changing Image of the Jew (New York: 2000), 71–72; Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 227. 82. Gabler, Rich, and Antler, Hollywood’s Changing Image of the Jew, 71. 83. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: 1999), 13. 84. Seinfeld, “The Serenity Now” (9 October 1997). 85. Richard Raskin, “The Origins and Evolution of a Classic Jewish Joke,” in Semites and Stereotypes: Characteristics of Jewish Humor, ed. Avner Ziv and Anat Zajdman (Westport: 1993), 88. 86. Seinfeld, “The Yada Yada” (24 April 1997). 87. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 118–119. 88. Ibid., 74–77. 89. Ibid., 118–119. 90. Naomi Pfefferman, “David, ‘Seinfeld’ Cast Reunite, Rant,” JewishJournal.com (16 September 2009), jewishjournal.com/hollywood_jew/article/david_seinfeld_cast_reunite_ rant_20090916 (accessed 15 March 2016). 91. Jason Zinoman, “On Stage, a Comic’s Still at Home,” New York Times (14 October 2012). 92. Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Ski Lift” (20 November 2005), HBO network; “The Survivor” (7 March 2004); “The 5 Wood” (1 February 2004). 93. Seinfeld, “The Conversion” (16 December 1993); Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Baptism” (18 November 2001).

“Humour Wholesalers”? Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s Anglo-Jewish Television Comedy Michael Berkowitz (University College London)

At first glance, there seems to be no real tradition, and only scant evidence, of Jewish humor in Britain. Moreover, until the appearance of Ruth Wisse’s No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (2013), which enfolds the British Isles with North America in the “Anglosphere,” the subject has attracted limited scholarly attention.1 Notwithstanding, I shall argue that, although American Jews have always been perceived as more brazenly Jewish in public than their British counterparts, there is a notable strain of Jewish humor in Britain, especially as realized in television comedy. The main focus will be on the television writing and production team of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, a “household name” in the UK. Beyond Britain, their shows are familiar mainly to the small but dedicated cadre of BBC-Worldwide enthusiasts. To some extent, Sacha Baron Cohen also has a place in this discussion, as he is both the leading comic actor in Britain today and an unequivocally “Jewish Jew.” However, as talented as he is, Baron Cohen has thus far failed to imagine a Jewish, or even vaguely Jewish, screen role for himself. Instead, he has repeatedly cast himself as either an Austrian (the fascistic fashionista in Brüno) or as an Asian (the selfstyled media icons in Borat and Ali G).2 David Gillota argues that Baron Cohen cleverly focuses sympathetic attention on Jews as an ethnic minority, seeking mainly to emphasize parallels between the African American and Jewish experience.3 More telling, however, is the fact that the character of Borat is a “Jew-hating yet paradoxically Hebrew-speaking Kazakh reporter, in a film saturated by representations of antisemitism,” and that Ali G is a fake within a fake—a white bloke, the son of an Anglican bishop, imitating a street-toughened, thuggish-but-cowardly West Indian from the drowsy suburb of Staines.4 It may be the case that Baron Cohen chooses not to portray Jews because his freewheeling style of comedy is unsuited to the straitlaced image of Anglo-Jewry, though with regard to his private life, he not only identifies as Jewish but takes pains to point to his fastidious observance. As opposed to the United States, where comedy writers come from diverse backgrounds, many of the great wits in contemporary British culture, such as the creators 75

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of Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean), and Hugh Laurie (best known to American audiences for the series House), are products of mainstream society, even Oxbridge.5 Much of what is recognized as “Jewish humor” in Britain is imported from the United States—for instance, one of the more popular BBC4 shows in the last few years is Old Jews Telling Jokes.6 This is not to imply that there is a lack of Jews or a paucity of “Jewish” influence in the entertainment industry in Britain, whether in the movies, television, or radio.7 However, according to Laurence Marks, there is a relatively small pool of Jewish writers, with only a fraction of them devoting themselves to comedy.8 There also are not that many native British Jewish actors, much less comic actors or stand-up comedians.9 Part of this is due to the relatively small population of Anglo-Jews, and also to the fact that television writing is not perceived as a viable career in Britain as it is in the United States. Those who were recognizable as Jews—and British—came relatively late to British television. There was no British equivalent to The Goldbergs, a long-running radio (and later, television) program about a Jewish family in the Bronx.10 However, The Phil Silvers Show, featuring Silvers in the role of Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko of the United States Army, was for decades a staple on late-night British television.11 The cast of the show included Jews (in life and art) serving under Bilko: Pvt. Sam Fender (Herbie Faye) and Pvt. Duane Doberman (Maurice Gosfield). However, it is doubtful whether the British public—outside of Anglo-Jewry—would have registered Sergeant Bilko as a Jewish character played by a Jew.12 Another popular program originating in the United States, The Dick Van Dyke Show, featured an overtly (and comic) Jewish character, Buddy Sorrell (played by Morey Amsterdam), as well as the abrasive and implicitly Jewish boss, Alan Brady (played by Carl Reiner).13 It was only in 1971 that a Jewish leading character appeared on a homegrown British comedy series. The series, Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width (ITV, Thames Television & ABC Television), featured “two tailors of differing religious and political views” who operated a shop in London’s Whitechapel neighborhood.14 Written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, the show ran for six seasons with a total of 41 episodes. At the end of its television life it was repackaged as an MGM feature film, akin to the “Carry On” genre, which was famous for a combination of pratfalls and the exposure of breasts and buttocks among its repeated sight gags. Apart from John Bluthal as Manny Cohen and Joe Lynch as Patrick Kelly, the ever-squabbling tailors, there were frequent appearances by a rabbi (Cyril Shaps) and a Catholic priest (Clive Geraghty). The comedy was broad and unsophisticated, often featuring old men and scantily clad women stumbling into compromising positions. While there was a smattering of Yiddish expressions, the Jewishness (as well as the Irishness and Catholicism) of the characters was worn lightly, and the program trod gingerly on what might have been heated issues for both Jews and Irish. Before and concurrent with Never Mind the Quality, British television, via America, enjoyed an additional Jewish character in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977). This sitcom featured a Jewish sidekick: Rhoda Morgenstern (played by Valerie Harper), which in 1974 was spun into Rhoda, a show of its own (also aired in the UK). In the 1972–1973 season CBS introduced Bridget Loves Bernie, which became an overnight sensation in America. This program was a more thoughtful play

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on Irish-Jewish dynamics than Never Mind the Quality. Despite its stellar ratings, CBS decided to drop the show after one season, in the face of heated opposition from American Jews (in particular) who were opposed to the show’s sympathetic take on intermarriage.15 This show, too, appeared in the UK. By the time The Nanny arrived (1993), starring Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, Jews as regularly featured characters on American television were nothing new. But even in the 1990s, Laurence Marks believes, British audiences—except for Jews—were not conscious of the “Jewishness” of, say, Seinfeld versus the “goyishness” of Frasier. Either that, or else they did not see the ethnic and religious background as relevant.16 In the late 1970s, two programs featuring Jews that were written by one of the country’s most successful television writers, Jack Rosenthal, were aired on British television.17 The first was Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), which was broadcast on the Play for Today series of BBC2. The program was in the same mold as Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, in the sense that both lampooned a bar mitzvah and, more generally, Jewish middle-class morality. Although amusing in a dark sort of way, Bar Mitzvah Boy was not overtly funny, though Rosenthal’s later work would be characterized as “gentle comedy.”18 The second program was The Knowledge, a comedy featuring four characters—one of them Jewish—who are attempting to pass the notoriously difficult examination (known as “The Knowledge”) in order to qualify as London taxi drivers. Rosenthal’s wife, Maureen Lipman, also appeared on the program as the wife of one of the non-Jewish characters.19 While this show was notable for having a Jewish character, it is also the case that the taxi-driving industry was regarded as having a disproportionate number of Jews, so there was something of a Jewish angle to the entire production. As it happens, Lipman is the actress best known for playing Jewish roles in British films and on television. In 1979–1981, for instance, she starred in Agony, a series produced by London Weekend Television, in which she played a Jewish advice columnist (“agony aunt”) with a disastrous private life.20 Beginning in 1987, she appeared in a series of commercials for BT (British Telecom) as Beatrice “Beattie” Bellman, a character whose accent and appearance clearly mark her as Jewish. In one of the more memorable television ads, Beattie calls her grandson to find out how he fared in his GCSEs (standard-level high school exams). Anthony dejectedly tells her he did miserably, failing “maths, English, geography, German, physics, woodwork, and art” while receiving passing grades only in pottery and sociology. Beattie, undaunted, notes that “people will always need plates” and if “you get an ology, you’re a scientist.” The commercials were cute (in small doses) and got their message across in a humorous way.21 In 1981, a series featuring a native-born, recognizably Jewish character (rather than caricature) was finally shown on British television. Its creators were Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, often known as Marks & Gran. Both were born at the end of the 1940s and grew up in Finsbury Park, in Stoke Newington (later the London borough of Islington). They first met as teenagers at Butlin’s, a vacation resort catering to middle-class British families, and “their paths crossed occasionally at the Finsbury Park Jewish Lads’ Brigade [boy scouts].” In their 20s they discovered a shared passion for comedy and commenced writing together. They conceived four sitcoms, “which they failed to sell.”22

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Marks later recalled: “It was [a] joyous day when I met Maurice Gran. I quickly learnt that he felt about his family exactly as I did about mine—we had the same experiences.” Their backgrounds differed in that Marks did not go to university but instead became a journalist, working both at newspapers (the Tottenham Weekly Herald, Sunday Times) and at Thames Television (where he worked on This Week, a leading current affairs program). Gran progressed further in his formal education, graduating from University College London and then working as a civil servant. Marks explains: Both of us had strong mothers, old enough to be our grandmothers at the time of our birth, and weak, “under the thumb” fathers. We were youngest children who needed to be admired. . . . [Being a] nice Jewish psychiatrist (that’s a Jewish boy who can’t stand the sight of blood), a dodgy Jewish accountant, better still, a nice Jewish lawyer were never going to be on our agendas.

The two men believe that their own career choices were in some way a result of their family background, by way of left-handed avoidance. At first glance, the civil servant and journalist episodes in their working careers would not be entirely out of touch with their lower-middle-class ethnic backgrounds, which presumably reinforced the ideal of white-collar mobility. In any event, Marks asserts that when they “took the plunge . . . to become writers of television comedies, none of our acquaintances was too surprised.” As he describes it: March 10, 1980 was the day we became professional dramatists. Maurice came round to my house. We sat downstairs drinking coffee and discussing a football match, killing time, avoiding the big moment. Maurice stood up, put down his cup, looked up at me and said, “Okay, come on, we’d better go upstairs and make 15 million people laugh.” How succinct a description of what we have been doing for the past two decades.23

Marks and Gran first established themselves as sitcom writers with the series Holding the Fort (about a working mother and a stay-at-home father of a baby), which ran for twenty episodes from 1980–1982.24 Their success with this show led them to excavate their Jewish backgrounds for their next series, Roots, which Marks admits was “a flop,” a disaster. After only a few episodes, Roots was moved from Friday night to Sunday morning, a graveyard spot generally reserved for religious programming, and Marks and Gran abandoned the project.25 “We wrote the only Jewish series of the past few years and it was a bomber,” Marks was said to have cheerfully admitted. Even its title, Roots, might have been a bit too clever. It referred, of course, to the best-selling history book and television series by African American author Alex Haley, but also to “root canals”—since its main character, Melvin Solomon (played by Allan Corduner), was that paragon of Jewish success, a dentist. It soon becomes clear, however, that Melvin would prefer to be an artsy film director; in the script of a pilot episode, he launches into a monologue about highbrow film and expounds on materialism versus the life of the mind.26 The “storyline” of the second episode— with a far too crowded title, “The Good, The Bad, and She May Not Be Too Much to Look at, But She’s Got a Lovely Personality”—has Melvin finding his mother greatly upset, because his

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Great Uncle Reuben has died in Israel [and] has remembered the Solomons in his will. Quite orthodox, he has left Melvin in particular ten thousand pounds a year. . . . However, like any Jewish will, there are conditions. Reuben insisted that Melvin should agree to live in his parents’ home until he marries, a Jewish girl of course. . . . [A] colleague suggests a “marriage of convenience” with a Jewish girl from abroad. . . . Eventually, through an “underground” magazine he contacts a Jewish political refugee from Argentina who is seeking the same sort of marriage as Melvin—in her case she wants British residence rights. A secret—very secret—wedding takes place in the Registry Office.27

The punch line: Melvin discovers that the legacy is in Israeli pounds, not sterling, so it is worth only a pittance.28 (The anachronism that the Israeli pound had already been replaced by the shekel did not bother the show’s writers.) Apart from that episode’s complicated chain of events, the plotlines for Roots included a house burglary; a celebrity visiting Melvin’s surgery; serving as best man at a Christian wedding; flat hunting (the landlord turns out to be a Nazi); Melvin’s sister leaving her husband and coming with her kids to live with her parents; and Melvin’s ruminating on whether to become a war newsreel photographer in Israel. According to Gran: “We were trying to do an English Rhoda but we found that in Britain there is a great dearth of nappy Jewish comic actors. The company [Central] was brave to the point of foolhardiness in thinking that what was a New York Jewish comedy, painfully transplanted to Elstree [a heavily Jewish north London suburb], would have national ratings possibilities in this country.”29 The episodes involved topics that may best be described as insular. In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Marks elaborated: “It was a huge flop because you can’t do something like that without creating caricatures—it just sank without a trace….”30 It appears that the characters in the show were not interesting or likeable enough to spark a sense of loyalty. Moreover, the directing was poor and the actors did not fit their roles well. “We learned,” Marks said, “that we must cast our own shows as much as possible, and that we [must] choose the director ourselves. No-one would give us that benefit at the time, so they made the show and it was terrible.”31 In retrospect, Marks and Gran claimed that they “were not too distressed” about the failure, since the first pilot of Shine on, Harvey Moon was already in the works.32 Although Marks and Gran had begun their screenwriting career in the realm of sitcoms, they subsequently moved in the direction of a more nuanced mix of comedy and drama. Shine on, Harvey Moon can be characterized as a drama with a number of comedic elements and a few broadly drawn, almost cartoonish characters.33 Little known outside of Britain, the program aired from 1982 to 1985 and was briefly reprised in 1995. The critic for Sunday People called it “the most engaging homegrown drama series around. . . . Amazing to think the authors were once responsible for the dire comedy about a Jewish dentist called Roots!”34 Taking place in London’s East End during the austerity era following the end of the Second World War, the program follows the fortunes of the (non-Jewish) Harvey Moon (Kenneth Cranham), a former football (soccer) player and committed Labour councilor who has only slightly more success in politics than in his troubled personal life. Upon his return home after service in the Far East, he finds himself estranged from his family and from just about everything else. He separates from his wife, Rita (Maggie Steed), and

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struggles to provide direction for his children, Maggie (Linda Robson) and Stanley (Lee Whitlock). The most comical character is Harvey’s mother, Violet (usually called “Nan,” played by Elizabeth Spriggs). As most people in Britain were aware, the underside of austerity in wartime and postwar times was the ubiquity of a thriving black market. In the show’s first season, this was personified by an unsavory Jewish character, Connie Rosenthal (Dudley Sutton). “With his Brylcreamed ginger frizz and eyes like poached egges [sic],” one admiring reviewer wrote, “Connie Rosenthal is the epitome of that yobbo of yesteryear, the postwar London spiv”—that is, a flashy gangster operating in the black market.35 Although Marks fondly recalls another Jewish character appearing in early episodes of the series, Lionel Pearlman (played by Daniel Peacock), the part of Lionel did not seem to elicit much of a response.36 In the second and third seasons, another Jewish character, Monty Fish (Linal Haft), appeared in several episodes as an associate of Connie Rosenthal and as the former boyfriend of Harvey’s estranged wife. One reviewer wrote that the character “occasionally seems a bit broad to me but it does rise out of the incongruities of the time, when rationing was actually becoming more stringent and class barriers were looking as solid as ever.”37 Even though black market dealers counted many types, Monty’s Jewishness was probably assumed by many television viewers. On the spectrum between comedy and realism (the program’s mixture of the two  was one of the factors accounting for its popularity and critical acclaim) the characters of Connie and Monty shaded toward the realistic.38 Perhaps anticipating complaints about stereotyping—possibly subsuming Jews and working-class characters—a critic at The Times, commenting on the second season of the series, noted that “the authentic sound and look of mid-Forties London is as strong as ever, and the characters are no nearer becoming stereotypes than they were when the series began.”39 In its third season, Shine on, Harvey Moon introduced two additional prominent Jewish characters, a brother and sister named Eric and Frieda Gottlieb (Leonard Fenton and Suzanne Bertish). Viewers come to learn that they are refugees from Vienna who have lost most of their family in the Holocaust. Although Eric and Frieda are among the most serious characters drawn by Marks and Gran, they also give rise to comic moments—as when Nan, learning that her son has arranged to rent rooms from them, protests: “I will not live under the same roof with Nazis!” (As Marks and Gran were well aware, from 1933 onwards, many non-Jews in Britain had a hard time distinguishing the Central European persecutors from their victims, or the bad guys from the good guys.) Some of the funniest lines of dialogue derive from the contrast between Eric’s and Nan’s use of the English language.40 One reviewer remarked that, in contrast to the Cockney English spoken by Nan and most of the other characters, “the producers pulled out all the glottal stops” with Frieda and Eric: “The Austrian-Jewish couple were erudite, high-brow, clever, interesting, literate, and beautifully mannered so of coss ve vere ze vell spokien type.”41 At the same time, episodes that featured the Gottliebs also explored serious issues, among them Eric and Frieda’s effort to bring over a young relative—an Auschwitz survivor—who was interned on Cyprus following an attempt to illegally enter Palestine. In another episode, as described by a critic at The Times, “we saw the burning

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of a London synagogue as a response to the murder of British troops in Palestine by Jewish terrorists. We know that these were isolated incidents but that excellent episode just caught the Jewish fear that perhaps even Britain would not be safe.” Having praised the series for dealing with “some of the less comfortable aspects” of the immediate postwar period, including British antisemitism and prejudice against homosexuals, the critic concluded: “A comedy series that can handle questions like that and still be funny is something worth having.”42 With regard to at least one sensitive topic, intermarriage, Marks and Gran chose to tread guardedly, as they did not want a Bridget Loves Bernie controversy on their hands. Although Harvey and Frieda eventually become lovers, it is clear that Eric is not happy about it—he wants a Jew as a brother-in-law, and even turns hostile to Harvey.43 Frieda, too, may have some reservations about her romantic involvement with a non-Jew. She seems intrigued with a Jewish art dealer she meets in the course of her involvement with Harvey. The show ended before this story line developed, but in the reprise of the series Frieda was said to have gone to Israel to pursue her career as an artist. Suzanne Bertish, who played Frieda, was an attractive woman not afraid to express her sensuality. Notwithstanding, the steaminess in Shine on, Harvey Moon is more often hinted at than shown. In contrast, Marks and Gran’s most successful television series, Birds of a Feather (shown on BBC1 from 1989 to1998, and revived for ITV in 2014), features a female Jewish character whose all-devouring sexuality was a hallmark of the show. The plot revolves around three women neighbors: Sharon Theodopolopodos (Pauline Quirke), Tracey Stubbs (Linda Robson), and the Jewish character, Dorien Green (Lesley Joseph). Sharon and Tracy are sisters married to armed robbers in “the nick” (that is, prison), whereas Dorien’s (offscreen) husband, Marcus, is an accountant—who does very well, thank you. Dorien is an overt status seeker, always attempting to show that she is higher-class and more refined than her friends. She also has a voracious sexual appetite that is not the least bit satisfied by Marcus, whom she has no intention of divorcing. Dorien shares many characteristics of the stereotypical Jewish American princess, and she is often the butt of the program’s humor. I would not say, though, that the portrayal of Dorien is antisemitic. It draws on stereotypes (as does much if not most humor) but deals with Jews in a way that is inoffensive to most British Jews—if Dorien’s portrayal is antisemitic, then almost all of British comedy is anti-English. Reflecting on their conception of Dorien, Marks notes that he and Gran are “always considering characters even when we’ve nowhere to use them. We bank them, lock them away in the strong room of our minds.”44 Dorien, then, existed before the idea for Birds of a Feather: “It wasn’t until we thought about writing Birds of a Feather and setting it in Chigwell, where we knew a high proportion of the community was Jewish, that we knew we could use this character as a neighbour.”45 Chigwell was selected as the setting because it was known to have a high proportion of properties that were purchased totally in cash, without a mortgage. This made it a good neighborhood for people, such as Dorien’s neighbors, who are seeking to unload some of their ill-gotten gains.46 Three influences were at work in the creation of the character of Dorien. “First,” Marks explains, “the unusual name came from a financial adviser we met, a good

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woman, a good mother, who was based in Manchester. It was a name we just wanted to use. We’d never heard it and we wrote asking if she’d mind us picking up on it and she said she’d only be too flattered. In fact our letter [to her] is framed and on her kitchen wall.”47 It was the kind of name that a Jewish woman of a certain age, and from a certain background, might have.48 Perhaps it also is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Wilde’s “Dorian Gray” character, which is, after all, a cue to sensual libertinism in English life and letters. A second influence was the character’s highly ornamented fingernails. For some, Dorien’s attention to her fingernails identified her as a “Beck” (short for Rebecca), the Anglo-British equivalent of a Jewish American princess.49 According to Marks: “For Dorien they’re a status symbol as much as a sexual attraction. People can see she has no need to work which increases her standing in life; [she] couldn’t work with long talons like that.”50 Finally, Marks and Gran knew a woman who, according to Marks, “spent most of her waking hours attempting to get men into bed. . . . Once she had met a man she’d do everything to ensnare him and have an affair. No. Affair is the wrong word because these were very, very short events. She’d go flat out for someone—on one occasion gave blood in order to lie down next to the man!” Gran describes the woman on whom Dorien was based more graphically: “Basically her entire raison d’etre appeared to be to get shtupped. Shtupping would play quite a big part in her life and yet she is, as Dorien is, an ugly, lonely and sad character. This was a real character awaiting a show.”51 Elsewhere, Marks provided additional background for the character: Dorien gets what she wants. That was made clear early on. But there is frustration there, too. Dorien can find men for sex, but not love. She has Marcus, her husband, who loves her, but she doesn’t want him for sex. In the end she’ll become old and morose and look back at her wasted marriage like so many old, frustrated English women who never capitalised on what they had.52

Shona Blass, interviewing Marks and Gran in 1992, challenged them by asserting: “However real the people upon whom Dorien was based, the reality also exists that she represents the sort of stereotype that the Jewish woman, trying to define herself on her own terms, does not want to keep contending with.”53 (Not surprisingly, the same charges have been leveled against Fran Drescher’s The Nanny.)54 In response, Gran acknowledged: We were accused of fostering a stereotype, but we felt we couldn’t be fostering the stereotype of the Jewish housewife because that was frankly not the character that Dorien seems to be. We now realise that we have tapped into a certain bored, young middle-aged, rich north London Jewish woman. . . . There were no less than thirty-five Doriens at the tennis club yesterday, all with their perfect nails and their hungry eyes. She’s a character who the big TV audiences love regardless of her Jewishness.55

Moreover, according to Gran, “any character risks being a stereotype if she can only be one thing. The alternative is to have the sort of plays where one character represents all the oppressed workers of the world and that is even worse.”56 Marks commented that “Jewish audiences, or an audience which contains Jews, will find who they want to watch. When a Jew reads in the TV Times, Radio Times, Time Out, [or]

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New Moon . . . that a new series contains a Jew, they see the word Jew and they switch on to fault the character and to say we’re not like that, but I don’t feel some sort of responsibility at all.”57 Blass’ question, meant to be provocative, instead showed her fundamental lack of understanding of comedy, of the tension between what might be termed “making fun of” and actually being “funny.” She also misses the point of television: the objective for its creators is primarily to make money, and perhaps entertain people—not to elevate social consciousness. Thus, while Marks and Gran made fun of Dorien, and women like her, their main objective (in which they succeeded brilliantly) was simply to make her funny. Dorien was not the last of Marks and Grans’ Jewish characters. Indeed, almost as soon as Birds of a Feather was ensconced in the BBC1 lineup, the team served up another series with a Jewish premise and main character: So You Think You’ve Got Troubles (1991), featuring the late Warren Mitchell as Ivan Fox, “a Jewish factory manager . . . relocated in later life to Belfast.”58 Marks says this was “the most courageous” of their productions because it was their most overtly political creation, directing its barbs at all parties—in particular, British government policy in Northern Ireland. It met with a warm response in the UK and was especially embraced in Northern Ireland. Its “Jews’-eye-view,” neither Catholic nor Protestant, served to educate the British about what Northern Ireland was actually like at a time when the country was at war with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Perhaps it was successful because, rather than professing Olympian detachment, it had its own pronounced perspective—which was different from the vast majority of the television audience. However, it ran only one season; it was cancelled by Marks and Gran when the writers felt that they had expended all their possible stories.59 A burgeoning group of scholars in Northern Ireland have recognized So You Think You’ve Got Troubles as having an impact well beyond the popularity of the show. According to historian Pamela Linden, Belfast Jews were somewhat intrigued to find themselves in the spotlight, despite being initially uneasy. The show therefore played a signal role in the enhanced Jewish self-consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1990s. Perhaps more important, So You Think You’ve Got Troubles helped inspire a new wave of comedy in Northern Ireland that had a greater element of detachment and self-deprecation on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. To be sure, there had never been a shortage of Irish-inflected humor. But the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, and the British role in Northern Ireland, had rarely been a laughing matter before So You Think You’ve Got Troubles. Although short-lived, the series inspired the efforts of the influential Hole in the Wall Gang comedy troupe, as well as the popular Northern Irish show, Give My Head Peace, which ran from 1998 to 2006.60 As with the character he portrayed, the star of So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, Warren Mitchell, was Jewish. Interestingly, he had previously won fame for his portrayal of a bigoted Cockney: Alf Garnett, the main character in Till Death Do Us Part, a sitcom that enjoyed a decade-long run on the BBC (1965–1975). Alf was the model for the character Archie Bunker in the renowned American series All in the Family (CBS, 1971–1979). It is reported that Till Death Do Us Part’s creator, Johnny Speight, “had initially avoided antisemitism in Alf Garnett’s rants for fear of offending Mitchell.”61 (Speight, growing up, lived just up the road from the well-known

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comedian Marty Feldman.)62 But Mitchell felt that sidestepping the question of Jews (many of whom lived in the vicinity where the program was set) would make the character of Alf less plausible. He “pointed out that such a bigoted character would almost certainly be anti-Semitic . . .  so Garnett became as vocal about Jews as any other minority group, e.g. making derogatory remarks about ‘the Jews up at Spurs,’ referring to Tottenham Hotspur, a north London football team with a large number of Jewish supporters, including Warren Mitchell himself.” Moreover, Mitchell prodded Speight to explore the wellsprings of Alf Garnett’s vitriol in an even more provocative manner. Consequently, “Speight began to work references into the show suggesting that Alf himself was from a Jewish family or had Jewish heritage. In one episode a Jewish taxi driver makes the assumption that he is Jewish and refuses to believe Alf’s protestations to the contrary, while in another Alf’s wife Else suggests in no uncertain terms that he is circumcised.”63 From an idea born of pure fantasy, Marks and Gran situated Hitler himself at the center of what was originally believed to be a comedy, in Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler, which was aired as a BBC radio play.64 Allan Corduner, the dentist from Roots, played Sigmund Freud, and Toby Jones was Hitler. There also was a reading at London’s Tricycle Theatre as a benefit for the Freud Museum in Hampstead. One of the funniest lines might have been something Maurice Gran said before the event: “We’re slightly apprehensive that during the discussion we’ll get some distinguished Freudian telling us that he never used the word trousers but always said pantaloons.”65 “For a while,” wrote critic Andrew Billen, reviewing the BBC radio version, the play “threw at the 20th century’s two great fantasists the sort of sitcom jokes you might expect from Marks and Gran. Mrs Hitler takes Adolf to see Freud. ‘Left leg over right knee,’ he says. ‘If you say so, doctor.’ ‘No, I meant the boy.’… But was it funny? This writer [Billen] did not find it terribly amusing.”66 Yet to fault the play as a comedy may have been ungenerous; Marks and Gran themselves referred to it as “our drama.”67 Perhaps the critics could not imagine this team producing something other than comedy. As one of them noted, it is extremely tricky to navigate “between the Land of the Smiles and the Vale of Tears,” as they had been able to do magnificently in Shine on, Harvey Moon.68 Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin are among the handful of writers who have managed to weave Hitler into some kind of comedy. The premise of Hitler visiting Freud was indeed a bizarre idea, which may be seen as part of the genre analyzed by Gavriel Rosenfield as “the world Hitler never made”—a fantasy about the prevention of the Holocaust.69 At bottom was the notion that if Hilter’s mother had sought Freud’s help for her disturbed son, the Second World War and the Holocaust would never have happened. It was too subtle, almost entirely ironic. The audience was expecting comedy and did not know what to make of it. Although Marks and Gran are today well known in Britain, somewhat akin to Aaron Spelling or Norman Lear in the United States, it took many years for them to achieve this status. Among the Jewish community, they still provoke a certain amount of unease and criticism. Furthermore, there is a myth among Jews in England that anyone who is really talented, especially in the world of entertainment, eventually moves on to America. Paradoxically, in order to be considered a great success in the Anglo-Jewish world, it helps to have first won over the broad masses of the United

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States. Using their nicknames, a Jewish Chronicle writer reported that “Lo and Mo made bucketfuls of money” in 1997, in addition to receiving one of the top honors possible to those in television: the chance to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture, the keynote address at Britain’s premier television festival. “But they failed to make a breakthrough [in Hollywood].”70 Perhaps at some point Jews in England will realize that they, too, have produced comic geniuses who have not been shy about the overt presentation of Jewishness. Mumbled criticism of Marks and Gran, both by Jews and non-Jews, might be compared to that faced by sprinter Harold Abrahams of Chariots of Fire (1981) fame. Abrahams was accused of gaining an unfair advantage by hiring his own coach and adopting a more scientific training regimen. Marks and Gran, with a possible whiff of antisemitism, have been deemed “humour wholesalers, comedy entrepreneurs . . . Lo and Mo, Marks and Gran, M&G—proprietors of the quality comedy store where the nation buys its underwear jokes.” By 1993 they had “turned out,” Hollywood factory imitation-style, “twelve new shows in fourteen years,” using teams of writers, as was the norm in Hollywood.71 Another story alleged that Marks and Gran “have by now become to comedy what Marks and Spencer is to retailing—the best known name in the business”—implying that they are the people’s choice, but not necessarily the best.72 This kind of assessment was meant to take them down a peg, inferring that they may be the people’s choice, but not the preference of the more discerning or sophisticated. According to their agent, Linda Seifert, some people “loathe them out of envy, because they’ve been so successful. They were very clever to start their own company when they did and that’s probably their strength.”73 Within what is often termed “the chattering classes” or “the writing world,” if they are noticed at all, Marks and Gran are often disparaged. “Is it because they didn’t come via Oxbridge or earn their stripes on the stand-up circuit?” Sue Teddern, a writer and academic, speculates. One of their producers maintains that “their commerciality” is held against them. “No one forgives you if you do populist stuff, even though The New Statesman [their show about a sleazy Thatcherite politician] was pure satire. I don’t think they’re always given the credit they deserve.”74 They did, however, win the prestigious British Academy’s Writers’ Award in 1993, and five years later they were the subject of the South Bank Show, which takes a serious approach to the entertainment world. One of Marks and Gran’s more penetrating insights concerns the links between their East and Northeast London origins and their television creations. Their success in comedy partly derives, Gran surmises, from the rhythm of the language—“perhaps because cockney humour is the music of the East End. It’s more imbued with Jewish humour and a Jewish rhythm, which, in my view, is the key to humour in the English speaking world.”75 But there may be more to Jewish humor in England than that. London’s East End summons up a still-remembered Jewish anarchist tradition, an edgier, untamed version of the parallel phenomenon that once flickered on the Lower East Side of New York. A vestige of that earlier age is still to be found at the heart of the East End, near the Aldgate East tube station—an alley leading to Freedom Press, one of the world’s last anarchist publishers and bookshops. It may well be the case that the half-tones of cynical disenchantment resonating with Marks and Gran, and with other contemporary comic Jewish artists in Britain, are a throwback to Jewish East Enders and their sallies against the sacrosanct order of respectability.

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Notes I wish to warmly thank Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran for taking the time to talk to me at length about their own work and, more generally, about Jewish humor in Britain. Laurence, in our first meeting, provided me with something of a roadmap for this project and answered some follow-up questions by e-mail, as well as directing me to the Marks & Gran collection at the Borthwick Institute Archives in York. This collection consists of 35 boxes of (to date) uncategorized material, including numerous press clippings. I am extremely grateful to have been allowed access to this collection with the assistance of Paul Dryburgh, who also helped to make the series So You Think You’ve Got Troubles available to me. 1. Ruth Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: 2013), 104–142, 239–244. 2. Ali G has been described as “a satirical fictional character.” The character first appeared on (British) Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show, and later as the title character of Da Ali G Show on Channel 4 in 2000 and HBO in 2003–2004. The material was largely recycled in the feature film, Ali G Indahouse (2002). Although generally not a reliable source for academic research, Wikipedia seems quite good on basic information about television programs and other aspects of popular culture; see entry for the character of Ali G at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ali_G (accessed 25 February 2015). 3. David Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America (New Brunswick: 2013), 16–17, 48–51, 68–75. 4. Nathan Abrams, “Cowboys and Killers: Cinema’s New Jews,” Jewish Chronicle (27 September 2012). 5. Recently, a number of comedians, notably Stephen Fry, have acknowledged a partial Jewish ancestry. See David Smith, “Actor Shaken by Anti-semitic Outrage as He Explored His Jewish Past,” The Observer (5 June 2005), online at theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/05/religion. hayfestival2005 (accessed 25 February 2015). Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London— who is perhaps the funniest British politician since Disraeli—happily confirms that Jews are part of his mongrel family tree. But Johnson remains a “toff,” a Tory aristocrat who attended Eton and was a member of the ultra-snobby Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Baron Cohen is a history graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge. 6. The program has a website at oldjewstellingjokes.com (accessed 26 February 2015). 7. Edward Nicholas Philip Marshall, “Ambivalent Images: A Survey of Jewish Involvement and Representation in the British Entertainment Industry, 1880–1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2010). Marshall also curated an exhibition at the Jewish Museum London along the lines of his dissertation. 8. Interview with Laurence Marks (24 June 2013). 9. In the 1950s, a Jewish comedy duo, Mike and Bernie Winters (originally Weinstein), gained prominence. They appeared on BBC TV’s Variety Parade from 1955–1958, and their 1963 show, Big Night Out, was considered a great success. However, there was apparently no religious or ethnic dimension to their act. See “Mike and Bernie Winters, “There’s an Elephant in My Bedroom” (1964?) at youtube.com/watch?v=XaVrZRJfTBE and “Batman” (1968) at youtube.com/watch?v=LY5R7mUCcKU (accessed 6 December 2015). 10. For more on the program, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldbergs_%28broadcast_ series%29 (accessed 8 February 2015). 11. A more detailed account can be found in the “UK reception” section of the Wikipedia article on the show, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phil_Silvers_Show (accessed 8 February 2015). 12. Interview with Marks (24 June 2013); see also the discussion in Jarrod Tanny’s essay in this volume, “Decoding Seinfeld’s Jewishness,” esp. 55. 13. In one episode (1964), Buddy has a belated “adult” bar mitzvah. Waiting in the rabbi’s outer office for his lesson, Buddy encounters a 12-year-old bar mitzvah student carrying a football. “Next time, kid,” he quips, “forget the pigskin.” See Eliot Gertel, Over the Top Judaism: Precedents and Trends in the Depiction of Jewish Beliefs and Observances in Film and Television (Lanham: 2003), 208. 14. For more on the program, see the online site, comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/never_mind_the_ quality (accessed 26 February 2015).

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15. For more on the program, see the Wikipedia article at wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_ Loves_Bernie (accessed 26 February 2015). 16. Marks interview (24 June 2013). 17. Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: An Autobiography in Six Acts; postscript by Maureen Lipman; foreword by Amy Rosenthal (London: 2005). Rosenthal had worked mainly for Granada Television, an independent British broadcasting company, as a writer for the longrunning prime-time soap opera Coronation Street. See Sue Vice, Jack Rosenthal (Manchester: 2009), 14–32. 18. Vice, Jack Rosenthal, 1, 176–188. 19. Ibid., 67–72, 127, 131, 165–168. 20. The series, which was one of the first to broach some previously untouchable areas of interpersonal relations, was resurrected as Agony Again on BBC1 in 1995. See Laurence Marks, “The Laughing Game,” The Sunday Times (3 September 1995). 21. The commercial can be seen online at youtube.com/watch?v=vEfKEzX9QLE (accessed 1 March 2015). 22. “Tee-hee for Two,” YOU section, Mail On Sunday Magazine (most likely July 1984) (date is missing from clipping), in Shine on, Harvey Moon press cuttings file (box marked “archive scripts”), Marks & Gran collection, Borthwick Institute Archives (hereafter: MG/BIA). 23. Laurence Marks, “How to Make a Million Laugh,” The Sunday Times (27 May 2001); the column was to promote his book A Fan for All Seasons (box marked "press cuttings, office"), MG/BIA. 24. Holding the Fort “starred Patricia Hodge as army officer Penny Milburn and Peter (Dr Who) Davison as her brewer husband who stays home minding the baby. It was notable for its progressive sentiments beneath the conventional sitcom format” (ibid.). 25. It is unclear how many shows aired—most likely no more than six, but possibly as few as three. 26. Typescript, Roots script (box marked “Marks & Gran”), MG/BIA. This appears to be a pilot episode draft, as the names of the characters do not match those that appeared on the shows. 27. Typescript, Roots storyline, Episode Two: “The Good, The Bad, and She May Not Be Too Much to Look at, But She’s Got a Lovely Personality,” in “Roots-miscellaneous” file (box marked “archive press cuttings”), MG/BIA. 28. Ibid. 29. “Two Writers Who are Developing a Range of Comedy: ‘Television Today’ Talks to Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran,” TV Weekly (19 July 1984), found in MG/BIA [unmarked box]. 30. Pat Lidket, “Roll Over Once Again, Beethoven,” Jewish Chronicle (16 March 1984). 31. “Two Writers Who are Developing a Range of Comedy.” 32. Ibid. The title of the program (variously given as Shine on, Harvey Moon; Shine on Harvey Moon; and Shine on, Harvey Moon!) is a play on the name of a popular Tin Pan Alley song, “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” 33. Phone conversation with Laurence Marks (8 August 2013). 34. Item in Sunday People (10 June 1984) (box marked “archive scripts”), MG/BIA. 35. John Rydon, “Tonight’s Choice: Connie and Chums Carry On Spivving,” Daily Express (18 September 1982). 36. E-mail from Laurence Marks (11 July 2013). 37. Item in The Times (17 June 1984), in file named “Shine on Harvey Moon press cuttings” (box marked “archive scripts”), MG/BIA. 38. Judith Simone, [untitled item] Daily Express (20 July 1984), in ibid. 39. [untitled and unattributed item], The Times (27 July 1984). 40. Dennis Hackett, “Personal Councillor,” The Times (2 June 1984). 41. Paul Donovan, “Why don’t ’Arvey Speak Proper . . . ?” Daily Mail (2 June 1984). 42. Item in The Times (17 June 1984). 43. Elizabeth Cowley, “Pick of the Day,” Daily Mail (13 July 1984). 44. “Writer Laurence Marks Tells How He and Maurice Gran Devised Man-eater Dorien—a New Series Starts this Week,” Radio Times, 24–30, 1997 (box marked “press cuttings, office”), MG/BIA.

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45. Ibid. 46. Marks interview (24 June 2013). 47. “Writer Laurence Marks Tells How He and Maurice Gran Devised Man-eater Dorien.” 48. Marks interview (24 June 2013). 49. Shona Blass, “Punch Lines,” New Moon: The Jewish Arts and Listings Monthly (January 1992) (box marked “Marks & Gran”), MG/BIA. 50. “Writer Laurence Marks Tells How He and Maurice Gran Devised Man-eater Dorien.” 51. Shona Blass, “Punch Lines.” 52. “Writer Laurence Marks Tells How He and Maurice Gran Devised Man-eater Dorien.” 53. Shona Blass, “Punch Lines.” 54. Chiara Francesca Ferrari, Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish? Dubbing Stereotypes in The Nanny, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos (Austin: 2011). 55. Shona Blass, “Punch Lines.” 56. Ibid. In the case of the widely acclaimed Shine on, Harvey Moon, one reviewer complained that the show’s treatment of the working class was too uncritical, just short of being “patronizing.” See Judith Simone [untitled item], Daily Express (20 July 1984). 57. Shona Blass, “Punch Lines.” 58. See shineonharveymoon.co.uk/page_921347.html (accessed 26 February 2015). 59. Phone conversation with Marks (8 August 2013). 60. Upon presenting a paper on So You Think You’ve Got Troubles at the annual conference of the British Association of Jewish Studies in Dublin (15 July 2014), I had occasion to meet Pamela Linden, a Ph.D. student at Queens University Belfast who is writing about Belfast’s Jewish community in the 20th century. See also Daniela Wack, “Give My Head Peace: Analysis of a Political Sitcom in Northern Ireland,” unpublished seminar paper, Albert-LudwigsUniversität Freiburg, 2004/5, online at grin.com/en/e-book/59580/give-my-head-peace-analysisof-a-political-sitcom-in-northern-ireland (accessed 6 December 2015), and report on an upcoming lecture by actor Dan Gordon on So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, online at culturenorthernireland.org/features/performing-arts/laugh-bank (accessed 1 March 2015). 61. On the character of Alf Garnett, see the Wikipedia article, online at en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Alf_Garnett (accessed 26 February 2015). 62. Marty Feldman (1934–1982), who was easily identified by his unruly hair and popeyes (the latter a consequence of a medical condition), was a leading British comedian and comedy writer. He also appeared on numerous U.S. television programs and in movies, notably Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie and Young Frankenstein; at least some of the characters he played were clearly Jewish. Feldman was part of the group that later coalesced (without him) as Monty Python; he worked with various comic ensembles and later had his own television shows in Britain and the United States. For more details on his career, see Nicola Tyrer, “Marty—The Mini Star with a Ferrari Engine,” Evening News (18 September 1976), found in the Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives. 63. Wikipedia article on Alf Garnett. 64. The play was first broadcast on Saturday, 31 March 2007. 65. Peter Gruner, “Writers Give the Little Hitler a Freudian Trip,” Camden New Journal, 10 May 2007, online at thecnj.com/review/051007/feat051007_02.html?headline=Writers_ give_the_little_Hitler_a_Freudian_trip (accessed 26 February 2015). 66. Andrew Billen, “Now, Lie Down on This Couch: Thought-provoking Drama from an Unlikely Source,” New Statesman (9 April 2007). 67. Laurence Marks, “Would Freud Have Saved Hitler and the World from His Madness?” MailOnline (30 March 2007), online at dailymail.co.uk/news/article-445721/Would-Freudsaved-Hitler-world-madness.html (accessed 26 February 2015). 68. Peter Davalle, “Choice,” in The Times (1 June 1984). 69. Gavriel Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternative History and the Memory of Nazism (New York: 2005). 70. Helen Jacobus, “Situation: Comedy. Helen Jacobus Watches a Tribute to One of TV’s Most Prolific Writing Teams,” Jewish Chronicle (6 February 1998). 71. Thomas Quirke, “Funny Business.”

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72. Peter Freedman, “Comedy’s New Statesmen” (box marked “press cuttings, office”), MG/BIA. 73. Sue Teddern, “A Write Pair: For the First Time Ever the MacTaggart Lecture is Being Delivered by Two People, Sitcom Maestros Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran,” The Television Book 1997, The Guardian (The Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival 31) (box marked “press cuttings, office”), MG/BIA. 74. Ibid. 75. Peter Freedman, “Comedy’s New Statesmen.”

Funny-Looking: Thoughts on Jewish Visual Humor Carol Zemel (York University)

Hannah Wilke’s Venus Pareve (1984) is a Jewish joke: a visual witticism. A cluster of ten miniature female nudes—self-portraits of Wilke, who liked to present herself satirizing beauty queens—these figurines mime the classical Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite, with their painted plaster replacing the white marble form. The visual reversal of color and scale delivers an immediate impact, and the inversions (a basic mechanism of jokes) perform a series of iconoclasms. The miniature size inserts the Greek goddess into a mass-produced company. Like souvenir copies that vulgarize high-culture originals, their number here does the same; aligned together, they form a sort of congregation, a purposeful group. Their colors, which are deep, rich, and dazzling, visually yank the figurines from their august heritage into the multicolored, multicultural world of today. In this fashion, the hallowed halls of Western civilization are invaded by familiar, but variant, forms. Small and candycolored, these Venus figures seem good enough to eat. (In fact, an earlier version of the work was cast in chocolate). Wilke’s title is the finishing touch, as Venus Pareve puns on the titles of the classical statues—Venus of Melos, Venus Anadyomene, and the like—that identify the work’s origin or type. Pareve offers another kind of cultural identity. As derived from the Jewish laws of kashrut, the term pareve declares this female figure neither dairy nor meat. Like the dietary designation of neutrality, this multicolored Jewish Venus is an adaptable, go-with-anything cultural companion. Yes, the work is witty—but it is hardly a “one-off.” Rather, the humor of Wilke’s work recurrently triggers a more contemplative response. Writing about Jewish visual humor in works like this presents a specific challenge. The issue is neither a definition of humor generally nor Jewish humor specifically, but rather the visual formats of humor and how they operate “Jewishly.” Thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze have reiterated both humor’s embeddedness in social relations and the critical function of its mockery.1And this is crucial to its analysis. When we react to something funny, when something makes us laugh, we are immediately “in company,” in the sense of joining the joker and sharing the joker’s milieu. Through humor, we enter a new community of shared values, ideas, concerns—one that may 90

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be time-bound (it depends how long the joke or its conditions endure), but a community nonetheless. “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group,” Bergson wrote. “However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.”2 Freud’s account, derived from Heine, of the lottery collector and corn-remover Hirsh-Hyacinth’s boast that, while on a train, he was treated “quite famillionairely” by Rothschild is still funny in a world of capitalism and class;3 Wilke’s Pareve Venus remains amusing as we critique its assumptions of ethnicity and gender ideals. But we may also find a challenge and revisionary thinking in the comedic experience and, through humor’s shared aesthetic, become what philosopher Jacques Rancière has called an “emancipated spectator”—alert and informed. Humor is serious business. What we find funny, then, relies on recognizable power and syntactical structures. Through forms that are fundamentally incongruous—in some obvious way, they “don’t fit”—humor’s task is to upend, debunk, or defeat. Among modern nations, national or ethnic humor is a mainstay. In multicultural contexts, we often label jokes about minorities racist; but, of course, minorities, like Jews, develop their own comic weaponry, poking fun defiantly both at themselves and at the dominant norm. For Jews, this kind of humor (Daniel Boyarin uses the Yiddish term goyim naches)4 underscores the jokester’s us/not us: that is, our group’s difference and specialness. Indeed, modern Jewish humor is largely diasporic, whether as commentary on its own community, as in the tales of Sholem Aleichem,5 or against the dominant social and political powers.6 Holocaust humor is the extreme case, funny only when voiced by Jews or Shoah victims, as is the case for any group tragedy or catastrophe, and even then, often disquieting.7 Pictorial formats involve another dimension, as Jewish visual humor is bound not only to Jewish history, but also to the history of Western art. A very brief overview of visual humor in its Western historical setting may start with the observation that, while caricatures can be found early on in ancient Greek culture (though chiefly in vase painting and not the high arts of statuary and murals), it is not until the late 18th and 19th centuries, when images move out of churches and palaces and into the public space of secular societies, that printed caricatures, cheap graphic series, and humorous broadsides multiply. Their success depends on their maker’s ability to manipulate familiar visual signifiers, taking ideal or neutral forms and exaggerating them, rendering them misshapen or incongruous, or placing them in impossible positions in order to produce some non-normative effect. As a result, visual comedy has an immediate appeal. Whereas a verbal joke or anecdote narrates some behavior or event, the visual form mocks a more embodied ideal with a quickly perceived distortion of person or form. Even with a widening audience, however, visual humor rarely entered the canon of high art.8 The comic mode usually appears in genre imagery—pictures of local folk made by artist professionals for middle- or upper-class patrons. Such pictures reinforce social hierarchies, looking down with some amusement (and modern political incorrectness) at those “below” rather than lampooning those “above,” or enjoying the bodily pleasures, usually unseen in polite company, of the carnivalesque. But unlike narrative-driven comedic literature or theater productions, funny pictures are

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often singular configurations whose punch depends on external context: what the viewer knows enables her to get the joke. Art history does not celebrate a comedic genre. Iconoclasm—or “iconoclash,” to use Bruno Latour’s neologism—is visual humor’s fundamental gesture, though its damage is more imagined than physical. Whether direct or allusive, humor attaches itself to its subject in order to separate and denounce some larger entity, community, or law. What made people laugh in other times is not so easily discerned.9 Guided by notions of incongruity (and these too are culturally shaped), inversion, and historical circumstance, we may attempt to recognize the iconoclasms of premodern visual humor. In a spirit of historicizing chutzpah, I begin my survey of the subject in the 14th century and consider some Jewish visual oddities or humor of the time. The figural illustrations of the Birds’-Head Haggadah (ca.1300), for example, may be, as is often argued, a way to circumvent Second Commandment prohibitions against graven images,10 but they may also be comic commentary on the Passover and seder preparations. Animal-head gods are mainstays of many religious traditions, especially in ancient Egypt, where the falcon-headed Horus was god of the sun, sky, war and protection—analogous in his numerous roles to the omniscient God of Israel. In his study of illustrated medieval Hagadahs, Marc Michael Epstein aligns the bird-head figures with composites like the eagle-lion gryphon, a hybrid that combined two (non-human) creatures also sacralized in Jewish texts and common in medieval Christian visual culture.11 But unlike most presentations of gods as icons of worship or semi-divine companions, the bird-headed folk in the Haggadah are actors in the Exodus narrative, and they are busy at their tasks. Their behavior seems remarkably quotidian, rarely heroic or grand. Israelite bird-men and bird-women are shown preparing the matzot for their journey; with their Jew-hats and the women’s snoods, they must have appeared to the medieval viewer like familiar figures immersed in domestic preparations for the holiday. Egyptians, in contrast, are shown as faceless. The distinction serves, of course, to distinguish between the two peoples and to obey the prohibition against imagery, as well as linking (in ironic manner) bird-headed Jews with the gods. Of course, we do not know if these images were considered to be comical in their own time; scholarly opinion is silent on the subject, as if seeing humor in this kind of document might be sacrilege. This would confirm both the iconoclastic force of a comic reading, as well as the difficulties of working outside the framework of our own time and recent history.12 The internet site Seforim, for example, shows early manuscript illustrations in which the leader of the seder points to his wife and compares her to the bitterness of maror.13 Today, we may lament this sexist gesture, but some viewers still regard it (or, at least, explain it) as humorous, and caution against the presumption that religious practice cannot have a comic side. Certainly, the lively bird-headed figures bring an odd dimension to the Exodus narrative. In psychoanalytic terms, the substitution “makes the story strange” at the same time as it renews its most compelling dimension. Like the Jews of Egypt, these hybrid Jews of the diaspora are necessarily different from their hosts. A modern revision of the medieval manuscript is Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassy’s Aachen Passover Haggadah (2003), a 50-page work in ink, gouache, and watercolor, whose Jew-headed bird figures are deliberate inversions of the Birds’-Head folk.14

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Each creature wears a blocky hasidic streyml that is echoed in a black square beard. In this form of hybridity, the figures are stranger than their busy medieval cousins, and so raise a visual conundrum. Does “human-ness” appear more plausible as head or body—as animal-head human or human-head beast? Mindful of antisemitic caricatures seen in her youth in Ukraine, Cherkassy abandons the format of marginal commentary. Instead, she makes the bird-Jews central to the page, where they perch in chilling groups on leafless trees, or else move in waddling processions between Hebrew text and geometric patterns that are derived from the revolutionary modernist works of the Russian Jewish artist El Lissitzky.15 Joining the Hagadah narrative and rituals to strange Jewish creatures as well as failed Soviet utopias, the result is both comic and unnerving. With the Jews of the Exodus portrayed as Orthodox grotesques, the satire ricochets between tradition, incongruity, and revolutionary satire. The Aachen Haggadah keeps multiple dimensions of that Jewish history—ancient, Orthodox, and modern—in sight. An obvious modern analogy to the Bird’s-Head Haggadah is Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991). Adam Gopnik made this comparison in an early review of Maus, but claimed that unlike the Haggadah, Maus depicted something “too profane to show.”16 Indeeed, Spiegelman’s humor is bitter, designating Jews as mice, Poles as cats, Germans as pigs, and Americans as friendly (rescue) dogs. Anyone who taught Maus shortly after its publication probably experienced students’ initial discomfort at “reducing” a people or nation to beasts, turning them, like animals in children’s books, into fully sentient beings.17 Strangely, the gesture is not reductive in its descriptive force. The Mice-Jews vary and are fully dimensional in character and behavior; they are the focus of the story, whereas the beasts of other nations (like the Egyptians of the Birds’ Head Haggadah) simply act out their assigned parts. “It’s those animal masks,” Spiegelman has said, “that allowed me to approach otherwise unsayable things.”18 As with the story of the Exodus, this is a cataclysmic history. Unlike the Exodus narrative, however, Maus does not recount escape or victory but a punishing sense of emotional endurance, trauma, and loss. The prominence of Jewish artists such as Spiegelman in the production of comics and graphic novels in the United States is well known.19 Stan Mack, Harvey Pekar, and Ben Katchor are among the funniest of that group. Of course, there is a good deal of humor in their story lines. But the humor also derives from the graphic style, and to focus solely on the text would be to miss the full experience. Mack’s snub-nosed, gesticulating characters in The Story of the Jews: A 4,000-Year Adventure 20 and Katchor’s angular, awkward types underscore the figures’ “mis-fit” and difference from the normative or the ideal. Katchor’s Jew of New York, for example, sets up a complex narrative of early American Jewish history: the 19th-century story of Mordechai Emmanuel Noah (1785–1851), who tried to establish a Jewish homeland, which he dubbed “Ararat,” on Grand Island in the Niagara River, near Buffalo, New York. There are other twists and turns in the story, including a fur-trapping trading venture in partnership with disenfranchised Native Americans. In any event, the elaborate narrative is packed with funny characters, each presented as an exaggerated type. Yosl Feinbroyt (akin to “Joe Donut”) wears the top hat and tailed waistcoat of a proper bourgeois citizen, but his hunched posture and smirking grin imparts an uneasy, vaguely disreputable character to the figure; the Native American Joseph

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Oriole, in contrast—also costumed in bourgeois dress—holds himself at subservient attention and stands humbly before us, hat in hand. Even the title page, featuring the Jew’s top hat caught by the wind and sailing over the city, emblematizes the comic adventures of the Jew as both costumed new arrival and luftmentsh. In contrast to the mass culture world of graphic novels, humor has been in short supply in the precincts of modern art. Following the existential angst of Abstract Expressionism, the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s brought humor into high culture’s rarefied space. In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Susan Sontag linked the impudent but stylish Pop-sters and their love of mass culture to what she termed a new “Camp” sensibility. “Camp,” Sontag wrote, “converts the serious into the frivolous”; in fact, its “whole point . . . is to dethrone the serious.”21 Among the Jewish Pop artists, we might see Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book style as high irony, but there is no Jewish content in Lichtenstein’s work. Larry Rivers’ triptych History of Matzah—Story of the Jews (1983–1985) combines montaged scenes of Jewish history in a synaptic diaspora history, but there is little or no humor here. Pop art, however, likely encouraged the Jewish abstractionist Philip Guston to shift from quiet, hovering configurations to comic figures. His boulder-headed men, smoking pipes and quizzically pondering the human situation, strike a note of Jewish old-age comic resignation, both grotesque and wise. In the 1990s, with Post-Modernism’s rejection of modernist purities and cultural hegemonies, visual humor and cultural pluralism entered the scene. In America, spurred by the new identity politics, several exhibitions displayed the art of ethnic sectors of society.22 The most comprehensive of these exhibitions was The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), which featured work by “artistsof-color”—Asian American, African American, and Latino-American—in a cultural celebration of identity politics. There were no Jews in this assembly; they were presumably no longer a marginalized minority, and the distinctiveness of Jewish American culture and humor, or high culture, at least, was left unseen. This was remedied in 1996 with Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities at New York’s Jewish Museum. The exhibition, curated by Norman Kleeblatt, not only documented and promoted a new inclusivity, but also featured a significant number of funny works, testimony to Kleeblatt’s remarkable sense of humor and irony. One of these, Ken Aptekar’s Albert, Used to be Abraham (1995), represents a familiar form of Jewish acculturation in the diaspora: the man in the portrait changes his name and performs an about-face—almost, but not quite. We are informed of this shift by the title, engraved on glass that is bolted to the picture surface. The transparent text is a Jewish one-liner, and though it is directive, it is the visual format that delivers the ironic punch line about the subject’s identities. Looking in opposite directions, the lower face is simply flipped, a mirror image of the man above. With the letters marking the split, one mouth or voice is effaced and silenced; only the lower, fuller face can speak. Aptekar draws his image from a portrait of an unknown man by the 17th-century Dutch artist and pupil of Rembrandt, Isaak de Jouderville (1613–1645). The sound of that name itself performs an appropriate pun: “de Jouderville” is a Dutch-French compound that we might translate as “Jews-town,” disclosing in its own cryptic way the artist’s—or subject’s—origin. Gesturing to a traditional past, the picture represents a barely discernible but significant change, as

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the former Abraham modifies his Jewish identity. The assimilationist gesture is familiar enough; it is a diasporic habit. But despite its centuries-old allusions, the irony of Aptekar’s painting suggests something new: a desire to acknowledge and even reclaim that double-ness as part of modern identity. What, besides the moniker, has changed for Albert/Abraham, as Aptekar paints him? His skin lightens somewhat; his nose almost imperceptibly straightens. His face moves from one side to the other, and with mouth partly covered, his voice is muted even as he adapts. Denis Kardon’s Jewish Noses (1993–1995), also in the Too Jewish? exhibition, presents cast and painted nose forms (there are 49 in all) of art world figures—artists, dealers, curators, collectors. The Jewish schnoz, a phallic substitute and public marker of Jewish identity, is catalogued—and celebrated—without reference to age or gender. What in fact can we determine about these noses? Like Aptekar’s Albert, these figures offer a parodic gloss on social history. By the end of the 19th century, as Sander Gilman describes it, the Jewish nose was not only a pejorative with connotations of racial ugliness, but its presumed disfiguring connotation had also been internalized by Jews eager to assimilate and avoid the stereotype. As Gilman writes, following Freud, Jews “mirror within their own sense of selves the image of their own difference.”23 With this careful alignment and display of noses, Kardon also parodies physiognomic manuals developed in the increasingly class-and-race conscious 18th century and their pseudo-scientific anatomic ploys.24 His play of Jewish nasal specimens points to the continuing force of this marker—a coy substitute for genital structures and orifices. Preposterous as this Jewish “mark” may be, the viewers’ scrutiny—specimen by specimen—underscores its continuing force. Sexuality is humor’s favorite ploy. The sexual and gender politics of modern Jewish humor is best embodied through the persona of the “Jewish Mother,” a mid-20th-century comic invention that functions in visual as well as verbal terms.25 The daughter of the “Yiddishe Mama,” she was invented by comic Jewish men, mainly writers, who were eager to separate from family and tradition. Dan Greenburg’s How to Be a Jewish Mother (1964), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks (1989) shaped the stereotype of this woman’s overdressed vulgarity, smothering affection, and constant complaint. She parodies the Virgin Mother of the Christian Holy Family, a visual configuration deeply ingrained in Western iconography; the motif turns secular in the 19th century as it moves from holy to bourgeois nuclear family. (The father, like the Christian Joseph, is a diminished figure, if he appears at all.) In Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, one part of the film trilogy New York Stories (1989), the Jewish Mother has ascended to heaven, and there she looks down to adore and berate her assimilating son. Comically exaggerated, overbearing, and needy, this Jewish mother is one her children love to reject. The stereotype assumes a more benign and amusing incarnation in Amichai LauLavie’s drag persona, the eponymous Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross. In performance venues and short videos, the Rebbetzin (widow of no less than seven rebbes) combines motherly advice with halakhic wisdom as she discourses knowledgably on the body, dietary tradition, and kabbalah. The Rebbetzin’s combination of wit and mimicry makes fine theater, but her visual presence, easily linked to the stereotype, also shapes her comic success. As gussied up as she is (“I always wear couture”), the

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viewer remains aware that this is a figure in drag: a “woman/not a woman.” The shifting gender produces a critical distance from the original stereotype and eases the comic turn from irritating harangue to loving hilarity. And in that process, the Rebbetzin manages to deliver Jewish wisdom, as well as wit. Funny Jewish objects such as museum shop items, which are themselves forms of high-art mimicry, depend on visual and tactile immediacy and play with emblematic forms. Canadian artist Melissa Shiff’s work is both commemorative and comic. Shiff’s Crush Oppression Matzo Cushion (2006) ($50 signed; $40 unsigned) riffs on the comforts and deprivations of the Pesach ceremony. A matzo-printed cushion filled with matzo bits is a reminder, of course, of the un-risen bread of the flight from Egypt, but it also provides a somewhat uncomfortable support for those sitting at a seder table (on the one night when Jews are supposed to lean, symbolically dining in the comfort of freedom). The title, too, refers to the Pesach narrative of oppression and freedom, though a glimpse at Shiff’s website links the ancient struggle to contemporary concerns: the beret-clad portrait of the artist mimes revolutionary guerrilla gear; the designation “JAP” and the assurance that “shopping is a mitzvah” redeploy Jewish American Princess materialism into a new Jewish feminism. With her marketing label, ganz schön jüdisch (“entirely Jewish”), Berlin artist Anna Adam produces mass culture articles—postcards, wrapping paper, envelopes, magnets, lapel buttons—to proclaim an in-your-face Jewish identity in a historically loaded diasporic space. Born in Germany in 1963 to a secular Jewish family, Adam grew weary of the Jewish stereotype in her homeland: Orthodox, kosher, and tearful. “As a Jew in this country,” she claims, “you are supposed to act according to the expectations of the majority. And I find that really infuriating.” Reversing the common practice, she gave up her non-sectarian identity and declares that it is “a kind of healing process to practice Judaism in everyday life. . . . [I] live a wonderful, funloving and proud Jewish everyday life.”26 Adam’s assertive embrace of “Jewishness” is conveyed through humor’s satirical force. “Alles koscher”? (“Everything kosher?” or “Everything OK?”) one image asks in German (not Yiddish), as a colloquial alert; the low-brow pin emblazons the caricatured head of a bearded Ostjude (East European Jew) with flowing red locks and streyml, who scans his Jewish horizon through binoculars. Another lapel button proclaims: “Couldn’t be more Jewish!”—the irony not lost in a country that once ­legislated identity badges as a means of control for Jews. The comic effect turns on revision of the culturally familiar into the culturally odd or incongruous. Relying on their humor to encourage discussion about Jews, Adam sells these oddball objects in museum gift shops and from her touring Happy Hippie Jew Bus. In such marketplaces, the work, like Melissa Shiff’s pillows, hovers in humor’s mischievous terrain between art and kitschy souvenir. Given humor’s social and cultural criticality, it is no surprise that Jewish stereotypes are prominent in Israeli visual humor, where they especially mark disillusion with Zionist ideals, Holocaust reverence, and, more recently, Haredi Orthodoxy, as that constituency assumes a prominent civic voice. An example of the last is Zoya Cherkassy’s Action Toy (2002), an 8-inch painted polymer sculpture that mimes a Jewish male doll with a helmet of black hair that extends to peyot and beard, a huge bulbous nose, and a circumcised penis. The doll is not simply anatomically correct;

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rather, these marks of Jewish maleness are the visual focus of the smooth white body. Like the cultural fascinations of the nose, this, too, presents the Jewish man as comically marked, but seen from within, Jew to Jew, thus shifting what had been internalized antisemitism to a contemporary—and gendered—Israeli factionalism. The focus is understandably different in Germany, a notable site for museum shows that affirm Jewish presence through humor. The perennial questions reemerge: who but the victim can make jokes about the Holocaust? How can this serve anything but renewed antisemitism? And yet, like Anna Adam’s rejection of the lachrymose Jew, the strategy of humor enables visitor response, as it returns the Jewish presence to “normal difference” rather than recurrent accounts of persecution, pain, and guilt. For his exhibition The Joys of Yiddish (2013) at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, Jewish American artist Mel Bochner created a monumental entry banner of Yiddish slang. With words transliterated from Hebrew to Latin letters, Bochner has all his viewers reading and speaking a diasporic tongue long regarded by Germans as Jewish Mauscheln, or bastardized German. Bochner’s terms, which are widely understood even by non-Jews in North America, are mild insults—among them pisher, nudnik, gonif, and kvetcher (small-fry, pest, thief, complainer)—which effectively describe either fellow Jew or Gentile. Bochner spits out his verbal insults with pictorial force. Spanning the museum façade like a billboard, the text of Yiddish slang proclaims a Jewish presence: “We are here” (or perhaps: “still here”) the design insists. Large and graphically loud, in the yellow of Third Reich Jewish badges and armbands, the visual qualities insist on an irreverent, semi-outsider company of viewers. The museum setting poses a special irony. The Haus der Kunst is the site of the Nazis’ infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, organized in 1937 by Adolf Ziegler and Joseph Goebbels, which featured modernist (among them, many Jewish) artists; now it welcomes those it previously despised. Continuing the effort to renounce the Nazi past, the museum website describes Bochner’s text as “words Jewish residents used to express unity and defiance during the Third Reich.”27 This, however, is a particularly tendentious explanation of the language; in fact, these Yiddish terms enliven the character of everyday speech as mild and belittling insults, hardly the language of serious protest. Of course, this is the work’s humor. Embla­ zoned across this German museum, they brazenly deride the visitor and passer-by. An earlier version shown outside Chicago’s Spertus Institute in 2006 brought an irascible Yiddish presence to the American street. In Munich, the words hurl an incongruous and cheeky welcome to museum visitors, even as they remain, like successful slang, among the “Joys of Yiddish” for Jews today. The Whole Truth, Everything You Wanted to Know about Jews . . . , the 2013 exhibition at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, extends that institution’s historical mission through humor’s mischievous frame. Curator Michal Friedlander describes the need in Germany, with only 200,000 Jewish residents among 80 million, to move beyond Holocaust trauma and to learn about Jews and Judaism through topics such as food and dress, Orthodoxy and conversion, and Jewish perceptions of “chosenness.” The most controversial element was the concluding gallery, where visitors were invited to “Ask a Jew. . . . ” A platform inscribed “Are there still Jews in Germany?” supported a

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glass enclosure in which a Jewish volunteer sat for two-hour stints and answered visitors’ questions. Critical reaction was immediate and indignant. How dare the museum simplify or make light of complex questions? How dare it turn Jews into objects of curiosity? Nor was the echo of the glass prisoner’s box at Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Israel lost on viewers.28 But even the blasphemous satire may serve humor’s instructive domain. The “Jew in the Box,” as the installation was soon designated, was hugely popular: it enthroned German Jews, immigrant Jews, visiting Jews, even Holocaust survivors as eager participants.29 Leeor Englander, a Jewish German columnist for Die Welt, commented, “It’s a bit funny, it’s ironic. . . . It’s no different to be in this box than to be at a cocktail party.”30 Another participant, Jeff Peck, dean at Manhattan’s Baruch College, reported that the experience “gave me the chance to discuss . . . the unique status of Jews in Germany and that indeed as a Jew in Germany, one was always ‘in the box,’ be it positively or negatively.”31 Along with the interactive conversation, visual elements also shape the installation’s success. With its tongue-in-cheek prodding, the blunt written invitation to “ask a Jew” interrupts the gravity of the museum setting. It also levels the cultural playing field, providing a performative aesthetic space in which “experts” and questioners freely speak and interact. The scenario enacts the kind of learning described by Jaques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator (2009); as with Rancière’s “Ignorant Schoolmaster,” the museum-designated Jew enables an open-ended aesthetic interactivity in which visitors—indeed, all participants—engage and learn.32 The Berlin exhibition script or scenario begins with the parodic and, in so doing, upends hierarchical formats and strictures, using a satirical premise to clarify and renew. “Renewal” may be a key term here, part of the critical incongruity of the examples I’ve drawn attention to. Humor is commentary and revision. It insistently pokes fun at what we assume; hence its subversive status. It delivers pleasure, and it’s impolite. Comedy and jokes may endure over time, but they are emphatically embedded in the here and now. As much as Jewish humor springs from Jewish custom and history— Hagadah narratives, Orthodox tradition, social types, even catastrophe—it is equally current in its critical sendup of race, gender, and society. As incongruous forms and potential agents of change, visual humor and Jews enter the world of high culture hand in hand.

Notes Sources for images described in this essay are readily available online; search through the artist’s name. 1. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: 1963); Mikhael Bakhtin, “The Art of The Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol),” Russian Studies in Literature 12, no. 2 (Spring 1976), 27–39; Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1911), trans. Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola: 2005); Georges Bataille, “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” in idem, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: 1985), 91–102; Bénédicte Boisseron, “Georges Bataille’s Laughter: A Poetics of Glissement,” French Cultural Studies 21, no. 3 (August 2010), 167–177; Gilles

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Deleuze, “Humor, Irony, and the Law,” in idem, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: 1994.) 2. Bergson, Laughter, 3. 3. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 16–17. 4. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: 1997), 33–81. 5. Sholem Aleichem’s funny stories, though usually about Jews in the shtetls of the Pale, are distinguished by the class differences between the principal figures. This also typifies Freud’s aforementioned recounting of Heine’s anecdote. See also Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, “America as the Theatre of Jewish Comedy: From Sholem Aleichem to Grace Paley,” Studia Judaica 13 (2005), 74–82. 6. Among the most useful studies of Jewish verbal humor are Theodor Reik’s Jewish Wit (New York: 1962), Elliot Oring’s The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity, 3rd ed. (Lanham: 2007), and the recent study by Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke; Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: 2013). 7. See the discussion in Sander Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000), 279–308. 8. Renaissance and Baroque emblemata, long considered a minor art form replete with coded meanings and message, may be the one important site where the comic and incongruous play a role. 9. For a useful survey, see Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: 1997). 10. See Vivian B. Mann, “Iconoclasm,” in idem (ed.), Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (New York: 2000), 19–36. 11. Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Medieval Imag­ ination (New Haven: 2011), 54–60. 12. Marginal images as visual commentary are not uncommon in Byzantine Christian manuscripts. They are usually polemical rather than comic, and they reinforce and concretize the message of the text. See Kathleen Corrigan, Visual Polemics in Ninth Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge: 1992), 5, 113. 13. See seforim.blogspot.com/2012/04/halakhah-and-haggadah-manuscript.html (accessed 24 June 2015). My thanks to Maya Balakirsky Katz for this reference. 14. The Hagadah was part of Cherkassy’s exhibition Collectio Judaica (Tel Aviv, Rosenfeld Gallery, April 2004). 15. The Hagadah’s abstract forms are usually linked to El Lissitzky’s Chad gadya (1917) illustrations. While Lissitzky inventively combines figurative form and Hebrew typography, Cherkassy’s formal allusions are closer to the abstract geometries of Lissitzky’s illustrations for 4 Billy Goats (Arba’ah teyashim) (1922). 16. Gopnik’s point affirms the iconoclastic force of Spiegelman’s imagery, though he too links the medieval Hagadah imagery to circumvention of the Second Commandment. See Adam Gopnik, “Comics and Catastrophe,” The New Republic (22 June 1987), 29–34. For Spiegelman’s comments, see Art Spiegelman, Metamaus (New York: 2011), 116–117. 17. Spiegelman requested that the New York Times move Maus from its fiction to non-­ fiction category list. The paper debated the issue and complied. Spiegelman also suggested a special “nonfiction/mice” category. See Spiegelman, Metamaus, 150. 18. Ibid., 127. 19. See the essay in Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: 2004) and Jeremy Dauber, “Comic Books, Tragic Stories: Will Eisner’s American Jewish History,” AJS Review 30, no.2 (November 2006), 277–304. Michael Chabon’s novelistic account of this history in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (New York: 2000) presents the invention of the comic book superhero as a counter-Holocaust tale. 20. Stan Mack, The Story of the Jews: A 4,000 Year Adventure (New York: 1998). 21. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” (1964), in idem, Against Interpretation (New York: 2001), 275–292.

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22. The Studio Museum and El Museo del Barrio, in the New York neighborhoods of Harlem and East Harlem, were among the venues of these exhibitions. 23. Sander Gilman, “The Jewish Nose,” in idem, The Jew’s Body (New York: 1991), 176. 24. The prime example is Johan Kasper Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–1778). A further irony that we may associate with Kardon’s sculpture is Lavater’s inclusion of a silhouette of his contemporary Moses Mendelssohn. Lavatar praised his face as that of a man of virtue, even though Mendelssohn sported unattractive and disfiguring physical features, including what one might call a typical Jewish nose. In a famous letter of 1769, Mendelssohn had rebuffed Lavater’s attempt to verbally bully him into converting to Christianity. My thanks to Gabriel Finder and Eli Lederhandler for pointing to this exchange. 25. Classic studies include Joyce Antler’s You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother (Oxford: 2007); Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Jewish Culture,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: 1996), 74–92. 26. Susanne Rohr, “Interview with Anna Adam,” in The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo; Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, ed. Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr (Heidelberg: 2010), 21–30. 27. This quote is found in the description of Mel Bochner’s exhibition If the Color Changes, online at http://www.hausderkunst.de/en/exhibitions/detail/mel-bochner-if-the-color-changes-3/ (accessed 28 June 2015). 28. See, for example, Anne Hromadka, “Jew in a Box?” Forward (4 April 2013), online at http://forward.com/the-assimilator/174244/jew-in-a-box/(accessed 28 June 2015). 29. Survivor and New York resident Marion Holme (née Sauerbrunn, born in Berlin), one of those who answered questions, escaped at age 16 on a Kindertransport. See James Kirchick, “A German Holocaust Survivor Steps into the Box,” Tablet (1 July 2013), online at tabletmag. com/scroll/136734/a-german-holocaust-survivor-steps-into-the-box (accessed 29 June 2015). 30. Quoted in Sally McGrane, “Ask a Jewish Person,” The New Yorker (5 April 2013). 31. Email correspondence (9 September 2013). 32. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: 2009).

Humor and Russian Jewish Identity Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto)

For those engaged in the study of a totalitarian culture, jokes offer a means of gaining access to the realm of everyday living while at the same time being notoriously difficult for outsiders to decipher. Humor in this context is not only culture-specific but also frequently subversive, so that “getting the joke” depends on an ability to read the subtext. This is even more complex when the matter involves an ethnic minority possessing its own distinctive cultural and linguistic tradition. In the course of this essay, I will argue that deciphering the laughter of Jews living under the Soviet Russian regime allows for a nuanced understanding of Russian Jewish identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet era. Over the past 25 years, the study of Soviet (and post-Soviet) Jewish culture has emerged as a field in its own right. Most scholars initially employed an approach similar to those encountered in studies of American, Israeli, and European Jewish identity, seeking signs of “thick” markers such as language, religion, customs, foods, dress, music, and ethnic neighborhoods. However, they found little in the way of such markers, since (for multiple historical reasons) many contemporary Russian Jews do not practice Judaism, do not speak Jewish languages, do not live in “Jewish” neighborhoods, do not observe the laws of kashrut, and prefer classical music to Fiddler on the Roof. Accordingly, scholars began to follow the lead of Zvi Gitelman, who argued—borrowing concepts of cultural analysis elaborated in a different context by Clifford Geertz—that post-Soviet Jews maintained a “thin culture” based on feeling, memory, and shared experiences rather than religious observances, a distinctive language, or distinctive cultural practices.1 Ever since Gitelman began applying the term to Russian Jews in the 1990s, it has dominated scholarship in the field. And yet there appear to be many Russian Jews who do not share this view: they do not see their identity as “thin” and they have no trouble defining what they mean by “things Jewish.” In fact, their understanding of their Jewish identity seems to be more in line with Geertz’s “thick description” of culture—that is, all the layers and details that make up a given culture, including matters that are left unsaid and are thus less clear to outsiders.2 In the past few years, some scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the concept of “thin identity,” seeking instead to find proper tools to

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determine thick markers of Russian Jewish identity.3 Some have argued that works of fiction, film, art, and photography produced by Russian Jews over the course of Soviet history reveal a strong sense of Jewish identity and belonging.4 I suggest that studying oral culture, especially humor, will aid in dismantling the false dichotomy of thin versus thick culture as well as allowing for the study of Soviet Jewish culture as an example of “subjectivity,” that is, an internalized code of mutual recognition and self-awareness. In particular, an examination of what Soviet Jews found humorous may lead us to a better understanding as to how Jewish subjectivity developed in a society in which “living Jewishly” was difficult, if not impossible. The only generation of Russian Jews that has the potential ability to recreate Jewish humor from most Soviet periods is the one belonging to what scholars have described variously as the “Soviet pivotal generation,” the “Soviet war generation,” or, more colorfully, the generation of “Stalin’s children.” In chronological terms, members of this generation are those born between 1906 and 1928. While the lives of Soviet Jews of this period are no longer considered to be a narrative of pure suffering,5 they are marked nonetheless by an unusual number of tribulations (most of which were shared, to one degree or another, by other Soviet citizens): famines, Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and postwar discrimination against Jews in the period that is widely known as the “black years of Soviet Jewry.”6 Surviving one of those “episodes” would normally be more than enough to change a human life, but experiencing all of them seems unimaginable.7 What seems even less plausible, at least to non-historians, is that joking and laughter was an important part of living through these episodes. Soviet Jews laughed, even though they knew that a publicly told political joke could lead to a long prison sentence. In fact, they created a joke about that, too: “Stalin is the best collector of Jewish jokes: he filled two gulag camps with Jewish jokers.” Not only is it difficult to understand jokes, it is also hard to obtain a significant corpus of them. One possible source would be the surveys of public opinion conducted by government agencies, which are stored in archives. The other sources are private in nature: memoirs, diaries, and oral histories. This essay largely relies on the last—oral histories based on interviews conducted with 474 people born between 1906 and 1928, all of them Ashkenazi Jews who were educated in the Soviet Union.8 More specifically, it looks at jokes that narrators used in the interviews, either to help them illustrate a point about their life, to release tension, to tie loose ends, or to clarify misconceptions and illusions. Although interviewees frequently made jokes, it is hard to contextualize their humor. In the course of my interviews, I recorded jokes about almost all aspects of Soviet life, including family relations, communal apartments, and daily situations. A portion of the jokes dealt with identifiably Jewish experiences. Many of them involve wordplay between Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish; full of nuance and subtle meaning, they are nearly impossible to translate, despite their being incredibly rich and informative. In presenting an essay about Russian Jewish humor in English for a Western audience, I am limited to jokes that can be translated with a degree of clarity. This is the first limitation of the present study. The second limitation is that it is impossible to tell whether any of the jokes from the interviews (recorded between 1999 and 2010, in Canada, the United States,

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Germany, and Russia) actually circulated in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and even if they did, what was their context. Finally, it seems certain that many jokes remembered by the interviewees did not come up during the interviews. We have only what they chose to share, and what they produced during the interviews often focused on how being Jewish affected everyday choices ranging from deciding where to live, whom to marry, where to study, what to do for a living, and how to raise children.9 Jokes came up in stories concerning the transformation of Yiddish culture to Soviet culture in the early 1930s; fears during the Great Terror of 1937-1939; efforts to maintain a positive spirit during the Second World War; strategies of ignoring the manifestations of antisemitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and methods of coping with the uncertainties of the 1960s-1980s. Each period had its own characteristics, and some produced memorable jokes. The best way to approach them is to see what content and what sorts of humor interviewees find appropriate when they discuss certain historical periods. I therefore propose that these jokes be considered as cultural products that circulate in the public and private spheres of the generation studied, and that help members of those generations to make sense of their lives in the Soviet Union.

Jokes of the 1920s and 1930s The earliest identifiably Soviet Jewish jokes are usually recalled in Yiddish and deal with two major themes: criticism of Soviet ideology and lifestyle, and criticism of Jews unable to adjust rapidly enough to Soviet culture. Most of these jokes, which were usually built on wordplay between Russian and Yiddish, came from fluent Yiddish speakers who lived in the United States at the time of the interview. Mila Ch. (born in Mstislavl, Byelorussia in 1928), grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household; her mother was an actress in a Yiddish theater. She delighted in offering details of Jewish life in the 1930s, from the time when she was a child and before her parents divorced. Her life seemed full of laughter, despite the lack of sufficient food. With regard to food, she recalled a joke she had heard as a child from an old man: “What is this “agit-punkt”? When are they going to make “a-git bulke”?10 Agitpunkt is the Soviet Russian abbreviation for agitatsionnyi punkt, which means propaganda unit. Such units were set up all over the Soviet Union in the 1920s (they existed through the 1980s) with the aim of educating the population about Soviet values and ideology. To a Yiddish speaker, agit sounds like a git in Yiddish, which means “[a] good”; punkt means “point” and bulke means a bread roll. The joke says, “Enough [good] points, when will we see a good piece of bread?”—thus ridiculing excessive talking in the face of difficult economic conditions. The joke is funny only to people who understand both Yiddish and Russian, and who experienced the novelty (and perhaps the absurdity) of the new Soviet-style propaganda. The centrality of Yiddish in the joke makes it an insider Jewish cultural product, albeit firmly based in Soviet realities. A Yiddish speaker from Poland or the United States would not get the joke because of its Soviet context, and a Russian speaker would not understand it because of the Yiddish wordplay. Moreover, a bilingual person listening to the joke at a time when propaganda units ceased to exist would probably not understand it.

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In other words, this joke is an artifact, caught in a time capsule of Jewish perceptions of the Soviet regime in the 1930s. A retired rocket-construction engineer named Victor Kh. (born in Piliava, Ukraine, in 1906) recalled a similarly informative (and brief) joke when he was interviewed in New York. He, too, was a fluent Yiddish speaker. The joke is as follows: What is the difference between kolkhoz and kol-nidre? For kol-nidre, one fasts for one full day, in a kolkhoz, one fasts for the whole year.11

Again, the double-entendre requires knowledge of both Yiddish and Russian, as well as some knowledge of the Jewish tradition. Kol Nidre (lit. “all oaths”), the prayer recited on the eve of the Yom Kippur fast, is juxtaposed against the similar-sounding beginning of the word kolkhoz, an abbreviation of kollektivnoe khozyaistvo (collective farm). The identical sound and (Russian) spelling of the Hebrew kol (all) and the Russian kol (collective) enables the joke—though only for those who understand its dual-language, dual-culture context. Victor told me the joke as an example of how the older generation in his shtetl reacted to changes introduced by the Soviet government. He did not remember it until he moved to the United States, settled in Brooklyn, got involved with Jewish religious organizations, and heard the same joke from a local rabbi. One joke originating from the 1920s and early 1930s concerned the low qualifications of teachers in Soviet Yiddish schools. In describing the difficulties Yiddish speakers had in learning Russian, one respondent told the following joke: Russian is an illogical language: Nastya is a shikse, and Ne-Nastya (nenastye) is bad weather.

Nastya is a Russian female name, short for Anastasia, whereas nenastye, which sounds like “No nastya,” means rainy weather. The lack of comprehension of Russian grammar by a Yiddish speaker is at the heart of the joke, which was meant to illustrate the inadequate training of teachers in Yiddish-language Soviet schools. Serafima (born in 1904), who told me this joke, explained that she did not want her daughter to go to a Yiddish school in 1930 because she was worried that the teachers would not know Russian well enough to teach it properly.12 A comparison of Yiddish and Russian jokes created during the same time period (which were often told by the same people) reveals that Soviet Jewish daily life was divided not only into private and public spheres but also into various linguistic situations, each with its own rules, borders, and cultural norms. Yiddish jokes made fun both of the Soviet Yiddishization campaign (which insisted on establishing numerous Yiddish-language schools with reputedly low-qualified teachers) and of Jews who did not register their children in such schools, which signaled the inefficiency of the Soviet undertaking as well as Jews’ misunderstandings of the meaning of Russian words.

1937–1953: Stories about Jokes The interviews were a poor source for Jewish jokes about the Great Terror and the immediate postwar period. Jokes that the respondents chose to share about this time

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did not deal with Jews, and even when prompted, they did not come up with anything that could be specifically attributed to that era. Nevertheless they frequently spoke about humor. The topic of jokes came up in association with the danger of imprisonment during the Great Terror of 1937-1939. In fact, discussion of this period often involved stories about relatives or friends (or sometimes the respondent) who did not restrain themselves from telling a joke. One respondent illustrated this phenomenon with the following story: My father wanted to divorce my mother, but she would not agree. According to the laws back in those days, it was almost impossible to exchange one apartment for two little ones. Instead we would have ended up in a communal apartment. It was terrible. We went through a number of courts—district, municipal, and a regional court. We got good judges. Once, my father testified that my mother told political jokes. It was 1953 and Stalin was still alive. The female judge, who I will never forget, says to him calmly: “Why did you not denounce her, but instead listened to anti-Soviet jokes?” He was not granted the divorce.13

In this account, the narrator firmly associates jokes with the difficult circumstances of her childhood, namely, the tribulations that her mother experienced in an unhappy marriage. In the story, which combines the details of daily life of the 1950s (communal apartments, shortages of available accommodations, and the loose following of codes of family law), both the judge and the father take it for granted that telling political jokes is a crime. The judge, however, rules that the failure to denounce those telling such jokes to the authorities is a crime of equal severity. A different respondent told me a joke from that time that reflected this theme: One prisoner asks another: “Why are you here?” The answer: “For being lazy. When I heard an anti-Soviet joke, I did not denounce the person who told it to me. So he denounced me for that.”14

Many respondents shared tragic tales about the consequences of joke-telling during the Great Terror and postwar period, which ranged from harassment and the loss of jobs to prison sentences and social isolation. Mikhail F. (an artist who was born in 1903 in Samara, Russia) attributed his luck in not being arrested in 1937 to the fact that he was careful: First, I never, ever told these jokes, and I did not listen to them. And no one told them in my presence. In fact, when someone did denounce me, they could not really say anything that could be used [against me].15

Significantly, Mikhail does not specify what kind of jokes are being referred to, but instead uses the generic term anekdoty. To him, it is clear that the word “joke” means an anti-Soviet joke, or something that could be understood as an anti-Soviet joke. Thus, the act of telling a joke is an act of rebellion against the system, and people telling jokes are either brave, or careless, or both. In this sense, the content of a joke matters much less than the very act of telling it. When respondents did remember what they called “jokes” of this period, they often did not contain a punch line but were rather a form of sardonic commentary on contemporary situations. For example, Victor Kh. brought jokes up in the following story:

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My father had two brothers in Odessa. One of them went to jail in 1937. [Q.] Why? He told a joke. He was at a sanatorium. He said to someone: “I did not have anything under the czar, and I still don’t have anything under the Soviets.” Immediately someone ratted him out, he was arrested, and no one ever saw him again.16

There is no way of verifying the story in terms of “what really happened”—that is, why Victor Kh.’s uncle was arrested. Yet a variant of this story is repeated time and again: it is a truism of the era that the public telling of “jokes” (which, as noted, are sometimes more in the nature of a trenchant statement rather than a humorous story or remark) was liable to result in a prison sentence, or worse. The very plot of the story in question, comparing pre-Revolutionary life with that under the Soviet regime, seems to be associated with anti-Soviet behavior. One respondent remembered that his father got into serious trouble for saying that before the Revolution it was easier for Jews to navigate the system (since at least the limitations on their careers and places of residence were official, whereas in 1948, with unofficial regulations, the situation was more difficult).17 This comment, too, may or may not have been intended to be humorous but was nonetheless regarded as an anti-Soviet joke. In addition to the firm association between jokes and trouble, respondents often refer to jokes as euphemisms for antisemitism. Some people stated that their “wakeup call” about being Jewish came to them when they first heard a joke ridiculing Jews, usually sometime during the Second World War, either from a fellow soldier or, in evacuation areas such as Central Asia or the Urals, from a fellow worker or student. There were only two types of “jokes” that respondents remembered. One, repeated by almost every respondent who served in the army, was that “Jews will find their way out. Look how they all serve in Tashkent” [a city in Uzbekistan, far away from the frontlines]. The second joke was that “Jews have horns,” usually reported as being heard somewhere in the Soviet rear, and regarded as non-offensive, albeit ignorant. Many respondents spoke about their strategies of reacting to antisemitic jokes during the war. Some chose to ignore them, others prided themselves on punching the bigoted joker in the face, yet others felt deeply hurt or betrayed. Almost all respondents who served in the war associated the word “joke” with antisemitism. This understanding, with some important modifications, continued throughout the entire postwar Soviet period. It is noteworthy that respondents who survived the war in Romanian-run ghettos or in partisan units did not remember any jokes relating to surviving through poor conditions. There was no Soviet Huberband18 to record Jewish jokes during the war, and the communal memory had to work hard to preserve the story of the destruction of Jews in the atmosphere of limited information available on the topic.19 Jokes, despite their strong emotional weight, did not become a part of this communal memory. Antisemitic jokes, however, found their way in. To sum up, stories regarding the Great Terror and “the black years” of state antiJewish policies between 1948 and 1953 associate jokes with danger, distrust, carelessness, and terrible consequences. I think it is no accident that respondents do not remember actual jokes, even if they were old enough to understand them (in the 1930s, and especially in the late 1940s). Subconsciously, even today, and even outside of Russian borders, they continue to regard the telling of an anti-Stalin joke or, more generally, an anti-Soviet joke, as something that belongs to the private rather

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than public sphere, and thus something that is best not shared with a stranger. These jokes do not represent “the heart and soul of the people” as folklorist Emil Draitser claims, because they did not survive in public memory.20 However, the emotional charge and power of these jokes led to stories about them, which in turn aid in preserving the memory of difficulties or strategies of survival. Moreover, most of the stories concerning jokes—or rarely, the jokes themselves—have nothing to do with specifics of Jewish life. They were told by Jews but did not contain Jewish protagonists or even specific Jewish reactions (unlike the jokes of the 1920s and 1930s). Significantly, we do not know about antisemitic jokes of the 1920s and 1930s (although there are jokes that ridicule people who are afraid of being jailed for antisemitism). In contrast, recollections of the “black years” frequently deal with antisemitic jokes and the reactions to such jokes.

Jokes of the 1950s through the 1980s When respondents spoke about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—decades that were associated with many unwritten restrictions against Jews (but not with mass arrests)—they remembered a large number of jokes. These were often self-deprecating in tone, while at the same time ridiculing the unwritten rules of discrimination against Jews in the Soviet workforce. Many respondents spoke of a “Jewish nose” in the sense of its being a liability. For instance, the saying, “One gets beaten up on the nose, not on the passport,” appeared in almost every interview in sardonic reference to the unwritten practice of denying employment to individuals whose nationality was recorded as “Jewish” in their internal passports. The juxtaposition of discrimination and physical violence helps to identify what the respondent believes constitutes antisemitism. The joke is critical both of antisemitism and of Jews. In fact, it may relate to the fact that some Jews managed to change the nationality line in their passports to “Russian,” but were then “betrayed” by their Jewish noses. Similarly, a large number of jokes referred to restrictions imposed on the employment of Jews at research institutes.21 One retired mathematician recalled that a research institute did not hire him in the 1960s, allegedly because his research was of the “wrong profile.” “Yeah,” the respondent commented when he told this story, “the wrong profile of nose,” referring, of course, to the discriminatory policies in hiring Jews, but also to the popular perception that Jews have prominent noses. (We don’t know whether he actually said that joke in the 1960s, but it was important to him to present the story in this way). Interestingly, while this respondent believed that the hiring practice was not fair, he did not feel that referring to Jews as having large noses was antisemitic.22 Some jokes about discrimination lampooned Jews for complaining too much or for invoking antisemitism as an excuse for what was really a lack of qualifications. When asked about how antisemitism had affected his life, Lev Parnsky (born in 1924 in Ruzhin, Zhitomir region, Ukraine), reported the following: I was never affected by antisemitism. I always recall this joke: “A help-wanted ad is posted at a radio station. Some Haimovich comes and says: “I want to be a radio

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announcer.” But he did not get the job. He goes home. His wife asks him: “What happened?” He replies: “They did not take me. P-p-p-robably b-b-b-because I am a Jew!”23

The joke suggests that the protagonist blames discrimination for his not getting a job as a radio broadcaster, rather than his own stutter, and thus illustrates the point that Jews sometimes exaggerated the discrimination they experienced at the workplace. It is not clear whether or not this joke has a Jewish or non-Jewish origin (that is, whether it was first told by non-Jews). Regardless, the sentiment it represents was common among many respondents. Respondents also knew how to distinguish self-deprecating jokes from antisemitic jokes that ridiculed alleged Jewish weakness, greediness, or lack of integrity. Consider, for example, an anecdote told by Shifra Goldbaum (born in 1919 in Cherkassy, Ukraine). She, like Parnsky, was asked whether she remembered any cases of antisemitism, and she, too, cited a joke in her answer. In this instance, however, the joke illustrates the presence of antisemitism: I worked as a schoolteacher in 1953. In the school, I had never heard the word zhid [kike]. Never. But once a female student was standing next to me, a good student. Some boy approached us, holding some money. She tells him: “You have as much money as kikes.” She did not understand what she said. Someone gestured to her, pointing to me, and signaling her to stop. I said: “It’s okay. If he is a kike, he will live a long life” [the wordplay here is between zhid and zhit, the latter meaning “to live”].24

In this story, Goldbaum prides herself on her ability to rise above antisemitic remarks, and even to play with an antisemitic statement by turning it into a joke. Similar strategies are referred to in numerous interviews detailing life in the early 1950s in Stalinist Soviet Union, when many Jews experienced popular antisemitism for the first time.25 There is no doubt in the teacher’s mind that the student made an antisemitic statement, and in recounting her compensatory joke, Goldbaum is expressing pride both in being smart and in being Jewish. Respondents often recalled the word zhid as an illustration of bigoted remarks that targeted them. In Ukrainian, the word zhid does not have a pejorative connotation, but simply means a “Jew,” in contrast with the Russian term, which is understood by all to be an ethnic slur. Notwithstanding, respondents in the interview samples universally understood zhid as a derogatory term, even when referring to comments made in Ukrainian. Samuil Iampolsky (born in Kiev, 1913) told a joke that reflects Jewish sensitivity (or the perception of Jewish sensitivity) to the word: Ivan is waiting for a tram. Someone asks him: “What are you doing here?” He answers: “I am pod’evreivayu the tram.” He was afraid to say “podzhidayu”! [laughing].26

This nostalgic joke, probably popular in the 1960s, was first recorded by Kornei Chukovsky in 1923.27 It refers to the 1920s, at a time when the Soviet government proclaimed the struggle against antisemitism as government policy and introduced criminal punishment for antisemitic remarks. The person in the joke, who has an identifiably Russian-sounding name, is worried about saying a combination of letters sounding like zhid even as part of a larger word, so he changes the legitimate word podzhidayu into “pod’evreivayu” thus replacing the offensive “zhid” with a neutral

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term for Jew (evrei). The humor here is two-fold. First, pod’evreivayu is gibberish: it does not mean waiting (or anything else); second, and possibly more important (and funny), pod’evreivayu might be understood as an antisemitic taunt, ostensibly implying that the person is trying to “Jew-up” a tram (however this may be understood, it is indisputably derogatory). Iampolsky is laughing at the joke because its protagonist, clearly a man who thinks a lot about Jews, and worried about exposing his antisemitic sentiments, ends up producing an antisemitic word in the course of trying to conceal his antisemitism. Most Soviet-born Jews understand “Jewish humor” as compensatory humor. This form of humor, which was widespread in the Soviet Union from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, ridiculed Soviet policies that limited Jewish rights and opportunities and ultimately presented Jews as witty, and enviously smart. Such qualities compensated for their perceived lack of physical strength. The sharing of such jokes became one of the cornerstones of Soviet Jewish identity and culture, and dozens of such jokes came up in the interviews. Here is an illustrative example, offered by Evgeniya L. (born in Shepetovka, Ukraine, 1912): “Rabinowich, do you know how to play violin?” “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it!”28

Significantly, Jews are almost never referred to as such in these jokes. Instead, listeners— both Jewish and non-Jewish—are expected to identify Jews by their last names (Rabinowitch, Haimovich), their accents (as indicated in certain jokes by variant spellings of Russian words), their special relationship with their children (a Jewish mother is overly protective and self-sacrificing), or their noses. At times, Jewish humor was referred to as “Odessa humor,”29 though Odessa humor was more selfdeprecating than the urban humor of Moscow or Leningrad. Nevertheless, Soviet Jews learned to recognize these jokes and to associate them with their culture.

Conclusion The transformation of the content of Soviet Jewish jokes from the 1920s through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the postwar period, reflects the transformation of Jewish culture from Yiddish- and religion-based into one that was grounded in Russian and reactive to the antisemitism of the late Soviet period. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jews were laughing at their difficulties of adaptation to the new Soviet ideology, the incompetence of teachers in Soviet Yiddish schools, and the difficulties of learning the Russian language; essentially, they were laughing at themselves. Even though popular antisemitism existed (and legislation was necessary to protect Jews from it), the jokes remembered from this time did not present it as something that affected Jewish life. The period of the Great Terror did not preserve jokes about Jews, but instead remained in memory as the time when the words “joke” and “danger” became synonymous. During the war, Jews became objects of ridicule for the first time since the beginning of the Soviet period, and the association between the words “jokes” and “antisemitism” became stronger.

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Can studying historical humor, as preserved in the memory of the generation studied, help advance our understanding of what it meant to be a Jew in the Soviet Union? Absolutely. In fact, jokes and the stories of jokes explain nuances of how Soviet Jews understand their ethnicity and culture. Jokes that survived in the communal memory of Russian Jews tell stories of balancing, navigating bureaucracy, making difficult choices, and triumphing despite difficulties. In retelling these tales, Russian Jews note the continuing relevance of their past experiences. Moreover, these jokes, and the values they express, offer insights into the evolving post-Soviet Jewish identity and culture—based in the main outside of Russia—in which religious observance, broadly defined, is secondary and cultural affiliation is primary. In that sense, the Jewish jokes “born” in the Soviet state hold a key to the culture and identity of the post-Soviet Russianspeaking Jewish diaspora. Members of the post-Soviet Jewish generation produce and enjoy a different kind of humor than that of their parents and grandparents. The latter found humor at the crossroads between Russian and Yiddish, whereas today’s generation has discovered a humor that thrives on contacts between Russian and Hebrew, English and German— the languages of the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. Despite the differences, they are doing something that is reminiscent of past patterns: they are using humor to create an inner, poly-cultural Jewish language of their own.

Notes 1.  Zvi Gitelman, “Thinking about Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine,” in idem with Musya Glants and Marshall Goldman (eds.), Jewish Life after the USSR (Bloomington: 2003), 49. For the detailed study of “thin” identity, see Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identity in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge: 2012). Gitelman bases his notion of “thin” identity on Clifford Geertz’s anthropological studies; see Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: 1973). 2. Thanks to Eli Lederhendler for suggesting this parallel. 3. For an argument against “thin identity,” see Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (January 2011), 129– 146. 4. On literature and Soviet Jewish identity, see Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford: 2011). On oral histories and identity, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: 2013); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: 2006). On photography, see David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: 2011). On film, see Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick: 2013). 5. The latest scholarship on Soviet Jews addresses their creative and destructive role in the Soviet system. Igor Krupnik suggests that they benefited from the Revolution; see his essay “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies toward Jews: A Legacy Reassessed,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro’i (Ilford: 1995). Ken Moss, David Shneer, Gennady Estraikh, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Harriet Murav deal with the Yiddish intelligentsia and the start that it got with the Revolution. See David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: 2004); Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: 2009); Gennady Ėstraikh, In

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Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: 2005); Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: 2000); and Murav, Music from a Speeding Train. Zvi Gitelman discusses the inherited ambiguity of the Soviet Jewish experience; see idem, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: 2001). Very few studies have been done on rural Soviet Jews and their perceptions of Soviet policies. The first study in the field is by Deborah Hope Yalen, “Red Kasrilevke: Ethnographies of Economic Transformation in the Soviet Shtetl, 1917-1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007).   6. The term “black years” was first coined by Jehoshua A. Gilboa in his book The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953, trans. Yosef Schacter and Dov Ben-Abba (Boston: 1971).  7.  During the past two decades, scholars of the Soviet system have widely employed the “generation” category. See, for instance, Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (New Jersey: 2005); Masha Gessen, Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace (New York: 2004); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (London: 2007); Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher; David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: 2000). The category makes sense in analyzing social, ideological, and cultural developments, as people born at different times experienced the Soviet system differently, and, of course, the system changed often during the regime’s 74 years of existence.   8. The interviews were conducted in the United States (New York and Philadelphia), Germany (Berlin and Potsdam), Russia (Moscow), and Canada (Toronto). In addition, I have transcripts of an additional 229 people of the same generation and background who were interviewed by the Kiev Institute for Judaica in the 1990s, and I examined more than 200 interviews with Soviet Jewish veterans of the Second World War that were conducted under the supervision of Zvi Gitelman in the United States, Israel, and Russia in the 1990s.   9.  I deal with this topic in detail in my forthcoming book, When Sonia Met Boris: Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin. 10.  Interview with Mila Ch. (Brooklyn, New York, August 2000). 11.  Interview with Victor Kh. (Brooklyn, New York, August 2000). 12.  Interview with Serafima (Brooklyn, New York, August 1999). 13.  Interview with Natalia Chepur, Kiev interviews. 14.  Interview with Samuil L. (Moscow, 2002). 15.  Interview with Mikhail F. (Moscow, 2002). 16.  Interview with Victor Kh. (Brooklyn, New York, 1999). 17.  Interview with Semyon F. (Moscow, 2002). 18. The reference is to Rabbi Simon Huberband (1909–1942), who recorded jokes in the Warsaw ghetto at the request of Emanuel Ringelblum. On jokes in the ghetto, see David G. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: 1988), 399–408. 19. On Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union, see Zvi Y. Gitelman (ed.), Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: 1997); Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust, 275; Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945 (London: 1993). 20. Emil Draitser, Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia (Detroit: 1998), 121. 21. On the historiography of Soviet Jewish life after the Second World War, see Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence; Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure (New York: 1987); Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry. 22.  Interview with Samuel Shapiro (Toronto, March 2007). 23.  Interview with Lev Paransky (United States, 1997; interviewer: Mochulskaya). 24.  Interview with Shifra Goldbaum (Kiev, 1997).

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25. Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris. 26.  Interview with Samuil Jampolsky, Kiev interviews. 27. Kornei Chukovsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 12, Dnevnik (1922–1935) (Moscow: 2009), 108. 28.  Interview with Evgeniya L. (Potsdam, 2002). 29. For a book-length study of Odessa humor, see Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: 2011).

“Laughter through Tears”: Jewish Humor in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Avinoam Patt (University of Hartford)

Gelekhter durkh trern—that is how Moyshe Nudelman titled his 1947 book on humorous and satirical works in postwar Poland, which was published in Buenos Aires as part of the multi-volume series Dos poylishe yidentum. The title was a tribute to Sholem Aleichem, the iconic Yiddish writer who was often praised for his ability to express “laughter through tears.”1 Yet what, we may rightly ask, could have been humorous about Jewish life in postwar Poland and Germany? In the immediate aftermath of the war, Zalman Grinberg, the first leader of the liberated Jews in postwar Germany, marked the liberation from the German camps in a speech at St. Ottilien in late May 1945, telling his fellow survivors: “We are free now, but we do not know how to begin our free but unfortunate lives. . . . We have forgotten how to laugh, we cannot cry any more, we do not comprehend our freedom yet, and this because we are still among our dead comrades.”2 A few years later, writing in the United States in 1951, Irving Kristol eulogized the passing of Jewish humor in an article in Commentary magazine, noting: “Jewish humor died with its humorists when the Nazis killed off the Jews of Eastern Europe, though it seems likely that even without the intervention of Hitler this humor would not long have survived the disintegration of the ghetto community from which it drew its inspiration.”3 As others at the time noted, it seemed that European Jews were far too traumatized to laugh, and that Jewish children raised without a childhood “were children who could not laugh . . . because they have seen things which killed their laughter.”4 Nonetheless, as unlikely as it may seem, Grinberg and Kristol were mistaken, and Nudelman was correct: Jews in postwar Germany and Poland had not only not forgotten how to laugh, they actively sought out opportunities to laugh, even through tears. An examination of humor in the displaced persons (DP) camps reveals humorous songs, theater, jokes, literature, and art. I argue that these functioned as one means by which people tried to process the recent traumas of the war, to cope with the enormity of the destruction, and to endure the seemingly endless and unnatural stay in Germany after the Holocaust. Humor helped them to maintain a sense of psychological advantage while also serving as an outlet for subversive observations on the state of DP camp politics, the seeming powerlessness of the DPs in relation to 113

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the international agencies that ran their lives, and the nature of their interactions with the surrounding German population. This article will examine several manifestations of Jewish humor in the aftermath of the Holocaust, analyzing the functions of this humor and pointing to some of the continuities and discontinuities between prewar, wartime, and postwar Jewish humor.

Jewish Humor before and during the Holocaust In some ways, Jewish humor in the aftermath of the Holocaust continued the wartime deployment of humor as one available means for engaging with the terrible reality that confronted them. And of course, wartime humor was an outgrowth of the distinctly Jewish humor of prewar Eastern Europe, especially as found in popular Yiddish literature of the late 19th century and onwards. Along the lines of Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Michael Wex’s thoughts on this subject, the tone that had emerged in East European Jewish humor was characteristically fraught with undertones of persecution and suffering—indeed, it was a reverse evocation of what others might take as the Jews’ incapacity for laughter, given the stark dilemmas of their lives. As Sholem Aleichem, surely one of the chief practitioners of this double-inflected wry comedy, put it: “Aftselakhis nisht geveynt,” which is to say, “holding back one’s tears and laughing out of spite.”5 In defining Sholem Aleichem’s humor, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Wex have suggested that he combined the three major approaches to Jewish humor classified by Elliott Oring, namely: the transcendental, the defensive, and the pathological. The transcendental seeks to define humor as a response to the often unpleasant conditions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; humor is meant to help the Jewish people bear up under the burdens imposed upon them and to console them in their suffering—“laughter through tears.” The defensive approach (which devotes considerable attention to the self-critical and self-mocking in Jewish humor, as well as to its anti-gentile aspects) sees humor as a preemptive social strategy; while the pathological hews more closely to Freudian ideas about the hostility and aggression that Freud finds at the root of all humor.6

Freud himself suggested that he had rarely seen a people so capable of laughing at itself as the Jews.7 Or, as David Roskies put it, Jews had succeeded in developing a finely honed ability to “laugh off the trauma of history.”8 How did this humor prepare Jews to confront the Nazi onslaught? As Steve Lipman argues in Laughter in Hell, before and during the war, Jewish humor drew on legacies of earlier catastrophes and thus contained a great deal of self-mockery, both stressing Jewish shortcomings and inverting antisemitic stereotypes, as in this classic joke from Berlin of the 1930s: Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altman,” said his secretary. “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why you’re carrying a Nazi libel sheet. Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?”

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“On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know—it makes me feel a whole lot better!”9

We can see here a theme that would repeat itself during and after the war in Jewish humor: power imparted to the powerless by means of an inversion of hierarchies. If powerlessness implied the inevitability of despair, mock self-empowerment implied a complex subversion of both despair and false hope. As one of the survivors interviewed by Chaya Ostrower explained, “without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I’m actually saying is that [humor] helped us remain human, even under hard conditions.”10 During the war, jokes often took the long view, imagining a future reckoning with Hitler, Hans Frank, and other enemies. As one set of Yiddish rhymes sung in the Warsaw ghetto (and recorded in Nudelman’s postwar collection) suggested: Vos darfen mir veynen, vos darfen mir klogen, mir veln noch Frankn a Kaddish noch zogn (Why must we cry, why must we wail; we’ll yet live to say Kaddish for [Hans] Frank) . . .  Lomir zayn freylech un zogn zich vitsn; mir veln noch hitlern shive noch zitsn . . . (Let us be happy and tell jokes; we’ll yet live to sit shiva for Hitler). . . . Di sonim, vos firn undz dort keyn Treblinke, zey veln doch vern in dr’erd ayngezunken . . .  (the enemies who drive us to Treblinka will yet be sinking in the ground) . . . ”11

Jokes recorded by Shimon Huberband, a member of the Oyneg Shabes archival project organized by Emanuel Ringelblum, captured the ghetto inhabitants’ bitter and often religiously inflected humor. Many of the jokes mocked Hitler or else poked fun at the unlimited Jewish capacity to endure persecution, as in the following examples: • We eat as if it were Yom Kippur, sleep in succahs, and dress as if it were Purim. • Jews are now very pious. They observe all the ritual laws: they are stabbed and punched with holes like matzoes and have as much bread as on Passover; they are beaten like hoshanas, rattled like Haman; they are as green as esrogim and as thin as lulavim; they fast as if it were Yom Kippur; they are burnt as if it were Hanukkah, and their moods are as if it were the Ninth of Av. • A teacher asks his pupil, “Tell me Moyshe, what would you like to be if you were Hitler’s son?” “An orphan,” the pupil answers.12 Laughter was a way for Jews to affirm that they were indeed still alive and had not yet given up hope; survival was still possible and, at the very least, the Jewish people would outlast the German efforts to exterminate them and “God willing, dance on German graves (im yirtseh hashem tantsn oyf daytshe kvorim).”13 Wartime humor also continued the prewar function of satirizing Jewish society, politics, and communal institutions. The hit songs of the Lodz ghetto by Yankl Hershkowitz subversively chronicled life in the Lodz ghetto under the leadership of Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the Judenrat, through irreverent wit and wordplay, as can be seen in two verses of his best-known punning song, “Rumkowski Khayim”:

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Jews are blessed with life (Khayim), Life (Khayim) from the land of the dead, Life (Khayim) from the house of life (Khayim) [i.e. the cemetery], Rumkowski Khayim and his great miracle. He knows how to make miracles, oy, Every day just like that, Cry for help, oy, oy, oy, A second question, oy, Khayim says, “It’s good like this.”14 Even concentration camp inmates had their own brand of gallows humor, and their repertoire included jokes about food, sexual humor, and scatological humor.15 Activists in the DP historical commissions created after the war collected examples of humor and wartime folklore as part of their broader documentation projects— which, as historian Laura Jockusch has suggested, “functioned as a poignant affirmation of “mir zaynen do [literally, we are here].”16 According to Israel Kaplan, academic secretary of the Central Historical Commission in Munich and editor of the Jewish historical commission’s journal Fun letsten hurbn, which collected expressions coming from the “mouth of the people” (dos yidisher folkmoyl): “The expressions, mottoes and witticisms which were created by and circulated among the captives contained within them the power to comfort and encourage the broken-hearted . . .  even during the back-breaking work, with the guards straining over them, following every movement with hostile eyes, ears strained to hear every syllable.”17 Kaplan’s research on humor and wartime folklore demonstrated the unifying function of humor. After the war, this humor helped forge a collective identity for the survivors, also known as sheerit hapeletah (the surviving remnant).18 As Kaplan noted, Jews throughout occupied Europe had developed an underground language, often based on Hebrew and including coded references to liturgy and biblical texts, to refer to various aspects of daily life in the ghettoes, camps, and in hiding. Thus, the term ya’aleh (literally, to rise up) had various meanings: in the holiday liturgy, the ya’aleh veyavo prayer was a supplication for Jewish prayers to “rise and come before (God),” whereas in ghetto parlance, ya’aleh veyavo could be used to refer to the arrival of a German officer (who was “coming”), and a ya’aleh referred to a Jewish social climber—one who rose in the ranks of the Judenrat or the Jewish police.19 Kovno ghetto songs frequently referred to the latter, as in the phrase “yeder ya’aleh hot a kale, un politsei, hot tsu tsvei . . . ” (each ya’aleh has a bride, and the police(man) has two . . .) Kaplan also detailed the various terms used to refer to precious staples such as “bread” or, in this case, “money”: Towards the end [of the war] there were Allied Marks, issued by Allied nations. These were called: HALLELUJAHS. The Allied mark had higher value than the Reichsmark. After Liberation, a popular expression was: ALLIED YEARS. When someone, especially a woman, gave her age, and it did not seem right, the listeners inquired: Aren’t the years “Allied”?20

In addition to folk sayings, the historical commissions collected examples of jokes and curses used by victims under Nazi rule, among them, “Hitler should lie so deep

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in the ground that a rabbit can run by on a summer day,” “Hitler should grow like an onion, that is, with his head in the ground,” “Hitler should have a wooden head and glass eyes . . . ”and “Hitler should eat one worm a day . . . and on Sunday, two.”21 Finally (as will be seen) allusions to Hitler as Haman and the belief that he would meet the same end as Haman were common. One joke included in Lipman’s collection and told both during and after the war went as follows: Hitler, not being a religious man, was inclined to consult his astrologers about the future. As the tide of the war worsened, he asked, “Am I going to lose the war?” Answered affirmatively, he then asked, “Well, am I going to die?” Consulting their charts, the astrologers again said yes. “When am I going to die?” was Hitler’s next question. This time the answer was, “You’re going to die on a Jewish holiday.” But when . . . on what Jewish holiday?” he asked with agitation. The reply: “Any day you die will be a Jewish holiday.”22

Jewish Humor and Entertainment in the DP Camps Gradually, in the aftermath of liberation, the sheerit hapeletah emerged from the catastrophe to form a vibrant, active, and fiercely independent community that played a prominent role in diplomatic negotiations leading to the creation of the state of Israel. According to Allied policy, a displaced person was defined “as any civilian who because of the war was living outside the borders of his or her country and who wanted to but could not return home or find a new home without assistance.”23 Displaced persons were initially divided into categories by place of origin into those from enemy and Allied countries (Jewish DPs were in fact a small percentage of the total number of refugees, forced laborers, and POWs displaced by the war). Germany and Austria were divided into American, British, and Soviet zones of occupation, plus a small area in the southwest of Germany that became the French zone of occupation. The majority of the Jewish DP population in May 1945, perhaps some 35,000 out of 50,000 liberated, was to be found in the American zone of occupation in Germany, many of them near Munich.24 Soon after liberation, Jewish survivors began to search for surviving family members. With the assistance of American Jewish chaplains, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) established a central tracing bureau to help find surviving family members. For those Jewish DPs who made the decision to remain in Germany, the majority chose to live in a DP camp (generally German military barracks, former POW and slave labor camps, tent cities, industrial housing, and the like), whereas approximately 15,000 German Jewish survivors chose to rebuild their prewar communities in German cities. Those survivors who remained in the camps faced deplorable conditions: poor accommodations, no plumbing, no clothing, rampant disease, continuing malnourishment, and a lack of any plan on the part of the American military. By the summer of 1945, the Jewish survivors had organized among themselves to represent the needs of the surviving Jewish population. In the American zone, they formed the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, headed by Samuel Gringauz and Zalman Grinberg; in the British zone, a committee with the same name was led by

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Yossel Rosensaft. In the wake of a report on DP camp conditions that was submitted by U.S. envoy Earl Harrison, American authorities under the leadership of General Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to ameliorate conditions for Jewish DPs, moving Jews to separate camps and agreeing to the appointment of an adviser for Jewish affairs. With the arrival of more than 100,000 Jews fleeing continued persecution and antisemitism in Eastern Europe over the course of 1946—many arriving with the Bricha (lit. “Escape”) movement, whose goal was to bring survivors to Palestine— the Jewish DP population reached 250,000 in Germany, Italy, and Austria by the beginning of 1947 (approximately 185,000 were in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy). In the absence of relatives, many survivors quickly created new families, as evidenced by the many weddings and the remarkable birthrate among the surviving population in the first year after liberation. With the assistance of representatives from UNRRA, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Jewish Agency, and other organizations, schools were established throughout the DP camps. While still living in a transitional situation, hoping for the possibility of emigration, DPs quickly put together communal frameworks in hundreds of DP camps and communities across Germany, Italy, and Austria.25 The largest camps, among them Landsberg, Feldafing, and Föhrenwald in the American zone of Germany, and Bergen-Belsen in the British zone, boasted a vigorous social and cultural life that included newspapers, theater, Zionist youth movements, and athletic clubs, alongside historical commissions and yeshivot.26 The DPs also took an active role in representing their own interests: numerous political parties (mostly Zionist in nature, with the exception of the Orthodox Agudat Israel) administered camp committees and met at annual congresses. As we shall see, DP politics provided fertile ground for satire. As evidenced by the creation of numerous theatrical troupes, a musical culture, a flourishing Jewish press, and a hunger for any form of entertainment, Jewish humor in the DP camps was a means of regaining a sense of normalcy after the war. As was the case during the war, it also served as a coping mechanism to deal with suffering and trauma and to counter absurdities of the postwar situation. Jewish DPs were acutely aware of the intense irony of their continued existence in postwar Germany. In various ways, they noted this irony, whether in a casual photo of Jewish youths sitting in front of the Wannsee train station, or in the appropriation of Nazi estates for kibbutz work—some 40 farms were created for this purpose, administered by young Zionists. One of the estates had belonged to Julius Streicher (publisher of the infamous Der Stürmer), who was awaiting trial in nearby Nuremberg.27 The estate was renamed Kibbutz Nili, an acronym for the biblical phrase “netzaḥ yisrael lo yeshaker” (the Eternal One of Israel will not prove false). According to one of the kibbutz leaders: “This is one of the greatest Jewish satisfactions . . . to be able to see Hebrew writings and slogans like “Am Jsroel chaj” (the People of Israel live), [and] “Necach Jsroel loj jeszaker” at Streicher’s palace; thus we have named our new kibbutz, the first agricultural school in Bavaria.”28 When showing around an American visitor, one of the kibbutz members pointed out two dogs, named Julius and Streicher, explaining: “They obey and protect us! It’s a pity to humiliate innocent animals with such swinish names. But we couldn’t resist the temptation.”29 A different (and perhaps unintended) form of irony was apparent in anti-British demonstrations that protested the continuation of immigration restrictions and the blockade of Palestine, at which

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banners would carry proclamations such as “We demand the eradication of the camps”—a call to liquidate the DP camps in Germany that alluded as well to the former concentration camps; or a text in Yiddish that read: “We want to return to our home in the Land of Israel”—a demand to return to a home these stateless Jews had never known, in a land where Yiddish would not be spoken.30 Historical allusions to Hitler as Haman continued to be popular in the postwar period. In his collection of postwar humor, Nudelman included an imagined letter from Haman to the remaining Jews of Poland that expressed jealousy of Nazi innovations: “My repressive methods were so primitive, so naïve, so clumsy. I had no ghettoes, no Gestapo . . . no akcies, no concentration camps, and not even any crematoria (!).”31 Understandably, the first Purim celebration after liberation was a long-awaited holiday in the DP camps. In Landsberg, survivors organized a week-long Purim carnival that featured a symbolic burning of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (which had been written in the local prison in 1924), a contest for best-decorated apartment house, a parade of workers, schools, kibbutzim, and various organizations, and of course, the wearing of costumes. The Landsberger Lager Cajtung reported that, at the entrance to Landsberg: “Hitler hangs in many variations and in many poses; a big Hitler, a fat Hitler, a small Hitler, with medals and without medals. Jews hung him by his head, by his feet, or by his belly” (see Fig. 8.1).32 Leo Srole, the UN-appointed welfare director for Landsberg and one of the organizers of the 1946 Purim carnival, later recalled: “It was (a day) of such elation, I had never seen anything like it . . . Hitler and Haman now had their due.”33 As a poster from Landsberg announced: “In the city where Hitler wrote his Kampf, the Jews will celebrate the greatest Purim hey-tow-szin-wow [the transliteration of the Jewish year 5706], the Purim of Hitler’s downfall!”34 In contrast, the first Passover after liberation was characterized by as much irony as joy, given the increasingly peculiar condition of survivors who were “liberated but

Figure 8.1.  Purim carnival at Landsberg DP camp, 1946, from the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

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not yet free,” in the words of Abraham Klausner, an American Jewish army chaplain. Klausner officiated at the first official Passover seder in Munich and facilitated the publication of the Survivor’s Haggadah, written by Yosef Dov Sheinson and printed by the military press with the insignia of the U.S. Third Army.35 In his preface to the haggadah, Klausner (never one to miss an opportunity for rhetorical flourish) highlighted the symbolic association of Egypt with Germany for those from the “CIC [Counter-Intelligence Corps], CID [Criminal Investigation Division], the ICD [Information Control Division], the UNRRA, and the American Joint Distribution Committee” who would be attending the seder, coming to “the city of Munich, there to relate as of old, the miracle of freedom. . . . [In] their hearts they felt very close to all that which was narrated. Pharaoh and Egypt gave way to Hitler and Germany. Pitham and Ramsees faded beneath fresh memories of Buchenwald and Dachau.”36 The Survivor’s Haggadah noted the ironies of continued Jewish oppression and enslavement on the “festival of freedom”—perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in its updated version of “Dayenu”: Had He scattered us among the nations but had not given us the First Crusade, we would have been content. Had He given us the First Crusade but not the Second, we would have been content. Had He given us the Second Crusade but not the Blood Libel, we would have been content. Had He given us the Blood Libel but not the persecutions of the Third Crusade, we would have been content. Had He given us the persecutions of the Third Crusade, but not the Badge of Shame, we would have been content. Had He given us the Badge of Shame but not the persecutions of the Black Plague, we would have been content. Had He given us the persecutions of the Black Plague but not the Inquisition, we would have been content. Had He given us the Inquisition but not the pogroms of 1648–49, we would have been content. Had He given us the pogroms of 1648–49 but not the slaughter of 1919 in Ukraine, we would have been content. Had He given us the slaughter in Ukraine but not Hitler, we would have been content. Had He given us Hitler but no ghettos, we would have been content. Had He given us ghettos but no gas chambers and crematoria, we would have been content. Had He given us gas chambers and crematoria, but our wives and children had not been tortured, we would have been content. Had our wives and children been tortured but we had not been forced into hard bondage, we would have been content. Had we been forced into hard bondage but not been made to die of hunger, we would have been content. Had we been made to die of hunger but not of disease and torture, we would have been content. All the more so, since all these have befallen us, we must make Aliyah, even if illegally, wipe out the Galut, build the chosen land, and make a home for ourselves and our children for eternity.37

In this radically revised version of what was originally a hymn of praise, God is sarcastically “praised” for an endless litany of punishment and persecution. In addition, through its use of historical references, the postwar “Dayenu” placed the most recent round of Jewish suffering within the longer history of Jewish persecution, again suggesting the eternal strength of the Jewish people. In addition to processing events of the very recent past through symbolic inversions, acts of revenge, or demonstrations of resistance, DP humor—in the form of songs, music, theater, and literature—also satirized the nature of Jewish life in postwar Germany. As Shirli Gilbert has noted, music in the DP camps functioned in several ways: as pure entertainment to restore some sense of normalcy to the abnormal

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surroundings (as with Henry Baigelman’s band, The Happy Boys); as a means of lamenting the lost past or expressing hope for the future; and as a vehicle for humor and satire.38 The Happy Boys’ song, “We Long for Home,” while acknowledging the homeless and stateless condition of the DPs, for whom every path to home seemed blocked, declared that “one must keep hoping, it can’t be otherwise, then life can be full of beauty, charm, and happiness . . . ”39 Henny Durmashkin, who sang in the Vilna ghetto and later performed extensively with the St. Ottilien orchestra in DP centers across Germany,40 not only recorded the plight of the Jewish DPs—their longing for “different times” and their desire to leave Germany for “Eretz Israel”—but also ridiculed the policies of UNRRA and the Joint, as in her song “Joint’l,” which concludes: “These overflowing pledges, these promises to be/Have left us still in tatters, nothing have we!41 In another song, “I Want Different Times,” Durmashkin directly articulated the subversive function of humor during the war, while also expressing longing for a former self that would never return: Listen to my little story Listen hard and true I am a girl, and am not sorry, And I can laugh at you. I turn the ghetto upside down And poke fun at commanders The trusties look at me and frown, To me they’re silly ganders. Refrain: I want different times An end to wandering . . .  I want to be another thing As I once was.42 UNRRA, though meant to provide relief and assistance to the DPs, was also a frequent target of criticism for the perceived lack of assistance it delivered. Another song recorded by Leo Schwarz tells the story of ten UNRRA cars meant to deliver much-needed supplies. One by one, the cars in the song disappear, along with their essential provisions, until there was only “one UNRRA car/Gone tears and care!/ They opened the doors—It was bare!”43 Like music, Yiddish theater in the DP camps served the dual function of restoring normalcy through a popular form of entertainment and channeling the trauma and grief of the recent past. Stars of the Yiddish stage in New York, including Molly Picon, Jacob Kalich, and Herman Yablokoff, toured the DP camps and were greeted by adoring fans who were familiar with their work from the interwar period.44 In 1947, Yablokoff, a native of Grodno and a star of the Second Avenue theater world who was best known for his role as Der payatz (the clown), toured the DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, where he gave more than 100 performances for 180,000 Jewish DPs. Yablokoff was overwhelmed by the response of the crowd (“applauding so hard they refused to leave”); he was also repeatedly thronged by crowds after his shows who asked: “What’s going to happen to us? What will be the end?” A letter from JDC child welfare officer Millicent Diamond that was written following Yablokoff’s visit to Rosenheim testified to the tremendous impact he had on the children of the camp:

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[A]fter the first hour of this artist’s performance one could see the change over from wrinkled brows, worried and dull expressions . . . to bright-eyed, laughing and shining faces, full of interest and completely absorbed in the delightful show. . . . Temporarily they had been able to forget their miseries and the daily drudgeries of their life. . . . Besides being a stage artist, Mr. Yablokoff seems to have also the promise of being an excellent social worker.45

More important, perhaps, than hosting outside performers, the Jewish DPs also created their own theater, establishing a great number of theater troupes that regularly performed the works of such classic Yiddish playwrights as Sholem Aleichem, S. Ansky, and Avraham Goldfaden.46 Jacob Biber organized the first Jewish theater group in the U.S. zone in the Föhrenwald DP camp, putting together a variety show that premiered on October 28, 1945. As Angelika Konigseder and Julianne Wetzel note, the first performance was so successful that the group was invited to perform for the Jewish DPs in Feldafing. Biber recalled in his memoirs the therapeutic aspects of performing Jewish theater again not only for the audience of survivors but for the surviving performers themselves: The theater hall in Feldafing was large enough to accommodate most of the DPs (about two thousand individuals), but we were most touched by the rows of sick people lined up on hospital cots in front of the stage. Feldafing had a sanatorium for tubercular patients, and all the survivors with that illness had been transferred there. When the show was running, I looked out from behind the curtain and saw pleasant smiles on their skeletal faces. Some of them were still wearing their striped concentration camp clothes. Others were covered with white sheets, but their eyes peering out from the covers expressed their eternal gratitude and satisfaction once again to see Jewish children performing. I saw tears in their eyes rolling down the hollowed cheeks. Shedding a few tears myself, I breathed a silent prayer: “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength to accomplish some good.” I suddenly felt a sensation of relief in my heart. The guilt I had carried in me for the sin of surviving, while so many of our loved ones had suffered and died, had somewhat diminished. I suddenly felt that my efforts were worthy, and that, perhaps, there was reason for all of us to hope again.47

Yiddish theatre in the DP camps was enhanced with the arrival of a number of professional theatrical performers over the course of 1946–1947. According to one report, there were at least 60 amateur groups appearing in the DP camps between 1945 and 1949.48 These presented revues, folk and partisan songs, recitations of poems, and original skits and songs about DP camp life. The Munich Yiddish Theater, active between 1946 and 1949, offered dramas and comedies by Dovid Pinski, Goldfaden, Aaron Glanz-Lyeles and Jacob Gordin to an estimated 400,000 spectators (this figure must have included Jews and non-Jews, or repeat performances)—including many who had entered the camp gates as children and had never seen theater before. According to Baruch Graubard, the “fate of the Munich Yiddish Theater . . . was directly connected with the fate of the She’erit Hapleitah” as a whole. The group developed in stages, influenced by immigration and the arrivals and departures of actors and directors.49 Under the influence of leading figures such as Israel Becker and Alexander Bardini, the Munich Yiddish Theater drew on the strength of performers and directors with prewar theater experience in Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Vilna, Kattowitz, and elsewhere. (Becker would in fact leave the group in order to make the first postwar film produced in the DP camps, Lang ist der weg.) Baderech, a Yiddish theatre

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group based in Berlin, performed works by Sholem Aleichem and Molière as well as original shows with titles such as Di sonim tsulokhes (To spite our enemies), Nekomeh (Revenge) and Di nazis in gehinom (Nazis in hell).50 These titles indicate that theater, beyond entertaining a DP public eagerly in search of entertainment, was also used to creatively channel the anger, bitterness, and ultimate desire for revenge on the part of the surviving Jews. According to Graubard, Yiddish theater in the DP camps represented an entirely unprecedented stage in Jewish theater, when a “state theater” supported by the Central Committee of Liberated Jews was composed of “actors who were a part of the [Jewish] public and a representative of their will” to fulfill the ideal of artistic truth.51 Beyond cultural events, there was an abundance of humor expressed in everyday life. Leo Schwarz, the highest-ranking JDC official in the American zone in 1946– 1947, put together a file dealing with Jewish humor in the DP camps (available in the YIVO Archives in the Leo Schwarz papers). He noted various slang terms in use, including those terms collected by Kaplan that were used to refer to wartime experiences, alongside material from DP periodicals that also captured some of this sensibility. Included in his “humor” files was a volume of Freiheit, an illustrated periodical published by the liberated Jews of Lampertheim in August 1946 that contained a collection of jokes making the rounds of the DP camps, among them one concerning the ongoing baby boom, titled “Modern Times”: A young man came into a baby carriage store and asked for the price of 12 carriages. Owner: “Why do you need twelve all at once?” Young man: “Yesterday was one month since I was married and my wife gave birth to a child. Why should I buy a carriage every month? I’ll get a whole year’s supply at once!”52

Afn tsimbl (On the Cymbalom), a satirical magazine that seems to have been published only once, included various ironic observations on life in the DP camps.53 One quite revealing section, titled “A Modern Lexicon,” poked fun at the realities of Jewish DP life and politics (Fig. 8.2): PRESIDENT:  a person who, although he travels by automobile, never arrives anywhere, except at a banquet. . . . SECRETARY:  says what he doesn’t remember and remembers what he hasn’t said; small in the eyes of others, big in his own. COMMUNAL WORKERS (askanim): people who make machines from paper and paper from machines. COMMITTEE:  a weed that grows out of ruins and cannot be uprooted. MEETING:  a gathering where the audience sits on the stage and doesn’t get a chance to laugh. . . .  member of sheyres hapleyte:  A person whom three Jews organize; four inform; five help; six agitate; they all make collections for him, while he starves to death.

The same volume included satirical articles dealing with various aspects of DP life and politics. For instance, the fact that many Zionist leaders of the Jewish DP population (among them Zalman Grinberg, Samuel Gringauz, and the ardently Zionist American Jewish chaplain, Abraham Klausner) wound up in America was the subject of ridicule in an article detailing the many accomplishments of “Moshe Zilberberg, Zionist activist, fighter in the Warsaw ghetto, and presidium member of the Z.K. [Central Committee] of the Liberated Jews in Germany, leader of Feldafing, editor of

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Figure 8.2. “A Modern Lexicon,” from the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Dos fraye wort,” etc., who makes the decision to relocate to Lynn, Massachusetts.54 In similar fashion, a letter purportedly from a mother in Munich to her daughter in New York informed the daughter that her father had become a leftist Zionist, which meant that after sending everyone to the Jewish state, he and her mother planned to come live with her in New York.55 The joke section of the same volume, titled “Der

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va’ad halotse” (the wit committee) was a play on words of the so-called “rescue organization,” the Va’ad hatsole. A rhyming ditty lampooned the nature of non-profit fundraising intended to assist (or rescue) the DPs: The begging firm (betl-firme) knows well the meloche [work] Of tsedakah campaigns with publicity blague [brats] They sing: “In schnorring lies the mazel broche [the key to success]” They schnorr from Miami to Chicageh.56

Another joke in the volume made light of the means employed by DPs to sustain themselves, including black marketeering: The sheyres hapleyte society is composed of two philosophical schools of thought: a. (The majority) “Rationalists,” those who live from rations [provided by UNRRA and JDC] b. (A minority) “Mystics” (mistiker), those who live from filthy (mistike), shady businesses . . . 57 Another satirical volume, Unzer beyzim (Our broom) included humorous and pointed cartoons satirizing life in the DP camps (see Fig.  8.3).58 In the cartoon pictured at top right, two men ridicule a Zionist leader at a DP banquet, with the caption reading: “Why is he screaming so much about Israel? Because he is going to America tomorrow . . . ” Other cartoons made light of DP society, the black market, the baby boom, the overcrowding in the DP camps, the slow and belabored attempts of the UN to arrive at a political solution of the refugee problem, and the continuities of prewar and postwar antisemitism. In the last example, the year 1937, with its “shlekhte semitn” (bad Jews) is juxtaposed with 1947, “Di Schlachtensee mitn” (a punning reference to the DP camp at Schlachtensee, near Berlin). This finely developed postwar satire seemed to reach its pinnacle just as the DP camps began to close. In Gelekhter durkh trern, Nudelman imagines what might have been if “Sholem Aleichem were alive today,” in the position of someone forced to choose between emigration to Brazil, Chile, or Venezuela.59 By 1947, as Tamar Lewinsky has noted, relief workers and visitors were describing with amazement the shtetl-like infrastructure and outlook of the camps and their social institutions.60 For instance, the Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski described the Pocking camp (near Waldstadt) as being like a Jewish shtetl from twenty or thirty years back, “but here it is even more Jewish, really a piece of Jewish life taken out from a book, as if in a fantasy.”61 At the end of the DP period, writers recreated these postwar shtetls with a mix of nostalgia and humor, through parodies that combined the prewar model of the shtetl with a satirical look at the bittersweet postwar reality. One of these writers was Baruch Graubard, who documented Jewish daily life in Munich in a DP camp.62 Graubard’s satirical volume, Geven a sheyres hapleyte, included a section on “Yankl Batlan,” editor of the DP newspaper, and another one about a “Dr. Kopegeh,” who decided to form a political party.63 There was also a chapter discussing the levels of Hebrew knowledge among the Sheyres hapleyte, and a profile of “Yoshke Paskudnik” [Yoshke nogoodnik], described as “a ‘hero’ of our times.” The cover of Graubard’s volume,

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Figure 8.3.  Unzer beyzim, from the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

which satirized the broken tree insignia of the sheerit hapeleitah with caricatures of Jewish DP types hanging off the tree, also symbolically commented on this unique period in Jewish history when survivors from all over Europe would be concentrated in DP camps, forming a collective identity on the blood-soaked soil of postwar Germany (Fig. 8.4). The recreated shtetls noted by Kaczerginski may have easily been mistaken for an illusion: could it be that Jews from all over Europe had once again been concentrated in one place, this time in replicas of prewar shtetls? What would Sholem Aleichem or Mendele Mocher Seforim have made of this situation? And what it did it mean to laugh at satires of a prewar culture that had been almost completely destroyed? It seems that humor was both a tool of survival and a means of examining an almost absurd philosophical conundrum after the war. In Graubard’s eyes, it may have also been a sign of healing: once the DP camps could be viewed through the lens of Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke or Mendele’s Kabzansk, then European Jews, and European Jewish humor, had come full circle—indeed, they had both survived.

Conclusion Jewish humor did not die in the Holocaust. In fact, it is unclear whether the Holocaust did anything to change Jewish humor. If anything, an examination of humor in the

Figure 8.4.  Geven a sheyres hapleyte, from the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

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DP camps reveals that Jews depended on humor to endure the period after liberation, both as a psychological weapon to grapple with what they had endured under the Nazi threat and as a source of coping with the displacement of the postwar period. After the war, humor was a poignant affirmation of mir zaynen do—we are (still) here—a declaration that the Jewish people had not disappeared and indeed could at times have the last laugh. Jokes and other sayings told by Jews in ghettos and camps manifested the many functions of humor identified by survivors in Ostrower’s study: the aggression and anger of the oppressed, the self-humor that was typical of Jewish life, the dark gallows humor of those who felt death was imminent, and the humor of last resort, which expressed the absurdity of life under such impossible circumstances. In addition, as Israel Kaplan demonstrated, humor had a critically important social function during and after the war: namely, maintaining social cohesion under extreme circumstances while also embracing the wit and resourcefulness of the oppressed and celebrating it in the aftermath of the war. Postwar humor, in the form of humorous songs, theater, jokes, literature, and art, functioned on various levels that adapted to the realities of Jewish life in liberated Germany: as a means of processing the recent trauma of the war; asserting Jewish endurance in the wake of the destruction; enduring the implausible situation of continued Jewish existence in postwar Germany; confronting the hypocrisy of British policy; and uniting Jews in their “laughter through tears,” by this means providing them with an assurance that life would continue, even after the greatest trauma the Jewish people had ever endured.

Notes 1. Nudelman’s volume was a collection of jokes and humorous essays from Jewish life in postwar Poland, Germany, and France. Gelekhter durkh trern was also the name of a 1928 Yiddish film based on Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peysi, the Cantor’s Son. 2. Yad Vashem archive, 033/1122 (Zalman Grinberg speech at concert marking liberation, June 10, 1945, Munich). 3. Irving Kristol, “Is Jewish Humor Dead? The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Joke,” Commentary 12 (November 1951); discussed in Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale: 1991), 133. 4. YIVO (Jewish DP periodicals collection), reel 31, Unzer weg (Our way) English edition, article by Ernest Landau, “Those Who Cannot Laugh,” 1. 5.  Quoted in Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Michael Wex, “Humor: Oral Tradition,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, online at yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Humor/Oral_Tradition (accessed 21 January 2015). 6. Ibid.; see also Elliot Oring, Jokes and Their Relations (Lexington: 1992), 119. 7.  Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: 1963), 133. 8.  David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: 1984), ch. 7. 9.  Quoted in William Novaks and Moshe Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor (New York: 1981), 61. For a variant telling, see Lipman, Laughter in Hell, 197. 10.  Chaya Ostrower, Lelo humor hayinu mitabdim (Jerusalem: 2011), 69. 11. Nudelman, Gelekhter durkh trern, 113. See also Lipman, Laughter in Hell, 137 and Ruth Rubin, Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong (Champaign: 2000), 432. Hans Frank served as governor-general of occupied Poland’s General Government territory.

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12. Shimon Huberband, “Wartime Folklore” (no date), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives (hereafter: USHMM), RG 15.079M, reel 8, Ringelblum Archive, I/109, published in Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Robert S. Hirt (Hoboken: 1987), 113–129. 13. Nudelman, Gelekhter durkh trern, 114. 14.  “Rumkowski Khayim,” song by Yankl Hershkowitz from the Lodz ghetto; USHMMA, Acc. 2000.134 (Joseph Wajsblat collection); for song notes and an alternate translation, see Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto (Champaign: 1992), 40. 15. For a detailed analysis of concentration camp humor, see Ostrower, Lelo humor ­hayinu mitabdim. Thanks to Carol Zemel for suggesting the distinctions between the social functions of humor in ghettos, camps, and in hiding during the war. 16.  Laura Jockusch, “A Folk Monument to Our Destruction and Heroism: Jewish Historical Commissions in the Displaced Persons Camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: 2010). 17. Israel Kaplan, introduction to Dos yidishe folksmoyl in nazi klem, quoted in Lipman, Laughter in Hell, 143; see also Boaz Cohen, “Representing the Experiences of Children in the Holocaust: Children’s Survivor Testimonies Published in Fun Letsten Hurbn,” in Patt and Berkowitz (eds.), “We Are Here,” 23. 18.  The term sheerit hapeletah is found in the writings of the Prophets; see, for instance, Micah 4:6–7 and II Kings 19:30–31. Use of the term links the notions of destruction and redemption; from 1943, Yishuv leaders used the term “remnant” to refer to what remained of European Jewry, believing that Jewish survival and the realization of Zionism remained possible despite the destruction. See Dalia Ofer, “From Survivors to New Immigrants: She’erit Hapletah and Aliyah,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle, ed. Israel Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: 1990), 306–307. 19. Israel Kaplan, Fun letsten hurbn, vol. 1 (August 1946), 23; also discussed by Roskies in Against the Apocalypse, 187. 20.  Translation from YIVO archives, RG 294.1 (Leo W. Schwarz papers), reel 46/1305 (p. 45). 21. Yad Vashem archive, M1PF/186 (“Curses at Hitler’s Expense”). 22. Lipman, Laughter in Hell, 201–202. 23. SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) guidelines on the care of DPs and refugees in Germany were published on December 28, 1944 as “Administrative Memorandum No. 39.” See as defined in Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–48 (Chapel Hill: 2001), 14. 24. For detailed surveys of the Jewish DP population, see reports compiled by the JDC in YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo W. Schwarz papers), reel no. 1032–1037. For more on postwar refugees, see Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics. On UNRRA, see George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: 1950). 25.  Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (Oxford: 1989), 203. Bauer counts 60 camps, 14 children’s centers, 40 hospitals, and 39 training camps (hakhsharot) in the U.S. zone of Germany alone. 26. On the life of Jewish DPs in postwar Germany, see, for example, Ze’ev Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope (Cambridge: 2002); Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: 2007); and Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: 2009). 27. Nudelman’s humorous volume included a chapter on the “excitement” of the Nuremberg trials, where “Everyone sleeps. The Tribunal sleeps. The public sleeps. The newspaper correspondents sleep. The accused sleep. The only ones who don’t sleep are the ‘righteous’ among the accused. . . . ” (Nudelman, Gelekhter durkh trern, 94). 28. YIVO library (Jewish DP periodicals collection), reel 1/1, Landsberger Lager Cajtung 11 (21 December 1945), article by Baruch Chita, “Di Wajs-Bloje Fon Iber Strajchers Palac”(p. 4). The newspaper, written in Yiddish, was printed in Latin letters (since there was no Hebrew type at the time) and was transliterated in accordance with Polish pronunciation.

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29.  Leo Schwarz, The Redeemers (New York: 1953), 100. 30. Examples found in the USHMM photo archives include photo no. 38309 (political demonstration at the Wetzlar DP camp) and photo no. 96435 (protest at the Neu Freimann DP camp). 31. Nudelman, Gelekhter durkh trern, 42. 32. YIVO, 294.1 (Leo W. Schwarz papers), reel 1/1, Landsberger Lager Cajtung (22 March 1946). 33.  Leo Srole, quoted in Elliot S. Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: 2006), 91; Toby Blum-Dobkin, “The Landsberg Carnival: Purim in a Displaced Persons Center,” in Purim: The Face and the Mask, ed. Shifra Epstein (New York: 1979), 52–59. 34. YIVO, RG 294.2 (DP camps and centers in Germany), MK 483, reel 61/753, “Poster from Landsberg for a Workers’ Purim Carnival in Landsberg” (15 March 1946). 35.  Abraham Klausner, A Letter to My Children from the Edge of the Holocaust (San Francisco: 2002), 108. 36. Found in Saul Touster (ed.), Survivor’s Haggadah (Philadelphia: 2005), 8; originally published by the U.S. Army in 1946. 37. Ibid., 62–63. I am grateful to Atina Grossmann for this suggested addition, which was made as a comment to a wonderful panel on Jewish humor at the 44th annual AJS conference in Chicago (18 December 2012). 38. See Shirli Gilbert, “ ‘We Long for a Home’: Songs and Survival among Jewish Displaced Persons,” in Patt and Berkowitz (eds.), “We Are Here,” 289–307. Gilbert notes, for example, that Henny Durmashkin, who survived the war in the Vilna ghetto and elsewhere, recorded in her memoir this snippet from a song that she wrote while in the Fürstenfeldbruck DP camp: “UNNRA, JOINT and ORT/Hand us tiny crumbs,/and butter their own bread/with tidy sums” (found in Durmashkin-Gurko, “Songs to Remember,” in Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance 1939–1945, vol. 3, ed. Isaac Kowalski [New York: 1986], 631). 39. See Gilbert, “ ‘We Long for a Home,’ ” 296–297. Text of “Es benkt zikh nokh a heym” (We Long for Home) in USHMM photo archives, photo no. 3184, courtesy Henry Baigelman. 40. Durmashkin-Gurko, “Songs to Remember,” 629–630, cited by Gilbert, “We Long for a Home,” 307 (n. 31). 41. YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo Schwarz papers), reel 46/1214, Henny Durmashkin, Munich (August 1949), “Joint’l.” 42. Ibid., 1217, Henny Durmashkin, “Chwil Cajten andere [I want different times].” 43. Ibid., 1236. 44.  Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Syracuse: 1996), 354. 45. YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo Schwarz papers), reel 35/1034, letter from JDC child welfare officer Millicent Diamond (International Children’s Center on Chiemsee in Kreiss Rosenheim) to Celia Weinberg (JDC 5th district director) regarding visit of Herman Yablokoff (19 July 1947). Yablokoff’s tour led to a United States Army Certificate of Merit and to the discovery of his niece, the only survivor among all his European family. See online source at milkenarchive.org/people/view/all/754/Yablokoff,+Herman (accessed 26 January 2015). 46. See Angelika Konigseder and Juliane Wetzel, “Displaced Persons, 1945–1950: The Social and Cultural Perspective,” in Post War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945–1950 (Gale Digital Collection, online at www.gale.com/DigitalCollections); see also idem, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany (Evanston: 2001), 121. 47.  Jacob Biber, Risen from the Ashes: A Story of the Jewish Displaced Persons in the Aftermath of World War II (San Bernardino: 1990), 27. 48. Sandrow, Vagabond Stars, 354. 49. YIVO (Jewish DP periodicals), reel 1/4, Hemshekh, article by Baruch Graubard, “The ‘She’eit Hapleitah’ Stage in Yiddish Theater,” 21. 50. YIVO, RG 118 (German theater after liberation), box 26. 51.  Graubard, “The ‘She’erit Hapleitah’ Stage in Yiddish Theater,” 26.

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52. YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo Schwarz papers), reel 46/1207, article by A. Dornfeldn, “Humor and Satire.” 53. Ibid., 1239. Tamar Lewinsky dates publication of the journal to September 23, 1949 (or 1950, according to Schwarz); see Lewinsky, Displaced Poets: Jiddische Schriftseller im Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen: 2008), 210–211. 54.  Moshe Zilberberg was indeed a Zionist leader in Feldafing—in all likelihood, he actually did end up in Massachusetts, where a relative of his was living. See Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope, 82 and YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo Schwarz papers), reel 46/1246. 55. YIVO, RG 294.1 (Leo Schwarz papers), reel 46/1251, “Letter from Munich to New York.” 56. Ibid., 1246. 57. Ibid., 1250. 58. YIVO, RG 294.2 (DP camps and centers in Germany), reel 62/492. 59. Nudelman, Gelekhter durkh trern, 222. 60. See Tamar Lewinsky, “Dangling Roots? Yiddish Language and Culture in the German Diaspora,” in Patt and Berkowitz (eds.), “We Are Here,” 327. 61.  Lewinsky, “Dangling Roots,” 327, citing Shmerke Kaczerginski, “Bitokhn, amkho!” in Shmerke Katsherginski ondenk-bukh (Buenos Aires: 1955), 425. 62.  Baruch Graubard, Geven a sheyres-hapleyte: notitsbukh fun Moyshe Yoslen (Munich: 1949). The satires previously appeared in the Po’ale Zionist newspaper Bafrayung. 63.  The name Yankl Batlan literally meant “Yankl the impractical” or “Yankl the idle”; Dr. Kopegeh may have been a play on kopeck, a coin worth one-hundredth of a Russian ruble.

And Hannah Laughed: The Role of Irony in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem Kerstin Steitz (Old Dominion University) By making our enemy small, mean, contemptible, comical, we take a roundabout route to getting for ourselves the enjoyment of vanquishing him, which the third person . . . endorses with laughter—Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious1

In April 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem. Eichmann, the former head of the Gestapo’s section for Jewish affairs, was characterized by the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, as a key perpetrator in the murder of six million Jews: “There was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose place in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. That was Adolf Eichmann.”2 Among those taking issue with this stance was Hannah Arendt, a Jewish intellectual born in Germany who was covering the trial for The New Yorker. As she saw it, Hausner misrepresented Eichmann as a “monster.” Eichmann, however, was no monster, but rather a “clown,” a “buffoon,” and there was no inevitability to the events that led to the Holocaust. The role that Eichmann played in the Holocaust was the outcome of what she called the “banality of evil,” a kind of unthinking following of rules by bureaucrats with no moral compass. The publication of Hannah Arendt’s serialized account of the Eichmann trial in The New Yorker in 1963 and its subsequent publication as a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), generated enormous controversy. In a widely quoted letter to Arendt, Gershom Scholem castigated her for her “British flippancy” and accused her of lacking “sensibility” (Herzenstakt).3 Golo Mann, the writer, essayist, and son of Thomas Mann, criticized what he considered to be her cynical tone, which he attributed to the prevailing style of The New Yorker. (Its editors, he wrote, were “jokers” [Witzbolde]).4 Walter Laqueur observed that Arendt “was mainly attacked not for what she said, but for how she said it.”5 In an interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt addressed the controversy about the tone of her report: Look, there are people who take it amiss . . . that, for instance, I can still laugh. But I was really of the opinion that Eichmann was a buffoon. I’ll tell you this: I read the transcript 132

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of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that.6

Indeed, readers can almost hear Arendt laughing when they page through Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt’s critics found that the humorous aspects and intonations of her report lacked the propriety and gravity one expects from material dealing with the Holocaust. Since her critics considered laughter and seriousness as binary oppositions and therefore as mutually exclusive, they failed to realize that Arendt’s irony and humor were part of her political rhetoric, which was intentionally provocative and had serious goals in mind. Her tendentious jokes about Eichmann (or Unsinnswitze, as Freud would have called them), are anything but innocent entertainment; they seek to reveal Eichmann as the personification of the “banality of evil,” which, while deviating from our traditional understanding of evil as having demonic depth, is none­ theless equally dangerous. The many anecdotes she provides about Eichmann’s inconsistent and even absurd utterances during his trial acquaint readers with his character and way of thinking, and thus constitute the groundwork for judging his degree of culpability for the crimes for which he was accused and ultimately ­convicted. In Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (2014), Marie Luise Knott locates Arendt’s use of laughter and irony in Eichmann in Jerusalem in a German-specific cultural context. Knott cites an interview with the journalist Joachim Fest in which Arendt explained that her “ ‘burschikose Ironie’ (irrepressible irony) was her most precious inheritance from Germany—or more precisely, from Berlin.”7 Arendt’s approach of treating serious matters with humor, irony, and satire is best understood, as Knott suggests, in the tradition of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin.8 Further, the poet Heinrich Heine, whom Arendt often quoted, used irony in his political poetry (as, for instance, in his Buch der Lieder) in order to circumvent censorship. The Germanspecific cultural context for this sort of ironic political speech suggests that the task of thorough debunking can be accomplished only by means of provocative speech. Since irony intends the opposite of what is expressed, it “requires,” as Knott notes, “on the one hand, rhetorical signals, and on the other, people capable of receiving and understanding them.”9 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), connects Arendt’s mockery of Eichmann to the tradition of Bertolt Brecht. In his play Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), written in exile in 1942, Brecht suggested that the Holocaust could have been prevented. YoungBruehl quotes an interview with Arendt in which she cited Brecht and added that she regarded Hitler as a clown: “If he killed ten million people, he is still a clown.”10 In an essay titled “Bertolt Brecht,” Arendt quoted Brecht on the necessity of laughter and comedy for the exposure of political perpetrators: The great political criminals must be exposed, and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man. If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged

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position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook, and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature. . . . One may say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.11

Brecht’s argument—that comedy is often more serious than tragedy—is based on the fact that comedy exposes the crimes of individuals without allowing for the glorification of evil, as can happen in tragedy. Hausner obviously did not read Brecht. In his opening statement to the court, he described the Holocaust as “the tragedy of Jewry as a whole,”12 and he seems to have conceived of the trial itself as a Greek tragedy, in the sense that it was meant to “touch the hearts of men,” as he explained in his 1966 autobiography, Justice in Jerusalem.13 Similarly, in “Reflections on The Deputy” (1964), Susan Sontag characterizes the murder of six million European Jews as “tragedy” and argues that “the function of the [Eichmann] trial was rather that of the tragic drama: above and beyond judgment and punishment, catharsis.”14 Arendt, however, viewed the matter differently. From the beginning of her report, she criticizes Hausner’s approach of lamenting the victims of the Holocaust instead of focusing on Eichmann and his crimes: A show trial needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what was done and how it was done. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play—and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he had caused others to suffer.15

She also ridicules Hausner’s staging of the trial, in particular his presentation of Eichmann as “executive arm [of Hitler’s iniquitous regime] for the extermination of the Jewish People.”16 Hausner’s “love of showmanship” is mocked; in Arendt’s view, his “theatrics [are] characteristic of a more than ordinary vanity.” Instead of serving justice, she argues, Hausner “does his best, his very best, to obey his master” (a reference to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion) by focusing on the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust—in particular, the suffering inflicted upon the Jewish people.17 In focusing on theatrics, Arendt argues, the actual prosecution of Eichmann was neglected. This is by no means to imply that Arendt regarded the Eichmann trial as a mere farce. Despite her firm rejection of Hausner’s staging of the trial as tragedy, Arendt took the trial itself very seriously, as demonstrated by her account of Abba Kovner’s testimony regarding Anton Schmidt, a German sergeant who had provided Jewish partisans and members of the Jewish underground with forged papers and military trucks and was subsequently executed.18 For Arendt, Kovner’s testimony was a pivotal moment in the trial, as it showed that Germans were able to make choices even under Nazi rule. That is, not all of them were clowns (in Arendt’s sense), as was Eichmann. Schmidt and the precious few Germans like him evoked solemnity and respect. Describing Kovner’s testimony and the effect it had on those hearing it, Arendt’s formerly mocking tone becomes serious and even pensive:  . . . a hush settled over the courtroom; as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question— how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany,

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in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.19

Unfortunately, for every Schmidt in Nazi Germany, there were countless Eichmanns. Another component of Arendt’s critique of the prosecuting team headed by Hausner was its mistaken understanding of Adolf Eichmann. Given the enormity of the crimes for which Eichmann stood accused, it might have seemed logical to characterize him as a monster. Arendt, however, rejected this characterization: Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.20

Interestingly, Arendt’s views on this matter seem to have evolved over time. Back in 1946, she had questioned the extent to which the Nuremberg trial could truly serve justice. In a letter to her former teacher, Karl Jaspers, dated August 17, she wrote: “Your definition of Nazi policy as a crime (‘criminal guilt’) strikes me as questionable. The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law, and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough.”21 In a response dated October 19, 1946, Jaspers voiced his disagreement: You say that what the Nazis did cannot be comprehended as a “crime”—I am not altogether comfortable with your view, because a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of “greatness”—of satanic greatness—which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the “demonic” element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterizes them. . . . Your view is appealing—especially as contrasted with what I see as the false inhuman innocence of the victims. But all this would have to be expressed differently (how, I don’t know yet). The way you do express it, you’ve almost taken the path of poetry. And a Shakespeare would never be able to give adequate form to this material—his instinctive aesthetic sense would lead to falsification of it—and that’s why he couldn’t attempt it. There is no idea and no essence here. Nazi crime is properly a subject for psychology and sociology, for psychopathology and jurisprudence only.22

The operative word in Jaspers’ reply is “banality.” For Jaspers, the Nazis possessed “no idea and no essence,” that is, neither depth nor greatness; their vapidity stood the greatest chance of being exposed within the purview of a criminal trial. Years later, in covering the Eichmann trial, Arendt adopted Jaspers’ view,23 rejecting the characterization of Eichmann as a monster since it insinuated a kind of greatness to the man and his crimes. In her view, Eichmann was the epitome of Nazi banality. Moreover, the notion of tragedy suggested by Hausner’s legal Holocaust narrative implied the inevitability of the event and thereby ran the risk of trivializing it, whereas Arendt considered the Holocaust an unprecedented crime.24 Arendt maintains that Hausner’s reading of the Holocaust as an inevitable consequence of antisemitism is a “misunderstanding” and therefore a misrepresentation: None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it

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appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early antiSemitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, these were “crimes” different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence.25

For Arendt, what distinguishes the Holocaust from pogroms is its inherent “banality of evil” as manifested in its bureaucratically organized program of genocide. On the individual level, Eichmann’s “banality of evil” is demonstrated by his indifference to making any kind of judgment. Arendt elaborated the matter in a series of four lectures titled “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” that she gave at the New School for Social Research in 1965 and later published under the title Responsibility and Judgment. In her words: Out of the unwillingness or inability to choose one’s examples and one’s company, and out of the unwillingness or inability to relate to others through judgment, arise the real skandala, the real stumbling blocks which human powers can’t remove because they were not caused by human and humanly understandable motives. Therein lies the horror and, at the same time, the banality of evil.26

The banality of evil personified by Eichmann was apparent in several of his character traits, which Arendt deploys to comic effect. For instance, there is Eichmann’s distortion and vulgarization of the German language. Arendt’s strategy in this regard is foreshadowed in the epitaph she chose for Eichmann in Jerusalem, a quotation from Brecht’s poem “Deutschland” (“O Germany–/Hearing the speeches that ring from your house/one laughs./But whoever sees you reaches for his knife”).27 If “speeches” are what provoke the laughter in Brecht’s poem, it is Eichmann’s use of the German language that most often prompts Arendt’s laughter: [T]he horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of “winged words” (geflügelte Worte, a German colloquialism for famous quotes from the classics) when he means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte.28

This humorous description of Eichmann, which introduces the theme of his “clowneries,” serves two functions. First, it debunks Eichmann, thereby emphasizing from the outset that there is nothing great or heroic about his evil. Second, in exposing and mocking his butchering of the German language, Arendt demonstrates her own command of her mother tongue and thus her superiority both to Eichmann and to those Nazis who defined her and other German Jews as corruptors of the German language and culture.29 The implicit joke in “the winged words” passage is that Eichmann’s flawed German undermines the Nazis’ claim to superiority, making him and (by extension, the others) appear ridiculous and uncouth. Arendt also pokes fun at Eichmann’s moral posturing. For example, she briefly mentions an episode in which Eichmann was given Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to read: “After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant; ‘Quite an unwholesome book.’ ”30 Eichmann’s reaction to Lolita, a novel about a pedophile who abuses his orphaned step-daughter (claiming that she seduced him) is funny because it is so

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outlandish—he prudishly condemns the fictional Humbert Humbert for perversity while remaining completely oblivious to the enormity of his own immorality and culpability. His very opaqueness epitomizes what Arendt means by “banality of evil.” Arendt reports additional, more obvious absurdities about Eichmann that are especially baffling in light of the suffering he caused: What could you do with a man who declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath. . . . and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath?31

In this passage, the juxtaposition of Eichmann’s statement with his action reveals inconsistencies in his character that are only implied in the Lolita anecdote. Eichmann explained in court that he learned one should not swear an oath, yet he then chose to do just that. The rhetorical question with which Arendt introduces this incident emphasizes her bafflement. Because of Eichmann’s self-contradictions, his thoughts, beliefs, values, and actions appear—like “clichés”—to be empty and meaningless.32 This realization confirms Jaspers’ previous observation of the defendants in the Nuremberg trial as being banal and lacking in depth and essence.33 The seeming incompatibility of Eichmann’s character with his crimes exasperates Arendt throughout her report. In the context of Eichmann’s use of clichés, Arendt creates an arc of suspense that stretches over close to 200 pages; after first introducing the topic, she adds: “As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés did not leave him in the hour of his death.”34 Foreshadowing Eichmann’s execution, Arendt suggests that Eichmann died the way he lived, and that his entire life was pointless. At the end of her report, just before her epilogue, she returns to the theme, characterizing Eichmann’s final words as “grotesque silliness.” As she reports, Eichmann first declared his rejection of the belief of an afterlife, only to contradict himself: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” Arendt interprets Eichmann’s final words as a summary of the “lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”35 Although Arendt’s recounting of Eichmann’s incongruities may seem to pertain to rather inconsequential matters, they are symptomatic not only of his thinking in clichés but also of his obedient character—the obedient character of a desk murderer. In this spirit she pointedly quotes Eichmann’s use of the word Kadavergehorsam, the obedience displayed by a cadaver, empty and malleable.36 Arendt describes one crucial point in the trial when Eichmann offered his recollections of the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, one of the few significant historical events he did not claim to have forgotten. According to his testimony, although he had once harbored doubts about the notion of exterminating the Jews, the unanimous decision at the Wannsee Conference in favor of the Final Solution (and especially the fact that among those speaking in favor of it were Reinhard Heydrich and his immediate superior, Heinrich Müller) caused him to change his mind. In Eichmann’s words: “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Arendt restates the matter as follows: “Who was he to judge? Who was he ‘to have [his] own thoughts in this matter’? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.”37

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In this instance, as in others, Arendt alternates between direct quotations from Eichmann (“I felt free of all guilt”) and her response to what he said (“Who was he to judge?”), in which she turns his own words against him. Thus, Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann in general (and of his refusal to judge, in particular) as “modest” is euphemistic and ironic, especially given her prior assessment that “[b]ragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing.”38 Later in the report, in  line with Jaspers’ distinction between the Nuremberg trial defendants and Shakespearean tragic villains, Arendt compares Eichmann with Iago, Macbeth, and Richard III. The latter are characterized by her as individuals who make conscious decisions to do evil, to walk over dead bodies to reach their goals; in this sense, they possess what she refers to as “demonic depth.”39 Eichmann, in contrast, had no criminal or evil motives and was essentially oblivious to the crimes he committed. This, she argues, was due to his fundamental lack of imagination and “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.”40 It is because Arendt perceives Eichmann to be lacking in depth that she refuses to designate his character as monstrous, demonic, or evil, insisting instead on characterizing him as “banal” or even comical. Arendt is convinced that the failure of imagination, lack of empathy, and lack of depth are precisely what led to the events culminating in the Holocaust. The Lolita anecdote requires knowledge of the novel to be considered funny, whereas the passage regarding the Wannsee Conference can evoke laughter only if the reader understands that it is ironic—that Arendt’s italicized question “Who was he to judge?” and her emphasis on Eichmann’s “modesty” are facetious. She means the exact opposite: Eichmann is indeed guilty for not judging, for not thinking on his own. To understand this passage as irony, the reader has to share Arendt’s insistence on the moral imperative of judging, thinking independently, and resisting evil. This display of quick-wittedness once more underscores Arendt’s intellectual and moral superiority to Eichmann. Further, it demonstrates her desire to transform her readers into accomplices in the matter of passing judgment on Eichmann, by means of appealing to their sense of the absurd. Such a strategy calls to mind Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in which he quotes a passage from the German philosopher Kuno Fischer’s Über den Witz (1889) on the connection between judgment and humor: “ ‘The judgment that produces a comic contrast is the joke. It has already played its silent part in caricature, but it is only in judgment that it attains its distinctive form and the free field of its unfolding.’ ”41 Indeed, Freud continues, citing the philosopher Kuno Fischer, the joke is tantamount to “ ‘playful judgment.’ ”42 In Eichmann in Jerusalem, playful judgment is not only a vehicle of resistance to Adolf Eichmann, but also provides a platform for passing judgment on both Eichmann the man and the Nazi ideology to which he subscribed.

Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: 2003), 98.

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2. Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court in Jerusalem, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: 1992), 63. Arendt herself quotes this passage in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: 2006), 6. 3. Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, Der Briefwechsel, ed. Marie Luise Knott (Berlin: 2010), 430. 4. Mann’s essay first appeared in Die Neue Rundschau 4 (1963) and Die Zeit on January 24, 1964. Here it is quoted from Golo Mann, “Der verdrehte Eichmann,” in Die Kontroverse: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden, ed. Friedrich Arnold Krummacher (Munich: 1964), 190. 5. Walter Laqueur, America, Europe, and the Soviet Union: Selected Essays (New Brunswick: 1983), 166. 6. Hannah Arendt and Günter Gaus, “ ‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter R. Baehr (New York: 2000), 15–16. 7. Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Arendt, trans. David Dollenmayer (New York: 2014), 8. 8.  Ibid., 11, 10. 9.  Ibid., 15–16. 10. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven: 2004), 331; see also Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo (Stanford: 2010); Mirjam Wenzel, Gericht und Gedächtnis: Der deutschsprachige Holocaust-Diskurs der sechziger Jahre (Göttingen: 2009). 11.  Bertolt Brecht, “Zu ‘Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui,’ ” quoted in YoungBruehl, Hannah Arendt, 331. 12.  Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 63. 13.  Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: 1968), 291. 14. Susan Sontag, “Reflections on The Deputy,” in The Storm Over The Deputy, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: 1964), 117, 118. 15. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 9. 16.  Israel Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 63. 17. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4–6. 18.  Ibid., 230. 19.  Ibid., 231. 20.  Ibid., 54. 21.  Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds.), Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: 1992), 54. 22.  Ibid., 62. 23. Both Jaspers and Arendt reversed their original positions in the context of the Eichmann trial. In a letter to Arendt dated December 16, 1960, Jaspers argued that “[i]t would be wonderful to do without the trial altogether and make it instead into a process of examination and clarification. The goal would be the best possible objectification of the historical facts. The end result would not be the judges’ sentence, but certainty about the facts, to the extent such certainty can be attained.” In her response, Arendt maintained that there were “no tools to hand except legal ones with which we have to judge and pass sentence on something that cannot even be adequately represented either in legal terms or in political terms” (ibid., 413). Shoshana Felman mentions this exchange in her book The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002), 139–140. 24. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 267. 25. Ibid. 26.  Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: 2003), 146. 27.  In similar fashion, David Alexander uses the metaphor of “the satirist’s dissecting knife” to describe how satire analyzes and exposes deficiencies. See Alexander, “Political Satire in the Israeli Theatre: Another Outlook on Zionism,” in Jewish Humor, ed. Avner Ziv (New Brunswick: 1998), 167. 28. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48.

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29. In her interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt elaborated on the significance of the German language to her: I have always consciously refused to lose my mother tongue. I have always maintained a certain distance from French, which I spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today. . . . I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. For myself I can put it extremely simply: In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind. I can never do that again. I do things in German that I would never permit myself to do in English. That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I have become bold, but in general I have maintained a certain distance. The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved. See “ ‘What Remains? The Language Remains,’ ” 12–13. 30. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 49. 31.  Ibid., 54–55. 32.  Ibid., 55. 33.  In an interview with Thilo Koch, Arendt notes that “it might be easier to accept being the victim of the devil or any other metaphysical principle rather than falling victim to a kind of random clown who lacks ideals and any sense of guilt.” See Arendt and Koch, “Der Fall Eichmann und die Deutschen: Ein Gespräch mit Thilo Koch (1964),” in Gespräche mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Adelbert Reif (München: 1976), 38. 34. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 55. 35.  Ibid., 252. 36.  Ibid., 135. 37.  Ibid., 113–114. 38.  Ibid., 46. 39.  Ibid., 287–288. 40.  Ibid., 47–48. 41. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 2. 42.  Ibid., 3.

An Irony of History: Ephraim Kishon’s German Triumph Gabriel N. Finder (University of Virginia) My entire literary work was created in Hebrew, in Israel, for the people of Zion. The absurd course of my life, however, made me an especially successful writer in the German-speaking countries. I’ve conquered German readers with the Hebrew language, with a language that no one today would speak if the Nazis had achieved their goal. I’ve become the favorite author of the offspring of my hangmen, and this is the true irony of history—Ephraim Kishon1

Ephraim Kishon (1924–2005), born Ferenc Hoffmann, was one of Israel’s most popular humorists from the 1950s through the 1970s.2 A Holocaust survivor, Kishon emigrated from Hungary to Israel in 1949 and took the Israeli scene by storm. He started his career writing satirical sketches for the newspaper Ma’ariv and also wrote lines and skits for many of Israel’s early comedic legends, among them the comedy duo of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. Apart from authoring a plethora of books and plays, Kishon went on to direct some of Israel’s most iconic comic films, including Te’alat Blaumilch (Blaumilch Canal) and Sallah Shabati. His popularity in his adopted home gradually faded, although it never dissipated entirely—but then, in (West) Germany, of all places, he became a preternatural success. Even after his heyday in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, his translated works remained relatively popular in Germany, especially among those of his generation. One of his admirers, the German-born Austrian writer Dietmar Grieser, recalls the pinnacle of Kishon’s popularity in Germany: “Autumn 1976. Ephraim Kishon is at the peak of his fame, he rules the book market with his collections of satire, he regularly heads all bestseller lists. There is hardly a household in which you could not find at least one of his books in the bookcase.”3 Sales of Kishon’s books worldwide exceed 40 million, a staggering figure in its own right. Truly astonishing, however, are the sales figures of his books in Germany: 34 million, and counting. A decade after his death, books by Kishon remain in print and are available in German bookstores. (One can also find his works in bookstores in his native Hungary, not to mention in Israel.) Moreover, Kishon’s popularity in Germany is measured not by books alone. His one-man show, Ein Abend mit Ephraim Kishon (An Evening with Ephraim Kishon), was seen by thousands of theatergoers 141

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in countless cities, large and small, throughout Germany and in other parts of Germanspeaking Europe. His plays were performed on numerous German stages. He was a regular on German television talk shows, and his radio skits are still rebroadcast throughout the country. In recognition of his accomplishments, Kishon won many prestigious awards in Germany.4 By the time of his death, Germans were generally as familiar with him as Israelis, if not more so, and eulogies were printed in several prominent Germany publications. In an obituary appearing in the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit, Josef Joffe termed Kishon’s success in Germany a “phenomenon, embedded in mass psychology, in need of explanation.”5 In seeking to understand Ephraim Kishon’s phenomenal success in Germany, it is useful to consider the broader question of Jewish humor in the country after the Holocaust. Jewish humor had flourished in Germany before the Nazis rose to power in the1930s.6 But by 1960, in a book titled Der jüdische Witz (The Jewish Joke), Salcia Landmann (1911–2002) was mourning its demise. The book, an unlikely bestseller, featured hundreds of Jewish jokes and anecdotes compiled by Landmann, a popular Hungarian-born Jewish writer who lived in Switzerland. With Freud in mind, Landmann argued in her introduction that the primary function of Jewish humor before the Holocaust was self-defense—the perennial deployment of humor to combat a hostile, antisemitic environment. Now, however, the Jews who personified this tradition, especially from Eastern Europe, were nearly all dead, killed in the Holocaust, while Jews in the postwar world, especially in America and Israel, no longer had any use for this sort of humor because they were generally spared the indignities of antisemitism (presumably because it had become taboo in the postwar world). “Wherever one looks,” Landmann wrote, “the conditions that produced the Jewish joke are nowhere to be found. One part of the Jewish people managed to survive the Nazi terror, but not [the Jewish] joke. It belongs to the Jewish past, just as German fairy tales belong to the German past.”7 Most critics (who apparently overlooked its somber introduction) loved Landmann’s book because they had not seen anything like it in postwar Germany. One of the few who didn’t was Friedrich Torberg (born Friedrich Kantor, 1908–1979), a prolific Viennese Jewish writer and himself a connoisseur of Jewish humor. His best-known book is probably Die Tante Jolesch oder der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes), a homage to interwar Jewish urban culture in Central Europe that was published in 1975. According to Torberg, an essential part of this culture was its sardonic humor, in particular as expressed by Jewish wits who frequented coffeehouses. In 1961, Torberg published a review of Landmann’s book in the Berlin-based periodical Der Monat. The essay’s title speaks volumes: “ ‘Wai geschrien!’ oder Salcia Landmann ermordet den jüdischen Witz” (Shouting “Oy Vey!” or Salcia Landmann Murders the Jewish Joke). In Torberg’s view, Landmann—with non-Jewish readers in mind—had taken numerous jokes and anecdotes from other traditions, recycled them with the substitution of stereotypical Jewish characters and labeled the concoction “authentic” Jewish humor, although any distinctive Jewish character or flavor was lost in translation. Moreover, Torberg charged, Landmann’s choice of (often negative) Jewish stereotypes had the effect of unwittingly validating antisemitic prejudices. This, he felt, might have accounted for some of the book’s unexpected popularity. In addition, the book’s success could be

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explained as the product of misguided philosemitism—a compulsion on the part of critics and readers alike to extol every artifact of Jewish cultural production regardless of its merits, in a kind of national (over-) compensation (Wiedergutmachung) for Germany’s Nazi past.8 Indeed, there are many flaws in Landmann’s analysis and presentation of Jewish humor, starting with her reductionist grasp of Freud’s analysis of humor. In his treatise Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious), published in 1905, Freud, who was a great admirer of Jewish humor, attributes multiple functions to jokes and anecdotes. According to Landmann, displaced aggression and rebellion, signifying a defensive retaliatory measure undertaken in reaction to an oppressive environment, characterize Jewish humor first and foremost. But for Freud, jokes also signify desires or expressions of skepticism, cynicism, or self-criticism; these, in his view, are the most salient features of Jewish jokes. As he famously wrote: The determinant of self-criticism may explain to us how it is that a number of the most telling jokes . . . have grown from the soil of Jewish popular life. They are stories invented by Jews and aimed at Jewish characteristics. The jokes made by outsiders are mostly brutal comic anecdotes, in which [the effort of making] a proper joke is saved by the fact that to the outsider the Jew counts as a comical figure. The Jewish jokes originating with Jews admit this, too, but they know their real faults and how they are related to their good points; and the share [that] the raconteur’s own person has in what is being criticized creates the subjective conditions for the joke-work that are otherwise difficult to set up. By the way, I do not know whether it often happens in other instances that a people should make fun of its own nature to such an extent.9

Understanding, sympathy, and admiration for “Jewish characteristics”—this is precisely what Torberg found lacking in Landmann’s book. Nowadays, the notion of distinctive Jewish characteristics smacks of essentialism, but Freud and most of his Jewish contemporaries, not to mention antisemites, subscribed to it. In his speech to the Viennese chapter of B’nai B’rith in May 1926 on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Freud lavished praise on exemplary Jewish character traits, which he presumed he shared with his audience, upstanding Viennese Jewish men like himself.10 But Freud was not immune to negative Jewish stereotypes then in circulation, especially those pertaining to East European Jews; in several condescending Jewish jokes that appear in his book, Ostjuden are portrayed as unclean, physically malformed, insufferable, and conniving. Torberg, too, subscribed to the notion of a Jewish character. However, perhaps because he had witnessed the devastating effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, he was less inclined to make use of negative stereotypes. In his novels, especially Meine ist die Rache (Revenge is Mine) and Hier bin ich, mein Vater (Here I Am, My Father), published respectively in 1943 and 1948 during his exile in Los Angeles, the Jewish protagonists are defined both by a striving for justice and fairness and by self-examination. In Torberg’s view, the best Jewish jokes exemplify these characteristics. Near the end of his critique of Landmann’s book, Torberg takes issue with her characterization of Israeli humor. Landmann, writing in 1960, did not discount the existence of Israeli humor but argued that it dealt primarily with the internal friction

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among various Jewish communities—for example, German versus Polish Jews. According to Landmann: “The Israeli himself . . . hardly produces a new and distinct form of jokes. He has no jokes because he does not need them. If the Jew in Israel is attacked, he can defend himself with a weapon instead of a joke, just like his ancestors in biblical times. The new Israel is as devoid of jokes as is the Bible.”11 In Torberg’s pointed rejoinder: “First, the Israeli needs jokes; second, he has jokes; and third, he has them not because he needs them but because he has them.”12 However sarcastic—and circular—Torberg intended this explanation to be, his point was well taken in 1961 and remains valid to this day: that Israeli humor flourishes despite the fact that it does not necessarily reflect latent aggression or self-defense, but rather tackles the manifold human devices and desires associated with daily Israeli life. Although Torberg was living in Vienna when he wrote his scathing review of Landmann’s book, he was well aware of the vim and vigor of early Israeli humor because (as he took pains to note) he himself had translated a book of Israeli humor into German earlier that year. More precisely, Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot! Satiren aus Israel was the German version of an English translation of a book of humorous sketches originally written in Hebrew. The English version, Look Back, Mrs. Lot!, was compiled and translated by Yohanan Goldman and published in the United States (1960) and Great Britain (1961). The author of the sketches was Ephraim Kishon; in the years to come, Torberg was to translate from English a total of 17 books written by Kishon, the last being published a year after Torberg’s death.13 Why spend close to two decades on such a massive translation project? Torberg was apparently motivated not so much by profit as by his belief that Kishon’s work represented nothing less than the salvation of Jewish humor in Germany and in German-speaking lands. This, of course, raises the issue of how Kishon’s humor should be characterized. Is it “Israeli” or is it “Jewish”? The answer: It is both. Consider, for example, Kishon’s story “Jewish Poker,” the tale of how Jossele (Arbinka, in the original Hebrew version), an indolent and incorrigible yet endearing schemer, persuades Kishon to play a Jewish variant of poker. “Jewish poker is played without cards,” Jossele explains, “in your head, as befits the People of the Book.” In this game, it transpires, the winner is whoever thinks of a higher number. Kishon struggles to outwit his opponent and at one point appears to prevail—whereupon Jossele shouts “ultimo!” and declares himself the winner of a large pot. When Kishon protests, Jossele invokes the authority of a leading poker expert whose ruling is that “the player who says ‘ultimo’ first wins in any case and regardless of the number.” Jossele adds: “That’s precisely the fun in poker, that you have to make split-second decisions.”14 Kishon decides to set a trap for his unsuspecting friend. They place their last bets in the pot. Jossele leads, shouting “ultimo!” and reaching for the money. Kishon, however, counters with “Ben-Gurion” and pockets the impressive stack of bills. “BenGurion,” he clarifies for Jossele, “trumps even ultimo.” When a disgruntled Jossele demands his money back, claiming that Kishon invented the Ben-Gurion gambit out of thin air, Kishon does not contradict him but retorts that “the charm of poker is precisely that you never return the money you’ve won.”15 This is Jewish humor, with Jewish mental agility on full display. However, the punch line, a satiric allusion to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his domineering style of leadership, gives the story a distinctive Israeli coloration. In a similar

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vein, Ein Apfel ist am allem schuld (An Apple is Responsible for Everything), published in 1994, may be inspired by funny interpretations of the Ten Commandments, a standard motif in Jewish humor, but its main protagonists, who wrestle with the demands of Jewish law and custom, are Kishon himself and his very typical Israeli family, neighbors, and acquaintances. To be sure, the disparity between the divine promise of Israel’s deliverance and the trials and tribulations of the Jews is inherent to Jewish humor. Notwithstanding, the standard elements of Jewish humor in Kishon’s work are often overshadowed by local Israeli motifs. While his protagonists are Jewish, they are first and foremost Israelis who happen to be Jews. In addition, much of Kishon’s humor centers on the gap between the Zionist ideal and the reality of Israeli life—a characteristic theme of much Israeli humor.16 Although Kishon had a genius for transposing Jewish humor in an Israeli key, what mattered most to Torberg were the specifically Jewish characteristics in Kishon’s writing—in particular, its introspection and its emphasis on the little man’s zeal for justice and fairness. These, for Torberg, constituted the distinctive bedrock of Jewish humor, and in this sense, Kishon’s humor promised the revival of Jewish humor in Germany. Kishon’s decidedly conservative political and social satire is inhabited by plumbers, house painters, doctors, impresarios, professors, and the inimitable Jossele (Arbinka), all of them struggling to evade financial ruin by outsmarting an oppressive and irrational Israeli political and socioeconomic system. (In addition, his social satire does not spare women’s aspirations for gender equality. Male victims include both Kishon and Arbinka.) Kishon may have been an Israeli patriot, but he did not recoil from writing pointed satire of Israel’s political elite and labyrinthine bureaucracy. For all of his satirical treatment of Israel’s sacrosanct institutions—the family, society, and the state—Kishon’s tone is never mean-spirited; it is gentle, sympathetic, charitable, and, ultimately, forgiving. Regardless of Israelis’ flaws, as far as Kishon was concerned, “the Utopian vision,” as Gidi Nevo observes, “will come about.”17 Prime examples of Kishon’s patriotism are Wie unfair, David! (How Unfair, David!) and Pardon, wir haben gewonnen (Sorry, We Won), both written after the Six-Day War and published in 1970 and 1971, respectively. In both books, Kishon avails himself of the opportunity to heap adulations on Israel’s military, taking special pride in the country’s citizen-soldiers. Even in endearing and intimate humorous sketches of family life, which most often feature his elegant, accomplished, but exacting wife and the couple’s three lovable but exasperating children, Kishon’s patriotism is on full display. In “Ein Vater wird geboren” (A Father is Born), which appears in one of his most popular collections, Kishon’s beste Familiengeschichten (Kishon’s Best Family Stories), first published in 1979 and reissued several times, Kishon recounts his nervousness when his wife was due to give birth to their first child. She goes into a prolonged labor; after several hours, Kishon is beside himself, driving the doctors, nurses, and even the hospital’s night watchman to distraction. Returning home from the hospital in the middle of the night, he thinks of God for the first time. Even though he is not religious, he kneels on the wet pavement, in the presence of bewildered passersby. “Lord in heaven,” he prays, “please help me this one time, let the girl be a boy and, if possible, a normal one, not for my sake but out of national reasons; we need young, healthy pioneers.”18 (Kishon’s wish is granted.)

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Much of the credit for Kishon’s success in Germany must go to Torberg, who labored tirelessly to introduce Kishon to a German audience by means of his elegant and inventive translations of Kishon’s prose from English. (Indeed, the German ­versions read better than the English.)19 Kishon and Torberg developed a symbiotic ­relationship. The survival of one depended on the other. In their voluminous corres­ pondence, they went so far as to express love for each other, although their partnership was not without friction. Torberg was discomfited by what he regarded as Kishon’s greed, he chafed in Kishon’s shadow, and—given that he saw himself as responsible for Kishon’s financial success in Germany—he felt that he deserved more money.20 For his part, Kishon wanted Torberg to translate ever more quickly.21 Kishon’s success raises a question that bedevils all Jews who have made a name for themselves in postwar Germany (or Austria). The contemporary German Jewish writer Maxim Biller, who was born in Czechoslovakia, adroitly explores this thorny issue in his humorous short story “Harlem Holocaust.” The story’s protagonist, Gary (born Gerhard) Warszawski, is the grotesquely obnoxious son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. An American professor who had disavowed his Jewish heritage in favor of African American culture, he becomes obsessed with the Holocaust after a life-changing encounter with his mother’s cousin, a survivor. From this point on, his novels are all variations on the Holocaust. The narrator of the story, Warszawski’s embittered German translator, reflects that in America, he was read only by a small coterie of friends and colleagues; . . . the public over there took no notice of him; as an experimental writer, he vegetated on the sidelines of publicity. In Germany it was a totally different matter. His voice quickly became more prominent here; he was frequently invited to appear on television and was interviewed at length, for his exalted bearing and penetrating look provided the kind of high-class entertainment that we normally had to get from Zadek, Gysi, Reich-Ranicki, and all those other guys. I call it the Alfred-Kerr syndrome.22

Can Kishon’s success in Germany, like the fictional Warszawski’s, be attributed to German guilt in the wake of the Holocaust, or to German fascination with the “exotic Jew” in a land with practically no Jews—both symptoms of Germans’ overcompensation and misguided philosemitism in the wake of the Holocaust (as noted by Torberg in his assessment of Salcia Landmann’s book)? Perhaps to a degree, but in Kishon’s case a concatenation of other forces was also at work. In the first place, Kishon was the beneficiary of Israel’s underdog status in the 1960s and 1970s. Latent postwar antisemitism in Germany notwithstanding, from the mid-1960s on, with the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany in 1965, Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the summer Olympics Games hosted in Munich in 1972, the West German public showed growing sympathy for, and interest in, Israel. A majority of (West) Germans sided with the Israelis in their conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians until the late 1970s.23 During the heyday of Germans’ romance with Israel, they did not seem to mind even when the tone of Kishon’s humor occasionally turned acerbic and aggressive, as it did, for example, in Pardon, wir haben gewonnen, in which Kishon gloated over the Arab defeat and upbraided Western countries for their lukewarm support, if not betrayal, of Israel during a time when its very existence was at stake. Germans’

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attitudes, especially within the German Left, changed with the rise of Menachem Begin and the Likud party to power in Israel in 1977, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the first intifada of 1987–1993. In the minds of German leftists, Israelis, formerly the oppressed, were now the oppressors of the Palestinians. Many on the Left made the invidious comparison between Israelis and Nazis, accusing Israelis of doing to the Palestinians what the Germans had done to the Jews. But, as Josef Joffe intimates, even in this environment, in which Zionism became unfashionable and German guilt for the Holocaust began to dissipate, the German center and centerRight remained largely in Israel’s corner—and their followers remained admirers of Kishon.24 Germans, especially middle-class Germans, liked Kishon’s brand of humor because they could relate to it. As Joffe points out, until the 1980s, Israel projected the image of a Central European enclave, a social democracy with a state-controlled economy. Thus, “when Kishon wrote about the search for an apartment or neighbors who get on your nerves, one had only to imagine Bialik Street as Schiller Street, and then every German reader could nod his head with a sigh: That’s how it is.”25 Moreover, Germans perceived reflections of their own families in Kishon’s. “Die beste Ehefrau von allen” (“The best wife of all”), a phrase that begins many of Kishon’s stories in German, became a catchphrase among Kishon’s German fans irrespective of the health of their marriages. In fact, it was Torberg who was responsible for the phrase, which does not appear in any of the original Hebrew stories; in Hebrew, Kishon simply used the impersonal, patronizing, and chauvinistic term haishah (the wife). (In an ironic twist of fate, the German phrase caused Kishon considerable consternation when his own marriage to “the best wife of all” began to deteriorate).26 In this vein, Loriot (the pen name for Vicco von Bülow [1923–2011]), the immensely popular German comedian, humorist, and cartoonist, comes to mind. Loriot’s métier encompassed the consequences of miscommunication between individuals, especially between husbands and wives.27 To this day, German readers can find stories by Kishon and Loriot side by side in popular collections of humorous sketches. Germans also love their cars, which may account for the popularity of Kishons beste Autofahrergeschichten (Kishon’s Best Drivers’ Stories), published in 1985. (Some of Loriot’s funniest cartoons feature Germans sitting pretty in their cars.)28 It stands to reason that Germans would have found Kishon’s humorous descriptions of his jalopy, family road trips, hazardous driving conditions on Israel’s highways, and, especially, his endless and demoralizing pursuit of parking spots intimately familiar. In “Süss ist die Rache” (Revenge is Sweet), Kishon and Jossele are enjoying an espresso at a sidewalk café when they spy a policeman writing a parking ticket and affixing it to the windshield of a car. Jossele bursts out of the café and accosts him: “ ‘Stop, stop!’ he [Jossele] screeched. ‘I went inside only for a minute, just to drink an espresso.’ ‘Mister,’ the [representative of the] law answered, ‘tell it to the judge.’ ” Jossele, however, is undeterred, and he continues with a relentless stream of verbiage. Exasperated, the policeman threatens Jossele with additional violations and even arrest if he does not desist. “ ‘Don’t you see?’ asked Jossele. ‘This is the reason that people hate you [the police].’ ” At this point, the policeman demands in vain to see Jossele’s driver’s license. Another violation. He finally asks him whether he has a mandatory vehicle insurance card. Jossele’s coy reply: “ ‘No. I also don’t have a

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car.’ ” The officer is dumbfounded. “ ‘You don’t have a car? . . . Yes, but, who then owns this red convertible?’ ‘How should I know?’ replies Jossele, now a little annoyed. ‘I  just went into the café for a quick espresso. That’s all, and I’ve been trying to explain this to you this whole time. But you won’t listen.’ ” The policeman turns pale, removes the parking ticket from the windshield, rips it into tiny pieces, and then disappears into the evening’s darkness. “The poor guy,” Kishon concludes, “will never be the same.”29 A self-righteous and unyielding traffic cop, representing arbitrary and overweening state authority—both Israelis and German drivers were intimately familiar with such types. Which self-respecting German driver wouldn’t derive indignant pleasure from seeing an officious traffic officer made the butt of a humiliating prank? Moreover, this sketch serves a larger purpose: it asserts the ordinary citizen’s claim to modest modern amenities, including a decent parking spot. Germans and Israeli drivers alike would share that sentiment. During the postwar era, what Israelis (exemplified by Kishon) and Germans had most in common—indeed, this was a hallmark of both Israelis and Germans—was skepticism in spades, along with an acute sense of irony borne of the precariousness, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons, of their respective lives. Like Kishon, many members of Israel’s founding generation were Holocaust survivors who had escaped death by the skin of their teeth only to find themselves in a country surrounded by enemy nations intent on its destruction. West Germans, for their part, emerged defeated, bitter, and disoriented from the Second World War; in an uncertain world of radically different expectations, many attempted to catch the fast train to bourgeois respectability in the shadow of the Cold War. Both countries became breeding grounds for mordant satire. Kishon was popular in Germany as well as in Israel because his brand of satire spoke to the uncertain predicament that so many Israelis and Germans felt in their bones. It goes without saying that an older generation of Germans who appreciated Kishon’s humor would be mortified by contemporary Jewish humor in Germany, as exemplified by Oliver Polak, the son of a German Jew who survived several concentration camps. Polak’s edgy and unrestrained brand of stand-up humor is on display in his provocative one-man shows, Ich darf das, ich bin Jude (I’m Allowed, I’m Jewish), which appeared in book form in 2008, and the award-winning Jud süss-sauer (Jew, Sweet-Sour—an obvious pun on the title of the infamous 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Jud Süss). Polak unabashedly takes Germans to task for the crimes of the Nazi period, but he doesn’t recoil from raking Jews over the coals, either.30 In contrast, the Holocaust is all but absent in Kishon’s work, and this omission, I would suggest, was critical to his success in Germany. Indeed, the casual German reader might be forgiven for not knowing that Kishon was a survivor, as the Holocaust is only rarely (and even then obliquely) mentioned in his scores of books, plays, and screenplays. It is not as if Kishon chose to repress memories of the past. Throughout Nichts zu Lachen: Die Erinnerungen (Nothing to  Laugh About: Recollections), his extended autobiographical conversation with popular Israeli television anchor Yaron London, which was published in 1993 in both Germany and Israel (there under the title Dusiaḥ biografi), Kishon openly discusses antisemitism and his struggle for survival in Hungary, first during Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany and then after the Germans’ takeover of the country. Indeed,

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Kishon was obsessed with the Nazi past. To take but one example, related by his widow, Lisa Kishon-Witasek, Kishon regularly listened to recordings of Hitler and Goebbels in his car because it gave him “enormous satisfaction that they were dead and he was rolling along in his Cadillac.31 It may be that the Holocaust is virtually absent from Kishon’s work because, by the mid-1960s, the Jews’ greatest enemies, in Kishon’s view, were not, in the main, Germans. Rather, they were Israel’s contemporary antagonists—the Arabs, followed closely by their Communist supporters in the USSR and its East European satellites.32 His most stinging verbal assaults on Arabs and, to a degree, Communists appear in Pardon, wir haben gewonnen. Bernard Reich and David H. Goldberg noted that “the eve of the Six-Day War (1967) marked the peak of Kishon’s popularity in Israel, as he captured with sensitivity and humor the day-to-day atmosphere of a country under siege from the perspective of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who was amazed and beguiled to realize that his country had managed to withstand the Arab threat to destroy him again and again.”33 For Kishon, Arabs had moved to the forefront in the pantheon of Israel’s enemies. Notwithstanding, Kishon gradually became more inclined to confront Germany’s Nazi past and German antisemitism. “One of the most important of his books to him,” according to Kishon-Witasek, was his novel Mein Kamm (My Comb).34 Kishon wrote an earlier version of it after the war while he was still in Hungary, and it even won a prize awarded by a Hungarian literary journal, though it was not published; he revised it in the 1990s. Published in Germany in 1997, it is a satirical allegory of the baleful effects of racism. In the novel, in an explicit reference to skinheads, it is bald people, ironically, who are oppressed and terrorized by the government on “racial” grounds. This comes about after a clerk is dismissed by his baldheaded boss. The clerk pays a friend, a dissolute journalist, to write an article in his defense. Writing under a pseudonym, the journalist composes a diatribe against bald people in which he claims, arraying bogus historical and biological proof, that bald people are evil and exercise a pernicious influence in society. The journalist becomes the hero of wild-haired youth. He forms an anti-baldies political party that takes over the reins of government and restricts the rights of baldheaded people. His government’s hallmark piece of discriminatory legislation—Kishon’s spoof of the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg Laws—classifies people on the basis of the thickness of their parents’ and grandparents’ hair. The secret police launch a hunt for people who attempt to conceal their baldness under wigs and toupees, while the party’s leaders line their pockets with the proceeds generated by the clandestine manufacturing of—naturally—wigs and toupees.35 The moral of the story is clear: race is an arbitrary but highly effective pretext for justifying aggressive state power, with dire consequences. Also clear is the analogy between this fictitious state and its discriminatory policies and Nazi Germany and its deadly persecution of Europe’s Jews. Nevertheless, although the book has much to commend it, Mein Kamm is not a frank discussion of the Nazi years. It circles around those years, but it does not directly confront them. To be sure, the few Jewish humorists who returned to Germany or to Austria after 1945 were initially hesitant to broach the persecution of the Jews under Nazism. But by the 1960s several of them, for instance, Georg Kreisler in Austria, were publicly deploying humor to expose their

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fellow Germans and Austrians’ complicity in Nazi anti-Jewish crimes and their later hypocritical efforts to whitewash their complicity.36 Kishon did not choose this path. In this regard, it may be instructive to invoke Franz Kafka. In January 1904, Kafka, then 21 years old, wrote to a friend: I think one should absolutely read only those books that bite and sting. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a fist to the skull, then why read this book? So that it would make us happy, as you write? My God, we would also be happy even if we had no books, and those books that make us happy we could write ourselves when needed. Instead, we need books whose impact on us is like a disaster that causes us much pain, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being driven into the woods far away from any living soul, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. This is what I believe.37

As historian Alon Confino writes, Kafka was only partly correct: “Of course books offer us hope, happiness, even a smile and a laugh, that enrich our life. Books can and should offer hope as well as a painful punch; there is no reason to limit the impact of books to one attitude at the expense of the other. But Kafka was of course insightful that books and stories shape our innermost identities.”38 To be sure, humorous books and humor in other forms can bite and sting, too. The books and performances of Oliver Polak, for example, do so. Kishon’s books, in contrast, even Mein Kamm, do not, nor did they shape or even challenge Germans’ innermost identities. They were, and still are, a pleasant diversion for Germans, an opportunity for guiltless association with Israeli Jews and, by extension, with all Jews. Although one occasionally finds in Kishon’s work a between-the-lines admonition to draw lessons from recent German history, these hints were never conspicuous enough, even to hypersensitive German sensibilities, to evoke the burden of the past and make Germans feel guilty. Indeed, Kishon’s humor was so successful in Germany precisely because Germans could enjoy it without compunction, even if its author was a Holocaust survivor from Israel. Kishon let them off the hook, allowing them to compensate their guilt by reading none other than Kishon. It is worthy of note that, whereas Germans, especially those of his generation, loved Kishon, that love was not reciprocated. A recording of his one-man show, Ein Abend mit Ephraim Kishon, demonstrates that Kishon was able to establish an easy rapport with audiences. But this was largely a pose; although Kishon did not believe in collective guilt or in the guilt of Germans born after 1945, he was never quite at ease with those German contemporaries who constituted the majority of his admirers.39 Be that as it may, Kishon relished his success in Germany. In the first place, it was sweet revenge for German crimes committed during the Holocaust. “It gave him great satisfaction,” reports Kishon-Witasek, “that the children and grandchildren of his hangmen stand in line to buy his books and get his autograph.”40 Moreover, he craved their adulation because he was a man driven by public recognition. “Man’s strongest drive,” he once explained to his wife, “is not the sex drive or . . . the will to power but the need for an audience (Publikumstrieb).”41 Yaron London got to know Kishon well while helping him write his autobiography. “The praise that the Germans showered on him made him dizzy,” London writes, “and he wanted more and more of it.”42 If Germans indeed became his adoring public, Kishon, a master of irony,

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marked it down to an irony of history. And while the match between Kishon and Germans was not exactly made in heaven, it provided emotional gratification for both sides, albeit for very different reasons.43

Notes 1.  Ephraim Kishon, Nichts zu lachen: Die Erinnerungen, translated from Hebrew by Ursula Abrahamy and Ephraim Kishon (Munich: 1993), 34. This memoir is the fruit of Kishon’s interviews with Yaron London, the popular Israeli news anchorman. London prepared the text, which Kishon then edited. 2. On Kishon’s meteoric success in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, see “Ferenc uMusyah,” episode two of Bimdinat hayehudim, an 11-part series, directed by Anat Zeltser and Modi Bar-On and screened on Israeli television in 2004, that explores Israeli identity through the history of Israeli humor. The fact that the first episode of the television series Ḥ agigat ’ei­nayim (broadcast on Channel 1 in 2015) was devoted to Kishon shows that his legacy is still alive in Israel. 3.  Dietmar Grieser, Das zweite Ich: Von Hans Moser bis Kishon, von Falco bis Loriot (Vienna: 2011), 103. 4.  Getzel Kressel and Anat Feinberg, “Kishon, Ephraim,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (2nd ed.), ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum (Detroit: 2007), 12:200. 5.  Josef Joffe, “Zum Tod von Ephraim Kishon,” Die Zeit (3 February 2005), online at zeit.de/2005/06/Trostspender/komplettansicht?print=true (accessed 22 December 2015). 6. See Michael Brenner, “Als der Humor noch in Deutschland zu Hause war: Ein Nachruf auf den berlinisch-jüdischen Geist,” in Humor (Jüdischer Almanach des Leo Baeck Instituts), ed. Gisela Dachs (Frankfurt: 2004), 11–25; Marcus G. Patka and Alfred Stalzer (eds.), Alle Meschugge? Jüdischer Witz und Humor (Vienna: 2013). 7. Salicia Landmann, Der jüdische Witz: Soziologie und Sammlung (Olton: 1960), 111. Landmann’s book remains popular in Germany and Austria; the 17th edition was published in 2013. 8. Friedrich Torberg, “ ‘Wai geschrien!’ oder Salcia Landmann ermordet den jüdischen Witz: Anmerkungen zu einem beunruhigenden Bestseller (Oktober 1961),” in idem, PPP: Pamphlete, Parodien, Post Scripta (Munich: 1976 [1964]), 236–268. On Torberg’s attack on Landmann, see also Josef Joffe, Mach dich nich so klein, du bist nicht so gross! Der jüdische Humor als Weisheit, Witz und Waffe (Munich: 2015), 27–29, 31–33. 9. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: 2003), 106–107. 10. Sigmund Freud, “Address to the Society of Bnai Brith,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alex Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: 1959), 20:273–274. 11. Landmann, Der Jüdische Witz, 111. 12.  Torberg, “ ‘Wai geschrien!’ ” 262. 13.  All of Torberg’s translations were published by the German publisher Langen Müller, the last of them in 1980. 14.  Ephraim Kishon, “Jüdisches Poker,” in idem, Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot! Satiren aus Israel, trans. Friedrich Torberg (Munich: 1961), 12–17, quotes on 12, 16 (here and elsewhere in this essay, all translations from the German are mine). In English, see Ephraim Kishon, “Jewish Poker,” in Look Back, Mrs Lot!, trans. Yohanan Goldman (London: 1961), 15–18; quotes on 15, 18. The story also appears in William Novak and Moshe Waldoks (eds.), The Big Book of Jewish Humor, 2nd ed. (New York: 2006), 18–21. In these translations, Arbinka is rendered as “Ervinke.” 15.  Kishon, “Jüdisches Poker,” 17; idem, “Jewish Poker,” 18. 16. Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: 2013), ch. 5.

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17. Gidi Nevo, “Arbinka, Shtucks and Co.—The Makings of Kishon’s Social Satire,” Israel Studies 10, no. 2 (2005), 129–146, quote on 145. 18.  Ephraim Kishon, “Ein Vater wird geboren,” in idem, Kishon’s beste Familiengeschichten: Satiren, 7th ed., trans. Friedrich Torberg (Munich: 1979), 16. 19. Torberg’s biographer agrees with this assessment; see David Axmann, Friedrich Torberg: Die Biographie (Munich: 2008), 220. 20.  Ibid., 220–221. 21.  Lisa Kishon-Witasek, Geliebter Ephraim (Munich: 2012), 97. 22.  Maxim Biller, “Harlem Holocaust,” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology, ed. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler (Omaha: 2002), 205–242, quote on 228. Peter Zadek (1926–2009) was a German film and theater director. Gregor Gysi (b. 1948) is a member of the German Bundestag, representing the political party Die Linke (The Left); before 1989 he was a reformist politician in East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED). Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013) was an influential literary critic and host of the popular literary talk show Literarisches Quartett on German public television from 1988 to 2001. Alfred Kerr (1867–1948) was an influential theater critic in Imperial and Weimar Germany. Zadek, Reich-Ranicki, and Kerr were born to Jewish families. Zadek spent the war years in London, Reich-Ranicki in the Warsaw ghetto, from which he escaped, and then in the Polish Communist underground. Kerr fled Germany in 1933 and spent the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland, France, and Great Britain. Gysi has Jewish ancestry. All four have been perceived in the public eye as Jewish, which may have contributed to their renown. 23. See Hannfried von Hindenburg, Demonstrating Reconciliation: State and Society in West German Foreign Policy toward Israel, 1952–1965 (New York: 2007), chs. 5–6; Inge Deutschkron, Israel und die Deutschen: Das besondere Verhältnis (Cologne: 1983), chs. 17–18; Lili Gardner Feldman, The Special Relationship between West Germany and Israel (Boston: 1984), ch. 9. 24.  Joffe, “Zum Tod von Ephraim Kishon.” 25. Ibid. 26. Kishon-Witasek, Geliebter Ephraim, 73. 27. On Loriot, see Stefan Lukschy, Der Glückliche schlägt keine Hunde: Ein Loriot Porträt (Berlin: 2013). 28. See Rolf Winter (ed.), Finden Sie das etwa komisch? Karikaturen von Loriot, Markus, Neugebauer, Papan, Tetsche, Wolf und Fotosatiren von Kortmann (Hamburg: 1985), 24. 29.  Ephraim Kishon, “Süss ist die Rache,” in idem, Kishons beste Autofahrergeschichten, trans. Axel Benning, Gerhard Bonner, and Friedrich Torberg (Munich: 1985), 11–14. 30. Oliver Polak and Jens Oliver Haas, Ich darf das, ich bin Jude (Cologne: 2008). 31. Kishon-Witasek, Geliebter Ephraim, 56–57; also 233. 32.  Ibid., 122. 33.  Bernard Reich and David H. Goldberg (eds.), “Kishon, Ephraim (1924–2005),” in idem, Historical Dictionary of Israel, 2nd ed. (Lanham: 2008), 277. 34. Kishon-Witasek, Geliebter Ephraim, 124. 35.  Ephraim Kishon, Mein Kamm (Munich and Berlin: 1997). 36. See Maren Waffenschmid and Adlabert Wagner (eds.), Our City! Jewish Vienna— Then and Now, trans. Nick Somers (Vienna: 2013), 76–77. 37. Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (New York: 1958), 27–28; quoted in Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: 2014), 236. 38. Confino, A World Without Jews, 236. 39. See Kishon-Witasek, Geliebter Ephraim, 79–82. 40.  Ibid., 121. See also Reich and Goldberg, “Kishon, Ephraim (1924–2005),” 277. 41. Kishon-Witaskek, Geliebter Ephraim, 121. 42.  Yaron London, Lu’ hayiti pirat: zikhronot (Jerusalem: 2014), 304. 43.  It should not be overlooked that many Jews in Germany took pride in Kishon’s popularity. In 2001, sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann conducted an interview with a Jewish man named Gabriel, born in 1969, who still lived in a provincial town in Germany. He had his own

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humorous radio show on which he and his guests told numerous Jewish jokes, including jokes about Jews. As Gabriel told Bodemann: “I believe that I do more for Judaism, in my small microcosm, making Judaism cool, as opposed to some old-fashioned Orthodox Jews with their ideas. Why can’t we have some humor about it? I believe Ephraim Kishon has done more for the Jews than any rabbi. Others in my generation support that completely.” Y. Michal Bodemann, A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (Durham: 2005), 173–174.

The “Tsadik from Plonsk” and “Goldenyu”: Political Satire in Dzigan and Shumacher’s Israeli Comic Repertoire Diego Rotman (The Hebrew University) I would get rid of all the government ministries; then there would be fewer ministers. Who needs so many of them? Once, I understand, it was a great honor to be a minister in Israel, but today? Today we’ve reached the point that if you tell someone that he “thinks like a minister,” he’s insulted.1

Shimen Dzigan2 and Yisroel Shumacher were the eponymous duo whose comic theater delighted an entire generation of Yiddish cultural consumers. The issues that they dealt with throughout their performing career reflected the major topics that generally preoccupied Jews of their era: the vagaries of making a living, the state of the economy, world and local politics, marriage, Jewish tradition, antisemitism, and current events. After the two artists emigrated to Israel, their repertoire expanded to include such issues as the individual confronting the Israeli bureaucracy, the question of Yiddish versus Hebrew, aliyah and the absorption of new immigrants, the nuclear arms race, the Jewish-Arab conflict, emigration from Israel, relations between diaspora Jewry (especially American Jews) and Israel, the memory of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust.3 Dzigan and Shumacher’s sharp perception of Israeli reality and their unusual command of the satiric genre enabled them to address a wide range of themes that were central both to Israeli society at large and to the more recent arrivals among the immigrants, in particular. One of the major targets of their satirical criticism was the Israeli political leadership. This essay is devoted to central aspects of their critique.4 In order to deal with Dzigan and Shumacher’s political satire and to illustrate how Dzigan’s work changed after the two split up, I will analyze two pairs of skits that focused on two prime ministers: David Ben-Gurion in “Der nayer dibek” (The New Dybbuk; 1957) and “In der yeshive fun plonsker rebbe” (In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva; 1961); and Golda Meir in the monologue “Goldenyu” (1971) and the skit “Golde baym poypst” (Golda Visits the Pope; 1973).

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Dzigan and Shumacher’s Early Careers Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher became central figures on the Yiddish stage in Poland prior to the Second World War and later on in Israel and in the Yiddish diaspora. They began their careers on the modernist experimental Yiddish stage in the Ararat theater company (directed by the poet Moyshe Broderzon), which was based in Lodz. Following six years of activity in the Lodz collective (1927–1933) they moved to Warsaw; after a year of performing with Di Yidishe Bande (The Jewish Gang) they reestablished Ararat together with some of the original actors from Lodz. Two years later, the renewed Ararat, of which they were both star performers and directors, became known (and later was officially publicized) under their names. In Warsaw, they transitioned from modernist theater to satirical-political performance in response to the dire political and economic reality on the eve of the Second World War. Following the German invasion of Poland, Dzigan and Shumacher found refuge in  the Soviet zone, continuing their work as artistic directors and actors in the Bialystok State Yiddish Little Theater until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. A few months after the group was disbanded, Dzigan and Shumacher were arrested for alleged anti-Soviet activity and imprisoned for four years in the Aktyubinsk labor camp in Kazakhstan. They were released in 1947 and after a few months were able to return to Poland, where they established a new satirical theater group that was active until 1949. In 1950, they made their first appearance in Israel as “guest performers,” a designation that allowed them to get around the government-sponsored prohibition against local actors performing in Yiddish (in force from 1949 to 1950).5 By 1958, they were permanent residents of Israel but continued to undertake performance tours abroad, particularly in North and South America. The team broke up at the outset of the 1960s. Shumacher, who performed in one serious dramatic stage role in a Yiddish repertory company, died soon thereafter, in 1961. Dzigan went on to organize a new satire company and carried on performing in Yiddish until his death in 1980. The Dzigan and Shumacher duo (and later, Dzigan on his own) took on a subversive and transformative role vis-à-vis Israeli culture and politics, comparable to the function they had filled in Warsaw. As Dzigan would later put it in his “Elections” monologue (1977), the hapless citizen—given his utter lack of confidence in the political leaders of the country—might just as soon declare his own candidacy for office, if only to avoid becoming “just one more among the three million zeroes who are being led down the primrose path.”6 Despite performing in a milieu in which a monolingual Hebrew national culture was institutionalized and Yiddish language and culture were officially considered unwelcome, Dzigan and Schumacher (and later, Dzigan) succeeded in creating and developing what many perceive to be the most significant satirical stage presence on the Israeli scene prior to the Six-Day War of 1967.

“The New Dybbuk” On October 8, 1957, Dzigan and Shumacher’s satirical Yiddish theater premiered in Israel with Nayn mos gelekhter (Nine Measures of Laughter) in Tel Aviv’s Ohel

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Shem Theater. Like their previous programs, Dzigan and Shumacher’s new production was widely covered in the press, on radio, and in newsreels. The performance was praised for its high artistic level, for the quality of its political satire, and, in particular, for the duo’s understanding of the Israeli way of life. Nevertheless, the final skit in the program—a satirical parody authored by “Y. Shudzhig” (Dzigan and Shumacher) with music by Shaul Berezowsky, titled “Der nayer dibek” (The New Dybbuk), caused a certain amount of discomfort.7 The source for Dzigan and Shumacher’s parody8 was S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a modern classic of the Jewish and Israeli stage that was first produced (in Hayim Nahman Bialik’s Hebrew translation) in 1922 by the Moscow Habima, directed by Evgenii Vakhtangov.9 Enormously influential in both the Hebrew and Yiddish theatrical canons, The Dybbuk was performed over the course of the first 40 years of Habima’s existence, and it became an almost mythic symbol of the modern Hebrew stage.10 The date that appears on the manuscript of Dzigan and Shumacher’s parody is 1956, the year in which Habima staged its one-thousandth performance of The Dybbuk and in which the star, actress Hanna Rovina,11 was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize. It is likely that these events provided the main impetus for creating the parody.12 Dzigan and Shumacher’s version is a reframing of the original Dybbuk story: Chanan and Leah’s unrealized love; the deceased Chanan’s spirit possessing the body of his beloved; the exorcism of this spirit (dybbuk) by Rabbi Azriel of Miropol; and Leah’s death, which allows the lovers to realize their union, although not in the world of the living. In the parody, all of the action takes place in the bes-medresh (study house) of Reb Dovidl, the tsadik from Plonsk (a town in north-central Poland, birthplace of David Ben-Gurion). The tsadik, in other words, is none other than the prime minister, as personified by Shumacher. His “court” is where “Zeyde Yisroel” (Grandpa Israel), with his daughter Medinahle (a diminutive for medinah, or state), played by Dzigan, comes to beg the renowned master to exorcise the demon that is possessing her. During the exorcism ceremony, the dybbuk reveals his identity as a new immigrant who, at the age of 41, is unable to find work and therefore cannot manage for himself in his new country. After a certain amount of negotiation, the tsadik succeeds in exorcising him in exchange for the dybbuk’s receiving a guaranteed exemption from income tax. This is accomplished by means of having the dybbuk move to Eilat—at the time, a small, godforsaken town in the south of Israel, where residents were exempt from paying taxes. On the way, however, the dybbuk makes a short detour to Germany to collect his restitution money.13 Meanwhile, Medinahle, who is madly in love with the dybbuk, awaits his return, and the parody (unlike the original Dybbuk, which ends tragically) concludes with his reappearance and a love song sung by the entire ensemble. In the parody the two central themes are the hierarchy within the ruling party (and primarily the place of the nation’s leader, David Ben-Gurion) and the life and frustrations of the new immigrant in his Kafkaesque encounters with Israeli bureaucracy. The parodic element is apparent as well in other aspects of the skit. For instance, the scenery, designed by Erich Moses, incorporated two elements from the Habima ­production (the synagogue table and the window to the shtetl courtyard) but otherwise transformed the naturalistic-expressionist setting into something more akin to cabaret. Rather than the hasidic-inspired music of the Habima production, “The New

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Dybbuk” featured mainly adaptations of songs from popular musicals. Its key musical motif was a take-off on the popular song “Hernando’s Hideaway” (from The Pajama Game, 1954)—set to a hasidic rhythm.

Ben-Gurion as Hasidic Tsadik The central figure in “The New Dybbuk” is Reb Dovidl. In the first act, his hasidim (played by Chayele Shifer and Leah Shlanger) sing his praises; in the second act, he speaks to them; in the third, he conducts the exorcism. Most of the tales told of Reb Dovidl portray the miracles and wonders he has already performed. He is termed “the greatest leader of the generation” and extolled for his “wise” and “holy” words; it is said that he has all the answers and that he has met the devil himself and defeated him. Such praise is in line with hasidic lore, which holds the tsadik to be all but omniscient and omnipotent—even capable of bending the laws of nature to do his bidding. Such criticism of Ben-Gurion’s quasi-monarchical, dictatorial style, which was uncharacteristic for the Israeli Hebrew stage at that time, may have been a product of Dzigan and Shumacher’s unusual status in Israeli culture. Despite their popularity, they remained marginalized by critics and by the political establishment. Observing Israel, as it were, from their place on the sidelines (one might even suggest, from their liminal role as cultural interlopers), they were able to display open criticism of Israel’s revered leader. In “The New Dybbuk,” the satire is conveyed via the response voiced by the hasidim to their holy master’s “retirement” to the country in order to become a shepherd. (Ben-Gurion famously stepped down as prime minister in 1953 and was pictured as tending to the sheep at the Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev.) The Plonsk-Mapai (Labor Party) hasidim sing the following: What are we if not sheep, cattle, oxen, and cows? He is our father We are his children He is our shepherd We are his sheep and cattle He feeds us with leaves He feeds us with grass He is our leader He leads us by the nose Meh! . . . mehh! Mehh. This cabaret-like song, full of self-mockery, reflects, on the one hand, Dzigan and Shumacher’s interpretation of the weakness and dependence of the hasidim on their leader and, on the other hand, the rebbe’s fatherly, patronizing, and even godlike attitude toward them. The song’s subversiveness is further intensified (to a nearly blasphemous register) by its invocation of a well-known High Holidays liturgical poem, “Anu ’amekha.” Ben-Gurion’s public persona as an indispensable father figure to the nation, as lampooned in this song, was well attested to by contemporaries and historians alike.

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One historian, Yechiam Weitz, writes the following about the feelings expressed by some party members when Ben-Gurion retired to the Negev: “First—the almost physical sensation of orphanhood, of unbearable separation from someone that many saw as a father figure; second—admiration, at times almost flattery, and sometimes even more than that.”14 The similarity between the portrayal of the period in the skit and in Weitz’s study underscores the satirists’ insight into contemporary reality.

Reb Dovidl’s Mysticism: Between Kabbalah and Security It is clear from the sound recording of the skit15 that Shumacher’s stage entrance as Reb Dovidl—presumably, he looked amazingly similar to Ben-Gurion—created a stir, as there is an initial hush followed by vigorous laughter. Reb Dovidl asks for a microphone and presents his version of Rabbi Azriel’s “holy speech,” imitating the hasidic melody used in Habima’s production. In Reb Dovidl’s text, the traditionally sanctified religious symbols are adjusted to Israeli-Zionist civic life. Tel Aviv, for instance, acquires the venerable sanctity of Jerusalem as the Jewish holy city: the Histadrut (Labor Federation) building in the heart of the “white city” takes on the role of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the political parties assume the function of the ancient Levites. In addition, the most sanctified letters in the holy Hebrew language become shin-bet, the Hebrew acronym for sherutei bitaḥ on (General security services).16 The “secret mysteries” of the Shin-Bet, ironically replacing the mysticism of the Kabbalah, are known to only two privileged figures: God and Reb Dovidl. Indeed, what Rachel Elior terms the “expertise in the holy Names and the interrelationships between revealed and concealed”17 is what enables Reb Dovidl to perform the exorcism successfully. In the mouth of Reb Dovidl, the parody of Reb Azriel’s text refers to the sacred symbolism of Israel’s political system, as manipulated by the nation’s leaders. This religio-political formulation of national values invites comparisons with Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), in which he argued that all of the most effective concepts underlying the modern state’s political idea are in effect secularizations of theological concepts. That is so not only in terms of historical development, in that they were lifted from religion and reembedded in the political, as in the case of the omnipotence of God, which has become replaced by the all-powerful lawmaker; but rather, it is true, as well, of their systemic structure.18

Both Dan Diner and David Ohana have commented on the relevance of Schmitt’s categories for the construction of a Jewish political lexicon by Ben-Gurion and other national Jewish leaders.19 In the case at hand, the use of a theological frame of reference, emptied of its religious significance in order to serve a different sphere entirely, receives particular force when portrayed via parody. Dzigan and Shumacher used elements of the sacred in order to emphasize and simultaneously critique Ben-Gurion’s style of quasi-sanctified, mythic leadership. The transition from the mystical discourse of theology to the political-secular plane lends (critical) force to the perceived enlargement of the political powers of the state, of the ruling party, and—first and foremost—of the unchallenged leader himself. Parodying the sanctimoniousness of the Israeli political system was a means of de-mystification that was aimed at deconstructing its dominant rhetoric.

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In “The New Dybbuk,” Reb Dovidl can be identified as Dovid Grin, the son of Sheyndl and Avigdor, David Ben-Gurion’s parents. In this fashion, the Plonsker rebbe is seamlessly blended into the persona of the father of the Hebrew nation as portrayed by Yisroel Shumacher—complete with his Lodz-style Yiddish accent. Shumacher’s Ben-Gurion persona is a key element in the deconstruction or distortion of the BenGurion myth. This bending of the myth first occurs in the act of impersonation, Shumacher “possessing” Ben-Gurion’s image just as the dybbuk takes spiritual hold of a person’s body. Second, taking into account Yechiam Weitz’s dictum that “BenGurion and the state of Israel seemed to be one and the same,”20 not only does the new immigrant actor “displace” the prime minister, but the immigrant “Yisroel” (Yisroel Shumacher), the state of Israel, and the leader (Reb Dovidl/Ben-Gurion) all become one and the same.

Portrait of the State In the climactic scene of “The New Dybbuk,” we hear Mikhoel, the tsadik’s beadle, announce the arrival of old Zeyde Yisroel at the study house. He has come to ask the tsadik to exorcise the dybbuk from his only daughter, Medinahle. Medinahle-Dzigan then appears on stage, a distorted “double” of Hanna Rovina’s stage persona. Thus, as with Shumacher’s first appearance miming Ben-Gurion, the “possession” of the body of Rovina by the comic artist Dzigan is evident before a single word of the script is spoken, as evidenced by the prolonged laughter heard in the recording. Regarding Rovina (in the role of Leah) as a mythic figure, Dorit Yerushalmi reminds us that the actress became a symbol [as] the ‘mother of the nation […] she stands for both the land and the people, which are personified in her. Of course, it is clear that such an identification is a signifying technique that strips Rovina of her specific personhood as an actress, transferring her presence and its significance to the signified, namely, to the nation.21

In “The New Dybbuk,” Medinahle-Dzigan is both a Yiddish version and a caricature of the “mother of the nation,” the “beautiful nation” symbolized by Rovina, with only the braid and wedding dress remaining unchanged. In this version, the image of the nation is revealed in all its diasporic complexity. An interloper, a dybbuk searching for refuge, has taken over the state, invading its body, attaching itself to it and speaking from the state’s throat in a masculine voice (and in Lodz-inflected Yiddish, at that). Thus, there is essentially a compounded case of possession: Leah (and, by extension, Rovina) has been taken over by Medinahle (Dzigan); while on another level, the state itself has been taken over by the tsadik (Ben-Gurion/Shumacher) who is responsible for exorcising the original dybbuk. This is a grotesque version of the encounter between two Zionist symbols, between the father and mother of the nation who speak about their troubles in mameloshn. In parallel with a traditional exorcism, the “new dybbuk” is first identified. Here, as opposed to being a young lover, he is an immigrant on the lower end of the social ladder, unemployed and homeless. After being identified, the dybbuk is commanded to confess his sins, and this is followed by a lengthy negotiation that culminates in his

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agreement to leave Medinahle’s body.22 From this point on, the sharp political satire becomes a light parody. Reb Dovidl succeeds in stopping the new immigrant’s symbolic gain of control over the state: with his stick he marks a border around Medinahle and asks her to stay within this boundary until he says otherwise. Echoing Leah in An-sky’s play, Medinahle calls to the dybbuk-immigrant to return to her. At this point (unlike in the original play), the dybbuk returns and again gains control over Medinahle. The tsadik has failed. The entire ensemble sings a love song. The gender reversal featured in “The New Dybbuk” is a common tactic in ­parodies— a central tool in discrediting conventions and myths. Following Naomi Seidman’s lead in discussing An-sky’s work from a gendered perspective,23 we can pursue this element further. The way in which women portray Reb Dovidl’s hasidim, for instance, highlights women’s entry into the body politic and its “male”-dominated discourse. Seidman discusses the ambiguous identity of the dybbuk, moving as it does between life and death, masculine and feminine, transcendental and grotesque, and hence, the ambivalence inherent in the interpretation of the character and of An-Sky’s play. In  his drag performance, Dzigan, in turn, added another layer of physical gender reversal to this mix, making a point about the hyper-masculine or transexual profile of “the nation.” The skit exposed sensitive points in a way that no other satirical theater had done at that time. Reviews of “The New Dybbuk” express the tensions prompted by the parody, the varied interpretations that the performance elicited and, from a wider perspective, the sense of threat that every good satire is capable of arousing. Some of the negative criticism related to the literary merits of its script or alleged that the parody showed poor taste. For instance, according to the theater critic of the daily Davar: “Portraying the figure of the prime minister on the satirical stage is not to be forbidden on grounds of honor and taste. In a democratic country, humor can choose its victim anywhere. It is rather a question of taste and wisdom, of choosing between high-level humor and artificial parody.”24 In similar fashion, the critic for the General Zionist newspaper Haboker criticized the “The New Dybbuk” for being “in poor taste, a kind of imitation of things that are sacred in Jewish tradition that many fine actors refrain from mocking.”25 The critics’ main source of discomfort, however, seems to have been the skit’s irreverent, “indecent” slaughter of sacred cows, be they national-political or Judaic-traditional. Perhaps the harshest reaction was that of Avrom-Shmuel Yuris, theater critic for the Yiddish-language Letste nayes: This time Dzigan and Shumacher failed. They lost their way because they tried to deal with higher politics. This is not a parody or a satire. My conclusion: Even Shudzhig’s [Dzigan and Shumacher] best creation should be “corrected” and even censored by its most “professional” authors.26

Such overreaction testifies to the extreme daring shown by Dzigan and Shumacher in going beyond the limits of what was deemed proper in contemporary satire.

Between Mimicry and Criticism According to Linda Hutcheon, parody can be defined as “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance.”27 The tension between imitation and criticism contained

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in parody reflects the complexity of the genre and its capacity to elicit different interpretations. In this case, if the social role of an exorcism is to preserve the social order,28 and if An-sky’s play was intended to preserve Jewish life, “The New Dybbuk” is an attempt to influence the interpretation of the social order. “The New Dybbuk” contained the potential to cast doubt upon the monolithic interpretation of the national narrative of that period; more precisely, to present publicly an alternative reading that until then had not been seen on the satiric stage in Israel, and to breach rhetorically and symbolically the political and ideological status quo. Beginning with their first public Israeli performances in the 1950s, Dzigan and Shumacher’s act conformed more or less to the standards of Israeli satire of its day in its dealing mostly with criticism of bureaucracy and corruption. However, it also incorporated sharp political satire—a novelty on the newly independent Israeli scene. In “The New Dybbuk,” the comedians pushed beyond their previous satirical boundaries to encompass a blunter form of political commentary. In this sense they took on the role attributed by Yochai Oppenheimer to the early works of the playwright Hanoch Levin in the late 1960s, a time that marked the beginning of Hebrewlanguage political satire in the Israeli theater. Preceding Levin’s early work by a decade, “The New Dybbuk” challenges a sacred cow and interrogates society’s underlying ideological foundations, so as to persuade the audience that “the accepted shibboleths are nothing but rhetoric.”29 The claims at stake in the case at hand are those that delegitimized any alternative mode of thinking about the country, its policies, or its social forms (such as a hypothetically multilingual and multicultural social sphere)—that is, any point of view not hegemonically enshrined by the powers-­ that-be. The satiric revisionism works toward undoing the state’s established rhetorical canon. According to Leonard Feinberg, the satirist does not really expect moral change or correction, nor does he offer any realistic alternative.30 The alternative that Dzigan and Shumacher suggest is not at the national level but at the level of the individual. They present a tactic for survival—a guide for coping with the Kafkaesque system facing the individual, a tactic that Michel de Certeau defined as a practice of daily resistance: taking advantage of every opportunity offered by the system and every loophole within it, while constantly struggling and negotiating with it.31 If these tactics ultimately fail, there still remains the option of holding fast to the state, capturing and taking it over in the form of a dybbuk.

The Alien and Discordant Voice In “The New Dybbuk,” Dzigan and Shumacher strove to demystify national icons— Habima’s The Dybbuk (via parody) and David Ben-Gurion (via satire). The demystification is accomplished through a process of linguistic, ethical, and cultural translation and displacement of key myths taken from Hebraic-Zionist iconography (Ben-Gurion, Rovina, and Habima), which are transposed into the mythic world of Jewish Eastern Europe—that is, adapted to the Yiddish heritage. In reading “The New Dybbuk” in the context of extant research on the dybbuk idea in Jewish culture, the new immigrant (as portrayed in the parody) stands side by side

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with apostates, heretics, and especially with informers, murderers, and suicides.32 According to tradition, the dybbuk is the spirit of a dead person who takes over a ­living body. In Dzigan and Shumacher’s socio-political metaphor, this is in fact the status of the new immigrant in Israel, and by the same token, the status of the immigrant Yiddish actor. According to Rachel Elior and Yoram Bilu, the dybbuk has the power to reveal dark secrets from the community’s past and to give harsh expression to aggressive, sexual, and anti-religious urges that cannot be expressed in any other context. Another characteristic of dybbuk-speech is its venting of thoughts that go beyond the pale, through the medium of a victim’s body—which is, simultaneously, the body that imprisons the dybbuk.33 In the case of “The New Dybbuk” the “body” is the social, political, and cultural fabric of the nation-state, which is at once both alien and beloved. Using the language of the theater, “The New Dybbuk” offered the possibility of a parallel universe, a counter-territory to the regnant reality. As the masters-of-ceremony in a rite of inversion, Dzigan and Shumacher invented a state within the state in which language is not just a cultural artifact, an attribute of the individual’s singular or corporate (ethno-national) identity, but rather a strategic weapon in the fight for free cultural expression. A literary analysis of the skit would designate it as a metaphor for Yiddish theater in Israel, or at least the theater of Dzigan and Shumacher. The liminality deployed in “The New Dybbuk” is multidimensional, allowing for the expression not only of the “alien and discordant” rejected voice, but also of the unresolved tensions between the living body and the dead spirit, between the immigrant and the national leader, between Yiddish and the Yiddish-speaking citizens of Israel.

“In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva” The critical discourse about Israeli leadership continued in Dzigan’s theatrical work after he and Shumacher went their separate ways. In 1961, four years after “The New Dybbuk” was performed, Dzigan presented a revue titled Tsit mir nisht bay der tsung (Don’t Put Words in My Mouth). Among the skits included in the program was one that extended the description of the rebbe of Plonsk. The skit, titled “In der yeshive fun plonsker rebbe” (In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva) was an abbreviated adaptation of a Hebrew text originally written by Yosef Netz Vinitsky for Dzigan and Shumacher, titled “Shi’urei hatanakh shel Ben-Gurion” (Ben-Gurion’s Bible Lessons).34 The rebbe in this skit once again displays an uncanny resemblance to David BenGurion. As in “The New Dybbuk,” he is revered by his disciples. In the later version, as presented on stage, Reb Dovidl teaches Bible to four of his hasidim. Unlike the anonymous hasidim in “The New Dybbuk,” these hasidim have distinct identities: Moyshele (Moshe Dayan), Shimele (Shimon Peres), Yosele (Yosef Almogi, secretarygeneral of the Mapai [Labor] Party), and Aba’le (Abba Eban). Thus, the satire is directed not only at the party and national leader, but also to the entire leadership of Israel’s ruling party. The “lesson” itself is a satire on the dynamics, hierarchy, and power relations at the top of the party. For instance, the rebbe criticizes a statement made by Moyshele (Dayan) on Israel Radio. He explains to his disciple that since Moyshele is not yet

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prime minister, he is still permitted to say a few intelligent things, and there was, therefore, no reason at all to have avoided doing so in a radio interview. Reb Dovidl also forbids Shimele (Peres) to read the newspaper. Overall, he is aggressive and impatient toward his students. He demands of them to be fearless: “A student of mine must be a hero,” he says to Shimele, “and you talk like a five-year-old child.” In a response that pokes fun at one of the best-known rivalries within the Labor Party, Shimele maintains that he is not afraid of anything or anyone, except one person: “Everyone knows that I’m not afraid, not of fire and not of water; I’m not afraid of bombs or cannon-fire; I’m not afraid of 40 million Arabs. But when I sit near [Yitzhak] Rabin, I quake”—thus making it appear as though Israel’s external, national conflict was dwarfed by its internal partisan rivalry. Meanwhile, in response to everything the rebbe says, the hasidim intone “bim-bam,” signifying their blind faith in him. When the rebbe asks for a more forceful reply, they say it louder, to the rebbe’s satisfaction (“That’s the way I like it. That was clear”). Ben-Gurion, the rebbe, has the power and authority to change and rewrite the law, to reinterpret the Bible, and even to put himself on equal footing with the Creator of the Universe. After all, Ben-Gurion created the land of Israel, or more accurately, improved on it (“God created the sky, I agree […] but the earth? What earth? The earth of our Land? What a dump this place looked like before I got here, what a spectacle! Stones, sand, swamps”). Accordingly, he contacts Almogi, a Mapai member of the Knesset, and asks him to change the biblical text so that only the creation of the heavens is left to the Almighty. The lesson continues with a series of new biblical interpretations and explanations of various miracles. The skit made waves not only among the spectators and the critics, but also among members of the government (though, overall, it received less coverage in the press than did “The New Dybbuk”). After the premiere, Almogi met Dzigan in a Tel Aviv coffeehouse in order to express the “serious concern among Mapai’s election staff that the skit might influence voters to vote against the ruling party.”35 In the end, Ben-Gurion and the Mapai were the ultimate victors in closely contested elections for the fifth Knesset. Dzigan’s influence, while not enough to change the political order, was nonetheless perceived to have influenced the public discourse prior to the elections.

“Goldenyu” and “Golda Visits the Pope” In the monologue “Goldenyu” (Our Dear Golda) that Dzigan wrote and staged in 1971 as part of his revue M’lakht a lebn (Laughing a Life), Dzigan portrayed Prime Minister Golda Meir speaking to “the citizens of the nation.” In the skit, she relates the story of her meeting with President Richard Nixon in Washington, D.C. a few months earlier. At the time, this meeting was considered a diplomatic coup; in its wake, Israel received American loans and (according to political folklore) the two leaders also reached an agreement regarding both the purchase of U.S. weaponry and the willingness of the American government to look the other way while Israel developed nuclear weapons.36

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In his monologue, Dzigan did not deal with the nuclear issue but rather with Golda’s success in raising money and with the gossip surrounding the journey. The prime minister makes a speech in folksy Yiddish. She describes her successful trip to the United States in a manner that combines anecdotes, jokes, and ironic comments about various Israeli political figures; she tells stories about the deepening friendly relationship between the two countries, using the metaphor of a couple in love; she confesses her fear of Communism (despite her being a socialist); and eventually she owns up to the real object of her trip: shnorring. In both content and narrative structure, “Goldenyu” draws liberally upon Yiddish cultural and literary traditions. Political-national discourse mixes indiscriminately with intimate household affairs. The journey to a world power in order to obtain financial support, weapons, and agreements is presented as a story about a Jewish mother who goes begging to the porets (Polish landowner). By means of language and performance, Golda (the public personage) turns into “Goldenyu” (the lady from next door). In Dzigan’s words, the prime minister is “the mother of the Jewish state.” The dissonance between mother figure and state figure is played up in the script as the audience hears of her reception in America: “When we reached New York the military band played ‘Hatikvah’ and afterwards, in my honor, they played a bit from ‘Mayn yidishe mame.’ ” Dzigan’s Israel is an expanded Jewish family, and its prime minister is accorded universal recognition as the quintessential Jewish mother. Dzigan was not the only one to draw upon the connections between the political and the domestic levels of discourse. The Israeli media regularly represented Golda by means of gendered stereotypes—for instance, “Golda’s kitchen” was the nickname given to her inner forum of close advisers at the top government level. According to Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, this metaphor was meant to convey a secretive, nondemocratic method of fundamental decision-making, often in the realm of state security.37 Another popular term among journalists was “Golda’s shopping basket,” used to report on the prime minister’s trips abroad to acquire Phantom jets, tanks, and missiles.38 In his monologue, Dzigan emphasized diametrically opposed elements in Golda Meir’s image, such as the tension between her feminine and masculine attributes. This tension is expressed in both the text and the performance, as it is a man playing the role of a woman who was sometimes perceived as “masculine.” In the stage directions, Dzigan noted that Golda was to wave to the audience “with the hand up, in the masculine way.” In the script, Golda-Dzigan says: “I spoke to the President […] man to man”—a reference to Ben-Gurion’s famous quip that Golda “is the only man in the government.” This gender reversal—or masculinity dressed as femininity—recalls another figure: Yente, the heroine of Sholem Aleichem’s monologue “Dos tepl” (The Pot), which features an independent woman coping alone with the challenges of her family’s livelihood after the death of her husband. “In incautious moments,” writes Dan Miron of Yente, “she [Yente] even speaks about herself in the masculine form, as if she were a man, and not just a man but an experienced man of the world.”39 In contrast to reviews of “The New Dybbuk” in which critics expressed their aversion to playing fast and loose with the “holy of holies” of Israeli politics, “Goldenyu” received no such overt crticism. Dzigan’s role-playing was not perceived as threatening. The critics praised the verisimilitude of his imitation and noted that an underlying

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admiration for Golda was evident despite the satire. Indeed, Dzigan’s impersonation of Golda was received as a tour de force, picture-perfect (both in the physical sense and in the spirit of the characterization) as well as soft-edged. He had studied her body language and speech patterns carefully, paid close attention to her television appearances, attended her public functions, and even visited her in her home. In his memoirs, Dzigan claimed that his imitation was so accurate that the first time he performed as Golda on stage, the audience was taken aback, believing that the prime minister herself was on stage.40 Similar satirical qualities and tone characterize “Golda Visits the Pope,” written by Mark Sidonia Sidon (Stanescu) and adapted for the stage by Dzigan. In this skit there is a “reconstruction” of Golda Meir’s visit to Pope Paul VI in the Vatican on January 16, 1973. Golda’s memoirs describe the encounter as a meeting of opposites: between a simple Jewish woman, albeit prime minister of Israel, and the head of the Catholic Church.41 Dzigan, once again playing Golda, exaggerated these differences for their comedic effect, highlighting the inappropriate behavior exhibited by the “simple” visitor who enters bareheaded to meet the pope, turns her back to him, and refuses to eat the unkosher food he offers her. Golda-Dzigan also invites the pope to speak in Yiddish, explaining that she can grant him this courtesy since they are not on Israeli (Hebrew) television. Thus the ceremonious meeting is given a familiar and intimate tone that could not have been achieved in real life. The two try to reach a mutual understanding with regard to the inauguration of diplomatic relations (at the time, the Vatican did not recognize the state of Israel); at the end of the skit, before they part, the two dance a hora together. The monologue “Goldenyu” and the skit “Golda Visits the Pope” are by no means literary masterpieces. They are less critical and less incisive than the political satires dating from the period of collaboration between Dzigan and Shumacher. They are not very critical of Golda or her policies in the scandalous style of the Ben-Gurion parodies. Despite the gender reversal, which in a way intensifies its subversiveness, the imitation of Golda reflects closeness to its subject and even arouses empathy. In the eyes of the critics, this inoffensive style made up for the satirical representation of the prime minister in a language that was not the official language of the state. (In this regard, it is noteworthy that Golda, unlike BenGurion, displayed an affinity for Yiddish; among other things, she attended performances by Dzigan and Shumacher.) Slavoj Žižek has posited a “critical tactic of over-identification” as a ploy used by those hostile to the ruling power; that is, demonstrating an obsessive fascination with the dominant ideology instead of preserving a proper distance, and thus adopting a position that is too close for comfort.42 This is the critical tactic employed consciously by Dzigan and Shumacher in “The New Dybbuk.” Conversely, in “Goldenyu” the exaggerated identification does not succeed in conveying criticism or even in causing discomfort, but rather creates a “parallel reality”: Dzigan offers himself as both Golda’s and the state’s double, heading a parallel state that conducts its matters in a different language and with a generous sprinkling of humor. Dzigan reputedly delighted in spreading a joke popular among Yiddish speakers, alleging that when the pope met Golda Meir in 1973 (two years after “Goldenyu” was staged), he greeted her with the words: “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dzigan.” When

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the mimic turns into the original, or the original turns into the imitator, the duplication creates a parallel reality. In his memoirs, Dzigan relates that the actor who suggested that he do a Golda imitation said: “Look at your nose. It looks as though you took it from her face.” “You mean,” answered Dzigan, “that thanks to my nose I can take her place as prime minister?”43 Dzigan’s claim was that, for a certain period of time, there were, in a sense, two prime ministers in Israel—two states, two Goldas— and that the boundary between them had become so blurred that the audience could not only see Golda in Dzigan (as noted by reviewers), but also Dzigan in Golda. According to the Hebrew writer and literary critic Yaakov Malkin, whose short essay, “The Satirical Theater—A Basic Condition of Liberty” was published in the printed program of Tsit mikh nisht bay der tsung: One of the childhood diseases of every new state is the exaggerated sanctified relationship to institutions, leaders, and principles to which and to whom the state owes its existence, at least in part. The most severe of Israel’s childhood diseases was a pronounced lack of humor. As long as the English were in charge, we cheerfully waved the broom [matate] of mockery at them.44 When we became the rulers—we put the “broom” into storage. We patted ourselves on the back until we got a backache. When we dared to stage satires—we limited them: we laughed at the corrupt, at the careerists, at those who had that kind of reputation, or in the best case took the blame upon ourselves, in the best Jewish tradition.45

Malkin goes on to claim that “democracy is based on the right to doubt everything— everything holy, every institution, every ideal and principle. The only thing that is not doubted is the doubt itself.”46 He ends by pointing to Dzigan’s theater as one of the best chances to maintain a permanent satirical theater. Until the Six-Day War, Hebrew satire dealt mainly with criticism of Israeli bureaucracy and public corruption.47 David Alexander, who does not make reference to Dzigan and Shumacher’s satire in his historical examination of political satire in Israeli theater, claims that biting political satire did not exist in Israel during the first two decades of statehood.48 After the Six-Day War, such satire began to develop on the Hebrew stage; many critics claimed that it stood “opposed [to our] national existence.”49 The theater critic Nahman Ben-Ami wrote of the “spirit of hatred toward the establishment, and self-hatred” that was reflected in it.50 A colleague, Uri Keysari, wrote: “Our Hebrew is too celebratory, joyful, wildly laughing […] it suffocates, really suffocates, any seeds of satire that are scattered here. I don’t know how or why, but anyone who wants to hear good satire has to find it not among the various [Hebrew] entertainment groups, but by Shimen Dzigan, who speaks, thinks and writes in Yiddish and performs in Yiddish.”51 This new critical Hebrew satire, in its very style and degree of undermining the Zionist establishment’s hegemony, was perceived as crossing the boundaries of good taste, as opposing the historical Jewish ethos. Against the background of the new Hebrew satire of the day, Dzigan’s solo-career Yiddish satire after 1960, albeit still critical of the political, economic, and social reality in Israel, was much softer than the earlier satire envinced in “The New Dybbuk” and “In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva.” In Yeshayahu Ben-Porat’s words, Dzigan’s satire was now presented “in the necessary measure, without prejudice and without unnecessarily destructive harpoons.”52

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Conclusion: The Diaspora Body The process of approaching and figuratively blemishing the sanctified image of mythic figures begins by means of the body. In “The New Dybbuk,” as we saw, BenGurion, portrayed by Yisroel Shumacher, became a satiric icon of the diaspora figure who speaks mameloshn with a Lodz accent. The actor’s body, claims John Rouse, can be interpreted as a text in which cultural norms are written, embroidered, or formed in stylistic codes of performance behavior.53 Dzigan and Shumacher took over Israeli bodies in order to interpret them, criticize them, or identify with them. In “The New Dybbuk,” for instance, the diaspora body and the Zionist body are merged in the figure of Reb Dovidl from Plonsk. In both “In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva” and in “Goldenyu,” the Yiddish actor is also in a state of hefker (lawlessness), as defined by Yosef Tunkel, and consequently does not feel inhibited from parodying religious texts and customs.54 Finally, Dzigan’s personification of Medinahle in “The New Dybbuk” and of Golda Meir in the two skits discussed in this essay adds an element of gender reversal, addressing the masculinity that was held to be a key aspect of the formation of the nation. As such, it serves to deride some of the accepted portrayals of Israel and the Israelis: if Golda is the only “man” in the Israeli government, then the government is a carnival. This metaphoric reality is realized when Dzigan plays Golda and essentially takes possession of her. As in the original Dybbuk, from the lovers’ perspective the dybbuk symbolizes “the ultimate romantic gesture, a union of their souls in the absence of any possibility for earthly marriage.”55 Reb Dovidl-Shumacher, Medinahle-Dzigan, and Golda-Dzigan are different expressions for the impossible love relationship between the Hebrew state and the Yiddish actor. In addition, Dzigan’s unprepossessing physical presence allowed the audience an  opportunity to envision an alternative national self-portrayal. As noted by Haim Gamzu in Haaretz, Dzigan’s “elongated, rather horsey-looking features” contained “more vitality and more humanity than is found among most young men, those seemingly masculine young men possessing a Tarzan-like beauty but lacking that seasoning of spicy satirical humor that flows from Dzigan’s aging face…”56 In this sense, we may regard Dzigan’s portrayal of Medinahle-Rovina and Golda, and even Shumacher’s portrayal of Ben-Gurion, as offering a kind of resistance to the corporeal image of the nation as conveyed by the hegemonic Hebrew culture of Israel. This anti- or alternative image was less self-deprecating than it was self-consciously critical. In 1955, Moshe Efrat of Hador, noting the vacuum caused by the disbanding of the Matateh and Li-la-lo satirical theatrical groups, asked: “Where is the Israeli humorist from whose mouth the people can speak?” His answer: Dzigan and Shumacher, who had presented a “revolution” on the Israeli stage.” According to Efrat, the two men were Israeli humorists who spoke in the name of the people, and through them the people were able to speak.57 With their characteristic pranks and humor, Dzigan and Shumacher exposed “hidden mysteries”—opinions that were repressed and excluded from the Hebrew public discourse. Pointedly snubbing the political elites in Israel and their vaunted selfimage, Dzigan and Shumacher sought to invert, deprecate, and thus subvert their claims. In essence, they took hold of the national Hebrew narrative and retold and recreated it using the Yiddish vernacular.

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Notes 1. From the skit “Der yisroeldiker Menachem-Mendl,” Yisroel Shumacher Archive, the Yehuda Gabay Theatre Archive, Beit Ariela, Tel Aviv (henceforth: BAA/Sh), 175/02. 2. The name is pronounced JI-gan. 3. See Diego Rotman, “Performance kebikoret tarbut—mif’al hateiatron shel Dzigan veShumacher 1927–1980” (Ph.D. thesis, The Hebrew University, 2012), 161. 4. John M. Efron, “From Lodz to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political Satire of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 50–79. Efron regards Dzigan and Shumacher as the modern continuation of the Jewish tradition of the badkhan and as heirs of Sholem Aleichem’s humor. See also Rotman, “Performance kebikoret tarbut,” 245–307. 5. Rachel Rojansky, “Haomnam ‘safah zarah vetzoremet’? Lesheelat yaḥaso shel BenGurion leyidish leaḥar hashoah,” ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael 15 (2005), 463–482; Diego Rotman, “Teiatron yidish beyisrael 1948–1988,” Zemanim 99 (Summer 2007), 38–45. 6. Several years earlier, the satirist Ephraim Kishon had suggested that Dzigan and Shumacher run for office; see “Ḥ ad gadya—Dzigan veShumacher lashilton!” Maariv (27 July 1955). 7. As the basis for discussion, I used a manuscript that remained in the artists’ estate, found in the Shimon Dzigan archive at the Yehuda Gabay Theatre Archive (hereafter: BAA/ Dz), 171/04; a home recording of the program; pictures from the production’s archive (BAA/ Dz; not yet catalogued); a video of the short skits that was filmed for the cinema news; film newsreels found at Herzlya Studios; and newspaper reviews of the program. 8. In distinguishing between parody and satire, I follow Ziva Ben-Porat’s definitions. BenPorat defines parody as “[a]n alleged representation, usually comic, of a literary text or other artistic object—i.e., a representation of a ‘modelled reality,’ which is itself already a particular representation of an original ‘reality.’ ” Satire she defines as “[a] critical representation, always comic and often caricatural, of ‘non-modelled reality,’ i.e., of the real objects (their reality may be mythical or hypothetical) which the receiver reconstructs as the referents of the message.” See “Method in Madness: Notes on the Structure of Parody, Based on MAD TV Satires,” Poetics Today 1, nos. 1/2 (Autumn 1979), 247–248. 9. The Dybbuk, written between the years 1912–1917 in Russian and Yiddish, was inspired by folktales about dybbuks that Sh. An-sky had collected in the course of a Jewish ethnographic expedition that he had led in the Volhynia and Podolia regions in 1912–1914. 10. Edna Nahshon, “Hebrew, Jewish, Russian: Habima’s Production of ‘The Dybbuk’ (1922),” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 51, no. 2 (2003), 56–68. See also Gad Kaynar, “National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima,” Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (March 1998), 1–20; Freddie Rokem, “Hebrew Theater From 1889 to 1948,” in Theater in Israel, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: 1996), 51–84. 11. Hanna Rovina, known as the “first lady of Hebrew theater,” began her theatrical career in Europe and immigrated to Palestine (together with other members of Habima) in 1928. She continued to perform until shortly before her death in 1980. 12. For a general discussion of this parody, see Diego Rotman, “Hadibuk eino Moshe Sneh: ’al haparodiyah hasatirit ‘Hadibuk haḥadash’ shel Dzigan veShumacher (1957),” in Al na tegarshuni, ed. Dorit Yerushalmi and Shimon Levy (Tel Aviv: 2009), 179–197. 13. This segment relates to the controversial reparations agreement between Israel and Germany, signed in 1952, which was supported by Ben-Gurion and harshly criticized by the political opposition. 14. Yechiam Weitz, “El hafantaziyah uveḥazarah: madu’a heḥlit Ben-Gurion laredet ­leSdeh-Boker” in ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael 8 (1998), 298–319. 15. BAA/Dz; not yet catalogued. 16. Ben-Gurion himself linked defense and spiritual matters when he noted in his diary that “this time around, the ministry of the spirit [misrad haruaḥ ] is the ministry of defense”— adding that “a hundred thousand Jews are fighting for their nation’s freedom. . . . this is the

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greatest creation of our time, which will serve as a source for literature and art for generations.” Quoted in Anita Shapira, Yehudim ḥ adashim, yehudim yeshanim (Tel Aviv: 2003), 227. 17. Rachel Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore, trans. Joel Linsider (Jerusalem: 2008), 103. 18. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: 1985), 36. 19. Dan Diner, “Ambiguous Semantics: Reflections on Jewish Political Concepts,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 1 (2008), 89–102. On Ben-Gurion’s use of the term “messianic vision” as an alternative to Zionist ideology, and on the religious rhetoric in labor movement discourse, see Shapira, Yehudim ḥ adashim, 217–247, 238–275. See also David Ohana, “The Politics of Political Despair: The Case of Political Theology in Israel,” in By the People, For the People, Without the People? The Emergence of (Anti)Political Sentiment in Israel and in Western Democracies, ed. Tamar Hermann (Jerusalem: 2012), 362–363. 20. Weitz, “El hafantaziyah uveḥazarah,” 306-307. 21. Dorit Yerushalmi, “Bitzilah shel Hanna Rovina,” Zemanim 99 (Summer 2007), 32. 22. On the various stages of the ceremony of dybbuk exorcism, see Yoram Bilu, “Hadibuk beyahadut: hafra’ah nafshit kemashav ḥevrati,” Meḥ karei yerushalayim bemaḥ shevet yisrael 2 (1983), 529–563. 23. Naomi Seidman, “The Ghosts of Queer Loves Past: Ansky’s ‘Dybbuk’ and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: 2003), 228–245. 24. A.Z. (full name unknown), “Tish’a kabin,” Davar (11 January 1957). 25. D. (name unknown), “Dzigan veShumacher betokhnit ḥadashah,” Haboker (23 October 1957). 26. Avrom-Shmuel Yuris, “Dzigan-Shumacher in ‘Dzigan-Shumacher,’ ” Letste nayes (23 October 1957) (quotation marks in original). 27. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: 2000), xii. 28. Bilu, “Hadibuk beyahadut,” 554–558. A similar view is expressed by An-ski; see “A briv fun An-ski tsu Haym Zhitlowsky,” Literarishe bleter 2, no. 11/2 (18 July 1924). 29. Yohai Oppenheimer, “Yitzug hamilḥamah etzel Hanoch Levin: satirah, komediyah, tragediyah,” in Hanoch Levin—haish ’im hamitus baemtzah: ’iyunim bitzirato hateiatronit shel Hanoch Levin, ed. Nurit Yaari and Shimon Levy (Tel Aviv: 2004), 173. 30. Leonard Feinberg, The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation and Influence (Ames: 1963), 35, 83. 31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: 1984), 36–38. 32. Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, 87. 33. Ibid., 52; Bilu, “Hadibuk beyahadut,” 537. 34. According to the manuscript, the changes were made between 1957 and 1959. The sketch was apparently meant to be part of a joint program by Dzigan and Shumacher. In this essay, I base my discussion on the transcripts found at BAA/Dz, 177/02. 35. M. Ben-Shlomo, “Almogi bikesh miDzigan lekatzer balashon batokhnit ‘al timshe­­ kheni,’ ” Hatzofeh (26 April 1961). Ben-Gurion was a longstanding target of the Dzigan and Shumacher team and later, of Dzigan alone. See, for example, Shimen Dzigan and Amnon Zakov, “The Duel,” Israel Magazine—The Israel Independent Monthly 2, no. 4 (1969), 22–27. See also the (future-oriented) skit “Dzigan and Shumacher in 1980” from the program “Tate, du lakhst?” (Daddy, are you laughing?) (1950): “Today we have only one party, one seat, one minister, one comic actor, everything is done by one person: Ben-Gurion.” 36. The discussion on “Goldenyu” is based on the manuscript found at BAA/Dz, 179/01, as well as the commercial recording of the monologue filmed by the Israeli television station in 1975. The discussion on “Golda baym poypst” is based on transcripts found at BAA/Dz, 178/02. 37. Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, “Metaforot milḥamah ke’iskei nashim,” Panim 56 (2011), 90–93. 38. Ibid.

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39. Dan Miron, Hatzad haafel bitzḥ oko shel Sholem Aleichem: masot ’al ḥ ashivutah shel haretzinut beyaḥ as leyidish ulesifrutah (Tel Aviv: 2004), 26. 40. Shimen Dzigan, Der koyekh fun yidishn humor (Tel Aviv: 1974), 362. 41. Golda Meir, My Life (London: 1976), 341–343. 42. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: 2008). 43. Dzigan, Der koyekh fun yidishn humor, 36. 44. “Broom of mockery” was a reference to Matate, a Hebrew-language satiric company. 45. Yaakov Malkin, from the theater printed program: Tsit mikh nisht bay der tsung (Tel Aviv: 1961). 46. Ibid. 47. Gershon Shaked, “Or vetzel, aḥdut veribui: hasifrut ha’ivrit behitmodedut dialektit ’im metziut mishtanah,” Alpayim 4 (1991), 113–139. 48. David Alexander, Leitzan heḥ atzer vehashalit: satirah politit beyisrael (sikum bei­ nayim): 1948–1984 (Tel Aviv: 1985). 49. See, for instance, Yehoshua Bar-Yosef, “Nivror leidish mitah yafah,” Yedioth Ahronoth (11 February 1964). 50. Nahman Ben-Ami, “Rishon bein lo shavim—Shimon Dzigan be ‘Tari, bari umetoraf,’ ” Maariv (7 April 1971). 51. Uri Keysari, “Hasatirah hayisreelit nikhtevet beyidish,” Maariv (23 April 1971). 52. Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, “Hamof’a hamedakeh shemiḥutz la’ulamot,” Laishah (23 October 1960). The review was of Dzigan’s first solo show,“Frish, gezunt un meshuge” (Fresh, Healthy and Crazy). 53. John Rouse, “Textuality and Authority in Theater and Drama: Some Contemporary Possibilities,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: 1992), 15. 54. Yosef Tunkel, Sefer hahumoreskot vehaparodiyot hasifrutiyot beyidish: mivḥ ar ketavim humoristiyim ’al yehudei mizraḥ eiropah vetarbutam bepolin bein shtei milḥ amot ha’olam, ed. Yechiel Sheintuch (Jerusalem: 1990), 83–87. 55. Seidman, “The Ghost of Queer Loves Past,” 237. 56. Haim Gamzu, “Dzigan he’atzuv,” Haaretz (4 June 1974). 57. Moshe Efrat, “Shenayim hameviim lanu tzeḥok goel—Dzigan veShumacher betokhnitam haḥadashah ‘Nadir un veyn nisht,’ ” Hador (7 May 1955).

Humor and Ethnicity on Israeli Television: A Historical Perspective Limor Shifman (The Hebrew University)

Humor, in all its forms, is a key to understanding collectives and individuals. While it is a universal phenomenon, the comic in each society is molded differently in accordance with varied ideologies, repressed anxieties, and power relations. These rich humorous manifestations have yielded ongoing inquiries into the ties between humor and social order. On the one hand, the comic can threaten an existing order; on the other, it can reinforce community values by ridiculing the “others” who threaten hegemony. Thus, it is an ambivalent form of communication: capable of building and demolishing, uniting and dividing, preserving and subverting.1 In this essay, I examine the role that humor has played in a specific context: Israel’s ethnic cleavage between “Ashkenazim”—Jews of Euro-American origin—and “Mizrahim”—Jews of Asian and North African origin. From the early 1950s, Israeli discourse about this cleavage revolved around three dichotomies: diasporic versus Israeli identity; Mizrahi versus Ashkenazi; and ethnic tribalism versus the Israeli melting pot. Within the Zionist ideology prevailing in Israel from its inception, the hierarchic relationship represented in each pair was well defined, with the latter element considered superior to the former. Yet during the 1970s, and more so in the 1980s and 1990s, social and cultural changes challenged these three dichotomies and the hierarchies ascribed to them. In what follows, I argue that a key for tracing the relationship between humor and these societal transformations is the concept of polysemy. The term originates in linguistics and refers to the association of a word or a phrase with several different meanings; in media studies, the phrase has been broadened to include “open texts” that are subject to multiple meanings.2 In a seminal work, John Fiske argued that commercial television is obliged to broadcast polysemic shows: since its goal is to reach a wide audience, it must create programs that allow disparate subcultures to derive different meanings from them.3 Fiske lists jokes and irony among the aids that facilitate the openness of television texts, since they are based on a collision between different discursive forms. This collision, he argues, creates an open semiotic space, in which the viewer chooses which meaning to adopt in keeping with his or her worldview. 171

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Yet humor is not always polysemic: some of its forms are more prone to be monosemic, or “closed” to competing interpretations. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of dialogicality as a discourse that reflects diversity of perspectives, I claim that humorous texts range on a spectrum between “monologic” and “dialogic.”4 Monologic humor is characterized by a clear victim, whom we, from a position of superiority, mock. On the opposite pole of the spectrum is dialogic humor. The most obvious indication that a given text is dialogic is a difficulty in determining who or what, exactly, is the target of its humor. Dialogic humor often involves a genuine collision between ideologies, and viewers are invited to decide between them in light of their own worldviews. Drawing on this background, I address two main questions. First, how were shifts in ethnic relations in Israel echoed by televised humor between 1968 (the year television was established in Israel) and 2000? And second, to what extent was ethnicoriented humor ideologically monologic or dialogic during different periods within this timeframe? The essay begins with a brief discussion of the literature on the social implications of ethnic humor. Following that, I examine the main changes that have taken place in discourse about ethnic power relations in Israel since the 1970s. The heart of the essay is an in-depth analysis of a number of canonical humorous television texts that epitomize four historical stages of ethnic representation in Israeli televised humor. Finally, I look into the broader implications of the analysis, arguing that polysemic qualities of humorous texts allow them to establish common ground between different social and cultural groups.

Humor, Society, and Ethnicity Studies dealing with the societal functions of humor focus on two spectrums: control/­ resistance and identification/differentiation. Most often, they recognize the dual or paradoxical characteristics of humor as a form of communication that accommodates simultaneous and opposing implications.5 The first spectrum, control versus resistance, relates to humor and social power. The assumption that humor can be wielded as a form of societal sanction imposing norms on those considered to be deviant was first raised by Henri Bergson in the late 19th century; during the 20th century, the notion was adopted by researchers influenced by Marxist conflict theories that considered humor to be a tool used by the majority to exclude minorities.6 By ridiculing the “other” as a figure threatening the social order, hegemonic forces reinforce the inferior status of marginalized groups.7 The other end of the spectrum emphasizes humor’s potential for subversion. For instance, the court jester, a figure that has had various incarnations throughout history, enjoyed an unusual measure of freedom of expression and dared to voice what others could not even dare to think.8 The second spectrum emphasized in social research about humor is identification versus differentiation. On the one hand, humor may increase group cohesion, reinforcing feelings of sharing and understanding among group members who enjoy the same text and ridicule the same target. On the other hand, humor may also exclude those who are scorned, as well as those who are unable to understand the group’s internal codes. Thus, humor both reflects and constructs social boundaries.9

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Researchers attempting to decipher the role of humor in generating social boundaries and maintaining societal power structures often make use of studies that focus on minorities in general, and ethnic minorities in particular. Ethnic humor is a longestablished type of humorous expression, defined by Charles E. Schutz as “humor directed at racial and nationality groups, denigrating alleged attributes of those groups.”10 This kind of humor is often based on ethnic stereotypes or “scripts” that contain shared sets of beliefs about ethnic groups,11 such as the binary opposition between stupidity and canniness.12 Ethnic humor in Israel is unique because most of it targets groups within the majority Jewish population. In this respect, a major division accompanying the state of Israel from its establishment is that between Western/Ashkenazi Jews and Eastern/ Mizrahi Jews. As outlined below, this tension—as well as its framing in popular and academic discourses—has undergone dramatic transformations since the establishment of Israel.

Ethnic Relations in Israel: Milestones During the first two decades of Israeli statehood, the official and mediated discourse in the country was strongly dominated by the melting-pot ideology. Originating in the United States, the metaphor has been widely used in immigration countries to describe the fusing of diverse cultural materials into one, unified, culture. In Israel, beyond this general meaning, the term also referred more specifically to erasure of the Jewish diasporic past and its replacement by a new, Israeli, identity. Speaking Hebrew, preferring deeds over debate and intellectual exercises, and sacrificing for the collective were among the elements that made up the new Hebrew ethos, which was primarily consolidated during the second and third waves of Ashkenazi immigration from Eastern Europe, occurring, respectively, between 1904–1914 and 1919–1923.13 The melting-pot concept was adopted in Israel during the massive wave of immigration of Jews from Arab countries during the 1950s. Some scholars maintain that it was a reaction of the country’s elites—the vast majority of whom were Ashkenazi— to this immigration. These researchers claim that, although the sabras explicitly rejected diasporic European Jewish culture, at its core, the Israeli ideal of the melting pot was Ashkenazi and Western, conforming to the Eurocentric modernization approach.14 Focusing on dichotomies such as modern versus traditional, developed versus developing, and science versus superstition, this approach identified immigrants from Arab countries as belonging to the “inferior” end of the dichotomies, hence in need of radical improvement.15 Two decades later, however, the dominant Western melting-pot discourse came up against intense resistance. In 1971, a group known as the Israeli Black Panthers emerged in Jerusalem and made use of a “new Mizrahi rhetoric” that centered on claims of discrimination and inequity.16 The Black Panthers asserted that discrimination, rather than a lack of qualifications, was what stood behind the inequality between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in the realms of education, occupational achievement, standard of living, and political power. Members of the establishment who considered

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the Black Panthers a threat refuted their claims by resorting to dominant melting-pot and modernization discourse. Denying allegations of discrimination, they argued that socioeconomic differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim stemmed from the behavior of the Mizrahi population, which was unable to integrate into “Western civilization.”17 The public focus on ethnic relations was disrupted by the Yom Kipper War of October 1973, which shifted the national agenda to security matters. But in 1977, ethnicity returned to the fore as a result of what came to be known as the electoral “upheaval.” After almost 30 years of unchallenged governance, the Labor coalition lost the 1977 election to Menachem Begin’s Likud Party. This defeat reflected not only political-ideological turnabouts, but also, and perhaps mainly, a protest of the Mizrahi public against the ruling party.18 Years later, Baruch Kimmerling coined the term aḥ usal, an acronym referring to the Ashkenazi, secular (ḥ iloni) veteran (vatik), socialist, and nationalist Zionist (leumani) elite, arguing that the 1977 elections marked the opening salvo in a process he termed “the end of aḥ usal rule.”19 The whirlwinds in the public and political worlds were accompanied by turnabouts in academic research and new forms of critical thinking with regard to ethnic power relations.20 These new attitudes were boosted in the 1990s by political, cultural, and academic processes taking place throughout the Western world. During the 1990s, attitudes toward ethnicity were marked by two concepts: “identity politics” and “multiculturalism.” Identity politics is based on the argument that citizens come to the public sphere as members of various groups; in Yuli Tamir’s words, this is hyphen-based politics: “There are no more Israelis, there are Israeli-Ashkenazi women, Israeli-Arab men. . . . ”21 One process accompanying the rise of identity politics in Israel was what Menachem Mautner and his colleagues call “discourse of rights,” in which various groups, among them those on the periphery, began to demand that the country recognize their unique rights.22 During the mid-1990s, another concept—multiculturalism—came to the fore alongside identity politics in the public and academic arenas. This term evolved from the outspoken criticism of ethnic communities around the world toward the melting-pot metaphor. As expressed by Gad Yatziv, multiculturalism tears off the guise of shared culture and reveals a simple truth: “The melting pot has a single-culture profile that can be identified… [It is] hegemonic and arrogant, aspiring to gobble up the cultures of ethnic groups in its domain.”23 These discursive and conceptual changes were intertwined with changes in the Israeli media landscape. Until the 1990s, Israel had only one public television channel, funded mainly by compulsory fees paid by the public. Over time, a combination of political, economic, and social shifts led to the eventual launching of the commercial Channel 2 in November 1993. Governed by the desire to attain high ratings, this new channel featured a stream of entertainment-based genres, bringing the epoch of “infotainment” to Israeli prime time.24 One of the most prominent changes brought about by Channel 2 was an increase in the variety and number of original Hebrew-language comedy and satirical programs, which were considered rating magnets. The public discussion of the ratings culture on the new Channel 2 was to a great extent nurtured by stereotype-based ethnic perceptions regarding its audience. In an

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interview in 1993, Alex Giladi, an executive at Keshet, one of the three companies holding the concession for Channel 2, said that “Masuda from Sderot” was the target population for its programming. This remark clearly suggested that “Masuda” was primitive, uneducated, and had limited horizons—the stereotypical embodiment of a  Mizrahi woman living in a backwater town. Moreover, the assumption was that Masuda did not understand English, hence the preference of Channel 2 concessionaires to produce telenovelas and comedies in Hebrew.25 Giladi’s words provoked a storm of protest. Many discerned an expression of Ashkenazi arrogance and patronage toward the stereotypically defined Mizrahi community. From time to time “Masuda from Sederot” still makes the headlines, usually in a negative context, as exemplifying arrogant, elitist, estranged, and unfeeling attitudes. At the same time, in the comic sphere, the imaginary presence of “Masuda” inspired writers and producers to explore new and occasionally subversive territories.

Analytical Scope Some comic programs are more important than others, in the sense that they have become part of the Israeli “comic canon.” In a previous study on which this essay is based, I interviewed key figures in Israel’s comedy world during various periods, asking them to cite what they regarded as the most significant comedy sketches or segments since 1968.26 For shows produced after 1993, the data from this survey was also crosschecked with ratings figures (viewing habits began to be measured systematically only when Channel 2 began broadcasting). On this basis I formed a list of 34 canonical texts, including characters, sketches, and program segments. The texts then underwent qualitative-interpretative analysis. Each of them was examined as a multichannel dialogue between two circles—the textual and the contextual. I studied three main aspects of the texts: characters, plot, and genre. In the contextual circle, all of the texts were examined with regard to four dimensions: discourse concerning social cleavages, the broadcasting station, references to specific social events/phenomena, and macro-processes in Israeli society. The analysis revealed that Israeli ethnic humor can be divided into four historical stages, labeled: 1) the Mizrahi as “comic victim”; (2) hegemony’s lost battle; (3) the Mizrahi as (commercial) court jester; and (4) “some of my best friends are Ashkenazim.” In order to support my arguments, I present a detailed analysis of one character, sketch, or program that epitomizes each of these stages.

The Mizrahi as “Comic Victim” (“The New Immigrants,” 1973) “Here in the beloved land of the forefathers, your dreams will come true. . . . ” “Stop singing that! Do you think that by singing you’ll get a duty-free television?” —“The New Immigrants,” Lul, March 18, 1973

The sea. Far in the distance is a ship. On the beach are two men with moustaches, keffiyehs on their heads. A small boat approaches. Two men wearing caps arrive

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at the beach and kiss the ground. Thus begins the parade of immigrants. One after another, pairs of Jews from Russia, Poland, Yemen, Germany, Morocco, and Georgia arrive. (All of the immigrants are played by the same actors, Arik Einstein and Uri Zohar.) As each group reaches the beach, it is ridiculed and disparaged by the group that preceded it. In the end, they all stand together and curse the Georgians, the last ones to arrive. The Georgians, in turn, quickly join a crowd facing the sea, screaming invective at the next group of immigrants making their way to the “Promised Land.” This is a summary of the plot of “The New Immigrants,” a comic sketch that was first broadcast on March 18, 1973.27 Two of the major events taking place in Israel during this period were massive immigration from the Soviet Union and the activities of the Black Panthers. Academic literature explores the connection between the two: the warm welcome and economic benefits granted to new immigrants from the Soviet Union exacerbated feelings of being discriminated against on the part of immigrants from Arab countries who had arrived in preceding decades. These historical events are echoed in the sketch as the Georgians, the last to arrive, stir up a commotion that is a parody on Black Panther protests following the wave of immigration from the Soviet Union. My analysis of this sketch relates to the three main discursive frames surveyed above: the melting pot, discrimination, and establishment-apologetic. To these I add a fourth discursive type prevalent in Israel from the early 1970s, depicted by Tamar Katriel as the “griping ritual.”28 The origin of the Hebrew word for griping (kitur) is the Yiddish word kuter, a male cat wailing during mating, implying unjustified dissatisfaction. And indeed, one of the main characteristics of such griping is that it is perceived as being completely without merit. Another main component of griping, which has its origins in differentiating between talk and deeds, is the perception that griping is the polar opposite of transformative social action. Griping rituals, as well as the other discursive frames depicted above, are reflected in the sketch mainly through the construction of the characters. Two main axes, which I label “similarity” versus “uniqueness,” underpin this construction. The former emphasizes what is common among the various waves of immigration, while the latter emphasizes the differences between them. From the very beginning of the sketch, when the immigrant groups are arriving in the Promised Land, the text points to the similarity between them. The emotional immigrants excitedly call each other by name (“Grisha!” “Marioma!”) and later hold an “immigration ceremony” marked by both a physical gesture toward the land (for instance, kissing the ground) and verbal expressions of joy (including singing, dancing, and hugging). The fervor, activity, and friendly atmosphere all disappear the moment the immigrants cross the imaginary line drawn on the beach and become Israelis. Then the second stage, the griping ritual, begins. This phase is characterized by diametrically opposed body and verbal language as the immigrants go from being active to passive—apart from shaking their heads, their bodies are motionless. The immigrants no longer relate to one another, as they did when they arrived, but rather to the common “enemy” facing them—members of the next wave of immigrants. Their main “activity” during this stage is verbal, as the optimistic, enthusiastic ­discourse is replaced by griping. This transformation paradoxically returns them to

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the Zionist stereotype of diasporic Jews, taking a step back from the Hebrew ethos of social action whose potency lies in deeds rather than talk. Yet alongside this “rhetoric of similarity,” the sketch also illustrates sharp differences between the waves of immigration. These differences can be discerned according to how they fare on the “contribution to Labor Zionism” test. All of the Ashkenazi characters are portrayed as young men or as a father/young son pair. In contrast, the Yemenite arrives with a pregnant wife and the Moroccan with an elderly grandfather who drags a baby carriage filled with belongings (a metonym for the rest of their presumably large family). Neither the woman nor the old man speak; they use only body language or mumble “ahhh…” The text spoken by the Moroccan immigrant emphasizes the advantages of his new situation—the possibility of receiving material goods from the country: “Whatever you desire is ours,” he explains to his grandfather. This sentence reflects the differentiation prevalent in establishment discourse between those who came to contribute to the country (the Ashkenazim) and those who came to get something from it (the Mizrahim). The Yemenite (and to a lesser extent, the Moroccan) are fashioned according to the Mizrahi stereotype in Israeli establishment discourse and popular culture: they are traditional, primitive, and belong to large, patriarchal families. In light of this analysis, I argue that “The New Immigrants” framed Mizrahi claims about discrimination as a griping ritual, consequently strengthening establishment ideology. This message is expressed both explicitly and implicitly. It is expressed explicitly at the end of the sketch, when the veteran immigrants protest the benefits given to the newcomers. The sketch ridicules claims of discrimination by creating a contradiction between what the immigrants say about their contribution to Zionism and what we saw in the sketch: a complete lack of action on their behalf. More implicitly, the various immigrant groups, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi alike, are shown to be treated the same by those who preceded them, thus implying that there was no discrimination against any given group. In fact, pointing to differences between the immigrant waves seems to support establishment claims that if a gap does exist, it is the fault of the “primitive” immigrants from the Arab countries. In this sense, the sketch strengthens the establishment-hegemonic discourse regarding the Israeli ethnic cleavage. At the same time, “The New Immigrants” incorporates a number of subversive messages with regard to the melting-pot ethos, as it lampoons constitutive components of Zionist ideology such as speaking Hebrew, the sanctity of Jewish labor, making due with little, and contributing to the collective. Although at the end of the sketch everyone is standing side by side, there is no connection whatsoever between them apart from the common venting of gripes in the name of an exaggerated Zionist ethos. Israel, it seems, is no more than a giant immigrant camp made up of different tribes. Whereas the sketch as a whole reflects the failure of the Israeli melting pot, its ending may be interpreted as providing support for it. In the final scene, the new immigrants from Georgia cross the imaginary line that separates the veteran from the new immigrants, and within seconds they adopt the discrimination rhetoric. In the last frame, all of them have their backs to the camera and are letting out a stream of invective at the next wave of immigrants. This photographic perspective, which invites the viewer at home to join the yelling crowd, seems to merge the points of view of the audience and the characters, expressing a new kind of melting pot—the

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“griping pot.” Far from the utopian Zionist vision of the melting pot, it keeps the notion of one nation sharing a piece of land, a historical ethos, and a common form of behavior—the griping ritual.

Hegemony’s Losing Battle (“The Sabbath Trip,” 1984) Daliat-el-Carmel, we went into Abu Yousef’s restaurant. Dad’s like, “Bring some lamb on the double, lay it on us already ’cause we’ve been on our feet all morning.” Till the lamb came, Mom suggested we have some stuffed pepper so we won’t dry out from eating just the pita. Moshe ordered orangeade. I said, “What’s with the orangeade, Moshe?” —“The Sabbath Outing,” excerpted from Slip of the Tongue, March 1, 1984

In 1984, Dudu Topaz introduced his stand-up comedy show, Slip of the Tongue (Pelitat peh). The name referred to a famous incident that had taken place three years earlier, in June 1981, at the height of a charged election campaign. Topaz, appearing at a rally for the Labor Party in Tel Aviv, referred to Likud supporters as chaḥ chaḥ im (a pejorative term for delinquents that was also used as a code word for Mizrahim). The next day Menachem Begin, the leader of the Likud Party, stood at the same site and made a scathing speech against the Labor coalition and Topaz. Two days later the Likud won the election; Topaz was forced to go underground because of threats on his life. The connection between Topaz’s 1981 speech and the stand-up show was manifest not only in its name but also in the most popular monologue in the program, “The Sabbath Outing.”29 This sketch was the direct continuation of anti-Mizrahi themes expressed by Topaz three years earlier. Before starting the monologue, Topaz announced that it would be about “the phenomenon known as the Israeli who takes his family on a Sabbath outing.” He then put on a blue and white kova’ tembel (the traditional Israeli bucket hat), which was meant to signal that he was playing the part of a young Israeli boy narrating the story. Very soon it became clear that the monologue was not about any average Israeli family, but rather an Israeli family of a certain type—a Mizrahi family. The monologue presents the boy through a series of negative Mizrahi stereotypes. The first is that of violence: to wake up the family members, the father is described as slapping them, with the mother joining in (“morning exercises,” in the boy’s cheerful description). In addition, the monologue demonstrates Mizrahi Jews’ purported lack of culture by showing how they are not averse to what is euphemistically referred to as “carrying away” (soḥ evim, in Israeli slang) things belonging to others. A specific target is singled out in the sketch: kibbutzim, which symbolize the country’s “old” socialist, Ashkenazi establishment. The sketch implies that the Mizrahim haven’t cultivated the apple trees from which they “carry away” apples, nor the fish ponds from which they take some fish. These two negative traits—petty violence, on the one hand, and pilfering and disobeying the law, on the other—characterize Mizrahim in other cultural productions

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as well, especially the “bourekas films,” the popular 1960s cinematic genre based on ethnic stereotypes. Yet if these films also highlighted the positive traits of Mizrahim, portraying them as sharp, down-to-earth, and warm-hearted, “The Sabbath Outing” focuses on their negative side.30 This is especially noticeable in the language employed by Topaz, which is stammering and full of grammatical errors. Rina Ben-Shahar notes that during the 1940s, Mizrahi characters speaking broken Hebrew began to appear as comic figures in Israeli stories, plays, and sketches. She argues that sketches made famous by the comedy group Hagashash Hahiver in the 1960s and 1970s, which featured numerous Mizrahi characters, continued this tradition, but with one salient difference— the Mizrahim usually took the upper hand. Though uneducated, they were by no means stupid, and they often poked fun at the elegant Hebrew spoken by the Ashkenazi intellectual.31 This subversive quality is nonexistent in the language of the boy in “The Sabbath Outing,” which makes the monologue more reminiscent of texts from the 1940s and 1950s than those of Hagashash Hahiver and others who followed. Up to this point I have depicted “The Sabbath Outing” as an extension of the chaḥ chaḥ im stereotype. But looking at it from a historical perspective and against the backdrop of its popularity among the Mizrahi public in the 1980s can lead to an alternative reading. The theoretical basis of this analysis lies with Dustin Griffin’s depiction of the dual role of food in satire.32 On the one hand, food can be used as part of a negative portrayal of gluttons and drunkards; on the other, it symbolizes celebration and liberation from established order. Thus, while food in Topaz’s monologue can be taken as a critical commentary on Mizrahim who gorge themselves on the best the country has to offer, it can also be regarded as a liberating Mizrahi celebration. This liberating celebration, I wish to argue, is closely tied with American capitalism and consumerism. Beyond the plethora of food and the car that appears throughout the sketch, American capitalism is epitomized by positioning “cola” (presumably referring to Coca-Cola) as Israel’s national drink. In several incidents throughout the sketch the whole family orders cola, except for Moshe, the boy’s brother, who wants orangeade. The narrator is baffled. “What’s with the orangeade, Moshe?” he asks repeatedly, in a sentence that became iconic. Just like prevalent keywords, iconic comic phrases incorporate deep cultural meanings. In this case, “orangeade” and “cola” are readily understood to be stand-ins for Israeli versus American consumer culture. The years following the Likud takeover were marked by a significant shift in this regard. Prior to 1977, many Mizrahim who felt they could not realize their potential in the Ashkenazi-socialist milieu left Israel for the United States.33 With the change in government, socialist values gave way to those of the free market; among other things, the Likud government reduced customs duties, which consequently lowered the prices for imported goods and raised the standard of living of many Israelis. In consequence, by the early 1980s the Mizrahi public no longer had to “escape” to America; America had come to it. The monologue positions American cola opposite orangeade, a carbonated drink popular during the 1960s among Israeli soldiers and children. In contrast with imported Coca-Cola, orangeade was local and, above all, it was identified with the army and with Zionism. The disparity between cola and orangeade is therefore tied to the substructure of the monologue, based on the contrast between the “old” Ashkenazi and the new, capitalistic-Mizrahi Israel. Moreover, the Mizrahi “liberation” described in

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the piece is not only economic; it is also cultural. When Topaz explains before the monologue that he will be talking about an Israeli family taking a Sabbath trip to the country, he defines Israeli identity as Mizrahi. Retrospectively, “The Sabbath Outing” can be seen as giving birth to a new comic character: the MCN—Mizrahi, capitalist, and nationalist—who is almost the mirror image of Kimmerling’s Ashkenazi, secular, veteran, socialist, and nationalist Zionist. This character distances himself from anything with even a whiff of intellectualism or sophistication; his attention is instead given to food, and later to soccer and popular entertainment. Capitalism as embodied in the MCN character is frequently tied to admiration both for American culture and its consumer products; alongside this, however, is a strong allegiance to national-Zionist mores. For example, in “The Sabbath Outing,” the narrator describes how his mother urges his father to get him a hamburger because he is too thin, and she is afraid that “they won’t take him into the army.” During the 1980s the MCN was mainly a comic target. However, in the 1990s this prototype emerged as a national comic hero, the reborn Court Jester of a new media ecology.

The Mizrahi as Court Jester in the Age of Commercial Television (“Jojo Halastra,” 1994) I went to a lecture by my friend, Sigmund Freud. Do you know him? [chuckles] Like, I would go to him to find out what my dreams mean. I went to him and asked, “bro’, what did my dream last night mean?” Sigmund answered me, “Look, that proves my theory, the  Oedipus complex . . . a boy wants to sleep with his mother and murder his father” [chuckles]. On the spot I gave him a fist complex. —Jo Jo Halastra (Tzvika Hadar), The Comedy Store, August 22, 1994

Some six months after the debut of the “kingdom” of Channel 2 in October 1993, a new court jester suddenly burst forth on the screen: Jojo (pronounced “Zhozho”) Halastra. The character, played by the comedian Tzvika Hadar on the popular ­program The Comedy Store, soon became the focus of adoration and imitation.34 Flamboyant in appearance, Jojo was the archetypical ars. This term, as described by journalist Neri Livne, is the latest in a series of pejorative monikers for young Mizrahim, following pushtak and later chaḥ chaḥ .35 An ars is readily identified by his concern (bordering on the ludicrous) with outward appearance: he is generally dressed in tight, low-slung pants and either an open shirt or a T-shirt, and he has an abundance of opulent accessories, including at least one thick gold chain around his neck and (often) a luxury car. His self-respect is excessive, and when he feels threatened he quickly resorts to verbal or physical violence. From his name and accent, there is no doubt that Jojo is of North African origin. His name, Halastra, meaning “being infuriated” in Jojo’s private language, (as in “this gives me the halastra”) hints at the hot blood running through his veins.36 The thick gold chain around his neck includes two pendants: one the Hebrew word chai (life) and the other a giant dollar sign. The chain necklace, the chai, and the dollar sign form the symbolic triangle on which the character is based: Mizrahi ethnicity,

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patriotism, and capitalism. Halastra thus constitutes a more complete version of the MCN character whose seeds were sown as far back as Dudu Topaz’s “Sabbath Outing” of 1984. Jojo’s character is manifest in a segment from a program first shown in August 1994, in which Jojo fulminates against a commercial for Pepsi that was then being broadcast on Channel 2. In the original commercial, an actor bemoans the fact that all too many years of his life have been wasted on a series of daily activities such as going to lectures or sleeping instead of being devoted to drinking Pepsi. Jojo sharply criticizes the Ashkenazi actor in the commercial, referring to him as a laflaf (nerd). According to Jojo, a laflaf goes to the beach wearing a business suit instead of a bathing suit and spends “3.2 years of his life listening to lectures,” whereas “three minutes were enough for me” (at this point, he relates the story about meeting Freud and offering him a “fist complex”). Moreover, a laflaf not only devotes too little time to eating but eats cottage cheese instead of meat. Finally, Jojo criticizes the lack of sexual activity implied in the laflaf’s account. Jojo’s sweeping criticism conjures up a clear contrast between the Mizrahi patish (literally, hammer) and the Ashkenazi laflaf. In Claude Levi-Strauss’ terms, these characters are the embodiment of basic binary contrasts: uncivilized/cultured, masculine/feminine, materialistic/spiritual.37 While the laflaf is cultured, well dressed, educated, and impervious to the temptations of sex and food, Jojo the patish is the uncivilized commoner. He prefers to be naked, he’s fed up with school, and he’s revved up to express his unrestrained lust for women and food. This binary structure can be interpreted as reinforcing hegemonic themes: Jojo is the last in a long chain of “primitive” Mizrahi characters who are apt to be laughed at and looked down upon. A similar reading can be based on an analysis of Jojo’s appeal to the presumably Mizrahi audience. Throughout the monologue, Jojo never uses the second person plural (“you”), but only the first person plural (“we”). He thus creates the feeling that he is addressing an imaginary community of Jojo duplicates who identify with him. Taking this into consideration, it can be argued that Jojo is conceived as the televised voice of “Masuda from Sderot.” Like Jojo, Masuda watches Channel 2, and like him she is perceived as someone who does not identify with (and perhaps does not even understand) some of the Ashkenazi content of its programming. Jojo’s most important job, according to this reading, is to sit in the studio and interpret those Channel 2 broadcasts that are still considered Ashkenazi in nature, such as commercials. In this way Channel 2 executives can have their cake and eat it too: while Jojo laughs at the commercials, the ideal they depict continues to be Ashkenazi. A different reading would argue that, rather than the butt of dozens of jokes, Jojo is a comic hero in a changing culture. This interpretation suggests that Jojo can be seen as a new personification of the Israeli community, an updated version of the sabra, the native-born Israeli. According to Miri Talmon, alongside the altruistic and heroic representation of the sabra in literature and canonical poetry, Palmach folk culture and Israeli cinema have presented an entirely different model: the anti-hero who refuses to be taken for a freier (sucker), who prefers chilling out to fighting, and who dissents from the pioneering pathos.38 During the 1970s, these antiauthoritarian traits shifted to the Mizrahi protagonists of the popular bourekas movies. Jojo

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Halastra can be seen as the continuation and expansion of the process described by Talmon. If until the 1970s the troublemaking sabra appeared mostly in radio sketches and popular films, by the 1990s, with the introduction of Channel 2, this figure had also penetrated the most central medium in Israeli society: television. Moreover, while such characters were depicted in popular movies as both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, on Channel 2 they were only Mizrahi. In light of this, we can relate to Jojo as a cultural folk leader of a new type, a prophet of what I would call “the second Mizrahi upheaval.” In contrast to the political upset of 1977, this was a cultural upheaval stemming from the confluence of political awareness on the part of a large Mizrahi public and the growing “ratings culture” of commercial Israeli television. Jojo positions himself as the representative of a group that detests Ashkenazi culture as represented in mass media. In Danny Rabinowitz’s analysis: Jojo hasn’t read either Walter Benjamin or Bernard Williams . . . but the gaps in his education do not interfere with him dealing, very much as they do, with cultural criticism. . . . The liberal middle-class Ashkenazi class, certain in its belief in its openness and acceptance of everyone, including Mizrahim, was caught unawares [by Jojo]. [Zvika] Hadar succeeds in expropriating from its hands the monopoly of observing Israeli culture from above, depriving it of the privilege of authoring the sole canonical interpretation.39

In yet another reading of his character, Jojo is interpreted as intrinsically dialogic, as he laughs at both groups—while his utterances ridicule Ashkenazim, his clothes and behavior scorn Mizrahim. He thus advances the middle ground, an archetype that is arguably neither Ashkenazi nor Mizrahi, in a way strengthening the notion of the melting pot. At the same time, since Jojo’s character is based on the separate existence of the “Ashkenazi” and “Mizrahi” identities, it also foreshadows themes of multiculturalism that will conquer Israeli discourse from the middle of the decade in programs such as Only in Israel.

“Some of My Best Friends are Ashkenazi” (Only in Israel, 1998–2003) Everyone is always talking about the right of the public to know. But the public’s had enough of that. The public wants to rest. I know the public personally, and it wants to rest, and no one lets it. —Limor (Orna Banai), in the debut of Only in Israel, March 1998

During the Purim holiday of 1998, Only in Israel (Rak beyisrael) debuted on Channel 2. The program, starring Erez Tal as himself and Orna Banai as Limor (his co-anchor on the show) humorously reviewed the (mostly) serious topics of the day as seen on Israeli and world television. Between recurring features and sketches, Limor and Erez (who was given the name “Shimon” by Limor, who claimed that it was more “manly”) provided their own interpretations of current events, while at the same time interacting in a complex relationship of attraction-aversion (attraction mostly on Limor’s part, aversion mostly on Shimon’s).40 From the very beginning, Limor was styled as a stereotypical freḥ ah. Like the ars, the freḥ ah is a common stereotype in Israeli culture, though to date it has received

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relatively little scholarly attention. In the Comprehensive Dictionary of Slang, a freḥ ah is defined as “a vacuous girl whose appearance and manners are considered cheap, in the past identified with Mizrahi origin.”41 The name Frehah (happiness in Arabic) was traditionally given to girls to express joy for their birth; in Israel, however, it became a pejorative term for women in general and Mizrahi women in particular.42 It came into use during the late 1960s, when American permissiveness and the pull of the discotheque conquered Israeli urban centers and attracted young people from the periphery. Freḥ ot, argues Oz Almog, “are thought of as loud, vacuous, vulgar, and cheap; explicitly and implicitly contrasting with girls from good homes—that is, sabras.”43 In her analysis of the character of Limor, Iris Mizrahi points to salient traits of the freḥ ah (superficiality, sexual permissiveness, and attraction to riches and the American dream) and characterizes Limor as the latest link in a long chain of ridiculed Mizrahi women.44 I would argue, however, that Mizrahi’s analysis, while well substantiated, only portrays part of the picture, as it ignores the dialogic quality inherent in Limor’s character. Like Jojo Halastra, Limor can be perceived not only as a target of ridicule but also as a comic hero. For instance, when she talks about “nationalistic pride” (rather than “national pride”) in fractured Hebrew, it is easy to laugh at her; but she can also be admired for the subversive twists she brings to well-worn sentiments. Limor’s construction as a comic hero also derives from her witty mockery of her television partner, Erez Tal, who represents Ashkenazi ethnicity. While the Mizrahi traditionally was understood to be the “other” by Israeli-Ashkenazi standards, the “other” on Only in Israel, at least in its explicit and verbal level, is the Ashkenazi. Though the word “Mizrahi” is never mentioned, Limor continually harps on the theme of Shimon’s being an Ashkenazi who prefers sushi to the all-Israeli pita, and who is reluctant to have children. Shimon, for his part, does not laugh at Limor. This may be a reflection of the real cultural change taking place in Israel, in which ridicule of Mizrahim is perceived as inappropriate, or at least not politically correct. Or it may be that Shimon has no need to ridicule Limor since her character is ludicrous to start with. In addition to defining Limor as both a comic victim and a comic hero, much like Jojo Halastra, I would like to put forward a different interpretation and argue that Limor is a freḥ ah only in the initial stages of the character’s development. With time, Limor developed from an actual freicha to what I would call a “post-freicha.” If in the beginning she was an attempt to imitate or be a representation of a real freicha, Limor of the 21st century became a representation of a representation of a freicha, an imitation of an imitation or, in the language of Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum.45 Structuring Limor as a symbol of the Mizrahi woman was carried out, among other methods, by using a plethora of Mizrahi indicators that created an artificial feeling. In one sketch, Limor is sitting at her favorite shwarma stand listening to the Mizrahi singer Eyal Golan. She orders “a glass of amba [a pickled mango condiment, common in Iraqi cooking], without sugar, please.” This profusion of Mizrahi indicators emphasizes the artificial construction of Limor as a Mizrahi. It also alludes to the fact that “Mizrahi” is itself an artificial construct relating to people from a wide variety of geographic origins. The profusion of Mizrahi indicators thus evinces a subversive potential, as it induces viewers to regard the seemingly “natural” categories of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi as artificial social constructions.

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Finally, it can be argued that, despite the apparent gulf between Limor and Shimon, they actually have a common aim: making money. Although only the fictional Limor talks about this objective openly, the audience is well aware that it is shared by Shimon—or rather, Erez Tal, who not only appears in the show but is also involved in its production. In order to produce lucrative televised entertainment, Shimon and Limor take on defined roles—Limor as the “Mizrahi,” Tal as the “Ashkenazi.” In this context, Only in Israel is a descendant of the comic “double act” that originated in Shakespearean dialogues between a servant and his lord, in which the serious lord attempts to contend with the recurring disturbance of his urchin subordinate.46 In Only in Israel, the incompatible personalities of the Mizrahi “servant” and the Ashkenazi “lord” are part of the show that Tal and Banai put on for the viewers of Channel 2—and, by extension, for their advertisers. Moreover, Limor and Shimon can be seen as stand-ins for their viewers in that they, too, are watching television. They meet in their “living room” (the television studio, which becomes everyone’s living room for an hour) to watch segments from television broadcasts. Most of these segments are from the First Channel, which is ridiculed as serious, technologically outdated, and backward—in a word, antithetical to the allegedly “fresh” atmosphere of Channel 2 and Only in Israel. If “The New Immigrants” sketch of the 1970s described the collapse of the traditional melting pot in favor of the “griping pot,” it seems that during the 1990s the new melting pot evolved into what can be called “the entertainment pot.” Offering a combination of patriotism and commercialism, Channel 2 both promoted and epitomized this change. And within this context, Only in Israel represented this new melting pot not only because it was structured as a salute to television, but also because its polysemic humor allowed each viewer to find an interpretation that was relevant to him or her, thus allowing everyone to join the celebration. In this way, Only in Israel closed the circle that was opened back in 1973 in the “The New Immigrants” sketch. When the complaints vocalized by the immigrants are carefully examined, we discover that most refer to material conditions. What the Israeli really wants, as revealed by the sketch, is a car, an apartment, and, of course, “duty-free televisions.” Twentyfive years later, Only in Israel portrays the realization of these new Zionist dreams.

Concluding Thoughts This essay has set out to explore the polysemic and dialogic qualities of televised humor through the case study of ethnic humor in Israel. Focusing on internal ethnic tensions, I have traced the ways in which televised comedy constructed Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identities over the course of nearly 30 years—from the advent of Israeli television in 1968 until the dawn of the 21st century. I have argued that popular humorous televised texts not only narrated the story of transformed ethnic relations, but also took an active part in their formation. I have broken down these ongoing multifaceted processes into four periods of ethnic representation. In the first stage, taking place in the 1970s, the Mizrahi was depicted as the primitive “other,” serving mostly as a comic victim. By the 1980s, however, when the old Ashkenazi hegemony was in decline, a new brand of Israeli comic hero—the MCN

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(Mizrahi, capitalist, nationalist)—took to the screen. This new hero became a major figure after the launching of the profit-based Channel 2 in 1993, which aimed to attract broad audiences (including those of Mizrahi origin). The third era, which I have labeled “the Mizrahi as court jester in the age of commercial television,” is thus marked by the construction of Mizrahi characters with whom—not only at whom—audiences can laugh. The fourth and current era is characterized by a continuation of the trend of Mizrahi comic heroes, and even by its deepening, as Ashkenazim have turned into main targets of explicit mockery. This fourth model of ethnic representation is manifested in many shows, including What a Wonderful Country (Eretz nehederet), the most popular satirical program of the last decade. Since it debuted in 2003, the show has featured many characters with clear ethnic markers. Among these, one of the most prominent was Lital Ma’atuk (played, in drag, by Mariano Idelman), the star of a series of sketches aired on 2010 that took place at an imaginary high school. Lital was framed as a stereotypical Mizrahi freḥ ah: vulgar, loud, violent, and utterly dismissive of anything her teachers had to say. Yet she was far from being merely a victim of ridicule. As the successor of dialogic comic characters such as Jojo and Limor, she was also constructed as funny and assertive. In the various comic situations presented in the sketches, Lital always outwitted the hapless (and Ashkenazi) school principal and teacher. While the Mizrahi character of Ma’atuk was clearly a comic hero, the Ashkenazi participants were framed as ridiculous figures. This framing had an effect on audience response. Although the show’s creators declared that they intended to construct Ma’atuk as a satirical warning flag against the deteriorating norms of Israeli youngsters, their casting her as a comic hero generated the opposite effect: Ma’atuk became a role model for Israeli teens who initiated Facebook hate groups against their teachers and who imitated her vandalistic activities. In an unusual step, the creators decided to suspend the character from the small screen. While this was the end of Lital Ma’atuk, her comic prototype will probably find a new incarnation. Alongside the processes of change depicted above, one element remains stable— almost all the canonic texts referring to ethnic relations in Israel combine subversive and conservative messages and can thus be defined as polysemic. This, in turn, has implications relating to two dimensions, social change and social cohesion. With regard to social change, I argue that humor’s multiplicity of meaning, or polysemy, may have an important role in transitional phases, as it allows those who cling to “old” ideologies to read texts in a manner that is congruent with their own values. In this process, new forms of representation can infiltrate without objection. Thus, the polysemous representation of Mizrahi characters in the bourekas movies and in the Hagashash Hahiver sketches of the 1960s allowed various groups to extract contradictory ideological messages: Mizrahim could identify with the new comic heroes, whereas prejudiced Ashkenazim could enjoy them for their being entertaining, sometimes ridiculous, and completely non-threatening. Such comic heroes fully penetrated television during the 1990s, the era of commercial television. During this new era, the old Mizrahi stereotypes were maintained—these characters were uneducated, gruff, and loud, together with being warm and street-smart. At the same time, in their new incarnation, the Mizrahim were not merely court jesters; in the new world of capitalism that was reflected on Channel 2, they were, to a certain degree, also the rulers.

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The second dimension linked to the polysemic nature of the comic texts d­ iscussed in this essay is social cohesion. On one level, canonical televised texts can be regarded as enforcing social borders by employing ethnic, national, and other stereotypes. In a deeper sense, however, the comic canon appears not only to differentiate between groups, but also to serve as a common denominator among diverse social classes. The polysemic qualities that characterize the comic canon enable it to serve as a cultural core shared by opposing groups that read it in various ways. Contrary to artistic or literary canons, which are defined and consumed by elites, the comic canon is part of the Israeli “cultural ID”—shared by highbrow and lowbrow Israelis alike. Consequently, comic canonical televised texts may be regarded as an integral part of the ongoing (and probably neverending) formation of Israeli identity.

Notes This essay is a belated offspring of my Ph.D. dissertation, written under the supervision of Menahem Blondheim and Itzhak Roeh; I will always be grateful for their wonderful guidance. I am also obliged to Helene Landau, who skillfully translated this piece from Hebrew. 1. See, for example, Owen J. Lynch, “Humorous Communication: Finding a Place for Humor in Communication Research,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (November 2002), 423–445. 2. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: 1979). 3.  John Fiske, Television Culture (London: 1987). In the United States, public television rather than commercial television is mandated to reach a broad spectrum of groups and provide diverse programming. For commercial television, catering to different groups is based not on ideological grounds, but rather on commercial interests. 4.  Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968). 5.  Lynch, “Humorous Communication.” 6.  Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1899; rpt. Whitefish, Mont.: 2003). 7.  Michael Mulkay, On Humor: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge: 1988). 8.  Ibid.; Chris Powell and George E.C. Paton, Humor in Society: Resistance and Control (London: 1988). 9.  Giselinde Kuipers, “Humor Styles and Symbolic Boundaries,” Journal of Literary Theory 3, no. 2 (2009), 219–239; Limor Shifman and Elihu Katz, “ ‘Just Call Me Adonai’: A Case Study of Ethnic Humor in Israel,” American Sociological Review 70, no. 5 (2005), 843–859. 10.  Charles E. Schutz, “The Sociability of Ethnic Jokes,” Humor 2, no. 2 (January 1989), 167. 11. Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Boston: 1985). 12.  Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World (Bloomington: 1996). 13. Anita Shapira, Yehudim ḥ adashim, yehudim yeshanim (Tel Aviv: 1997), 94; Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton: 1999). 14.  According to Elliot Oring, early forms of Israeli humor echoed sabras’ dual attitude toward the “Orient.” The ḥ izbatim (tall tales) of the Palmach, for instance, reflected, on the one hand, fascination and incorporation of cultural elements such as Arabic slang, food, or folk dance, and on the other a sense of superiority toward “the Orient.” See Oring, Israeli Humor:

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The Content and Structure of the Chizbat of the Palmah (Albany: 2012). This conflicted approach will also surface, years later, in the construction of the Mizrahi comic heroes depicted in the essay. 15. Sammy Smooha, Social Research on Jewish Ethnicity in Israel (Haifa: 1986); Hannan Hever, Yehouda Shenhav, and Pnina Motzafi-Haller (eds.), Mizraḥ im beyisrael: ’iyun bikorti meḥ udash (Tel Aviv: 2002). 16. Sammy Smooha, “Black Panthers: The Ethnic Dilemma,” Society 9, no. 7 (May 1972), 31–36. 17.  Henriette Dahan Kalev, “Ma’arakhot hitargenut ’atzmit: Wadi Salib veha ‘pantarim hesheḥorim’—hashlakhot ’al hama’arekhet beyisrael” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991); Gerald Cromer, “The Israeli Black Panthers: Fighting for Credibility and a Cause,” Victimology 1, no. 3 (Fall 1976), 403–413. 18.  Hanna Herzog, ’Adatiyut politit: dimui mul metziut—nituaḥ sotziyologi-histori shel hareshimot ha“’adatiyot” leasefat hanivḥ arim velakeneset, 1920–1984 (Tel Aviv: 1986). 19. Baruch Kimmerling, Ketz shilton haaḥ usalim (Tel Aviv: 2001). 20.  Erez Weiss, “Maḥbarot lemeḥkar uvikoret: ḥamishim learba’im veshemoneh,” special issue of Teoriyah uvikoret (1998), 301–311. 21.  Yael (Yuli) Tamir, “Hapolitikah shel ha’elbon,” in Kav hashes’a: haḥ evrah hayisreelit bein keri’ah veiḥ ui, ed. Ruvik Rosenthal (Tel Aviv: 2001), 30–31. 22.  Menachem Mautner, Avi Sagi, and Ronen Shamir (eds.), Rav-tarbutiyut bamedinah demokratit veyehudit: sefer zikaron leAriel Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv: 1998), 67–76. 23.  Gad Yatziv, Haḥ evrah hasektoralit (Jerusalem: 1999), 149. 24.  Tamar Liebes, American Dreams, Hebrew Subtitles: Globalization from the Receiving End (Cresskill, N.J.: 2003). 25.  Orit Galili, “Hakelalim haḥadashim shel hateleviziyah,” Haaretz (30 September 1994). 26.  Limor Shifman, “ ‘Ha’ars, hafreḥah vehaima hapolaniyah’: shesa’im ḥevratiyim vehumor televizyoni beyisrael 1968–2000” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2004). 27.  In Hebrew, “Ha’olim haḥadashim.” The sketch can be found online at youtube.com/ watch?v=xIoUVziCBwU (accessed 22 November 2015). 28.  Tamar Katriel, Milot mafteaḥ : defusei tarbut vetikshoret beyisrael (Haifa: 1999). 29. In Hebrew, “Tiyul beshabat.” The sketch can be found online at youtube.com/ watch?v=p1k66KaboLo (accessed 22 November 2015). 30.  Miri Talmon, Bluz latzabar haavud: ḥ avurot venostalgiyah bakolno’a hayisreeli (Tel Aviv and Haifa: 2001). 31. Rina Ben-Shahar, “’Al meafyanim signoniyim aḥadim shel ma’arkhonei haGashash Haḥiver,” Lashon ve’ivrit 1 (1990), 31–35. 32.  Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: 1994). 33. Nitzan Ben-Shaul, “Hakesher hasamui bein sirtei haburekas lisratim ishiyim,” in Mabatim fiktiviyim—’al kolno’a yisreeli, ed. Nurith Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman (Tel Aviv: 1998), 128–134. 34. See, for instance, the following online segment (Jojo appears approximately five minutes into the program): youtube.com/watch?v=xyo6FLeZ3Aw (accessed 6 December 2015). 35. Neri Livne, “Ha’arsim haḥadashim,” Haaretz (6 September 2002). The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “shepherd of whores.” 36.  Interestingly, the word “halastra” originates in the Yiddish-Slavic slang for “the gang.” Its use as a quasi-Mizrahi slang expression charges it with polysemic qualities, as it appeals to two comic traditions at the same time. 37.  Claude Levi-Straus, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 68 (October-December 1955), 428–444. 38. Talmon, Bluz latzabar haavud. 39.  Danny Rabinowitz, “Haarizah shel Zhozho,” Haaretz (2 January 1995). 40. See, for instance, the following online segment: youtube.com/watch?v=SnaR-LcQ_ LE&list=PL8AE79FF95CDF5EFF (accessed 6 December 2015). 41. Ruvik Rosenthal, Milon hasleng hamekif (Jerusalem: 2005).

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42.  Yardena Alon, “Ani freḥ ah?” Hakivun mizraḥ 3 (2002), 22–24. 43.  Oz Almog, Pereidah miSrulik: shinui ’arakhim baelitah hayisreelit (Haifa: 2004), 886. 44.  Iris Mizrahi, “Limor [Orna Banai],” in Adonei hatarbut: anatomiyah shel yatzranei tarbut yisreelim, ed. Nir Baram and Noah Greenberg (Tel Aviv: 2003), 28–41. 45.  Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: 1983). 46. Steve Neal and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy (London: 1994).

From Monsters to Pop Icons: The Use of Humor in Films on Nazis and Hitler since Der Untergang Asal Dardan (Lund University) Why doesn’t anybody ask the question whether those who think that one is not permitted to laugh about Hitler are more “suspect” than those who feel compelled to laugh about his ridiculousness (and the ridiculousness of the cult around him—then and now) in order to maintain a certain degree of sanity? —Hanno Loewy1

The German comedy Hotel Lux (2011) was not a particularly successful film in terms of box-office appeal or critical acclaim. Nonetheless, it hit upon an underlying fact with regard to contemporary representations of Hitler and the Holocaust. In the film, which begins as Hitler is coming to power in 1933, two German variety actors have earned popular acclaim with a musical act in which, dressed up as Hitler and Stalin, they dance alongside a handful of showgirls to the well-known German song “Ein Freund, ein guter Freund” (1930). Inevitably, they get themselves into serious trouble; shortly before the war breaks out, they are forced to flee Europe. In a scene taking place on a plane that is presumably heading for the United States, we hear one of them in voice-over, reading a letter of introduction to a Hollywood producer: “Dear Mr. Silberstein, we’re open to anything you’ve got, even small roles. But we do think that in the coming years there will be great demand for actors specializing in Hitler and Stalin.” Hotel Lux suggests that Hitler has become a mythological character—a stock figure representing absolute evil, globally recognized and instantly understood across all genres and age groups.2 Hitler even serves as a template for the villain in a Dutch children’s cartoon series, Alfred J. Kwak (1989–1991)—also aired in Israel, with Hebrew dubbing—in which a crow named Dolf, complete with black beak, pencil moustache, and cocked hat a là Napoleon seeks to rule over the “Great Waterland.” As the prominent German columnist Harald Martenstein wrote in Die Zeit: “In previous times every older, famous actor wanted to play Lear. Nowadays it seems to be Hitler instead.”3 Presented with the unchanging moustache, eerie gaze, and barking 189

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rant, a viewer may easily forget that any given television program, film, or theatrical production merely gives us one of many artistic interpretations of the historic individual that was Adolf Hitler. In the widely accepted view of Hayden White, “all stories are fictions”—thus, there is no possibility of attaining objectivity or factuality even in historiography, which is also determined by narrative.4 The events of the past offer a range of options for stories, always depending on a framing device, a viewpoint, and a narrative form. Yet in the case of Hitler, until recently there seemed to be a notion that even the most banal factual detail—that is, any evidence of humanity in a man synonymous with evil—could somehow elucidate the mystery of who he really was. In Mein Führer— Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer; 2007), a comedy directed by Dani Levy that will later be discussed in greater detail, a Jewish actor named Adolf Grünbaum (Ulrich Mühe) gives expression to this very conundrum: “In 100 years, authors are still going to write about him, actors, great ones and hams, are still going to impersonate him. And why? Because we want to understand what we will never understand.”5 In the meantime, a growing number of mainstream filmmakers—following on the heels of the avant-garde—are moving away from verisimilitude, perhaps because there is an element of redundancy in the attempt to rebuild a figure solely on the basis of available facts. It seems to be more interesting to contemporary filmmakers to turn to the versions that have been created of Hitler and the question of what they have come to represent. In fact, one of the main points of reference for comedies today is not the historical figure Adolf Hitler but rather the fictional character played by Bruno Ganz in the internationally well-received film Der Untergang (Downfall; 2004), a drama that recreates the last days of Hitler in his bunker. Der Untergang is the most prominent example of films about Nazis and the Holocaust since the release of Steven Spielberg’s influential Oscar-winning Schindler’s List (1993)—many of which emphasize a supposedly authentic and historically accurate approach. They are frequently based on real events6 or else refer to memoirs7 or, as in the case of Der Untergang, historiographical works, yet this would seem to be a strategy to legitimize the way in which their stories are presented. Their public reception has largely focused on issues of accuracy and authenticity rather than acknowledging them as works of entertainment based on interpretation. Often the value of a film is gauged by historiographical criteria, even if it does not attempt to be historically truthful. At the same time, films perceived as more authentic share a rather conventional narrative form. There are clearly defined heroes and villains, a mise-en-scène that is derived from actual historical settings, and an ending that can generally be described as happy, at least in the sense that morality and justice ultimately win out. Der Untergang is based on a historical work of the same title by the prominent German historian Joachim Fest, as well as on the memoir of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary. Its claim that it relied on minutely verified facts in its cinematic attempt to re-enact Hitler’s last days in the bunker, triggered a public debate on the legitimacy of focusing on Hitler as a human being rather than as a political figure in a broader context. Leading German news magazines such as Der Spiegel and Stern ran feature articles in which the film was lauded for its grounding in academic sources. In contrast, German filmmaker Wim Wenders criticized the film’s reliance on facts, stating

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that it created a fake sense of authenticity without taking a position on its subject matter—in effect trivializing the larger historical reality in favor of a Kammerspiel (chamber play). In addition, as will later be discussed, the po-faced earnestness of Der Untergang sparked a torrent of online parodies. There is also a voyeuristic tendency in factual representation, as for example when Der Untergang recreates the last known images of Hitler shortly before his death, in which he is seen handing out medals to young boys on his 56th birthday. The scene suggests that we are right there with the protagonists, observing what really happened, particularly as the fictional scene consciously re-enacts the original and widely known footage of the event. As historian Gavriel Rosenfeld writes, what was new about Der Untergang was that for the first time a film “portrays [Hitler’s] reactions to failures in human terms.”8 Hence, this “transformation of Hitler into a figure of tragedy”9 places his human aspects at the center, observing instead of trying to understand. According to German film critic Georg Seesslen, the film’s claim of verisimilitude creates the “paradox of an ‘authentic myth,’ ”10 an empty image corroborated by reenactment. Moreover, Seesslen asserts that Der Untergang is a film for “the children of CNN, Big Brother, and political correctness”11 who want to experience the bunker, Hitler, and his inner circle in a manner similar to the way in which they view reality TV: up close and personal. Seesslen’s verdict on the film is that it is “one big lie, even if it is put together of many small truths.”12 In this essay I will focus on films released since Der Untergang, which, to my mind, are directly influenced by this fallacy of verisimilitude and even by the visual presentation of the figure of Hitler, all of which has added new dimensions to the use of humor in the treatment of Hitler and Nazi ideology: the aforementioned Mein Führer, Germany’s first “Holocaust comedy”; Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009); a science fiction film, Iron Sky (2012), by the Finnish director Timo Vuorensola; and Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back, 2015), the adaptation of the German bestselling novel of the same title. All four films diverge from historical accuracy in the sense that they do not even attempt to be realistic. In addition, all rely on humor as a central driving force, with strong elements of the grotesque, and in each film, the emphasis is not on the Holocaust but rather, as Hanno Loewy puts it, on the cult of Hitler and, by implication, Nazism “then and now.”

The “Truest Truth” about Hitler By the time Dani Levy announced his plans to make the first German comedy about Hitler, he had already made a name for himself as a Swiss Jewish filmmaker and actor with a fondness for upending clichés concerning Jewishness and German Jewish history. His two biggest successes, Meschugge (The Giraffe; 1998), and Alles Auf Zucker! (Go for Zucker; 2004) strike a tone of affectionate irreverence and are characterized by a kind of humor that is more generally associated with American Jewish culture. In an interview, Levy commented that “[h]umor is a light that is turned on in a roomful of taboos. This is a function of humor that has always interested me, and this is why comedies in fact belong in the sphere of redemption.”13

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In claiming to deliver “the truest truth about Adolf Hitler,” Levy toys with our awareness of the past and our familiarity with filmic images of and by the Nazis. His aim is to disrupt the agreed-upon narrative, which, like a taboo, can function as a shield around an idea that has become sanctified. Levy takes the superficial paraphernalia and exposes it to ridicule. We are more than accustomed to Nazi salutes and swastikas; to Hitler’s moustache on a variety of  actors’ faces; to the Führer’s speeches and rants performed by many different men—the real Hitler among them. National Socialism cannot be imagined without the p­ erformance, the theatricality, and the staging.14 One aspect of the Nazis’ power was their image-producing machinery, which left us a great deal of material that is shown and reproduced in feature films, television productions, and documentaries. All Hitler comedies are an attack on the image and self-glorification of the Nazis. Like Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Mel Brooks before him, Dani Levy focuses on these performative aspects to ridicule the Nazi elite. These comedies are also a commentary on our way of dealing with the images. Mein Führer, which shows Hitler briefly before his defeat, is a direct answer to Der Untergang, as it assembles a collage of the existing iconography without trying to be true to it. As Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert write in their essay on the reception of another film, Roberto Begnini’s Life is Beautiful (1997): “Artistic realism for grown-ups does not depend on whether all the details of the story are ‘true’ and the props are ‘real.’ It is rather reliant on a ‘social truth,’ which lies in the cohesion of the story that is being told and the performative aspects of telling a story and being told a story.”15 The main protagonist of Mein Führer is Adolf Grünbaum, a Jewish actor released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at the end of 1944 in order to coach the depressed Führer in preparation for his grand New Year’s speech in the heart of Berlin. (In other words, even Hitler has to work on himself.) As the real city is lying in ruins, Goebbels plans to build a cardboard backdrop both to delude Hitler and to mobilize the citizens: “Staged reality, your and my special area of expertise,” he admits to Grünbaum, winking at him good-humoredly. As the two Adolfs meet for the first time, Hitler demands of Grünbaum, “Heilen sie mich!” (“Heal me!”), which prompts the Jew to say “Heil Hitler!” This wordplay directly refers to Lubitsch’s “Heil myself” (in To Be or Not to Be) and Brook’s “Heil, baby!” (in The Producers). Later, when Grünbaum reveals Goebbels’ plans to him, Hitler cries out: “I’ve been lied to! They find me ridiculous enough to let me walk about among stage scenery?” Sobbing one moment, then composing himself the next, he turns around to ask his teacher, “How was I? My acting? The dramatic comes easier to me than the comic.” Hitler clearly enjoys his time with Grünbaum, growing fonder and also more dependent on him. “Der Jud’ tut gut” (“The Jew is good for me”), he admits to Albert Speer at one point. Grünbaum’s coaching, which aims to help him “get in touch with his inner being,” leads to the revelation that Hitler suffered greatly under the callousness and physical abuse of his father. Hitler’s explanation for his father’s brutality lies in his grandfather’s Jewish origin, which offers a rationale for his hatred of Jews: “But please, Grünbaum, don’t take it personally, I don’t mind Jews as long as they leave me alone.” Already suffering the effects of impotence—as revealed in a scene with Eva Braun, who, during intercourse says, “Mein Führer, I can’t feel you”— Hitler is sent up as a pitiful figure undercut even by his closest allies. There is an

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interchanging between humorous interludes and a reversion to the familiar oratory and ideology. The effect of this is a sort of revulsion at the horrors of Nazism, paired with a deconstruction of the myth of Hitler as the personification of pure evil. A highly comical moment in Mein Führer occurs when Hitler demands “his Jew” to be brought back to him after Goebbels loses his temper and orders Grünbaum’s deportation back to Sachsenhausen. Hitler peevishly makes it clear to Goebbels that he will not make the speech unless his teacher returns, threatening to leave his propaganda minister to deliver it on his own and even mimicking his rhetorical style with a jocular, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” (“Do you want total war?”)16 At the end of Mein Führer, Hitler loses his voice and proposes that his speech be performed instead by Grünbaum, who is hidden underneath the podium in order to act as a sort of ventriloquist. But Grünbaum does not stick to the scripted speech, instead revealing to the masses that Hitler is nothing more than an impotent man, troubled by his childhood: As loyal Germans you have followed me and made the world into sauerkraut. Today our fatherland lies in ruins. And all of you are Aryans, blond and blue-eyed, except me. And yet you cheer me. . . . Why do you do it? I am a bed-wetter, a drug addict. I can’t get an erection! I was beaten by my father so often that I torture defenseless people as I was once tortured myself.

This psychological interpretation of Hitler’s personality, based on the works of Alice Miller,17 sparked controversy and criticism of the film. The accusation is that by portraying Hitler as a pitiable figure, one tends to make him look harmless, thus belittling the atrocities he was responsible for. Yet the question of his heinousness is brought up in the film. Both Grünbaum’s wife and oldest son repeatedly raise the topic of murdering Hitler, reminding him that he has a larger obligation than merely saving himself and his family. Grünbaum feels conflicted, not wanting to endanger his family even as he is developing a certain sympathy for Hitler. When Hitler, suffering from insomnia, shows up sobbing by their bedside, Grünbaum’s wife invites him to sleep in their bed with them, singing him to sleep with a Yiddish song. The film critic Daniel Kothenschulte describes this as a moment of “audacious magnificence,”18 as Levy attacks the “philosemitic cliché of the affectionate Jewish mother.” The film would fall into banality were it not for her attempt to suffocate him with a pillow the moment he falls asleep. After all, she says to her husband, he is a mass murderer. But Grünbaum stops her, asking her whether she can’t see that he is “also just another unloved child.” However offensive certain viewers may find this psychologizing of Hitler, one could argue that his evil legacy is well established; in consequence, it may not be necessary to continually remind audiences of it in order to forestall any thoughts of empathy or pity. Levy may even have resorted to this comic device as a way of satirizing the figure of Hitler as portrayed in Der Untergang, where the Führer comes across as a downtrodden man whose passions and hopes have come to nothing. In that film he admittedly yells a good deal at his staff, but he makes up for it by being charming and paternal with his secretary, and exhibiting a soft touch with regard to his dog. The satirical portrayal of the Nazi elite and the slapstick elements of Mein Führer (the dog Blondi mounting Hitler; Hitler’s moustache mistakenly being shaven off;

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Himmler’s broken arm fixed in a Nazi salute by a plaster cast; Speer as an almost lovesick admirer of Hitler; Hitler sitting in the bathtub with a toy battleship) are accompanied by a second, more serious plot, which centers around Grünbaum and his family. Whenever the Holocaust is addressed, there is no joking. This, in fact, would seem to corroborate the third rule defined by Terrence Des Pres that forbids the dishonoring of the dead.19 Any film comedy in which there is laughter at the victim’s expense is no longer a comedy. Humor is always an act of rebellion and liberation, whereas laughing at the victims would necessarily mean adopting the perpetrator’s point of view. Therefore, any defense of comedy as a strategy for working through historical events, even when it strays from historical verisimilitude, should recognize that there are inherent restrictions to the genre. The lightness of Mein Führer lies mainly in the presentation of the perpetrators, and especially in the portrayal of Hitler by the well-known comedian Helge Schneider. Levy’s choice of casting Schneider, who up until then had had his biggest success with a song about a cat’s toilet (“Katzeklo”; 1992), caused much debate before the film was even finished. The decision to have a comedian play Hitler was widely criticized—despite the fact that the most memorable depiction of Hitler in film is that of another comedian, Charlie Chaplin. Schneider plays the dictator as a childlike character, a sulking and egocentric little man, almost likeable in his anarchic madness. It is remarkable to note that Schneider spent three hours in make-up every day for a film that is otherwise not very concerned with accuracy; moreover, even with the make-up, he does not look much like Hitler. Whether his performance can be appreciated outside Germany, where the unique persona he has created is unknown, is another matter. Levy’s film might be too coded to be understood in other parts of the world, as can be seen in Stephen Holden’s review of the film in the New York Times. “The scattershot jokes are undermined by the miscasting of Helge Schneider, a bloated, heavyset actor who bears only a slight resemblance to his infamous character,” Holden writes, appearing not to realize that Schneider’s Hitler is a satire of all previous Hitlers and gains its main strength from its opposition to Der Untergang.20 This fact was more readily appreciated by German critics, among them Kothenschulte: Helge Schneider, who is as outstanding in the lead role of Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer, as Ganz is in Der Untergang, isn’t playing Hitler at all. He is playing Bruno Ganz. Dani Levy’s film might be set in the time of Nazi Germany, yet the ghost that is being ridiculed is still with us. In fact, it is the current media mania of using randomly edited archival images and reenactments to bring the Hitler era back to life.21

In spite of what may seem to be the obvious dissimilarities between the two interpretations, other critics have agreed with Kothenschulte’s comparison between Schneider and Ganz. Steffen Hantke, for instance, notes: “Like Schneider in Levy’s film, Ganz does not aim to discover anything new about Hitler; he only illustrates what we already know. Skilled as he is, he runs through an inventory of familiar gestures and moments, offering one more interpretation of the historical Hitler that was already part of the discursive field before the film came along.”22 In addition, Der Untergang delivers many involuntarily funny moments that very likely inspired Levy and also prompted fellow German actor Josef Bierbichler to comment on Ganz’s performance: “I sat there in the cinema and for forty-five ­minutes

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I thought that Bruno Ganz had managed to do a really good parody of Hitler behind the backs of Fest and Eichinger. Then I suddenly noticed: He means it!”23 One scene in particular, in which Hitler rages against his staff because he will not accept that the war is lost, inspired a flood of YouTube parodies suggesting that Hitler was raging about any of a range of absurd and unrelated topics—anything from the re-election of Obama to attacks by elves from Middle Earth. The real point of these parodies is that, somehow, the studiously authentic presentation of Hitler involuntarily spills over into comedy. Similarly, Mein Führer picks up on elements in Der Untergang in which this solemn treatment of “facts” has created a hint of absurdity. Examples include Hitler’s excessive emotions for Blondi, his Alsatian dog, and, more importantly, his tenderhearted friendship with Speer (the highly dubious and idealized hero of Der Untergang). Finally, Eva Braun’s silliness in Der Untergang is over the top; at times, when she is shown giggling, chatting, and confiding in Hitler’s secretary, the film not only becomes ridiculous and embarrassing but also calls into question the authenticity of its representation of facts. Comedy does not have this problem to contend with. In Levy’s film, there is a joyfully invented scene in which Hitler sings and plays the home organ to accompany home movies being screened for Eva Braun on New Year’s Eve. At no stage does anyone believe this ever happened, yet the scene illustrates Hitler’s provincialism and sentimentality with great perceptiveness.

The Nazi-Killing Business Since film was an essential part of Hitler and Goebbels’ propaganda campaign, it seems appropriate that the climactic scene of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a movie theater, where “the basterds” take their revenge on the Nazis by destroying their propaganda machine as well as their entire elite. Quentin Tarantino is not out to attack historical figures; it is rather the images of the Nazis created by them and us that he sets out to demolish. His Hitler (played by Martin Wuttke, who is also not new to this role, having portrayed him in the film version of Berthold Brecht’s Der auf­ haltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui [The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; 1996]), is a caricature of the popular image of Hitler. Tarantino does not care very much about historical truth. Rather than mocking clichés and standard narratives, as Mein Führer does, he ignores them. He “cancels . . . official reality”24 altogether, inventing military ranks, uniforms, and historical settings, reversing roles of victim and perpetrator, and creating a surreal revenge scenario that is so far from historical fact that it never allows one to mistake it for a naturalistic story. In fact, the story is not really about Nazis. They are simply the backdrop for a film that creates a genre of its own, probably best described as a “bastard” in that it draws its energy from a blend of Westerns, war films, anti-war films, comedy, action cinema, and pulp movies.25 Artifice is inscribed in every frame of this movie; at every moment we know that this is a construct, a product of popular culture that has lost almost any connection to the history books. Above all, Tarantino has made a film about film, not about a historical period. It is a satire on the workings of film media, constantly invoking film not only in a peripheral sense but also in much

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of the dialogue. Even Churchill, in his one brief appearance, is shown questioning a British intelligence officer on the capabilities of Goebbels as a film producer. There are numerous other examples of this skewed focus. Indeed, Inglourious Basterds is so rich in allusions to other films that it has become a favorite among film buffs, who enjoy trying to decipher all of its cross-references. The film is divided into five segments, which are presented through intertitles. It is surprisingly heavy on dialogue and focuses on caricatures rather than believable characters. As often happens in comedy, the characters stay as they are, and in this film they are comic book heroes rather than true-life people. In the first segment we are introduced to a Nazi, Hans Landa (Christoph Walz), who is known by the name “The Jew Hunter.” He has many passions—good food, the arts, attractive women—but National Socialism is not one of them. He is cerebral and cold, greatly pleased with his reputation, trying to be as good at his job as he can be. Describing himself as a “damn good detective,” he goes on to explain: “Finding people is my specialty, so naturally I worked for the Nazis finding people. And, yes, some of them were Jews.” Seesslen describes him as “a villain who feeds into all the clichés, while at the same time undermining them. A villain more evil than the representatives of the absolute evil, yet at the same time more trivial.”26 If one were to strip him of his Nazi uniform, he could easily pass as a modern-day executive of a multinational corporation, unconcerned about how many lives he wastes. Landa is responsible for the elimination of many Jews, among them the entire family of Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young French woman who managed to escape and now lives under a different name as the owner of a Parisian cinema. When she meets the Nazi soldier Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), whose exploits have made him the hero of a German propaganda movie, Stolz der Nation (The Nation’s Pride), a favorite project of Goebbels, she comes up with a plot for revenge. Zoller, who shows great interest in Shosanna, manages to arrange for his film to be premiered in her cinema, which gives her access to the Nazi elite, among them Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, and even Hitler himself. Not wanting to let this opportunity go to waste, she decides to use the large archive of nitrate film stock in her cinema to burn it down, incinerating the entire audience at the premiere of the film. In the meantime, another group is also plotting to use this event as a way to get rid of the Nazis and end the war. At the center of what becomes known as “Operation Kino” is Landa’s American counterpart, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who has put together a special unit of American Jewish soldiers in order to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Members of the unit carve swastikas into the foreheads of the Nazis they leave alive and gather scalps of the ones they kill—a well-known trophy in the Western genre. Unlike the educated, gentlemanly Landa, Raine is an unsophisticated, rural farmer-type with a heavy southern accent. We do not get to know very much about his motivation or backstory, though the scar on his throat, which seems to have resulted from an act of strangulation, hints at a violent past. He does not play the part of the hero any more than do other members of his guerilla gang. When recruiting new American Jewish soldiers for his “basterds,” Raine describes their mission in colorful terms: Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I sure as hell didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily

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and jump out of a fuckin’ airoplane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. . . . That’s why any and every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die.

Raine equals Landa in cruelty, and in the process the film blurs the line between victims and perpetrators. It is precisely this analogy that the American essayist Daniel Mendelsohn finds troubling: In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by—well, by turning Jews into Nazis. In history, Jews were repeatedly herded into buildings and burned alive . . . ; in Inglourious Basterds, it’s the Jews who orchestrate this horror. . . . And in history, Nazis carved Stars of David into the chests of rabbis before killing them; here, the “basterds” carve swastikas into the foreheads of those victims whom they leave alive. . . . Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carbon copies of Nazis, that makes Jews into “sickening” perpetrators?27

In fact, this is precisely what Tarantino intended, turning stereotypes upside down by refusing to stick to the common, accepted narratives, not wanting to tell a story in which good and evil are easily deciphered. Seesslen describes this in very simple terms: “The good are also by no means [simply] good, they are just a little less bad than the bad ones. Or rather, they have better reasons to be bad.”28 Inglourious Basterds tells a story that goes beyond victimhood. As in all of Tarantino’s films, violence seeps into the characters and has no moral dimension. In a film about Nazis and Jews, it is usually quite clear who will play the role of victim; in Tarantino’s film, the main victims are Nazis. Moreover, this fact is exploited for comedy, which can make moviegoers feel a little uncomfortable. As Seesslen puts it: “The good ones, who refuse to continue being victims, can therefore not be fully good anymore.”29 Tarantino is not interested in psychology; to him, the Nazis are not much more interesting than zombies in a horror movie. They are a good target and a clear enemy, and the way they are presented here is fully depoliticized. Tarantino does not enter into their myths, nor does he take the audience very close to the figure of Hitler or his supposed human qualities. Hitler is nothing more than “a Jew-hatin’, mass-murderin’ maniac,” as Raine puts it. This maniac does not need to be understood, we are told— only killed. Tarantino does not engage with the mystery of the Nazis’ evilness, which is at the center of so many other mainstream films. The Nazis we get to see in Inglourious Basterds are no longer demons or possessed by an ideology; neither are they troubled, frail human beings or foot soldiers for a cause. Rather, they are concerned with personal goals and power.30 When Hitler compliments Goebbels on the new film, saying it is his best production yet, Goebbels is so touched that he starts to weep. It is a very amusing moment. If Goebbels, an unscrupulous film producer type, is at all driven, it is far more by his cinematic ambitions than by anything else. And when Landa captures Raine, he has no intention of uncovering the Basterds’ plan and saving Hitler. He is willing to let the massacre take place so long as he can make a deal with the Office for Strategic Services (OSS) for his safe passage out of Germany— along with some money, medals, and a laudatory spot in the history books. Raine is wary, saying that a story that sounds too good to be true is usually not true. To which Landa replies: “Sitting in your chair, I would probably say the same thing, and 999,999 times out of a million you would be correct. But in the pages of history, every once in a while, fate reaches out and extends its hand. What shall the history books read?”

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The same could be said for Tarantino’s story. To a certain extent, viewers might wish that things had happened in accordance with Taratino’s narrative in which Hitler and his henchmen are wiped out, or at least that such events could have been possible. And yet Tarantino’s tale of revenge may be a “poisoned gift,” as Seesslen puts it, since despite a sense of relief at the eradication of this enormous evil and an element of comedy in the way that Hitler’s pathetic figure dies in a hail of bullets, we do not feel like laughing—after all, there is a yawning gap between the fantasy presented in the film and the reality of what actually happened. It is noteworthy that revenge has become a popular theme in recent humorous films addressing the Holocaust, such as Cheyenne—This Must Be the Place (2011), Made in Israel (2001), and also Iron Sky. It seems as if, for now, popular culture has become tired of both “authenticity” and of victimizing narratives, preferring to kill off some Nazis instead of repeatedly showing their crimes.

Nazis in a “Space Oddity” Iron Sky takes place in the near future and opens with a U.S. moon mission gone wrong: James Washington (Christopher Kirby), a black American model-turnedastronaut, is captured by 21st-century Nazis who have built a “Fourth Reich” on the moon, with a base in the shape of a swastika. Moreover, there is a new “Führer,” a man named Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier), a tired and tetchy leader who suffers pangs of irritation when his subordinates constantly proclaim “Heil Hitler” instead of “Heil Kortzfleisch.”31 A younger man, Klaus Adler (Götz Otto), has ambitions to take over as the next Führer. Accordingly, he arranges to lead an attack on planet Earth, bringing with him the captured Washington in the hopes of gaining access to the U.S. president. The Nazis are also keen on getting their hands on modern technology to launch Götterdämmerung, their gigantic warship named after the fourth part of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. As it happens, Washington’s moon mission was a public relations stunt intended to boost the popularity of the president (an unnamed woman, unmistakably inspired by the 2008 Republican candidate for vice-president, Sarah Palin), who is running for re-election. As soon as the Nazis turn up on the scene, her campaign manager sees potential in their image and rhetoric. Both she and the president are fully aware that they are dealing with Nazis. Much of the comedy in this film lies in the interaction between Nazis who are very much frozen in time, fixedly declaring their strongly held views, and modern, nihilistic Westerners (in this case, Americans) whose main concern is scoring points with their electorate. The Nazis, of course, are also no strangers to the idea of propaganda. The two sides seem to talk past each other, the difference being that the Nazis believe their own propaganda. Yet the film also blurs distinctions between the Americans and the Nazis. In one scene the campaign manager has an outburst, yelling at her staff in an unmistakable parody of the bunker scene from Der Untergang. The comedy here lies in a recycling of other filmic sources, which creates a kind of “insider joke.” Because Iron Sky was crowdfunded and also produced collaboratively by a team of filmmakers who made their name in free internet content, it is even conceivable that this reference to Der

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Untergang is solely inspired by the YouTube parodies of the bunker scene.32 Whatever the case, the underlying point in the portrayal of the American campaign manager is that she is herself a little Hitler—which seems a rather trivializing joke. Strengthening the point, the campaign manager is also attracted to Adler, the Nazi leader. This, too, sounds a recurring theme: that of the virility and sexual fascination of Nazis.33 This element of the plot is not particularly comic, since Adler is portrayed as fanatic, strong, shrewd, and sexy rather than funny. In addition, of course, he is very much a man of the 1940s, in the sense that he has been born and bred on the moon amid the company of Nazis. That such an anachronistic figure could pose a threat to presentday America is silly, but it is nonetheless presented as a possibility. Overall, the Nazis in Iron Sky seem like villains very typical of the science fiction genre. Many of them never remove their space helmets, and the wheezing sound of their breathing brings to mind Darth Vader in the Star Wars series—another clear reference to Star Wreck, the filmmakers’ previous work. Indeed, if the evil empire in Star Wars was to some extent inspired by the superficial, performative aspects of Nazism, then Iron Sky, in turn, may be indebted to Star Wars in its presentation of the moon Nazis. Popular culture, rather than history, supplies the framing references in this film. Celebrating its much-anticipated premiere in Berlin, Iron Sky drew attention not only for its subject matter but also because it was one of the most high-profile projects ever to be financed by crowdfunding. It was made on a budget of approximately €7.5 million, of which about 10 percent came from online fan funding. Several critics who had lauded the film’s promising idea were disappointed by the final product.34 Notwithstanding, Iron Sky recouped its investment, which may be evidence that people paid for what they wanted to see—not a story about the Third Reich but rather a dystopian trash movie offering an entertaining and pleasurable thrill, the humor of which is used in a superficial sense, without any deeper engagement. Iron Sky offers no character development, but rather spins out a rapid series of improbable events. All in all, it does not feel very well thought-out. Further away from historical truth than Inglourious Basterds or Mein Führer, it turns Nazis into protagonists of a pulp-like comic with farcical elements. It is an example of history turning into mediated pop culture, where symbols are easily deciphered and the comedy is pitched in a fairly predictable manner. It is an entertaining rather than a profound film and will probably not pass the test of time, as have the films of Chaplin and Lubitsch. But it does have moments in which telling continuities are provided with these earlier classic films, as when the U.S. president makes her case to a skeptical audience: “You don’t believe me? Watch the movies, movies don’t lie.”

Selfies with Hitler With the most recent Hitler comedy, Er ist wieder da, the genre seems to have reached a moment of ultimate self-reference. The film is directed by David Wnendt and based on the bestselling debut novel by Timur Vermes, which sold two million copies in Germany alone. It rests upon the contention that Adolf Hitler, played by theater actor Oliver Masucci, finds himself in present-day Berlin, disoriented but in full health. He stumbles through the German capital, trying to make sense of all the changes. He is

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confused by political developments but quite enthusiastic about the new technical possibilities, such as the Internetz. Eventually he encounters the filmmaker Fabian Sawatzki (Fabian Busch), who sees big potential in the comedic talent of this stranger. Sawatzki, who wants to further his career, convinces Hitler to go on a tour through Germany in order to film his encounters with its citizens for a television show. In consequence, Hitler becomes a widely celebrated television and YouTube phenomenon, as his well-known rhetoric is now perceived as a drastic and refreshing form of ­comedy. At the end of the film he manages to use his popularity to enter the political landscape yet again. As Christian Buss writes in his review: “Irony becomes the backdoor through which fascism enters.”35 The most interesting aspect of this otherwise clumsy attempt to satirize the media is its documentary-style sequences, Sawatzki and Hitler’s film within a film. Wnendt here misses the opportunity to deepen his satirical take on contemporary media. Yet this does not seem to be the main concern of his film, which prefers to indulge in slapstick humor. Many of the scenes are improvised and show real encounters of passersby with Masucci’s Hitler, which is first and foremost a rendering of Bruno Ganz’s performance in Der Untergang. Some of the people take selfies with Hitler, raise their arms in a Nazi salute, or start to chuckle, while others enter into a more or less serious political debate. In his review of the film Daniel Kothenchulte describes these moments as haunting: “The way in which they confide in this fake moustache reminds one of children, who trustingly talk to a hand puppet. . . . They never would have confessed their misgivings about democracy to a journalist, but they pour their hearts out in front of a fake Hitler.” For instance, in one of these scenes, a functionary of Germany’s far­ ­Right party, NPD, thinking he is off-camera, confesses to the Hitler character that he would go to war for him if he were the real thing. Kothenschulte as well as film critic Sonja M. Schultz, who has written a well-informed book on National Socialism in film,36 regret that Er ist wieder da does not stick to this documentary-style format, which is somewhat inspired by Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat (2006), but instead falls back on scripted episodes. Both commentators perceive this as an altogether uninspired attempt to satirize the television and media businesses, which, after all, are only too happy to make full use of the figure of Hitler for the sake of their own profit. However, what is more important than the film’s quality is its main assumption— namely, that Hitler could make a fabulous career as a media personality, and many people would also give him full political backing. This theme is reinforced in yet another bunker scene based on that of Der Untergang. This time the ranting is done by the head of a television station, a cynical and power-driven man. This character is played by comedian Christoph Maria Herbst who, incidentally, parodied Hitler in his role as Alfons Hatler in the 2004 comedy Der Wixxer.

Conclusion Humor and satire in cinema enable subsequent generations to claim a level of personal control over a historical period—the significance of which, as noted above, is still elusive. However, as Kathy Laster and Heinz Steiner write in their essay on Mel

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Brooks’ remake of To Be Or Not To Be (1983), fear of the Nazis and a sense of horror have diminished over time, and this has made it possible for subsequent generations (without personal memory or connection to the historical events) to engage in “more forceful fantasies of victory over the enemy’s system”37 and therefore deploy humoristic elements more freely. I agree with historian Gavriel Rosenfeld, who describes “a larger shift currently underway in the memory of the Nazi past” that challenges “the traditional belief throughout much of the Western world that the Third Reich should be remembered from a moralistic perspective.”38 Yet, unlike Rosenfeld, I do not believe that this necessarily leads to a normalization of the Nazi past. The recurring question of whether one is permitted to laugh about Hitler and, by extension, the Third Reich, implies that humor diminishes the victims and trivializes the brutality of the National Socialist regime. I prefer to agree with Hanno Loewy, who in the epigraph to this article (written on the occasion of the release of Mein Führer), challenges the notion that seriousness is a more acceptable or worthy way of approaching Hitler. Instead, he argues, humor can serve as a deconstructive tool not only to elucidate Hitler’s personality and motivations but also to expose the myth of authentic representation. As Mein Führer, Inglourious Basterds, Iron Sky and Er ist wieder da prove, most humorous films do not, in fact, focus on the historical events themselves but reveal far more about the images, codes, and established narratives that have been created over the decades. To some extent, the Hitler of Der Untergang has come to replace the historical figure as a point of reference. In the case of the examples chosen here, the comic element is used to debunk such established narratives—or “authentic myths”39—without delving too deeply into what really happened. Not only do they make passing references to the classic films of Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Mel Brooks, but they also frequently concern themselves with modes of representation. One of their most striking similarities is the use of actors, clowns, and jesters as protagonists and the portrayal of the Nazi elite as laughable and pompous rather than powerful. The films presented here raise questions about our use of images, traditions, and established narratives and the need to break open what seems to have been consecrated by convention. As I have argued, Hitler has become a media personality, detached not only from the historical figure but also from the events that caused him to be perceived as wholly evil. The comedies make fun of the self-glorification of the Nazis, highlight the performative aspects of the cult around them, and reflect on our own images of the past. The better ones manage to create a moment of distance that encourages critical understanding, whereas others serve as entertainment—or “Hitlertainment”40 as Er ist wie­ der da author Vermes wrote in an interesting article about the “cardboard cutout” of the historical figure. At the same time, these comedies have adopted some of the common denominators of the image of Nazis in popular culture. Nazis are often shown nowadays not as obsessive and deranged demons, but rather as people protecting their own interests and trying to advance themselves. They are individualists and careerists, in other words, rather than being solely dedicated to a political cause. This shift in focus in the portrayal of Nazis goes beyond the comic genre as discussed here. There are clear differences between the films I have analyzed, mainly in terms of the level of complexity and engagement of their comic attack. Whereas Mein Führer

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is in the tradition of Chaplin, Lubitsch, and also Brooks in that it attempts to reveal something about Nazism, Er ist wieder da points to the obsession of contemporary media with Hitler, to the extent that he has become a pop icon and movie star somewhat detached from history. In contrast, Inglorious Basterds and Iron Sky use the Nazi era as a sort of backdrop for genre fiction—a very convenient backdrop, as the territory is so familiar to audiences. In any event, whether such films are comedic or authentically historical, or even when the quality of a film is open to question, the ideal outcome is for audiences to take away something that encourages continued debate—since it is this, in the end, that keeps memory alive.

Notes 1. Hanno Loewy, “Warum nicht selbstbewusst lachen über die eigene Schwäche?” Frank­ furter Rundschau (7 January 2006). 2. Earlier in Hotel Lux, when the two friends fight, the one who plays Hitler declares that he is tired of it, telling his partner to take over his role, to which the actor playing Stalin replies: “Nothing easier. A small moustache under the nose, flying spittle as you shout and roll your R’s. And that’s your Hitler. But Stalin, that’s a difficult character.” 3. Harald Martenstein, “Adolf auf der Couch,” Die Zeit (4 January 2007), online at zeit. de/2007/02/Hitler-als-Popfigur/ (accessed 12 April 2015). 4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: 1973); idem, “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” in idem, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Baltimore: 2010), 112–125. 5. Quoted in Steffen Hantke, “Hitler as Actor, Actors as Hitler: High Concept, Casting, and Star Performance in Der Untergang and Mein Führer,” online at cinephile.ca/archives/ volume-5-no-1-far-from-hollywood-alternative-world-cinema/hitler-as-actor-actors-as-hitlerhigh-concept-casting-and-star-performance-in-der-untergang-and-mein-fuhrer (accessed 20 April 2015). 6. See, for instance, Rosenstrasse (2003); Babij Jar (2003); and Der Letzte Zug (The Last Train; 2006). 7. See, for instance, The Grey Zone (2001); The Pianist (2002); Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters; 2007). 8. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: 2015), ch. 5 (Kindle file). 9. Ibid. 10. Georg Seesslen, “Das faschistische Subjekt,” Die Zeit (16 September 2004), online at zeit.de/2004/39/Hitler-Filme (accessed 22 January 2016). 11. Georg Seesslen, “Der Untergang,” first published in epd-film 10/2004, online at filmzentrale.com/rezis/unterganggs.htm (accessed 20 April 2015). 12. Ibid. 13. Louis Lewitan, “Komödien gehören in den Bereich der Erlösung,” interview with Dani Levy, Die Zeit Magazin 14/2010 (1 April 2010), online at zeit.de/2010/14/Rettung-Dani-Levy (acessed 20 April 2015). 14. Even Der Untergang underlines this, maybe unintentionally, in various scenes. At one point Speer says to Hitler, “You should be on stage when the curtain falls.” Later Goebbels states: “The Führer cannot disappear from the stage of world history as an inglorious fugitive.” 15. Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert, “Eine neue Moral in der Darstellung der Shoah?” in Lachen über Hitler—Auschwitz-Gelächter?, ed. Margit Frölich, Hanno Loewy, and Heinz Steinert (Frankfurt: 2003), 195. 16. This, of course, refers to Goebbels’ infamous speech, which he delivered at the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18, 1943.

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17. See, for example, Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: 1983). 18. Daniel Kothenschulte, “Lachen gegen den wohligen Schauer,” Frankfurter Rundschau (9 January 2007). 19. The first two rules, which Des Pres sees as limiting “respectable study,” are “1. [t]he Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality as a unique event . . . above or below or apart from history” and “2. [r]epresentations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation.” Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: 1988), 217. 20. Stephen Holden, “Some Unexpected Behavior Therapy for the Not-So-Great Dictator,” New York Times (14 August 2009), online at movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/movies/­14fuhrer .html?_r=0 (accessed 21 April 2015). 21. Kothenschulte, “Lachen gegen den wohligen Schauer.” 22. Hantke, “Hitler as Actor, Actors as Hitler.” 23. Peter Kümmel: “Besser als Hitler,” interview with Josef Bierbichler, Die Zeit (23 November 2006), no. 48, online at zeit.de/2006/48/Interview-Bierbichler (accessed 20 April 2015). 24. Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” 227. 25. See Georg Seesslen, Quentin Tarantino gegen die Nazis: Alles über Inglourious Basterds (Berlin: 2009), 141. 26. Ibid. 27. Daniel Mendelsohn, “Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack,” Newsweek (31 August 2009). 28. Seesslen, Quentin Tarantino gegen die Nazis, 141. 29. Ibid., 147. 30. Ibid., 145. 31. Kier is a favorite among filmmakers of independent as well as horror films and is not new to playing Hitler. He appeared in Christoph Schlingensief`s expressionistic 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die Letzten Stunden im Führerbunker (1988–1989) and also starred in the highly amusing British short film Mrs. Meitlmeihr (2002). The latter film features Hitler in postwar London, disguised as a woman; living in a rundown flat as he awaits his ticket to South America, he becomes the love interest of a Jewish neighbor, who courts him with gefilte fish and other Jewish specialties. 32. Director Timo Vuorensola, producer Samuli Torssonen, and writer Jarmo Puskala began their careers with a series of low-budget Star Wars parodies titled Star Wreck, which became a big hit on the internet. 33. See Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista, Faschismus und Sexualität im Film (St. Augustin: 1999). 34. See, for instance, Andrew Pulver, “Berlin 2012: Iron Sky—review,” The Guardian (13 February 2012), online at theguardian.com/film/2012/feb/13/berlin-2012-iron-sky-review (accessed 21 April 2015). 35. Christian Buss, “Hitler-Groteske Er ist wieder da: Vorsicht, Witz mit Bart,” Spiegel Online (7 October 2014), online at http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/er-ist-wieder-da-hitlergroteske-nach-timur-vermes-a-1056231.html (accessed 22 January 2016). 36. Sonja M. Schultz, Der Nationalsozialismus im Film, Von Triumpf des Willens bis Inglorious Basterds (Berlin: 2012). 37. Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert, “Von der Schmierenkomöodie zur Broadway-Show: To Be Or Not To Be und der polnische Widerstand,” in Frölich, Loewy, and Steinert, Lachen über Hitler, 228. 38. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler!, introduction. 39. Georg Seesslen, “Das faschistische Subjekt.” 40. Timur Vermes, “Das Monster von nebenan,” The European (14 October 2014), online at theeuropean.de/timur-vermes/8908-hitlertainment-historischer-vs-medialer-hitler (accessed 22 January 2016).

Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic: Humor and the Holocaust in Australia David Slucki (College of Charleston)

Until the 1990s, the Holocaust did not feature prominently in Australian life. To be sure, Holocaust commemoration was a pressing concern within Australia’s Jewish communities, which had received a large influx of survivors in the late 1940s and 1950s, but it was largely an internal affair, conducted mainly in the Jewish communities of Melbourne and Sydney. A number of factors brought the Holocaust into the wider public sphere in the 1990s, perhaps most importantly the exposure it received in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film, Schindler’s List (1993). Since then, it has become more salient in public discourse and in popular culture, with television,  film, radio, and the popular press taking a keen interest in individual stories of survival. Along with this shift from marginality to center stage is the advent of Holocaustrelated humor, ranging from the work of local Jewish comedians and artists to comments by the prime minister in the federal parliament. Since the 1990s, the use of humorous devices in artistic expression related to Holocaust memory has become a part, however minor, of Holocaust representation in the United States, Israel, and Europe. This essay will examine the growing body of Holocaust humor in Australian popular culture in the past decade and how it is produced, received, and ultimately regulated in various local media. By looking at case studies including television series, radio broadcasts, videos, and political cartoons, this essay will demonstrate that Holocaust humor and its reception tell us much about how the Holocaust is remembered—and misremembered—in Australian life. What is ultimately at the heart of this discussion is the question of who “owns” memories of the Holocaust and who regulates what is deemed acceptable in its representation. All instances of Holocaust humor cause outrage, some more than others. Such controversies attest to the persistence of a phenomenon that Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir once referred to in a provocative essay titled “On Sanctifying the Holocaust,” in which he criticized the emergence of a series of “commandments” dictating how the Holocaust could be discussed and remembered in public.1 Together, these prescribed axioms contributed to what he called the sacralization of the Holocaust, a kind of “religious consciousness” that inscribed the Holocaust as its foundational myth. He complained that Holocaust historians, religious leaders, politicians, and 204

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educators—what the survivor and writer Imre Kertész subsequently described as the “choir of Holocaust puritans, Holocaust dogmatists and Holocaust usurpers”—had effectively conspired to make the Holocaust appear to be a transcendent, meta-historical, and uniquely Jewish event.2 This is certainly the case in Australia, where any form of Holocaust humor is apt to be regarded, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a serious affront to the survivor community. Thus, the genre’s recent emergence in Australia offers a local case study of how Holocaust humor is used to renegotiate the implicit rules of public discourse, particularly but not exclusively within Jewish communities. Of course, public responses to humor are never uniform, as there are no simple rules to dictate just which forms of humor may be acceptable in the context of the Holocaust. Similarly, criticism of such forms of humor also varies considerably. In the Australian context, it seems to be the case that Jewish comedians and artists, although criticized for inserting Holocaust-themed humor in their work, are not excluded from Jewish life. In contrast, when non-Jews have been the source of remarks deemed improper by the community’s gatekeepers, the sharp response by the Jewish community has led to anything from public apologies by the offenders to an ongoing feud between Australian Jewry and one of the nation’s most celebrated cartoonists. This is telling in terms of the question of ownership: Jewish leaders demand reverence and solemnity in all media, and non-Jews are subject to special censure for mixing Holocaust with humor. When considering the boundaries of Holocaust depiction and the (intentionally) transgressive quality of Holocaust humor, this essay will ask the following questions: Is Holocaust humor permissible or tolerable only when it is told by Jews for Jews? Within what ethical parameters can Holocaust jokes form part of the tapestry of Holocaust remembrance? And who is to arbitrate these matters? Of course, none of these questions have definitive answers. They are situational and fluid. Nonetheless, despite fluctuating opinion on these issues, and despite the participation of non-Jews in public discourse related to the Holocaust, it seems clear that Jews in Australia have maintained a substantial role in determining levels of appropriateness.

Australian Jewry and the Holocaust Before attending to the issues of Holocaust humor in the specific context of Australia, a few words on the Australian Jewish community are necessary. Although there have been Jews in Australia since the very beginning of British colonization in the late 18th century, they remain a small minority of the general population, accounting for less than half a percent: in the 2006 census, 106,000 people identified as Jews, out of a total population of somewhat more than twenty million.3 As noted, the Jewish community has a high concentration of Holocaust survivors. In the decade after the war, Australia accepted around 17,600 Jews from Europe, of whom 60 percent (mostly from Poland) settled in Melbourne; the remainder, mostly from Germany, Austria, and Hungary, settled in Sydney. Overall (including net migration and natural increase), Australia’s Jewish population nearly tripled in size between 1933 and 1961, from 23,000 to 60,000.4 With ongoing antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe through

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the 1960s and beyond, further waves of refugees would follow through to the end of the 20th century, when a large number of former Soviet Jews, as well as South African Jews, made their way to Australia.5 With a substantial survivor community, and with the composition of the community going through numerous periods of major social, cultural, and demographic change, it is likely that Australian Jewry has put a premium on the need to protect a sense of communal cohesion and consensus. Moreover, the communal institutions are dominated by Orthodoxy, reinforcing this sense of vulnerability. Unlike the United States, where Jews are, despite their relatively limited numbers, a major presence in the public imagination and in the film and television industries in particular, Australian Jews usually go about their business unnoticed on the local popular scene. By and large, they are neither represented nor involved in television or film. The film critic Don Perlgut has argued that this situation is largely due to the fact that, prior to the mid-20th century, most Jewish immigrants to Australia hailed from Britain, where they had not been as actively involved in the broader cultural life as were East European Jews in the United States.6 According to film historian Freda Freiberg, Australian Jews’ lack of presence in Australian film and television can also be explained by the sensitivity of the local Jewish community to “the politics of representation” (in consequence, non-Jewish artists and studios tread warily with regard to putting Jews on screen); the fragility of the Australian film industry, which inhibits filmmakers from taking risks and portraying the diversity of the Australian population; and the absence of an established literary or dramatic tradition among the Australian Jewish community.7 During the first half of the 20th century, only one Jewish comedian left an indelible mark on Australian popular culture: Roy Rene, a major figure in Australian film and theater history, who influenced Australian comedy with his own brand of Jewish humor.8 Apart from Rene, the only Jewish characters depicted on screen or on Australian television before the 1980s were those appearing in imported films and television programs. Things changed in the mid-1980s with the broadcast of a television miniseries titled The Dunera Boys (1985), starring British actor Bob Hoskins, which reenacted the story of a group of German Jewish refugees who were deported from the UK (under “enemy aliens” provisions) in 1940 and sent aboard a British ship for internment in Australia. A bit more than a decade later, the Oscar award-winning Shine (1996), a biopic about the internationally acclaimed pianist David Helfgott, dealt with themes of Holocaust trauma within a refugee family and Jewish identity in postwar Australia. More significantly, Australian popular memory of the Holocaust was shaped by events and cultural productions originating abroad. Along with many other commentators, historian David Ritter has argued that the reporting of the Eichmann trial in 1961 first brought the Holocaust into widespread public consciousness in Australia, as elsewhere.9 In 1978, the American television miniseries Holocaust was the top-rated program of the year, gaining close to half the market share in both Melbourne and Sydney. The program’s popularity demonstrates that, by the late 1970s, the Holocaust was catching the attention of Australian audiences.10 Fifteen years later, the enormous popularity of Schindler’s List11 further confirmed the notion that imported programming was shaping the way in which Australians understood the Second World War.

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During the 1990s, two local controversies also brought the Holocaust firmly into the public sphere. One was the publication of a novel by a young Australian author, Helen Demidenko, a pseudonym for Helen Darville, who claimed falsely to be the daughter of a Ukrainian migrant. Her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, told the story of a Ukrainian family attempting to survive the Soviet-engendered, deadly famine of the 1930s and the Soviet-German war in the 1940s. It initially received major Australian literary prizes, but it was also castigated by many critics as antisemitic, since it highlighted Jews’ roles as prominent Communist officials who took part in perpetrating the Ukrainian famine, implicitly making this seem a justification of Ukrainians’ complicity in Nazi atrocities against Jews.12 Around the same time, the Australian government barred the entry of notorious Holocaust-denier David Irving into the country, sparking a major public debate about the limits of free speech and also furthering discussion of the Holocaust, especially after Irving appeared by video link on national current affair programs across the country, in one instance debating with an Auschwitz survivor.13 Two further changes in the broader memorial landscape in Australia formed the backdrop to these controversies. First, Australian memorial practices were changing in the 1990s in a manner described by historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds as the “militarisation of Australian history,” with war narratives (in particular, those centering around Australia’s participation in the British campaign in Turkey in 1915) assuming a more central place in conflicts and debates over Australian identity.14 And perhaps even more significant, in 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission released a report titled Bringing Them Home (1997), which documented decades of government-sponsored removal of Indigenous children from their families. Release of the report sparked major public debates regarding the darker side of Australia’s past—namely, centuries of mistreatment and dispossession of the Indigenous population.15 Some historians went so far as to suggest that Australia was guilty of genocide and that this reevaluation of Australia’s past invited comparisons with the Holocaust. In order to better understand settler-colonial violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it was argued, Australians might do well to look at the history of the Holocaust.16

Jewish Holocaust Humor Jews have been producing Holocaust- and Nazi-themed humor since the Second World War. During the war, such humor took different forms: both as a coping mechanism for Jews under Nazi occupation in Europe and, in the United States, as a vehicle for anti-Nazi propaganda, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).17 In the postwar period, humor continued to be used as a weapon to lampoon or humiliate the Nazis, most famously in Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968) and more recently in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy, Inglourious Basterds (2009). Another form of Holocaust humor focuses on aspects of life and survival inside the ghettos and concentration camps, particularly in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) and Jurek Becker’s Jakob the Liar (1975; remade in 1999 starring Robin Williams).18 These different

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forms of Holocaust humor have mostly been produced by Jews, but occasionally, as with Benigni or Tarantino, non-Jewish filmmakers have been at the helm. At times controversial, at other times celebrated, the genre has become part of how societies, including Australian society, find meaning in remembering the Holocaust. What distinguishes Australia from most other places (with the notable exception of Israel) is that the Holocaust was the formative experience for most of its Jewish population, either directly or indirectly, as the majority of Australian Jews are either survivors or descendants of survivors. Thus, it was perhaps inevitable that an “in-group” experience of cultural filtering—including humor relating to the Holocaust—would become part of the local landscape.

John Safran: Race Relations John Safran grew up in Melbourne between two Jewish worlds. Although he was raised in an ostensibly secular Jewish family, he was sent as a teenager to Melbourne’s Yeshiva College, a high school set up by the local chapter of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. As a result of this religiously ambivalent upbringing, his work has tended to focus heavily on themes surrounding religion, race, and ethnicity.19 Safran burst onto Australian television screens in 1997 as a contestant on the cult program Race around the World, which encouraged young filmmakers to produce short documentaries set in various foreign locales. His antics included running naked through the streets of Jerusalem (clad only in the scarf of his local football club) and placing a voodoo curse on an ex-girlfriend. In 2002 and 2004, Safran’s two subsequent documentary series, John Safran’s Music Jamboree and John Safran vs God, aired on SBS, Australia’s publicly funded, multicultural broadcasting company.20 In 2009, Safran reached a wider audience with John Safran’s Race Relations, which was broad­cast on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Offering a documentarystyle look at issues concerned with intermarriage and cross-cultural relationships, it was inspired by Safran’s personal dilemma of being a Jew who is attracted specifically to non-Jewish women while being continually pressured by family, friends, and community to stick with his own “tribe.” (As he explains in the introduction to each episode: “People say that love will conquer all, but mother says I must marry a Jew.”)21 Race Relations brought Safran high audience ratings22 and was well received by mainstream reviewers, if not always by Australian Jews. Writing in The Monthly, Alice Pung pronounced the show “one of the most perceptive and funny looks at the delusions of modern-day romance” that she had seen on television.23 Another reviewer, Peter Kirkwood, wrote that although Safran’s stunts were “cringe-making, in-your-face, and potentially creepy,” they nonetheless worked in the “context of a cogent and pithy argument that has serious intent.” In Kirkwood’s view, Safran operated in the tradition of the “holy fool,” someone who could “see through cant, hypocrisy and pomposity, and, using cutting stories, actions or parables, tell uncomfortable home truths.”24 Like Woody Allen, Larry David, and a number of Philip Roth’s fictional characters, Safran’s on-screen persona is that of an outsider within the Jewish community. Apart from being attracted specifically to non-Jewish women, he is socially awkward (albeit opinionated). As with Allen, Safran’s comedy is often grounded in personal

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neuroses. Like David, Safran feels alienated from the Jewish establishment and ­identifies with more marginalized groups in Australian society, such as Eurasians.25 He is the classic shlemiel, a luckless character whose own deeds bring about his downfall. The shlemiel, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out, “is a fool, seriously—maybe fatally—out of step with the actual march of events,” although the shlemiel character in Jewish literature has also acted as a conduit to “challenge the political and philosophical status quo.”26 Literary scholar David Gillota argues that David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm brought the shlemiel tradition to 21st-century America; in his view, it “critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference, and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary Americans feel about their own ethnic identity.”27 Similarly, Safran’s series seeks to undermine standard narratives connected with multiculturalism in Australia, highlighting the ambivalence many Australians feel about maintaining their cultural specificity. He does this very firmly in the guise of the shlemiel who seeks cross-cultural love but who, despite his best efforts, cannot find it. For Australian audiences steeped in American popular culture, Safran’s Jewishness is very recognizable. One segment in particular demonstrates the way in which a particularly Jewish brand of humor can be used to criticize both the local Jewish community and the ways in which Holocaust symbols are revered. It begins with Safran recalling a ­dinner conversation that once took place at his friend Jeremy Weinstein’s house. Weinstein’s father appears in a flashback, warning Safran that by dating a non-Jew he is “finishing Hitler’s work for him.” This is followed by another flashback from the more distant past in which Safran’s former high school rabbi declares that if Safran ever married a non-Jew, he would be worse than Hitler: whereas Hitler only killed Jewish bodies, marrying outside the faith kills Jewish souls. The scene cuts back to Safran in the present proclaiming: “My God! No wonder I’m so fucked in the head!” He decides that the only way to exorcise these demons is to “make out” with a nonJewish woman—preferably one with blonde hair and blue eyes—in Anne Frank’s attic, a location clearly representing the Holocaust. This, Safran believes, will help him overcome the fear of non-Jewish women that has been instilled in him. Accordingly, he enlists Katherine Hicks, a blonde-haired “shikse goddess,” and has her fly out to Amsterdam, where she will join him in the attic of the Anne Frank House. Inside the house, although seemingly not inside the attic itself, the two kiss awkwardly, finding a quick moment in which there are no visitors filing past them. This segment recalls an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry is caught kissing his girlfriend during a screening of Schindler’s List, a major transgression against what quickly became a globally celebrated symbol of the Holocaust.28 In both scenes, the characters’ behavior is an act of defiance against the norms and solemnity of Holocaust remembrance, particularly shocking because of its sexual nature. Perhaps more significant in terms of understanding the trajectory of Jewish and Holocaust humor, this segment is an open assault on the Australian Jewish community’s manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of guilt. Safran is clearly aggrieved at the way the Holocaust has been utilized in the construction of a particular, narrow kind of Jewish identity. Equally sharp is his attack on a symbol that has come to be seen as “holy.” It is important to note that Safran is not the first to satirize Anne Frank—that is, Anne Frank as a symbol rather than an individual.29 Nor does he seek

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deliberately to disrespect the actual story of Anne Frank’s innocence and resilience during the war. Rather, he is concerned with the way such symbols have become sacrosanct yet virtually emptied of substance, consisting mainly of a competition for the mantle of victimhood. If Safran’s communal leaders can use the Holocaust to shame him on issues of dating women outside the fold, what meaning can sites like Anne Frank’s attic really have for him or for anyone else? Safran was excoriated not only for sexualizing a space of innocence but also for desecrating what had become a holy symbol of the Holocaust. Local Jewish studies scholar and newspaper columnist Dvir Abramovich wrote in the Australian Jewish News that he “squirmed in [his] seat as Safran claimed [onscreen] that he was ‘brainwashed, played like a two-dollar chump-machine‚’ by the Jewish community because it has used the Holocaust to make him feel guilty about dating non-Jewish women.”30 In another article in the Melbourne broadsheet The Age, Abramovich wrote that he was “flabbergasted” by the sketch, as Safran “went for broke in trivializing and cheapening the memory of Anne Frank.” Abramovich continued: “Had Anne Frank survived the Holocaust, I’m pretty sure she would not have had a chuckle at Safran’s tasteless skit. Someone told me that he nearly died laughing watching Safran. Well, I said, millions actually did.”31 A number of readers of the Australian Jewish News also expressed their disapproval of the sketch. One writer noted that he “found the kissing scene in Anne Frank’s house both disrespectful and childish.”32 Another wrote that “John Safran is an embarrassment to the Jewish community in Australia and he is not funny, only vulgar.” A third letter claimed that the ABC had “shamed itself with the showing of John Safran’s Race Relations,” and concluded, “no doubt more bad publicity has been showered on us Jews.”33 Such responses seemed to confirm Safran’s complaint: when he dared to highlight the Jewish community’s exploitation of the Holocaust—in this case, the repeated invocation of Hitler in an attempt to dissuade him from dating non-Jews—he was firmly taken to task for his own act of exploitation. That implied an element of hypocrisy. Moreover, such expressions of outrage betrayed a distinct anxiety within the Jewish community about how Jews appear to non-Jews. Given that Jews are largely absent on Australian television screens, there is a risk that when they do appear, they will be perceived by non-Jews as representative of the entire community. In the case  of Safran, this possibility gives rise to real concern: he is regarded as airing Australian Jewry’s dirty laundry in public and, in so doing, bringing shame on the community at large. Safran, however, did not come in for universal condemnation. In response to Abramovich’s complaint that Race Relations constituted Safran’s attempt to erase his Jewishness (which also included his exploring the possibility of having his foreskin reconstructed as well as a sketch in which he investigated whether or not his father had had a nose job decades earlier),34 columnist Julie Szego wrote in The Australian Jewish News that “Safran succeeds only in re-affirming its [his Jewishness’] almost mystical power.” Conceding that some may have found the Anne Frank segment offensive, she further maintained that “bad taste is a far lesser crime than trivialising the Holocaust,” arguing that the sketch was not at all about the Holocaust, but rather about Safran’s struggle to “let love (or even lust) conquer all in this post-racial world.”35 A Jewish blogger writing under the name Jewin’ the Fat wrote that “Safran

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hits the G-spot of satire gold with this one. He is bold, unafraid, and blissfully unpretentious in his geek-makes-good style” and “a man who is not afraid to push the limits of good taste, as long as he makes his point.”36 In spite of the loud voices criticizing Safran, the response of Szego and Jewin’ the Fat may have found resonance in the broader Jewish community. Safran never became a persona non grata in Australia’s Jewish community. In the years since the Race Relations controversies, the Australian Jewish News, Australia’s longest-running Jewish weekly newspaper, has continued to interview him and to feature his work favorably, and he has been featured at both the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival and the Melbourne Jewish Writers’ Festival.37 This indicates that, despite Safran’s claim to have avoided walking down the main Jewish street in Melbourne in the wake of Race Relations, the reality of his reception was actually rather complex.38 Although he was criticized, it was as an insider. Many Jews may not have liked his work, and may have even thought it was bad for the Jews. But the Jewish establishment, in this case represented by its largest circulating newspaper, did not shun him. This also shows a possible gap between the Jewish leadership and the community at large, certainly not unique to Australia. To date, Safran’s various television series have been  the most sustained, popularized, and (arguably) sophisticated expressions of Holocaust humor in Australia, and he may be credited with being the first Australian comic to bring such forms of humor to a mainstream audience.39

Jane Korman: Dancing Auschwitz In late 2009, at about the time that John Safran’s Race Relations premiered, Melbournebased digital artist Jane Korman posted three short video clips to the video-sharing website YouTube. Together, the videos constituted a project she called Dancing Auschwitz.40 In the first and most controversial segment, “I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz Part I,” Korman, together with her father, Adolek (an Auschwitz survivor), and several younger family members, are seen dancing clumsily to a cover version of Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” at a number of Holocaust sites around Europe, among them Auschwitz, Birkenau, the Terezin concentration camp, the Lodz Holocaust memorial, a preserved, war-era railroad cattle car, and the complex of synagogues that form the Jewish Museum in Prague. In some of the shots, the family members wear yellow Stars of David sewn onto their clothing, reproducing the yellow identification badges that Jews were forced to sew onto their outer garments under the Nazi occupation; other shots feature them in white shirts with either “survivor,” “2nd gen,” or “3rd gen” printed across the front. Part 2 is a silent home movie showing Korman’s parents and friends dancing on a vacation trip decades earlier, overlaid with Leonard Cohen’s iconic “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and Part 3 features discussions between Adolek and his grandchildren as well as Adolek reenacting conversations he had with local Poles as the train on which he was deported during the war stopped on the way to Auschwitz. What is striking in this third video is that Adolek is laughing and smiling as he peers out through the window of the preserved cattle car and as he dances at various sites of destruction. Korman has been displaying her art in Australia and Israel since the 1970s, working in a range of media. After the release of Dancing Auschwitz she gained greater

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prominence, with the work displayed and screened in galleries and festivals around Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney. Korman also won the People’s Choice Award for Best European Short Film at the DocumentART Film Festival in Berlin. The videos continued to be screened into late 2012, more than two years after they were initially released.41 Although they did not initially receive much attention, by the middle of 2010, the main video—in which Korman and her family dance at Auschwitz—had gone viral on YouTube. Major Australian news outlets reported the story, and it was soon picked up by mainstream newspapers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Germany, and Poland. Subsequently, the first video received around half a million views, according to a reporter from the AOL online news service.42 “My motive in making Dancing Auschwitz was to create a new response and a fresh interpretation of the past and its historical trauma,” Korman explained on her website. “I needed to create artwork that succeeded in awakening and reminding people of the important lessons the Holocaust and all genocides teach us—namely, an awareness of our own prejudices, stereotyping and intolerance.” In addition, she aimed to create “a celebration of life” while also evoking “the feeling of absence, loss, and mourning.”43 Thus, she used humor, in the sense of juxtaposing light-hearted popular culture and very earnest historical spaces, as a call to remember the past and to act to prevent future genocides. Her video was a means of tackling what she perceived as fatigue in reference to Holocaust remembrance. The humor in Korman’s work lies in the discord between a disco song about surviving the breakup of a relationship and the iconic settings that have come to be regarded as mythical or holy sites; the juxtaposition between different experiences of “survival” is what encourages laughter. Such employment of humor as a response to the trauma of the Holocaust sits comfortably within the long tradition of Jewish responses to suffering. As the late literary scholar Sarah Blacher Cohen argued, humor acts as a “principal source of salvation. By laughing at their dire circumstances, Jews have been able to liberate themselves from them.” Moreover, humor has “helped the Jewish people to survive, to confront the indifferent, often hostile universe, to endure the painful ambiguities of life and to retain a sense of internal power despite their external impotence.”44 In line with this argument, Korman’s work seeks to re-empower her father, to further liberate him from the sites of his trauma, to give him a feeling of ultimate triumph over those who tried to destroy him. In this way, Dancing Auschwitz should be read as specifically Jewish, as a project confronting tragedy with a self-deprecating and whimsical Jewish optimism. Producing the video served a therapeutic purpose for Adolek, Korman, and even her children, and its dissemination undoubtedly had therapeutic value for numerous Jews who watched it. In similar fashion, art historian Louis Kaplan has argued that many of the postwar expressions of Holocaust humor carry out this central aim of Jewish humor: “to transmute suffering into liberating laughter.”45 Discussing Mel Brooks’ The Producers, Kaplan writes: “Brooks’ aggressive and anarchic strategy must be seen as a postHolocaust installment of the old Yiddish maxim that preaches the need to laugh off suffering. The Producers defuses the pain by reducing the Holocaust to bad theatre.”46 Films such as The Producers demonstrate that the pain of the Holocaust has been absorbed as a cultural keynote by Jews in America and the world over. Many of

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those who did not suffer directly at the hands of the Nazis have incorporated the Holocaust as their own trauma. Just as all Jewish souls are said to have stood at Sinai, witnessing the handing down of the Torah, so too many Jews imagine themselves to have stood at the gates of Auschwitz.47 For them, the Holocaust is an inherited rather than an actual trauma, and “ownership” of the Holocaust has become more generalized, no longer resting exclusively with survivors. Korman’s work complicates this further. For the survivor and his descendants, the acts of dancing and laughter (Adolek is seen laughing in a cattle car at one point) ameliorate the pain of the Holocaust. In addition, the clip serves a broader need by enabling others to come to terms with the Jews’ suffering during the war. In its affirmation of life, it gives audiences permission to laugh and rejoice in spite of the terrible tragedy. The reception to Dancing Auschwitz was mixed. The video was uplifting for many, for others funny, and for some, simply shocking. Danny Katz, a Jewish columnist at The Age, described it as “one of the most unexpectedly impressive Holocaust masterpieces ever made.” Watching the video, he “cried because it was the purist [sic], simplest expression of joy and survival.” He added: “This movie shouldn’t work, it should be offensive. But it’s not one bit—it’s the ultimate stuff-you to the Nazis.”48 Similarly, Australia’s most widely syndicated conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, wrote that he felt “incredibly stirred” watching the video: “What a shout of joyous defiance to those who wanted this man dead. He did survive . . . and he’s dancing, damn them.”49 Members of the Australian Jewish establishment, however, were less approving. For instance, Zvi Civins, education director at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, told the local tabloid newspaper, the Herald Sun, that Korman’s video was “inappropriate.” In his view, “Auschwitz is the site of over a million deaths, and if dance is the best way to express the vitality of the Jewish people, despite the [Holocaust], perhaps a better location could have been chosen.”50 As a spokesperson for Australia’s most important Holocaust remembrance institution, Civins’ statement is significant. He ascribes a certain sanctity to the particular site of memory, a site that must remain uninterrupted and solemn. At the same time, his suggestion that Korman’s father might dance at a different location overlooks the whole purpose of the project—that a survivor revisit the sites of his trauma in order to neutralize their horror. Another communal leader voicing skepticism at Korman’s project was Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, the umbrella body for Jewish organizations in New South Wales. “As human beings we have a right to celebrate ­survival,” he told the daily broadsheet The Australian, “but there is a time and place to do so. There is an infinite number of ways to do that, but we need to consider the sensibilities of those for whom places such as Auschwitz will always hold terrible pain.”51 Letter writers in the Australian Jewish News were also trenchant in their criticism. When Dancing Auschwitz was first released in late 2009, one Holocaust survivor, Helen Leperere, wrote: “The word ‘humour’ does not even enter this subject, there was nothing humourous about it.” “No-one,” she continued, “has any right to desecrate the memory of our people; it is as if they were being annihilated anew.”52 When the video went viral in July 2010, Leperere once again expressed her concerns: “I consider the film ugly and insensitive and making a mockery out of Auschwitz‚ the

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death factory. To affront the memory of our loved ones is like murdering them again.”53 Ingrid Weinberg, a granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor, also found the video “inappropriate and disrespectful” and felt that it could only cause “hurt for victims and misunderstanding for many others.”54 The newspaper’s editorial line was a little more circumspect, although it clearly sided with those who saw the artwork as inappropriate, noting that, although Korman’s intent was clear, its implementation was “misguided.”55 To be sure, some readers expressed their support for the project. One letter writer commented that the exhibition “moved [her] to tears.”56 Another, the son of survivors, wrote that he did not “for one moment feel that Mr. Kohn or Ms. Korman are dancing on the graves of Holocaust martyrs.” On the contrary: “If there is any dancing on graves at question here, I take it to be Hitler’s grave and those of his demonic minions.” For him, the video was a celebration of the fact that at least some Jews had survived. Defending Korman and her father’s right to celebrate in any way they deemed appropriate, he paraphrased a well-known saying: “They tried to wipe out all Jewry. They failed. Let’s dance!”57 Holocaust historian and educator Avril Alba noted in the Australian Jewish News that the debate over Korman’s videos was “oddly reassuring, indicative of the continuing and passionate engagement of Australian Jewry with the history and meaning of the Holocaust.” Although acknowledging that the work would inevitably offend people, particularly survivors, Alba nonetheless welcomed the questions that it raised among Australia’s Jews.58 Overall, there remains a strong undercurrent among Australian Jewry that the Holocaust and its associated symbols have taken on a certain kind of sanctity. Thus, humor has no part to play in remembering the Holocaust, and any artist who breaches this unwritten code desecrates the memory of the Holocaust, even if survivors themselves take part in the project or performance. Within the Australian Jewish community, deference to survivors is paramount in determining what is acceptable or appropriate in representing and commemorating the Holocaust. It is not surprising, then, that when a family (even one comprising survivors and their descendants) transgresses the etiquette of Holocaust memorialization, controversy erupts. At the same time, the participation of a Holocaust survivor standing (and dancing) at the center of the work lends a moral authority to Dancing Auschwitz. Adolek’s presence demonstrates that this work is not only about an artist working through her own Holocaust-related questions, but about a Holocaust survivor affirming the celebration of life. His active endorsement of the project mitigates the shock factor, the sense of desecration that audiences might otherwise be likely to feel, and instead draws them onto the artist’s side. It was his presence that Korman’s supporters—both Jewish and non-Jewish—cited in their defense of the video. The idea that even a minority of survivors might exercise veto power over what constitutes Holocaust memory reflects growing anxiety over survivors’ legacy specifically, and over the future of Holocaust remembrance more generally. In 1998, Imre Kertész reflected on the fact that as survivors age, and as the temporal distance grows, Auschwitz, and by extension memory of the Holocaust, is “slipping out of their hands.” “There is something shockingly ambiguous,” he wrote, “about the jealous way in which survivors insist on their exclusive rights to the Holocaust as intellectual property.” Kertész noted that the pressing question for survivors is: “to

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whom will it [Auschwitz] belong?”59 This question, although unresolved, comes starkly into view when examining the response to Korman’s work, and it also stands at the heart of any discussion around whether humor has a place in Holocaust remembrance, and whether Jews alone can use humorous devices to this end.

Non-Jews and Holocaust Humor Although Jewish artists and performers have sparked controversy through their use of humor in exploring issues around the Holocaust, they have, on the whole, been able to stand by their work. The invective aimed at them pales in contrast with the criticisms leveled at non-Jews who produce Holocaust humor. They are pilloried by Jewish leaders and prominent Jewish writers, and they lack the moral authority— grounded in a direct connection to the Holocaust—to shield their work from criticism. Since the late 1990s, a number of controversies have arisen with regard to the invocation of the Holocaust, Hitler, or Nazism by non-Jewish Australians. Such incidents have stirred up anger and division in the Jewish community and in society more broadly. Jewish communal leaders are generally at the forefront of the public outcries; in most instances, the controversy revolves around images of or allusions to Hitler and Nazism that appear in comedic or humorous formats, and in the most controversial cases, there is a comparison, made either explicitly or implicitly, between Nazism and the state of Israel.

Michael Leunig and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Michael Leunig is one of Australia’s most celebrated cartoonists. As a regular cartoonist for The Age, Melbourne’s liberal daily newspaper, he has for decades entertained Australians with his whimsical, folksy characters, his religious themes and imagery, and his gentle sense of humor. In particular, his character Curly Pajama has become a kind of folk hero in Australia. In 1999, the National Trust of Australia declared Leunig one of Australia’s Living Treasures, cementing his place as a leading voice in Australian art and in the local media. At the same time, Leunig has also distinguished himself as a political cartoonist, taking a distinctly antiwar position with regard to the war on Iraq, and especially as an observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These political cartoons have to some extent shifted the public perception of Leunig: for many, he has become a polarizing figure either loved (mainly by those on the Left), or despised (mainly by those on the Right).60 It is his cartoons on Israel that have raised the ire of the Australian Jewish community. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a highly visible issue in Leunig’s work, and he has used the comic form to great effect in magnifying the despair of Palestinians. Since 2002, he has drawn cartoons that lampoon Ariel Sharon; that highlight the lack of Palestinian voices in reportage of the conflict; and most controversially, that invite comparison between the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. Two cartoons in particular have caused enormous controversy, causing Australian Jewish writers and leaders to ­castigate Leunig as naive at best, and antisemitic at worst.

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The first was a two-panel cartoon Leunig penned in 2002, titled “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002,” which likened Gaza to the notorious death camp. In the first panel, a Jew (in this case, the beloved Curly Pajama with a Star of David on his back) stands at the iconic Auschwitz gates, which here bear the English translation “Work Brings Freedom.” In the second panel, the same Jewish Curly Pajama is carrying a rifle as he stands alongside a gate marked “War Brings Peace.” The gates are now concertinas of barbed wire, resembling a Palestinian refugee camp, with Israeli warplanes flying overhead. Most likely, the planes are a deliberate allusion to the lack of Western intervention during the Second World War—a direct comparison with Western countries’ non-intervention in the present-day conflict. The cartoonist’s intention is unmistakable: to show that the same Jews who stood as victims at the gates of Auschwitz are now perpetrators of violence against Palestinians. The cartoon also suggests that Israel is using the same Orwellian language that the Nazis employed, cynically equating security with freedom. When Leunig first drew the cartoon in 2002, his editor at The Age, Michael Gawenda, refused to publish it, telling the ABC’s Media Watch: “Anyone seeing that cartoon would think it inappropriate.”61 Later, on reflection, Gawenda described the cartoon as “intellectually lazy.” “Leunig’s truth . . . was a falsehood,” he wrote, “and I was not in the business of publishing falsehoods.”62 That Gawenda was Jewish made his decision all the more controversial. Was he censoring the cartoon because he was the child of Holocaust survivors and particularly sensitive to the boundaries of representing the Holocaust? Did his Jewishness compromise his objectivity on editorial matters surrounding Israel? Although he argued that was not the case, Gawenda was keenly aware that the issue was problematic. The time of the second intifada, he said later in an interview, “was difficult for all editors . . . but it was particularly difficult for me because I was Jewish . . . Both sides of that conflict saw me through a Jewish prism.”63 He insisted, though, that the fact of his Jewishness did not inform his decision to pull Leunig’s cartoon; rather, the cartoon itself had breached reasonable standards in a highly charged debate. Although it was never published in The Age or in any other publication, the cartoon was aired publicly on the ABC network and would later circulate online. This was not the end of the matter. In 2006, Leunig’s cartoon was entered—without his knowledge—in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition run by an Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri. The contest had been launched in response to a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed that had been published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005.64 Leunig discovered the hoax after his cartoon made the headlines and insisted that it be removed from competition. Nonetheless, the episode left a lingering sour taste. Given that the cartoon was celebrated in an antisemitic competition, did it not follow that it was inherently antisemitic? Not according to Leunig, who insisted that it was “an anti-war cartoon not an anti-Semitic cartoon.”65 Noting in a radio interview that “cartoons are ambiguous, they have many meanings,” Leunig explained that, at the time he drew the cartoon, “it was a very vicious time in [the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict and it was all getting worse and worse and I thought . . . [i]t’s like there was a new emblem over Israel saying ‘War brings peace,’ and I thought this was as pernicious a lie as that first one, ‘Work brings freedom,’ and I wanted to make that comparison, that Israel was a land

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surrounded by barbed wire.”66 Although Leunig was correct in arguing that cartoons are ambiguous, it must also be acknowledged that cartoons use symbols and imagery that are instantly recognizable to audiences. In the case of “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002,” there seemed to be no doubt that the cartoonist was drawing an analogy between Nazi and Israeli policy—an analogy sure to create maximum controversy and to invite contempt on the part of the Jewish community. In November 2012, during the Israeli aerial bombing of the Gaza Strip, Leunig once again raised the ire of Australian Jewry when he published a cartoon in The Age titled “First They Came for the Palestinians.” The text in the cartoon echoed a famous poetic indictment made by German pastor Martin Niemoller against Germans who did not speak out against Nazi persecution. The poem, whose opening lines state “First, they came for the communists, but I was not a communist—so I did nothing,” has become a universal symbol of the consequences of a moral failure to intervene when state violence escalates. Implicit in its lines are the call to take seriously those instances in which a state targets its citizens on the basis of political affiliation, race, or religion.67 In Leunig’s version: First they came for the Palestinians and I did not speak out because I was not a Palestinian. Then they came for more Palestinians and I did not speak out because I feared hostility and trouble. Then they came for even more Palestinians and I did not speak out because if I did, doors would close to me, hateful mail would arrive, bitterness and spiteful condemnations would follow. Then they came for more and more Palestinians and I did not speak out because by then I had fallen into silence to reflect upon the appalling, disgraceful and impossible aspects of human nature.68

There are two dimensions to Leunig’s refashioning of Niemoller’s poem. The first is the comparison between Israel and Nazism; implicit in Leunig’s text is the idea that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany in the way it targets Palestinians. In contrast with the original poem, which escalates in terms of the targeted victim group, Leunig’s escalation involves increasing numbers of Palestinians; the implicit message is that Israel is carrying out plans for their systematic round-up. The other noteworthy aspect of this cartoon is Leunig’s comment that those who might otherwise speak out against Israel refrain from doing so, for fear of a backlash from the (in this case unnamed) Jewish community. By implication, Leunig has been silenced over the years, a claim he made even more strongly in an article he penned defending his cartoon. “I know I am not an anti-Semite, not even vaguely or remotely,” he wrote. The very suggestion, he argued, was “cynical,” “bullying,” and “lazy.” Leunig claimed to be fighting for the powerless, those on the wrong side of the power balance. Thus, in his view, the cartoon was “universal and eternal. It could apply to any oppressed group.”69 Leunig’s “First They Came” was roundly condemned by Jewish community figures, academics, and writers in the Jewish and the mainstream Australian press, as well as by bloggers. The backlash against this cartoon was even greater than that accorded to his previous cartoon on the issue, for two important reasons. First, unlike the earlier cartoon, it was published in The Age. Whereas “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002” was censored by Michael Gawenda (finding a public platform only when the ABC’s Media Watch program publicized it), his successors at The Age did not have the

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same reservations with regard to the later cartoon. In addition, social media outlets had become much more pervasive by 2012, ensuring that “First They Came” was widely disseminated beyond its initial newspaper-reading audience. In consequence, although far less visually explicit than the earlier cartoon, it gave rise to greater debate. In his new role as chairman of the Australian branch of the Anti-Defamation League, Dvir Abramovich slammed the cartoon as “ugly,” “simplistic,” and “hateful,” charging that it had crossed the line into antisemitism with its lack of nuance and its demonization of Israelis and Jews.70 Particularly galling to Abramovich was the lack of sensitivity in Leunig’s comparison between Israel and the Nazis. “I wonder,” asked Abramovich, “if Leunig paused to consider how a survivor of the Holocaust would react when they came upon his cartoon?”71 Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel Affairs Council, described the cartoon as “offensive, inflammatory, and beyond the pale.”72 Nick Dyrenfurth, an Australian historian and occasional writer on Jewish issues and Israeli politics, said Leunig’s comparison was “intellectually lazy, deliberately cruel, and counter-productive.” “Depicting a genocidal Israeli Goliath pitted against a Palestinian David is laughably obscene,” he wrote in The Age.73 In a more terse response to the cartoon, the Zionist Federation of Australia’s media and advocacy director, Emily Gian, took to Twitter to describe Leunig as “vile” and “anti-Semitic to the core.”74 Jewish bloggers were perhaps even more scathing. Anthony Frosh, editor of the Jewish online forum Galus Australis, suggested, in response to Leunig’s own claim that there was no evidence he was an antisemite, that “the evidence is in his own cartoons.” For Frosh, equating Israeli policy with the Nazis’ extermination ideology was “about as anti-Semitic as it gets.”75 The Blank Pages from the Age, an anonymous, right-wing website dedicated to seeking out anti-Israel bias in The Age, called the cartoon an “outrageous anti-Semitic daubing” and attacked Leunig as a “horrible, disgustingly sick piece of work,” and a “Jew-hating cartoonist.”76 When the cartoon was republished in 2014 by a local NGO in support of Palestinians during the IsraelGaza conflict, Rabbi James Kennard, principal of Melbourne’s largest Jewish day school, blasted the cartoon and the NGO in a Facebook post. Comparing the plight of Palestinians with that of Jews during the Holocaust “implies either a nonsensical inflation of their grievances or an evil denial of the horrors and the extent of the Holocaust,” he wrote. “This comparison in Leunig’s cartoon was worse than offensive. It was totally and utterly wrong.”77 Other websites and blogs, including The Online Hate Prevention Institute, a Zionist Federation of Australia project to combat online antisemitism, and the right-wing online magazine, Jews Down Under, criticized Leunig’s cartoon specifically, and the artist more generally, as hostile to Jews.78 The episode even received attention internationally. B’nai B’rith International put out a press release congratulating the response of its Australian branch and decrying Leunig’s “anti-Semitic views.”79 The U.S.-based pro-Israel website Honest Reporting took notice of the cartoon, giving Leunig its Poison Pen award in 2012 as part of its “Dishonest Reporting Awards.” “Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is sick enough,” wrote blogger Pesach Benson, “but using Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous statement is even more warped.”80 The lone exception to the chorus of Jewish condemnation was the response of “tobybee,” a Jewish (woman) blogger in Melbourne, who argued that Leunig’s c­ artoon

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was not in fact equating the magnitude of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. “Leunig’s cartoon,” she wrote, “is not about—or not just about—the Holocaust. It is a call to action, a reminder that the Holocaust is one moment when action was lacking. What are others? When do we silence ourselves because of disinterest, or fear of personal repercussions? How can we rethink our responsibilities to others?” Although Leunig’s was an “imperfect” comparison, she added, it still had value if one looked beyond the surface.81 Hers was seemingly a lone voice in the Jewish world, which, at least in the public sphere, was otherwise unanimously hostile toward Leunig. The controversy surrounding Leunig’s cartoons is fundamentally different from those sparked by Safran’s television programs or Korman’s videos. Most obviously, Leunig is not Jewish. He does not inherit the same legacy of the Holocaust as those whose parents and grandparents survived under Nazi occupation. This does not disqualify him from commenting on the Holocaust, or using it in his satire, but it does mean that the way he has been regarded is different from the perception of Jewish public figures such as Safran and Korman. There were no suggestions that Safran or Korman were antisemites. They were accused of trivializing the Holocaust, to be sure, but their credentials as Jews meant that although they created controversy, they were spared the same level of opprobrium directed at Leunig. As Jews, they also criticized the Jewish community from within (in the case of Safran, explicitly). They knew the contours of the community, and they remained within that community, even when they divided it. Leunig did not divide the community—for the most part, it united against him. To some extent, this was because of the subject matter he dealt with. Although Safran and Korman have also dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of satire, Korman in particular from a left-wing perspective, they do not draw parallels with the Holocaust. As a result, while their Holocaust humor may be regarded by many as being in bad taste, it is not seen as threatening in the same fashion as Holocaust satire that criticizes Israel. There is another difference. Political cartoons are a complex medium, with varying intent and impact. As two scholars of Australian political cartoons, Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian, have shown, such cartoons can vary from “light relief to prophetic clarification of a major public issue.” Similarly, they can be received in very different ways: “What makes one reader roar with laughter of sympathetic recognition, may merely bemuse another.” Moreover, they are “liminal things, poised somewhere between being ‘the most influential thing in the paper’ and ‘just a joke,’ ” which gives them “special license” to provoke readers.82 By design, then, political cartoonists are provocative. As cartoonist Art Spiegelman has argued, they are “a breed of troublemakers by profession.”83 This is a trait they share with other comics and artists, but perhaps not with their colleagues in the newspapers and magazines in which they publish their work. It is therefore a difficult line to tread between journalistic responsibility and the cartoonists’ mandate to evoke amusement. Given the constraints of their medium, cartoons use visual clues and stereotypes to get their message across quickly and succinctly. Spiegelman recently argued that “cartoons use a kind of symbolic language. If you don’t understand the symbol, you don’t understand what you’re looking at.”84 Because they use this shorthand, cartoons are often offensive. As Spiegelman noted in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, they have a predisposition to insult. Caricature is “by definition a charged or

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loaded image; its wit lies in the visual concision of using a few deft strokes to make its point. The compression of ideas into memorable icons gives cartoons their ability to burrow deep into the brain.”85 He continues: Cartoon language is mostly limited to deploying a handful of recognizable visual symbols and clichés. It makes use of the discredited pseudo-scientific principles of physiognomy to portray character through a few physical attributes and facial expressions. It  takes skill to use such clichés in ways that expand or subvert this impoverished vocabulary.86

Perhaps Leunig did not deploy these skills effectively enough to subvert the “impoverished vocabulary” available to cartoonists, at least in terms of conveying his intended meaning; or perhaps he was being deliberately provocative and sparked the reaction he imagined would follow. What is clear, though, is that, given their constraints, cartoons—particularly political cartoons—must be assessed differently from other forms of humor and comedy. They are ambiguous, invite multiple readings, and cannot by their very nature provide the kind of nuance many critics demand. Leunig’s comparison was clumsy and offensive to many Australian Jews, and his justification did not show the kind of contrition his opponents insisted upon. His cartoons were not drawn to produce laughter—or, at least, not in a pleasurable sense. Rather, they were meant to evoke a wry or sardonic reaction from The Age’s audience, and perhaps to challenge or provoke some soul-searching in the Jewish community. There are, then, two audiences for this work: one that might be seen as sympathetic to the message, embracing it and regarding Leunig’s intended nuance; another, Australian Jews, who see no room for nuance in such instances. In a sense, the cartoons were not even about the Holocaust, but about the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Notwithstanding, the Holocaust is at the very heart of these controversies, for what is at stake is how we talk about the Holocaust and how the public reacts to images of the Holocaust. By using his iconic Curly Pajama as the Jewish figure in the Auschwitz 1942 cartoon, Leunig was likely trying to evoke the same kind of pathos that Spiegelman did by imagining Jews as mice in his celebrated Maus (1991). As the late Terrence Des Pres wrote in his widely cited essay on literary humor and the Holocaust, “the iconography of the mouse is perhaps the perfect sign for this amalgam of lightness and weight.”87 Arguably Leunig does not achieve this amalgam. He made his point with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, with cartoons that were designed to shock and provoke audiences. Certainly, this is the prerogative of the cartoonist, but it raises the question regarding what responsibilities cartoonists have in being sensitive to their various audiences. The debate over political cartoons, satire, and what is acceptable became particularly pertinent in January 2015, when radical Islamist gunmen slaughtered twelve members of the editorial staff at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for what they regarded as the newspaper’s disrespect vis-à-vis Islam. Discussions concerning free speech and the limits of satire are now part of a broader global discussion. Although Islam is at the center of this debate, the limits around Holocaust representation are a corollary, particularly in light of the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest in 2006 and its resurrection in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.88

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Tom and Alex: “Six Degrees of Hitleration” Leunig’s 2012 cartoon certainly indicates the extent to which satirical use of the Holocaust or Holocaust-related issues has become a part of the public discourse in Australia. It was preceded by a number of other incidents, among them a radio presenter’s suggestion in 2009 that actor Magda Szubanski—coincidentally, the daughter of a postwar Polish refugee—would lose weight if “you put her in a concentration camp.”89 In 2013, Christopher Pyne, a senior opposition member of Parliament (now Minister for Education), commented that the government was “beginning to resemble a scene from the movie Downfall,” which depicts the last days in Hitler’s bunker.90 In early 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott twice made Holocaust-related references in Parliament, the first time suggesting that the Australian Labor Party had caused a “holocaust of jobs” while in government (referring to the contraction of jobs in the military industrial sector), and then a few weeks later labeling the opposition leader Bill Shorten the “Dr. Goebbels of economic policy.” He retracted both statements, but was nonetheless roundly criticized both by Jewish and non-Jewish members of Parliament and by Jewish community leaders.91 While the use of crass insults is a standard feature in the Australian parliament, these jokes, although evoking laughter within the prime minister’s own party, seemed to fall flat in the court of public opinion. Abbott apologized on both occasions. One fairly recent controversy connected with the youth-oriented radio station Triple J is of particular interest. In August 2012, Triple J’s breakfast program hosts, Alex Dyson and Tom Ballard, participated with guest comedian Alan Brough in a game called “Six Degrees of Hitleration,” in which various objects were linked to Hitler in six steps. Asked to link wind farms to Hitler, Ballard responded: “Wind farms, fan-forced ovens, let’s not go there.”92 The response was swift. Within 24 hours, outraged columnists and letter writers had complained in popular online and print media outlets, and the topic quickly became the most hotly debated topic on the program’s online message board.93 Taking to Twitter to censure Ballard, one listener wrote: “Cheap laughs invoking Hitler this morning. Bad form bad taste!! Really scraping the barrell [sic].”94 Ballard, for his part, defended his right to make Holocaust jokes, claiming that making fun of Hitler was simply in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Mel Brooks, and Monty Python. “Dude,” Ballard responded when pressed to recant, “if you don’t like the show, just don’t listen. It’s profoundly easy.”95 On Triple J’s Facebook page, dozens of commentators expressed their (mock) disapproval by means of additional Holocaustrelated puns, while those objecting to the program leveled accusations of antisemitism and Holocaust trivialization at Triple J and its presenters.96 Ultimately, Ballard and Triple J both apologized for the sketch.97 Within the Jewish community, it was once again Dvir Abramovich who led the attack. Writing in the opinion section of The Age two days after the broadcast, he blasted Ballard and Triple J and decried the “dangerous trend” in which “there is no aspect or symbol of the darkest chapter in human history that is not subject to perverse abuse and cheap trivialization.” Denouncing the sketch as a “hurtful and sickening prank,” Abramovich accused the radio hosts of re-traumatizing survivors and “trampling on their feelings.”98 He added: “Would they have played the same game if

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their grandparents, parents, siblings or uncles were executed and their naked corpses incinerated in the ovens?”99 In contrast, writer and comedian Ben Pobjie leaped to Ballard’s defense, arguing that Ballard had neither suggested that the Holocaust was funny nor trivialized the suffering of the victims. Moreover, Pobjie maintained, the Holocaust, like all subjects, should not be off-limits for comedians, even if some occasionally overstepped the bounds of good taste.100 Two bloggers at the online Jewish forum Galus Australis also published scathing commentary. Galus editor Anthony Frosh argued that the episode highlighted the need to re-evaluate Holocaust education in Australia.101 And Malki Rose, a regular contributor, wrote that the “Hitleration” game should have caused widespread outrage among Australians in general, since many Australians are descended from postwar Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Slavic refugees. Noting that the intention of Holocaust humor “was always to mock the persecutor, but NEVER the victim,” she, like Frosh, advocated for a heightened commitment to anti-racist education among young people.102 This insistence that a lack of education was at the heart of the problem suggests that these writers put Ballard’s indiscretion down to naivety, rather than malice, and that the controversy might have been avoided had the radio host been better educated. Perhaps most interesting, though, was Rose’s insistence that the targets of the radio game were not Jews, but all victims of Nazism. “Although Jews,” she wrote, “were systematically executed and tortured as a top priority in Nazi German, we do not ‘own’ the Holocaust. We do not own Auschwitz or Dachau and have no monopoly over being victims of Hitler’s concentration camps, ovens, or gaschambers.” Jewish journalist Jonno Seidler took the opposite position, arguing that Holocaust humor was an expressly Jewish matter. “As a Jew,” he wrote on the entertainment news website The Vine, “I’d be more than happy to let it blow over if [Ballard would] apologize.” The fact that Ballard wasn’t Jewish was particularly galling, since “if there was ever a rule in the school of comedy, it’s that you don’t make jokes about a  tribe you don’t belong to.” It followed that only Jewish artists such as Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman could successfully deal with Holocaust humor: “Holocaust jokes aren’t funny 98% of the time, but when they are, it’s those guys who are allowed to make them. They’ve rationalized an approach to the tragedy based on the suffering of their ancestors, and it’s usually the other Jews who get it.”103 Like Abramovich, Seidler also addressed the current situation (and sensitivity) of Australian Jews. “The reason Holocaust jokes are a no-go,” he explained, “is because in my grandparents’ lifetime, our families were decimated by the greatest hate crime the world has ever seen.” Ultimately, then, for both Seidler and Abramovich, the trouble with Holocaust humor more broadly is the Jews’ perceived contemporary vulnerability. Without remembering what Jews have endured historically, and the gravity of their suffering, it is too easy to allow Jews to become targets once again. In his study on ethnic jokes, sociologist and leading humor theorist Christie Davies wrote that ethnic humor enforces the “moral boundaries of the group[,] which define what is acceptable and characteristic behavior of the members, and what is unacceptable behavior characteristic of outsiders.”104 In this case, it was a joke made by a non-Jew on a topic particularly sensitive to Jews that contravened the established

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boundaries. Jews’ response to this particular controversy could be characterized by what folklore scholar Moira Smith has termed “unlaughter”—the absence of laughter in situations where it might be expected.105 Sigmund Freud made a similar point in his classic 1905 treatise, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in which he claimed that Jews are among the most self-deprecating people in their willingness to make fun of their own nature. In his words, “the share the raconteur’s own person has in what is being criticized creates the subjective conditions for the joke-work that are otherwise difficult to set up.” However, jokes made about Jews by outsiders are tendentious and aggressive, as they simply see Jews as “comical figures.”106 The fact that Ballard ultimately felt the need to apologize points to an important distinction between how Jewish and non-Jewish expressions of Holocaust humor are viewed: Jewish artists like Safran and Korman were able to continue to produce or reproduce their works without the need to express their remorse. Indeed, their position as descendants of survivors and inheritors of the Holocaust legacy gave them the assurance to stand by their work, or at least, there was a sense in which even if they transgressed the boundaries of good taste, their status as insiders was never seriously under threat. In the case of Leunig, his use of the Auschwitz-Gaza analogy marked him in the eyes of many Australian Jews as hostile not only toward Israel, but toward Jews more broadly. The Ballard incident was a little less straightforward. First, he was a young comedian rather than a veteran commentator like Leunig, so there was an extent to which he was labeled naïve rather than malicious, and ignorant rather than antisemitic. In the case of the “Hitleration” game, it was not clear who the butt of the joke was: was it Hitler, Holocaust victims and survivors, or Jews generally? Ballard protested that his joke was simply a part of a longer tradition, invoking comics such as Chaplin and Brooks, but in their work it is clear that the perpetrators are the butt of the humor, not the victims. This goes to the question of how humor and laughter are used to elicit solidarity between joke-teller and audience. In the case of “Hitleration,” many Jews (although not necessarily the target audience) were offended by the joke and were even more irate at Ballard’s initial defensive response. The joke was not premised on shared laughter—it was performed between non-Jews for a predominantly non-Jewish audience on a subject that was sensitive to the Jewish community—and it therefore had an exclusionary effect. The latest episodes involving Leunig and Ballard highlight ways in which the new media landscape is far less conducive to the regulation of Holocaust humor, in the sense that there are myriad new platforms in which such humor can be displayed and almost instantaneously disseminated. At the same time, such humor is subject to a more informal form of regulation on the part of audiences, who can (and do) respond urgently and immediately to perceived instances of insensitivity or bad taste. Without the outcry on Twitter, it is unlikely that the radio station and its presenters would have felt forced into a public apology (as qualified as Ballard’s apology was). Reactions are instant, and it does not take long—in this case, only a matter of hours—for controversy to materialize. The new landscape also makes it possible to trace the public reaction, through comments on blogs and social media platforms. For researchers, it provides unprecedented opportunities to conduct research on audiences and their responses.

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Conclusion When it comes to Holocaust humor in the Australian context, the juxtaposition of comedic tropes and ineffable memory has inevitably prompted public outcry. Moreover, although Jewish purveyors of Holocaust humor are often pilloried for their work, their direct connection (as survivors or descendants of survivors) or indirect connection (as members of the broader Jewish community) lends them the ability to weather criticism and still remain within the fold. Non-Jewish comedians and artists, by contrast, must tread a much finer line. They stand to be accused of much more serious misdemeanors than Jewish comedians, such as antisemitism and racism, or even to become pariahs for their trivializing of the Holocaust. Recent controversies over Holocaust humor in Australia have much to tell us about how memories of the Holocaust are culturally diffused and regulated. Jewish responses make it clear, on the one hand, that sensitivities around the subject are still raw. On the other hand, claims made by intellectuals such as Ophir, Kertész, and Des Pres— that the Holocaust has come to be revered in a way that makes it difficult to appreciate its universality—remain relevant as well. In many ways, the responses to Holocaust humor in Australia have reinforced the ways in which the Holocaust is imagined as Jewish, to the exclusion of other victim groups. This attitude stems from and reinforces the perception of the Holocaust as a specifically and uniquely Jewish tragedy. And yet, if the Holocaust is to be seen as a universal tragedy, can we not then suppose that Holocaust remembrance in all its forms is available to Jews and non-Jews alike? Holocaust humor may all be in bad taste, yet that is not the pertinent issue. Rather, we must consider whether the incongruity between form and content can be made productive for producers and consumers of humor. The question we must ask is not whether the Holocaust can be the subject of comedy, satire, parody, or black humor, but how and within what ethical framework can it be incorporated into the broader context of representing and remembering the Holocaust. In the Australian setting, as elsewhere, this is a question that is yet to be resolved.

Notes 1. Adi Ophir, “On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise,” Tikkun 2, no. 1 (January-March 1987), 61–66. 2. Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” trans. John MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 270. 3. See Suzanne Rutland and Gary Eckstein, “Australasia: Jews in Australia,” in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, vol. 1, ed. Mark Avrum Ehrlich (Santa Barbara: 2008), 521. 4. Suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (New York: 1997), 225–256. 5. Judith E. Berman, Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945– 2000 (Crawley, W.A.: 2001), 5–6. 6. Don Perlgut, “Australian Jews and Film” (June 2010), online at www.jgcinema.com/ single.php?sl= (accessed 4 January 2015). 7. Freda Freiberg, “Lost in Oz? Jews in the Australian Cinema,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 8, no. 2 (1994), 198–200.

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8. On Rene, see Kathy Leahy, “Roy Rene Mo: Australian Clown or Monarch of the Mob?” Australian Drama Studies 42 (April 2003), 91–111; Barry York, “In the Company of Chaplin,” National Library of Australia News (September 2006), 7–10; Celestine McDermott, “Rene, Roy (Mo) (1891–1954),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, online at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rene-roy-mo-8181/ text14305 (accessed 4 January 2015). 9. Although the Eichmann trial had significant impact in Australia, it was not the watershed that Peter Novick claimed it to be for the United States. See David Ritter, “Distant Reverberations: Australian Responses to the Trial of Adolf Eichmann,” in The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia, ed. Tom Lawson and James Jordan (London: 2008), 51–73. 10. See “The Top TV Programs of 1978,” Media Information Australia, no. 13 (August 1979), 28. On the reception and impact of the miniseries Holocaust, see Grant Noble and Craig Osmond, “ ‘Holocaust’ in Australia,” International Journal of Political Education, 4 (1981), 139–150. 11. Schindler’s List was the eleventh-highest grossing film in Australia in 1994. See Screen Australia, online at screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/cinematop50films.aspx#Ran79299 (accessed 4 January 2015). 12. See Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper (St. Leonards, NSW: 1994). On the controversy concerning Darville, see Robert Manne, The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust (Melbourne: 1996); Andrew Reimer, The Demidenko Debate (St. Leonard’s, NSW: 1996); Gianna Totaro, Christine Tyshing, and John Jost (eds.), The Demidenko File (Ringwood, Victoria: 1996). 13. On the circumstances surrounding Irving’s visa, see Tzvi Fleischer, “The End—Issues surrounding the Denial of a Visa to David Irving,” Australia/Israel Review 21, no. 19 (December 1996), 18–20; Lawrence W. Maher, “Migration Act Visitor Entry Controls and Free Speech: The Case of David Irving,” Sydney Law Review 16, no. 3 (1994), 358–393. 14. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: 2010). 15. For an overview, see Stuart MacIntyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: 2003). 16. The literature on this topic is extensive. See especially A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: 2005); Tony Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: 2008), 296–322. 17. Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale: 1991). 18. On Holocaust humor in film, see Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: 2011), 79–100; Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: 2009), 59–76. 19. John Safran, interview with Monica Attard, Sunday Profile, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (5 June 2005), transcript available at abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1383760. htm (accessed 17 April 2015). 20. On Safran’s career, see Dave Hoskin, “Renting Mums and Riling Ray: The Career of John Safran,” Metro Magazine 164 (March 2010), 90–93. 21. By the time the series aired, Safran’s mother was no longer alive. In a memorable episode, Safran and two friends dig a hole alongside the grave of his mother so that, following what he claims to be an obscure medieval Jewish custom, he can ask his mother’s blessing to marry a non-Jew. Historian Jordana Silverstein has argued that part of what is so problematic about Safran’s discourse is that he constructs Jews as a strictly racialized category, taking no account of historical, political, or cultural factors. “Jewish women,” in Safran’s world, “are too known, too intimate, both in scientific and cultural terms. Jewish women are bossy, they are unattractive.” This stands in stark contrast to Safran’s essentialized conception of “blond shikses” or Eurasian women, who are seen to be desirable. See Jordana Silverstein, “Dating while Jewish: Historicising Racialised Discourses of Attraction and Desire,” unpublished paper delivered at

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Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Annual Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney (December 2012). I thank Dr. Silverstein for sending me a copy of the paper. 22. In its opening episode, Race Relations attracted an audience of more than 700,000, although this figure gradually dipped each week to as low as 322,000 by the final episode in December 2009. For more details, see David Knox, “A Tight Race for Wednesday,” TV Tonight (22 October 2009), online at www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/10/a-tight-race-for-wednesday.html (accessed 11 January 2015). 23. Alice Pung, “Border Crossings: Review of the Television Series John Safran’s Race Relations,” The Monthly (February 2010), 68–69. 24. Peter Kirkwood, “John Safran the Holy Fool,” Eureka Street 19, no. 20 (23 October 2009), 3–4. 25. On Larry David, see David Gillota, “Negotiating Jewishness: Curb Your Enthusiasm and the Schlemiel Tradition,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 4 (2010), 152–161. 26. Cited in ibid., 154. 27. Ibid., 153. 28. See David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne, Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom (New York: 2006), 52; Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: 2011), 80–81. 29. In a recently published volume, Edward Portnoy examines how Anne Frank has become a comedic trope. See Portnoy, “Anne Frank on Crank: Comic Anxieties,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: 2012). 30. Dvir Abramovich, “No Laughing Matter,” Australian Jewish News (29 November 2009) (citations from the Australian Jewish News also available online). 31. Dvir Abramovich, “Exploiting the Holocaust,” The Age (1 July 2010) (online at theage.com.au). 32. David Kupfer, “Safran Not Funny,” Australian Jewish News (13 November 2009). 33. David Cashrein, “Not Funny, Just Vulgar,” and Noah Levin, “Shameful ABC,” Australian Jewish News (30 October 2009). 34. The foreskin reattachment sketch may have been an allusion to Agneiszka Hollande’s 1990 film, Europa Europa. 35. Julie Szego, “Standing Up for Safran,” Australian Jewish News (18 December 2009). 36. [Jewin’ the Fat], “Safran Pushes the Boundaries,” Galus Australis (online journal) (26 October 2009). 37. For example, in January 2011, Safran headlined a feature in which the newspaper asked prominent Australian Jewish personalities what was on their summer reading list. See “Summer Reading Hits and Misses,” Australian Jewish News (11 January 2011). His true crime book also received a positive review in the newspaper: see Timna Jacks, “Safran’s ‘Truman Capote’ Moment,” Australian Jewish News (31 October 2013). 38. Jacks, “Safran’s ‘Truman Capote’ Moment.” 39. In his earlier series, John Safran vs God, Safran made light of the common Jewish practice of boycotting German goods. In Race Relations, he also lampoons the Holocaust denier David Irving, making him look like a buffoon in a radio interview. For the latter, see youtube.com/watch?v=0rBCst4hph0 (accessed 12 January 2015). Apart from Safran, stand-up comic Austen Tayshus (stage name of Sandy Gutman) has used Holocaust jokes as part of his act for decades. See Ross Fitzgerald and Rick Murphy, Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace (McMahons Point, N.S.W: 2011). 40. Korman has posted the videos to her website, with an accompanying photo gallery. See Jane Korman, “Dancing Auschwitz,” online at janekormanart.com/janekormanart.com/16. Dancing_Auschwitz/16.Dancing_Auschwitz.html (accessed 4 January 2015). Because of a copyright infringement, Korman was required to remove the soundtrack of the song “I Will Survive.” 41. A list of Korman’s exhibitions and awards can be found online at janekormanart.com/ janekormanart.com/About.html (accessed 4 January 2015).

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42. Hugh Collins, “Dancing Holocaust Survivor at Auschwitz Sparks Debate,” AOL News (17 July 2010) [link no longer available]. 43. Jane Korman, “The Controversy,” Jane Korman ART, janekormanart.com/­janekormanart .com/The_Controversy.html (accessed 4 January 2015). 44. Sarah Blacher Cohen, “Introduction: The Varieties of Jewish Humor,” in idem (ed.), Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor (Detroit: 1990), 4, 13. 45. Louis Kaplan, “ ‘It Will Get a Terrific Laugh’: On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham: 2002), 353. 46. Ibid., 352. 47. This outlook is criticized by Jacob Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor who is also an acclaimed memoirist. See his Sunrise West (Blackheath, NSW: 2007), 153. 48. Danny Katz, “The Shortest Sweetest Holocaust Movie,” The Age (22 July 2010). 49. Andrew Bolt, “Dance, and Damn Them,” Herald Sun (14 July 2010). 50. Wayne Flower, “Dance Video Fury: Holocaust Survivor’s Bizarre YouTube Act,” Herald Sun (14 July 2010). 51. “Outrage at Melbourne Artist Jane Korman’s ‘I Will Survive’ Dance at Polish Death Camp,” The Australian, 14 July 2010, online at theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/outrageover-melbourne-artist-jane-kormans-i-will-survive-dance-at-polish-death-camp/story-­ e6frg6of-1225891392172 (accessed 18 April 2015). 52. Helen Leperere, “Dancing on the Graves of Our Martyrs,” Australian Jewish News, (4 December 2009). 53. Helen Leperere, “Dancing on the Graves of Holocaust Victims,” Australian Jewish News (22 July 2010). 54. Ingrid Weinberg, “Nothing Glorious about Gloria at Auschwitz,” Australian Jewish News (4 December 2009). 55. “Dirty Dancing,” Australian Jewish News (16 July 2010). 56. Debbie Masel, “Don’t Condemn Jane Korman’s Auschwitz Art,” Australian Jewish News (11 December 2009). 57. Sam Laser, “Dancing on the Graves of Nazis,” Australian Jewish News (29 July 2010). (According to the popular joke: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!”). 58. Avril Alba, “Desecration or Celebration,” Australian Jewish News (23 July 2010). I thank the author for sharing a copy of the article. 59. Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” 267. 60. For background on Leunig, see Roman Rosenbaum, “Australia and Symbolic Rep­ resen­tation in the ‘Cartoon Controversy,’ ” International Journal of Comic Art 9, no. 1 (2007), 468–471. 61. “Lost Leunig,” Media Watch (6 May 2002), transcript available at abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/060502_s5.htm (accessed 24 April 2015). 62. Michael Gawenda, American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey (Carlton, VIC: 2007), 160. 63. ra, “Anti-Semitism and the Media—An Interview with Michael Gawenda,” Galus Australis (4 November 2009). 64. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman provides valuable commentary on the Danish contest and the cartoons that were entered. See his article “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2006), 43–52. 65. Justin Norrie, “Chaser Behind Leunig Stunt,” The Age (16 February 2006). 66. Michael Leunig, interviewed by Andrew Denton, “Enough Rope” (television broadcast), Australian Broadcasting Corporation (8 May 2006), transcript available at abc.net.au/tv/ enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm (accessed 27 April 2015). 67. There are several reported versions of Niemoller’s poem; the text quoted above is reportedly from the version officially approved by Niemoller’s wife for publication. See Trudy Gold, Rudy Kennedy, Trude Levi, and Frank Reiss, “The Survivors’ Right to Reply,” in The Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: 2005), 254.

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68. Michael Leunig, “First They Came . . . ,” Leunig (21 November 2012); the cartoon can be seen online at leunig.com.au/cartoons/recent-cartoons (accessed 8 April 2015). 69. Michael Leunig, “Just a Cartoonist with a Moral Duty to Speak,” The Age (11 December 2012). 70. “The ADC Slams Leunig Cartoon,” J-Wire (21 November 2012), jwire.com.au/30003/ (accessed 25 April 2015). 71. Dvir Abramovich, “Comparing Nazis to Israel is Unacceptable,” The Australian (12 December 2012). 72. Colin Rubenstein, “Analogy Is Offensive,” Sydney Morning Herald (3 December 2012). 73. Nick Dyrenfurth, “Leunig, Your Provocative Use of Nazi Analogies Is So Tiresome,” The Age (14 December 2012). 74. Emily Gian, Twitter post (22 November 2012, 9:49 p.m.), online at twitter.com/emilygian/status/271626366330482688 (accessed 27 April 2015). 75. Anthony Frosh, “Michael Leunig Hangs Himself,” Galus Australis (11 December 2012). 76. Wilbur, “Leunig Comes for the Jews” (21 November 2012), online at t­ heblankpagesoftheage .blogspot.com/2012/11/leunig-comes-for-jews.html; idem, “Comparing Nazis to Israelis is Unacceptable (except at Fairfax Media and in anti-Semitic circles)” (12 December 2012), online at theblankpagesoftheage.blogspot.com/2012/12/comparing-nazis-to-israelis-is.html (accessed 27 April 2015); idem, “A Cartoonist’s Immoral Duty to Fire Missiles at the Jews” (11 December 2012), online at theblankpagesoftheage.blogspot.com/2012/12/­a-cartoonistsimmoral-duty-to-fire.html (all articles accessed 27 April 2015). 77. James Kennard, Facebook post (30 July 2014), online at facebook.com/RabbiJamesKennard/ posts/581978871919895 (accessed 27 April 2015). 78. See “An Anti-Semitic Response to the Israel-Hamas War” (22 July 2014), online at ohpi.org.au/an-antisemitic-response-to-the-hamas-israel-war (accessed 27 April 2015); Pam Hopf, “Leunig Slams Jews—and Lycra!” (15 September 2013), online at jewsdownunder. com/2013/09/15/leunig-slams-jews-and-lycra-3 (accessed 27 April 2015). 79. “B’nai B’rith Praises Anti-Defamation Commission’s Response to Anti-Semitic Cartoon,” B’nai B’rith International (12 December 2012). 80. Pesach Benson, “2012 Dishonest Reporting Awards” (17 December 2012), online at honestreporting.com/2012-dishonest-reporting-awards/#Leunig (accessed 27 April 2015). 81. Tobybee, “Comparisons” (14 December 2012), online at jewonthis.wordpress.com/­ 2012/12/14/­comparisons/ (accessed 25 April 2015). 82. Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian, “The Political Cartoonist and the Editor,” Pacific Journalism Review 11, no. 2 (2005), 127–128. 83. Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood,” 46. 84. Democracy Now, “ ‘Cartoonist Lives Matter’: Art Spiegelman Responds to Charlie Hebdo Attack, Power of Cartoons,” Democracy Now: A Daily Independent Global News Hour (8 January 2015), online at democracynow.org/blog/2015/1/8/cartoonists_lives_matter_art_ spiegelman_responds (accessed 28 April 2015). 85. Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood,” 45. 86. Ibid., 45. 87. Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: 1988), 231. 88. Matt Schiavenza, “The Hypocrisy of Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Contest,” The Atlantic (31 January 2015). 89. Emily Dunn and Ellie Harvey, “Kyle’s Big Mouth in Nasty Relapse,” The Sydney Morning Herald (9 September 2009), 3. 90. Rachel Baxendale, “Pyne’s Hitler Crack ‘Offensive’—Election 2013,” The Australian (4 February 2013). 91. See Latika Bourke, “Tony Abbott Accuses Labor of Causing a ‘Holocaust of Jobs,’ ” Sydney Morning Herald (12 February 2015); Lisa Cox, “Tony Abbott calls Bill Shorten the ‘Dr. Goebbels of Economic Policy,’ ” Sydney Morning Herald (20 March 2015). 92. Triple J has not posted the podcast of that segment, but reports about it are available in the Australian Jewish News and on the music news website Faster Louder. See Gareth

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Narunsky, “Triple J Host Forced to Apologise,” Australian Jewish News (16 August 2012); Darren Levin, “Tom Ballard ‘Sorry’ for Hitler Gag,” Faster Louder (10 August 2013), online at fasterlouder.com.au/news/local/33402/Tom-Ballard-sorry-for-Hitler-gag (accessed 15 February 2015). 93. A total of 41 comments were recorded. Generally speaking, threads on the message board tend to get one or two comments and very rarely a few more than that. See “Discussion: Triple J Holocaust Joke Sickening,” online at www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message.aspx?b=3& m=556337&ps=50&dm=1&pd=3 (accessed 6 January 2015). 94. Jeremy, Twitter post (8 August 2012, 3.43 p.m.), online at https://twitter.com/jeremyengy (accessed 12 January 2015). 95. Tom Ballard, Twitter posts (8 August 2012, 6.10 p.m.), online at twitter.com/ TomCBallard/status/233380176493424641 and 233415043268616192. 96. The Facebook page was not accessible as of January 2015. 97. Ballard apologized as follows: “I’m very sorry that on my breakfast radio program, I offended and upset a lot of people. That’s not what I like doing; I like making people laugh and I like making people happy. I never set out to vindictively offend or belittle anyone or any group with my comedy, that’s not what I’m about. See “Triple J Apologises for Breakfast Comments,” online at abc.net.au/triplej/musicnews/s3565105.htm#.UQto1h1lmDp (accessed 8 February 2016). 98. Dvir Abramovich, “Triple J Holocaust Joke Sickening,” The Age (10 August 2012). 99. Abramovich’s article was circulated around Twitter—mostly by those supporting his view—and ironically gave the segment a great deal more exposure than it would otherwise have received. For instances of the article being sent around Twitter, see topsy.com/www.theage .com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/triplej-holocaust-joke-sickening-20120810-23yem.html (accessed 13 January 2015). 100. Ben Pobjie, “Defending Holocaust Humour: My Fool’s Errand,” The Sydney Morning Herald (10 August 2012). 101. Anthony Frosh, “Triple J Incident Unearths Need for Holocaust Education Revamp,” Galus Australis (15 August 2012). 102. Malki Rose, “Educating the Dumb, Drunk, and Racist,” Galus Australis (24 August 2012). 103. Jonno Seidler, “You’re No Larry David: Why Tom and Alex’s Holocaust Joke Really Isn’t Funny,” The Vine (10 August 2012). 104. Christie Davies, “Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values, and Social Boundaries,” The British Journal of Sociology 33, no. 3 (September 1982), 384. 105. Moira Smith, “Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance,” The Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 484 (2009), 151. 106. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (London: 2002 [1905]), 108–111.

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In Memoriam: Ezra Mendelsohn Richard I. Cohen (The Hebrew University)

 

Ezra Mendelsohn, a dear friend and a preeminent scholar of modern Jewish history, died in Jerusalem on May 12, 2015 (23 Iyar 5775). One of the founding editors of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Ezra taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement in 2002 at the age of 62, after which he taught for several years at Boston University, worked on various historical projects, and served for eight years as one of the editors of Zion. 233

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Ezra was born in 1940 in New York, and the city of his birth exerted a strong pull on him to the end of his life. He loved Jerusalem, but given his avid interest in all branches of art and culture, he regretted the nationalistic direction taken by his adopted city in recent years. He was reared in a home that was both secular and scholarly, and in his youth he encountered the engaging New York world of art, literature, science, history, and radical politics. His parents, Isaac and Fanny (née Soyer) were born in tsarist Russia. Fanny and her family left Russia for the United States in 1912; Isaac immigrated to Palestine during the Third Aliyah and enrolled at the Hebrew University, where he met Fanny during a visit she made to Palestine in 1925.1 They married in Jerusalem but in 1927 left for New York, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Isaac Mendelsohn became a well-known scholar of the ancient world of the Near East, specializing in ancient Semitic languages and pioneering the study of slavery as a professor at Columbia University. Fanny, a graduate of Hunter College, continued her studies in education at the Teacher’s Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and taught remedial reading. Ezra’s older sister, Ora Mendelsohn Rosen, was a distinguished biologist who studied diabetes and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She died in 1990 of cancer, the same disease that felled Ezra. In his home, Ezra was immersed in socialist and Zionist Jewish culture. His parents, who spoke fluent Hebrew and Yiddish, sent him to a public school but encouraged him to study Hebrew. While doing his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Ezra took up his parents’ suggestion that he spend a year at the Hebrew University. During his 1959–1960 academic year in Israel, he had his first encounter with Jerusalem’s scholarly community. The experience made a deep impression on him and persuaded him that his future lay in the field of Jewish studies. That was the direction he chose when he returned to Philadelphia to complete his B.A. in history. The year in Jerusalem was also decisive on a personal level, as it was then that he met Judy Wahl, an Israeli American student, whom he married in Jerusalem in 1965. Ezra decided to return to New York for graduate studies. At the time, few universities in the United States offered a program in Jewish studies, but at Columbia University, where he studied under the towering Jewish historian Salo W. Baron, he was able to pursue his calling. Baron, then the only professor of Jewish history at a secular American university, urged him, for pragmatic reasons, to concentrate on East European history, with Jewish history as a secondary specialization. Alongside Baron, Ezra studied under the formidable medievalist Gerson D. Cohen, as well as under one of the great scholars of modern East European history, Marc Raeff, who became an important mentor and model for him as a scholar. (Mendelsohn would later co-edit a festschrift in his honor,2 and he frequently visited him in New York.) Under Raeff’s direction, Mendelsohn wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Jewish labor movement in tsarist Russia. Completed in 1966, the work was published four years later as Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Worker’s Movement in Tsarist Russia. The book offers a nuanced portrait of the economic conditions under which the Jews of the Pale lived; relations between Jews and nonJews; Jewish attitudes toward the authorities; and, of course, the complex interactions among the disparate groups within the Jewish community. Mendelsohn describes adroitly how Jewish socialists teetered between the particularism of specifically Jewish

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labor movements, on the one hand, and universalist trends and the desire to belong to the larger movement outside Jewish society, on the other. The book’s reissue forty years later, an unusual occurrence in publishing today, testifies to its important and lasting contribution to understanding Jewish society in the Pale. Class Struggle in the Pale was the first of Mendelsohn’s works to deal with the tension between Jewish particularistic and universalistic tendencies. Other works revisited this topic, which became one of his lifelong interests. Mendelsohn never denied that his personal and family experience prompted him to study the Jewish labor movement and plumb its national and cosmopolitan affinities. He said as much in an unpublished autobiographical essay written a few years ago: As I look back on things, I see that not only my move to Israel, but my scholarly interests as well, derived in great measure from my family background. My parents, uncles and aunts did not tell me much about their lives in the old country, and my father told me virtually nothing about his life in Palestine in the 1920s. I therefore had to find these things out for myself. I wanted to understand the revolutionary changes in Jewish life at the end of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, changes that had shaped the lives of my parents and other members of my family. I think that my interest in the history of the Jewish Left, the subject of my first book and of subsequent studies, derived directly from my parents’ and uncles’ left-wing politics—I hoped to understand the origins of this political orientation. I was also intrigued by the often tortuous way in which so many East European Jews combined Zionism and socialism.

But it was not just the Left that caught Mendelsohn’s interest at the beginning of his career. A brace of studies he published in general venues, in 1969 and 1971, address two fascinating East European figures, Wilhelm Feldman and Alfred Nossig. Clearly it was Mendelsohn’s personal quest that induced him to consider these two enigmatic individuals, who cannot easily be categorized. Both had abandoned the world of Jewish tradition at the end of the 19th century and had fashioned for themselves a different sense of belonging to the Jewish community, undergoing various twists and turns during their lifetime. These articles were eminently appropriate for academic journals of a general nature that rarely accepted studies on Jewish subjects but were open to high-level research on East European history, including Jewishrelated issues. Their publication was indicative of their broad conceptual concerns and lent weight to the emerging field of Jewish studies during the last third of the previous century.3 By the time these articles and his first book were published, Mendelsohn was already a member of the faculty of humanities at the Hebrew University, where he taught East European and Jewish history, having moved to Israel in 1969 (after several years of teaching Russian history in the United States). Indeed, as Ezra later reflected in his autobiographical essay, it was his personal goal to settle in Israel, a decision that “felt natural to me,” believing that by doing so he was “fulfilling the dreams of my father, who regretted his departure from Palestine and hoped, some day, to return (he never did). I felt that someone who wanted to specialize in Jewish history should work in Israel, where this discipline was accorded so much importance. I wanted to be at the center, not at the periphery.” And yet Ezra did most of his major writing in English, in some way accepting his hybrid nature. Nonetheless, he won esteem in Israel even as he gained prominence

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in the scholarly world as a whole, especially after producing a pair of impressive books that appeared just two years apart. The first, published in 1981, was Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926.4 This comprehensive study demonstrates how meticulously Mendelsohn pursued his research, delving into the Jewish and Polish archives, reading about central figures in Polish history and their attitudes toward the Jews, and thoroughly investigating the different currents among Poland’s Jews and the Zionist movement’s leading figures.5 It is not a narrow organizational study but rather a fundamental historical consideration that lays the basis for understanding the different motivations and contrary courses within the Polish Jewish community. Mendelsohn shows in this book how economic, national. and cultural aspects of Polish life linked up with trends in Jewish society to transform Poland into a country in which Jewish nationalism had its best opportunity to thrive. The comparative dimension, so central to Mendelsohn’s work both on Jews and Poles, sharply delineates the political and spiritual alternatives available to Jews during this period. A number of the conclusions he reached in this work served as a basis for later studies. Unlike its predecessor, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (1983) does not rely principally on archival work but rather grew out of Mendelsohn’s proclivity for viewing events in their broad context. Demonstrating a rare capacity for synthesis, the book offers a collective portrait of Jews in all the countries of the region—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Never losing sight of the wider picture, Mendelsohn misses none of the small details without which the larger questions cannot be answered. Consequently, the book provides a fundamental orientation for understanding the complexity of Jewish life in this region prior to the Holocaust. (Mendelsohn, for his own reasons, largely avoided touching on the Holocaust directly.) Each chapter intricately examines the dynamics of Jewish life following the First World War, portraying the huge effects the conflict had on the regimes in these countries. In particular, it laid the foundation for nationalism and, consequently, for the development of antisemitism.6 The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars is history painted by an  artist, as Mendelsohn seeks to elucidate phenomena against a broad backdrop. Moreover, the comparative element is always enlightening. Mendelsohn might, in a single sentence, direct his readers’ attention to the fact that Czechoslovakia under Masaryk took a unique approach amenable to the Jews, while at the same time noting that, in Poland, Piłsudski took a much more problematic approach; or else show why Lithuania’s Jews abandoned integration into local society faster than did those of Hungary. To this day there is no work on the subject that offers such a clear and nuanced synthesis, devoid of simplistic paradigms. Among the notable conclusions Mendelsohn reaches in his final chapter is that the actions of the Jews of this region during this period were not a significant factor in determining attitudes toward them. As he puts it: “In the last analysis, the Jews could neither emigrate from Eastern Europe in significant numbers nor find reliable allies among the Christian population. These two basic facts doomed all Jewish political solutions—from that of the Zionists to that of Agudes Yisroel—to failure.” He portrays the sad state of affairs that anti-Jewish attitudes created in the region on the eve of the Holocaust. If there is  anything optimistic in Mendelsohn’s historical view of the period, it lies in his

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conclusion: “The Zionist movement may have failed in its efforts to save interwar East European Jewry, but it has succeeded in establishing a state which in some ways preserves and carries on the historical traditions of East European Jewry.”7 At the time Mendelsohn was writing this rich history, he and his dear friend Jonathan Frankel, along with their close colleague Peter Medding, both of the Hebrew University, were moving forward with the idea of establishing an English-language annual devoted to 20th-century Jewish history and life. They believed that the time was ripe for a journal to showcase the impressive growth, since the 1960s, of research into the history of the Jews in the modern age. The result was Studies in Contemporary Jewry, the first volume of which was published in 1984.8 The annual included articles by scholars around the world on a particular theme, various contributions unrelated to the symposium theme, and a book review section. The editors put special emphasis on the last, feeling that the existing journals of the time, including those devoted to Jewish studies, did not sufficiently cover new books in the field. Mendelsohn and his colleagues believed that scholars of the modern period—from a variety of disciplines, from different countries and working in disparate languages—needed a platform of this type. The three editors oversaw issues in rotation. Mendelsohn’s first turn came with the third volume, published in 1987. In keeping with his great interest in comparative studies, he chose as the symposium topic “Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-ethnic World.” In his brief introduction to the volume he stressed the need for comparative work in Jewish studies as a way of addressing the field’s central question: “To what extent is modern Jewish history unique, and to what extent have the Jews acted in ways similar, if not identical, to those of other minorities?”9 There can be no doubt that this question preoccupied Mendelsohn in all aspects of his teaching and research. It was, I feel, a central aspect of his being; he was always encouraging scholars and students to tackle this theme in their research and writing, and he often reflected on it in terms of the political situation in Israel. Studies in Contemporary Jewry became a major undertaking for all three of its editors, who worked in close collaboration in the process of developing the various symposium topics. It gave Mendelsohn a way to connect closely with colleagues in the scholarly world and to utilize his extensive reading and wide interests to diversify symposium topics. The issues he pursued focused on matters that concerned him or that he knew intimately and loved—art, music, literature, the modern city and the Jews, the place of the state in their lives, and, of course, sports. In all these areas he felt that he was expanding the boundaries of Jewish historical research. During the time he served as one of the editors (that is, until 2010), he oversaw seven volumes, and he was also a partner in producing Volume XXIV, begun by Jonathan Frankel before his death in May 2008. That volume contains an introduction written by Mendelsohn that is a beautiful expression of his admiration and love for Frankel, whose absence he felt keenly. While editing Studies in Contemporary Jewry and other books, Ezra did not neglect his own research. In 1993 he published a short work, On Modern Jewish Politics, which grew out of a course he taught jointly with Frankel and Medding.10 The book opens with a presentation of the many political alternatives available to the Jewish people at the beginning of the 20th century. It concludes with the only one of these options that remained at the end of the century—a Hebrew-speaking Jewish nation-state

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in the land of Israel. In between, Mendelsohn sails the rocky seas of the political remedies and options that Jews concocted over the course of the century in Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, the Balkans, and the United States, skillfully navigating between major currents and central movements. Mendelsohn did not presume to present here a chronological account of events or developments. Rather, his goal was to offer a typology that historians could use to identify the central lines of Jewish political action in the 20th century, with a focus on Eastern Europe and the United States, and with particular attention to the pre-Holocaust period. He considers the means of defining the group referred to as Jews—the language they spoke, the place they ought to live, the models and figures from the Jewish past they chose to identify with, their friendships and political ties with non-Jews, their political leanings, and their evaluation of the future of diaspora Jewry. The answers to these questions are scattered throughout the book, and Mendelsohn uses them to compare the ways in which contrasting political currents addressed these issues. In addition, since politics has cultural aspects, Mendelsohn opted to integrate literary and artistic sources into his historical discussion, an approach that increasingly engaged him and grew ever more prominent in his writing during the last two decades of his life. This is most evident in his study on the Galician Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879) and in a series of articles that preceded and followed it. Mendelsohn clearly wanted to say that the history of movements and ideological currents—and history as a whole—cannot be disengaged from cultural expression. This became for him a working hypothesis: To delve into the history of Jewish nationalism in all its forms, and into history as a whole, one must take into account the artifacts that served as a means of expressing those ideas. The opposite may also be true—significant aspects of works of art, music, and literature cannot be understood without an appreciation of the context in which they were created.11 In 1991, Maurycy Gottlieb was the subject of an extensive retrospective and catalogue produced by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. As he began to study Gottlieb’s work in historical context, Ezra saw lacunas in the way the artist had been interpreted in previous studies. He sensed that the museum catalogue did not fully recognize how Gottlieb was affected by the milieu in which he worked and how necessary that context was to fathoming Gottlieb’s agenda. His research eventually led to a fascinating book, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002), which was translated into Hebrew in 2006 and which was awarded the prestigious Bialik Prize in 2008. Gottlieb might not, at first sight, seem like the obvious candidate for such intensive examination. However, he produced a not insignificant oeuvre during his productive years and his work engaged both Poles and Jews, who identified strongly with certain paintings for different reasons. By the time Mendelsohn chose him as a subject, his work had been considered and reconsidered. But, as often happens in scholarship, a new study or exhibition can spur scholars to reexamine an artist and his work. The Tel Aviv Museum’s fine Gottlieb retrospective impelled Mendelsohn, a prominent historian of the Jews in Eastern Europe, to offer an original perspective on the artist and to ask different questions about him. Since Mendelsohn’s book, Gottlieb has been the subject of another fine exhibition in Poland.12 Very few Jewish artists have won such renewed attention.

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What was it about Gottlieb’s life and work that attracted a historian to the task of “completing the picture”? Mendelsohn explained by paraphrasing Shakespeare: “He was, indeed, all things to all men.” An art historian clearly sees one Gottlieb while a Jewish historian sees another. Can the work done in both disciplines be brought together to provide a fuller picture of Gottlieb’s world? Can such a disciplinary encounter lead each side to a more profound understanding of the artist? At the beginning of his book, Mendelsohn declares that he is not an art critic and makes no attempt to offer detailed artistic interpretations of Gottlieb’s work. Rather, his purpose is to situate the artist’s life and work in the world of Galician Jewry at the end of the 19th century. The context that Mendelsohn so wonderfully offers is what leads him into an examination of Gottlieb’s work, which prompts the conclusion that Gottlieb was a man torn between alternative identities, Polish and Jewish. His inner world was saturated with questions of nationalism and Jewish affiliation. Gottlieb seems to invite the historian to consider his personality. Why did he choose the themes he did, why did he paint the figures of Jesus, Shylock, the Wandering Jew, and a scene of Jewish prayer on Yom Kippur in which he seems to be prophesying his own death? Mendelsohn the historian cannot, however, simply consider Gottlieb’s life and work. He is compelled to address the contradictory interpretations Gottlieb’s paintings produced in those who contemplated his work, even after his death. An illuminating chapter, based on primary research in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish sources, is devoted to Gottlieb’s reception: How did the generations that follow him grapple with his identity? Is he a Jewish or a Polish hero? Zionist or assimilationist? The chapter displays Mendelsohn’s impressive capacity for recognizing the historical potential in embarking on such an endeavor. In Mendelsohn, Gottlieb found a historical interpreter who offers profound diagnoses about Jews, art, nationalism, and culture. During his years of work on Gottlieb, the love for Jewish history and culture that Mendelsohn had acquired from his parents came to full fruition. What began as an interest in the paintings of his uncles, Raphael and Isaac Soyer, led to his consideration of Gottlieb and, from there, to Jewish American artists of Communist and radical inclinations, such as Wilhelm Groper, Louis Lozowick, and Ben Shahn. Following an earlier essay on these figures, he wrote a short piece on them for an exhibition of American radical art in the 1930s, which concluded with words expressive of his own personal identification with these artists: “They deserve to be remembered—for their skill as artists but also for their love of humanity, for their sincere desire to improve society, and even for their Jewishness, even if this sort of Jewishness—secular, left-wing, Yiddish-tinged, anti-religious—is now, too, a thing of the past.”13 The same could be said of Mendelsohn himself, with the exception of the antireligious element. While he was an entirely secular Jew, he enjoyed listening to hazzanut and respected people’s beliefs as long as they remained within a liberal, democratic orientation. In his statement about these artists we hear a clear echo of his great belief that “to understand historical scholarship in depth, we must first become acquainted with the historian who wrote it—his biography, the political-cultural-social context in which he grew and lived, his political and religious opinions, and so on.”14 Ezra evoked these words on many occasions. Not that he thought that this was the only way to understand a historian’s work, but it was certainly an aspect that could

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not be overlooked. Serving from 2007–2015 as one of the editors of Zion, the Hebrew-language periodical of Jewish history, Mendelsohn aimed to reproduce something of the character of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, especially in terms of centering issues of the publication on specific subjects. This led, for example, to the issue titled “To Remember and to Forget: An Israeli View of the Jewish Past.” The issue, published in honor of the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, sought “to answer the question: What are the principal characteristics of Jewish ­historiography written in Israel?”15 Mendelsohn was the prime mover behind this project, which aroused a certain amount of controversy among Israeli historians, as some essays attributed to certain scholars ideological tendencies in their scholarly work. In a posthumously published essay Ezra returned to the matter, defending his belief that the context in which a historian lives definitely has an impact on one’s writing of history.16 Knowing full well the impact of his rearing on his own historical direction, Ezra did not accept the criticism of his colleagues. (In general, Ezra was sensitive, even when it came to disagreeing with his evaluation of a tennis match— especially if Rafael Nadal—his “hidden Marrano”—lost. He did not take criticism lightly.) Ezra displayed devotion and responsibility whenever he took on a task, in particular in his work at the Hebrew University. He served there in many capacities—as director of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry for several years, chair of the department of Russian studies, as mentor of doctoral and masters students whom he fostered with dedication—and he was always available to scholars from Israel and other countries. Many turned to him for advice and he offered it freely, though he had little patience for people who did not display the same commitment to his core values: precision, comprehensiveness, rigor, and hard work. His devotion was also evident at other institutions in which he served as a visiting professor. He showed the same qualities in relating to his colleagues, and he had a special place of respect and honor for his beloved teacher, Marc Raeff, and his close friends Jonathan Frankel and Steven Aschheim. He was the moving force behind the Festschriften for the latter two scholars, applying himself not only to the scholarly content of the volumes but to their aesthetic appearance.17 Ezra Mendelsohn is not recommended reading for postmodern historians. He did not try to dazzle the reader by citing popular theoretical perspectives, and he was not much of a name-dropper, either. He was a historian who believed in basic facts that have undergone careful scrutiny and selection. He presents them in an engaging, interesting, and original way, often with lovely touches of humor and wide-ranging associations. A Renaissance man, Ezra’s books and articles and dozens of book reviews often entertain, sometimes provoke laughter, and always elicit deep thought. Reading him, like being in his company, was always a challenge, because he had so many sides to him. As soon as you thought you had sufficiently plumbed the implications of what he was saying, he would surprise you with a comment or remark from an unexpected quarter that required you to take yet another look. The scholarly community, the staff of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and I personally have lost a colleague and friend of wide horizons and profound depths who enriched us here in Jerusalem and abroad, much more than we ever knew.

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Notes This essay was translated by Haim Watzman. 1. Ezra published three letters that his mother sent in 1925 to her sister-in-law Rivka Letz, two in Hebrew and one in English. The letters convey her first impressions of Palestine in a most authentic manner. See Ezra Mendelsohn, “Morah amerikanit beeretz-yisrael: sheloshah mikhtavim miFanny Soyer leRivka Letz (1925),” Cathedra 72 (June 1994), 91–98. 2. Ezra Mendelsohn and Marshall S. Schatz (eds.), Imperial Russia, 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition. Essays in Honor of Marc Raeff (DeKalb: 1988); see also Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven: 1981), x. 3. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Assimilation in Lvov: The Case of Wilhelm Feldman,” Slavic Review 28, no. 4 (December 1969), 577–590; republished in Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia, ed. Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn (Cambridge, Mass.: 1982), 94–110; idem, “From Assimilation to Zionism in Lvov: The Case of Alfred Nossig,” The Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 117 (October 1971), 521–534. 4. A Hebrew translation of Zionism in Poland appeared in 1986. This was intended to be the first of two volumes dealing with Polish Zionism between the two world wars. A second volume, however, never appeared, as other projects intervened and demanded Mendelsohn’s attention. 5. Michael Stanislawski reviewed the volume glowingly. He praised it as “a marvelous book . . . so well-documented, so chock-full of new data on Polish Zionism . . . that it is unlikely that anyone else will plow through the mounds of raw material that he has unearthed, and that therefore his account must be definitive. . . . Simply put, Zionism in Poland is essential and fascinating reading.” The review appears in Jewish Social Studies 45 (1983), 90–92. 6. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: 1983). The book was translated into a number of languages and later came out in a paperback edition. 7. Ibid., 257–258. 8. The first three volumes of Studies in Contemporary Jewry were published by Indiana University Press. Subsequent volumes were published by Oxford University Press. 9. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Preface,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 3, Jews and Other Ethnic-Groups in a Multi-ethnic World, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1987), ix. 10. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: 1993). 11. See, for example, Milly Heyd and Ezra Mendelsohn, “ ‘Jewish Art’? The Case of the Soyer Brothers,” Jewish Art 19–20 (1993–1994), 194–211. Significantly, the Soyer brothers were Mendelsohn’s uncles, and several of the works discussed in the article are in the possession of his family. See also Ezra Mendelsohn, “On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 9, Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1993), 3–16; idem, “Max Liebermanns Zwölfjäger Jesus im Tempel. Einige Anmerkungen zum historischen und kulturellen Kontext,” in Der Jesus-Skandal. Ein Liebermann-Bild im Kreuzfeuer der Kritik, ed. Martin Faass (Berlin: 2009), 103–124. 12. See the exhibition catalogue, Maurycy Gottlieb. W poszukiwaniu tożsamos ́ci/In Search of Identity, ed. Maria Milanowska (Lodz: 2014). Mendelsohn’s article in the catalogue was titled “Maurycy Gottlieb: A Jewish Artist?” 13. Ezra Mendelsohn, “On the ‘Jewishness’ of American Jewish Radical Artists,” in The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940, exh. cat. appearing in Grey Gazette 15 (Spring 2015), ed. Lucy Oakley, 7; idem, “Jews, Communism, and Art in Interwar America,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 20, Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner (New York: 2004), 99–132. 14. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Mavo: Lizkor vegam lishkoaḥ,” Zion 64 (2009) (special issue titled “Lizkor vegam lishkoaḥ: mabat yisreeli el he’avar hayehudi”), 9. 15. Ibid., 7.

242Essay 16. Ezra Mendelsohn, “ ‘Zion’ veKuti: Kitaei zikhronot,” in Avnei derekh: masot umeḥ karim behistoriyah shel ’am yisrael. Shai leZvi (Kuti) Yekutiel, ed. Immanuel Etkes, David Assaf, and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2015), 524–526. 17. The volumes in honor of Frankel and Aschheim, respectively, are Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (eds.), The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (Philadelphia: 2008); and Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (eds.), Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times (New York: 2014).

Review Essay

The New Marranos Mordechai Altshuler, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964, trans. Saadya Sternberg. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012. x + 324 pp. Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. xi + 276 pp. Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. x + 275 pp. Rina Lapidus, Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union. London: Routledge, 2012. xii + 211 pp. Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. xi + 399 pp. Yaacov Ro’i (ed.), The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xv + 450 pp. David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. xii + 283 pp. Nearly five hundred years after Christopher Columbus discovered America, Américo Castro discovered Spain. Where generations of Spanish historians had seen the ingathering of Christian lands, Castro saw conquered territory that was claimed by Iberian Christian colonists and cultivated by Iberian Jewish and Muslim natives. Eventually, most of the natives would be tempted or induced to abjure their local and filial loyalties for the sake of an undivided national patria.1 According to Castro, the adjective “Spanish” was expressly invoked to designate the novelty of a “humanhistorical reality” in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians were collectively and indefeasibly implicated.2 Galvanized by the progress of “internal colonization,” the architects of Spain had tried to erase the lines of its fractured Iberian past. But the traces, Castro insisted, remained everywhere apparent, not least among the family trees of Spain’s “New Christians” who were prepared to pledge their fortunes and sometimes their lives to an imagined community called España.3 Against the Catholic integralism of the Spanish academy under the decades-long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Castro (an exiled Republican) had gone so far as to insist that the “peculiar structure” of Spanish history had its “origins in a living disposition forged in nine centuries of Christian-Jewish-Moorish interaction.”4 Hispanicity, Castro concluded, was a political faith, and Spain was, from its early modern beginnings, a country of conversos. 245

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Castro’s revised genealogy of modern “Hispanic genius” challenged the assumption, upheld with the force of a religious conviction by historians of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Spain, that policing these confessional boundaries in the name of nationalist claims constituted the proper object of their scholarly investigations. The founders of Zionist historiography (a field in which the history of the Jews in Spain held a particular significance) were, in fact, committed to the same transcendent concept of nationality that Castro’s work explicitly challenged. They championed the premise that the history of the Jews constituted “a homogeneous unity, encompassing all times and places.”5 However, if Castro was right, Jewish historians would need to take the acquired hispanicity of Iberian Jews at least as seriously as their counterparts in the Spanish academy took the supposedly inherited hispanicity of so-called Old Christians. From the perspective of Spanish state-building, even Old Christians could be considered conversos, insofar as they were equally obliged to reorder their existence in accordance with the material changes and social values that the politics of unification and the costs of imperialism introduced into Iberian life. Neither Iberian Judaism nor Iberian Catholicism, to say nothing of Islam, could be said to have withstood hispanization intact; but neither was hispanization ever so successful as to wipe out completely the evidence of nine centuries of Christian-JewishMoorish interaction. Castro, in a bold dialectical move, argued that, in fact, the sense of noble failure dogged the Spanish experiment in imperial integration from the very beginning; inner doubt, rather than manifest triumph, was the most original cultural legacy of “Hispanic genius,” both the inspiration and the undertow of its Golden Age. In Castro’s account, the political idea of Spain was tethered to an unfinished social revolution. The conspicuous presence of Jewish conversos among the Spanish elite highlighted the inheritance of Iberian diversity that the invention of España only ever partially repressed. “New Christians” signified the precarious novelty of a regime, the legitimacy of which rested on the presumption of continuity between Iberia’s partially Christian past and Spain’s precariously realized Christian present. The dependence of the Spanish state on converso talent, money, labor, and connections challenged a conservative mythology of restoration that justified the radical expansion of state power at the expense of the aristocratic Old Christians, many of whom could not be reconciled to the prospect of centralization and bureaucratic control. Anxious about their own position vis-à-vis an invigorated, ambitious monarchy, Old Christian elites naturally suspected that the creation of España was the insidious handiwork of Jewish upstarts, their origins obscure and the ink on their baptismal certificates barely dry. This dangerous surmise the “most Christian monarchy” was anxious to silence— chiefly by charging conversos with Judaizing and exposing them to the indignation of the Christian public. The policy of Jewish expulsion was the state’s desperate response to the ideological threat embodied not in the Jew but in the converso. For Jewish historians, invested in their own project of national integration, the converso presented an indigestible fact. Not only in Spain, but throughout Western Europe and in the New World, the presence of conversos—suspected of disloyalty and victimized by the same regime that elevated them to unprecedented heights of  wealth and power—destabilized the normative confessional divide between Jews and Christians. Increasing skepticism and the search for spiritual alternatives to

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institutionalized religion, apt to be misconstrued by both sides as symptoms of Jewish resistance to Christianity, expressed a sense of frustrated patriotic longing for an imagined hispanicity that the actual Spanish Christian state failed to satisfy. The passionate ambivalence of the converso toward his adopted fatherland threatened both Christian and Jewish self-conceit. Converso realism exposed the religious justification of imperial ambition as spiritually bankrupt; converso idealism advertised the insufficiency of a Jewish legal tradition of reclaiming apostates for Judaism as “sinners in Israel.” In general, medieval halachic authorities avoided the intellectual challenge of conversion, as converso criticism often raised uncomfortable internal doubts about the preeminence of the “chosen people.” Jewish and Christian conversion anxieties combined to transform the intractable “human-historical” reality of the converso into the myth of the Marrano: a story where the converso figured as a displaced person, a “crypto-Jew” whose authentic convictions were not to be sought in his own strenuous confessional avowals but in the records of the Inquisition, an institution dedicated to outing New Christians as closet Jews. In the Marrano myth, the discordant strains of Spain’s early modern converso culture—the seedbed of Castro’s “Hispanic genius”—did not purport the slow death of Spanish ideology but the agony of a “split” Spanish Jewish self-consciousness.6 Although increasingly a matter of contention among Jewish early modernists who work on Spain and on the Iberian Jewish diaspora (a field where Castro’s work is well-known and obviously relevant), the Marrano myth has found enthusiastic votaries among Jewish historians of the Soviet Union. Here is another place where disproportionately large numbers of Jews are infamously to be found among conversos to a revolutionary political creed of state expansion and to a project of “internal colonization.” Driven, sometimes with inquisitorial zeal, to unmask the converso element in Soviet culture as crypto-Judaism, much of the recent literature on Soviet Jewry routinely rearranges the furniture in the “historical dwelling”7 of the converso to make room for the latest Marrano convention in Jewish history. The Marrano myth has become the necessary fiction of Soviet Jewish scholarship. Encompassing a wide spectrum of sources, dealing with several different kinds of subject matter, and informed by the methodological eclecticism of their common orientation toward cultural history, the seven studies reviewed here exemplify the long reach and broad appeal of the Marrano myth. Two of them examine social practices (Bemporad and Altshuler), one addresses the dynamics of dissent (the collection edited by Ro’i), two investigate literary self-expression (Lapidus and Murav), and two focus on visual representation (Shneer and Gershenson). For all of the notable differences in exposition that make some of these books more readable than others, all of them share a common purpose: “to tell the ‘story’ of Jewish continuities in the midst of the Bolshevik transformation of society” (Bemporad, p. 7); to document the “survival of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union” (Altshuler, p. 258); to “redeem what has been destroyed [ . . . ], to recover Jewish [ . . . ] culture from the Soviet Union” (Murav, pp. 1-3); to “redeem the Russian-Jewish [ . . . ] spirit from the mists of oblivion” (Lapidus, p. 8); to unearth the “Jewish narrative [that] lurked in the shadows of the national [Soviet] story” (Shneer, p. 9); to “reinscribe Jewishness” onto Soviet modes of self-expression (Gershenson, p. 12); and, finally—to reassure anyone who may still be in doubt—to show how it was “almost inevitable that a growing number

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of [Soviet] Jews would turn to, or seek out, their Jewish roots” (Ro’i, p. 21). Set out in the form of arguments, such unequivocal statements of intent have the distinct flavor of foregone conclusions. Ostensibly engaged in open-ended historical inquiry, their authors seem to have anticipated just what they were going to find before they set out to look. One might say that they have mistaken a map for a set of driving instructions. Given the importance of social practice in any historically meaningful definition of being Jewish, we may as well begin with the work of Elissa Bemporad and Mordechai Altshuler. While Lapidus, Murav, Shneer, and Gershenson are chiefly concerned with the elusive Jewish “genius” (literary and visual) of Soviet culture, Bemporad and Altshuler, relying almost exclusively on newly available archival information, seek to understand the continuing relevance of Judaism to the lives of  ordinary Soviet citizens. Focusing on Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belorussia, Bemporad’s book is a local study of sovietization among the Jewish population during the 1920s and the early 1930s. Altshuler, concentrating on the extensive jurisdiction of one state agency, the Council for Religious Affairs (established in 1944), covers more square mileage and extends Bemporad’s account of Judaism in the Soviet Union into the postwar period. Bemporad’s sources are richer and more complex than Altshuler’s, but where Altshuler stretches the meaning of his evidence, Bemporad underestimates the historical implications of hers and thus misses an opportunity to have written a much better book. To students of Soviet history, Bemporad offers a comprehensive account of socialism in one city, comparable to Merle Fainsod’s groundbreaking Smolensk under Soviet Rule (1958), a precedent that Bemporad strangely fails to mention, perhaps because she is uninterested in the contribution of her own work to the history of the Soviet Union. Positioned in a field that tends to spotlight policies, institutions, or individuals, Bemporad is well placed to remind readers of Soviet history that sovietization did not occur in a social vacuum or by Party diktat but rather through the recruitment of local cadres whose Bolshevik credentials were of recent vintage. Before Minsk became Soviet, its strongest regional ties, severed by the First World War and the subsequent Soviet-Polish war (1919–1921), were to “Jewish Lithuania” (“Lite,” in Yiddish) and its regional centers of Vilna, Grodno, and Kovno, all of which lay beyond the Soviet frontier. After the devastation of battle and the general chaos that immediately followed, integration into the Soviet Union brought political stability and economic opportunity, changing the demographic profile of the city. Jews from surrounding small towns, which were more vulnerable to the swath of destruction and which did not attract significant state investment in reconstruction, began to move to Minsk. Migration continued throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The tension between the converso loyalties of Minsk’s political and cultural elite and the religious habitus of its more recently arrived Jewish population forms the underlying theme of Bemporad’s study. Minsk’s converso intelligentsia included a substantial number of homegrown Bundists who were charged by the new government with transforming provincial newcomers into exemplary Soviet citizens. The attempt to turn Minsk into a “Soviet Jewish synthesis based on the Bundist tradition” (p. 80) involved Bundists in the invention of a Belorussian Socialist Republic, which had to be ideologically separated from the

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former northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, also known, ambiguously, as the kresy (borderlands) of eastern Poland. The production of a distinct Belorussian heritage was the express raison d’être of Soviet Yiddish culture and scholarship: “Yiddish literature in Belorussia,” wrote the editors of a 1935 anthology called Soviet Belorussia, “brings to the All-Union Soviet Yiddish literature the scent of the Belorussian landscape, the sound of the Belorussian folksong, the distinctiveness of socialist construction in Belorussia” (p. 105). While the local memory of the Jewish labor movement traced its beginnings to the contested kresy, Minsk’s former Bundists now “recast” their own formative period of class struggle in the Soviet mold (p. 69). The purpose of state-sponsored Yiddish elementary schooling, scholarship, and literature was not to raise the revolutionary conscience of the Jewish proletariat or to expand its stock of received Jewish ideas—or even to improve its taste in literature— but rather to provide the Jews of Minsk, many of them caught up in the process of adjusting to urban life and to the imperatives of revolutionary politics, with an exemplary Soviet pedigree, a “new regional identity and consciousness closely intertwined with the territory of Belorussia” (p. 106). But despite the best efforts of converso activists, Jewish religious recidivism seemed to resist the push of “belorussianization” even within Party ranks. The chief obstacle to the Soviet project of indigenization (korenizatsia) was not the secular Jewish ideology of the Bund (just the reverse, in fact), but the resilience of the Jewish religion, sustained by the steady stream of small-town Jewish families whose arrival in Minsk kept Jewish piety a going concern. The administration confronted continual lapses into ritual “behavior unbecoming a Communist” (p. 112), which duly repentant Party members tended to minimize by placing the blame on their unregenerate wives. Bemporad shows that sexism, another old habit that died hard among the comrades, was what attenuated the political significance of Judaism to the point where it practically disappeared from public view. In light of this gender dynamic, Soviet law gradually demoted Jewish religious expression from an ideological violation of Party discipline to the status of a private family matter, subject to the jurisdiction of the state (p. 137). While the Party strengthened its vigilance over the secularization of “national” institutions immediately concerned with the management of ideology and the dissemination of information (especially those that operated in Yiddish), the state continued to tolerate synagogue attendance and kosher slaughter as concessions to the sensibilities of ignorant Jewish mothers and grandmothers. In the absence of religious authority, Bemporad writes, kashrut and circumcision evolved into folk customs and domestic habits (p. 128) and “retreated to the private (or secretive) sphere” of Jewish life (p. 144), where they survived as markers of Jewish ethnicity. Removed from high politics, the Jewish behavior of “old believers” was hardly in a position to challenge the ideological monopoly of the Party, maintained with the assistance of Yiddish-speaking conversos and, within a generation, their Russianspeaking successors. Leaving the vestiges of religion to the jurisdiction of the state, the Great Terror (the mass purge that targeted the Communist Party, where the degree of ideological vigilance was much higher) decimated the ranks of Minsk’s secular Yiddish intelligentsia, but “not because they were Jewish.” Rather, as the cultural leadership of an “extra-territorial minority” residing in a vulnerable border region, they posed a threat to the integrity of Soviet sovereignty (p. 195). Intent on recovering

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an underground tradition of Jewish nationalism within the political activities of the Bund, Bemporad takes the credibility of such a threat rather too much for granted. Belorussia was not Ukraine, the one republic (besides, possibly, Georgia) where an autochthonous radical leadership did have the power to challenge, if not subvert, the authority of Moscow. What is far more certain is that by the 1930s, Bundists had become disposable because Jewish Minsk was manifestly a Soviet—Belorussian— city. Alongside former “bourgeois experts” and other victims of Stalin’s cultural revolution, which was “directed primarily against the old intelligentsia,” the converso leadership of Soviet Minsk was wiped out to make room for the great infusion of new Party members promoted from below rather than co-opted from above.8 That the Jews of Minsk entered the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) as proud Soviet citizens attests to the success of the same process of upward mobility and socialization through education that allowed the Soviet state under a Stalinist party to make a more effective break with its pre-revolutionary past than had been possible under Lenin in the 1920s. It was the Nazi occupation, not the “Bundist tradition,” that put Soviet Minsk back on the Jewish map of Eastern Europe, and it was Nazi genocide, not Soviet persecution, that turned Soviet conversos back into Russian Jews. Bemporad places the persistence of kashrut and circumcision on the same cultural  continuum as Bundist politics, marshaling the former alongside the latter as evidence of a “transformation of Jewish identity from a religious to an ethnic category” (p. 144). For Bemporad, the collapse of religious belief offers testimony to the success of secular Jewish nation-building. The same gap in Bemporad’s historical reasoning foregrounds the counterintuitive claim that the seismic shift in values that was involved in relegating “religious commandments” to the status of “habits” is to be celebrated as “evolutionary” (p. 144), a sign of cultural progress and of convergence between the ideological commitments of the Soviet Yiddish republic of letters and the intuitive behavior of the Jewish masses. But Bemporad’s evidence suggests that the intellectual and political leadership of former Bundists contributed to the gradual expulsion of Judaism from the life of Soviet Jews, not to its “evolution” into the higher state of Marrano (self-) consciousness. During the 1920s, Jewish Party members transformed Soviet Minsk into the “capital of Yiddish” by waging a public war on the “social deviance” of circumcision and the residual “backwardness” of Jewish women; the “Soviet Jewish synthesis” enacted by the Yiddish avant-garde militated against the private religious “habits” of Russian Jews. A utopian investment in the creation of a Yiddish-speaking Belorussian republic without a past resulted in a folk yidishkayt without a future. Possibly Bemporad is troubled by the extent to which revolutionary Yiddish modernism contributed to rendering Jewish observance an anachronism; this may be why she so carefully sidesteps the long-term costs of removing Judaism from the center to the periphery of Jewish experience. In order to invest evidence of rapid sovietization with some kind of redemptive significance, Bemporad ends up having to endorse the  Bund’s Belorussian alternative as a model for a new Soviet Jewish synthesis. An attachment to the Marrano myth of Jewish continuity prevents Bemporad from grappling with the catastrophic cultural loss entailed in the dispossession of Jewish knowledge, the dissolution of communal discipline and Jewish regional ties, and the suspension of a vibrant tradition of Russian Jewish public discourse, all of which

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were consequent upon the radical separation between Judaism and Jewish nationality introduced into Russian Jewish life not by the inner logic of modern Jewish history but by the Bolshevik government and its converso representatives in Minsk. The confinement of Judaism to the private sphere left in its wake a devastating vacuum of meaning that posed a greater danger for any sort of Jewish continuity—including secular Jewish nationalism—than the erosion of religious belief. Bemporad’s celebration of Soviet folk yidishkayt ends with the war and the neartotal destruction of Mink’s Jewish population. At the end of Bemporad’s book, the Marranos of Minsk die as Jewish martyrs, their ethnic identity exposed by the Nazis who herded them all into the same kind of ghetto that housed their former neighbors and relatives in Vilna and Kovno. In Altshuler’s story, the Marranos are, as it were, reborn—thanks, in part, to the Jewish agony of the war—to ignite the cause of a secular Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union to the state of Israel. Guided by the same redemptive mythology as Bemporad, Altshuler likewise takes explicit evidence of religious decline for implicit evidence of Jewish continuity. Underpinning an exhaustive catalogue of synagogue attendance, matzah baking, kosher slaughter, circumcision, and Jewish burial practices is an argument that the state-sanctioned “return” to religious activity during the 1950s actively “[sustained] the identity of the broad Jewish public, nearly all of which was not religious” (p. 253). According to Altshuler, the postwar religious awakening of Soviet Jews, mostly elderly and mostly confined to Ukraine and Belorussia (p. 57), evidence of which can be found in the records of a state agency charged with policing and regularizing religious affairs, did not fundamentally challenge the secularization of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union. The institutionalization of a Council on Religious Affairs (CRA) pointed to the recession of the heavy-handed approach to secularization adopted during the heroic 1920s, either because the results did not justify the investment or, more likely, because it was no longer considered essential (Altshuler does not explain). The establishment of the CRA signaled the state’s apparent willingness to treat the persistence of religious observance as a nuisance to be contained rather than a significant source of ideological subversion to be confronted and stamped out. It says a great deal about the success of sovietization that the open practice of Judaism—the most visible sign of a Jewish self-consciousness—no longer seemed to pose a serious threat to Jewish membership in the Soviet family of nations. CRA officials did, however, express concern that “behind [ . . . ] the registered Jewish congregations and their synagogues hide certain dark powers and it is possible that nationalist elements are exploiting the Jewish religious movement as a camouflage for their various goals to which [the security services] will pay attention” (p. 79; my emphasis). Turning “possibility” into certainty, Altshuler is prepared to credit the dubious conspiracy theories of Soviet government officials: on the basis of their antisemitic speculations about “certain dark powers,” Altshuler concludes that evidence of a revival in Jewish religious activity ought to be “regarded primarily” as the starting point of “an ethnic-national awakening consequent to the Holocaust” (p. 57). According to Altschuler, it was the legal reconstruction of “congregational Judaism” under the auspices of the CRA that brought Jews together with other Jews and forged local “frameworks for building Jewish national identity” (p. 256). He never explains how, exactly, this happened; his sources do not extend beyond the files of the CRA.

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Official suspicions of Judaizing shed little light on the social or intellectual resonance of the religious practices zealously documented by the administration, which was mostly interested in settling local disputes over funding and personnel rather than ferreting out the tracks of an incipient national revolt. Given Bemporad’s conceptual difficulties in making a case for Jewish ethnicization under the converso leadership of the Bund, we may well ask whether the metamorphosis of a rudderless congregational Judaism into a Jewish political movement is plausible, let alone empirically demonstrable. Like Bemporad, Altshuler divests the religious behavior of Soviet Jews of religious meaning. Both his argument and hers assume that ethnic feelings are indistinguishable from religious beliefs. But unless we are prepared to adopt both a very narrow definition of religion and a very wide definition of ethnicity, the suggestion that they are functionally interchangeable is untenable. To begin with, the idea that ethnic pride simply took over where religious belief fell off is difficult to reconcile with the ethnic dissolution of Soviet Jewry as attested by rapidly escalating intermarriage rates (which Bemporad mentions in passing on p. 212 and Altshuler entirely ignores). Despite its totalitarian ambitions, the Soviet state did not compel Jewish men and women to choose non-Jewish women and men as their life partners. A longestablished tradition of endogamy, the primary ethnic taboo in Judaism, did not survive the first decade of the Revolution. Moreover, the continuing appeal of conventional rites that relate specifically to the sanctification of the body (circumcision, kashrut, burial) seems to suggest the persistence of normative Jewish behavior most obviously motivated by explicitly religious prescriptions rather than by a Jewish state of mind or even a residual desire for community. A fixation on worship, the resonant Hebrew word for which is ’avodah, presupposes the continuing moral resonance of commandments, a responsiveness to the idea of a religious self, and a reaction against the radical secularization of Jewish identity, re-tagged with the vacuous label of “nationality.” Jewish cult is much older than Jewish culture; more importantly, unlike the latter, its demands are both unambiguous and non-negotiable. What Bemporad calls “customs” and “habits” are traditional devotional performances, not modern lifestyle choices. Unwilling or unable to perceive the difference between the latter and the former, she is defeated by her own evidence. Indeed, the sources unearthed by Bemporad and Altshuler show very nearly the opposite of what their own arguments assert about the fraught relationship between Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity. First, the domestic confinement of Jewish piety led to a radical constriction of Jewish self-expression, a cultural disaster for which Jewish conversos were directly responsible (which, of course, does not lessen the culpability of the Soviet state). Second, the transition from a consciousness of personal religious obligation to a sense of collective ethnic entitlement was a by-product of Soviet state-building, not a development within the history of modern Judaism. And, finally, old-fashioned religious observance was more politically adaptable and less dangerous to the state than the new faith of converso patriots—which ultimately undid the Soviet Union in much the same way as it first undid the faith of Russian Jews. In fact, the Soviet resurgence of “Jewish national identity,” the subject of Yaacov Ro’i’s edited collection on the “Jewish movement in the Soviet Union,”

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o­ perated at a considerable social and intellectual remove from the conservative “congregational revival” of the early postwar period and caused much more trouble for the authorities. While the synagogues had to deal with the state and the CRA, Jewish dissidents ran up against the Party and the KGB. Unlike Altshuler, Ro’i considers a wide range of intervening circumstances, including Cold War geo-politics and an internal crisis of political reform, to explain the converso divorce from the Soviet state, although not necessarily from Soviet values. In his capacity as editor, Ro’i provides a serviceable synoptic overview of the aims and accomplishments of the Jewish emigration movement. The real strength of his volume, however, derives chiefly from the essays of two of his contributors: Juliane Fürst and Anne Komaromi, whose work defies the Marrano leanings of their editor and their fellow authors. Fürst’s “Born Under the Same Star: Refuseniks, Dissidents and Late Socialist Society” (pp. 137–163) argues that “specifically Jewish factors” played a less important role in mobilizing Jewish national consciousness than the “confluence of life- and generation-shaping factors, most of which were experienced by Soviet Jews but also by their gentile Soviet peers” (p.  139). Soviet Jewish dissidence, she maintains, was informed not by Jewish disaffection from Soviet society, of which she found little evidence, or by Holocaust trauma, the social effects of which are hard to gauge, but by the deepening postwar discrepancy between Soviet ideals and Soviet reality. A sense of cognitive dissonance could and did find multiple outlets: not every converso nonconformist of Jewish origins became a Jewish nationalist and many continued to feel alienated and disconnected from Judaism, despite a sense of outrage at the ripening climate of official antisemitism. Individual “trajectories of resistance” varied (p. 144). Moreover, the “ideal of emigration”—the ultimate goal of Jewish national aspirations—had nothing much to do with the Zionist dream of aliyah; a desire to leave the country, not always for Israel, was rooted in the commonly held dissident fantasy of dropping out of Soviet life and moving beyond the reach of Soviet corruption (p. 154). Finally, Fürst’s research highlights an important geographical discrepancy in Altshuler’s attempt to trace the development of Jewish nationalism in dissident ranks to a Jewish “religious revival.” The latter developed mainly in the western provinces of the former Russian Empire where old patterns of Jewish behavior were marginalized but not altogether repressed. But, as Fürst shows, active dissent started in Moscow, where the official infrastructure of Jewish observance under the auspices of the CRA was weaker and much less important for aspiring Jewish nationalists than the unofficial and illegal infrastructure of the dissident movement. In this context, even the embrace of a “non-rational” commitment to Jewish fraternity could have nothing to do with the desire to return to Judaism, a goal in which the founders of the emigration movement showed little interest. Their spiritual aspirations derived from the more common search within dissident circles for a satisfying philosophical alternative to the pseudo-rationalism of Soviet life (p. 161) and, one might add, to the vulgarity of Western materialism. The quest for an intimate “mystical” community started in the experience of imprisonment in Soviet labor camps, rather than in nationalist sentiment. By the time some conversos finally arrived at Zionism, Fürst shows, they were already accomplished Soviet dissenters.

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In an interesting contrast to Fürst’s wide conceptual lens, Komaromi’s piece on Jewish samizdat (the informal reproduction and distribution of proscribed reading matter) provides an empirical corrective to the inflation of Jewish content as a factor in Soviet dissent. Another contribution to Ro’i’s volume blithely conflates unhealed psychological wounds of Holocaust survival with a sense of political betrayal by an increasingly hostile government, a feeling that was surely not peculiar to Soviet intellectuals of the Jewish persuasion.9 Komaromi’s essay breaks into this ethnocentric Jewish narrative with a powerful question that Y.H. Yerushalmi first asked about the original New Christians: what did conversos know about Judaism and how did they know it?10 The results of her extensive survey of samizdat material dealing with Jewish topics are revealing but not very surprising, given the kind of education most dissidents received in elite Soviet schools and universities. The initial stir of Jewish self-awareness apparently came from secular literature, specifically Leon Uris’ Exodus (1958), a very successful middle-brow American novel about the drama of illegal immigration to Palestine. In light of the astonishing popularity of this book among Soviet conversos, Komaromi seems remiss in failing to consider its singular role in the internal culture of the emigration movement. Remarkably, the popularity of Exodus never really waned, not even when the near-exclusive focus on contemporary novels with a Jewish theme during the 1970s finally gave way to the inclusion of publications on Jewish history, Hebrew culture, religious observance, and Jewish thought in the 1980s. No other single work in the Jewish repertoire of samizdat came close to matching the popularity of Exodus—which, among other things, might mean that conversos had more in common with Uris’ American readers than with the novel’s Israeli heroes. Complementing the work of Fürst, Komaromi’s samizdat data seriously undermine Altshuler’s scenario; the awakening of religious sentiment among an aging provincial population in Ukraine and Belorussia (or, for that matter, its resilience in Bukhara and elsewhere in Soviet Central Asia) played no direct role in the inner lives of the founders of the Jewish national movement in Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga, and not just because the latter tended to look down on the former as old-fashioned and provincial. If some converso dissidents made the transition from Soviet nationality to Jewish nationalism, which was by no means a certainty, they did so in the same way as every other secular Jew who first discovered Jewish nationalism as an adult: by reading secular books. Among the readers of samizdat, the introduction of religious texts into the stock of available material encountered considerable opposition and occasioned intense debate; the connection between religion and nationalism that seems obvious to Altshuler was not so obvious to them. For converso dissidents, a practical commitment to religious performance was more likely to be viewed as the last step in a process of return to Judaism that started with the embrace of Jewishness as an idea, not the first step on the road from congregational Judaism to Israeli citizenship. Komaromi’s findings make it difficult to see how the irreverence of Soviet dissident culture could have been the offspring of a religious awakening. Identity questions aside, Komaromi’s findings raise an important point about the need to adopt a minimalist position on the extent of Jewish cultural awareness in the Soviet Union. Even the Jewish “underground railroad” out of the Soviet Union could not generate much collective excitement about books that were any more Jewish than

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Exodus. In this context, it is important to recall that unlike the small number of approved modern Jewish writers (most prominently, Sholem Aleichem) whose work was periodically churned out by Soviet publishing houses, the supply of samizdat was at least to some extent based on the demand of its consumers. Difficulties of access were compounded by the limitations of converso familiarity with Jewish texts and converso tastes for secular Western literature. The eloquent testimony of samizdat concerning the impoverishment of Jewish knowledge in Soviet Russia ought to be borne in mind as we consider the case for a Marrano renaissance in revolutionary Russia, which was first advanced in the work of Jeffrey Veidlinger, Anna Shternshis, and Ken Moss and is now enthusiastically propounded by Rina Lapidus, Harriet Murav, David Shneer, and Olga Gershenson.11 Before turning to individual works, a brief contrarian note about the foundational premise of every argument about Soviet Jewish culture—namely, that it exists. Like their immediate predecessors, the latest advocates of Soviet Jewish “hybridity” take for granted the idea that a work produced by a Soviet artist or writer of Jewish parentage, or for that matter, consumed by Soviet Jews, attests to the “split” self-consciousness of a Marrano. Starting with this genetic fallacy, a scholar is liable to interpret any evidence of engagement with the question of personal identity as an expression of an intimately Jewish concern, despite the fact that an intense preoccupation with identity—common enough to all Soviet modernists, not just those with Jewish antecedents—is the defining feature of a converso culture, one in which identity statements are always vulnerable to moral and political scrutiny and accusations of hypocrisy, and potentially punishable as sabotage or treason. Given the prominence of conversos of Jewish origin in Soviet public life, it is, of course, tempting to scour the cracks in Soviet culture for deposits of Marrano angst “lurking” (as Shneer puts it) beneath the surface of converso nostalgia for a lost Jewish childhood. Tempting, yes. Rewarding, no. Readers of Lapidus, Murav, Shneer, and Gershenson may find the converso text of Soviet art more interesting and more edifying than its Marrano subtext. Lapidus’ Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union is a good example of this sort of misreading. The little-known materials she has collected with such painstaking care lend themselves to an entirely different interpretation from the one that Lapidus has attached to them. Their meaning as Soviet ego-documents is much more apparent than her impassioned but ultimately insupportable defense of their significance as hidden Jewish “spiritual and cultural riches” (p. 1). Ambitiously titled, Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union provides brief biblio-biographical accounts of eleven literary women, born between the mid-1880s and the 1920s, who worked in the Soviet Union and who, according to Lapidus, were all “split” in their “attitude toward Judaism.” In their work, Lapidus finds “Judaism [ . . . ] perceived as a symbol of family warmth and a source of national and cultural pride” as well as “something disturbing their professional advancement and a source of fear of possible harm from anti-Semitism” (p. 2). Leaving aside for the moment the methodological difficulties involved in treating literary texts as a transparent reflection of emotional states—a problem to which I will return in my discussion of Murav’s work—I want to focus on Lapidus’ evidence for the existence of a distinctive Jewish psychology, so that we may evaluate on its own terms her attempt to rescue “the Russian-Jewish female spirit from the mists of [Soviet] oblivion” (p. 8).

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Lapidus tells us that Alexandra Brushtein, Elizaveta Polonskaia, Raisa Bloch, Hanna Levina, Ol’ga Ziv, Yulia Neiman, Rakhil’ Baumvol’, Margarita Aliger, Sarah Levina-Kul’neva, Sarah Pogreb, and Zinaida Mirkina all shared a common affection for Judaism that they wished to impart to their readers and that, presumably, stimulated their creative imagination. Vitiated by Soviet antisemitism, this secure “Jewish self” (p. 2) also suffered a Jewish sense of anxiety. However, on the evidence of the texts that Lapidus cites, the ambivalence that she attributes to their authors is difficult to detect. For one thing, an imaginative response to the horrors of anti-Jewish violence here bespeaks neither panic about the authors’ own fate as Jews nor fear for the collective future of Soviet Jewry. On the contrary: most of the writers in Lapidus’ book mobilize Jewish sentiment, whether by evoking a happy Jewish childhood or a pathetic Jewish old age (Brushtein, Levina, Ziv, Aliger, and Levina-Kul’neva), exclusively in the name of Soviet patriotism. Literary indictments of antisemitism tend to reinforce the contrast between tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other (Brushtein, Polonskaia, Neiman, Baumvol’, and even Bloch, who left the Soviet Union in 1922 but began to introduce “Jewish motifs” into her work in response to the rise of Nazism). In fact, the occasional recourse to Jewish content is always subject to some other inner impulse; in other words, it is incidental to the primary concerns that shape the author’s literary interests and cultural anxieties. The shared mental world inhabited by the writers canvassed in Lapidus’ book appears to be so far removed from Judaism that “Jewish feelings” can refer only to feelings about something other than Judaism—as with Christianity, in the work of Polonskaia, who resorted to “effusive, defiant and challenging praise of Judaism [ . . . ] as an instrument for settling personal accounts in her circle” (p. 47), or, more typically, motherhood and erotic love. A fragile network of Jewish references does not in itself exhibit the influence of any values, needs, or beliefs that could not also be attributed to a Soviet mindset. Since the ostensive Jewishness of these texts cannot be disentangled from their Soviet authorship, the distinction between “Soviet” and “Jewish” becomes moot and the notion of a split consciousness collapses. For “Jewish women writers in the Soviet Union,” there are no dual loyalties; their work does not support an argument for Marrano ambivalence. What it does exhibit, on the whole, is a pattern of relentless, near-hysterical self-affirmation, characteristic of a true believer desperately trying to stave off a creeping sense of self-doubt— someone, in other words, who has the psychological make-up of a converso. It is not the presence but the absence of Judaism, or of anything else other than patriotic love of country that makes these works both so moving and so insufferable. The same deep and exclusive sense of identification with their Soviet homeland that ultimately moved these women to write extended as well to their Jewish memories, memory being the last frontier of internal colonization. This is strong converso writing, weakly recast as a species of modern Jewish literature. Turning to Harriet Murav’s Music from a Speeding Train, we find a thoughtful book, written by a skilled and experienced reader of Russian literature. Her sources are more robust than those of Lapidus and her readings are lucid, polished, and frequently intriguing. Yet, for all of the differences between them, Murav defines her own project—to detect “the Jewish presence in mainstream Soviet culture” (p. 15)—in

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much the same way as Lapidus. Like Lapidus, Murav bases her interpretive decisions on a distinction without a difference between “Soviet” and “Soviet Jewish.” But the basic argument is problematic in other ways as well. To begin with, Murav relies on the concept of a “mainstream” culture, which does not apply to a country where publishing activity was controlled by the state rather than by the tastes of consumers, and where the collected works of Lenin were continually reprinted but almost never read. The mere fact of publication did not make a book “mainstream.” Censorship standards were inconsistent and often capricious. The Soviet house of culture was both more complex and more capacious that Murav suggests. Moreover, all of Soviet literature—not only that which was written by writers of Jewish extraction—could well be described as music coming from the speeding train of Soviet state-building: only possible to hear if one is actually on the train, but forever “interrupted and incomplete” to those who remain standing on the platform. Tellingly, David Bergelson (the author of the evocative quotation in Murav’s title, and a prominent Yiddish modernist) did not limit himself to works that Murav categorizes as “Russian-Jewish and Soviet Yiddish.” On the occasion that inspired the metaphor, a speech he gave in Warsaw in 1930, he simply referred, as Murav says, to “literature from the Soviet Union” (p. 1). In fact, Bergelson’s primary object of concern was probably not the fate of the Jewish avant-garde in the Soviet Union but the conservative tastes of Jewish “ears” both in Warsaw and further west, most of which he considered deaf to the rich cacophony of Soviet modernism.12 For all of its emotional appeal, Murav’s most substantive claim, that “the traditional emphasis on remembrance lends a distinctive color to the work produced by Jewish artists working in both Russian and Yiddish” throughout the Soviet period and beyond (p. 15), remains just as unconvincing as that of Lapidus. Murav is not wrong about the seminal role of memory in Jewish culture. But this emphasis is hardly peculiar to Jewish “color” (here, I must confess to having cringed slightly at Murav’s casual recourse to an obvious racial metaphor). It is difficult to think of any cultural system that does not insist on the importance of memory. Without placing high value on the preservation of memory, no culture can survive its original founders. Ambivalence at the prospect of cultural destruction is not necessarily Jewish. The real source of the difficulty in distinguishing “Soviet” from “Soviet-Jewish” is that Murav’s view of Soviet culture, which is not the same thing as official pronouncements about Soviet culture, is narrow, doctrinaire, and self-serving, as if designed expressly to provide a convenient foil for a literature of “fluidity, fusion and hybridity” that Murav locates in the “uniquely Jewish space within the Soviet cultural framework” (p. 71). This is not an argument so much as an elegant postmodern appeal to Jewish moral privilege against a persecuting society. Such a position requires the polarization of Jewish and Soviet as if they were antithetical markers of good and evil. A literary tradition is more than a tendency to dwell on the same subject matter— in this case, the prospect of cultural death in combination with the reality of physical destruction. A fascination with memory is not the same thing as participation in a ritual or liturgical tradition of remembrance; the former may be triggered by any number of extra-literary events including shared experience or some sort of genealogical epiphany. But no matter how vividly Ilya Ehrenburg recalls that his mother’s name was Hannah, it is still deeply misleading to characterize his powerful evocation

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of the murder of Soviet Jews at Babi Yar as anything other than an outstanding example of Soviet war poetry. This is because Jewish literature is not a birthright. Whether we like it or not, Jewish authorship is the ripened fruit of a particular kind of education. Tradition may communicate feelings but it operates by the transmission of both erudition and technique. The distinction of yikhes belongs to the poem, not to the poet. A deep structure of generic, stylistic, and thematic quotations and revisions, the product of shared knowledge and institutional history, informs the social life of a text. Soviet literature in Mongolian or about Mongolians, living or dead, is still Soviet literature, not merely because it was written by Soviet Mongolians but because it was also meant to be read by them. Whether or not it is also Mongolian literature is not a subjective decision for the critic to make on the basis of her own wishful reading; in such matters, context is everything. A latke is a latke and a dream is a dream. But the dream of a latke remains a dream no matter how hungry the dreamer may feel. Judaism was so attenuated in the Soviet Union that a Jewish literary tradition ceased to exist. Soviet policy may have left a few synagogues standing, but Soviet ideology foreclosed the possibility of continuing engagement with Jewish textuality, which provides the necessary tools for making both Jewish writers and Jewish readers. A writer like Isaac Babel (who was educated in Odessa before the Revolution) might have retained some minimum of Jewish textual knowledge, but he thought like a Soviet modernist, not like a Jewish reader, and still less like a Jewish author. Even if one were prepared to accept Murav’s version of a given work as a reliable index of what its writer was trying to say—as Lapidus likewise tries to establish—her larger claim is unsustainable because the cultural location—the context—of all of her sources is still the Soviet Union, a secular state that trained, employed, and promoted secular poets whose sensibilities were shaped by the values of the European avant-garde, translated into a Soviet revolutionary idiom. However many examples one might offer into evidence of a Soviet obsession with Jewish tsuris, they still do not add up to a recognizably “Jewish presence.” What if every text produced in the Soviet Union by “Jewish artists working in both Russian and Yiddish” focused on “remembering, mourning and testifying” (p. 17), a predisposition that Murav has decided to assign to Bergelson, Markish, Babel, and  Slutsky? The case that the treatment of Jewish death by select Soviet writers of Jewish origins is, in some irreducible way, Jewish still remains to be proven. An emphasis on the urge to remember, mourn, and testify is not enough. It is possible, surely, to argue that Markish wrote The Mound for the same reason—as fragments, shored against his ruins—that his contemporary, T.S. Eliot, wrote The Wasteland. Markish’s personal memory was, presumably, very Jewish, Eliot’s very Christian; yet, on the question of both the why and the how of modern poetry, they seem to agree. Murav’s diagnostic readings are more refined than those of Lapidus. However, without providing more convincing documentation of a writer’s engagement with Jewish discourse, her analysis remains at the level of armchair psychology. Like Lapidus, Murav settles for making guesses about the author’s feelings although her sources suggest an elaborate verbal performance, to which questions of “identity” are misapplied. Markish, for one, was a supremely controlled poet who handled words as if they were razorblades. It is hard to see his assault on the emotional equilibrium of the reader as a Jewish retreat from the constructive power of Soviet masculinity

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(p.  29). To paraphrase W.H. Auden, another modernist contemporary with whom Markish might have agreed, the architecture of poetry represents the triumph of language over the chaos of decay. A poetics of “excess,” or verbal overkill, is not an index of unacknowledged Jewish pain (p. 31); it is the pre-existing condition of modernism. Markish’s work of stylized verbal recomposition is not a direct outpouring of Jewish rage flung against the Soviet abyss (although this is how a romantic Jewish reader like Murav may feel while reading it), but rather a valedictory address to the poet’s supreme capacity—decidedly, even militantly, masculine and certainly informed by the Soviet creation myth—for making something out of nothing. The Marrano myth insists on continuity where converso history posits a break. Converso writers, many of them already committed modernists when 1917 caught up with them, embraced the revolutionary rupture with the Jewish past as an enabling violation.13 So did Jewish women, typically marginalized by the practically all-male establishment of Russian Jewish culture. Where Lapidus can easily identify eleven female writers of Jewish origins (and there are a great many more who did not make it into her slim volume; she lists them on p. 7), there had been almost none before. Carole Balin managed to disinter a mere handful of female contributors to the Russian Jewish renaissance of the 19th century, none of whom actually produced an independent body of work in poetry or prose.14 Yiddish writers had similarly worked in the long shadow of rabbinic textual authority that relegated the vernacular to the domain of women and to men who read like women. Zionism, the ideological brainchild of the study house, consigned the Yiddish of the synagogue to the margins of its cultural project. Yiddish fellow-travelers of the revolution such as Markish and Bergelson were therefore well-placed to embrace the Soviet promise of empowerment, position, ready opportunities to publish, a captive audience, and minor celebrity status as the long-awaited confirmation of their neglected genius. It is the worst kind of scholarly condescension to presume that we understand their motives for having done so better than they did. Converso writers accepted their Faustian bargain with the Soviet state; we practically faint at the prospect that the production of literature—merely Soviet literature—could have justified such a bargain. Joseph Brodsky (himself a converso poet whose spellbinding meditations on personal and cultural loss do not, for one reason or another, make it into Murav’s Soviet Jewish canon) once said that Americans take their poets for granted; they don’t even bother to kill them. In the Soviet Union, the ultimate price of such honor was well known to all participants in the revolutionary experiment. And this is why death stalks all great Soviet poetry—all of which, in whatever language, was written by conversos rather than Marranos. Murav’s quest for a distinctive Jewish space within the mainstream of Soviet literature is empirically misguided; but it is by no means absurd. After all, Jewish culture privileges engagement with text over any other religious activity: Talmud-torah keneged kulam (Torah study outweighs them all) may not be a statement of fact, at least not for the majority of Jews throughout history, but it is definitively a normative statement of value. Moreover, although she is clearly looking for love in all the wrong places, Murav is not the first to elevate literature by and about Jews to the lofty status of Jewish Scripture that requires exegesis rather than historical criticism and formal analysis.15 Such acts of retroactive sanctification represent a powerful profession of

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desire; and desire can make people lose their heads. Exhibit number one: David Shneer’s first book, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet-Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (2004). Exhibit number two: Through Soviet Jewish Eyes. Despite its misleading title, the former is a clear and focused case study in the history of converso politics; the latter, an exercise in Marrano mythology that could have been written by a different person. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes initially commits to telling a story about “the social reality of Jewish migrants who left provincial Russia for Moscow in the early Soviet Union” in order to build “a new mass medium” (p. 3)—photography. Shneer dismisses immediately the idea that the “Jewishness” of Soviet photography can be “found in social critique or traditional Jewish content” (p. 4). He likewise concedes that the issue cannot be settled by any aesthetic benchmark. So far, so good. But then we get this: “No matter how one understands the challenging question of the Jewish eye, it seems absurd to say that someone’s Jewishness did not affect how he or she photographed” (p. 5). This proposition—presented as an argument but written with all of the certainty of a foregone conclusion—presumes not only the existence of “the Jewish eye,” but also that such an eye poses a “challenging question.” There is no evidence in the book that anyone, prior to Shneer, had ever been challenged by the fact that roughly 60 percent of all Soviet photographers were of Jewish origin (numbers, rather than matters of form or content, are the starting point of Shneer’s investigation). Not even the Soviet establishment, despite its reputation for pathological antisemitism, was bothered by this datum. Just two paragraphs earlier (p. 4), Shneer cautions that asking “what’s Jewish” about Soviet photography “presumes a reified definition of Jewish identity and a static image of the Jew.” But I am hard-pressed to see the “Jewish eye question” as anything but an example of reification. Is it possible to identify as a Jew and still not claim possession of a Jewish eye? Can a non-Jew have a Jewish eye? The ostensible question of the Jewish eye is a typical non-falsifiable statement (one that presumes the answer in the course of asking the question)—the primary categorical error that renders a hypothesis invalid. Reading a little further, we discover that Shneer’s case for the Jewish eye in Soviet photography is mostly rhetorical, conveyed in the urgent language of the Marrano myth (via a quotation from Anna Shternshis): For these photographers, seeing things Jewishly despite the assignment they were given was a way they expressed their [ . . . ] ethnic identity. [ . . . ] So in the case of photographers, the “Jewish eye” was definitely there. It might be hard to interpret or distinguish but you [David Shneer] (and your reader) can be sure that these people were not simply Soviet citizens of Jewish origin. Yes, they were builders of Communism, but they were also Jewish artists, who simply understood Jewishness differently from the rest of the world’s Jews (p. 5).

If Murav and Lapidus at least stand on the terra firma of reading Jewishly, Shneer and Shternshis dive, without looking, into the murky waters of “seeing things Jewishly.” What does this mean? What is the connection between seeing things through the lens of a camera and one’s “ethnic identity”? How does one recognize “the” (was there only one?) Jewish eye, especially if “it is hard to interpret” or even “distinguish”? Why is it wrong to assume that Jewish photographers were “simply Soviet citizens

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of Jewish origin,” especially since that this is exactly what they were, although no fact could be less simple? If the “builders of Communism” did indeed understand “Jewishness differently from the rest of the world’s Jews,” the matter of difference is likewise neither simple nor self-evident. I suppose if one understands Jewishness differently enough from the rest of the world’s Jews, one may eventually arrive at Christianity. For all of her insistence that the “Jewish eye was definitely there,” Shternshis seems just as confused as Shneer. She admits, with obvious reluctance, that “the Jewish eye” may actually be obscure to the point of being completely invisible, only to silence her own doubts by becoming more emphatic. In the absence of a coherent theoretical position on the provocative question of “seeing things Jewishly,” Shneer’s argument must rest entirely on empirical evidence. He must show that there is a material difference between writing a social history of Soviet photography—a fairly accurate description of the best parts of Shneer’s book—and writing a study of Jewish photography in the Soviet Union—which, despite Shneer’s best efforts, is impossible. Shneer tries hard to show that the Holocaust prompted Soviet photographers to underscore the Jewishness of their subjects and thereby to undermine the “universalist” discourse of wartime representation that he alleges was mandated by the Party. In the effort, he, like Murav, is forced to adopt a totalitarian approach to Soviet culture in which any reference to the Jewishness of Nazi victims can be claimed as an example of Jewish self-assertion that is somehow separable from its conventionally Soviet form. The upshot seems to be that the discernment of the Holocaust within the Great Patriotic War was the particular province of the “Jewish eye,” the eye of the Jewish artist inside the loyal “builder of Communism.” But this is a tautology, based on the same false distinction that we have already encountered in the work of Lapidus and Murav. Just because Soviet photographers arrived at the killing fields and death camps earlier than the Americans does not mean that what they saw through the camera lens was “the Holocaust” rather than the intimate ravages of the Soviet struggle against fascism (which is precisely what Vassily Grossman saw both at Stalingrad and at Treblinka). What Soviet war photographers saw depended on how they were trained to see. Like literature, art is the product of a complex system of representation, the rules of which govern the habits of an educated eye—an eye, for instance, that can espy the mother of God in a picture of a nice-looking girl from Florence. For any artist who must work on commission, whether as an employee of Lorenzo the Magnificent or of the Soviet Communist Party, the subject—the “what”—always comes as an afterthought to matters of form—the “how.” (A heightened interest in the how, often at the expense of the what, is the reason that non-representational art produced by the Soviet avant-garde constantly ran the risk of being labeled formalist.) Shneer intuits that Soviet war photography somehow pushed the formal boundaries of documentary realism. Having looked at the pictures in his book, I can see how he got that impression. Some of them seem to be asking to be read against the grain of the aesthetic values that scholarship associates with some kinds of Soviet art. Some of them, indeed, take on the relentless immanence of Stalinist social realism and engage the viewer in a visual struggle for transcendence, which was, indeed, a risky thing for a Soviet documentary photographer to do.

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Take, for example Evgenii Khaldei’s “Budapest Ghetto” (reproduced on p. 201). Despite its explanatory Jewish subject matter, the look of the picture seems to echo Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–1522), a painting that figured in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1873) as the site of confrontation between the abjection of the body and the eternity of art. Referencing the capacity of representation to overcome the state of cosmic disorder that Dostoevsky called bezobrazie (a word that connotes both ugliness and disgrace but literally means “that which has no image”), “Budapest Ghetto” aspires to move the photographic record into the elevated register of classical tragedy. For the viewer, Khaldei’s lens becomes a medium of purification from direct contact with the scandal (likewise a connotation of bezobrazie) of death. If this is where he was aiming, then we can hardly attribute what ended up in the frame to Khaldei’s Jewish ethnicity. Whatever it is that makes this photo visually arresting clearly relates to Khaldei’s subtle violation of Stalinist aesthetic decorum, to his engagement with the nature of his art (fueled by a knowledge of Dostoevsky and possibly Homer), not to his own Jewishness or to his identification with the ethnic identity of the figure in the photo. Taken at face value, the most Jewish thing about “Budapest Ghetto” in particular and of “Soviet Jewish” wartime photography as a whole is the Jewish content of the captions, which are copiously quoted by Shneer. In fact, the long text explaining Khaldei’s provocative picture to the readers of the newspapers where most such photos appeared was not authored by Khaldei. Neither does it deploy any language that does not qualify the description of Jewish slaughter and the “hate-driven attack of the Red Army” on the Fascist enemy, thanks to which “a significant part of Hungarian Jewry was saved from murder” (p. 201), as anything but a highly conventional expression of Soviet patriotism. In this case, the textual allusion to the Jewish “nationality” of the dead man in the photograph actually distracts the viewer from the originality of the photograph and normalizes Khaldei’s unorthodox visual idiom by connecting it back to the immediate historical reality of the events it depicts. People who feel the need to insist on the singularity of Jewish visual culture (both in and out of the Soviet Union) must be prepared to take a leap of faith. Murav can at least index a Jewish literary tradition; arguments that demand assent to a Jewish way of seeing can only press the button of Jewish difference. And no one presses it harder and to so little effect than Olga Gershenson. While Shneer’s argument may be insubstantial, his subject—Soviet photography—is, at least, real. But Gershenson’s Phantom Holocaust never gets off the ground because its subject is a conceit, invented by Gershenson. The “phantom” that Gershenson means to resurrect is a generic category, irresistibly tagged as Jewish, called “Soviet Holocaust cinema.” Yes, there are many movies about the Holocaust, some of them made by Soviet directors. And, yes, there are books and university courses devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in film. But readers of Phantom Holocaust would be well advised to remember that the most important thing to know about phantoms is that they don’t exist. Repeated screen references to emaciated bodies in striped pajamas, crematoria chimneys, and Nazi jackboots do not provide access to a unifying aesthetic, much less a Jewish one. The Holocaust is a generally compelling historical subject that, as countless audiences have now seen, lends itself to every film genre, with the possible exception of

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the Western, and to every conceivable mode of cinematic representation, from ­surrealism to screwball comedy. Every director in the world who makes a picture about the Holocaust deploys his own signature style; it is unclear, from Gershenson’s catalogue of references to the Holocaust on “Soviet soil” that reading any one of these films through a Jewish lens makes any of the films that she discusses more intelligible. But then again intelligibility is not really the point here. In nearly every way, Gershenson’s book reproduces the conventions of the Marrano myth. Like Bemporad and Altshuler, she treats Jewish feelings as a substitute for Jewish knowledge and Jewish religious belief. Like Lapidus and Murav, she privileges intentionality over context. Like Shneer, she reduces the question of form to matters of content. The main difference between her recourse to the interpretive framework of the Marrano myth and theirs is that Gershenson is explicit about the moral of their common story: that Soviet Jewish Marranos upheld a secret life of heroic struggle against a totalitarian regime that treated them with prejudice and threatened them with destruction. For Gershenson, the bringing to light of this secret life endows her research with self-evident moral purpose; for this reason, the writing of the book must be documented alongside the hidden lives of the films. And that is precisely what she does. Over the course of the book, Gershenson installs herself firmly inside her own narrative. While celebrating the unremembered and unrecorded achievements of Soviet Jewish filmmakers, she also celebrates her own work as part of their achievement. More than that, she casts herself in the role of providential deliverer, redeemer, and resurrectionist of “Soviet Holocaust cinema.” It is she who not only disinters the buried Jewish past of Soviet film but actually raises the dead. Thanks to her “lucky touch” (p. 112), officially proscribed scripts that have been lying in the archives for years finally get made into films while long-forgotten works of cinematic genius are revived as new classics. Fascinated with the prospect of her own role in the process of restoring the Jewishness of Soviet art to life, she realizes the nature of her true scholarly vocation which, in turn, enables her to renounce any claim to historical detachment: “All of a sudden I was reminded of a research methods seminar back in graduate school, where we learned that there was no such thing as ‘data collection’ in the social world, that all research is an intervention. Now this was playing out before my eyes” (p. 112). Loss of objectivity, she seems to say, is not the end but the beginning of her professional responsibility. The ultimate purpose of her education as a scholar is finally fulfilled when she becomes personally implicated in the production of a “Soviet Jewish” memory. Consisting primarily of interviews, Gershenson’s sources are not merely used to obtain information or as a way of demonstrating a distinctive filmic discourse. Instead, the interviews serve to transform Gershenson the “data collector” into Gershenson, the faithful guardian of Soviet Jewish genius. Although she occasionally adopts the perspective of a historian with an interest in the past, the book’s main source of ­fascination for Gershenson herself lies almost exclusively in the present. While she condenses roughly seventy years of historical context to just a few paragraphs of breezy, journalistic prose, she devotes considerable attention to crafting elaborate scenes of “remembering” in which she herself not only contributes actively to the

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conversation she is recording but often steals the show. Here, for instance, is the introduction to her account of a meeting with Icchokas Meras, a “reclusive . . . Lithuanian-Jewish” writer who “refused to play by the Soviet rules” (p. 90): Today, Meras lives in Israel (he immigrated there in 1972). Failing health turned him into a recluse and he rarely meets with people, limiting his social interaction to e-mail and phone. But I was lucky: when I got to Israel in the winter of 2009, Meras agreed to meet with me. On a bright Friday morning, when the entire country was going shopping in preparation for the Sabbath, I took a bus to a quiet neighborhood in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, where Meras lives with his wife Frida, an artist. He told me to call him Icchokas, his Lithuanian name (in Israel, he goes by Itzhak). Meras is short, with a heavy-set head and piercing blue eyes. He moved slowly and deliberately, leaning on a sturdy cane. He spoke to me in accented but precise Russian (p. 105).

Gershenson provides us with pictures of perfect intimacy between herself and her subject. We are meant to admire not only the heroism of Meras (evident, apparently, in the “piercing blue eyes”), with which Gershenson identifies completely. Her own journey to Holon is a ritual pilgrimage that takes place on Friday, when the “entire country” is preparing for the Sabbath. Gershenson acts like a Soviet-Jewish Marrano even in a Jewish state, where, one hopes, a person may do any number of things on Friday besides preparing for the Sabbath, as, say, going to the beach. Significantly, Meras permits her to use his “Lithuanian” name rather than the Hebrew “Itzhak.” Such scenes are meant to transcend the limitations of dry scholarly prose, but their rhetorical affect is deeply manipulative and, for the reader, more than a little embarrassing. Indeed, the obvious effort involved in reproducing direct communication makes these set pieces so obviously stagy as to invite a suspicion that where Gershenson presents herself as mere participant, she is also the director and the producer. Ger­ shenson’s attempt to “read [Soviet Holocaust] films through a Jewish lens” (p. 12) focuses largely on herself. The reader is never sure where Gershenson’s project of self-fashioning ends and her “data” begins. Indeed, somewhere around p. 65, a book about the Jewish identity of Mikhail Kalik, Grigorii Kanovich, and Maya Turovskaya becomes a book about the Jewish identity of Olga Gershenson. Gershenson collapses their work into her personal narrative of Jewish discovery, so that her own love and admiration for their secret “feats of courage” against Soviet censorship both announce her own heroism in standing against a scholarly establishment that excludes “Soviet Holocaust cinema” from Jewish culture and underwrites her Jewish intentions toward her sources. Meanwhile, the films themselves are treated gingerly, like relics; we are not surprised to find Gershenson confusing aesthetic value with moral significance. In consequence, the book devotes much more space to the struggle against Soviet film censorship (the main subject of conversation between Gershenson and the people she interviewed) than to Soviet cinema. As soon as Gershenson casts herself in the role of a Marrano, her credibility as a scholar ceases to have anything to do with her skills in data collection and becomes dependent on the strength of her emotional connection to the Soviet Jewish past. In fact, the underlying problem in all academic studies of Soviet crypto-Judaism is that data collection or historical inquiry is not their primary goal. The elaborate

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intervention of Jewish experts against the forgetting of Soviet Jewry is driven not by the desire to know the past but to prevent it from being known. Soviet Jewish scholarship is a lieu de mémoire that fills a historical void with signs of a “Jewish presence”; but in the immortal words of Gertrude Stein about another instance in which meaning is characterized chiefly by its absence, there is no there, there. Russian Jews broke their ties to Judaism when they became Soviet citizens. Reduced to the Soviet idea of “nationality,” the Jewishness of Soviet Jews was radically stripped of Jewish content. Cut off from access to Jewish knowledge, it could generate none. The pathos of converso idealism that defines the historical “genius” of Soviet civilization is not evidence of a “Jewish eye.” Notwithstanding Stalinist delusions about the hidden Jewish agenda of Soviet “New Christians,” Soviet Jews were Soviet. The inquisitors employed by state security got it tragically, brutally wrong; Soviet Jews were not Zionist cosmopolitans (some of them are now, but that’s another story). Sovietization had its blind spots, to be sure; but we should not confuse the limits of Soviet ideological control over people’s private lives (on which, see Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers)16 with the preservation of Jewish continuity, much less the nurturance of a satisfying alternative to Soviet conformity and Soviet socialization. Jewish “habits” survived the Soviet expulsion of Judaism from public life the way a foreskin may be said to survive a circumcision—by an act of deliberate detachment from the living body of Jewish culture. What Isaac Babel had in common with Peretz Markish was that they were both Soviet modernists, consumed by the aesthetics of rupture; their alleged deviations from Party discipline were no more Jewish than they were Trotskyist. Even Jewish dissent was Soviet. It was a group of well-placed converso intellectuals, not a secret club of Marrano believers, that gave birth to an emigration movement which, for the last half-century, has been attempting to reconstruct a lost civilization on three continents. Unfortunately, for the proponents of Soviet Jewish “hybridity,” that civilization happens to look a lot like the Soviet Union. In the name of the new Marranos, the self-appointed keepers of Jewish memory pay homage to the converso culture of the Soviet Union as an epitaph that honors the unacknowledged Jewish victims of Soviet antisemitism. This posthumous victory for Judaism effectively translates the irreversible tragedy of the Russian Revolution into the redemptive mode of a divine comedy. The Marrano myth remains the old—very old—story of death and resurrection, which retains both the thrill and the comfort of a good old wives tale (or, you should excuse the expression, a bobe-mayse). But only God can raise the Jewish dead; in order to do their work, historians of the Jews must, perforce, stipulate His absence and dispense with the promise of a happy ending. My vote is for less Marrano mythology and more converso history—the kind of difficult history that myths are invented to master, the kind that tells us what happened instead of reassuring us that nothing happened at all. Russian Jews should not have been at home in the Soviet Union; but they were. The most conservative Jewish population in the 19th century should not have become the 20th century’s most radical; but it did. Soviet Jews who live in America and Israel should not be Russian cultural patriots; but they are. Without a full account of the pressures and inducements of sovietization at the beginning of the Soviet era, we cannot possibly understand the source and the power of converso disillusionment at its end. Conversos made the Soviet

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Union; but they also unmade it. Without owning up to the former, historians of the Jews can hardly claim credit for the latter. Olga Litvak Clark University

Notes 1. Castro’s controversial thesis received unexpected support from the research of H.H. Ben-Sasson, who found that the Spanish-Christian state-building project was embraced as “vital to the existence of the nation” even by those among the “generation of the expulsion” who chose to leave rather than convert. Some Iberian exiles contended that the long history of “unnatural toleration” of religious difference constituted nothing short of a “spiritual miracle.” See Ben-Sasson, “Dor golei-sefarad ’al ’atzmo,” Zion 26 (1961), 23–64, esp. 53–59. The quotations appear on p. 59. 2. Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton: 1954), 46. The first Spanish edition, España en su historia, appeared in 1948; three subsequent editions, revised and under a new title, La realidad histórica de España, came out in 1954, 1962, and 1966. 3. On the process of “internal colonization,” see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: 2011). The connection between the Russian imperial project, a social revolution which culminated in the creation of the Soviet Union, and the Iberian reconquista, similarly “completed” in the creation of early modern Spain, is not fortuitous, as we shall see. 4. Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, 96. 5. [Ben Zion Dinaburg and Yitzhak Baer], “Megamatenu,” Zion 1 (1936), 1. This premise, despite the recent inroads of postmodernism and the new emphasis on cultural “hybridity,” continues to exercise the profession. Cf. David Biale (ed.), Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: 2002) and Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: 2007). 6. On crypto-Judaism, see David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: 1996), and Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford: 1999). On the split self-consciousness of the Marrano, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: 2009). 7. Castro, Structure of Spanish History, 43. 8. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: 2008), 2. 9. See Irena Cantorovich and Nati Cantorovich, “The Impact of the Holocaust and the State of Israel on Soviet Jewish Identity,” in Ro’i (ed.), The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, 119–136. 10. Y.H. Yerushalmi, “Anusim haḥozrim leyahadut bemeah ha-17: haskalatam hayehudit vehakhsharatam hanafshit,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 5 (1969), 201–209. An English version appeared under the title “The Re-education of the Marranos in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, ed. David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye (Brandeis: 2014), 157–174. 11. See Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Indiana: 2006), Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Indiana: 2006), and Ken Moss, The Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard: 2009). 12. It is possible, too, that as a relatively recent convert to the Revolution, Bergelson was expressing his own anxiety about being too late to catch the right train. In 1930, when the speech was made, he had not even bought a ticket. As it happens, he got on just in time; Bergelson left Weimar Germany for Soviet Russia in 1933. Murav’s tendentious use of his ambivalence

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notwithstanding, Bergelson himself had no way of knowing that the same locomotive that sped him out of the reach of Hitler would run him over in the purge of 1952. 13. This is the approach of Efraim Sicher; see his Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution: Writers and Artists between Hope and Apostasy (Cambridge: 1996). Murav cites Sicher’s work in connection with her discussion of Babel (see p. 2 and p. 43) but she does not engage his argument directly. This is an unfortunate omission. 14. Carole Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (Cincinnati: 2003). 15. For a formative example of this trend, see Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (Chicago: 2000). 16. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: 2007).

Book Reviews

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

Esther Farbstein, Beseter hamadregah: hayahadut haortodoksit behungariyah nokhaḥ hashoah (Hidden in the Heights: Orthodox Jewry in Hungary during the Holocaust). Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2013. 939 pp. Esther Farbstein deserves our thanks for undertaking the far from simple task of investigating the attitude of the Orthodox community in Hungary during the Holocaust. Only a few scholars have dealt with this subject, and until now there has been very little research on the specific topic of rescue activities on the part of Hungarian Orthodox Jewry. Thus, as Farbstein notes, her comprehensive volume, based on extensive archival research, can be regarded in the light of “repaying a historical debt” (p. 201).1 Beseter hamadregah is divided into four main sections. The first, dealing with the period immediately preceding the German occupation of Hungary (1942–1944), during which Jews were sent to labor camps, focuses on efforts to help religious Jews maintain their ritual observance in the camps. The second section covers the period of German occupation and discusses rescue activities initiated by the Orthodox community. Issues of faith are examined in the third section, while the concluding section offers an overview of communal rebuilding and commemorative activities in the postwar era, as well as a discussion of the ways in which Hungarian rabbis sought to allow ’agunot—referring in this case to wives whose husbands were missing and presumed dead—to remarry. During the period preceding the German occupation, thousands of Jewish refugees arrived in Hungary from Poland and Czechoslovakia. A number of initiatives were carried out by the Orthodox community, some more successful than others. In Budapest, the rescue committee dealt with such matters as the forging of documents, smuggling people across borders, and finding accommodation for those on the run. In order to finance these activities, appeals were made mainly to rabbinic colleagues in the United States and Switzerland. When it came to rescue activities, the Orthodox (the term covering both religious Zionist and anti-Zionist haredi groups) also cooperated with secular Zionist groups, as in the case of the Glass House, an office operated by the Zionist leadership, which (under the auspices of the Swiss consul) issued documents allowing some 40,000 individuals to immigrate to Palestine. Orthodox leaders, as Farbstein shows, operated both out in the open and behind the scenes. Thus, Philip Freudiger, the head of the Budapest Orthodox community, took part in negotiations with the Nazis in the attempt to ransom Hungarian Jews, in 271

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addition to his more clandestine activities. Success was often limited, at best—the mass smuggling and resettlement of refugees in Romania, for instance, came to an end once the border between the two countries was closed more effectively. All told, however, thousands of Jews were saved by means of Orthodox rescue efforts. Even after the war, those involved in such efforts generally refrained from publicizing their activities, which undoubtedly contributed to the widespread perception that Orthodox leaders had been passive bystanders. Several controversial incidents are dealt with in somewhat cursory fashion by Farbstein, who at the outset declares her intention to refrain from polemics. One such incident involves the rescue and departure of R. Aharon Rokeah, the leader of the Belz hasidic community. Before his departure, his brother made a farewell speech in which he assured Hungarian Jews that they would come through the war safely (in the end, some two-thirds of the community perished). Farbstein, who discusses the speech at length in a previous volume, Hidden in Thunder (2007), here relegates the matter to a long footnote (p. 174), though she acknowledges that the community was left bereft by R. Aharon’s departure.2 In the concluding section of her book, Farbstein moves to the postwar period. One of the most important challenges facing the Orthodox Hungarian community was the reconstruction of congregations and religious life. In Budapest, where a great part of the Jewish population had been saved, the return to communal life began immediately after the war with the resumption of communal activities and the reopening of synagogues, schools, and yeshivot. Farbstein does not give religious Zionists enough credit in this regard—they were noteworthy in setting up a variety of institutions for both adults and children. On the poignant issue of ’agunot, a special beit din was established in Budapest, which eventually succeeded in “freeing” thousands of these women to marry again. Although Farbstein is one-sided in her presentation, refraining from criticism of both the rabbinic and lay Orthodox leadership, she succeeds admirably in redressing a scholarly gap. This excellent work, based on comprehensive research and interviews, provides much insight into an important chapter in the history of Jews in Hungary during the Holocaust. Haim Genizi Bar-Ilan University

Notes 1. The book under review has more recently appeared in English as Hidden in the Heights: Orthodox Jewry in Hungary during the Holocaust, trans. Deborah Stern (Jerusalem: 2014). 2. See Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust (New York: 2007), 91–97.

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Amos Goldberg, Traumah beguf rishon: ketivat yomanim bitkufat hashoah (Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust). Or Yehuda: Dvir, 2012. 447 pp. Holocaust scholarship has always been swayed by ideological trends that embody political and moral positions. Thus, in much of Israeli public culture of the early 1950s, the Holocaust and, in particular, its survivors were dogged by tacit or explicit images of weakness, submissiveness, shame, and betrayal—all of which conflicted with the national project of forging a “new Jew.” In Israeli society today, in contrast, the Holocaust is more often represented as a historical vindication of the establishment of a Jewish state and perceived in terms of spiritual virtue, survival, triumph, revolt, and heroism. For Amos Goldberg, both types of Holocaust representation constitute “narrative fetishism,” that is, a story that “empties” the traumatic empty space and restores the meaning of the human victim. This orderly and programmatic form of telling establishes the place of the traumatic event along an uninterrupted historical continuum, where it marks a rift in the condition of exile or eminently conveys the Jewish people’s resistance against its mortal enemies. Since this form of narrative conveys a “lesson” and uses historical perspective to hide the event’s traumatic essence, its meaning is redemptive rather than undermining. Goldberg’s book eschews the narrative fetishism of the Holocaust in his analysis of diaries kept during the Holocaust period. It grapples not only with the unsettling, radical powerlessness of the writers whose diaries he examines but also with the inadequacies of categories that we often associate with the study of history. History, he notes, describes “being”—existence as event, reaction, and survival—rather than “nothingness,” that is, the negation of identity, institutional disintegration, and the erasure of the ability to produce coherent meaning. Like any “normal” writing, historiography does not recognize trauma as an annihilating experience, emptying life as it is conventionally conceived of any palpable value or “essence.” In other words, historiography is equipped to deal with what “is,” not with what is absent or emptied. To reinsert the concept of trauma into our perceptions of the historical event, scholarship must somehow break through its own normative boundaries. Goldberg suggests that literary reading and psychoanalytical interpretation must reclaim the text from any superimposed narrative of continuity. Not only does Goldberg’s scholarly paradigm linger within the Holocaust’s trauma in order to identify and discuss its expressions, it also seeks to indicate what history alone cannot contain: a moment in time and space that simultaneously appears to break out of nominal spatial or historical categories. Indeed, the events as trauma, Goldberg suggest, also lie beyond the inner control of the witnessing subject. Trauma in First Person addresses several life stories and diaries written during the Holocaust, focusing mainly on those by Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan. As Goldberg explains, the period in question essentially altered the genre of autobiographical diaries. Composing a life story allows a person to shape himself as a complete, unique subject endowed with a sense of continuity, who infuses the events into which he has been cast with meaning and weaves them into a personal and collective

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history. However, when the perception of reality and self-knowledge collapse, one’s story can unravel and what is left is only a narrative that negates and dismembers the subject. How, then, can one bridge the gap between the assumptions of autonomy and individuality typical of the autobiographical genre, on the one hand, and the writing of Holocaust victims in real time, on the other? The self’s dismemberment also spells dismemberment of the text, including its internal and external documentation. The formidable forces that engulf people determine their fate and self-understanding more than their introspection and decisions, a state of affairs expressed as performative powerlessness. In 1934, Klemperer wrote in his diary: “I don’t mean to document here the details of historical facts. Only the sense of ‘breathlessness.’” How can one write “breathlessness”? Goldberg highlights the fragmentary aspect of this writing, the manner in which the fragmentation defeats the sense of continuity, so that the writing itself appears as a dismembered representation of the writing subject. The psychic presence that animates the text, Goldberg writes, can function in several ways: as the source of primal, ragged reaction—the scream, as it were, that extends the body’s suffering; as a subject whose consciousness, now removed from any form of normal order, can only doubt his own human, subjective existence; or as a documenting observer who acts by virtue of a temporal breach and a projection: he is absent in the present only in order to resurface (as text) in some future time that reserves for him the place of a witness of the past he has not entirely experienced. These positions are well conveyed by the diaries’ textual aspects: a stifled consciousness regarding events; transgression of time and the perception of the present as an ever-returning eternity; mangled language, and the blurring of basic distinctions between human and animal, good and bad, “I” and “other,” persecutor and persecuted. The book opens with methodological and theoretical statements that deftly wield psychoanalytical, linguistic, literary, and meta-historical concepts. The next two sections offer a scrupulously close reading of Klemperer’s and Kaplan’s diaries, which are marked by brilliant interpretive competence and finely tuned sensitivity. Goldberg’s analysis approaches the diaries not only as a signifier of an external reality but also as a mechanism that uses the tension between content and form, as well as syntactic tensions and metaphorical paradoxes, to present itself as the unconscious of the writing subject. At the end of his book Goldberg shows how his methodology and theoretical distinction can be used beyond the study of Holocaust diaries. “The narrative shards of trauma,” he writes, “point to the deep rifts lodged in human life as such” (p. 386). His study is an example of a humanistic, responsible, ground-breaking debate on how writing testifies about liminal, traumatic situations. It crosses the potential limit of the “life story” to what lies beyond the imagination, beyond the Holocaust as a historical signifier, and reaches the edge: a place where trauma crushes the subject, leaving word shards in the empty space it has rent. Omri Herzog Sapir College

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Michal Shaul, Pe’er taḥ at ’efer: haḥ evrah haḥ aredit beyisrael betzel hashoah 1945– 1961 (Beauty for Ashes: Holocaust Memory and the Rehabilitation of Ashkenazi Haredi Society in Israel 1945–1961). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 2014. 492 pp. How did members of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in Israel relate to the Holocaust during the first decade and a half after the war? By what means did they teach about, learn from, and commemorate the war’s events? What were the long-term lessons that they tried to present to their adherents regarding Jewish life and death in Europe under the Nazis? In Beauty for Ashes, Michal Shaul poses these and other questions and attempts to portray haredi society in Israel and its attitude toward the Holocaust between the end of the war and 1961. Shaul’s book, an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation, consists of four main sections dealing with different types of memory, following the framework outlined by Lawrence Langer in his study of Holocaust testimony.1 The first, “Shaping Memory,” includes two chapters, the first an overview dealing with haredi society, the Holocaust and haredi survivors, and the second focusing on what she terms “means of rehabilitation” in the haredi world (for instance, doing work on behalf of the haredi community). The second section, “Harrowing Memories, Obligatory Memory,” analyzes the haredi response to the question “Why did we survive?” and describes the endeavor to establish new families after the war. The third section, “Didactic Memory,” is divided into four chapters, each of which pinpoints a different facet of haredi educational endeavors related to the Holocaust: restoring the Torah-learning way of life, female survivors and the rehabilitation of the Beis Ya’akov school network, the role of religious myths that were deployed in rehabilitating postwar haredi society, and Holocaust commemoration. Finally, “Counter-memory/Joint Memory” deals with the haredi encounter with Israeli society and its rabbinic leadership, the question of Judeo-centric historiography, and the haredi version of Holocaust heroism. The book concludes with an epilogue summarizing the ways in which Israeli haredi survivors remember the Holocaust. For me, two of the more fascinating chapters in the book were those dealing with the revitalization of the Beis Ya’akov girls’ school system and the construction and function of myths in haredi society. I have dealt with both in my own writings,2 and it gave me pleasure to see photographs of the protagonists of my own research at various stages of their postwar lives. Shaul’s research is meticulous and thorough; she has managed to unearth biographical particulars about many of the women who were generally extremely reticent about their postwar “adventures.” Rivka Shantzer, for instance, became responsible for a postwar orphanage in Germany, while Rivka Hoffman took charge of a “women’s kibbutz” known as Hafetz Hayim (near the Zeilsheim DP camp) and later worked in a “pioneer home” for haredi women survivors in Palestine. Some of the women were single at the war’s end, others were young childless widows. All were 30 and under, some much younger. What Shaul does not discuss is the fact that their work on behalf of the haredi public generally entailed the postponement of marriage and childbearing. It would have been interesting to learn why this particular group of women chose to devote

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themselves to public work despite their having been educated to regard marriage and family as the pinnacle of women’s role in Jewish life. How can their decision be understood in view of their religious education and work in the Beis Ya’akov movement both before and after the war? Such questions become more pointed when one considers Rivka Horowitz, who had spent much of the war years in the same labor and concentration camps, and who, after the war, collaborated with the other women in reconstituting the Beis Ya’akov movement in postwar Germany. Horowitz soon chose to marry Leibl Pinkusewich, another Agudath Israel survivor-activist, and almost immediately left the limelight. Was she the anomaly, or did she represent the prevailing norm among haredi women activists? Although Shaul’s book is well-researched and well-written, the reader at times misses the hand of a competent editor who might have encouraged her to add a few words of historical explanation at critical junctures. For example, there is no real discourse regarding the significance of the chronology in Shaul’s chosen title. To be sure, it is difficult to be ignorant of the fact that 1945 marked the war’s end, and the year 1961 is readily identified—certainly by most Israelis—as the year of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. At the same time, Shaul would have done well to provide some explanation of the significance of the Eichmann trial for the haredi public in Israel. And while she does include a short discussion in her opening chapter about prewar versus postwar haredi society, Shaul never actually notes that, during the period covered by her book, it was not common for haredi survivors (anywhere in the world) to refer to themselves as “haredim” or even “ultra-Orthodox.” Those of German-Jewish origin would usually speak of themselves as belonging to “Torah-true Judaism” (Gesetzgetreuer Judentum); in English they would refer to themselves as “Orthodox” or (when applicable) “hasidic.” Even in Hebrew, the term “haredi” only became popular after the 1960s; until then, terms such as aduk and frum (the Hebrew and the Yiddish words, respectively, for “devout”) were far more common in daily parlance. There is also a less than sufficient effort to locate this population within the broader framework of Israeli society. Although Shaul argues that the dichotomies between Israeli haredim, modern religious, and secular in the 1950s were not as great during the period of her study as they are today, a serious discussion of haredi participation in general Holocaust commemoration in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s would have greatly enriched her book. I was once told by the daughter of a well-known hasidic rebbe (and Holocaust survivor) that when she took her high school placement exams during the 1960s, she and her classmates were asked to write an essay about “the woman who most influenced you.” None of the students chose to write about Sarah Schneirer, the founder of the Beis Ya’akov school network, or indeed about any rebbetzin of note. Rather, most picked a canonical secular Zionist, Hannah Szenes— the volunteer parachutist from Palestine who was caught, tried, and put to death in Hungary during the war. This testifies to the influence of modern Israeli culture and ethos on the ostensibly separatist ultra-Orthodox girls’ culture of those days. In spite of these lacunae, Michal Shaul has provided us with an important addition to our understanding of the Israeli haredi world during the early postwar period. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz Bar-Ilan University

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Notes 1.  Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: 1999). 2.  Judith Tydor Baumel and Jacob J. Schacter, “The Ninety Three Bais Yaakov Girls of Cracow: History or Typology?” in Reverence, Righteousness, and Rahamanut: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, ed. Jacob J. Schacter (New York: 1992), 93–130; Judith Baumel-Schwartz, “Pioneers, Teachers, and Mothers: Ultra-Orthodox Women among She’erit Hapletah,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 1 (2008), 145–179.

Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. 327 pp. The golden age of Hollywood’s studio system coincided with the demise of German democracy, the establishment of the Third Reich, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and the outbreak of the Second World War. Notwithstanding, the American film industry refrained (almost) entirely from any direct reference to these events. Ben Urwand’s enlightening study aims to explain this apparent policy of negligence, illustrating a complicated network of individuals, agencies, and interests that enabled and upheld it. Although he is not the first to note Hollywood’s odd silence regarding the menace of Nazism, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler is based on original archival research and offers novel—and controversial—conclusions. Other studies, most notably Thomas Doherty’s nuanced account, Hollywood and Hitler, have interpreted this “failure of nerve and imagination” as the outcome of poor judgment that was typical for American business at the time. “The meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood,” Doherty asserts, and Hollywood “was no worse than the rest of American culture.”1 Urwand, by contrast, argues that Hollywood studios were not slow to recognize the meaning of Nazism but rather chose to overlook it: like IBM and General Motors, they “put profit above principle in their decision to do business with the Nazis” (p. 8). According to Urwand, this self-serving policy had severe consequences, since Hollywood films “could have alerted the world to what was going on in Germany” (p. 192), thus helping to build a front against Nazism. Instead, the studios—most of them owned and run by Jews—sought to maximize their revenue by appeasing Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Within this context, Urwand reads their profit-oriented decision as a greedy collaboration with Hitler that petered out only in the early 1940s, when the prospects of future gains in Germany dimmed. American films were extremely popular in Germany after the First World War, and  Hollywood studios worked in close cooperation with their local counterparts throughout the 1920s.2 The rise of Nazism had no real impact on the preferences of German moviegoers or the interests of the U.S. film industry. Despite the almost immediate “purification” of the German film industry by means of the dismissal of Jewish and anti-Nazi filmmakers, American studios “had reason to believe that their sales would improve under the new Nazi regime” (p. 128). Sure enough, Hollywood sold between 20 and 60 films in Germany each year during the 1930s. As Urwand

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sees it, the fear of losing potential profit influenced the studio owners much more than their “desire to defend their Jewish heritage” (p. 218). They therefore worked closely with Nazi representatives in Los Angeles and in Berlin to adapt their productions to the new sensibilities of the German market. Urwand convincingly argues that the Nazi regime, for its part, highly valued its business with Hollywood. Maintaining “friendly relations with at least a few studios” was an effective method of regulating the content of Hollywood’s productions, preventing anti-Nazi “hate films” and promoting pro-fascist films. Urwand argues that had the Nazis banned all American movies in Germany, they would have lost their bargaining power and “almost certainly would have become the villains” of popular cinema (pp. 140–141). While the key patterns of Hollywood’s “pact with Hitler” were set in the early 1930s, before and shortly after the Nazi rise to power, the German regime managed to enforce new restrictions throughout the decade. The efficient campaign of the National Socialist party against Lewis Milestone’s antiwar film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), in the latter months of the Weimar republic resulted in a peculiar capitulation on the part of Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal Pictures. Laemmle, a German-born Jew, agreed to edit a new, “non-offensive” version of the film for distribution around the world—a precedent that became the rule for many Hollywood studios in the following years. German legislation in the pre-Nazi years reflected a similar aspiration to defend “German prestige” on the screen. In Article 15 of the 1932 film law enacted by the Weimar government, local censors were instructed to ban film companies if they distributed an “anti-German” film anywhere in the world. In order not to lose the German market, American studios now had to present favorable portrayals of Germany in all productions, not just those they intended to sell in Germany. In order to use Article 15 effectively, the Nazi regime sent a representative to Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, whose job was to “educate and train” American studios. During his short time in Hollywood, between 1933 and 1939, Gyssling viewed—and demanded revisions of—more than 400 films; Urwand’s exploration of his vast influence on American cinema makes for fascinating reading. As a result of Gyssling’s uncompromising attitude and his threat of implementing Article 15, Hollywood consciously succumbed to Nazi interests. According to Urwand, “a film advocating liberal democracy over fascism . . . could not have been made in the United States at this time” (p. 174). The Hays Office, which under William Hays formulated a moral code for American film production—and monitored its implementation—played an important role in this development. In particular, Hays’ representative in Los Angeles, Joseph Breen, acted effectively to prevent the production of anti-Nazi films. While Hays was not a Nazi sympathizer (in fact, he warned against the proto-fascist messages of certain American productions), he and Breen worked tirelessly to preserve the political “neutrality” of American film entertainment (p. 210). Within this framework, a curious alliance was formed between Breen and several Jewish agencies, among them the Anti-Defamation League and the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Representatives of these and other Jewish agencies repeatedly pressured studio owners (oftentimes through Hays) to avoid portraying Jewish characters in Hollywood productions. According to Urwand, their fear of American antisemitism gave Hays and the studios a good excuse to avoid confrontation with Gyssling. When Nazi

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authorities demanded the dismissal of the studios’ Jewish representatives in Germany, the studios complied. Similarly, in many cases, the studios opted not to employ Jewish actors, composers, and directors in order to appease the Nazi regime. The Collaboration is a well-researched documentation of Hollywood’s extensive efforts to forestall confrontation with Nazi Germany and to facilitate its ongoing business with the fascist regime. At the same time, Urwand’s depiction of Hollywood’s Jewish moguls as avaricious opportunists seems at times simplistic and unfair. For one thing, even in more profitable years, the studios’ business in Nazi Germany was minor—almost insignificant in comparison with their profit in England and France (Urwand mentions this fact in passing on p. 201). Moreover, when the German regime initiated more restrictions on the import of American films in the latter half of the 1930s, most studios suffered losses in Germany or else pulled out of the country. (Notwithstanding, until the early 1940s they rarely presented any anti-Nazi content in their films.) It may also be somewhat simplistic to claim that the studios were still acceding to Gyssling’s demands in the late 1930s, since Gyssling by that time, as Urwand acknowledges, had “all but lost his credibility in Hollywood” (p. 198). Urwand’s two-fold explanation, that the studios hoped to profit in the future, and that their continued compliance with Gyssling’s requests was merely a matter of habit “derived from their years of collaboration” (p. 218), overlooks the complex circumstances of Hollywood studios in the 1930s. It is more than likely that shameless profit-seeking was not the only motivation of Hollywood’s decision-makers. Indeed, given the antisemitic accusations to which they were subjected, and the multi-national society with diverse ideologies and alliances that they served with their products, their cautious approach was a logical, albeit not heroic, survival strategy. Ofer Ashkenazi The Hebrew University

Notes 1.  Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York: 2013), 12. 2. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: 1994).

Cultural Studies

Joy Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014. 254 pp. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) has long been one of the composer’s most hotly debated works. A six-minute work for narrator, men’s chorus and orchestra, this fictional account of the wartime experiences of a survivor in the Warsaw ghetto, in which the narrator recounts the tale in English, the Nazis bark in German, and the Jews pray in Hebrew, has always been regarded by many as one of Schoenberg’s most palatable works, but for others it is a simplistic dramatization of unspeakable horrors. For Theodor Adorno, it is the work that “made the impossible possible . . . a companion piece to Picasso’s Guernica,” whereas more recently it was denounced by Richard Taruskin as a “banality” replete with “B-movie clichés” and “kitschtriumphalism” that are all “painfully obvious.”1 But as Joy Calico remarks in  her excellent new monograph on A Survivor from Warsaw’s reception in postwar Europe, “there is no minimum aesthetic standard a piece of music must meet to be historically, culturally, or personally significant” (p. 2). Calico is not so much concerned with A Survivor from Warsaw’s qualities as a musical work as with its ability to provoke responses, “to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe” (p. 1), and at times it is precisely this work’s ostensible shortcomings that make it all the more exciting for the reception theorist. Calico’s book sets out on a voyage throughout postwar Europe, a voyage that is in its essence more of an investigation into the fragile, confused political and cultural climate of that period than an account of one specific musical work. Calico organizes her book as a series of case studies presented in chronological order, tracking A Survivor from Warsaw’s remigration to Europe from its West German premiere in 1950 to its Czech premiere in the 1960s (Calico adopts an extended definition of “remigration,” viewing the work’s travels as “Schoenberg’s noncorporeal return,” a proxy for the remigration he never undertook). In West Germany, A Survivor from Warsaw’s reception exemplifies what Michael Kater has termed “retrenchment,”2 with former Nazi music critic Hans Schnoor resorting to thinly disguised antisemitic rhetoric in attacking Schoenberg and his modernism. In Austria, in contrast, the piece’s complicated reception highlighted that country’s embrace of its “first victim status” and its obliviousness with regard to its own complicity in the Holocaust. In Norway, Calico suggests that the endorsement of A Survivor from Warsaw by the formidable Pauline Hall may be seen as an early acknowledgement of the Norwegian Holocaust, and in Czechoslovakia its reception provides fascinating evidence of a rare moment of Jewish “visibility” in that country’s tormented postwar history. 280

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There, as in East Germany and Poland, the work was “de-Semitized,” and its anti-­ fascist message was recruited to serve anti-Nazi and even anti-American agendas, while at the same time its use of dodecaphony was lambasted as the very proof of modernism’s (and Schoenberg’s) association with Western “fascism.” These are only a few of the themes Calico touches upon as she delves into the complex and often inconsistent cultural politics that characterized postwar Europe. Calico’s array of sources is as im­­ pressive as her range of themes. Relying on concert reviews, interviews with performing artists, and protocols of political and cultural apparatuses, she explores the personal histories of critics, Schoenberg’s status as a composer and as a Jew in each country being examined, the programming of the work within a specific concert or recording, the languages of each performance, and the personal histories of the performers. Calico’s volume makes for fascinating and engaging reading, and it is accessible to both professionals and laypeople. At times, however, the book’s structure as a compilation of case studies (three of which were published in other contexts) results in a certain amount of repetition. For example, the term Wiedergutmachung is explained twice within less than twenty pages (p. 98 and p. 114) and the observation that “the term ‘survivor’ did not carry the specific connotations it has now” is repeated three times (pp. 64, 110, and 146). Although each of the chapters can be read as a free-standing essay, the overall flow of the book is impeded by such repetition. The afterword provides an illuminating discussion of the representational aspects of A Survivor from Warsaw, basing itself, among other things, on Schoenberg’s own description of the work. But this last source is considerably more problematic than Calico allows: Schoenberg connects the reading of the Sh’ma at the end of the work to “our thinking of the one, eternal, God who is invisible, who forbids imitations, who forbids to make a picture”(quoted on pp. 161– 162). This, as Schoenberg pointed out explicitly, is the God idea from Moses und Aron, Der biblische Weg, the Modern Psalm, and the composer’s essays from the early 1930s on the eternal role of the Jews. It was also intimately related to Schoenberg’s notion of pure artistic idea, the avoidance of representation and, to a large extent, his own twelvetone system. It is thus curious to note that Schoenberg preaches against representation in a work rife with “moments of representation” (a similar problem can be observed as well in Moses und Aron). To be sure, the inconsistency is Schoenberg’s, but it is an important point, too pertinent to go unmentioned. These are but minor quibbles. Calico’s work is an immensely valuable contribution to our understanding of culture, politics, Jewishness, antisemitism, and reactions to modernism in postwar Europe, as well as to our appreciation of the interpretative layers latent in A Survivor from Warsaw specifically and in commemorative Holocaust works and Schoenberg’s musical style in general. It represents musical reception history at its very finest. Yoel Greenberg Bar-Ilan University

Notes 1.  See Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert; new translations by Susan

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H. Gillespie (Berkeley: 2002), 149; Richard Taruskin, “A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the 21st Century,” New York Times (24 August 1997). 2.  I was unable to trace the term in Kater’s book, although it is quoted in his name in the source referenced by Calico, Toby Thacker’s Music after Hitler: 1945–1955 (Aldershot, UK: 2007), 119.

Ernest B. Gilman, Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 187 pp. Ernest B. Gilman, a scholar of early modern English literature and the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England (2009), has written a study about the sojourn of three Yiddish poets in Jewish-sponsored tuberculosis sanatoriums in Colorado and Quebec and the transformative influence of this experience on their literary careers. As he did in Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Gilman adds his voice to the apocalyptic choir of historians and medical writers who have been addressing a contemporary global predicament, namely, that “tuberculosis has come back with a vengeance, in MDR (‘multi-drug resistant’) and worse, X-DR (‘extensive drug-resistant’) strains” (p. xiii). As such, the study is positioned as both “a recollection . . . and a foreboding” (p. 138). On a more personal note, Gilman dedicates his book to his father, Jack Gilman, who is portrayed in a photograph alongside the Yiddish poet H. Leivick (p. xix) taken in 1933, when they were both patients at Denver’s Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (JCRS). Gilman provides fascinating portraits of Jewish TB patients, including three major Yiddish poets (Yehoash, H. Leivick, and Sholem Shtern), through readings of their poetry and stories composed in the JCRS. In his introductory chapter, Gilman provides an overview of Jewish sanatoriums, noting that creative writing was considered an important part of the JCRS’s regimen of rest, leisure, and sun bathing (though it was only with the advent of antibiotics in the 1950s that the disease was effectively combated). The second chapter dicusses the work of Solomon Bloomgarten (1870– 1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Yehoash. Gilman demonstrates how, during the course of his stay at the JCRS during the first decade of the 20th century, Yehoash’s commitment to Yiddish as a poet, lexicographer, and biblical translator infused the multifaceted literary work he carried out. The central part of the chapter analyses Yehoash’s Yiddish translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1910), though Gilman’s interesting reading of the ways in which Yehoash reenvisions the classic American poem (which first appeared in 1855) is marred by the almost complete invisiblity of the Yiddish version. In his “Note on Transliteration,” Gilman states: “As the Hebrew alphabet will be Greek to many readers, I do not use it to represent Yiddish words. Nor, with rare exceptions where the sound or other nuance of the word is important, do I employ the conventional phonetic transcription of Yiddish . . . as these usages will mean nothing to those who know no Yiddish, and will be pointless to those who do” (p. xxiii). Obviously, Gilman wants to reach outside the field of Yiddish to readers for whom Yiddish is either terra incognita or at least no longer alive as a colloquial language.

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As a result, Gilman shoots himself in the foot by mostly excluding references to the original Yiddish poetry and using his own idiosyncratic transliteration instead of the standard YIVO transliteration system. An example is his reference to the Yiddish word eyver (here in standard YIVO transliteration) which can mean either “limb” or “penis.” Gilman mistransliterates the word as ober (meaning “but”) thereby changing the meaning completely (p. 96). For Gilman, the only possible rescue of the Yiddish literary heritage is through English translation and criticism, as exemplified by his book. Several times he refers to the much circulated cliché about the impending “death of Yiddish” without engaging with recent scholarship that has introduced new approaches to post-vernacular Yiddish and post-Holocaust Yiddish culture.1 Following this is a chapter dealing with Leivick, whose long poem, “Ballad of Denver Sanatorium,” Gilman has translated in an appendix. Gilman’s stated aim is to restore this work “to the canon of Leivick’s work, and Leivick criticism, in English” (p. 84). He points to the centrality of the trope afn shvel (on the threshold), which later becomes a pivotal poetic device in “I Was Not in Treblinka,” Leivick’s response to the Holocaust. Gilman shows how the liminal position of the TB patient—suspended between life and death—originates in Leivick’s grueling experiences in the course of escaping tsarist Russia in 1912 and reverberates through his post-Holocaust poetry. The examination of the TB sanatorium years with regard to Leivick’s poetics of “suffering” in a Jewish key would have gained a good deal from an engagement with Yiddish primary and secondary sources. Critical sources are derived primarily from English anthologies of Yiddish literature edited by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (1986 and 2006) and Jules Chametzky et al. (2001).2 The final chapter traces Montreal Yiddish writer Sholem Shtern’s retrospective recreation of his TB sanatorium years in the form of his novel in verse, Dos vayse hoyz (The White House, 1967). Gilman shows how this work responded to the Québécois nationalism and antisemitism of the mid-1960s. The novel depicts the French Canadian as the natural “other” rooted in the land, in contrast to the TB sanatorium’s polis—the latter a kind of artificial shtetl of squabling Jewish cosmopolitans of various political and religious stripes, all of them facing a terminal illness. An example of how Gilman’s book might have benefited from a broader Yiddish transnational approach is the American Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn’s two Yash novels (1938, 1940), a key work of American Yiddish modernism. The works depict the poet’s visit to his dying mother in Lublin in 1934, which is the same time that Leivick was a patient in the JCRS sanatorium. In the second Yash novel the protagonist narrates his experiences in a Polish Jewish hotel that functions as a kind of  sanatorium outside Lublin. Similar to Leivick’s Ballad and Shtern’s Dos vayse hoyz, the Yash novels feature various Jewish representatives of political and religious groups in an imagined “Yiddishland.” The cultural, historical, and literary intersections between the works of Glatshteyn, Leivick, and Shtern would have broadened Gilman’s examination of the TB sanatorium in Yiddish literature beyond the book’s North American frame. Jan Schwarz Lund University

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Notes 1.  See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: 2006), and Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (eds.), Leket: Jiddistik heute (Dusseldorf: 2012). 2.  Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (eds.), American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Berkeley: 1986); Jules Chametsky, John Felstiner, Hilena Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (eds.), Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: 2001).

Efraim Sicher (ed.), Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Berghahn, 2013. xvii + 380 pp. What is the current status of racial thinking about Jews? One might expect to find such a sentence in a book review written in 1915 rather than 2015. Yet, as this volume clearly demonstrates, questions about Jews and race—and Jews as a race—continue to preoccupy scientists, scholars, journalists, and others. These essays offer a nuanced and welcome view of the current thinking on the subject. At the same time, when taken as a whole, the volume is somewhat schizophrenic in its presentation of the epistemic status of bio-genetic thinking when it comes to Jews, moving uneasily between the idea of race as a social construction and race, reconfigured as genetics, as biological reality. It is a virtue of the volume that it ranges so widely across geographical boundaries. There are essays dealing with matters of Jews and race in the United States, Germany, Israel, Africa, and Great Britain, as well as more theoretical essays that are not contained geographically. At least half of the essays, though, focus on the United States, perhaps because that country offers the starkest illustration of the way in which notions of race and color with regard to Jews played out historically. A majority of American Jews—those coming from Central and Eastern Europe— were regarded as white. This determination, which went more or less unquestioned, afforded Jews over time all the advantages of whiteness in a binary society organized literally along lines of black and white. At the same time, the racial identity of Jews was more problematic, as the notion of race and the category “whiteness” encompassed far more than just skin color. For Jews, questions of race had as much if not more to do with matters of what we would call “culture”—including religion—than color (though physiognomy did not, of course, cease to be important). The essays devoted to this tension do a fine job in delineating the ways in which white Jews negotiated their desire for the economic and social benefits of whiteness while at the same time refusing to accept the political and cultural mantle of whiteness that constituted the identity of the Christian majority. As Cheryl Greenberg notes, Jews, unlike other Eastern and Southern European immigrant groups, “hesitated to define themselves” as merely white (p. 38). Moreover, not all Jews in the United States, let alone around the world, were white. Several essays explore the complex challenges faced by black Jews, who had to negotiate African American antisemitism and Jewish ­racism as well as the more general systemic racism in the United States.

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Most of the essays focus on the discourse of Jews and race, and endorse the view of race as a social construction. Hence the important distinction that is made throughout the volume between color and race, with the former a rather straightforward biological or phenotypical trait and the latter a matter of subjective notions of identity. Some of the essays, however, move from the discursive to the ontological and appear to embrace the possibility that the identity of the Jews may be grounded, at least in part, in biology. Efraim Sicher seems to accept this idea, writing in the introduction that contrary to an anti-essentialist argument about Jewish identity, “sociobiology and psychological evolution theory have looked to the Bible, Jewish beliefs and practice, and comparative religion, as well as to genetic and medical evidence, to explain the continuity of the Jewish people despite adverse demographic and historical conditions, through a process of evolutionary selection” (p. 2). To be sure, race is now reconfigured as genetics, which is not only more politically and socially acceptable, but intellectually viable and compelling. And it is here that I think this collection makes its most important contribution. However, it also elides a tremendous opportunity. Those essays that stress the discursive or socially constructivist approach to Jews and race provide important reminders of the role that racial thinking has played, and continues to play, in the conception and construction of Jewish identity, both by Jews themselves and by others. While these essays offer some fascinating material probably unknown to many readers, the larger theoretical issues are by now fairly familiar. The notion that race is a construct, and thus that the Jewish race has no basis in biology, has been paradigmatic over the past half century or so. However, recent and widely publicized genetic studies having to do with what the popular media labels “Jewish genes” complicate matters. These studies would appear to challenge the assertion that race is wholly a social construct by reintroducing biology into the equation of individual and collective identities. In this regard, the most challenging essay in the volume is that of Noa Sophie Kohler and Dan Mishmar. They review the numerous genetic studies on Jews undertaken over the past few decades, studies that either confirm or challenge the normative, traditional narratives of Jewish history and identity. For instance, studies such as those carried out by Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki confirm what many or most Jews want to believe, that “most Jewish communities are genetically more similar to each other than they are to their Diaspora host populations” (p. 241). Other studies, such as the by now famous study of kohanim, may fulfill the fantasies of some that they are literally descended from the ancient high priests of Israel. Then there are others, such as those concerned with the so-called “founder effect,” that offer a far more ambiguous set of results for those committed to a straightforward homogenous Jewish identity. Despite the differences in the results of such studies, what emerges is the underlying faith that many Jews have come to evince for the science of genetics as a means by which questions of identity and belonging can be addressed and solved. While Kohler and Mishmar at times seem to query the usefulness of genetic data, in the end they endorse it as a valuable tool for historical reconstruction. There is, for instance, a 2010 study headed by Steven M. Bray that purported to demonstrate the founder effect of Ashkenazic Levites, tracing their origins back to a non-Jewish convert to

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Judaism and thus undoing the notion that Levites, unlike kohanim, can trace their ancestry back to an identifiable biblical group within the Temple in Jerusalem. This study is considered by Kohler and Mishmar to be “a case in point for unbiased research and a good example of a traditional Jewish belief not being reinforced by genetic findings. There is no place in Jewish legal rulings for a convert to become a Levi, nor has historic evidence been found. It is solely due to genetics that we have a support for this” (p. 242). While such studies open up numerous epistemological and ethical issues, their findings do not appear to unduly disturb those whose identity is being investigated. In the case of the Ashkenazic Levites, “their religious status is determined by family tradition and is not revised according to scientific research results” (ibid.). The juxtaposition of essays taking a social constructivist approach with those that embrace the reality of a biological Jewishness presents us with an important, even urgent set of questions, and we should be grateful for Sicher’s efforts in bringing these articles together. At the same time, these questions—perhaps intentionally—go mainly unaddressed. The parts of this book are bigger than the whole. The essays do not speak to one another, and so we are left to try to work out what to make of the return of a bio-genetic approach to Jewish identity and history. Should we be as sanguine as Kohler and Mishmar seem to be? Or should we resist this turn toward Jewish self-racialization? The unease felt by many Jews may be explained as follows. First, many (if not most) people are intellectually and professionally ill-equipped to evaluate the truth of genetic research. On the one hand, there is a feeling that one should trust scientific evidence; on the other, there is a historical awareness of the role that science played in modern racism and antisemitism. Does it make a difference that many of today’s researchers into Jews and genetics are themselves Jewish? Should this ease the fears of those who continue to think of the matter in relation to the 1930s and 1940s? In other words, what is the current relationship between Jews, genetics, and politics? If the reader, after closing this volume, remains uncertain or confused about the fundamental questions related to Jews and race (though not Jews and color), this is because fundamental questions appear to remain unresolved. Overall, the essays do a marvelous job in both illustrating and illuminating this confusion. Mitchell B. Hart University of Florida

Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850–1950. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. 367 pp. During the Middle Ages, Jews in the Islamic world produced a rich culture whose thought and literary creativity was expressed mainly in Classical Judeo-Arabic (that is, Arabic written in Hebrew characters with a greater or lesser admixture of Hebrew and Aramaic words). Only poetry—the ultimate art form in Muslim civilization— was written in Hebrew as a mark of national Jewish pride. However, in the late 15th

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century, medieval Judeo-Arabic began to give way to different regional vernaculars. With the influx of Sephardi refugees from Iberia, Hebrew became the primary literary language of the new elite, with local varieties of Judeo-Arabic mainly reserved for folkloric literature. In the modern era, few Jews in the Arab lands, with the notable exception of Iraqi Jews and a few individuals in Syria and Egypt, were attracted to the modern Arabic literary revival known as the Nahḍa (awakening), which was founded in large part by Levantine Christians. From the second half of the 19th century, most Jews from Morocco to the borders of Iraq began to adopt French as their language of modern expression and creativity, and Judeo-Arabic as a literary medium became increasingly marginalized—except in Tunisia. This excellent book by Yosef and Tsivia Tobi provides a detailed account of the flowering of a rich and variegated vernacular Arabic literature produced by Jews in Tunisia during the modern era over the period of a century.1 Yosef Tobi, a distinguished scholar of Judeo-Arabic language and literature in all periods, and his colleague/wife, Tsivia, an accomplished researcher in Tunisian popular literary and material culture, have written the most comprehensive study not merely of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic literature in the modern era, but of any of the JudeoArabic literatures and indeed any modern Jewish literature from the Arabic-speaking world. A few books and a fair number of articles have appeared in English, French, and Hebrew on a wide range of individual examples of one variety or another of postmedieval Judeo-Arabic literature (certain poetic genres, individual translations of a single novel, proverbs, journalistic endeavors, and calques of religious texts), but till now there have been no comprehensive surveys of a single country’s literature. The initial chapter surveys the rise of this literary efflorescence in North Africa and its connection to modernizing forces that were penetrating the region during the 19th and 20th centuries. These forces included not merely European colonialism and cultural missionaries such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, but also the Hebrew periodicals and books of the Haskalah. It also enumerates the genres that are meticulously dealt with in the next seven chapters: piyyuṭim (liturgical poems); malzūmāt (satirical ballads); qinot (laments); ghnāyāt (songs); essays on ideology and propaganda; drama and theater; and ḥ ikāyāt (narrative tales). Each of the chapters contains extensive information on writers, specific literary works, and venues of publication as well as rich, illustrative examples from the literature in translation. Some of these translations are quite substantial and extend up to a dozen pages, as for example the two laments on the death of the film and stage star Habiba Messica, who was brutally murdered by a spurned suitor (pp. 137–147) or the satirical ballad on the trials and tribulations of the Jewish hospital in Tunis (pp. 98–108), which was meant to stir the Jewish public to come to the aid of the institution. The final chapter is a translation of a short (and very hard to come by) book by the Tunisian Jewish writer Daniel Hagège, published in 1939, which surveys the circulation of JudeoArabic books in Tunisia and the authors and publishers of that literature. Rounding off the volume are two appendices containing valuable charts. The first deals with Judeo-Arabic journals and other periodicals based upon Hagège and supplemented with Robert Attal’s 2007 book on Tunisian Judeo-Arabic literature. The second is as full a listing as may be found today of Judeo-Arabic books, based upon Hagège, Attal, and other sources.

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The entire volume is amply annotated, and the notes frequently contain valuable commentary and linguistic explanations that would have cluttered the main body of the text. The four indices (names, subjects, places, and books) provide a convenient and useful search tool for scholars and students, as does the excellent bibliography. Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi have made a signal contribution not only to the modern cultural history of the Jews in Tunisia and the wider Islamic world, but also to Arabic literary studies. Their work also offers a valuable case study for comparison with other modern literatures created by Jews during this same time period in other Arab countries, Europe, and the Americas. Norman (Noam) A. Stillman University of Oklahoma

Note 1.  This is a translation of an earlier Hebrew edition: Yosef and Tsivia Tobi, Hasifrut ha’aravit hayehudit betunisiyah (1850–1950) (Tel Aviv: 2000).

History and Biography

Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 343 pp. Reading Hanukkah in America reminded me of a Friends episode in which Ben, the young son of (the Jewish) Ross, must choose between listening to the story of the Maccabees as told by his father, dressed as an armadillo (if you don’t remember why, look up “holiday armadillo” on YouTube), or opening a pile of gifts brought by “Santa.” The episode ends with the lighting of Hanukah candles alongside a decorated fir tree—a juxtaposition that is symbolic of the all-American “holiday season,” as it is now known. Fans of Friends know, of course, that in most of its Christmas episodes, Ross and his sister, Monica, decorate a fir tree and celebrate Christmas without mentioning their Jewish descent. The implicit message is that, despite Christmas’ unchallenged dominance, the day itself has drifted away from explicit Christian symbolism to become a post-Christian holiday. The Hanukah scene described here raises the question: Is the same true of Hanukah? Has it become a “post-Jewish” holiday? This question hovers over Hanukkah in America, in which Dianne Ashton chronicles how a once minor holiday gradually became (along with Passover) one of the most significant days on the American Jewish calendar, as well as the most prominent symbol of Jewish culture in the wider American milieu. This process entailed a dramatic makeover in the content and traditional meanings of the festival. The ancient Maccabees story was adjusted to fit the American pluralist reality, since “Hellenization” (read: Americanization) was longed for by many Jews. Moreover, espe­cially of late, the burning issue has ceased to be the struggle against an outside force for religious freedom; what is more at stake today is the maintenance of a clear sense of Jewish identity. In her introduction, Ashton points to four factors that moved Hanukah to the center stage of American Jewish life. First, the candle-lighting ceremony is simple, short, and easily performed. Moreover, its domesticity renders its supervision by religious authorities impossible, which makes the ceremony more adjustable to various needs and contexts. Second, it falls during the December holiday season, at a time when American culture sanctifies the cult of family and children. Third, the original story can be retold in diverse ways to suit American Jewish dilemmas, while always featuring the heroes as “us” American Jews. And finally, because the story underlines the tension between miraculous intervention and the Jews’ religious devotion, it serves to trigger conversations about the role of religion and God in modern life. 289

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In my view, a distinction can be made between the first two factors, which are unique to Hanukah, and the latter two, which are relevant for any holiday or cultural practice. As argued by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, any (hi)story can and always is retold and reinterpreted in light of present-day circumstances. All religious holidays have content, story, and message, and what makes one holiday more prominent  than another is often a matter of timing, specific festive practices, or even material objects. An object like the Hanukah menorah, for example, is more apt to strengthen or permanently fix the importance of this particular holiday—in contrast with the “four species” of Sukkot, which dry out and need to be replenished each year, a menorah may be handed down from one generation to the next. Setting the background for American Jewish interpretations of the Hanukah story, the first chapter of the book elaborates on the origins of the ancient festival and its rabbinical interpretations, such as the famous “What is Hanukah” question with which the rabbis opened the matter for interpretation. Here, it may have been useful to add a reference to the talmudic text dealing with an ancient, eight-day festival that was celebrated in the aftermath of the winter solstice.1 Following this introduction, the story of Hanukah in America is chronologically unfolded, with an emphasis on “Hanukkah’s timing, its story, its domesticity, and its joyfulness” (p. 231). Chapter 2 describes the struggles waged between traditionalists and reformers among American Jewry, which were expressed through differing interpretations of the traditional story. Ashton also recounts how, in the latter half of the 19th century, popular retellings of the Hanukah story were appearing in periodicals such as The Israelite and pageants glorifying the Maccabean revolt were being staged by chapters of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA). One such pageant, held at the Academy of Music in New York in 1879, contained a highly gendered and hierarchical tableau: “male heroes and priests above with the divine light of the Temple shining on them, other warriors standing below, and women kneeling before them all.” Ashton notes that pageants such as these “portrayed the Jewish past with grandeur, along with a Victorian sense of social order and piety” (p. 63). Chapter 3 demonstrates how, during this era, Hanukah was also being recast as a children’s festival, in close parallel with changes that took place in American Christmas celebrations. Among other innovations was the introduction of Sunday-morning Hanukah parties, which were mostly organized by women and held in synagogues. This chapter demonstrates how the perceived need to differentiate Hanukah from Christmas actually resulted in the two holidays becoming more similar, most notably in their common focus on the purchase and giving of gifts. The emphasis on gifts and shopping continued in the era of mass immigration (1880–1924), as described in Chapter  4, and in the interwar era (described in Chapter  5), in which the emerging consumer culture came to dominate Hanukah. “The result,” according to Ashton, was “a Hanukkah filled with objects [. . .] Hanukkah and the American marketplace had become interwoven to an unprecedented degree” (p. 183). The sixth chapter describes the increased blurring of boundaries between Christmas and Hanukah during the postwar era, with the suburbanization and the renaissance of religious institutions—this was when, for example, the notorious “Hanukah bush” made its first appearance. Chapter 7 describes the attempts at reinventing Hanukah made by Jewish Renewal activists, who criticized the lack of spiri-

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tuality and the overemphasis on consumer culture in the Hanukah of the established Jewish communities. At the same time, the Chabad hasidim had begun to stand out in their unprecedented assertiveness of Judaism in the public sphere, most notably by means of public Hanukah candle-lightings, which from the 1970s onwards were impossible to ignore; by the Clinton administration, even the White House was a venue for the ceremony. The major attraction of Hanukkah in America is the wealth of detail it provides as Ashton tackles such questions as who celebrates the holiday, and when, how, where, and with whom it is celebrated. Her analysis powerfully demonstrates how minor changes can serve as a litmus test for significant socio-cultural transformations. At the same time, despite its ethnographic wealth, the story is presented in a somewhat overly schematic manner. In the story of the Jews in America, Hanukah appears as Forrest Gump: it is always there, present at all the key historical junctures. Yet Ashton’s account of the holiday offers no new perspective on the American Jewish story as a whole. In particular, I think that the book would have benefited from ­discussion of a fundamental question reflected upon by scholars of American festive culture such as Elizabeth Pleck—namely, what made modern holidays such a major expression of ethnic and religious identity, beginning with the industrial era and continuing until the present day?2 Ashton only hints at this matter in the epilogue, in which she writes that for the decisive majority of American Jews, “[Hanukkah] is all for the children” (p. 275). In addition, Hanukah could have been better contextualized vis-à-vis the history of Christmas, which was hardly the most important holiday on the American calendar until it, too, developed into a major national event. The author’s reluctance to present Hanukah as merely the Jewish foil of Christmas, along with her preference for focusing on the meanings mined from the holiday by American Jews, are aimed at demonstrating how contemporary Hanukah is by no means “post-Jewish,” but rather a significant cultural mechanism by which Jews understand their Jewishness. Despite this truism, my own feeling is that the history of the diverse ways in which Hanukah’s cultural boundaries grew ever closer to those of Christmas is the truly interesting and innovative story. These caveats aside, Ashton has succeeded in putting together a fascinating account of Hanukah in America; students of modern festive culture, and not only of American Jewish holiday culture, will undoubtedly find the book to be instructive. Hizky Shoham Bar-Ilan University Shalom Hartman Institute

Notes 1.  BT, ’Avodah zarah 8a. 2.  Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture and Family Rituals (Cambridge, Mass.: 2000).

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Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn (eds.), Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. viii + 309 pp. It is a mark of the increased sophistication of the field of American Jewish studies that practicing scholars no longer feel it necessary (or sufficient) to define their investigations as limited to what has transpired within the territorial boundaries of the United States. Rather, in keeping with wider trends in historical research in recent decades, scholars interested in the American Jewish experience are beginning to display greater sensitivity to the interplay between social, cultural, and economic phenomena in the United States and their counterparts abroad. This approach is forcefully expressed by the editors of this new volume in the first pages of their introductory essay. Their manifesto is thoroughly borne out in the rest of the book. The shift toward transnational studies seems, in long-term retrospect, to have grown out of two impulses in general academic discourse. First, it is the natural extension of a longstanding interest in social history—that is, bottom-up historical research that begins from street-level social experience rather than from nations, states, and political institutions. Having set aside (for the sake of targeted studies) the influence of governments, leaders, and nations, it then became possible to ask how the lives of many ordinary people took shape within micro-communities of their own making. Social historians assigned “agency” (the power to initiate and shape events and processes) to people who otherwise had been relegated to merely passive roles in the larger historical narrative. Individuals and smaller groups “evade” the heavy-handed limits of spatial boundaries and political power when they are seen working below and beyond the radar of the local established powers that be. When dealing with immigrant populations in a place like America, which has always been a crossroads for mobilized families and individuals on the move, the orientation of historians only to the local boundaries of community life was bound to come up short, considering that immigrants’ lives frequently retain a “foreign” dimension. Second, transnational and trans-local studies are frequently interlaced with a postcolonial subtext, adding critical perspective to research on empires, their subjects, and their frontiers. Imperial domains subvert local national cultures in the name of dominant interests. For the same reason, however, empires are instruments for dislocating and transferring far-flung populations and involving them in schemes of development, migration, and conquest. Transnational scholarship aims, in some instances, to enhance, “correct,” or recover the story of those groups who came from the margins of empires but acquired the means to position themselves more favorably. The volume under review contains a number of interesting and notable gambits by scholars imbued with some of these perspectives. Adam D. Mendelsohn examines the trans-Atlantic “Diffusion of New Models of Religious Leadership” in the AngloAmerican Jewish world, using a microcosmic paradigm based on three brothers and their 19th-century careers. Ava F. Kahn, a veteran of regional historical research, invokes the interconnected histories among Jews moving along different sea lanes in “Roaming the Rim: How Rabbis, Convicts, and Fortune Seekers Shaped Pacific

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Coast Jewry.” This topic is further addressed by Suzanne D. Rutland’s essay on Australia and California, which expands the chronological frame from the 19th into the mid-20th century. Two essays are devoted to the influence wielded in late 19th-century Eastern Europe by American-based and American Jewish-sponsored enterprises. Rebecca Kobrin’s “Currents and Currency” addresses the globalized network of financing arrangements that facilitated the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the West, chiefly to the United States. Eric L. Goldstein (better known until now for his interest in Jews and racial discourse in America), examines the role of “American Yiddish Publications in Imperial Russia” as a channel for the flow of information, but even more as a positive image of freedom of the press. Several essays are devoted to particular corners of the Jewish immigrant world. Tobias Brinkmann, an established authority on “German” Jews in American cities in the 19th century, provides a well-honed capsule survey of the emergence of “German” as a label available at large for Central European Jews who had relocated to the United States (noting that a generic “German” brand for such Jews did not appear in U.S. publications until 1880). German-related identity and behavior shows up in similar approaches to religion, family life, and social life more broadly. Lara Rabinovitch’s “The Gypsy in Them: Imagined Transnationalism amid New York’s Little Rumania” is narrower in scope, but yields an exciting new angle on popular culture and the transitional, alternative identities sometimes adopted by entertainers and other figures in the process of negotiating Jewish difference. Jonathan Goldstein’s “No American Goldene Medina” discusses the oft-forgotten enclave of Russian Jews who settled in Harbin, China in the early 20th century, placing this experience in the context of the times and the immigrants’ different strategies. Ellen Eisenberg, a steady provider of studies on Jews in rural settings, contributes a new essay on the formation of Jewish farming projects in late-19th- and early 20th-century Argentina and the United States. Joan G. Roland’s essay on Bene Israel Jews from India who settled in the United States is well worth reading in the context of Bene Israel studies pertaining to Israel, as well as in the framework of South Asian immigration studies focused on the United States. This impressive volume is rounded out by Ava F. Kahn, who offers a second contribution, this one on “Transnational Aspirations: The Founding of American Kibbutzim, 1940s, 1970s,” which deals with two different generations of American Jewish immigrants to Israel who looked to the kibbutz as their communal ideal. Throughout the essays, one reads a current of fresh, critical thought, which works in various ways to reduce the oft-cited “exceptionalism” of America (and by extension, American Jewry). Jews in America, we are told, are to be studied within the fabric of American society, to be sure; but, at the same time, that fabric (and its Jewish aspects) can never be seen as insular. In this volume, American Jewish history is depicted through reflections on the worldwide networks established by migrating Jews, American Jews’ roles in projecting their influence and activities to other lands, and the border-crossings (geographical as well as cultural) that are somehow at the root of the American experience. Americanists have been debating the question of America’s quintessential character for a very long time. Here, in this volume, scholars of American Jewry add their view that America—revolutionary, independent,

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New World, “made in the U.S.A.” though it was—resonated (and still resonates) with globally connected narratives. Eli Lederhendler The Hebrew University

Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 321 pp. Yiddish as a word—not as the name of a language—literally means “Jewish.” Thus, to speak “Yiddish” means to speak “Jewish,” or, to borrow an apt and colorful phrase from the eminent literary scholar, David G. Roskies, “Jewspeak.” Yet the semiotic union of the two meanings (Jewish and Jewish speech) becomes a dualism when we translate the relevant concepts into English usage. The designated term in English for “Jewish” does not do double duty as the accepted proper name of the Euro-Jewish Ashkenazi vernacular (except, indeed, in the colloquial usage among a certain generation of American Jewish immigrants). Cecile Kuznitz’s book carries the problem of this dualism into its very title, in which she refers first to “Jewish culture” and second to the “Yiddish nation.” As her book makes clear, the subject—the history of YIVO, the acronym for Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (the Yiddish/Jewish Academic Institute, known today in English as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)— requires recourse to this dualism. Moreover, transmuting “Jewish” into “Yiddish,” as Kuznitz does in her subtitle, is a necessary clarification. As “Jewish” as the term Yiddish might be etymologically, YIVO’s mandate was to study specifically Yiddish-speaking Jewry and to promote its culture in all its ramifications. The Institute, founded in 1925 and headquartered in the (then) Polish city of Wilno (the historic Vilna of Russian imperial times and Vil’nius, capital of Lithuania today), was wholly identified with the linguisticcultural heritage of Ashkenazi Jewry per se. Notwithstanding, YIVO’s intellectual leading lights tended to elide the distinction between “Jewish” and “Yiddish,” insofar as  Yiddish represented, for them, a coherent repository of core Jewish values and experiences. This attempt to efface the conceptual distinctions between Yiddish (language) and Jewish (culture) was deemed feasible at the time, because Yiddish was still the native tongue of the largest number of Jews—as many as two-thirds or more of the world total. Even then, however, Yiddish (as Kuznitz points out) constituted only one of the linguistic and cultural strategies that Jewish intellectuals were pursuing at the time, whether around the world or around the corner from YIVO. The era from the late 19th to the early 20th century saw the development of high-level cultural discourses and academic disciplines in the co-territorial languages (for instance, German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, and English) used by Jews in various lands, alongside the development in Palestine of a modern Hebrew-language-based cultural and academic idiom. In that context, championing Yiddish not only as an object of research but also as a form of ethnic and linguistic self-affirmation, and as a sophisticated medium

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for Jewish academic, pedagogical, and public discourse, was by definition an ideological project, carried out in conscious contradistinction to the available alternatives. YIVO’s history, as Kuznitz’s book bears out, exemplifies the bitterly contested, multilingual cultural politics of the Jews in modern times. At this point, some full disclosure is in order. Like Kuznitz, who speaks personally and admiringly about the men and women of the latter-day YIVO Institute in New York (today a partner of the Center for Jewish History), whose work she observed and participated in, I, too, am a YIVO alumnus, having worked at YIVO during two brief stints in the late 1970s and in the mid-1990s. Kuznitz’s research focuses almost entirely on the European period of the Institute (1920s to 1940). With regard to the post-1940 metamorphosis of YIVO in New York, she presents only a hurried summary in the form of an epilogue. Nonetheless, her description of the Vilna YIVO during the early 1930s, when the entire enterprise nearly expired because of financial difficulties (staff salaries were not paid for months at a time, leading to work stoppages and a strike at one point), was for me a vivid historical “prequel” to a similar episode during my time at YIVO. The tottering state of affairs at the prewar YIVO (and its uncanny recapitulation decades later in New York) figures prominently in Kuznitz’s portrait of the institute and its history. Kuznitz conveys, with subtlety and precision, the underlying paradox of YIVO: a cultural center with world-class academic ambitions and a grandiose self-image that was, at the same time, continually and precariously poised on the verge of collapse— to say nothing of the impact of the drastic socioeconomic fortunes and the deteriorating political status of Polish Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s. She refers, without undue exaggeration, to the YIVO “mystique”: the extraordinary perception cultivated by YIVO’s leaders among themselves, and assiduously promoted among their myriad grass-roots supporters, that their work was a sacred mission. YIVO, as they saw it, possessed the status of a national institution—a substitute “government” and “capital” of a non-territorial global diaspora; a symbol or “myth” of the Jewish epic covering an entire, thousand-year-long legacy, which they themselves canonized; a myth that, predictably, gained in luster and pathos precisely at the time of its tragic demise under the Soviet and finally Nazi occupation of Lithuania. Indeed, without that myth and the devotion it inspired, one could hardly explain why YIVO staffers risked their lives, and the lives of others, to rescue precious manuscripts and books for posterity, literally under the Nazis’ noses. Kuznitz is at her best when detailing the professional and ideological debates that energized (and plagued) the YIVO staff and its supporters (and detractors) even before the institute took shape and throughout its career in Europe. She makes a strong case, too, when it comes to delineating the institute’s achievements in the sphere of historical, social, linguistic, and statistical scholarship; its publication record; and the considerable efforts that it made to create reader-friendly journals to popularize academic projects and to forge links with teachers in the secular Yiddish school system in Poland and abroad. Indeed, given the circumstances in which it operated, words like “audacious” and even “awe-inspiring” seem most apt to describe what YIVO did in Vilna and in its other branch offices. Yet there is another level (not explicitly examined by Kuznitz) at which the audacity of YIVO’s vision appears all the more profound, or perhaps so extreme as to test

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the limits of utopian thinking. The coterie of scholars and writers who formed YIVO set out (in Kuznitz’s words) to “make” Jewish culture possible—nay, essential— under conditions of life in a modern, secular, diaspora. This they thought to do by the power of words alone. The ultimate idea behind YIVO was that Yiddish/Jewish culture was sustainable by language, without the physical props of statehood, territory, and similar national resources, and without the apparatus of Jewish traditional culture (customs, beliefs, and everyday ritualized behavior). Kuznitz presents the secularism and diaspora nationalism that animated the leaders of YIVO more or less as a matter of course, without actually stepping back to subject these terms to critical scrutiny. The intellectual and spiritual abstraction that the YIVO vision entailed is what ultimately placed its work far beyond the ken of those “simple Jews” for whom, ostensibly, the entire edifice of cultural reconstruction was undertaken. Its rarified point of view is reminiscent, perhaps, of other great ideological projects of the Jewish mind from other times and places (the texts of kabbalistic mysticism come to mind). Be that as it may, YIVO never had the resources that national language academies elsewhere rely upon, nor did it ever get the opportunity to reformulate its ideas in terms that a living community of “simple Jews” might adopt as part of a quotidian lifestyle. That is, it never actually succeeded in eliding the distinction between “Yiddish” and “Jewish.” Cecile Kuznitz is to be applauded for her well-researched, eloquent reconstruction of the unique venture that YIVO represents. As she puts it so well in her closing pages, there is something yet to learn from the career of this quintessentially Jewish— quintessentially Yiddish—institution, caught ultimately on the horns of existential dilemmas too enormous to be resolved by words alone. Eli Lederhendler The Hebrew University

Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism and Orthodoxy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 390 pp. Jess Olson’s book is an attempt to rescue an important figure in modern Jewish history from obscurity. In his lifetime, Nathan Birnbaum was involved in the major Jewish ideological movements of Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Zionism, diaspora nationalism, Yiddishism, and religious Orthodoxy. While most scholars either ignore Birnbaum or dismiss his intellectual peregrinations as the ramblings of a confused thinker and an egotistical and irascible personality, Olson contends that they actually reflected a sophisticated and largely credible effort to redefine the basis for Jewish national identity in a period of complex challenges. Born in 1864 in Vienna, Birnbaum helped to found Kadimah, one of the first Jewish nationalist movements in Central Europe. In the 1880s and 1890s, he largely framed the goals of the nascent Zionist movement, even going so far as to coin the term “Zionismus” in one of his essays. Not surprisingly, therefore, Birnbaum was

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deeply troubled by the sudden appearance of Theodor Herzl in the late 1890s as “savior” of the Jewish people. Though he was appointed secretary-general of the Actions Committee at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Birnbaum left the organization two years later, his decision prompted by a combination of petty jealousy, the need to earn a living, and principled concern. Birnbaum did not, however, abandon Jewish nationalism. Instead, he now increasingly focused his energies on finding an explanation for the centuries-long survival of the Jewish people in the diaspora. His conclusion was that, far from representing a life in “exile,” the diaspora experience had been the source of much of Jewish creativity—including, ironically, the modern Zionist movement. (As he famously stated: “Israel precedes Zion.”) In 1907, in the course of his unsuccessful run in Galicia for a seat in the lower house of the Austrian Reichsrat, Birnbaum adopted the ideal of Jewish cultural autonomy. “Discovering” the Jewish masses of Central and Eastern Europe, he now extolled the value of Yiddish as the source of Jewish national unity in the past and as the vehicle for ensuring a national cultural renaissance in the future. (In 1908, Birnbaum helped convene the Czernowitz conference, which proclaimed Yiddish to be “a”—though not “the”—national language of the Jewish people.) Sometime before the First World War, Birnbaum abruptly changed course again and adopted the beliefs and rituals of religious Orthodoxy. His effort in the 1930s to create an elite corps of young observant Jews who would bring non-believers back to the fold would find little support in the face of the rise of Nazism and antisemitism. Birnbaum died in 1937, convinced that Jewry was in desperate straits and longing once again for a return to the land in Palestine. Olson traces Birnbaum’s personal history and intellectual development in meticulous detail, thanks in large part to his access to Birnbaum’s previously unexamined personal letters in his family’s archive. The author has also succeeded in tracking down Birnbaum’s voluminous articles, essays, tracts, correspondence, and speeches. In emphasizing the depth and subtlety of Birnbaum’s thought and explaining the reasons for his ideological odyssey, Olson provides the reader with extremely valuable insights into the major movements Birnbaum encountered during his intellectual journey and the historical contexts in which they arose. Of particular importance is Olson’s discussion of religious Orthodoxy as a viable choice for a modern Jewish intellectual. His work reminds us that in the difficult and rapidly changing conditions that attended the modernization of Central and East European Jewish life, many solutions were offered to ensure Jewish national survival and growth, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For all the importance of Olson’s book, however, one comes away with a sense that the author has not always succeeded in explaining away the significant inconsistencies and ambiguities in Birnbaum’s thought. In discussing the reasons for Birnbaum’s turn to traditional religious observance, for example, Olson is confronted with two profoundly different personal accounts that cannot easily be aligned. In the end, he is forced to rely largely on the letters of Birnbaum’s acolyte, Tuvia Horowitz, which provide the reader with an insight into the latter’s mindset but do not fully explain that of Birnbaum. At the same time, the author’s continual attempt to counter previous historical analyses that either have portrayed Birnbaum in a negative light or have dismissed his significance leads at times to overstatement. It may have been true, as

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Olson contends, that many Zionists questioned Herzl’s activity, but few were prepared to abandon the movement entirely, as did Birnbaum. Ultimately, Olson is forced to admit that Birnbaum’s many transformations cannot be explained rationally or scientifically. What matters, the author argues, was “the awesome depth of the individual life and its convictions” and Birnbaum’s commitment “to pursuing with all his means his deepest sense of personal authenticity regardless of where it took him” (p. 16). If Olson appears at times to force his analysis, it is only because of his deep conviction that Birnbaum’s role in the various movements in which he participated was distorted or minimized by Herzl and others who did battle with him. In the end, Olson makes a compelling case for revisiting the writings of this fascinating thinker and activist who made a signal contribution both to modern Jewish nationalism and to Orthodox Judaism. David Weinberg Wayne State University

Lee Shai Weissbach (ed. and trans.), A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 470 pp. The life of Menachem Mendel Frieden (1878–1963) extended over nine decades and three continents. His memoir reflects the broad panorama of his life as a Jew who was born in Eastern Europe, migrated to the United States, made aliyah to Palestine, and then returned to America. Written for the sake of his descendants, this is the record of an East European Jew with a sense of historical awareness. Frieden’s memoir is rich in description, full of material that can be utilized by historians wishing both to reconstruct the past and to understand the spirit of the times in which he lived. It is significant as well for being the account of an “ordinary Jew” rather than that of a public figure or political leader—a fact that acquires additional importance when Freiden discusses his life in Palestine in the interwar period. During that time, he lived with his family in Jerusalem rather than following the more common path of draining marshes in an outlying region. At first he opened a small cigarette factory; after going bankrupt, he began working with the Joint Distribution Committee in Palestine as a representative of the Loan Bank. He spent the years of the Second World War in Palestine and in 1946 decided to return with his family to Norfolk, Virginia. As he explains it: “This great fear, the worry over our sons and sons-in-law on the various fields of battle, the frightening cost of living […] and above all, the serious illness that consequently befell me […] all this motivated me to leave the Land of Israel” (p. 393). The memoir, originally written in Hebrew, is divided into eighteen chapters. A disproportionate amount of space—the first eleven chapters—is given to Frieden’s early years in Europe. This follows a pattern noted by YIVO archivist Yehezkel Lifshits in a comprehensive 1970 bibliography of American and Canadian Jewish memoirs and autobiographies in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. Most memoirists, Lifshits wrote, “came to America in their early twenties and some even in their teens.

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Their lives were molded in this country and in Canada. Yet their autobiographies and memoirs are far more concerned with their native hamlets and towns than with the country of their adoption, where they lived, in some cases, for fifty years and more.”1 In line with this observation, Frieden’s memoir devotes only two chapters to his migration to the United States and the difficulties of acclimatization, with the rest of the volume covering his immigration to Palestine, his life there, and his subsequent return to the United States. Each chapter begins with a preface by Weissbach that offers an overview of its content and historical context. The volume also contains a prologue, again written by Weissbach, discussing the uses of memoirs as a historical source and an epilogue that sums up Frieden’s life. Scattered throughout are extensive footnotes and clarifications regarding personalities, historical events, and geographical sites. Frieden was a wandering Jew who participated in the massive Jewish migration from Eastern Europe that began at the end of the 19th century and continued throughout the first decades of the 20th century. Over the course of this period, old centers of Jewish population in Europe gradually lost their importance; during the Holocaust, most were destroyed. Taking their place were newer concentrations of Jewish settlement, most significantly in the United States and in Palestine. However, despite points of resemblance in the underlying causes of migration, the historiography dealing with migration to the United States is very different from that concerning migration to Palestine. The Jews who migrated to the United States did so for economic reasons, while those who went to Palestine arrived as immigrants for ideological reasons. Because of this, historians of the Jewish migration tended to stress the differences between the two migration movements to Palestine and the United States. Frieden’s memoir, dealing with both places, provides points of contact between the two approaches. Among the questions concerning migration is why, within a specific economic and political reality, some people choose to leave while others stay behind.2 Another question pertains to the decision-making process with regard to countries and cities of destination. In terms of the latter, one important factor was the presence or absence of reliable information about the economic possibilities in the destination country— in particular, information provided by a family member who had already migrated. Between the years 1881–1900, approximately half a million people migrated to the United States; from 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War, approximately two million additional migrants arrived. Those who had come during the 1880s and 1890s not only provided a support network for later migrants but were a source of reliable information about employment prospects in the United States.3 Frieden’s memoir is a good illustration of this point. In contrast with many European Jews who settled in northeastern U.S. coastal cities such as New York or Boston, he chose to go to Norfolk, Virginia in the wake of his brother. He left his wife with her parents in Eastern Europe and migrated alone to his brother, who had arrived there a few years earlier, opening a grocery store that barely provided a livelihood for his family. Frieden, who had been unaware of the economic situation of his brother, tried to become self-sufficient and himself opened a grocery store in a mostly AfroAmerican neighborhood.

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Frieden’s account of life in a small city with relatively few Jews (whether migrants or native-born), his encounter with the local black population, and his attempts to open his own business is of particular interest, as it opens a window onto a rarely described venue of Jewish settlement in the early 20th century. “[T]he assumption was that every black was a thief and a murderer, and that one had to keep careful watch around them, and I didn’t know the language and was unable to converse with them,” he writes. “Their faces were the faces of savages, their eyes protruding and frightening, their white teeth jutting out from the blackness of their faces, their lips red and thick” (p. 231). When his economic situation improved a little, Frieden bought a sailing voucher on installments and sent it to his wife. Frieden’s emigration to Palestine during the period of the Third Aliyah also broke with the usual mode. Very few East European Jewish immigrants to America subsequently left the country (the proportion of returnees at the beginning of the 20th century was estimated at only 5 percent, and after the First World War, it was even lower), and even fewer moved to Palestine. Frieden, however, had become involved in Zionist activities during his stay in the United States, and in 1921 he made up his mind to leave Norfolk and to immigrate to Palestine. Arriving there shortly after the Jaffa riots of May 1921, he once again met with a local non-Jewish population that filled him with unease. Lee Shai Weissbach, the editor and translator, is Frieden’s grandson (he is, in addition, a professor at the University of Louisville and the author of the important work Jewish Life in Small-Town America [2005]). He has done excellent work in his textual annotations and prefaces, informing readers not only about Frieden but about the periods in which he lived. Moreover, Weissbach (who was born in Israel but who has spent most of his life in the United States) approaches the text both with sensitivity and a necessary scholarly distance. Menachem Mendel Frieden has indeed been well-served by one of the descendants he had in mind when he set down his life story. Gur Alroey Haifa University

Notes 1.  See Yehezkel Lifshits, Bibliografye fun amerikaner un kanader yidishe zikhroynes un oytobiografyes oyf yidish, hebreish un english (New York: 1970), 1–2. 2.  On this point, see, for instance, Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers (New York: 1977), 57. 3.  Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago: 1986), 118.

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Gideon Aran, Kookism: shoreshei Gush Emunim, tarbut hamitnaḥ alim, teologiyah tziyonit, meshiḥ iyut bizmanenu (Kookism: The Roots of Gush Emunim, Settler Culture, Zionist Theology, and Contemporary Messianism). Jerusalem: Carmel Publishers, 2013. 464 pp. Back in the 1970s, when Gideon Aran was a doctoral student specializing in the sociology of extremist cults, he began to observe the phenomenon of Gush Emunim, a nationalist religious movement that had begun to form in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. His assumption was that this was a quirky, ephemeral movement that would be gone by the time he finished his dissertation. More than thirty years later, however, Aran is still avidly following the metamorphosis of Gush Emunim from a negligible and little-known circle of devotees to a powerful movement that has exerted a formidable influence on the political face and destiny of the state of Israel. His latest work is a fascinating, real-time record of the various stages of this development. Aran’s main focus is on the movement’s original hard-core founders and the ideology driving their distinctive variety of religious activism. Popularly known as “Kookism,” this ideology ostensibly draws heavily on the thought of R. Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865–1935), the first chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community in British Mandatory Palestine. In his time, Kook was confronted with the paradox of a  Jewish nationalist movement that effectively realized the traditional vision of redemption: promoting the return to the homeland, the ingathering of the exiles, and bringing the desert to bloom, while at the same time deliberately rejecting religious observance. The problematic nature of secular Zionism led him to develop a dialectical worldview that regarded the Zionist Jewish “heresy” as a religious impulse in disguise. According to Kook, the rebellion of the early pioneers against the tradition of their fathers was actually a legitimate critique of the narrow religiosity of diaspora Judaism; at bottom it revealed a subconscious yearning for a more full-blooded spirituality that would encompass all facets of life. This broader goal, in R. Kook’s eyes, was merely the reflection of a higher, all-inclusive unity eternally present on a metaphysical plane. The unique mission of the Jewish people in returning to their homeland was to demonstrate this divine reality on the earthly plane, by playing out the circumscribed religiosity of the synagogue and the beit midrash, and concern for one’s personal spiritual welfare, both in a collective manner and on a national scale. Kook believed that this extended application of spirituality bore practical ramifications as well. A more inclusive view of the holy enhances our vision of the possible. 301

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It encourages us to blur distinctions between the supernatural and the natural, between infinite perfection and the limitations of created being, thereby heralding redemption of the cosmos at large. Kook’s claim to understand the motives of the rebellious pioneers better than they did themselves has been decried by many as patronizing and presumptuous. In addition, although he garnered a considerable measure of awe and respect for his saintliness and spiritual depth, as well as for his impressive grasp of classical Jewish sources and his attunement to the philosophical currents of the surrounding Western culture, his sweeping vision of “sanctifying the profane” gained little traction during his lifetime. Rich with mystic allusions, this central aspect of his thought remained an obscure body of writings studied by a narrow circle of disciples, with little practical influence. His attempt to establish the Degel Yerushalayim movement (dubbed by Aran a “Zionist religion”) as a more comprehensive spiritual alternative to the pragmatic Mizrahi brand of religious Zionism was a failure, as were his efforts on behalf of an effective chief rabbinate that would unite the Jewish people. Even his ambitious plans for a “central world yeshiva” that would feature a course of study reflecting the breadth of Kook’s unique redemptive vision eventually boiled down to an institution consisting, in his lifetime, of no more than a handful of students who were engaged, for the most part, in the standard yeshiva curriculum. Aran’s book traces the transformation of Kook’s legacy from an esoteric vision into the practical ideology of Kookism, which in turn fueled Gush Emunim. He locates the origins of Kookism in the unexpected (or—if you will—providential) alliance created between a handful of earnest teenagers and R. Kook’s son, R. Zvi Yehuda. This took place in the early 1950s, when R. Yaakov Moshe Harlap, Kook’s close disciple, passed away, and the task of running Mercaz Harav fell into Zvi Yehuda’s hands. Several students in the yeshiva who were affiliated with Bnei Akiva, the major youth movement of religious Zionism, were troubled by an anomaly similar to that originally confronted by R. Kook, frustrated by a sense of their marginalization in the context of secular Zionism and its vibrant pioneering spirit. Their desire to find a practical outlet for their religious idealism dovetailed with Zvi Yehuda’s mission of disseminating his father’s teachings. R. Zvi Yehuda was a charismatic figure whose personal warmth and ascetic way of life inspired the small circle of students that collected around him. However, he lacked his father’s originality and depth. In his hands, the nationalist and political elements of his father’s teachings were brought to the fore and translated into an aggressive chauvinism that placed state, sovereignty, and territorial dominion at the center of its messianic strivings. As opposed to the vague and lofty character of his father’s theology, Zvi Yehuda’s narrower vision provided his young followers with a clear plan of campaign, according to which “redemption of the land” and Jewish dominion at any cost was a primary religious duty. They, on their part, cultivated his public image in the media, such that the prominence and influence of settler politics after 1967, and the proudly militant nationalism promoted in Zvi Yehuda’s name, was to some extent a product of their making. Creating a cult of hero worship around Zvi Yehuda facilitated the advancement of an ideology of religious activism that viewed the hanging of diapers on a clothesline in Samaria as holy ritual, re-appropriating in revised political format the traditional vision of redemption that secular Zionism had

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abandoned. In the long run, according to this view, the new, imperialized version of Jewish nationalism would bring about the salvation not only of the Jews but also of their Arab neighbors, and of the nations of the world at large. Although an avowed secularist, Aran managed to gain the confidence of the subjects of his study and to develop genuine friendships with some of them (as he explains, such friendships were grounded, in part, in the hope that Aran might himself be converted to the cause). This, in turn, allowed him to penetrate the founders’ inner circle and to witness firsthand their responses to the growing disparity between real and the ideal. As this disparity developed not only in the religious sphere (in the form of unrelenting secularism) but also in the political realm (with the persistence of Arab terrorism, and the lack of a Jewish consensus regarding the primacy of land over peace), Aran records the gradual demise of Kookism and its branching out into one of two alternatives: on the one hand, a more insular variety of religiosity that, apart from its continued reverence for Jewish political sovereignty, more closely resembles ultraOrthodoxy; on the other, a slightly more bullish version of the moderate religious Zionism that predominated in the era prior to Gush Emunim. Aran’s empathy for some of the leading figures in his study does not prevent him from assuming a detached, critical stance when evaluating the repercussions of their increasing reliance upon an “inner” dialectic fraught with hidden religious meaning as a means of bridging the gap between ideology and what might appear to be brute fact. (The idea is that the worse things look on the surface, the greater and more valuable the significance about to be revealed.) His deep reservations regarding some of the moral positions adopted by Gush Emunim, its lack of civic responsibility, and its utter disdain for what others would describe as political realism become increasingly forceful as the book moves along. These phenomena serve to highlight the problematic marriage between traditional Judaism and secular Zionism that is the central thesis of this book. While Aran’s professional orientation is sociological, he adopts an interdisciplinary approach in documenting the rise and fall of Kookist ideology—deftly combining detailed accounts of cultic mannerisms and practices (for instance, a fascinating description of the unique role and status of women within Gush Emunim’s inner circle) with a historical survey of Zionism, a penetrating summary of R. Kook’s theology, a scholarly discussion of the relationship between mysticism and messianism, and allusions to comparable manifestations in other religions. These amplifications are illuminating and valuable, though their seemingly random interspersion within a primarily chronological account makes for occasional repetition and draws attention to some of the book’s drawbacks: the lack of an index, the dearth of subsections and a narrative that could have been more tightly organized. Despite these reservations, the patient reader will end up with a riveting and vivid portrait of the rise and fall of “Zionist religion” that raises important questions regarding the viability of conflating the classical redemptive vision of Judaism with the political reality of the modern state of Israel. Aran’s study suggests that the very success of one might imply the failure of the other. Or, to phrase it in Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s inimitable terms: “The Messiah is essentially he who always will come . . .  The Messiah who comes, the Messiah of the present, is invariably the false Messiah.”1 Faithful Kookists, however, still have the option of retaining Kook’s dialectical mode of thinking, by regarding the breakdown

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of Kookism itself as yet another element of God’s mysterious plan. In this spirit, they might understand the current stalemate Israel faces on a political level, alongside a blurring of the sharp religious/secular divide on the cultural front, as a sign that the time is ripe for pushing the settler ideology of Gush Emunim beyond the limits of Zionist religion to another level of Jewish self-understanding—one that avoids the perils of modern nationalism by overcoming its obsession with territorial sovereignty, preferring instead to mesh religious commitment with protection of minority rights and more general humanist concerns. In addition to its other virtues, Aran’s study offers an important preamble to this discussion. Tamar Ross Bar-Ilan University

Note 1.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1992), 72.

Israel Bartal and Shimon Shamir (eds.), Beit Salomon: sheloshah dorot shel meḥ adeshei hayishuv (The Salomons: Three Generations of Pioneers and Leaders). Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2014. 242 pp. Following a period of several years in which it seemed that research on the Jewish community of Eretz Israel was focused mainly on the British Mandate era and the first years of statehood, there has been a revival of scholarly interest in the Jewish community of Eretz Israel during the 19th century. Recent publications regarding this era have dealt with a range of topics, including the history of Jerusalem during the late Ottoman period; European Jewish philanthropy in mid-19th century Jerusalem; the immigration of the Vilna Gaon’s disciples to Eretz Israel and the establishment of the Hurva synagogue; and the early hasidic community in Jerusalem (in particular, the saga of the Tiferet Israel synagogue).1 This volume of collected essays, edited by Israel Bartal and Shimon Shamir and concentrating mainly on three individuals— Shlomo Zalman Zoref; his son, Mordechai Zoref; and his grandson, Yoel Moshe Salomon—makes use of novel methodological viewpoints in its multifaceted exploration of the 19th-century Jewish community of Jerusalem. The volume’s eight essays, based on lectures given during a conference held in 2011 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the initial immigration of the Zoref-Salomon family to Eretz Israel, combine biography with broader analyses of the time and place in which the three main figures lived and operated. The built-in tension between the personal stories and the broader historical context is addressed cogently in the preface written by Shamir. Overall, it should be noted, the clearest achievement of the volume is its emphasis on far-ranging local processes and worldwide Jewish developments, rather than the

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more immediate social environment. Amnon Cohen, for instance, looks at Shlomo Zalman’s lobbying activity in the Muslim courts on behalf of repurchasing the Ashkenazi courtyard from the Arab creditors of the local Ashkenazi community, whereas Bartal examines the agricultural and economic initiatives undertaken by his son, Mordechai Zoref, some of which went beyond the social and geographical boundaries of Jerusalem. Another essay, by Roni Beer-Marx, deals with the decision to publish Halevanon (co-edited during its first year by Yoel Moshe Salomon) in Hebrew, rather than Yiddish or German, as a reflection of Central European Jewish Orthodox values. All three members of the Zoref-Salomon family feature in an excellent essay by Yochai Ben-Ghedalia titled “Three Generations of Salomons: Changing Roles from Emissary to Newspaper Editor,” which draws parallels between the changing nature of the Zoref-Salomon family’s activities and those of the local Jewish community vis-à-vis world Jewry and non-Jewish bodies in the diaspora. More specifically, ­Ben-Ghedalia shows how innovations in the realm of newspapers, propaganda, and publishing led to greater and more direct forms of contact with both Jewish and nonJewish groups in the diaspora. The focus on the world Jewish context as a means of understanding certain developments occurring ostensibly on the local level is not surprising, given the fact that several of the essayists are former students of Bartal, who has championed this approach in many previous works. At times, though, the preoccupation with broader contexts almost relegates to the sidelines the immediate social reality in which the Zoref-Salomon family members operated. Missing, for example, is discussion of the complex and changing relationship between various Zoref-Salomon family members and prominent rabbis and other Jewish community leaders active in Jerusalem at the time. Also absent are accounts of friendship (or rivalry) with contemporaries such as Yosef Rivlin, Nissan Bek, and Yehiel Mikhl Pines, or anecdotal information regarding how various members of the Zoref-Salomon family were regarded by the Jewish community at large. At the same time, the volume does contain an essay (albeit somewhat hagiographic in nature) on Yoel Moshe’s wife, Hannah Fruma, which shifts the scene from the crowded streets of Jerusalem to Petah Tikvah, an agricultural settlement co-established by Yoel Moshe in 1878, in which the family lived for several uneasy years. Other notable features of this collection are its annotated presentation  of eight relevant historical documents dealing with the main activities of the three characters and the redefining of the (indirect) ideological links between some of the social and economic initiatives of mid-19th-century Jerusalem and those of the Jewish national movement beginning in the 1880s. The editors’ decision to limit this volume to the lives and times of three generations of the Zoref-Salomon family—albeit in accordance with the parameters of the conference on which it is based—is somewhat regrettable. In later years, a number of fourth-generation family members were extremely active in public affairs, among them Haim Salomon (Yoel Moshe’s youngest son), who, among other things, served as president of the Jewish community in Jerusalem during the 1920s as well as being a member of the board of the Bikur Holim hospital (his father was one of its founders), a delegate to the National Council of the Yishuv, and even a deputy mayor of Jerusalem. Analysis of his personality and life, as well as those of some of his siblings, could further our understanding of the changes that took place among the

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l­eadership of the Old Yishuv and its institutions, both before and especially after the First World War. To be sure, no one collection can cover all the relevant topics connected with this prominent family; it is left for future scholarship to fill in at least some of the gaps. In the meantime, the present volume manifestly fulfills its main goal of re-examining well-known individuals and affairs by means of a variety of analytical tools and historical contexts. Reuven Gafni Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Kinneret Academic College

Note 1.  Israel Bartal and Haim Goren (eds.), Sefer yerushalayim: beshalhei hatekufah ha’otmanit (1800–1917) (Jerusalem: 2010);Yochai Ben-Ghedalia “Filantropiyah yehudit-eiropit birushalayim bizeman milḥemet krim” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2013); Immanuel Etkes, “Hagaon mivilna vetalmidav ka‘tziyonim harishonim’: gilgulo shel mitos,” Zion 80, no. 1 (2015). See also Yochai Ben-Ghedalia Reuven Gafni, and Uriel Gellman (eds.) Gavoha me’al gavoha: meḥ karim ḥ adashim ’al beit hakeneset Tiferet Yisrael birushalayim (Jerusalem: 2016).

Anat Helman, A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. 246 pp. In the West, fashion shows often pitted “Mrs. Well Dressed” against “Mrs. Poorly Dressed.” In the Middle East, especially within the nascent state of Israel, one was more apt to find the “Harvest Queen” vying with the “Wine Queen.” The difference between the Western and Middle Eastern productions—one highlighting fashion, the other agricultural products—wasn’t simply a reflection of differing gross national products, but rather pointed to sharply divergent ways of understanding the relationship between clothing and the self. By the 1950s, dress in the West had come to be entirely a personal concern; in Israel during the same period, it was more a matter of pressing national business. Discussed at length by the press, lampooned in cartoons, and fiercely debated in kibbutz dining halls, what to wear—or more precisely still, what not to wear—figured prominently in the new nation’s public arena, giving rise to all manner of observations and pronouncements. “In our country,” observed one journalist in 1954, “the simplicity of dress has reached dimensions unknown in other countries” (p. 24). Another keen-eyed observer put it this way: “Here the tie doesn’t count” (p. 43). Of a piece with efforts to create a national language, a national body of folkloristic practices, and a national sensibility, a shared aesthetics of dress went to the very heart of how Israel presented itself, both internally and externally. Eschewing ornamentation, fuss and frippery, and even make-up, the model citizens of the new state sought to free the body as well as the body politic from frivolity. Nowhere was this collective

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mandate more deeply felt than on the kibbutz, whose members made a point of ­cultivating a simplicity that bordered on austerity, renunciation, and androgyny. “In those days we did everything we could to blur the lines between ourselves and the male members,” recollected a veteran female kibbutznik. “If I tell you that I had never ironed a dress, it was not only because I had neither spare time nor an iron, but also because I believed that such ‘vanity’ might distract our minds from the essence of our lives” (p. 149). The pursuit of austerity was fueled by the realities of 1950s Israel, no less than by ideology. In a concerted effort, directed from the top, to stabilize the national economy, a detailed system of rationing was imposed on the purchase of clothing and shoes as well as on food. Although the nation’s citizens understood the reasons behind this policy of “self-limitation,” they chafed under its provisions and at times mocked them, too. In 1951, for instance, a dance troupe performed a number called “Rationing” in which each dancer wore only one boot. Yet once the economic situation improved, Israel aspired to become the fashion mecca of the Middle East, an ambition nursed along by ORT and Hadassah, both of which established schools to train young Israelis in design, as well as by American Jewish garment manufacturers who lent a helping hand in getting Israel’s fashion industry off the ground. With their support, there was every reason to believe that “soon enough, fashion from Tel Aviv will be in demand as much as fashion from Paris” (p. 173), or so predicted an optimistic reporter for Haisha bamedinah. But, as it turned out, developing talent was one thing; developing a distinctive look, one that reflected “Sabra simplicity, Eastern colorfulness, and Western sewing techniques” (p. 111), was another, and far more difficult to achieve. Eager to cultivate a Western audience for its products, the Israeli garment industry of the mid-1950s took its cue from Paris and New York rather than from Tel Aviv, resulting in clothing that added little to the vocabulary of fashion. A “made in Israel” label only stood out when it came to items purchased as souvenirs, not as wearable goods. These and other fascinating developments loom large in Anat Helman’s deeply researched and thoughtful account, which draws on a wealth of sources, from popular periodicals such as Haishah and Lagever to the minutes of kibbutz meetings and the anguished letters sent to the Ministry of Rationing and Supply, in which petitioners beseeched the powers that be to allow them a few more ration points on the grounds that they had gained twenty pounds, or that the soles of their shoes were full of holes. Supported by this lively material, Helman’s work highlights one of the most important, yet barely studied, ways in which clothing—army uniforms and El Al ensembles, fashionable dress and religious (haredi) attire, Yemenite jewelry and Maskit exports—furnished the new state with a bonanza of sartorial possibilities. Though Helman perceptively trains her sights on each of these manifestations, she resorts all too often to special pleading, as if she needed to convince her readers that clothing really mattered. Instead of relying rather heavily on the voices of others to buttress her claims, she would have been much better served had she made more of her material and trusted to her own valuable insights. At times, as if uncertain of her interpretive footing, the author stops short—the section on hasidic dress is a case in point—instead of giving her subjects their full due.

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Helman’s diffidence is completely unwarranted. Hers is a strong and vibrant story, a most welcome contribution to the growing body of literature on Israeli daily life as well as to the history of fashion and clothing more generally. Helman makes it clear that any culture that boasts a “Negev” colored suit or a “Sharon” haircut is well worth exploring. Jenna Weissman Joselit George Washington University

Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg (eds.), One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xx + 273 pp. During a series of unofficial talks between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem in  the 1990s, Ruth Lapidot, a well-known expert in international law, proposed a revolutionary idea that was taken from the realm of maritime sovereignty disputes. Instead of sticking to the common concept of sovereignty—that is, the exclusive rule of a single entity over a given territory—she suggested considering alternatives such as joint sovereignty on the part of several states, a suspension of any operative decision regarding sovereignty, or a form of functional division of territory without determining overall sovereignty. In similar fashion, the contributors to One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States attempt to think outside the (broken) box in an effort to solve what seems to be an intractable conflict. The essays in this volume, based on collaborative work carried out under the auspices of Lund University in Sweden between 2008 and 2010, advance the notion of two entities, Israel and Palestine, establishing parallel management of the land extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. As explained by the volume’s editors, Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg: “At the heart of such a political arrangement is the still-novel idea of states responding primarily to their citizens and only secondarily to their territory” (p. iv). Such an arrangement, they argue, would be a win-win situation: Israel, as a state, would remain Jewish while the Palestinians would achieve self- determination and statehood, and members of both nations would enjoy the right to live anywhere in historic Palestine/the land of Israel. This arrangement, though different from a federal or bi-national political system, would include elements of both. The eleven essays in One Land, Two States (three of them authored by Israeli Jews, three by Palestinians, and five by scholars from Sweden and the United States) elaborate on the concept and suggest principles of implementation with regard to power-sharing, security, the economy, the legal system, and religion. On the face of it—due, in no small part, to the overall high level of scholarship of the essays—the parallel states concept appears to be brilliant and appealing. However, upon closer examination (this, too, provided by the various authors), it proves to be no less problematic or difficult to implement than the more commonly promoted “two-state” solution. It calls upon Israel not only to give up much of its current state power but also to lose its ethnic Jewish identity. The Palestinians, for their part, would need to abandon their dream of full sovereignty—accepting the continuing

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presence of Jewish settlements in the midst of densely populated Palestinian areas— and operating under a political system radically different from that of any other Arab country. LeVine and Mossberg’s basic assumption, shared by the other essayists, is that both the classic two-state concept (dividing both sovereignty and land) and the onestate option (Israelis and Palestinians co-existing in one territory) are unfeasible. However, they also note that when Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia underwent a division of territory into separate states (six states, in the case of Yugoslavia) neither country opted for a parallel states model. LeVine and Mossberg do not delve into the reasons underlying their decision, nor do they relate to the question regarding the international system’s readiness to provide recognized political status to entities that have less than full sovereign power. In two separate essays, Mossberg and Peter Wallensteen argue that the parallel state structure can be designed in different ways. The criteria according to which one would belong to Israel or to Palestine could be left flexible, allowing individuals to  decide for themselves in accordance with ethnic or national considerations. Alternatively, such criteria could be determined on a regional or community level, or some combination of the different levels. The latter options bring the parallel model very close to that of a two-state solution with open borders between the states, or a confederation. Wallenstein’s well-structured essay covers a wide range of issues, including language, education, international representation, central bank, supreme courts, and transportation. Each of these subjects is discussed on the state, extra-state, regional, and global levels and is presented in a clear and comprehensive manner. The (perhaps unintended) result is an appreciation of some of the problems left unresolved by the parallel states model. For instance, Wallenstein leaves open the question of how to reconcile Israel’s promotion of Jewish immigration (and its granting of nearly automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants) with the Palestinian demand for the right of refugees to return to their former homes. His assumption is that foreign institutions will exercise authority in key areas—for instance, the European Central Bank would monitor the two currencies that are chosen, criminal law appeals will turn to European courts, and the International Criminal Court will appoint the joint Supreme Court. Moreover, on certain issues (among them, safeguarding “equal rights with respect to gender and sexual orientations” [p. 56]), Wallenstein ignores significant differences between more conservative elements within Israeli and Palestinian society, on the one hand, and the more liberal norms of the European Union, on the other. Finally, his outline ignores the huge power imbalance between the two sides, with Israel being much more developed economically and advanced technologically than the Palestinians. Without an initial period of separation, it is unlikely that this imbalance can be resolved. Two of the Israeli contributors, Nimrod Hurvitz and Dror Zeevi, are more cautious, more conservative, and less innovative than the parallel states visionaries. In accordance with the prevailing Israeli security establishment view, their approach is heavily colored by existential fears and historical demons. Thus their argument that, within the parallel states model, Israel must “maintain a clear asymmetry of power” with the Palestinians as well as with Arab states, “and install legal and other safeguards

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against loss of autonomy. . . . [T]hey must know that if a crisis unfolds, they possess the military means and legal option to detach themselves from the power-sharing agreement, maintain strategic deterrence, and, if need be, have the ability to overcome any foe” (pp. 72–73). In other words, Israel should accept the model only on condition that it can extricate itself from the arrangement, while at the same time maintaining its regional superiority. Hurvitz and Zeevi suggest that security arrangements be implemented in the course of two transition periods: the first lasting five years, followed by a generation-long period of 25 years. In the second period, the Israeli army would redeploy into the heartland, that is, to areas in which Jews are a clear majority of the population. International forces (U.S. or NATO), would take care of possible external threats, while Israeli police and Palestinian police forces, reorganized under municipalities rather than the state, would enforce law and order. The Palestinian perspective on national security, offered by Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi, is influenced by the trauma of Palestinian loss in the 1948 war, mass deportation and, since 1967, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and (until 2005) the Gaza Strip. For the Palestinians, security means more than operational methods to win or to prevent armed conflict—it is a necessary tool both to achieve and preserve national goals and to quiet collective fears. Not surprisingly, the security interests promoted by Agha and Khalidi clash with Israeli interests, particularly with regard to the return of refugees and the status of Jerusalem. Like Hurvitz and Zeevi, the Palestinian authors are cautious. They would accept the parallel states model only if it “would allow members of the refugee and diaspora populations to reside in any area of Palestine–Israel that they chose, . . . include potentially current Palestinian citizens of Israel,” and provide for “Palestinian guardianship over its Muslim and Christian holy places” in Jerusalem (p. 112). Agha and Khalidi agree with their Israeli counterparts on the notion of transitional stages and the need to build a high degree of coordination and cooperation between the two sides’ security forces. Strong leadership and political will are needed on both sides to confront domestic opposition. Two of the essays in the collection, Raja Khalidi’s “An Israel-Palestine Parallel States Economy by 2035” and Raphael Bar-El’s “Economic Considerations in Implementing a Parallel State Structure,” deal with economic issues. Khalidi rightly notes that, with implementation of the parallel states model, “the security-first mentality would give way to the logic of markets, development and cooperation” (p. 126). However, assuming that the security-first mentality is not going to disappear, he deals as well with security issues such as safeguarding the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and securing effective control and jurisdiction over vital natural resources. Khalidi also supplies data regarding the huge gap between the Israeli and Palestinian economies. For instance, in the years 2005–2006, the per capita income gap between Israel and the West Bank/Gaza was 17.1 in favor of Israel (p. 132). Moreover, 74 percent of Palestinian imports (in dollar terms) came from Israel; in the opposite direction, 87 percent of Palestinian exports went to Israel. In economic terms, the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute a “captured market.” For this reason, Khalidi opposes economic integration and prefers central government regulations over a neo-liberal free-market system. Bar-El, for his part, suggests separating the two

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Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

economies for five to ten years and limiting the number of Palestinian workers employed in Israel (while at the same time ensuring that Palestinian workers get a  fair income and social benefits). Bar-El also proposes advancing the Palestinian economy by means of having qualified Palestinian workers joining Israeli high-tech firms, joint tourism projects, and regional cooperation. What is missing in Bar-El’s analysis is the expected cost Israel would incur in the loss of the captured Palestinian market, and what might replace this market. LeVine and Liam O’Mara IV tackle the issue of religion in a mostly unconvincing essay. For one thing, their discussion of Hamas is based entirely on the Islamic Covenant of 1988 and disregards later documents such as the much more pragmatic Hamas party platform for the 2006 elections.1 Second, LeVine and O’Mara ignore the overlap between religion and ethnicity that exists among traditional Israeli Jews and Palestinians. As a result, they make no mention of nominally secular parties such as the Likud or Fatah, both of which are strongly influenced by ethno-religious values. Finally, the authors express a French-style attitude toward religion. They believe in creating a “secular” public space open to a variety of views, with no preference given to any particular identity, religious system, or ideology. Such a model is clearly inapplicable to a region in which religion plays a key role in forming collective identity, public space, and political institutions—a fact that was self-evident even before ISIS came onto the scene. In sum, One Land, Two States performs a valuable service in presenting a different framework for discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although most of its proposed solutions are unconvincing, the questions it raises are provocative and worthy of further thought and discussion. Menachem Klein Bar-Ilan University

Note 1.  See Menachem Klein, “Hamas in Power,” Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 442–459; idem, “Against the Consensus—Oppositionist Voices in Hamas,” Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 6 (November 2009), 881–892.

Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXX Edited by Richard I. Cohen

Symposium Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society Asher D. Biemann, Imagining a Homeland: The Election of Place and Time Saskia Coenen Snyder, An Urban Semiotics of War: Signs and Sounds in Nazi-Occupied Amsterdam Roy Greenwald, Shifting Places: The Representations of Sand in pre-State Hebrew Poetry Vivian Liska, Jewish Displacement as Experience and Metaphor in Continental Thought Vered Madar, Where is Paradise? Place and Time in the Memoirs of Women from Yemen Natan M. Meir, “An Unworldly, Sacred Sphere”: The Hekdesh in Eastern Europe Richard Menkis, Two Interwar Jewish Travelers to the Canadian West: Competing Transnational Visions of Jewish Orthodoxy, and Local Realities Alec Mishory, Artists Colonies in Israel Mirjam Rajner, The Orient in Jewish Artistic Creativity: The Case of Maurycy Gottlieb’s Self-Portrait in Arab Dress Björn Siegel, Envisioning a Jewish Maritime Place: The Establishment of the Palestine Shipping Company Andrea A. Sinn, Restoring and Reconstructing Jewish Communities: Munich for Jews after the Second World War Yuval Tal, The Social Logic of Colonial Anti-Judaism: Revisiting the Anti-Jewish Crisis in French Algeria, 1889–1902 Scott Ury, The Urban Origins of Jewish Degeneration: The Modern City and the End of the Jews, 1900–1939

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Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) for possible publication. Please address all inquiries to: [email protected]. Essays that are submitted undergo a review process.

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