Is the Jewish joke on the verge of becoming extinct?  The Last Jewish Joke, written by the veteran Parisian sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and newly translated into English by Cory Stockwell, argues that in recent years, Jews began to seem less heimish for at least three reasons: The Holocaust receded from memory; Israel’s government became guilty of actions decried internationally as war crimes; and right-wing antisemites who were always present became more boldly vocal.

Reminiscing about when he heard certain jokes, the author compiles his own consoling self-portrait in an autumnal mood. Wieviorka will be 80 next year, and his prose has a tendency to poignantly deem things as the “last” or at their “end.”

English language readers may need to be reminded that, when Wieviorka alludes to family situations in which he first heard Jewish jokes, it is in the context of his distinguished family of overachievers. His sister Annette is an eminent historian of the Holocaust. Another sister, Sylvie, is a psychiatrist and academic, and a brother, Olivier, is a historian specializing in World War II and the French Resistance. The entire mishpocheh is inspired and motivated by the memory of their paternal grandparents, Polish Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, Annette Wieviorka recently published a “family autobiography,” which asked subtle, eloquent, and nuanced questions about her antecedents.

In a comparable emotional aura of reverence, Wieviorka characterizes Jewish comedy of the past as “never malicious” (though apparently insult comics like Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers never got the memo).

The notion that joking Jews had to be sympathetic victims to elicit empathy from non-Jewish audiences may be true of some raconteurs, but is also belied by historical examples of potty-mouthed rapscallions like Belle Barth, B. S. Pully (born Murray Lerman) and Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz), who startled nightclub audiences of their day with profanity.

Later Jewish shock jocks of the Howard Stern variety likewise chose to surprise, rather than charm, the public as a way to win notoriety. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, far from relying on vulnerable Jews as victims, presented characters screaming putdowns to elicit hilarity.

To bolster his arguments, Wieviorka refers to the counterexample of Popeck (born Judka Herpstu), a demure, wry entertainer of Polish and Romanian Jewish origin, who at 90 still appears at French theaters with gentle monologues akin to those of the Danish Jewish wit Victor Borge. Popeck presents himself onstage as a grumpy Eastern-European immigrant speaking Yiddish-accented French.

Wieviorka values such exemplars of rapidly vanishing tradition; as a social scientist, he is convinced that because communal settings such as the Borscht Belt no longer exist, the comics who once flourished on hotel stages in the Catskills have disappeared from memory.

To be sure, American standups like Myron Cohen, Jan Murray, and Carl Ballantine, once familiar from TV variety shows, are rarely mentioned now, though  others like Eddie Cantor are periodically rediscovered by a new public, as Cantor was when he showed up as a character in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. But in his autobiographical deep dive, Wieviorka, who writes here more as a memoirist than a history of comedy, is naturally more concerned with things that he personally saw or heard, rather than any objective history of Jewish comedians through the ages.

Wieviorka also somewhat curiously refers to the “Yiddish-inflected” comedy of Groucho Marx. Apart from the word “schnorrer” which appears in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” a song written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, it is difficult to think of many other explicit Yiddishisms in Groucho’s verbal elan.

Wieviorka’s anecdotes tend to be hefty and hearty, like a family repast of kreplach that remains in the visceral memory for days after being consumed. Some of the quaintly old fashioned tales he refers to recall the precedent of Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, a dissection of pleasantries that reflects a sturdy Yekke approach to light-heartedness. Of course, in this optic of Jewish humor, there is no room for concise one-liners from the likes of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen). For Wieviorka, as with Freud, brevity was so far from being the soul of wit that it might almost seem non-Jewish.

Another of Wieviorka’s claims appears to conflict with Jewish tradition itself, such as when he states that funny Jews laugh at themselves, never at others, negating the othering of mocked and disdained people in Chelm, a legendary village in Yiddish folklore inhabited by fools who believe themselves to be wise.

To support some of his claims, the author discusses the 1970s French film The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a box office success, now somewhat frantic and dated-looking, starring the popular Gallic comedian, Louis de Funès disguised as a rabbi. More to the point, Wieviorka justly reveres the French Jewish comedian Pierre Dac for his still-fascinating wartime broadcasts from London for the Free French forces. Dac’s sense of humor simultaneously expressing Yiddishkeit and also undermining the enemy’s Fascist ideology is a subject that might have intrigued Freud himself.

To bolster the essentially serious messages of his book, Wieviorka mentions the writers Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart as well as the painter Marc Chagall, names rarely seen in books about humor.

Wieviorka’s elegiac, end-of-an-era tone might be cheered up by a glance at the Netflix streaming schedule or a visit to a comedy club. Of course Jewish humor is thriving, as Wieviorka himself admits; Le Monde headlined a relevant story about the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Israeli comedians are boosting morale in wartime.”

So, for all its methodical, highly intellectual analysis, The Last Jewish Joke might be best appreciated as a moving Kaddish for the demise of anecdotes that were once considered the height of drollery. It is very much a product of brainy French Jewish creativity, which itself deserves to be cherished and celebrated.

 

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(JTA) — When Rabbi Adam Mintz’s Modern Orthodox congregation was first looking for a space on the Upper West Side, finding one that worked was no simple task.

Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, the fledgling congregation, didn’t have the resources — i.e. tens of millions of dollars — to buy a property and develop their own building, so the plan was to rent. 

But renting space for a congregation comes with very specific needs. 

They needed a room that could fit the entire congregation, which would typically draw 50 to 80 people for services. There had to be a second space for kiddush lunch after Saturday mornings. The building needed to be on the Upper West Side, where its congregants, who’d broken off from Lincoln Square Synagogue following a lay leadership dispute, lived and could walk to synagogue. Perhaps most importantly, the space needed to be available for them on Friday nights and Saturdays, plus the major Jewish holidays. 

And all this in the Manhattan real estate market.

Finally, after a months-long search, Mintz, on the advice of a congregant, found a spot that checked all those boxes, housed inside the National Council of Jewish Women’s building on West 72nd Street.

“God was smiling at us one day,” Mintz said in an interview.

“You can’t go on StreetEasy and find a synagogue space exactly as you want it,” Mintz said. “And that space on 72nd Street, I guess we walked past it every day. But it took somebody — one of our members had this amazing idea.”

Mintz said the arrangement was a win-win. For Mintz, his congregation had a place to meet while paying below market rate. Meanwhile, the NCJW was now benefiting from a new stream of income while housing a Jewish group, a partnership which Mintz said “strengthened the Jewish community.”  

That search was just one example of the effort — and creativity — required to secure a space to congregate in New York City and solve the “edifice complex,” as Mintz refers to it. 

“As real estate prices have gone sky high, New York City — and especially Manhattan — congregations have had to get creative,” said David Kaufman, author of “Shul with a Pool.”

Kaufman has written extensively on the history of American synagogues, including the entry for synagogues in Kenneth Jackson’s “Encyclopedia of New York City.” In that entry, Kaufman segmented the history of the city’s synagogues into four phases — the latest of which, starting around 2000, details the challenge of finding space as rents have skyrocketed.

“In my early years, the ‘70s and ‘80s, New York was not like that,” Kaufman said. “Rent was not astronomical and you could find premises for various purposes. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible.”

Congregations have indeed gotten creative, leasing from a variety of properties that moonlight as synagogues. A “shul community” called Kehillat Harlem rents out a storefront property on Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. Modern Orthodox synagogue Prospect Heights Shul is housed in Luria Academy, a Jewish school in Brooklyn.

But even after a congregation secures a space, it is not necessarily out of the woods. 

Independent minyan Darkhei Noam had been renting from Manhattan Country School on the Upper West Side since 2017. Its lease at MCS was set to expire in 2034 — but when the school went bankrupt this summer, the congregation was left scrambling for a new home. 

Similarly, the Fort Tryon Jewish Center has been renting from the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in Upper Manhattan, but the church’s closure is forcing them out at the end of December, according to an email sent to their mailing list. 

Paul Wachtel, the former co-chair of Darkhei Noam’s board who was involved in their building search, said it was “very difficult to find a place.” The cost of renting property can be prohibitive for a congregation that only uses the space a few times per week, he said.

“We need a space for all the Jewish occasions and events, but it would be impossible to buy and difficult to rent unless we have a partner who would make use of it at other times during the week, like an educational institution,” Wachtel said in an interview during the search. That search recently concluded — for now — when Darkhei Noam came to a one-year lease agreement with the Trevor Day School.

Mintz said he believes the optimal model is to rent space from a large Jewish organization’s building. He stuck to that model earlier in September when his congregation moved, after 21 years at NCJW, into the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, rebranding as the Shtiebel @ JCC.

Mintz said he was excited by the move, for starters, because the congregation would be moving into “probably the busiest Jewish building in Manhattan.” (Mintz had long wanted to move into the JCC; things were finally set in motion after KRA held a service there last year, which served as something of a trial run, while its own air conditioning was broken.)

About a month into the relocation, Mintz said the Shtiebel @ JCC has been successful, with new people “from the community and people connected through JCC” joining services every week. His congregation is also planning to use the JCC’s rooftop sukkah.

But Mintz said this model — renting space from a Jewish organization — goes beyond just the JCC, and that he’d like to see it “replicated everywhere.” He added that big synagogues often rent out their spaces to non-Jewish organizations between services, and could do so with smaller Jewish nonprofits in mind.

“Whether it’s synagogues looking to find space in Jewish buildings, or big synagogues looking to rent [out] space to Jewish things — and nothing wrong with the non-Jewish things — but I think within the community, it only strengthens the community,” he said.

Kaufman said he hadn’t seen much precedent for the concept of a congregation leasing space from a Jewish community hub.

There are examples, Kaufman said, of congregations that were formed within organizations, such as at the Educational Alliance (originally called the Hebrew Institute) and the former Young Women’s Hebrew Association building on 110th Street.

“But in none of these cases is it another congregation that moves into and takes over space in one of those buildings,” Kaufman said. “So that is new to me.”

UJA-Federation of New York, the city’s largest Jewish organization, “regularly gives space to community organizations — including synagogues — for a wide variety of events and activities in our building,” public relations director Emily Kutner said by email. But she said that until now, “We have not been approached by a congregation to hold services in our building.”

Other Jewish organizations have been approached, and have rented out their space.

Temple Emanu-El’s downtown campus moved last year into the Center for Jewish History’s building. Executive director Dina Mann said the search involved looking at “dozens” of commercial spaces and reaching out to other “mission-aligned” nonprofits and museums that “could have had spaces.” 

“I think having a similar sensibility about how to approach different aspects of Jewish community and life in New York is helpful. Specifically around security,” she said. 

Another perk of being in the building, Mann added, is that “our religious school kids get exposed to different aspects of Jewish history.”

Rabbi Jonathan Leener, who leads Prospect Heights Shul, said the synagogue’s partnership with Luria Academy has opened up new opportunities in jointly applying for grants.

“It made sense to be like, ‘Wow, we could split this,’ and working really together to take advantage of what’s out there,” Leener said. “We’re hoping that some of the larger foundations and philanthropists are attracted by this model of Jewish community, of working together.”

As congregations like the Fort Tryon Jewish Center continue searching for a home, Mintz said he’d love to see a fund that incentivizes Jewish partnerships by kicking money to both the hosting and renting organizations. Some congregations face more obstacles with this model than others; FTJC, for example, serves the community of Washington Heights, which lacks Jewish organizations that could house tenants.

Still, for congregations that are walking distance from those organizations, Mintz said he believes these partnerships could be fruitful for all.

“It’s such an important real estate model, and we don’t utilize our real estate properly,” Mintz said.

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(JTA) — LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — In June 2024, Slovenia’s parliament voted to recognize a Palestinian state only one week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had taken that dramatic step.

Half a year later, Slovenian public broadcaster RTV — citing the ongoing war in Gaza—became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. This past May, RTV warned it might boycott future editions of Eurovision if Israel isn’t expelled.

Over the summer, Slovenia banned imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, only a week after prohibiting all weapons trade with Israel — the first EU member to do so. That ruling followed on the heels of another one declaring two right-wing Israeli officials persona non grata. Last week, it became the first EU country to impose a travel ban on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“People are dying in Gaza because they are systematically denied humanitarian aid,” the government said in announcing the arms embargo. “In such circumstances, it is the duty of every responsible country to act, even if that means taking a step before others do.”

Some analysts have pegged the aggressive anti-Israel stance as a gambit ahead of the country’s upcoming elections, when the country’s pro-Israel right will try to retake control after losing power in 2022.

But for Slovenia’s roughly 100 Jews, the campaign against Israel is part of a pattern of hostility that transcends the vagaries of politics. Barely five years ago under a right-wing government, a Slovene court voided the 1946 treason conviction of executed Nazi collaborator Leon Rupnik, who nearly liquidated the country’s Jewish population.

“Slovenes always want to be on the side of the underdog, and the media perception over the last 40 years is of poor Palestinians and big, imperialist Israel who took their land,” said Robert Waltl, president of the Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia. “But now, because of the war, it’s worse here than any other former Yugoslav republic.”

Waltl spoke to JTA from his office at the Mini Theater, which since 2013 has also housed the Jewish Cultural Center and Slovenia’s only active synagogue. The 500-year-old building, which Waltl renovated with $1.6 million in donations, fronts Krizevniska Street in Ljubljana’s old city.

Its 6,500 square feet — crammed with prayer books, menorahs, historic photographs and an entire exhibit on the Holocaust — has become the focus of Jewish culture in Slovenia, with 2.1 million people the smallest and most prosperous of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.

Unlike neighboring Croatia — whose center-right government has pursued a stridently pro-Israel policy despite a rising, homegrown fascist movement — Slovenia has veered sharply to the left in recent years.

“Christian antisemitism was very visible here before World War II,” Waltl, 60, explained as his dog, Umbra, repeatedly barked at passersby. “At the beginning of the 20th century, there was no university here, so people studied in Vienna — and the mayor of Vienna was very antisemitic. Students learned it there and brought it back home with them.”

The presence of Jews in Slovenia dates back to Roman times, with the first synagogue in Ljubljana built around 1213. During the Middle Ages, the most important community was in Maribor, though Jews were expelled from that town in 1496, and then from Ljubljana in 1515.

By the early 20th century, Slovenia’s Prekmurje region had become home to two-thirds of the country’s 1,400 Jews, mostly in the towns of Murska Sobota and Lendava. Yet antisemitism was pervasive; an outbreak of Jew-hatred during the 1929 economic crisis followed accusations that Jewish moneylenders were profiting from exorbitant interest rates. By the end of World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators had killed all but a handful of the country’s Jewish inhabitants.

During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Yugoslavia under Tito helped the fledgling Jewish state, but later, as head of the Non-Aligned Movement, he befriended Yasser Arafat and switched his allegiance. After Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, the region was plunged into years of ethnic warfare that left an estimated 130,000 dead and millions homeless.

Only Slovenia escaped serious bloodshed, with only 62 deaths reported during its 10-day war of independence against the dominant republic, Serbia. Nevertheless, the Alpine republic — the same one that has just declared an arms embargo against Israel — became embroiled in a massive scandal involving weapons sales to Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, both of which were fighting Serbia, despite a 1991 United Nations arms embargo.

Waltl said his country’s policy toward Israel, as well as domestic media, is riddled with hypocrisy and misinformation.

“In Croatia, the government strongly criticized what Hamas did on Oct. 7 and they stand with Israel. In Slovenia, it was the same for the first few days, but then all attention shifted to the plight of the Palestinians,” he said. “Today in Slovenia, 99% of the media isn’t just pro-Palestinian but anti-Israel. You will never hear that Israel was attacked by Hamas or Hezbollah, only that Israelis kill women and children.”

He added: “It’s also true, however, that the right-wing government in Israel has crossed all acceptable lines and limits of humanity, triggering a wave of hatred towards Jews worldwide.”

It doesn’t help that Israel has never established an embassy in Ljubljana — even though Slovenia has maintained one in Tel Aviv for the past 30 years.

Polona Vetrih, a prominent stage actress whose father survived World War II as a partisan, said she’s had several unpleasant encounters with local antisemites. Recently, she sang at a peace concert where she performed the Ladino song “Adios Querida.”

“One girl from Palestine was very loud. She was screaming, and they threatened me. I was scared to death,” she said. “I went to the police afterwards.”

Frequently, she hears Slovenes complain that Jews are mean and think only of themselves.

“They don’t have a clue. Even during the Middle Ages, they blamed Jews for the plague,” she said. “I think it’s up to us to show them it’s not true.”

During communism, Slovenia had virtually no organized Jewish life. In 1991, the Liberal Jewish Community was established, and in 2002, local Jews contracted with a Chabad rabbi from Trieste, Italy, to conduct High Holiday services. The following year, said Waltl, the community received a Torah scroll from a British donor, and turned a nearby cigarette factory into a small synagogue with the help of the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee.

Ten years ago, with the help of Lustig Branko — producer of the film “Schindler’s List” — the museum established a Festival of Tolerance. Last year, some 6,000 elementary school students came to see performances of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Currently, liberal rabbis Alexander Grodensky of Luxembourg and Tobias Moss of Vienna visit Slovenia for special occasions.

In April 2024, a 10-member delegation from the World Jewish Congress traveled to Slovenia to meet with government officials, but they were ignored, Waltl said. And when swastikas were discovered scrawled on the walls of the Jewish Cultural Center one night, he said, “no one from the government came, and no one called me — not even the mayor of the city.”

Maya Samakovlija, the organization’s executive director of community relations, went even further.

“We were not merely ignored. What happened to us is something no other government in the world has done ever in the long history of the WJC,” said Samakovlija, who is based in Zagreb, Croatia. “Neither the prime minister, the president, the speaker of parliament, nor the minister of foreign affairs made any effort to meet with us. Instead, they sent only deputies and lower-ranking officials.”

At that meeting, Blanka Jamnišek, deputy head of Slovenia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, asked the visitors what they were doing “to promote a ceasefire and stop the killing of children, and the famine in Gaza,” according to Samakovlija and a statement that the AJC released at the time. The IHRA definition of antisemitism cites holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions as an example of antisemitism.

“Her colleagues were visibly shocked,” the WJC official said. “Once she had finished, I made the decision that we’d leave as a delegation. We stood up, ended the meeting and walked out.”

Ernest Herzog, the WJC’s executive director of operations, was also part of that delegation. He said Slovenia’s Jews “face an alarming rise in antisemitism, evident in acts of vandalism, threats and hostile rhetoric.”

“It is deeply troubling that certain officials have sought to justify this climate of intolerance through a distorted interpretation of the Middle East conflict — an excuse that is wholly unacceptable,” he added.

Politicians on the right more often support Israel. This past April, the Slovenia-Israel Allies Caucus was established by lawmaker Žan Mahnič of the Slovenian Democratic Party. Former Slovene Prime Minister Janez Janša, who supports the caucus, has said that if he returns to power, he will relocate his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and rescind Ljubljana’s recognition of Palestine.

Steve Oberman, an attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee, and past president of that city’s Arnstein Jewish Community Center, visited Slovenia in 2024 to teach a law class at the University of Ljubljana. He has since become a passionate defender of Waltl’s efforts.

“I’m disappointed that the Slovenian government isn’t doing a better job of supporting the Jewish community of Slovenia, given the country’s history,” Oberman told JTA in a phone interview. “Poor Robert has carried this task, almost singlehandedly, to revive Jewish life there and create a synagogue. I’m trying to work through our local Jewish community here in Knoxville to raise awareness, and hopefully some money.”

Meanwhile, the situation for the few Jews remaining in Slovenia isn’t getting easier.

Sophia Huzbasic, a native of Kyrgyzstan who lived for a time in Israel but settled in Slovenia nine years ago, said she was born with Soviet citizenship but chose to retain her Israeli passport.

A graphic designer, she lives in Ljubljana with her husband Igor, who’s from Sarajevo, Bosnia.

“For local Jews, I truly believe the antisemitism is really terrible,” she said. “I was raised in Moscow in the 1990s, so for me this is nothing. I’m not scared but I’m angry.”

Huzbasic, 43, said her bank refused to approve a car lease when officials learned she was an Israeli citizen — just one example, she said, of the insidious antisemitism that seems to be prevalent.

“We feel very angry because of the official position of the Slovenian government. What they’re doing is propaganda from a very poorly educated point of view, and they don’t want to widen their knowledge about the conflict,” Huzbasic said. “I totally disagree with the Israeli political situation, and I chose to keep my Israeli citizenship and live here. But now I’m very close to changing my mind. I cannot stop being a Jew.”

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