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Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan?
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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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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