HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JEWISH WOMAN AND A SHIKSA?
Of course, the Jewish mother also has plenty to say when it’s someone else who’s starving:
Once, a homeless woman accosted her on the street:
‘Miss, I haven’t eaten in three days’
‘Force yourself’, she replied.
If ‘let them eat cake’ is the mistake that too much money can make, ‘force yourself’ is an error of too much analysis:
Sadie Goldberg wants to expand her intellectual horizons, so she goes to a lecture on ‘Human Sexuality’ by the eminent psychoanalyst Dr Feigenbaum.
She is so entranced that at the end of the lecture she decides to approach him.
‘Dr Feigenbaum,’ she says, ‘I want you to know I found your lecture fascinating. There was just one thing I didn’t quite get. You kept referring to “bestiality”. What is that?’
‘OK,’ Feigenbaum says, ‘so bestiality is the practice of a human being having relations with an animal. For example, you may wanna have sex with a dog.’
‘A dog?!’
‘Yeah, a dog. Or you may wanna have sex with ... a horse.’
A horse?!?!’
‘Yeah, a horse. Or you may wanna have sex with a bull.’
‘A BULL???!!!!?!!’
‘Yeah, a bull, or maybe you wanna have sex with a chicken?’
‘A chicken? Feh ...’
But though Sadie Goldberg may fancy a bull, the husband of a Jewish woman will get no action if he compares her to a cow:
An impoverished couple in a poor shtetl in Poland couldn’t make a living on their farm so they asked their neighbour what to to. ‘You must buy a cow, feed it up, and then when it is ready take it to a bull. When she mates, you will have a calf, the calf will grow up and then you have two cows.’ This is the way to riches. So they saved and saved and saved until they could afford to buy a cow. Then they fattened her up and took her to the bull. However, whenever the bull came close to the cow, the cow would move away.
The couple were frantic; they decided to ask the rabbi what to do. They told the rabbi what was happening: ‘Whenever the bull approaches our cow, she moves away. If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. When he approaches her from the front, she backs off. An approach from the side and she just walks away to the other side.’
The rabbi thought about this for a minute and asked, ‘Did you buy this cow from Minsk?’
The people were dumbfounded. ‘You are truly a wise rabbi,’ they said. ‘How did you know we got the cow from Minsk?’
The rabbi answered sadly, ‘My vife, she is from Minsk.’
Winning the heart of a Jewish woman is thus a complex and subtle art:
Heschel was in awe of his friend Abe. Abe could get any woman he wanted – and he did. ‘Teach me how you do it,’ Heschel begged him.
‘It’s easy,’ said Abe, ‘the trick with attracting Jewish women is that you have to show them you care about three things: food, family and philosophy. Food, because that means you care about their physical well-being. Family, because that means your intentions are serious. Philosophy, because that means you respect their intelligence.’
Heschel was thankful for the advice and asked a woman he fancied on a date. ‘Tell me,’ he opened, ‘do you like to eat kugel [baked noodle pudding]?’
‘I can’t stand kugel,’ his date replied.
‘Hmm, so does your brother eat kugel?’ he tried again.
‘I don’t have a brother,’ she retorted.
‘I see,’ Heschel pressed on, ‘And tell me, if you did have a brother, do you think he would like kugel?’
But philosophy isn’t only useful when dating – it has its place in the bedroom too:
Shmuley returns home to find clothes strewn everywhere, and his wife undressed in bed, tying up her hair. Feeling suspicious, he starts frantically searching around until at last he finds his old foe Itzhik hiding in the cupboard.
‘Vhat,’ Shmuley splutters, ‘are you doing here?’
‘Everyone,’ Itzhik replies, ‘has got to be somewhere.’
He’s got a point. Though Itzhik’s philosophical defence might at root be considered an historical one if we recall all those out-of-place Jews who were forced, under somewhat different circumstances, to use much the same defence when faced by interrogators far more fearsome than Shmuley.
But never mind Abe and Heschel or Shmuley and Itzhik. We’re talking here of the Jewish woman, and of what Jewish jokes tell us about her. And what they tell us, for one thing, is that she adheres to neither side of patriarchy’s most enduring binary – the virgin/the whore – but admits instead of another stereotype: a stereotype that’s still sexist, but at least she makes it her own.
Because you can get a Jewish woman into bed, it’s just that she doesn’t make it easy for you. And besides, she’s always dealing with a million other things at the same time:
Three old men are discussing their sex lives.
The Italian says, ‘Last week, my wife and I had great sex. I rubbed her body all over with olive oil, we made passionate love, and she screamed for five minutes at the end.’
The Frenchman boasts, ‘Last week when my wife and I had sex, I rubbed her body all over with butter. We then made passionate love and she screamed for fifteen minutes.’
The Jewish man says, ‘Last week, my wife and I had sex. I rubbed her body all over with chicken fat, we made love, and she screamed for six hours.’
The others are stunned and ask, ‘What could you have possibly done to make your wife scream for six hours?’
‘I wiped my hands on the curtains.’
Since sex in Jewish law is considered a mitzvah (good deed), however, even a very orthodox Jewish woman can find reasons to enjoy it:
A nineteen-year-old religious boy marries an eighteen-year-old religious girl. Both are sexual innocents before their wedding. After the wedding ceremony and celebration is over they go home and do the mitzvah. On the second night after they’re married, he says to her, ‘You know, I had a grandmother, of blessed memory, who raised me like a son. She couldn’t be at our wedding. In memory of her soul we should do the mitzvah again.’ Third night he says to her, ‘I had a cousin, we were like brothers. He died too young. In his memory we should do the mitzvah again.’ And they do. On the fourth night he mentions another cousin. On the fifth night an uncle, then an aunt, and a great-uncle.
Come Shabbat, she gets herself to synagogue. All her friends surround her: ‘Nu, what’s he like?’
‘He’s a fool, but I get nachas [pleasure] from the family.’
To find this joke as funny as I do – I find it very funny – you’d need to understand the context: the importance, in orthodox circles, of marrying into a respectable family. For only then can you expect to find yourself laughing aloud at what I take to be the joke’s key revelation: that however hard you may try to hide what gets you going under the cover of respectability – such as within the sanctity of a marriage, for instance – still, there’s no such thing as an ‘innocent pleasure’.
How so?*
To recap, two young, religious and sexually inexperienced people are rather more capable than they might have us believe of following the logic of their own desires. Although, throughout the joke, we’re made aware of the groom’s use of pious rhetoric to serve his own pleasurable ends, it’s the punchline revelation of the bride’s polymorphously perverse satisfactions – i.e. the pleasure identified in the joke as ‘nachas’ is that huge turn-on enjoyed by a Jewish woman who senses she’s ‘married well’ – that really gives the game away. Because, my goodness, here we have a Jewish woman who, no less than the Jewish man, no less than anyone in fact, is her own brand of pervert! She gets her pleasure, that is, from the feeling that there’s something more to be enjoyed, something beyond or beside what she’s been officially given. Thus her sexual pleasure is not unlike the pleasure we get from the joke: the pleasure of secrecy, of doubleness, of a double entendre. So it’s a joke, in other words, whose comic disturbance of its protagonists’ presumed innocence perfectly illustrates what delights and disturbs us all in that everyday form of taboo-breaking we try to pass off as nothing really, as an innocent pleasure – as only joking.
What’s critical, then, is that, no matter how she gets her kicks, this young woman’s piety remains unimpeachable. She does nothing overtly transgressive. On the contrary, she’s doing her duty – her conjugal duty. As such, she’s hard put to explain the sex – or the pleasure – that isn’t a mitzvah:
Becky returns home and finds her husband in bed with her best friend. Shocked, she rounds on her friend: ‘Me – I have to, but you?’
Truly, the bedroom is full of philosophy.
But if the Jewish woman typically needs to be talked into bed, shiksas, we’re assured, are always up for it:
A rabbi and a beautiful model get stuck in a lift. The model turns to the rabbi and says, ‘Before we press the alarm ... I have to confess, I, I, I ... always fantasised about having sex with a rabbi. Why don’t we take this opportunity?’
The rabbi thinks about it for a moment and then asks, ‘What’s in it for me?’
And they’re endlessly obliging:
A congregation honours a rabbi for twenty-five years of service by sending him on holiday to Hawaii, all expenses paid.
When the rabbi walks into his room, there’s a gorgeous woman lying naked on the bed. She tells the rabbi that she is here for him at any time during his trip. Naturally, the rabbi is shocked and extremely embarrassed. Who has dared to imagine that he would even want such a thing?
The woman tells him who is paying for her services. He picks up the phone, calls the synagogue, and asks for the president of the congregation: ‘Where is your respect, how could you do something like this? Have I ever done anything to suggest that I’m the type of person to appreciate this sort of “gift”? As your rabbi, I am very hurt, and very angry.’
As he continues to berate the president, the woman gets up and starts to get dressed, not wanting to embarrass the rabbi any more than necessary.
The rabbi turns to her and says, ‘Where are you going? I’m not angry at you’
I love that joke, but who is it a joke ‘on’ exactly? Am I laughing along with an anti-Semitic slur – an essentially racist joke about hypocritical Jews? Or is the joke a subtler but still rather anti-Semitic indictment of the sophistry of religious Jews specifically? Or maybe it’s a joke about not Jews so much as men – as in all men, including rabbis? Unless, that is, it’s a joke on each and every one of us – a joke about the self-justifying manoeuvres that one can always discern between the lines of just about any system of public morality. (Though that it’s a rabbi who teaches us this moral lesson – a moral lesson about the immorality of morality – does make it that bit funnier):
A rabbi who’s been leading a congregation for many years is upset by the fact that he’s never been able to eat pork. So he devises a plan whereby he flies to a remote tropical island and checks into a hotel. He immediately gets himself a table at the finest restaurant and orders the most expensive pork dish on the menu, a whole suckling pig.
As he’s eagerly waiting for it to be served, he hears his name called from across the restaurant. He looks up to see ten of his loyal congregants approaching. His luck, they’d chosen the same time to visit the same remote location!
Just at that moment, the waiter comes out with a huge silver tray carrying a whole roasted pig complete with an apple in its mouth. The rabbi looks up sheepishly at his congregants and says, ‘Wow – you order an apple in this place and look how it’s served!’
Well, at least it makes a change from man’s standard calumny of blaming his own hankering for forbidden apples on a woman.
And not just any woman ...
* One benefit of including an abstruse joke fewer readers are liable to get is that the po-faced business of then explaining and interpreting the joke should feel a bit less ruinous.