HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JEWISH MOTHER AND A JEWISH MOTHER-IN-LAW?

Here’s how:

Goldie and Frieda were chatting. Goldie says, ‘So nu, how’s your daughter?’

Frieda responds, ‘Oh, just fine. My daughter is married to the most wonderful man. She never has to cook, he always takes her out. She never has to clean, he got her a housekeeper. She never has to work, he’s got such a good job. She never has to worry about the children, he got her a nanny.’

Then Goldie asks, ‘And how is your son these days?’

Frieda says, ‘Just awful. He is married to such a witch of a woman. She makes him take her out to dinner every night, she never cooks a dish. She made him get her a housekeeper, God forbid she should vacuum a carpet! He has to work like a dog because she won’t get a job, and she never takes care of their children, because she made him get her a nanny!’

Ouch.

But let’s deal with the mother-in-law first:

A Jewish town had a shortage of men for wedding purposes, so they tried to import men from other towns. Finally a groom-to-be arrived on a train, and two mothers-in-law-to-be awaited him, each claiming true ownership.

A rabbi was called to solve the problem. After a few minutes of thought, he said, ‘If this is the situation, you both claim the groom, we’ll cut him in half and give each one of you half of him.’

To this replied one woman, ‘If that’s the case, fine, give him to the other woman.’

The rabbi intoned wisely, ‘So be it. The one willing to cut him in half, that has to be the real mother-in-law!’

Thus, while a father-in-law can sometimes disguise his true feelings ...

A girl brings her new boyfriend, a serious young scholar studying Torah, home to meet her father. The father takes the boy into his study and begins to ask him questions.

‘So,’ says the father, ‘you’re a Torah scholar. How do you plan to support my daughter?’

‘Don’t worry,’ says the boy, ‘God will provide.’

‘And where will the two of you live?’ asks the father.

‘Don’t worry, God will provide.’

‘And how will you support your children?’

‘Don’t worry,’ says the boy, ‘God will provide.’

The father finishes his discussion and the young man leaves. The daughter then comes in and asks her father, ‘So, what did you think of him?’

‘I like him,’ says the father. ‘He thinks I’m God.’

... a mother-in-law will always let you know what she thinks:

Jake visited his parents. He said, ‘Finally, I’ve found my true love. Just for fun, I’m going to bring over three women and you can guess which one she is.’

The next day he brought three beautiful women, who sat on the sofa and chatted with his parents over a little cake. After they left, he challenged, ‘OK, guess which one I’m going to marry?’

‘The one in the middle with the red hair,’ his mother replied instantly.

‘Right! But ... how did you know?’ asked Jake, amazed.

‘Simple,’ his mother said. ‘Her, we don’t like.’

Which doesn’t mean she won’t get as good as she gives:

Sadie is dying. As she lies on her deathbed, she says to her husband, ‘Shlomo, I want you to promise me one thing.’

‘Anything darling,’ says Shlomo.

‘On the day of my funeral I want you to look after my mother. And you and she must travel there together in the same car,’ says Sadie.

Shlomo squirms. He struggles. At last he says, ‘For you, on your funeral, I will do this. But let me tell you right now – it will completely ruin the day for me.’

When it comes to his own mother, though, a Jewish man sees things rather differently:

Hymie is beside himself – his wife is in bed and it’s clear she’s dying. Nothing will revive her – not water, not whisky, not food of any kind. ‘Is there anything I can do to bring you joy in your last moments?’ he pleads.

‘Well, there is one thing,’ she replies, ‘I’d like to have intercourse with you, Hymie, one last time.’

Hymie obliges. Miraculously, his wife is completely revivified by their coupling. She’s not only better, she’s better than ever. She leaps out of bed, ready for anything. Hymie, seeing this, bursts into tears.

‘Whatever’s wrong, my Hymie?’ she asks. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me so well? We’ll have many more happy years together.’

‘It’s not that,’ sobs Hymie, ‘it’s just got me thinking – I could have saved Mother!’

So the Jewish joke, then, has a theory of neurotic guilt that both extends and revises the one we’ve inherited from Freud; for, as we find it here, what the Jewish son feels most guilty about is precisely his failure to be incestuous (which theory, personally, I think has some mileage).

Ah, but Oedipus Shmedipus, as long as he loves his mother:

Mother 1: My son loves me so much – he constantly buys me gifts.

Mother 2: My son loves me so much – he always takes me on holiday.

Jewish Mother: That’s nothing. My son loves me so much, he goes to see a special doctor five times a week to talk exclusively about me.

So we must pity the Jewish mother! Sometimes it seems as if the entire Jewish joking industry exists only in order to poke fun at her: narcissistic, self-martyring, smothering, guilt-inducing, hysterical, paranoid, overweening, complaining, castrating – honestly, is there any sin she hasn’t been accused of by her ungrateful children?

Her daughter certainly expects the world of her:

Mitzy springs to the telephone when it rings and listens with relief to the kindly voice in her ear.

‘How are you, darling?’ it asks. ‘What kind of a day are you having?’

‘Oh, Mother,’ she says, breaking into bitter tears, ‘I’ve had such a bad day. The baby won’t eat and the washing machine broke down. I haven’t had a chance to go shopping, and besides, I’ve just sprained my ankle and I have to hobble around. On top of that, the house is a mess and I’m supposed to have two couples to dinner tonight.’

The mother is shocked and is at once all sympathy. ‘Oh, darling,’ she says, ‘sit down, relax and close your eyes. I’ll be over in half an hour. I’ll do your shopping, clean up the house and cook your dinner for you. I’ll feed the baby and I’ll call a repairman to fix the washing machine. Now stop crying. I’ll do everything. In fact, I’ll even call Simon at the office and tell him he ought to come home and help out for once.’

‘Simon?’ says Mitzy. ‘Who’s Simon?’

‘Why, Simon! Your husband!’

‘No it isn’t. I’m married to Shlomo.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I have the wrong number.’

There’s a short pause before Mitzy says, ‘Does this mean you’re not coming over?’

But when it comes to mother-blaming, it’s really the Jewish mother’s ultimate victim, her poor emasculated son, who is the first to point the finger and cry ‘J’accuse’. He, after all, is famously the object of such mountainous maternal pride that she can’t even stop herself boasting about him when he’s in mortal danger:

‘Help! Help! My son – a doctor! – is drowning!’

Though her maternal narcissism took root much earlier, of course:

Mrs Cohen is pleased to announce the birth of her son, Dr David Cohen.

The announcement may sound premature, but you have to remember at which moment life is said to begin in Jewish tradition:

In Jewish tradition the foetus is not considered a viable human being until after graduation from medical school.

And actually Mrs Cohen predicted Instagram too:

When pushing David along in his buggy one day, she bumps into Mrs Shindler.

‘Oh, what a beautiful baby!’ Mrs Shindler coos.

‘Meh, that’s nothing,’ replies Mrs Cohen, ‘you should see his photos.’

But that’s what you get in a culture that puts family first:

Ninety-one-year-old Morris and Sophie, his eighty-nine-year-old wife of sixty-six years, go to their lawyer to get a divorce. Puzzled, the lawyer asks, ‘Why did you wait all this time if you were both so miserable for so long?’

Sophie replies, ‘We were waiting for the children to die.’

And a culture that will do whatever it takes to keep loved ones close:

Goldie Cohen, an elderly Jewish lady from New York, goes to her travel agent. ‘I vont to go to India.’

‘Mrs Cohen, why India? It’s filthy, and much hotter than New York.’

‘I vont to go to India.’

‘But it’s a long journey, and those trains, how will you manage? What will you eat? The food is too hot and spicy for you. You can’t drink the water. You must not eat fresh fruit and vegetables. You’ll get sick: the plague, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid, malaria, God only knows. What will you do? Can you imagine the hospital, no Jewish doctors? Why torture yourself?’

‘I vont to go to India.’

The necessary arrangements are made, and off she goes. She arrives in India and, undeterred by the noise, smell and crowds, makes her way to an ashram. There she joins the seemingly never-ending queue of people waiting for an audience with the guru. An aide tells her that it will take at least three days of standing in line to see the guru.

Dat’s OK.’

Eventually she reaches the hallowed portals. There she is told firmly that she can only say three words.

‘Fine.’

She is ushered into the inner sanctum, where the wise guru is seated, ready to bestow spiritual blessings upon eager initiates. Just before she reaches the holy of holies she is once again reminded: ‘Remember, just three words.’

Unlike the other devotees, she does not prostrate herself at his feet. She stands directly in front of him, crosses her arms over her chest, fixes her gaze on his and says: ‘Sheldon, come home.’^*

So while the Jewish mother can be overprotective:

What’s a Jewish sweater? The woollen garment worn by a child when his mother is cold.

That’s only because she doesn’t like to see him sitting around like a guru all day doing nothing useful.

On the contrary, she’s ambitious for him:

A little Jewish boy is telling his mother about how he’s won a part in a play at school. His mother asks, ‘What is the part you will play, Saul?’ Saul responds, ‘I shall play the Jewish husband,’ to which the mother replies, ‘Pah! Well, you go right back to that teacher and tell her that you want a SPEAKING part!’

Hang on! Is it really the woman who gets such a great speaking part in all these Jewish jokes? Or aren’t these jokes mostly told by men precisely in order to pin the blame for their own guilt – or their own Jewishness – on a woman? And, as we know, it was Adam, the first man, who paved the way here, by blaming his own tsores on Eve, the first woman.

Adam started a trend. For who, in any man’s life, is the first woman if not his mother: a woman so spectacularly powerful that he entered the world wholly on her account, and then relied on her for his own survival? So it’s having a mother at all that’s emasculating. And that goes double for Jewish men – and especially Jewish men from first-generation immigrant families who tended to wield less power in the world than Gentile men, rendering them subject to more domesticity and more mothering. Hence, though to some extent all the jokes Jewish men tell about Jewish women seem really to be jokes about the overwhelming influence of their mothers, the merciless mother-bashing of the male Jewish stand-up act during its 1950s and 1960s heyday should be seen in the context of a distinct historical backdrop.

That said, the most notorious comic creation of the Jewish mother stereotype belongs to neither biblical patriarch nor secular stand-up, but comes to us instead from a novelist. It’s Philip Roth’s ‘most unforgettable character’, Sophie Portnoy, who is the guilt-inducing Jewish mother par excellence.^† As Alex, her long-suffering son, complains:

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel – on the body of every Jewish child! – not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.

And the novel comprises exclusively Alex’s monologue as he lies on his back on a psychiatrist’s couch, tirelessly complaining about the damage inflicted on him by his mother’s fantasised omnipotence:

It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, ‘Momma, do we believe in winter?’

If a Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother, then every joke is a ‘family joke.’

*  Whenever I hear that joke it’s always with the name Sheldon in the punchline, which dates the joke (taking it back to the countercultural trends in America in the 1950s and 1960s), but also makes the joke impossible to update: no other name seems as funny or works as well.

†  Roth entitles the first section of the novel, about Sophie, ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met’.