HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JEWS AND ISRAELIS?
If two Jews alone with each other on the same train feel free to make themselves at home by flouting the rules, then what can we expect of the Jewish State? Can a whole country run on chutzpah?
By the looks of things, yes. In Israel it does appear as if those same overfamiliar manners have prevailed:
As the plane set down at Ben Gurion airport, the voice of the captain came on: ‘Please remain seated with your seat belt fastened until this plane is at a complete standstill and the seat-belt signs have been turned off.
‘To those who are seated, we wish you a merry Christmas, and hope that you enjoy your stay in Israel ... and to those of you standing in the aisles and pushing towards the doors, we wish you a happy Hanukkah, and welcome back home.’
Yet there are those who maintain a big difference between diasporic and nationalist personalities. Israelis, says a character in the film The Infidel (2010), are ‘Jews without angst, without guilt, therefore not really Jews at all’. Or, in other words, what makes Jews recognisably Jewish is their self-consciousness before an audience, which brings them a constant nagging sense of how they might be seen from the outside:
On a bus in Tel Aviv, a mother is talking to her small child in Yiddish. But he keeps answering her in Hebrew. Each time, his mother corrects him: ‘No, no, talk Yiddish.’
An increasingly exasperated Israeli, overhearing all of this, demands to know, ‘Why do you insist your son speaks Yiddish instead of Hebrew?’
‘Because,’ the boy’s mother replies, ‘I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.’
She gets the problem, in other words – if diasporic Jewishness has become a byword for difference, then how can Jewishness be sustained in Israel? The stereotypical splits and tensions to be found within diasporic jokes can hardly be expected to work in a place where the majority are Jews:
A classical musician was performing a solo recital in Israel. As he concluded his performance he was astounded by the cries from the audience: ‘Play it again!’ He was incredibly moved by this response, and gladly did so. As he finished a second time, he was astonished to hear their demands once more: ‘Play it again!’
He bowed to the audience, wiped a tear from his eye, and said, ‘I have never felt more humbled. Truly it is the greatest wish of any musician to have such an appreciative audience. And I would dearly love to play it for you again, but, sadly, I must away to Tel Aviv, where I am due to give another concert this evening.’
At this point a voice from the crowd was heard: ‘You must stay here and play it again until you get it right.’
The refined classical musician turns out to be just another shlemiel who, not unlike Kafka’s Abraham, imagines applause where there’s only derision – only now the mockers are his fellow Jews. (It’s why Israelis, despite their rep for bad manners, will never engage in sexual intercourse on the street for fear that a passer-by may stop to point out they’re doing it wrong.)
Clearly, then, Israelis are no longer quite the same as those meek and terrified back-of-the-queue Jews we find in jokes about Soviet Russia ...
A journalist asks a Pole, a Russian, an American and an Israeli the same question.
He asks the Pole, ‘Excuse me, sir, what is your opinion on the meat shortage?’
The Pole replies, ‘What is meat?’
He asks the Russian, ‘Excuse me, sir, what is your opinion on the meat shortage?’
The Russian replies, ‘What is an opinion?’
He asks the American, ‘Excuse me, sir, what is your opinion on the meat shortage?’
The American replies, ‘What is a shortage?’
He then asks the Israeli, ‘Excuse me, sir, what is your opinion on the meat shortage?’
And the Israeli replies, ‘What is “excuse me”?’
But still, there are some things you can’t leave behind, and in Israel the Jewish propensity for a gallows sense of humour has not only been sustained, it’s if anything intensified:
Anat in Jerusalem hears on the news about a bombing in a popular cafe near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that the family’s OK.
‘And Yael?’ Anat asks after the teenager who frequents that cafe.
‘Oh, Yael,’ says her mother reassuringly, ‘Yael’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.’
... Auschwitz being the fail-safe destination of Israeli school trips.
And the furrowed brow of the optimist hasn’t gone away in Israel either:
Things are going badly for Israel. The occupation, social unrest, the extreme right attacking the extreme left, the economy in a tailspin, inflation getting higher and immigrants flooding in from all over. Problems, problems, problems, but what to do? So the Knesset holds a special session to come up with a solution. After several hours of talk without progress, one member stands up and says, ‘Quiet, everyone, I’ve got it, the solution to all our problems.’
‘What?’
‘We’ll declare war on the United States.’
Everyone is shouting at once: ‘You’re nuts! That’s crazy!’
‘Hear me out!’ says the minister. ‘We declare war. We lose. The United States does what she always does when she defeats a country. She rebuilds everything – our highways, airports, shipping ports, schools, hospitals, factories – and loans us money, and sends us food aid. Our problems would be over.’
‘Sure,’ says another member, ‘if we lose.’
So the punchlines haven’t died, they’ve merely relocated:
Four Israelis have arranged to meet in a cafe. For a long time, nobody says anything. Then, one man groans, ‘Oy’
‘Oy vey,’ says a second man.
‘Nu,’ says the third.
At this, the fourth man gets up from his chair and says, ‘If you guys don’t stop talking politics, I’m leaving!’
Thus, even in ‘Zion’ Jews are still kvetching, and still sitting in the dark telling each other the lightbulb-less jokes that remain the most bearable form available for transmitting a traumatic history. Though it’s a traumatic transmission that, sadly, doesn’t stop there. For just as Diaspora Jews have passed their gallows sense of humour on to Jewish Israelis, Jewish Israelis appear to have passed it on to ... Palestinian Israelis.
No one conveys the tragic absurdity of that situation better than the very funny Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, whose novels remind one of Kafka and whose Israeli sitcom, Arab Labour, is partly inspired by Seinfeld. ‘I use a lot of humour,’ Kashua remarks, ‘and I follow the saying that if you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh first, otherwise they will shoot you.’ Tragically, he isn’t joking. What he is doing is knowingly focusing attention on the way in which Palestinians have been inveigled into not only the traumatic aspects of Jewish history, but the mordant wit required to survive it. Thus the uncannily familiar tenor of Kashua’s quintessentially outsider comic sensibility turns ‘getting’ his jokes into an implicit mode of acceptance of the very form of historical recognition that has so far, for Palestinians, been politically denied.
That said, the primary thing Jewish humour seems to have given Kashua is someone to blame for his people’s sufferings:
I couldn’t lie any more to my kids, telling them that they are equal citizens in the state of Israel. They cannot be equal because in order to fit in and to be accepted and to be a citizen in Israel, you need a Jewish mother. So basically what I’m trying to tell my kids is just, it’s their mother’s fault and it’s not my fault.*
A line that’s both funny and, potentially, hopeful, if we recall Freud’s remark that ‘laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychic conformity.’ For if two people or peoples can share a laugh, then mightn’t it be possible for them to share other things as well?†
* From an interview with American NPR in 2016.
† That’s the dream, but current reality does not reflect it. Thus in 2014 Kashua lost faith that he could change attitudes in Israel and so uprooted his family to the US – a despairing move reflected in his increasingly sober weekly columns for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. ‘To have humour,’ he explained, ‘you have to have hope.’ And here we might again consider David Grossman’s rendering of an Israeli comedian whose stand-up act is one of such unmitigated desperation that the Jewish joke, while still being pressed into the service of defence and attack, seems, in this novel, to have finally run out of gas. In an admiring review of the book in the NYRB, literary critic Stephen Greenblatt describes it as ‘one of the least funny novels I have ever read’.