HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ONE JEW AND ANOTHER JEW?
You’ll have heard it said that wherever you can find two Jews, you’ll find at least three opinions. It’s because Jews don’t only disagree with Gentiles, or with each other, they don’t even agree with themselves:
A Jew is shipwrecked on a desert island. Years later, a passing ship notices his campfire and stops to rescue him. When the captain comes ashore, the castaway thanks him profusely and offers to give him a tour of the little island. He shows off the weapons he made for hunting, the fire pit where he cooks his food, the synagogue he built for praying in, the hammock where he sleeps. On their way back to the ship, however, the captain notices a second synagogue. ‘I don’t understand,’ the captain asks; ‘why build two synagogues?’ ‘This,’ says the Jew, motioning to one, ‘is the synagogue I pray in, and this,’ he motions at the other, ‘is the synagogue I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’
What is quintessentially Jewish? It’s being at odds with oneself. It’s taking pride in one’s difference and feeling ashamed of it at the same time. Hence, perhaps, why self-deprecation plays such a key role in Jewish joking – so much so, in fact, that Freud could ponder ‘whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character’.
And yet the funniest thing about Jewish selfdeprecation is the pride that Jews are wont to take in it:
It is the Yom Kippur service and the cantor suddenly stops mid-prayer and declares, ‘Forgive me, God! I can’t say this! I’m just a nothing!’ Later the rabbi, mid-sermon, stops and cries, ‘Forgive me, God! I am not worthy! I’m only a nothing!’ Seeing this, the synagogue’s caretaker charges from the back of the synagogue. ‘If you two great men are unworthy to beseech God, then what right have I, as someone so ordinary? I’m a complete nothing! Oy vey, am I a nothing!’ At which point the rabbi taps the cantor on the shoulder: ‘Look who thinks he’s nothing.’
No two nothings are ever quite the same. Thus the joker’s modest pose is assumed, the better to distance the joker from the real butt of her joke – always those other Jews whom she doesn’t resemble in the least:
A woman is riding a bus in the Midwest, when a man gets on the bus and sits down next to her. He’s wearing a black hat, long black coat, black trousers and shoes, and he has a long curly dark beard.
The woman looks at him with disgust. ‘Jews like you,’ she hisses at him.
He looks up at her, puzzled, and says, ‘I beg your pardon, madam?’
She says, ‘Look at you. All in black, a beard, never take off your hat! It’s Jews like you that give the rest of us a bad name.’
‘I beg your pardon, madam, but I am not Jewish. I’m Amish.’
The woman suddenly smiles, ‘Oh, how darling! You’ve kept your customs.’
It’s a Jewish joke, in effect, about the Jewish joke – about the types of jokes that assimilated Western Jews have historically told to denigrate and thus distance themselves from their poorer relatives, the so-called Ostjuden (Jews from the East). Indeed, given how often Jewish jokes seem to turn on such divisions and doublings within Jewish identity, one wonders if Jewishness itself mightn’t be structured like a joke.
Of what such a suggestion might mean, there’s more in the rest of the book. But for now let’s simply note that, like jokes, Jews love nothing more than telling the difference between things – and especially each other:
Q: How do you tell the difference between one Jew and another Jew?
A: Wait, wait. They’ll tell you.