HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JEW AND AN ANTI-SEMITE?
The anti-Semite thinks the Jews are a despicable race, but Cohen? He’s not too bad actually. Kushner? A stand-up guy. The Jew, on the other hand, believes his people are a light unto the nations, but Cohen? What a shmuck! Kushner? Don’t get me started!
So when it comes to telling the difference, even here we’re in the realm of the slippery. And thus the same may be said of the difference between a Jewish joke and an anti-Semitic one. For while some Jewish jokes seem to manifest an internalised anti-Semitism, others poke fun at the anti-Semitism they parrot:
Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. ‘Herr Altmann,’ said his secretary, ‘I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?’
‘On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and people leaving the faith in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, dominate in the arts and are on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better.’
Jews have got rather used to hearing that they’re responsible for all the world’s problems. And not only the man-made ones, the natural ones too:
‘Did you hear that Jews sunk the Titanic?’
‘The Jews? I thought it was an iceberg.’
‘Iceberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg, they’re all the same.’
But even during the worst of times they’ve found ways to joke:
Cohen lives in Berlin in 1933. He’s walking along the street when Hitler drives up in a Volkswagen and leaps out with a Luger pistol in his hand. ‘Get down in the gutter and eat the filth like the dog you are, Jew!’ he snarls.
Cohen has no choice. He obeys and eats the filth. Hitler starts laughing at the sight so hard that he drops the gun. Cohen snatches it up. ‘Your turn, mein Führer,’ he says, and points to the gutter.
Later that night, Cohen comes home. His wife asks how his day went.
‘Oh, so-so ... But you’ll never guess who I had lunch with today ...’
Although, as we find in the following dialogue from Woody Allen’s film Deconstructing Harry (1997), one can’t always tell if the joker is even joking: