My Favorite Joke

A Jewish family goes to check on their Zeidi in his new nursing home.  “How do you like it here, Sabah?”, they ask.  “Oh, it’s marvelous, simply marvelous; everyone is so respectful and courteous.  Would you believe it, there’s a former conductor here, who hasn’t stood in front of an orchestra for a couple of decades, and still everyone calls him ‘Maestro’.  And a one-time cook who hasn’t stepped in a kitchen for ages, whom everyone calls ‘Chef’.  And a retired bank manager to whom everyone refers as ‘The Director’.  As for me, I haven’t had a shtup since your beloved Bubby passed away, and still they call me ‘That Fucking Jew’!

I apologize for the expletive; but gratuitous it was not – the punch line requires it!

The joke genuinely is a favorite of mine.  Yes, it is gallows humor.  It is also apropos our times.

On the face of it, the old man in the joke seems oblivious, naive, foolish.  He is ignorant to the hostility.  Does he not realize he is being singled out for being Jewish?  Part of you wants to shake him, to wake him up.

But dig down a layer and consider that he is not hopelessly ignorant to the hostility but willfully ignores it, and purposefully transforms it into an honorific.  He may just be worthy of our admiration.  He has chosen to meet the insult not merely with resignation and restraint, let alone with anger and hurt, but to invert its intended meaning and treat it as a compliment.

In so doing he masters his inner world.  He is imperturbable; his equilibrium cannot be upset.  He is free!  Free not from hostility in his environment – that’s beyond his control – but he is in charge of his mental state.  The effect of the slurs is the opposite of that intended, which is to intimidate and wound. Instead of cowering and feeling upset when the insult is hurled in his direction, you can imagine him gaily skipping a beat.  He doesn’t show them the middle finger; he gives them a thumbs up – he turns the joke on them!  It must be infuriating. He does not get enraged by their slander; not he.  To the contrary: they put a pep in his step.  He wastes no time arguing with them, convincing them of the error of their ways, or declaring himself to be mortally wounded and offended.  He is merrily off to his 2pm canasta game.  He is impervious.

I wish to argue that this should be instructive to us as we contemplate our own attitude in the face of an unrelenting wave of antisemitism.

I want to be crystal-clear: antisemitism itself is no laughing matter.  It is a pathological scourge, an ever-changing and adapting mental virus that induces in the susceptible a demented, baseless hatred of our people, and is ever present in every society and every generation in the history of humanity since Avraham Avinu.  It is a symptom of a mental disease you won’t find in the ICD-10, though maybe it should be included, of an obsessive loathing towards us Jews.  It is base and vile, and boorish, and consumes the antisemite and the societies in which his pernicious beliefs spread.

We Jews try to understand it, to wrap our arms around its origins, to God forbid not feed into it, to analyze what it is about us that gives rise to it.

The answer is everything and nothing.  Everything that makes a Jew a Jew is a red rag to the antisemite, and none of these attributes and qualities rationally deserve the hatred that the antisemite bears us.

By focusing on us, we look in the wrong place to explain the antisemite.  The makings of a Jew hater lie not in us but in him, in his envy, his exposed inferiority, his injured fragility, and his malignant narcissism.

As the NY Times columnist Bret Stephens said in his ‘State of World Jewry’ speech this January, “We have the honor of being hated by Ali Khamenei,” (BDE – ‘Blessed is the True Judge’) by “Erdogan and other despots whose loathing of Jews is directly proportionate to their crimes against their own people.  We have the honor”, he went on, “of being hated by the so-called feminists who downplayed the rape of Israeli women on and after October 7 and by the so-called progressives who denied it. We have the honor of being hated by virtually every political movement, left or right, that also opposes the idea of personal merit as an organizing social principle.  We have the honor of being hated by UN mandarins who would like you to know that the preponderance of human rights violations on this earth are committed by one small country, Israel. We have the honor of being hated by queers for Palestine who neglected to notice what happens to queers in Palestine. We have the honor of being hated by the Hamas water carriers masquerading as reporters at the BBC and other news media.  We have the honor of being hated by all the Hollywood celebrities who see nothing amiss with demanding boycotts of Israeli artistic institutions, but not of, say, Chinese ones. We have the honor of being hated by New York’s charming new mayor” – and, may I add, his wife – “who thinks he can endorse the erasure of one state and one state only, the Jewish state, and still acquit himself of the charge of anti-Semitism. We have the honor of being hated by people who parade their so-called Jewishness only when it serves as a tool to defame and endanger half the Jewish people, as if they’ll be spared the furies should, God forbid, Israel someday fall.  In short, we have the honor of being hated by an axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid.”  I could not of course have put it better myself.

When the truly deplorable conveniently out themselves as Jew haters as they have in the last two and a half years (thank you very much), I for one have found my Jewish pride soar to levels it had not reached before.

There is, unfortunately, no cure, no magic elixir to rid the antisemite of his antisemitism, much as we might wish it were otherwise.  We cannot convince them out of it, persuade or negotiate with them to turn away from it.  It would be a mistake to think that antisemitism stems fundamentally from missing or inaccurate information, or a defect in education; the world is full of educated antisemites.  No, it is more like a psychological plague, a communicable neurosis.  Once the virus has taken them over, a cure is elusive.

“But”, you may protest, “what about the formidable Rawan Osman, or the son of Hamas, or Tommy Robinson?  Aren’t these living proof that antisemites can be reformed?”  No – and it is not because I do not take them at their word that they are not antisemites; I am quite willing to believe that they are not wolves in sheep’s clothing.  I contend that they never were true bigots.  They may have swum in the same waters, been brought up with antisemitic paroles and by antisemitic authority figures.  But – for whatever reason – these supposedly reformed antisemites lacked the deep conviction and animus of their former compatriots.  They did not know – the way their hate-filled former fellow travelers know – that the Jews killed Christ, control the economy, spread their tentacles and commit genocide.  They were, I contend, sheep in wolves’ clothing.  True antisemites are refractory to any cure that is rooted in rationalism.  There are no facts we can present to them, well-intentioned encounters we can arrange with the most presentable of our breed, or Super Bowl advertisements we can show them that will rid them of their plague.  What, I ask you, as I (born and raised in Frankfurt am Main) have asked myself for decades now, could the German Jews in the early 1930s have done to reform a Hitler, or Himmler, a Heydrich or Goebbels, a Goering or Hess or Höss?  Not a thing.  It is a waste of our time and communal charity efforts.  The return on investment of ‘hasbara’, of explaining Israel and ourselves to the rest of the world, and of social media efforts to counter antisemitic messaging is mostly disappointing.  Yet if I am afraid that if it’s improbable to cure antisemites, I fear it is impossible to cure Jews of the delusion that we can cure antisemites.

Not only is it an exercise in futility, any reflexive response to antisemitic posts, protests or acts on the part of the well-meaning, compulsive social media warriors among us, thin-skinned and sensitized as many of us have necessarily grown to be, keeps us in a perpetual state of outrage and despair at humanity, an emotional catacomb of our own making.  It is a form of Mizrayim, a place of bondage.

Which brings me back to my joke’s protagonist, the ‘Fucking Jew’.  What should he do?  What for that matter should we do?  And how might the answer be connected to Pesach?

One option might be to do nothing; in theory, I suppose, but in reality, to do no nothing would – I believe – be dead-wrong (I choose my words deliberately).  We simply cannot afford to ignore antisemitism.  It is too mortally dangerous for that.  Ask the Jews of Bondi, of Manchester and of Pittsburg.  We cannot outsource this; after all, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”  So we must stay alert, must expose and shame the antisemites, and –  crucially – must mobilize the non-haters in non-Jewish society to join the fight to isolate the haters.  To keep this virus in check, we need not only the gifted and energetically outspoken among us, the Natasha Hausdorffs, Eylon Levys, Emily Austins, Jonathan Greenblatts of the ADL and the Haviv Rettig-Gurs, heroes every one of them; we should all make an effort to emulate and support them.  We also want to cultivate, platform and otherwise support allies among the ‘goyim’, the Erin Molans, Elise Stefaniks, Elica LeBons and the Douglas Murrays, who recognize antisemitism for the societal decay it is – Godspeed!  Our collective future may depend on their success.

And that is not all we must do.  We must also invest in ourselves, in thriving Jewish communities, in Jewish pre-schools, the teaching of Jewish and Israeli history and the Hebrew language, and facilitate familiarity with Israel.  Yes, we need to fight to live another day.  But investing in our and our children’s future will ensure that when that day comes, we and they have lives worth living.  We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the goal of Jewish life is not to fight antisemitism, but to bring about Jewish thriving.

Can we do both?  I know we can.

The Hebrew word for face is pannim – it’s a plural form; ‘faces’, if you will.  There is no singular ‘face’.  With one face, we must face down the antisemite, give him no brook, no hold, and – if necessary – hatch an escape plan, which – in my analysis – was the only redeeming action German Jews of the 1930s could ultimately have taken.  Our vigilance and adaptability have allowed us to survive existential crisis after crisis for millennia.  And with another face, we must build for ourselves a glorious Jewish present, and – for our children and their children – a glorious Jewish future.  In creating our future, we express our freedom.  What could be more apropos Pesach than to aspire to freedom?

We cannot put all our eggs in one basket and not the other.  An ostrich strategy is not an option; it is Polyannish, and could literally cost lives.  Ignoring the threats against us is not a luxury we can afford.  But an exclusive focus on fighting antisemitism is not an option either, because even if we won (and we won’t) it will have cost us who we are; it will have cost us our freedom and our Jewish identity.  And a world without Jews would be a benighted world.  Being Jewish is not about engaging with the wider world with suspicion, gloom and despair, and yet that is precisely where, I am afraid, we are headed if we let the rising antisemitism post-October 7 turn us into expressing our Jewishness primarily through fighting antisemitism.  That is not a yoke to which we must submit.  An investment in Jewish thriving is an investment in us being the light in the world that we were meant to be.

This week, Jewish families the world over will gather around the Seder table to recite the story of our people’s exit from the shackles of Mizrayim towards freedom, of the historic resetting of our identity from an enslaved nation to a people aspiring to be free in its own land – “lihiot am chovshi be’arzeinu”.  How are we to make sense of our mission to identify as a light in the world?  I used to understand it as a call to set an exemplary standard.  But if so, then to what end?  So others emulate us?  Perhaps; but we are hardly a proselytizing religion.  Lately, I wonder whether the purpose of our light is to illuminate that caustic, disastrous element in each society and every generation that bears antipathy to us Jews.  Perhaps our role in the grand design is to serve as a lightning rod that draws unto it the hatred of antisemites and in so doing reveals them, causes them to out themselves.  It often starts, but never ends, with the Jews.  As a gentile London Times op-Ed writer put it last week, “Standing by and saying nothing now corrodes us all”.  Every society is healthier without antisemitism.  Perhaps by some divine plan, we are destined to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.  A people chosen to serve as a flashlight unto the nations.  Chag Pesach sameach!