The Upside-Down Joke

In 1992, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin published a book called Jewish Humor, exploring what Jewish jokes reveal about the Jewish people. It quickly became one of my favorite books. I memorized many of the jokes, but even more than the humor itself, I appreciated the way Telushkin contextualized them. Jewish humor has never simply been entertainment. For centuries, it has functioned as a coping mechanism, a form of resilience, and at times a quiet act of defiance.

As a people intimately familiar with struggle, Jews have long used humor to endure difficult realities. During periods of persecution, rising antisemitism, and even the horrors of Nazi Europe, Jews continued to tell jokes. In the 1930s, as fascist movements gained traction in America and Europe alike, humor became one more way to maintain dignity in the face of fear. Over the past week, I have found myself thinking again about one particular joke from that book:

In the late 1930s, a Jew is traveling on the subway reading a Yiddish newspaper, The Forward. Suddenly, to his shock, he spots a friend of his sitting just opposite him, reading the local New York Nazi newspaper. He glares at his friend in anger: “How can you read that Nazi rag?”

Unabashed, the friend looks up at him. “So what are you reading, The Forward? And what do you read there? In America, there is a depression going on, and the Jews are assimilating. In Palestine, the Arabs are rioting and killing Jews. In Germany, they’ve taken away all our rights. You sit there, and read all about it, and get more and more depressed. Me? I read the Nazi newspaper. We own all the banks. We control the media. We control all the governments.”

The brilliance of the joke lies in its inversion of antisemitic tropes. The humor comes from reclaiming hateful caricatures and turning them upside-down. The Jewish reader derives comfort not from the hatred itself, but from the absurdity and grandiosity of the accusations. That kind of inversion has long helped Jews process the pain of antisemitism in everyday life.

This past week, many readers encountered Nicholas Kristof’s latest op-ed in The New York Times. In it, Kristof repeated deeply inflammatory accusations against Israel regarding abuse of Palestinian prisoners, relying on anonymous claims and sources long associated with Hamas and anti-Israel activism. The piece is not investigative journalism – it is an op-ed. But it reads as advocacy journalism wrapped in the credibility of a major newspaper.

The timing also raised concerns. The article appeared just days before the release of additional reporting about Hamas’s actual documented sexual violence on October 7. To many Jewish readers, the juxtaposition felt deliberate: an attempt to redirect attention away from atrocities committed against Israelis and toward a familiar narrative of uniquely Jewish atrocities.

Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic. Israelis themselves engage in vigorous debate every single day. Israel’s courts, journalists, watchdog organizations, and political opposition routinely investigate allegations of wrongdoing. That is what healthy democracies do. Abuse in prisons, wherever it occurs, is wrong and must be investigated seriously and transparently.

But what troubles many Jews is the disproportionate moral framing so often applied to Israel alone. When coverage consistently singles out the Jewish state for uniquely sensationalized condemnation while minimizing or contextualizing atrocities committed against Jews, people notice. The cumulative effect is not accountability. It is delegitimization.

And so I think back to that old upside-down joke, and I imagine how it might sound in 2026:

Two Jewish people are riding the subway in New York. One is scrolling through The Times of Israel and across from him sits another passenger scrolling through The New York Times on his phone.

The first asks, “How can you read the New York Times? It has become a propaganda machine for Hamas and its allies.”

The second replies, “What about you? You read about bombings, drone attacks, antisemitism, and war all day long. Me? I get to read that we control the banks, control the media, run secret cabals around the globe, and apparently even train dogs to commit sexual violence!”

We live in an upside-down world.

When major media institutions repeatedly platform rhetoric that many Jews experience as defamatory or obsessive, it should not be surprising that Jewish trust erodes. For generations, The New York Times was regarded as the paper of record. Increasingly, many Jews no longer see it that way. They see a publication willing to amplify narratives that would once have been recognized immediately as dangerous caricatures of Jewish power and evil.

None of this means legitimate criticism of Israel should disappear. Democracies require scrutiny. But scrutiny becomes something darker when it crosses into obsession, double standards, or the denial of Jewish legitimacy itself. As Natan Sharansky famously argued with his “3D test,” antisemitism often reveals itself through demonization, delegitimization, and double standards.

Too often today, that line is being crossed.

There are countless ways the broader issue of prisoner abuse could have been reported responsibly and ethically without feeding broader narratives of Jewish malice or Israeli exceptional evil. Yet the editorial choices made by The New York Times suggest that provocation and outrage now take precedence over nuance and fairness.

That is a tragedy not only for Jews, but for journalism itself.