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Tag : humor
February 11, 2021 by April Baskin
When Jewish Space Laser Jokes Help the Enemy
Last week, as I was scrolling through Facebook, I noticed all the chatter and jokes about a “Jewish space laser.” It was clear to me that people were responding to a headline. Initially I assumed based on context clues that it was some sort of joke coming from a Jewish leader, or perhaps out-of-context banter about an Israeli space program.
No one’s post directly identified a source, so I went searching to find out for myself. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to learn that it wasn’t “one of our own.” Rather, this absurd antisemitic conspiracy theory was from a November 2018 Facebook post written by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a recently-elected congresswoman and QAnon enthusiast, in which she speculated Rothschild-owned space lasers were the cause of the California wildfires.
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January 26, 2021 by Sarah M. Seltzer
Abortions Every Day: The Feminist Literature of Norma Klein
About three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I embarked upon a project that I don’t expect to finish anytime soon. Some people read books to be trans-
ported or to feel empathy. I read for those reasons, too, but I also read to conduct
research. Since high school, I’ve actively sought books that I believed would help me answer the question of how I can be a woman in a world that makes being one practically impossible. My plan was to keep reading books until I found an author or character whose womanhood I could emulate perfectly. In the past three years, I’ve read well over 100 books by female authors. My project continues.
In the summer before I went to college, my research led me to a book that in turn led me to Norma Klein, a writer whose scandalous young adult novels of the seventies and eighties earned her a spot on a list of most-banned authors. As she was praised for her precocious feminism, I made it my business to get a hold of her books even though they were mostly out of print. Once I got them, I swallowed them up one after the other after the other. Fortunately, Klein wrote more than 50 books before her premature death at age 50, some of which are for children but most of which are for teens or adults.
No matter how much I read, I never got a straight answer from Klein about how to be a woman. Her female characters, intelligent young (mostly Jewish) women whose families can somehow afford apartments in Manhattan, make decisions with which I often disagree. But while Klein’s feminist literature may not signify an end to my research journey, it offers consolation by presenting characters who, despite being flawed and despite living in a society that is broken, manage to turn out OK, surviving on ruthless introspection and politically incorrect humor.
Take, for example, the teenage heroine of Domestic Arrangements (1981), nicknamed Rusty for her deviant red hair. Rusty’s parents are cheating on each other, she can’t decide whether she actually enjoys sleeping with her boyfriend, and her appearance is constantly commodified by men who can’t resist ogling her. Her parents offer conflicting advice. (She says of her father, “Daddy is a socialist, sort of, meaning he worries about how many poor people there are in the world and feels guilty that he isn’t poor.”)
Rusty is only one of many Norma Klein characters who is sexually active and, like the rest of them, her sexual activity leads to more complicated issues. What should she do if she doesn’t find sex enjoyable? What if she’s annoyed that her boyfriend is so obsessed with it? Is she too young for sex, or have the times changed? If this were any other author, the topic probably wouldn’t be considered to begin with, and even if it were, it might turn out to be a cautionary tale about the fates that await adventurous young women—I think of the Mean Girls scene where the coach says to the high school students, “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die!” But Rusty doesn’t get pregnant or die. Instead, she finally says to her boyfriend one day when he begins touching her, “I just don’t feel like it.” Before, she says, “I just figured I sort of had to, that you’d be mad if I didn’t… But now that it’s gotten really good, I like the idea of it being special.”
The heroines of Klein’s novels almost always have sex and almost always don’t die. They get pregnant sometimes, but not as a cautionary tale. Some who get pregnant get abortions, and others don’t. In “Pratfalls,” a novella featured in Love and Other Euphemisms (1972), a young woman divorces her husband and enrolls in clown school. When Rachel gets pregnant despite her tipped uterus, she is encouraged to get an abortion because of the stigma surrounding unwed mothers, but she decides against it. In order to make it clear that her decision to have the babies (they end up being twins, of course) has nothing to do with fear of abortion, she asserts delightfully, “I would have an abortion every day in the week… I believe women should have the right to strangle their newborn babies with their bare hands if they feel like it.” She’s not sure who the twins’ father is, but one of the possible fathers is Black and the others are white. At the hospital, when her Black ex-husband asks on the phone “what color” the children are so he can find out whether he’s the father, Rachel wants to mess with him and says “Gee, Edward. I’d send you a swatch, but they’re a little young for skin grafting.” The story ends soon after, but her lighthearted sense of humor suggests that Rachel will end up OK, tipped uterus and single status notwithstanding.
American Dreams (1987), one of the last books Klein published before her passing, follows four characters from their college graduation to middle age. The comedy in this novel isn’t as natural as in Klein’s other novels. The jokes seem out of place next to a scene where an Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant parent says to her child, “If you knew what we know, you wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning” and where one of the main characters ends up getting murdered. The twisted humor of this novel is captured when one of the main characters has finally found an editor to publish his short story: “‘You have captured all the sordidness and anomie of city life,’ the editor writes. The writer is confused: “he sent the sordid one somewhere else!” Despite the trauma present in the novel, and despite the fact that life doesn’t turn out like any of the characters expect it to, the characters mostly end up OK—a gay man who used to be suicidal now lives more-or-less happily with his partner in Paris, and a man and woman who divorced both find love again. But the tone of the novel is sad, and the humor forced. How could Norma Klein, the queen of witty banter, write something so sad?
But then again, maybe that’s what Klein’s humor was for all along. Without it, Rusty may not have been able to stomach the creepy comments she got from men, and Rachel might have surrendered to the idea that she couldn’t have kids out of wedlock. And even if they were still able to do what they wanted, they might not have been able to do it as joyfully without their humor. So, how can one be a woman in a world where it’s practically impossible? Nobody knows. But Klein shows that whatever path a woman does take, she’s going to need a sense of humor, even if and perhaps especially if she’s forcing it. And she wants us to believe that everything’s going to be OK—that we won’t be punished for our curiosity, though it might change us for the better.
Lauren Hakimi is a student at CUNY Hunter College, where she studies history
and English literature.
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July 27, 2020 by admin
Comedy? You Bet!
LAURA BEATRIX NEWMARK is the Director of LABA at the 14th Street Y. Her work at the intersection of the arts, media, activism, community building and Jewish programming spans two decades.
At the 14th street Y’s LABA program, where artists study Jewish texts together and nurture their own work, we were supposed to do five nights of performances this spring—and we couldn’t. But we did put together a show—“Jewnight Show Pandemic Passover.” It was terrifying to do all this virtually.
It turns out we were ahead of the curve, as everything went virtual. Yet human beings need to be around people. It’s a nice interlude to provide theater virtually, but it’s hard not to connect in person.
In the meantime, to cope, I’ve been consuming comedy. We need it. From the beginning, the funny videos people post, the angst, the parodies are the only thing giving me comfort. The viral video of an Israeli mom complaining about having to homeschool (“Now, our children will find out how dumb we are. It’s not right!”) is a perfect example: comedy that gives us a release.
I had actually picked humor as the theme for LABA this year—we had a long discussion about how in Jewish humor there’s this balance between observant and profane, between intimacy and shared trauma; it’s all rooted in struggle. I think we are going to see interesting humor emerge. And just making people laugh is important.
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April 4, 2020 by admin
ZoomWear: A Virtual Fashion Guide
Zoom meetings, Zoom teaching, Zoom Seders, Zoom Zumba; your Pandemic calendar is full but what do you wear? Lighthearted tips to help the modern social isolate shine on screen!
Make-up:
Your face is key! Zoom Professional allows meetings of unlimited length; you are going to get bored and sleepy but no-one has to know. Pencil those brows into arches of amazement. (Fireplace ash works in a pinch.) Lighten the skin around your eyes with bleach wipes for an alert demeanor. Blusher masks indoor pallor. When you run out of blush, cut a beet in half and apply to cheeks. When you run out of fresh produce, smear maraschino cherries in a “C” curve starting 9mm from the bottom of your eye socket to the hollow beneath your cheeks. When you run out of red food, slap yourself in the face.
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January 15, 2020 by admin
Laughter As Medicine for Resistance
I had my first real MS flare following the 2016 election, 10 years after my diagnosis. Once I had recovered, I realized that I would need a way to cope with a changed landscape: the news, the politics, the tension.
And for me, they only way to manage the scary reality of a Trump presidency was through comedy. The importance of living in a country that could jeer at the President without being offed or poisoned—mixed with the sheer release of laughing—provided a certain catharsis needed to process a way forward. I also appreciated the importance of comedians tearing apart the Trump Administration’s lies, policies and hypocrisy and making a huge mockery of the people in power.
I knew this particular President was watching—and it would irk him.
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January 8, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
The Power of Humor for Smashing the Patriarchy
Most attorneys don’t moonlight as a humorists, so Lori B. Duff’s new collection of essays, If You Did What I Asked in the First Place (Deeds Publishing), may just be a first of its kind. Duff talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about her unusual professional pairing.
YZM: How do the jobs of lawyer and comic coexist in your life?
LBD: I feel sorry for lawyers without a sense of humor. I feel like those two things are the Yin and Yang of my life. They balance each other out. The law can be so harsh. No one thinks, “I’m having the best day of my life. I think I’m going to go see my lawyer.” People come to talk to me professionally when they are at their lowest: when someone has died, when their marriages are breaking apart, or when they are in financial trouble. When you focus on those things for 40 or more hours a day, you start thinking the entire world is tragedy. It’s important to balance that by thinking about the opposite of tragedy, which is comedy. When you add to that the maxim that comedy is tragedy plus time, they are natural partners. (more…)
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May 14, 2019 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
The Meaning and Value of Humor: An Interview with Marilyn Simon Rothstein
In Lift and Separate and Husbands and Other Sharp Objects (both from Lake Union Publishing) humor is the lens through all of life’s mishegas is viewed. Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough asks author Marilyn Simon Rothstein what it means to be funny, and why it’s more essential now than ever.
YZM: Have you always been considered funny?
MSR: When I was growing up in Flushing, New York, a terrible name for a wonderful community where there were two ethnic groups—Orthodox Jews and Conservative Jews—my family sat around a wrought iron kitchen table and discussed one important topic—other people. Being funny was the way to get everyone’s attention.
YZM: Do you think that Jewish humor, and in particular Jewish women’s humor, is its own category?
MSR: All humor is based on observation. So, Jewish humor is based on what a member of the Jewish community observes. I feel that my first book, Lift And Separate, is very Jewish.
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July 9, 2018 by Chanel Dubofsky
Four Things Rabbis Should Stop Saying at Weddings
Here we are, in the grip of another Wedding Season. Perhaps you’re a perpetual bridesmaid, or the one getting married, or you’re not particularly into marriage as a life choice for yourself.
Maybe you’re going to a wedding every weekend until the end of time (or Labor Day). As we descend further into the madness of tulle, plus-ones, and open bars, let’s review some things you’re basically guaranteed to find at Jewish weddings: aggressive dancing (ask me about incurring my stiletto related injury), which usually involves the couple being hoisted into the air on chairs while they pretend not to be afraid of falling, people shouting “Mazel Tov!,” and of course, a rabbi.
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