The Problem With Funny Jews

Jews who are funny, who have the flare of the comedian in them, the smart, clever and flippant variety, are a problem. For them, the case usually is, the most funniest topics and situations they can make fun of are....Jewish ones.

Now, I am not against making fun of one's self, or family or the whole gantzeh tribe. But when Howard Jacobson, author of “The Finkler Question” which won this year’s Man Booker Prize, takes on Hanukkah, with expected results, it is all so disappointing.

In his Hanukkah, Rekindled, written in Dublin of all places, he makes this point:-

...But how many Jews truly feel this narrative as their own?...Hanukkah — at least the way it’s told — struggles to find a path to Jewish hearts...it doesn’t quite feel authentic.

Isn’t there something a touch suspicious, for example, about our defeating the Syrian-Greek army? It lacks equivocation...Exodus played to our strengths. Similarly, Esther — who had married out of the faith, remember — turning the tables on Haman. In our best stories, we lose a little to gain a little. We use our heads. Trouncing the Syrian-Greeks sounds worryingly like wish fulfillment...

Of course, being a galut Jew, it doesn't occur to him that it is not wish fulfillment but motivation to fulfill our national responsibilities and obligations. Heaven forbid that Jacobson should think of the IDF in this context, not to mention (he is British, you know) the Irgun, Lechi or Palmah.

A Jew a soldier? A hero? A brave, self-sacrificing individual? And tens of thousands of them now? Jacobson can't be proud of that so he puts down the who thing with a smirk.

And he adds,

...The cruel truth is that Hanukkah is a seasonal festival of light in search of a pretext and as such is doomed to be forever the poor relation of Christmas. No comparable grandeur in the singing, no comparable grandeur in the giving, no comparable grandeur in the commemoration (no matter how solemn and significant the events we are remembering...those Hasmoneans — who sound too hot for this time of the year — don’t have a chance of engaging our imaginations.

So what’s to be done? Either Hanukkah should merge with Christmas — a suggestion against which the arguments are more legion even than the Syrian-Greek army — or it should be spiced up with the sort of bitter irony at which the Jewish people excel.

Irony?

Mr. Jacobson, that even isn't sardonic wit.

It's a manifesto of the League of Trembling Israelites who are embarrassed by their own kith and kin and our heritage and tradition.

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