This year, Ms. Kaufman did something more than tell jokes. She became one of the few adjunct professors in her age cohort and taught a course on Jewish humor at Hunter College, her alma mater. One of the jokes the class dissected:“The Frenchman says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have wine.’ The German says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have beer.’ The Jew says: ‘I’m tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes.’ ”
“We were not just telling jokes,” Ms. Kaufman said in her book-lined Park Avenue study, her eyes glinting mischievously. “We were investigating why so many comedians are Jewish and so many Jewish jokes are so self-accusing.”
“It goes back to immigration from the shtetl, from that poverty, and because the Jew was the object of so much opprobrium and hatred,” she said. “The jokes were a defense mechanism: ‘We’re going to talk about ourselves in a more damaging way than you could.’ ”
That psychological handicap applies to all the Ashamed Jews (see The Finkler Question: "In Jacobson's book, Finkler dwells among those miscellaneous Jews who answer the question in versions of condemnation of Israel, Zionism, and Judaism. Finkler is an anti-Zionist Jew who is comfortable in his outrage. The novel mocks them; there is of course much to mock. Among their number, for example, is a risible academic who insists that the Jews, "sent mad in the Holocaust, not least by their own impotence and passivity, [are now] spilling what was left of their brains over the Palestinians and calling it self-defence." Finkler joins "Ashamed Jews," a group of Jews proud to be ashamed of their Israeli or Israel-supporting fellow Jews. His first act is to modify the typography of the name, to bring out the group's affinity with the dead, good Jews of the Holocaust, and to intimate the affinity of bad, living Israelis with Nazis: "ASHamed Jews.")
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