Satire and self-deprecation

If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather than be accused of making false allegations to further their own malign agenda, the chances are you could do with a laugh right now. The resurgent far right’s threat feels frightening but expected, whether from torch-waving American mobs or European ethno-nationalists directing the restive masses’ anger towards the traditional target, presently embodied by George Soros.

More dismaying for many have been the myriad controversies involving putative anti-racists: for instance, the Momentum activist who claimed that Jews were the slave trade’s ‘chief financiers’ and rank their suffering above other oppressed minorities’; or the Bradford council candidate selected last week who once asked on Facebook: ‘What have the Jews done good in this world?’; or the group of Labour conference delegates leafleting against the NEC’s proposal for tackling anti-Semitism, who saw an identifiably Jewish stranger approaching and turned their backs on him.

The poisonous assumption that Jews habitually smear critics of Israel by lying about anti-Semitism is now ingrained among such people. Humour is fundamental to Jewish culture — whose literature Saul Bellow characterised as dealing in ‘laughter and trembling’ — but many British Jews are, if not visibly trembling, uneased by a distinct chill in the air.

So… anyone know any good jokes? The literary academics Devorah Baum and Jeremy Dauber do, and between them their books examine how diaspora Jews have tended to relate to the world, with humour an enduring survival tactic. Dauber’s history of Jewish comedy is really one of how the past century’s American-Jewish comedy relates to a deeper cultural heritage — but, that caveat aside, it displays impressive mastery of the subject. Rather than set out a single chronology, he divides Jewish humour into seven themes, among them satire, reaction to anti-Semitism, the vulgar and body-obsessed, and the ambiguous nature of Jewishness itself.