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WORK TITLE: The Jewish Joke
WORK NOTES:
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CITY: Southhampton
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1984; married Josh Appignanesi (a filmmaker); children: three sons (one deceased).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, scholar, documentary film director, public speaker, and educator. University of Southampton, Southampton, England, associate professor of English literature and critical theory, affiliate researcher at Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations. Codirector of documentary film, The New Man, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor to newspapers, including the London Guardian and the New York Times Sunday Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Devorah Baum is a writer, scholar, and educator. She is an associate professor in English literature and critical theory at the University of Southampton in England. She is also an associate researcher with the university’s Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations. She has conducted research on topics such as religion in modern and contemporary politics, literature, and philosophy, and on Jewish identity and culture. She is a frequent speaker at public institutions and commercial and community centers, where she discusses her research and academic interests. In addition to her academic work, she is also a documentary film director, serving as codirector of The New Man, a film that “looks at a female experience, pregnancy, from a predominantly male point of view,” Baum remarked on the University of Southampton website.
Feeling Jewish
Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just about Anyone “explores what it means to feel Jewish—even when you’re not,” commented an interviewer on the Yale Books blog. Baum explained the seemingly contradictory idea to the interviewer: “The idea of the book is that everyone these days is feeling a little like the way Jews have felt throughout the entire modern period: hyper-connected but insecure, both at the center of the maelstrom and always an outsider to it, uncertain, marginalized, labile, mobile, even if you stay put,” she stated. In other words, the interviewer stated, “because our complicated world leaves countless people feeling marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, such ‘Jewish’ feelings are increasingly common to us all.”
Baum “suggests that in a troubled global village, stereotypes often ascribed to Jews—guilt, hysteria, envy, resentment, self-hatred, extreme mother-love—may have become universal,” observed a Kirkus Reviews writer. She references literature, film, and popular culture as well as academic works and sacred texts to explain her concept of feeling Jewish. She combines anecdotes about her own experiences with the thought and concepts of major Jewish figures such as Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, Woody Allen, and Sigmund Freud. She addresses some of the conditions ascribed to Jews over the years, particularly the condition of self-hate, which has come to be seen as a pejorative in its negative depiction of Jews and their personalities. Baum believes that the feelings and perceptions she describes in the book, often seen as something divisive, can instead be interpreted as a uniting factor for Jews and non-Jews alike. “These seemingly negative Jewish feelings can actually be seen as ‘blessings’ because it is these emotions that have contributed to the wonderful Jewish sense of humor, perceptiveness, and passion for others and ideas,” commented a reviewer on the Jewish Book Council website.
The Jewish Joke
Baum’s book The Jewish Joke further delves into the idea of Jewish humor. The work “curates classic and new jokes and asks why it is, given that jokes tend not to travel all that well, that Jewish jokes have survived a long and treacherous history and been able to move across national, class and temporal boundaries without having to rewrite their punchlines,” Baum stated on the University of Southampton website. In the book, Baum seeks to determine what it is that makes a joke Jewish, apart from references to clearly Jewish elements such as rabbis or synagogues. She analyzes specific jokes and the works of Jewish comics, “not in an academic, scholarly way, but certainly in an intelligent one,” commented Booklist contributor Michael Tosko. She notes that Jewish humor can be found even in the sacred texts such as the Torah and the Zohar. She considers the work of comics such as Jackie Mason, Woody Allen, Jon Stewart, and others. In the end, Baum “tacitly proposes that what unites and explains the less recent humor in these pages is the outsider status Jews have endured almost everywhere and almost always,” observed Boris Fishman, writing in the Washington Post.
A Kirkus Reviews writer called The Jewish Joke “delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful” as well as a “lighthearted, appreciative, and very funny survey of Jewish humor.” Tosko likewise found the book to be “light-hearted, entertaining, and informative.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Michael Tosko, review of The Jewish Joke, p. 14.
Jewish Chronicle, November 30, 2017, Karen David, “Feeling Funny: Devorah Baum on Jewish Jokes and Emotions.”
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just about Anyone; February 15, 2018, review of The Jewish Joke.
Publishers Weekly, March 26, 2018, review of The Jewish Joke, p. 112.
Washington Post Book World, April 26, 2018, Boris Fishman, “Collection of Jewish Jokes Shouldn’t Shy from the Sorrow behind the Humor,” review of The Jewish Joke.
ONLINE
Jewish Book Council website, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (September 30, 2018), Carol Poll, review of Feeling Jewish.
University of Southampton website, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/ (October 16, 2018), biography of Devorah Baum.
Yale Books blog, http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/ (November 27, 2017), “A Q&A with Devorah Baum, Author of Feeling Jewish.”
Dr Devorah Baum
Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory
Dr Devorah Baum's photo
Dr Devorah Baum is an Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is also attached to the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non Jewish Relations.
My book Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) (Yale University Press) came out in 2017. It delves into fiction (especially American), film, and memoir to explore feelings that have been stereotypically associated with modern Jews – self-hatred, guilt, resentment, paranoia, anxiety, hysteria, overbearing maternal love - and analyses why such feelings may be increasingly common to us all as the pace of globalization leaves many feeling marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened. One chapter from the book has been extracted and adapted for a long read essay in The Guardian, and the book has also inspired a New York Times Sunday Review essay and other essays, talks and blogposts, e.g. here.
The Jewish Joke (Profile Books) also came out in 2017. It curates classic and new jokes and asks why it is, given that jokes tend not to travel all that well, that Jewish jokes have survived a long and treacherous history and been able to move across national, class and temporal boundaries without having to rewrite their punchlines. The book examines jokes whose precise origins are unknown as well as the work of known authors and comedians, primarily but not exclusively American. The book has been the subject of radio and press interviews and has been the focus of public events where I’ve been in conversation about jokes and how to understand them with comedians.
My earlier research focussed predominantly on the role of religion in modern and contemporary politics, literature and philosophy. In a West glossed as ‘secular,’ hostility towards migrants and diasporic groups has often been predicated on an imputed primitivism or even barbarism to their religions and religiosity – as if Western culture were not itself deeply formed by its own religious heritage. It is this disavowal of religion that I examine at length in a number of articles and book chapters. And by reflecting on how language as such might be said to position the subject in an inherently ‘faithful’ relation, I also suggest alternative ways of encountering religious difference and religious ideas in politics, poetics, and in the modern university.
The documentary feature film I co-directed, The New Man (2016), funded by the Wellcome Trust, looks at a female experience, pregnancy, from a predominantly male point of view, tracking the migration of hysterical feelings into a twenty-first century man, who feels replaced by not only the prospect of a baby at his wife’s breast, but by new reproductive technologies in the bedroom, and by women in a global workplace. Theatrically released, the film has been widely reviewed across the UK print, radio and television media and has had numerous special event screenings and also been screened in academic contexts as well as in education and training contexts for use by midwives and psychotherapist groups. It has also been the subject of a conversational feature in Granta Magazine.
I have spoken about my research and interests at community centres, commercial centres and public institutions including the Southbank Centre, The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), the London Film School (LFS), the Royal Albert Hall, the Philadelphia Association (PA), JW3, The Freud Museum, The London Review Bookshop, McNally Jackson Bookshop (Manhattan), Daunts Bookshop and King’s Place.
I have been interviewed about my research and interests for a number of BBC TV and Radio programmes, including Radio 3’s Free Thinking (and here), BBC2’s Newsnight, Radio 4’s Front Row, news programmes, and TV and Radio documentaries.
In October 2017 my research was the subject of a feature profile in Times Higher Education.
A Q&A WITH DEVORAH BAUM, AUTHOR OF FEELING JEWISH
Described as ‘intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny’ by Zadie Smith, Devorah Baum’s Feeling Jewish: A Book For Just About Anyone explores what it means to feel Jewish – even when you’re not. Exploring why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to ‘negative’ feelings, she argues that because our complicated world leaves countless people feeling marginalised, uprooted, and existentially threatened, such ‘Jewish’ feelings are increasingly common to us all. We chatted to her about what it’s like to be a debut author writing on this subject, and what she hopes readers will take away after reading her book.
Author image – copyright Laura Palmer
1 . Your book’s subtitle is ‘a book for just about anyone’. In these divisive times, why do you think Feeling Jewish is something we can all relate to?
The idea of the book is that everyone these days is feeling a little like the way Jews have felt throughout the entire modern period: hyper-connected but insecure, both at the centre of the maelstrom and always an outsider to it, uncertain, marginalised, labile, mobile, even if you stay put.
Throughout modernity, Jews have been subject to a great deal of suspicion and scrutiny and a swirl of unanswerable questions about their identity and belonging. In a fast-changing, globalised, “Facebook world”, these questions and uncertainties are ones that I suggest more and more of us have come to share – along with the insecurities and feelings that can accompany them, like self-hatred, envy, guilt, paranoia, to name a few I look at in the book. In the literature I analyse, these feelings have been quintessentially associated with the Jewish experience, and it places Jewishness at a kind of vanguard for understanding them, now that they’re ever more widespread. So I take examples from books, films, people’s lives, to find out how we’re living these feelings out, and maybe figure out how to live with them better, find out if perhaps they’re not as negative, toxic or unwelcome as they might appear to be at first. Perhaps they’re actually quite necessary and useful, if we can admit them.
2. What do you think readers will take away after reading your book?
Perhaps an understanding of the way in which feelings can’t be commanded; they escape us, and so become shared whether we like it or not. Likewise, I hope readers find a new sense of the nature and significance of their feelings and a renewed willingness to admit those feelings to themselves and to feel them, no matter what their feelings might be. It’s my hope as well that in so doing they may find that they feel things differently – and thus could feel themselves moved accordingly. Those probably sound like rather dramatic hopes for one small book, but hey, why not dream big?
3. You recently co-directed a documentary feature film The New Man. Tell us a bit about that.
My husband Josh Appignanesi is a filmmaker – this is the first film I’ve co-directed . We started charting a part of our own lives on camera – the part where we became parents. It was at times an unbearably intimate, odd and for me unexpected thing to do, but ultimately it proved a very fertile one. We started to feel it was more than just a personal project, that it reflected a zeitgeist, the big changes in the way our generation are having children today. The medical stuff, the later age, all that, but focussing especially on the way it plays out in a marriage, how it plays out in these conspicuously gendered ways that are frequently at odds with our espoused politics. And there hadn’t really been a film charting that in an intimate lived way before, and people really seemed to respond to that. It was in theatres and now you can rent it on Amazon and iTunes.
4. As a debut author, what advice do you have for other aspiring writers?
I recently wrote a blog for Yale US about writing and self-hatred – a theme familiar to many writers, aspiring or otherwise. I said that deep within many a would-be writer you can find a bullied state of self-consciousness in the person of an intimidated child looking up at the giants and wondering “who am I to speak?” It’s a question that imagines a world divided between actual authorities and the pretender or imposter whom the writer assumes herself to be. So my advice to writers –including, continually, the writer that is myself – is that the real freedom of the blank page resides in its total negation of authority. Who are you to write? Nobody at all. It’s the sole reason that you can write.
5. Are there any writers that particularly inspire you?
I’m fortunate to be friends with several very talented writers who constantly inspire me, not least because I see what they go through to make their work really work. But I also teach literature at university so I’m conscious of the way in which every writer can become an influence or a sort of spell one is under. If I’m reading or teaching Henry James, for example, I find myself writing emails in long, more formal and densely nuanced sentences than I perhaps would otherwise. Or if you’re in an Emily Dickinson phase, you’re liable to become a little freer with your dashes – which is all to the good.
But lately I’ve been particularly inspired by a writer whom I’ve admired for years: the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. His latest book In Writing is inspiring in lots of ways. He suggests, for instance, that writing can be a source of unmitigated pleasure that needn’t necessarily be served up with a side portion of masochism. Who knew? And he also mentions a detail about his own writing process that I find incredibly inspiring: that when he writes something that he isn’t completely sure about, but which he still finds interesting, he leaves it in. So being a writer needn’t require one to preside over one’s writing imperiously, like an Author. Surely there can be few things more inspiring to a writer than a notion like that.
Feeling Jewish
Devorah Baum is lecturer in English literature and critical theory, University of Southampton, and affiliate researcher with the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non‑Jewish Relations. She is the co-director of the creative documentary feature film The New Man.
Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just About Anyone is available to purchase here.
Keren David
November 30, 2017
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Feeling funny: Devorah Baum on Jewish jokes and emotions
Devorah Baum has two new books out which examine the essence of Jewishness. Keren David met her to find out more.
Devorah Baum promotes one of her two new books: Feeling Jewish
Devorah Baum promotes one of her two new books: Feeling Jewish Photo by Yvonne Brooks
Two Jews, Moshe and Itzik, are walking in the Ukrainian forest. In the distance, they see two local guys walking towards them. Moishe turns to Itzik, panics, and says, “Itzik, what should we do? There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!”
This, according to Devorah Baum is the world’s most Jewish joke. And she should know. The author of a new book entitled The Jewish Joke, she has written an “essay with examples (less essay, more examples)” which not only contains a lot of jokes, but also an insightful analysis of what lies behind them. (I know what you’re thinking, but, honestly, it doesn’t ruin the humour. Baum’s tone is light and she is never boring).
What’s more, this is only one of the two books of huge Jewish interest that Baum had published within a week of each other. Her debut Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) examines emotions commonly associated with Jewish people, drawing on texts from Portnoy’s Complaint to Jane Eyre. Put it this way, if you’re looking for Chanukah presents for intelligent, introspective, cultured Jews, with a sense of humour, you’ve found them.
On the way to interview Baum at her home in West London, I try a little experiment. In the introduction to Feeling Jewish she writes: “Whenever I’ve been asked the name of the book I’ve been writing — the book you’re reading — I nearly always fudge or muffle my answer. Can I really say ‘Feeling Jewish’ out loud? Oh the irony, that ‘feeling Jewish’ for me at least , should be so neatly exposed by the way I feel about saying those very words.” I decide to travel from Finsbury Park to Putney Bridge on public transport, reading Feeling Jewish, just to see what emotions it evokes in me, and possibly other people, displaying something which acts as an instant “I’m Jewish” label. (Of course some people do this all the time by wearing a kippah, say. Not me, though).
And, sure enough, pulling the book out of my bag, I feel a little anxious and nervous, and instantly worry that this indicates a certain level of paranoia. In fact, no one reacts to my reading matter, apart from a lady on the Victoria Line who gives me a meaningful smile. I interpret this as a silent “I’m Jewish too.” And then I ponder how this fits Baum’s thesis, that the emotions we think of as stereotypically Jewish — including guilt, self-hatred and paranoia — are pretty much universal as globalisation has left people, Jews and non-Jews, feeling marginalised, uprooted and existentially threatened.
Arriving at the terraced house in Fulham which she shares with her husband, the film-maker Josh Appignanesi and their two young sons, aged three and one, Baum makes me comfortable in their sofa-lined kitchen, a space made for hordes of friends to lounge in. She explains, almost apologetically, why there are two books. One grew out of the other. She sent the proposal for Feeling Jewish to one publisher, but then decided it needed a more traditional academic publisher. The first publisher had liked the humour in her proposal, and asked if she’d consider a shorter, joke-led book. The two projects proceeded side by side, and ended up coming out at the same time.
Calling the original book Feeling Jewish is, she says “a provocation”. It’s not meant to suggest that all Jews feel the same or share the same emotions. “It’s an argument about the nature of feelings,” she explains. “Feelings don’t come out of nowhere. They have a history.”
Baum is a lecturer in English Literature at Southampton University, and her book draws on literature, film and memoir. Her focus is the modern, post emancipation period, “when Jews were admitted into society, yet not quite accepted.” The sources for the joke book stretch from the Zohar to Louis CK. Both seek to identify answers to the question of what is quintessential Jewishness. “It’s being at odds with oneself. It’s taking pride in one’s difference and feeling ashamed of it at the same time,” writes Baum.
Many Jewish jokes, and many emotions identified with Jews come from an insider/outsider consciousness, she tells me. “We create borders and tackle them. Jewishness becomes a good metaphor for boundary-troubling ideas.” She quotes Kafka, who wrote in his diary; “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in the corner, content that I can breathe.”
“You don’t have to be Jewish to feel that ‘I’m a weird Jew’ feeling that you don’t really fit in, you’re not really part of the family, you don’t belong,” she says. “You don’t have to be Jewish to feel you have nothing in common with Jews, but being Jewish helps.”
Matters of Jewish identity have always fascinated her. She grew up in south west London, part of a “profoundly Jewish-identifying” family, members of Richmond United Synagogue. It was a happy secure upbringing, but “we were inheritors of modern Jewish history. Our grandparents had come from the Old World. There was a horrible history burned inside us.”
She was the only Jewish girl at her school. “There’s a sense of secrecy and privacy, that you are carrying something that might get found out.” She talks about feeling proud, yet somehow “vigilant”, charged by a need to represent Jews and Jewishness, which leads to a feeling that “no one will assume that I am speaking for myself…if myself is even a possibility”. These ideas are brilliantly explored in Feeling Jewish, in particular in her discussion of The Diary of Anne Frank and the almost inescapable tendency to turn a real girl into a saint and a symbol.
Baum read English at Bristol University and became an academic, because “I never knew what I wanted to do. I’m a real kvetcher.”
Avowedly impractical — “ I never cook” — she felt teaching was something that she could cope with. I’m not sure how much to believe this claim, as Baum, as well as being super-bright and very likeable, has managed to produce two books alongside two small children, as well as commuting to a full-time job in Southampton, all of which points to someone pretty practical. “I’m an old mum,” she points out — she’s 43 in December — and the books are a culmination of a long period of research. “It’s a blur,” she says of the last few years.
We talk about the Jewish propensity to make all of life into a joke, a kind of sitcom, like Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld. It’s something that she and Appignenesi did when she first became pregnant. They wrote in the JC earlier this year about how their “fun experiment”, of documenting the pregnancy in film, turned from a gentle comedy about a neurotic father-to-be, into something very different. Baum was pregnant with twins, but as the film, entitled The New Man, progressed they learned that one would die and the survival of the other was uncertain. The film ends with the birth of their first son, Manny and the burial of his brother, Ben.
Devorah Baum and her husband Josh Appignanesi in The New Man
Devorah Baum and her husband Josh Appignanesi in The New Man
Her loss is still raw — she has tears in her eyes as we discuss it — a moment, ironically, interrupted by her husband arriving to film our interview. And there’s another irony to discuss, the humour and over-the-top emotion surounding the very notion of being a Jewish mother.
“Mother blaming isn’t exclusive to our community,” she points out. And in Feeling Jewish she expands on this “Like Jews, not only are mothers convenient scapegoats who can find themselves blamed for pretty much every ill in society, but they can also wind up feeling terribly bad about this fact — guilty, paranoid, self-hating, all the various feelings this book has been associating with modern Jewish experience.” Or, in the words of Philip Roth’s mother Bess: “All mothers are Jewish mothers.”
Baum “likes religion a lot”, but is not currently a member of a synagogue. She grew up Orthodox, the couple were married by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of Masorti and for a time she was involved with the Yakar community. “I am always feeling nostalgic for being deeply religious.”
Baum’s company is so good, her home so welcoming, that I accept another cup of tea when our interview is done. Which prompts another joke from her book.
Moskowitz and Finkelstein were in a cafeteria drinking a cup of tea. Moskowitz studied his cup and said with a sigh, “Ah, my friend, life is like a cup of tea.”
Finkelstein considered that for a moment and said “But why is life like a cup of tea?”
Moskowitz replied: How should I know? Am I a philosopher?”
Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone) is published by Yale University Press
The Jewish Joke: An essay with examples (less essay, more examples) is published by Profile Books
Devorah Baum will discuss The Jewish Joke with David Baddiel at JW3 on December 7
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Print Marked Items
The Jewish Joke
Michael Tosko
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p14+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Jewish Joke.
By Devorah Baum.
May 2018. 192p. Pegasus, $22.95 (9781681777429). 817.
Baum (Feeling Jewish, 2017) traces the history of Jewish jokes and provides telling examples, mostly from
well-known American Jewish comedians like Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld,
and Sarah Silverman. Baum attempts to pin down what makes a joke Jewish, other than obvious references
to rabbis and synagogues. The melancholic and often existential undertones of popular and lasting Jewish
jokes are pointed out. Specific jokes and routines are analyzed, not in an academic, scholarly way, but
certainly in an intelligent one. For example, the old Groucho Marx saw about never wanting to belong to a
club that would have him as a member, later echoed by Woody Allen's character Alvy in the opening
monologue of Annie Hall, is discussed. The somber seems to inevitably shine through, as exemplified by
Lena Dunham's recent line, "over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife,
Woody Allen." Through it all, The Jewish Joke manages to be light hearted, entertaining, and informative.
Complete with an index, mostly of subjects and people. Recommended for all types of libraries.--Michael
Tosko
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Tosko, Michael. "The Jewish Joke." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 14+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268018/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8cddffc0.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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The Jewish Joke: A Short History--with
Punchlines Devorah Baum
Publishers Weekly.
265.13 (Mar. 26, 2018): p112.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Jewish Joke: A Short History--with Punchlines
Devorah Baum. Pegasus, $22.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-68177-742-9
Baum (Feeling Jewish), lecturer in English literature and critical theory at the University of Southampton,
considers the history of Jewish humor in this cursory study. She begins with a brief exploration of humor
within the Torah, recounting that the Zohar ("the foundational text of Jewish mysticism") considered God's
command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac "the biggest joke in the Hebrew Bible." In an attempt to explain
that bizarre assessment, she refers to the last-minute substitution of a ram for Isaac as a "classic switcheroo"
that Abraham "really fell for," and that showed God as "a prankster of the highest order." She effectively
considers the roles Jewish humor has played as a response to oppression and as a way to mock hypocrisy
about religious observance, but other efforts aren't as successful. For instance, her explanation of why
Jackie Mason employed the simple repetition of the word "Jew" in his standup routine--because, for Mason
and his audience, there isn't "all that much of a difference between a Jew and a joke"--is insufficient. Her
reliance on personages tainted by accusations of sexual misconduct (such as Woody Allen and Louis C.K.)
also distracts from many of her points. Readers interested in Jewish wit will be better served by Jeremy
Dauber's Jewish Comedy or anthologies aiming just for laughs, such as The Big Book of Jewish Humor.
(May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Jewish Joke: A Short History--with Punchlines Devorah Baum." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p.
112. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997206/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9fade666. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532997206
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Baum, Devorah: THE JEWISH JOKE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Baum, Devorah THE JEWISH JOKE Pegasus (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-68177-742-9
A compendium of jokes that reflect and create a sense of cultural identity.
An affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, Baum (English Literature
and Critical Theory/Univ. of Southampton; Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just About Anyone, 2017) brings
thoughtful analysis to a lighthearted, appreciative, and very funny survey of Jewish humor. Each pithy
chapter abounds with jokes: some "that illustrate the arguments of the essay" and others "that have no
obvious place in the essay but were too good to leave out." The author begins each chapter with a question--
e.g., "how do you tell the difference between a blessing and a curse? Jews, Baum asserts, can spot "the
gloomier side of good news." One example: "May you become so rich that your wife's second husband
never has to work a day in his life!" Much Jewish humor takes the perspective of the outsider and--like
black humor--recognizes a history of oppression. As Jon Stewart put it: "We've come from the same history-
-two thousand years of persecution--we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the
blues, Jews complained--we just never thought of putting it to music." The sentiment of many jokes, Baum
writes, reiterates a theme: "if you start worrying now, history will be sure to prove you right." Take this
terse rendering of "the traditional Jewish telegram: Start worrying. Details to follow." The author includes
unattributed jokes that have been retold by generations (some featuring rabbis, Jewish mothers, and, of
course, Jewish mothers-in-law) and newer jokes by contemporary comedians, including Woody Allen,
Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, and
Amy Schumer. Considering the debate "over whether Jewish jokes are battling anti-Semitism or are in fact
forms of it," Baum admits that discerning the difference can be "slippery" and sometimes depends on
whether a Jew or non-Jew is telling (or interpreting) the joke.
Delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Baum, Devorah: THE JEWISH JOKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8c063db7.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247959
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Baum, Devorah: FEELING JEWISH
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Baum, Devorah FEELING JEWISH Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 8, 22 ISBN: 978-0-300-21244-0
Unique theories on how "feeling Jewish" plays out not only among secular Jews, but also among
individuals with no Jewish heritage.In alternately playful and academic prose filled with down-to-earth
anecdotes and grand theories, Baum (English Literature and Critical Theory/Univ. of Southampton)
suggests that in a troubled global village, stereotypes often ascribed to Jews--guilt, hysteria, envy,
resentment, self-hatred, extreme mother-love--may have become universal. Throughout history, Jews have
been reviled and persecuted, both emulated and envied for their successes. While explaining the concept of
feeling Jewish, Baum relies heavily on representations of Jews in novels, memoirs, films, plays, sacred
texts, and on psychologists' couches. She makes multiple references to a variety of significant Jewish
figures, including Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, and Sigmund Freud. At times,
though, Baum examines her own back story, revealing how her reactions to all sorts of occurrences have
become linked to how she feels about herself as a Jewish woman. Does she feel shame about her
Jewishness? If so, why? If not, what to call her feelings about being Jewish? Does the word "Jew" arrive
with a trigger warning in the same way that "black" or "Muslim" or "gay" might? As the author seeks
answers, she produces a wide-ranging, deeply original inquiry into modern life. One of Baum's overarching
messages is that in a world where non-Jews as well as Jews perceive themselves as marginalized and thus
threatened, stereotypical Jewish feelings seem a good fit in other cultures. "When it comes to feeling
panicky, weak, outnumbered, and existentially threatened, Jews are by no means all alone," writes the
author. "Indeed, the sense of dispossession that might be said to underpin resurgent 'nationalist' feelings
could hardly have more in common with the feelings of those rootless cosmopolitans accused of
aggravating them." An impressive work of intellect and presentation.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Baum, Devorah: FEELING JEWISH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495428076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55ddcd08.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495428076
Book World: Collection of Jewish jokes shouldn't shy from the sorrow behind the humor
Boris Fishman
The Washington Post. (Apr. 26, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Boris Fishman
The Jewish Joke: A Short History - With Punchlines
By Devorah Baum
Pegasus. 208 pp. $22.95
---
Recently, I lucked into an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. Tempting fate in a way any fellow ex-Soviet Jew could have told me was reckless, I looked up the weather in Honolulu. Then I took a screenshot and sent it to my non-Jewish fiancee, with the message: "This is called Jewish luck." Seven days of rain.
What made the experience truly Jewish, however, was that, in the end, it didn't rain at all. No, it was infernally humid and hot in a way that local people assured me "never, ever happens" in their dry, breezy paradise.
In her slim volume "The Jewish Joke," the British academic Devorah Baum collects enough humor of this ilk to unstick the slowest dinner party. There are groaners to please every Jewish mother sitting in the dark waiting for her son to change the lightbulb, and there are "jokes" that leave marks, like the one that goes: "Good news! Good news! The child that got killed in the forest yesterday? He's Jewish!" (This is good news, Baum explains, because a dead Christian child would have started a pogrom.)
Between the jokes, which are divided into 23 brief sections, Baum sprinkles light analysis and commentary. She tacitly proposes that what unites and explains the less recent humor in these pages is the outsider status Jews have endured almost everywhere and almost always. Only professional, consummate outsiders could make a joke out of a Jewish panhandler pretending to be Christian next to a confessed Jewish one: The goyim's dislike of Jews will make them give double to "the Christian." (This joke - or the Jewish plight it references - had no respect for the Iron Curtain. I heard a version of it from my grandfather.)
The groaners seem to show up roughly when the threat of bodily harm goes away, if not its phantom limb: existential anxiety. In other words, in America. (Baum tends to cite American-Jewish humor more frequently than its British counterpart.) Jewish mother: "My son loves me so much, he goes to see a special doctor five times a week to talk exclusively about me."
But Baum doesn't pursue this kind of historical connection. Her categorization scheme is thematic ("How Do You Tell the Difference Between Jews and Israelis?"). And she seems to feel a little guilty about interpreting too much in the first place. Tellingly, the main section of the book carries the heading "Less Essay, More Examples." But even the best jokes can feel relentless after a while, and the "essay" part is what someone like Baum is uniquely suited to write to enrich the meaning of these jokes for us. I longed for a longer perspective.
For instance, Baum almost never lingers on the melancholy, if not outright sorrow, behind a lot of the older humor. Reading her breezy, upbeat examination, you'd be forgiven for failing to realize - were you someone not born into the understanding - just how many of the jokes are meant to elicit a weary nod rather than outright laughter: This is the comedy of Bernard Malamud (whom Baum never mentions) rather than Woody Allen (whom she calls on all the time, along with Seinfeld).
Her reference points make the book right for a young Jewish audience, but somewhat false to the pain and suffering that actually produced a lot of the best humor she cites. Good humor is subjective, of course, but, for me, the problem with this tilt toward Woody Allen is that it reinforces kvetching as what most people think of when they think of Jewish humor. But Jewish humor can be far more complex, beautiful, haunting and moving. And cool - in the way that experience and wisdom are cool: A darkly humorous, knowing wryness as freighted with grief as with irony. I don't know if Baum was seeking to explain Jews to others - she's an affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton - or clarify us to ourselves, but I closed her book a prouder Jew than I had begun it.
It feels unfashionable, if not downright retrograde, to remain devoted to this darker notion of what makes Jewish humor Jewish, especially considering that it's among the main reasons I've failed to acclimate fully despite 30 years in America, a country that laughs and cries about very different things than my old one. Perhaps part of the reason is that it's among my last bonds to the family that brought me here from the U.S.S.R. By now, we are all but foreigners to one another. But it takes only one little story about rain and heat in Hawaii for all of us to start nodding with rueful bemusement to the same invisible rhythm. It's among the best feelings in the world.
---
Fishman is the author of "A Replacement Life" and "Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo," and will publish "Savage Feast," a family history told through recipes, next spring.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fishman, Boris. "Book World: Collection of Jewish jokes shouldn't shy from the sorrow behind the humor." Washington Post, 26 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536274607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7d18534e. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536274607
Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone)
Devorah Baum
Yale University Press 2017
296 Pages $26.00
ISBN: 978-0300212440
amazon indiebound
Review by Carol Poll
Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum is an intriguing study of what constitutes “feeling Jewish” through an analysis of the treatment of Jews in literature and popular culture. Baum draws upon critical theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and social science to support her conclusions. Each of her chapters focus on those “feelings” that she writes are “famously associated with Jews.” The chapter titles are “Self-hatred,” “Envy,” “Guilt,” “Over the Top,” “Paranoia,” “Mother Love,” and “Affected.” The somberness of these topics is misleading; Baum’s work is interspersed with Jewish jokes, which are used as poignant yet delightful illustrations of her deductions.
In her introduction, Baum clarifies her goals for the book: “It’s not my project here to advance a particular political agenda. I want to talk instead about how the feelings that seem so often to divide us may also be a means of uniting us.” In today’s rapidly changing global society, large segments of society feel existentially threatened and marginalized. These are the hallmark feelings often associated with being Jewish. In actuality, Baum suggests, these emotions are often shared with other groups, especially those stigmatized based on their “race, migration, class, or sexuality.” The commonality of these feelings may serve to bring different groups in society closer together.
The chapter entitled “Self-Hate” is particularly interesting. Characterizing a writer or person as a “self-hating Jew” is an especially odious designation. These days, Baum suggests, the term is more often used by Jews against Jews who are seen as “publicly critical of Israel or Zionism.” In other contexts, it was a term applied to popular Jewish writers such as Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Woody Allen. Baum writes, "dogged by the accusation of Jewish self-hatred from the beginning of his career, Roth made this charge a recurrent theme in his work.” This can be seen in Portnoy’s Complaint, in which Roth’s Jewish characters have overbearing mothers and experience ever-present anxiety, guilt, and a sense of marginalization. But, argues Baum, these seemingly negative Jewish feelings can actually be seen as “blessings” because it is these emotions that have contributed to the wonderful Jewish sense of humor, perceptiveness, and passion for others and ideas.
Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone) is recommended for all readers who would like to examine “feeling Jewish” from a variety of new perspectives.