No Joke: Making Jewish Humor
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Best Medicine
1. German Lebensraum
2. Yiddish Heartland
3. The Anglosphere
4. Under Hitler and Stalin
5. Hebrew Homeland
Conclusion: When Can I Stop Laughing?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Suggested Reading
When Eve Ate the Etrog: A Passage from Tsena-Urena
There was once a custom for a pregnant woman to bite off the tip of the etrog at the end of Sukkot. This excerpt includes the text of a Yiddish prayer, or tkhine, that the pregnant woman is instructed to recite based on an interpretation of Genesis 3:6.
Two Poems
Two untitled poems by Avraham Halfi, translated by Leon Wieseltier.
Postcards from the Shoah
Stamps and the paper they traveled on create a historical record of the Holocaust, capturing, for instance, “the exact historical moment when one person reached out in desperation to another."
Distant Cousins
None of these four novels by American Jewish writers is fully at home in Israel—they’re more like Mars orbiters than rovers.
