The most honest writer in the world has no choice but to be a plagiarist. The writer who demands originality of himself, the one who would rather dangle from the gallows than commit a cliché, is sentenced to serve forth material that's old, familiar, used, and recycled mercilessly over and over without ever being given a chance to rest. You know your reader is not going to smile as he reads your words saying to himself, "Wow, what delightful revelations!" Instead you know he's going to be saying, "Let's see. Where have I read THAT before?"
And the answer is usually in something by Leo Rosten, but it could be Myron Cohen, Sam Levenson, Jackie Mason, Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Shalom Aleichem. To their credit (I mean them and those like them. An adequate roll call of Jewish humor originators and collectors would be longer than this article!), they make no claim of originality for themselves. For all the joy they unlock with their "Jewish humor," all of them quite righteously also assign credit to sages of ages past. And there's plenty of credit to go around. After all, editors don't ask writers to commit plagiarism by writing overviews of Swedish humor, Czech humor, Peruvian humor, or Tanzanian humor - even though each of those nationalities has roughly the same number of eligible humorists as the Jews!
Let's now cut across the rainbow of Jewish humor and take a look at a sample or two from each color.
American Jews have an emotional connection with Israel, but no more so than Americans of Italian, Irish, Polish, or Scandinavian extraction have with their homelands. Jews, however, are more nervous about "getting caught" and accused of harboring some sinister loyalty to a "foreign power." But among American Jews, the Hebrew language is more looked up to than spoken and understood. So...
The American Jew and his wife went to a nightclub in Israel and caught an Israeli comic's hour-long act entirely in Hebrew. The husband laughed uproariously to the amazement of his wife, who sat there bewildered and impatient, not understanding a word.
Afterward she said, "Honey, I didn't know you understood Hebrew."
"I don't," said he.
"Well," she asked. "How is it you were laughing so much at whatever that comic was saying?"
"I trust him," he explained.
Jewish fundraising is blunt and, to outsiders and even some Jews, distasteful and even shocking. At fundraising banquets for major Jewish charities, you'll frequently hear "card-calling"; after the speaker has implored the crowd to give to the brink of involuntary bankruptcy, the "card-caller" takes the podium, brandishes his stack of three-by-five index cards, and calls the names of those present, whereupon each rises and announces the amount of his contribution. Shame and embarrassment, more tactfully called "peer pressure," are mobilized to maximize the contributions to all worthy causes. Those who perpetrate card-calling know it's rough, but they justify it as essential not just to meeting contribution quotas but to Jewish survival itself. Those bludgeoned into giving more than they ordinarily
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