A Laughing Matter

THE MOST META-JEWISH JOKE of all time was told in “The Yada Yada,” a 1997 episode of Seinfeld. Jerry— Jewish on the show, as in life — shows up at a priest’s confessional. He does so because of a grievance he has with his dentist, a man who was, until recently, Catholic:

Jerry: I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley. I have a suspicion that he’s converted to Judaism purely for the jokes.

Father Curtis: And this offends you as a Jewish person?

Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian.

It’s a quip that is in keeping with the show’s history of ribbing the Jews who make a big thing of antisemitism. (Jerry’s Uncle Leo does this incessantly in 1996’s “The Shower Head.”) But it is also quintessentially of its moment. Who was worried about antisemitism in the 1990s?

Fast-forward to today, when Jerry Seinfeld is one of the major anti-antisemitism celebrities. (Consider that there is even a category: anti-antisemitism celebrities.) The Second Intifada, 9/11, and, most definitively, October 7 have changed the tenor of public speech by and about Jews. Exactly which antisemitism different Jews — famous or not — care most about varies, as do definitions of the term. But this much is clear: antisemitism’s days as a laughing matter were, in retrospect, a blip.

That blip is the subject of a densely packed new book, The Last Jewish Joke. Its author, Michel Wieviorka, is one of France’s premier sociologists, the author of dozens of books, and a former president of the International Sociological Association. Wieviorka’s thesis is that Jewish jokes — which he defines as “funny stories that can be told and heard by non-Jews without stoking anti-Semitism” — thrived in a specific atmosphere, one where Jews still felt a bit Other, still felt the recency of oppression, but were also relatively at ease and welcome in their surroundings. A good-for-the-Jews moment made for a golden age for Jewish jokes.

The times we now live in, with their complicated mix of reality and discourse of ever-rising antisemitism, do not lend themselves to joking around. Indeed, part of Wieviorka’s argument is that, while antisemitic comedy lives on, Jewish humour is much scarcer: the days of light-hearted ribbing are kaput. To make his case, Wieviorka offers a deep background in modern French and (to a lesser degree) American Jewish history. (At times, this background strays far enough from the question of humour that I wondered, Where do jokes fit into this? But I wasn’t too bothered: the value of the book might equally be getting an audience of anglophone Jews to learn about the third-largest Jewish population, as much as about anything punchline-related.)

As a conceit, framing Jewish history through humour is spectacular. What if you told the story of Jews not via what has led us to cry but through what’s made us laugh? (It is explicitly a counterpoint to the eminent historian Salo Baron’s concept of lachrymose Jewish history.) While plenty has been written about Jewish humour — Wieviorka makes no claim to be the first scholar taking it on — his approach is novel.

A Golden Age?

THE CHAPTER that will feel most familiar to English-speaking readers — “The American Invention of Jewish Jokes” — was bound to be the trickiest to land in translation, for a readership possibly more familiar with the original material than the book’s own author. But it’s, in a sense, the most important part of the book, describing the intersection of Jewish humour and optimism under the most golden-age-type circumstances: postwar, pre-9/11 America. That time and place offered a promise of a post-antisemitism landscape that went beyond what was possible in France, due to the recency of the Holocaust and the fallout from decolonization, among other factors.

This chapter on American comedy covers a lot of ground quickly, running the gamut from Saul Bellow to Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Seinfeld merits a paragraph — less real estate than the Jewish-mother jokes. Wieviorka’s observations about the show read like those of someone who knows what it is but has not necessarily seen it: “This sitcom, perhaps the most successful from a financial standpoint in the history of American television… makes Seinfeld’s Jewish milieu seem very appealing, as it demonstrates that those in this milieu do not hesitate to make fun of the Jewish religion, even on television.”

That summary is broadly correct, but the relationship between Seinfeld and Jewishness is so much more complicated than a golden-age interpretation makes it seem.

Wieviorka describes 1990s sitcoms, and even 1960s and 1970s film and fiction, as a break from an earlier era, when American Jews succeeded — but via their embrace of the universal. He cites the significance of Fran on The Nanny (1993–1999) being Jewish and not euphemized as Italian, as sponsors had wanted, presenting this as emblematic of its golden age. In truth, it was more like a rule-proving exception, a brief respite from a catalogue of Jewish-coded American sitcom characters who were not permitted to be open about this status. I’m thinking of “Italian-Americans” like haughty Dorothy Zbornak and no-nonsense mom Sophia Petrillo on The Golden Girls (1985–1992), neurosis-incarnate George Constanza on Seinfeld (1989–1998), or wisecracking Carla Tortelli on Cheers (1982–1993): not merely Jewish actors in Jewish-created roles, but iconically Jewish characters despite being officially gentile. (Add to the list Michael Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, Rob Reiner’s lefty, proto–Bernie Bro son-in-law character on All in the Family (1971–1979). Meathead is Polish in the same way that American senator Bernie Sanders is Polish, which is to say, in geographical origin.)

Jews absolutely existed in these shows’ universes, but the thinking seemed to be that we were tolerable only in small doses. One finds plenty of parallels here to (and overlapping with) Matt Baume’s work on gayness and American sitcoms in 2023’s Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture.

Absent these generational memories, it can be difficult to understand how refreshing it was when Broad City aired in 2014, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend the following year, with unapologetically Jewish women characters front and centre, effortlessly blending self-deprecation and sex appeal — or as the French might put it, particularism and universality. Long-present Jewish actors and references were finally given licence to be open about their Jewishness. The arrival of “out” Jewish characters represented the end of a certain hybrid idiom. The new order was, in a sense, a better time to be Jewish, because you didn’t have to be evasive.

The lack of evasiveness about Jewishness was itself born of a moment of intense literalism in criticism. It wasn’t merely that shows could depict people from historically marginalized groups triumphing. The cultural mood was one that demanded sitcoms contribute in overt ways to social justice. That, and even apart from political polarization, there was a new expectation that fictional characters be nice people, leading to the gentle comedy moment exemplified by shows like Parks and Recreation (2009–2015). This was meant to be a corrective for the nihilism of Seinfeld, which I suppose it would have been, if you’d seen that as a flaw.

One was forever hearing that comedy must punch up, as though this were a descriptive rather than prescriptive fact about all that elicits laughter, or indeed as if there were always a consensus on which targets count as “up.” As part of a general cultural obsession with privilege hierarchies, ascertaining Jews’ whiteness and privilege became a major preoccupation in parts of media, social media, and academia, in ways that would presage the campus-encampments discourse of 2024. Jews’ ambiguity in these hierarchies made us a tricky fit for a moment in comedy — and in the culture generally — that favoured absolutes.

Am I panning Wieviorka for not adding to the one or two trillion existing works on Jewishness in American sitcoms? Am I mad at him for not grabbing the low-hanging fruit of Elaine Benes introducing gentile audiences to the concept of the “shiksa” yet being played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Affair Dreyfuses? Hardly — I am, if anything, borrowing his analytic framework for looking at these micro-eras. The subtle distinctions between the moments when (say) Seinfeld versus Broad City were possible are, if you focus on the right elements, a tremendously rich source of information about whereJews were in American society at the times these shows were made. Comedy is not high culture, but it’s a category of primary source that academics aren’t always as plugged into as they could be, and it’s to Wieviorka’s credit that he is.

Meanwhile in France…

WHAT WIEVIORKA lacks in deep engagement with the late twentieth century American Jewish sitcom repertoire, he makes up for in how attuned he is to nuances across time, place, and attitudes of European Jews. He points out that the shtetl was already on its way out when the Second World War began, its one-time residents leaving not just due to antisemitism, but also in search of opportunity, or anonymity, elsewhere.

And he offers a readable, thought-provoking synthesis and analysis of French-Jewish history, from French Jews’ 1791 emancipation up to the post–October 7 moment, with an emphasis on the postwar period to the present. He covers notorious antisemitic attacks as well as cultural achievements (the Asterix comics were created by René Goscinny, a Jew!) and intracommunal strife over how much to support Israel. Much of this material will be new to anglophone North American Jewish readers who grew up, as I did, thinking of Europe as the old world from which the fortunate Jews escaped.

The French part of the story is where Wieviorka’s true expertise lies, and where his own family history comes into play. He writes entertainingly and movingly about friends and relatives in the garment industry, and about his own initiations as an Ashkenazi Jew into Sephardic culture. He explores how Jewish identity politics came to thrive within French republicanism — something the original architects of that republicanism would have neither foreseen nor desired. Indeed, unlike the Anglosphere generally and the US specifically, France didn’t do hyphenated identity.

Much has changed in not all that many years. We now have a situation where multiculturalism and diversity and such can be more accepted in France than in the United States.

Comment Dit-on Yo Mama?

THE LAST JEWISH JOKE opens with Jewish mother jokes, recounted and admired. Wieviorka retells a joke told to him about Jewish mothers, about how they don’t want their sons to be gay, but if they must be gay, better that they should marry a doctor. Not a homophobic joke so much as a joke about homophobia. Wieviorka adds his own commentary: “The invasive Jewish mother is no mere myth.”

As a Jewish mother myself, I tried to square this with Wieviorka’s framing of this subject matter: “The most defining characteristic of Jewish jokes is that they are favorable, and not hostile, to Jews. They are made for them, and generally by them, or for those who appreciate them or at least do not reject them.”

Hear me out: What if someone is Jewish, but also a woman?

Wieviorka is on the cusp of addressing this. He notes that his mother and sister enjoy Jewish-mother jokes as well, and is careful to state that he did not grow up with an overbearing mother. He suggests the jokes are good-natured and come from a place of knowledge that Jewish women were at the forefront of feminism: “The ‘Jewish mother’ was wildly successful because it arose in a context of empathy for an increasingly visible Jewish culture and history, and at the same time evoked a development whereby women attained emancipation while paternal authority declined.”

Is that really the reason? Might there not be another explanation for the popularity of a strain of humour at (canonically sexually unappealing) women’s expense?

This chipper, nostalgic take on Jewish-mother humour is at odds with how others — who happen to be Jewish women — have interpreted matters. In a 2025 article about pioneering sitcom The Goldbergs, The New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum writes, “By the nineteen-sixties, Jewish women were rarely portrayed as protagonists, and, when they did show up, it was often as cruel stereotypes: the spoiled princess, the homely meeskite, the castrating mother.”

A longer, scholarly analysis of this phenomenon can be found in the late historian Paula Hyman’s 1995 Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Hyman dates the origin of this strand of humour to Ashkenazi life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. Antisemites, Hyman explains, focused their resentments on Jewish men. These men, in turn, did the classic thing of taking out their entirely legitimate frustrations on whichever women were closest by:

By caricaturing Jewish men as feminized, antisemites and their fellow travelers attempted to strip them of the power and honor otherwise due them as men, especially as economically successful men. Jewish men, in turn, as they experienced emancipation and conditions of middle-class life and anticipated the rewards of both, responded to their disparagement in cultures influenced by antisemitism by creating negative representations of Jewish women.

Moreover, as the role of transmitting Jewish culture and religion shifted from men to women during this period, Jewish women began to represent, for Jewish men, that which was parochial, stifling, and holding them back from their big adventures.

Referencing a “study of Jewish-authored jokebooks” by the sociologist Gladys Rothbell, Hyman explains, “Both the narrators and the male audiences of the disparaging Jewish-mother jokes that circulated in the years after the Second World War could perceive the jokes as ‘instances of sympathetic in-group humor’ because they did not stress the Jewishness of the female target of the humor.”

Is it strange that Hyman, a major figure in American scholarship of French Jewry and author of The Jews of Modern France, wouldn’t have been on Wieviorka’s radar for this, given how deep she dove into Jewish-mother jokes? Not necessarily; even the best-read haven’t read everything. But something about Wieviorka’s interpretation of these jokes missed the mark. In his defence, he points out that the younger generations don’t find these jokes funny. In less of his defence, was Paula Hyman — born, like Wieviorka, in 1946 — part of a younger generation?

To borrow from Jerry’s offended-as-a-comedian punchline, what gets to me here is not (or, not just) the obliviousness to sexism. Rather, it’s that Jewish-mother jokes are so ripe for analysis, and Wieviorka barely scratches the surface.

Scolds Versus Trolls

WHAT KILLED the Jewish joke, if it is dead? Wieviorka looks to Jewish history for answers, and it is, caveats aside, a fun trip to take with him.

But the Jewish-history framing gets you only part of the way there. For the rest, you need to look at the evolution of humour generally. Wieviorka notes that Jewish humour doesn’t work as well online as it does in person or in movies, books, and so forth. This is true of jokes more broadly, and is as much about changes to Jewish identity as the shift from in-person to online.

In the US especially, the culture wars have led to a polarization where virtually every comedian, every joke, is instantly legible as on one political team or the other. The left version of this was exemplified by Nanette, Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix special, which deemed self-deprecation, if not comedy itself, problematic and harmful to marginalized people. The right wing’s was The New Norm, an animated sitcom whose pilot was accurately described on Wonkette as, “What if we remade All in the Family, set in 2024, only Archie Bunker is always right, his foils are always idiots, and it’s not funny?” Between the “humour” that exists solely to offend, and the one whose only purpose is to educate and uplift, there’s little space left for uncomplicated (or, apolitical) amusement. Our times may just be too ideological for jokes, Jewish or otherwise.

There is also the awkward question of whether Wieviorka has picked up on the end of an era or is merely revealing his own lack of familiarity with contemporary Jewish comedy. Alex Edelman, Ilana Glazer, and Nathan Fielder are all Jewish-joking for Jewish and mainstream audiences. Then there’s the Slam Frank musical, Andrew Fox’s satire that “imagines what happens when a progressive community theater company decides to transform Anne Frank’s true story into an intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.” It’s not what Jewish humour looked like previously, and it’s not for everyone, but is it any less authentically Jewish than Annie Hall?

Wieviorka writes of the “near absence in Israel” of Jewish jokes, something I cannot speak to (beyond the oft-circulating Eretz Nehederet clips satirizing Western leftist pro-Palestinian activists, which have struck me more as political point-making than funny). But I’m not sure he can, either, as Hebrew-language humour does not appear to be his area. Here, too, one sees the drawbacks to an “X is dead” framing, coming from someone whose primary expertise is not in the area in question.

His assertion that Jewish humour outside of Israel doesn’t much reference the Jewish state had me nodding along, until I remembered counterexamples. There’s the 1995 episode of The Nanny where Fran recalls losing her virginity at a kibbutz, with the teen girl she is (inexplicably at this point) nannying for poised to do the same, in a scene set in what is meant to be Israel but it’s a sitcom, so they’ve just added some plants. The Birthright Israel–inspired episode of Broad City. The Adam Sandler film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat character speaks a “Kazakh” that is largely modern Hebrew. And Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint — an assumed presence in any Jewish humour canon — ends (well, almost ends) with Alexander Portnoy in Israel, incapable of performing with an Israeli woman.

Wieviorka is correct that there was a style of Jewish humour that was a happy part of diaspora Jewish culture, and that is less congruent with our times. The titular “last Jewish joke,” about clerics of various faiths caught gambling, is one that hovers between a cozy Jewish joke and an indictment of Jews as disloyal — that is, an antisemitic one.

The end of “The Yada Yada” has Jerry flirting with a woman who shares Jerry’s affinity for making “anti-dentite” jokes (a play on antisemite, but referencing jokes about dentists). It’s all fun and games until she mistakenly assumes Jerry will share her enjoyment of jokes about Black and Jewish people. A wink to those in the know: playing this character is Debra Messing, who is Jewish, and who would go on to star as Grace Adler in Will and Grace. Who could have guessed that a 2025 Wall Street Journal headline would read, “Debra Messing Knows What Antisemitism Feels Like”? And yet, here we are.