Jew-Day-Ism

I got to Farragut North yesterday morning and realized that I had a picture of Ari Roth prominently displayed on my lapel.

No wonder people were looking at me like that.

Alas, I was only able to stay for 2/3rds of Ari’s roast, which it too bad because what I saw was really very entertaining. My favorite quote? From Ari’s daughter: “I mean, where would Theater J be without the use of child labor?”

Someday we’ll be able to put Skye to work. Maybe she can start writing grants next year. Maybe she’d do a better job.

I then bolted over to the hill to watch a run through of SWIMMING IN THE SHALLOWS. Which opens this weekend.

Tonight and tomorrow: rehearsal for FIVE FLIGHTS.

Then over the weekend I’ll be rehearsing a reading for Theater J: BROWNIE POINTS. Come see it next Monday or Tuesday if you can.

Anyway--I guess because of the roast and because I was catching up on EV’s comics over at Jewcy last night--I’ve been thinking a lot about “jewish humor”. Whatever that means.

I am so impressed by Eli’s artistic and writing prowess; always have been. And for that alone his comics are fun to look at. But I’m also fascinated by the comment threads that most of them incite. For one, unless you are some degree of an insider in that community it is nearly impossible to tell who is being serious and who is being sarcastic in their reactions. Some of the responses drip so heavily with urban-hipster-cooler-than-thou irony that it’s like they’re written in code. But the ones that do, sometimes, I think, seem serious—what riles them up? Usually it’s Israel. Almost always it’s Israel. Even the Holocaust is becoming less off-limits. Not Israel.

Transition: is Jewish humor an outsider art? Sometimes. Certainly not always. Jewish comics have for decades traversed the boundaries of faith to reach non-Jewish and secular audiences. But this made me laugh: several members of my cast attended the roast as well. When we were discussing the separate skits one of them asked about the “Jews-having-more-mucus” joke.

Me: “Huh?”
Him: “Well, the song about ‘You Got Some Phlegm”…?’”
Me: “Yeah. I thought it was just a joke about Ari being a hippy-folk-singer type in his college days. And an excuse for Steve to wear a big Jew-fro wig.”
Him: “Hmmm. I thought maybe there was a stereotype that Jews have a lot more mucus than non-jews. I figured I’d just never heard it.”

Not that I know of. Anyone?

This got me thinking about how easy it is to misinterpret an idea or a word or a concept that exists in one culture/language/identity, especially when trying to apply it to another culture/language/identity. It made me think again about the whole “shiksa” discussion I had with Callie about a year ago. Her interpretation of the word gives it an unquestionably negative, offensive tone. However, many people in this country—Jews and non-Jews alike—don’t put that weight on it, as evidenced by the many innocuous uses we find of the word in pop-culture and the media. Then it is interpreted to mean, simply, “non-Jew”. If it takes on a negative tone, it is usually because of the context in which it is used as in, “I can’t believe my son is dating a shiksa!” In this context, many words can take on a negative quality: Substitute “Blonde”, “Libertarian”, or “West Virginian”. None of these things are innately bad things--they are undesirable, potentially, only in the eyes of the beholder.

The blogger 40-Questions has an interesting discussion on the matter over here.

Actually, what I find most relevant about his argument is the very fact that Shiksa is a Yiddish word. 40-Questions’ tribulations of hunting down words in his Yiddish dictionary speak volumes: Yiddish is a language pieced together from many languages, cultures, and locales. It is passed from one generation to the next. It has evolved and changed and grown and shifted, like any language, but perhaps even more so since for so much of its history there was no one purporting to be a definitive expert on the language. So what means one thing in one household may mean something rather different in the home next door. Such is the nature of an inherited language. And that is the beautiful, amazing, and wonderful thing about Yiddish.

His other examples made me laugh though. I am quite sure I have misused “putz” once or twice myself. Which kind of makes me one.