Laughter After

Humor and the Holocaust

David Slucki, Avinoam Patt, Gabriel N. Finder

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814344798
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust argues that humor performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. Co-editors David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries? Clearly, there have been comedy and laughter in the decades since. However, the extent to which humor can be ethically deployed in representing and discussing the Holocaust is not as clear. This book comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, there is great concern among scholars and community leaders about how memories and lessons of the Holocaust will be passed to future generations. Without survivors to tell their stories, to serve as constant reminders of what they experienced, how will future generations understand and relate to the Shoah? Laughter After is divided into two sections: "Aftermath" and "Breaking Taboos." The contributors to this volume examine case studies from World War II to the present day in considering and reconsidering what role humor can play in the rehabilitation of survivors, of Jews and of the world more broadly. More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, while challenging memorial conventions around the Holocaust and helping shape the way we think about the past. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is inadequately understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. This book seeks to uncover how and why such humor is deployed, and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences—from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.

Breaking Taboos

Nebbishes, New Jews, and Humor

The Changing Image of American Jewish Masculinity Post-Holocaust

Jennifer Caplan

I would like to thank my research assistant Kira Stern for her invaluable help in composing this essay, as well as Deborah Barer, Barry Gittlen, Sarah Oliver, and Carl Yamamoto for their guidance.

“If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world? Why were there Nazis?”

“How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.”

Hannah and Her Sisters

Laura Levitt once wrote, “No event informs the narrative of 20th-century Jewish history more than the Holocaust.”1 That the Holocaust altered every facet of Jewish life, both in Europe and abroad, is as close to an inarguable statement as might exist when discussing Jews. In this essay I focus on one particular element of Jewish life: the presentation and reception of Jewish masculinity. I argue that in the decades following World War II many prominent Jewish performers, specifically comedians, presented differing and sometimes competing versions of modern Jewish masculinity, all of which owed something to the lasting psychosocial impact of the Holocaust. The Holocaust left Jews desperate to escape the conception of them as consummate victims, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s Jewish writers, artists, and performers all sought to put forth new narratives of Jewish strength and agency. Few went as far as Leon Uris and the Jewish superheroes he created for Exodus, but many if not most Jewish artists of the postwar period ended up establishing new visions of Jewish strength and power. In addition, because of the specific ways in which World War II and the Holocaust altered the American landscape for Jews, Jewish men in particular found themselves with a much more open field on which to play out their construction of gender. I focus on Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen to highlight two poles of this new Jewish masculinity and show not only the cultural forces that made their seemingly opposite portrayals possible but also the ways in which they each sought to counter pre-Holocaust conceptions of Jewish masculinity with their unique types of subversions.

Long-standing images of Jews as passive and helpless pushed some Jews to embrace hypermasculine or athletic Jewish heroes, whereas others felt more comfortable with an acerbic wit or ironic barb, especially when pointed at antisemites or others seen as obstacles to Jewish success. Both approaches, however, had the Holocaust in their DNA, because they were both attempts at an “I’ll never be passive again” mentality (with apologies to Scarlett). The two visions of Jewish masculinity that I discuss here are therefore much more closely linked than they might appear. If you are still seeing Nazis as the enemy (and both Bruce and Allen at times use Nazis in their humor), then you fight them with whatever you have, whether that is physical strength, intelligence, sarcasm, or slapstick.

The Holocaust and humor have often overlapped. Before, during, and after the Holocaust, Jews made jokes about Nazis, about Hitler, and about antisemitism. Mel Brooks famously said of Hitler, “You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you’re just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him. It’s been one of my lifelong jobs—to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”2 That approach became one of the ways Jewish comedians in the 1950s and 1960s could reassert themselves as human beings and (largely) as men.3 Bruce and Allen represent the many different ways comedians performed their idea of what a Jewish man is, or should be, and in doing so, they won their “posthumous victories” over Hitler and the antisemitic establishment that had sought to demean and define Jewish men (and women) for so long.

Pre-Holocaust Jewish Masculinity

American antisemitism was at an all-time high in the years between World War I and World War II. As Eric Goldstein argues, “Jews increasingly became a target for those nervous about the direction of modern American culture. . . . By the early 1920s, Jews were held responsible for a variety of the country’s modern evils.”4 Jews were seen, by some, as the most dangerous group in America because they could so easily “pass” and therefore infiltrate American life. Gender theorist Michael Kimmel argues that in the early twentieth century Jews were seen as “less manly. The Jew was effeminate, bookish, and conniving; he got his way insidiously by passing himself off as a real man, and thereby sabotaging the purity of the race.”5 After World War II, however, much of this anti-Jewish sentiment was quieted, though not eliminated. The new image of the Jew, as the perfect victim of Hitler and the Final Solution, may have evoked pity more than suspicion, but it was just as damaging. This sense of Jews as weak, fearful, ineffective, and unable to defend themselves interacted with much, much older images of Jews, especially Jewish men, as weak, effeminate, and passive.6 This was especially frustrating to the many Jewish men who served in World War II. As Deborah Dash Moore writes, “Fighting for their country empowered American Jews. In the armed services they came to identify with America and its ideals.”7 Jews who saw themselves as patriotic Americans were faced with the pervasive idea that American involvement in World War II was a result of Jews’ inability to defend themselves or fight on their own.

Simultaneously (and seemingly incommensurately) Jewish men were seen as being lascivious seducers of innocent Gentile women. This image of Jewish men as sexually dangerous was part of the racialization of Jews during the Progressive Era in the United States. Journalist Tom Watson wrote in 1915 that “the black man’s lust after the white woman is not much fiercer than the lust of the licentious Jew for the gentile.”8 Jews were seen as seducers of white women through their sneakiness, their wiliness, or often through their money. When one pushes this a little harder, it becomes clear that the tension between the sexually threatening Jew and the emasculated Jew is less than it originally appeared. Unlike the way black masculinity was being conceived—that is, as physically powerful—Jewish men were seducing women through “softer” means, such as money and trickery. Both types of men were a threat, but the Jewish threat was sometimes viewed as more perfidious, because it was harder to spot. Jewish men were thought of as inherently untrustworthy, especially around women, because they were such skilled manipulators.

One popular embodiment of this stereotype can be seen in the characters portrayed by Julius (aka Groucho) Marx. Each of the Marx Brothers had a distinct, larger-than-life personality that took them from vaudeville to Hollywood. Chico was the felonious immigrant, Harpo was a mute and child-like clown, and Groucho was the suave, fast-talking con man who spent the film trying to seduce some heiress or wealthy widow, usually played by the very non-Jewish Margaret Dumont. The Marx Brothers were among the most famous and prolific film stars of the 1930s, producing nearly a film a year, so many Americans saw and experienced their performances. Groucho, as the leader, seemed to embody the exact stereotype Watson and others had been warning people about. He was slick, erudite, and urbane and dazzled Gentile women through his facility with language and manipulation. Take, for example, the opening of Duck Soup in which Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly meets Dumont’s Mrs. Teasdale.

Firefly: Not that I care, but where is your husband?

Mrs. Teasdale: Why, he’s dead.

Firefly: I’ll bet he’s just using that as an excuse.

Mrs. Teasdale: I was with him to the very end.

Firefly: Hmmph. No wonder he passed away.

Mrs. Teasdale: I held him in my arms and kissed him.

Firefly: Oh, I see. Then, it was murder. Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? Answer the second question first.

Mrs. Teasdale: He left me his entire fortune.

Firefly: Is that so? Can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? I love you! [jumps into her arms]

Mrs. Teasdale: Oh, your Excellency!

Firefly: You’re not so bad yourself.9

In the performance of the scene Groucho speaks so quickly that Mrs. Teasdale can hardly catch her breath between his questions and professions of love. He spins her around with his rhetoric and attempts to seduce her through his frenetic speech. Despite conforming to some of the most insidious antisemitic tropes of their era, the Marx Brothers were, nonetheless, actually quite subversive. They included little hints of Jewish references in an era when the censors were eagle-eyed for any hint of religion, politics, or sex. Groucho has been described as “the eternal outcast, removed from his working-class background, but retaining a proletariat disdain for elite behavior. His battle cry, ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it,’ can be seen as both an attack on unduly held power and as anarchic expression of distrust of any form of social or political organization.”10 They demonstrated a sort of guerilla class warfare in which the ragtag brothers always prevail over the wealthy (and WASPy) establishment.11

Therefore, while the rest of the country was becoming more “manly” as the phenomenon of muscular Christianity spread, “American Jews were far less invested in physical strength and ruggedness, spent much less time and energy complaining about women and the ‘feminization’ of religion, and rarely embraced the ‘barbarian virtues’ that Teddy Roosevelt, G. Stanley Hall, and others trumpeted as essential for American men.”12 Groucho’s portrayal is in some ways a “if you can’t beat ’em”–type compromise. “Be what they expect you to be,” his performance seems to say, “because then they won’t notice when you tweak their noses.” Muscular Christianity and, moreover, the subtle influence of Christian hegemony, put Jews in a position where they could never quite seem to match mainstream gender expectations. Jewish familial and religious expectations were simply at odds with Christian trends. Family religion had become primarily a (Christian) woman’s obligation as early as the Second Great Awakening. It was up to the wife to keep her husband’s soul protected and to drag recalcitrant children to church on Sundays. But rabbis worried that this trend would have disastrous results on the Jewish home. Jenna Weissman Joselit recounts an interwar rabbi who “roundly criticized the Jewish father for his inattentiveness. . . . The decision to leave matters of faith and ritual entirely in the hands of one’s wife was sure to have a chilling effect on the next generation, especially in the case of young boys. . . . Fathers, faced with the prospect of an entirely feminized Judaism, were exhorted to assume their rightful place in the ...