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Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust
Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust
Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust
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Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust

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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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 7, 2020
ISBN9780814344798
Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust

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    Laughter After - Anna Shternshis

    Laughter After

    Laughter After

    Humor and the Holocaust

    Edited by David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt

    Wayne State University Press

    Detroit

    Copyright © 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

    ISBN 978-0-8143-4478-1 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-4738-6 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-8143-4479-8 (ebook)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931376

    Wayne State University Press

    Leonard N. Simons Building

    4809 Woodward Avenue

    Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

    Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: To Tell Jokes After Auschwitz Is Barbaric, Isn’t It?

    David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt

    Aftermath

    Hitler Hanging on the Tree: Humor and Violence in Soviet Yiddish Folklore of World War II

    Anna Shternshis

    Too Soon? Yiddish Humor and the Holocaust in Postwar Poland

    Marc Caplan

    Is It Still Funny? Lin Jaldati and Yiddish Satire Before and After the Holocaust

    David Shneer

    I. B. Singer’s Art of Ghost Writing in Enemies, A Love Story

    Jan Schwarz

    A Ring of Fire: Humor and the Holocaust

    Stephen J. Whitfield

    Breaking Taboos

    Nebbishes, New Jews, and Humor: The Changing Image of American Jewish Masculinity Post-Holocaust

    Jennifer Caplan

    We’re Safe Here, but Poland Is a State of Mind: The Exploitation of Holocaust Consciousness in Jewish Fiction and Memoirs

    Jarrod Tanny

    This Way to the Ovens, Señoras y Señores: Holocaust Cartoons in Latin America

    Ilan Stavans

    The Image of Anne Frank: From Universal Hero to Comic Figure

    Liat Steir-Livny

    I’m Allowed, I’m a Jew: Oliver Polak and Jewish Humor in Contemporary Germany After the Holocaust

    Gabriel N. Finder

    The Holocaust Was the Worst: Remembering the Holocaust Through Third-Generation Jokes

    Jordana Silverstein

    Yad Vashem, You So Fine! The Place of the Shoah in Contemporary Israeli and American Comedy

    Avinoam Patt

    Did You Ever See Our Show? Holocaust Comedy in American Sitcoms

    David Slucki

    The Last Laugh?

    Ferne Pearlstein and Robert Edwards

    Contributors

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    We started talking about working together on a book on humor and the Holocaust at a 2016 conference at Brandeis University on the legacy of Lenny Bruce. What began as a conversation during a coffee break became a traveling road show and ultimately this book. We are grateful to all the colleagues who spoke to us, challenged us, and argued with us about the significance and value of Holocaust-themed humor at conferences, workshops, and lectures. Special thanks go to all the authors in the volume, whose cutting-edge scholarship has contributed to the production of what we think is a groundbreaking volume. Their diligence and brilliance have made working on this volume a real pleasure.

    We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Kathy Wildfong and Annie Martin, our editors at Wayne State University Press, for championing this project, despite its controversial nature. We further wish to thank Kristin Harpster, Emily Nowak, Kristina Stonehill, and Jamie Jones, members of the press staff, for helping bring this book to fruition. We are, moreover, grateful to Mimi Braverman for her careful and professional editing of the manuscript.

    We would be remiss if we did not thank one another. This book is the fruit of a cooperative effort from start to finish. We were close friends before we embarked on this book project. We’re even closer friends now upon its completion.

    We would each like to thank our families for putting up with all our bad jokes.

    We dedicate this book to our funny children, Arthur Slucki, Chloe and Hillel Finder, and Maya, Alex, and Micah Patt. Their peals of laughter instill hope in a better world.

    David Slucki

    Gabriel N. Finder

    Avinoam Patt

    Introduction

    To Tell Jokes After Auschwitz Is Barbaric, Isn’t It?

    David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt

    Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers.

    Anne Frank, 28 September 1942

    Act I: Jokes and the Holocaust

    In May 2018, researchers at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam uncovered hidden pages of the iconic diary that Frank kept during her years in hiding. The newly uncovered pages show a different side of Frank. They reveal her thoughts about sexuality, sex education, and sex work and even include dirty jokes. The revelation raises questions about how our perception of Anne Frank is changed and how these new findings should be incorporated into the dissemination of the diary. Is it right to publish materials that the diarist clearly wanted to remain out of view? How does this change her legacy and image, so ingrained in Western popular culture? To what extent do these two pages of taboo material undermine the idea of innocence that Frank has embodied for so long? One commentator in England thinks that it was a betrayal of Frank to publish the jokes and that publication merely created a spectacle that dehumanized the young author.¹

    What is most interesting here is not so much the fact of the jokes themselves. It has been well-enough established that those living under totalitarian regimes tell jokes for a variety of reasons: as a coping mechanism, as a form of resistance, or as a way to maintain a sense of humanity through laughter, even in the face of dire circumstances.² More pertinent is how the new revelations change our perceptions of Anne Frank, the emblem of innocence, a young girl who maintained hope and her belief in the goodness of humankind despite her worsening circumstances. It helps to raise questions about what role humor played in the Holocaust experience, but even more pertinent, what role it plays in our remembering of the past. The new discovery may make Frank look more human, more cynical, more naïve, certainly not the messenger of purity that many have imagined her to be. Or perhaps it reveals taboos that may not sit easily with people—that humor does not fit neatly into discussions of the Holocaust.

    Act II: Jokes About the Holocaust

    Seinfeld creator Larry David appeared in late 2017 as guest host on the weekly sketch comedy juggernaut Saturday Night Live. It was the Curb Your Enthusiasm star’s second appearance as host, having cemented his relationship with the show in 2016, when he appeared regularly as Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. David had just recently launched the latest season of his hit HBO comedy after a six-year hiatus and was by then a household name.

    The monologue opened with David imagining what it would have been like had he been homeless in New York City. It then veered into uncomfortable territory as he turned to the recent spate of sexual assault allegations against powerful public figures, observing that many of those making the biggest headlines, such as film producer Harvey Weinstein, were Jewish. If this was not already making the audience squirm in their seats, David then took a left turn, speculating on whether or not he would have tried to woo women in concentration camps had he lived during the Holocaust era. Imagining what his pick-up line might be, he mused, How’s it going? They treating you OK? You know, if we ever get out of here, I’d love to take you out for some latkes. You like latkes? What, what’d I say? Is it me or is it the whole thing? It’s ’cause I’m bald, isn’t it?³

    The audience reaction was muted, the uncomfortable laughter clear in the background. The critical reaction was more mixed. Some found the monologue to be a desecration of the memory of the victims who perished in the camps.⁴ For another commentator the central problem was that the jokes diminished the severity of the serial sexual assaults of which Weinstein and others stand accused.⁵ Jewish literature scholar Jeremy Dauber sought to locate the monologue within its historical and cultural context, explaining that the success of such controversial humor depends on its ethical framework.⁶ For regular viewers of David’s oeuvre, the SNL monologue was not so surprising or shocking. Curb Your Enthusiasm dealt with the Holocaust on a regular basis, as David mocked revered icons of Holocaust memory. It was David’s brazenness in bringing that taboo so starkly to network television that shocked audiences so much and sparked a mini-wave of opinion pieces on the possibilities or acceptability of humor that invokes the Holocaust, and where the boundaries fall on this question.

    Only eighteen months later, the Netflix series Historical Roasts, hosted by roast master and comedian Jeff Ross, included an episode in which Anne Frank (played by Rachel Feinstein) is roasted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (played by Jon Lovitz), Don Rickles (played by his daughter, Mindy Rickles), and, most controversially, Adolf Hitler (played by Gilbert Gottfried). The humor is risqué and even cringe-worthy, with jokes making fun of Frank’s hiding place, satirizing the popularity of her diary, and lampooning FDR (with allusions to current atrocities: Just do what FDR did and look the other way) and the Greatest Generation. The main butt of the jokes, though, is Hitler. The lion’s share of Lovitz’s Roosevelt routine is devoted to jokes about Hitler having only one testicle. Feinstein’s Anne Frank, however, has the last laugh, taking Mel Brooks’s cue in roasting Hitler, a kind of posthumous Jewish victory. Guess what, Hitler? she taunts. You’re being played by a Jew right now, and it’s the loudest and most annoying Jew we could possibly find, as though to emphasize the fact that one-third of Europe’s Jews survived the Holocaust and could laugh at his expense.

    The writers seem to have been keenly aware of the potential criticism and to have written a script that anticipated any outrage. A few factors point to that. First, Ross gives context by summarizing Frank’s story in a manner that makes it clear that it is a serious story and that Frank is a figure that he reveres. (That said, he can’t help himself and makes a joke here: Please enjoy the roast of Anne Frank . . . and the end of my career. After this, I may have to go into hiding for a while.) Second, each of the actors is Jewish, a fact that Ross highlights to give them license to insert Anne Frank into the series. Us Jews, he says, always get through the pain with laughter, and if we don’t laugh, we cry. The episode is also topical; contemporary references to climate change and refugees in the United States are used as justification for the episode. That is, it is the urgency of contemporary political issues that requires comedians to highlight historical figures such as Anne Frank. Another way in which Ross anticipates criticism is to point out that, typically, roast subjects are popular figures, not villains. Ross says that they are roasting Frank rather than Hitler because I only roast the ones I love.

    The audience reaction was, as with David and his SNL monologue, often marked by uncomfortable laughter, and the critics reacted with outrage.⁷ Yet, like David’s monologue, the roast asks the audience—perhaps more explicitly than does David—to consider the boundaries and function of humor and to question who the butt of the joke really is. It suggests that humor can indeed be part of a Holocaust memorial landscape as well as perform an educational function, as Ross seems legitimately to believe that he can use the forum to teach his audience about Anne Frank, the current plight of refugees, and the dangers of indifference.


    In this volume the contributors argue that humor is possible after the Holocaust. They examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. What are the boundaries? What is still considered taboo and why? What are the functions of humor in the context of the Holocaust? Clearly, there has 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. The issue is becoming more pressing. In the last two decades, humor that invokes symbols of the Holocaust has become more prevalent in American, Israeli, Canadian, Latin American, Australian, and European popular culture. Whereas a film like Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968) was controversial in its day for its use of Nazi symbols and imagery, today it has been adapted as a Broadway musical, and it would be considered relatively tame alongside other examples of humor that touch on the Shoah. The boundaries have shifted when it comes to the relationship between laughter and the Holocaust.

    Still, there is little agreement on where those boundaries lie, and episodes such as the discovery of jokes in Anne Frank’s diary or Larry David’s SNL monologue highlight a certain kind of discomfort that persists around this topic. Many questions still remain unanswered: Is humor totally off-limits when the subject matter is so serious, so devastating? Is the only possible approach to Holocaust remembrance one that is earnest and reverential and conveys historical events in a sober, factual manner? Who is allowed to make such jokes? Survivors, Jews, anyone? Did the Shoah itself create a rupture in the modern Jewish tradition of laughter through tears, exemplified by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem?⁸ If Theodore Adorno’s oft-misinterpreted maxim that to write poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric contains an ounce of truth, how much more so does that apply when discussing humor after the Holocaust?⁹

    Scholars have been grappling with this question since the late 1980s, after the critical and popular success of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus. The literary scholar Terrence Des Pres argues that works such as Maus, which used humorous forms and could elicit laughter from readers, offer an alternative to the tradition of high seriousness that is typical of representations of the Holocaust. This approach is the result of a certain kind of Holocaust etiquette that developed over decades, a set of fictions that function as regulatory agencies to influence how we conceive of, and write about, matters of the Holocaust. These fictions, which took decades to crystallize, are that the Holocaust is unique, its data cannot be trifled with, and we respect those conditions by staying within the bounds of high seriousness.¹⁰

    Des Pres claims that a certain weariness had set in with this earnest approach, a weariness that could be debilitating. For him, laughter is another way to begin to think through the challenges of remembering the Holocaust, something that can add to how we understand it: I want to consider the energies of laughter as a further resource. We know, to begin with, that a comic response to calamity is often more resilient, more effectively equal to terror and the sources of terror than a response that is solemn or tragic. Or, in short, laughter revolts. Comic approaches refuse to take the Holocaust on its own crushing terms. It is the comic, and the act of displacement that laughter offers, that allows us to move forward in the world, even with the devastating knowledge of the Holocaust.¹¹

    The late 1990s saw the release of three Holocaust films that would reignite this discussion: Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award–winning Life is Beautiful (1997), Radu Mihăileanu’s Train of Life (1998), and Peter Kassovitz’s remake of Jakob the Liar (1999), starring Robin Williams. Only a few years after Schindler’s List (1993) had taken the world by storm with its hyperrealistic depiction of the rescue of more than 1,000 Jews by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, filmmakers were pushing back against the Holocaust etiquette identified by Des Pres. If Schindler’s List marked the apex of high seriousness in representing the Holocaust, these later films showed the possibility of laughter in a world after Auschwitz.

    Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek suggests that these films emerged as a direct response to Schindler’s List, and what he argues is the failure of Holocaust tragedies: All three films are centered on a lie that allows the threatened Jews to survive their ordeal. He claims that they emerged because realist films such as Schindler’s List are based on a fiction that the Holocaust can be faithfully represented.¹² Why not turn to comedy, he writes, which at least accepts in advance its failure to render the horror of the holocaust?¹³ For Žižek, the emergence of Holocaust comedies on film is directly related to the elevation of the holocaust itself into the metaphysical, diabolical Evil—the ultimate traumatic point at which the objectifying of historical knowledge breaks down and even witnesses concede words fail them. The holocaust cannot be explained, visualized, represented or transmitted, since it marks the black hole, the implosion of the (narrative) universe. Any attempt to locate it in its context, to politicize it, equals an anti-Semitic negation of its uniqueness.¹⁴

    Literary scholar Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi goes a step further than Žižek, picking up on Des Pres in arguing that the comic is a necessary part of what allows us to move forward in a world beyond the Holocaust: "So let me state what might seem obvious: yes, life is beautiful. No, the Shoah cannot be funny. What is at stake in the reinstatement of laughter ‘nach Auschwitz,’ after Auschwitz, is not the fidelity of a comic representation of the Shoah but the reinstatement of the comic as building block of a post-Shoah universe."¹⁵ Clearly, the Holocaust is not funny, does not elicit laughter. But finding those moments of irony and lightness, those times when humor served to give victims a sense of dignity, helps us to see the possibilities for another way to remember that offers a way back into a world that can indeed be beautiful.¹⁶


    Twenty years after Life Is Beautiful, it is now time to take stock of how the genre has developed and how it has shaped or been shaped by how we remember the Holocaust. Life Is Beautiful marked a turning point, if not in humorous representations of the Holocaust, then at least in discussions about the ethics and functions of such humor. This volume is possible because of the distance from the popular emergence of the Holocaust comedy genre in the late 1990s. The decades since have also seen the explosion of Holocaust humor on television, in stand-up comedy, and in literature in the Americas, Israel, Europe, and Australia.

    This volume comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, scholars and community leaders are greatly concerned 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?

    Moreover, recent years have seen a spike in antisemitism in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Against the backdrop of events such as the massacre of Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or the ongoing targeting of Orthodox Jewish institutions in France and the United States, the urgency of remembering the Holocaust and taking it seriously has increased. Does laughing at aspects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly when neo-Nazis march in the streets of the United States and Europe, minimize its gravity? Does humor that invokes the Holocaust then trivialize the severity and horrors of the Holocaust? Does it undermine the moral authority of survivors and their descendants? Does it make the victims’ suffering seem less extreme, easier to dismiss? Moreover, who is permitted to make jokes invoking the Holocaust? Are we all survivors of the Shoah? Or do descendants of survivors reserve the right to determine what is funny?

    Another corollary is that the very groups reviving antisemitism often deploy their own twisted humor to harass Jews and stoke the flames of hatred, regularly invoking the gas chambers and Hitler’s planned extermination of Europe’s Jews in their online forums. Drawing on historic Nazi techniques, they use humor as a form of humiliation and propaganda to attract supporters. Humor and satire can also serve to normalize new manifestations of fascism; laughing at those in power can soften them and lead people to let their guard down against the threat of antisemitism and racism.¹⁷ These issues challenge the conception of humor as therapeutic or as a weapon of the disenfranchised, when it is those who enjoy positions of privilege who can benefit most from the use of humor.

    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. Does comedy have a place in the landscape of remembering tragedy? Several contributors deal with the question of what boundaries exist for humorists and comedians, if any boundaries exist at all. If boundaries do exist, who is responsible for enforcing them? What type of humor can exist in the depravity of the Einsatzgruppen, the cold efficiency of Treblinka, and the quiet, calculated mass murder of people with disabilities by the Nazis? In what ways, if any, does Jewish humor change because of the Holocaust? Who is permitted to invoke the Holocaust for humorous purposes and to what ends?

    Humor has been a factor in how we think about the Jews’ experiences under Nazism since World War II. Whether revelations about humor during the war (including jokes, satirical songs and plays, and films) or satirical plays in Displaced Persons camps that mocked the Jews’ vanquished enemies, humorous treatment of issues surrounding the Holocaust date back to the war itself.¹⁸ More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, such as Israel, Germany, and the United States. Humor after the Holocaust can serve different functions. It can serve as a weapon against Nazism or against the rise of new forms of fascism, as in The Producers. It can be a coping strategy for survivors and their descendants; the Yiddish film Undzere kinder, produced in immediate postwar Poland, shows how humor could be therapeutic for survivors. Humor can help illuminate the plethora of ways that victims and survivors experienced the war and can show the complexity that underpins those experiences. This is most famously the case in Life Is Beautiful, which, although fictional, suggests that humor could operate even under the most dire circumstances. Finally, humor can challenge memorial conventions around the Holocaust and help shape the way we think about the past.

    The question is not whether or not Holocaust-related humor is appropriate or how it should be policed. To reinforce Ezrahi, the Shoah is obviously not funny in itself, and with the exception of Holocaust-inflected humor deployed for antisemitic purposes, that is not the starting point for the artists under consideration. The Holocaust, for these writers and comedians, is not the butt of the joke but the background to explore contemporary political, social, and cultural issues. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is barely understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. The contributors to this volume seek to uncover how and why such humor is deployed and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. They are concerned with the ethical underpinnings and implications of such humor, a task that has become more urgent as we enter a memorial landscape in which the contact with that past continues to recede.

    Notes

    1. Tanya Gold, Publishing Anne Frank’s ‘Dirty’ Jokes Demeans the Human Who Wrote Them, The Guardian, 17 May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/17/publishing-anne-frank-dirty-jokes-demeans-human [accessed 18 May 2018].

    2. The best collection of such humor from the Holocaust era is Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1991).

    3. Larry David stand-up monologue, Saturday Night Live, 4 November 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0eeNijdv3I [accessed 22 May 2018].

    4. Jeffrey K. Salkin, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Tasteless, Forward, 6 November 2017, https://forward.com/scribe/386961/larry-david-pretty-pretty-pretty-tasteless/ [accessed 1 July 2018]; Dvir Abramovich, Standing Shoulder to Shoulder with Survivors, Australian Jewish News, 16 November 2017, https://www.jewishnews.net.au/standing-shoulder-shoulder-survivors/71133 [accessed 1 July 2018].

    5. Lila MacLellan, What Will It Take to Make Men Stop Making the Wrong Jokes About Rape? Quartz, 5 November 2017, https://qz.com/1120692/larry-david-snl-monologue-when-will-men-stop-joking-about-sexual-assault/ [accessed 1 July 2018].

    6. Jeremy Dauber, Why Larry David’s Holocaust Joke Was So Uncomfortable, The Atlantic, 7 November 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/why-larry-davids-holocaust-joke-was-so-uncomfortable/545105/ [accessed 1 July 2018].

    7. See, for example, Julia Métraux, Netflix’s Roast of Anne Frank Is as Bad as It Sounds, Hey Alma, 5 June 2019, https://www.heyalma.com/netflixs-roast-of-anne-frank-is-as-bad-as-it-sounds/ [accessed 17 June 2019]; Marcy Oster, Episode of New Netflix Series Mocks Anne Frank, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 29 May 2019, https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/episode-of-new-netflix-series-mocks-anne-frank [accessed 17 June 2019]; and Sue Surkes, Uproar over Netflix Show in Which Hitler ‘Roasts’ Anne Frank, The Times of Israel, 30 May 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/uproar-over-netflix-show-in-which-hitler-roasts-anne-frank/ [accessed 17 June 2019].

    8. A spate of scholarship examining the tradition of Jewish humor has appeared recently. Among the most important works are Ruth Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (New York: Norton, 2017); Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel N. Finder, eds., A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians (Oxford: Public Affairs, 2001); and Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).

    9. Adorno is not, as many have assumed, proscribing poetry and art. Instead, he suggests that the Holocaust necessitates a shift in how we think about culture and its role in society. After the brutality of the Nazis, Western assumptions about the freeing potential of art needed to be rethought, as totalitarian regimes showed how easily culture could be usurped and brought into the service of oppression and violence. See Marianne Tettlebaum, ‘Nothing Is Meant Quite Literally’: Adorno and the Barbarism of Poetry After Auschwitz, in Dorian Stuber, ed., Holocaust Literature (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016), 200–213.

    10. Terrence Des Pres, "Holocaust Laughter?" in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 217.

    11. Des Pres, "Holocaust Laughter," 220–21.

    12. At least in film. As Slucki and Patt show in their chapters in this volume, television series such as Seinfeld and HaHamishia HaKamerit (The Chamber Quintet) highlight the absurdity of the representation being conflated with the event itself.

    13. Slavoj Žižek, Camp Comedy, Sight and Sound 10, no. 4 (2000): 26. The lowercase h is in the original text.

    14. Žižek, Camp Comedy, 26.

    15. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, After Such Knowledge, What Laughter? Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, no. 1 (2001): 287.

    16. Other studies of the genre of Holocaust humor, which tend to focus particularly on films, include Sander Gilman, Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films, Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 279–308; Yosefa Loshitsky, The Politics and Ethics of the Holocaust Film Comedy, in Ronit Lentin, ed., Re-Presenting the Shoah for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 127–37; Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), 79–100; Eyal Zandberg, ‘Ketchup Is the Auschwitz of Tomatoes’: Humor and the Collective Memory of Traumatic Events, Communication, Culture, and Critique 8 (2015): 108–23; and David Slucki, Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic: Humor and the Holocaust in Australia, in Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel N. Finder, eds., A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 204–29.

    17. For a discussion on this side of satire, see Malcolm Gladwell, The Satire Paradox, Revisionist History, podcast, 17 August 2016, http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox [accessed 20 March 2018]; and Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam, "The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report," International Journal of Press/Politics 14, no. 2 (2009): 212–31.

    18. See, for example, Avinoam Patt, Laughter Through Tears: Jewish Humor in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, in Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel N. Finder, eds., A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 204–29.

    Aftermath

    Hitler Hanging on the Tree

    Humor and Violence in Soviet Yiddish Folklore of World War II

    Anna Shternshis

    Adolf Hitler is a brown Haman,

    A thick robe awaits you.

    We are building, in your honor

    A coffin, a beautiful one.

    To the grave will bring you

    Our Stalin, our joy.

    On the right side will hang

    Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Frick.

    From the left side will swing around

    Rosenberg and Ribbentrop.

    Flying right with their

    Heads down into the ground.

    And we will bury you

    So deeply into the ground.

    From your corpse, the ugly one

    There will be no stink!¹

    This somewhat prophetic² yet not entirely sophisticated ditty promoting violence and savoring dark details of Hitler’s death was first collected in 1943 from Shifra Perlina, a young Jewish woman from Lithuania who lived in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.³ She sang it to Hirsh Bloshteyn (1895–1978), a Yiddish poet and journalist who was on a mission to write about Soviet Yiddish anti-fascist humor for the Soviet Yiddish weekly Eynikayt (Unity); the magazine was published in Moscow by the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee between 1942 and 1947.⁴ Eynikayt’s agenda included mobilizing Jews from around the world to support the Soviet war effort. Bloshteyn was probably assigned to write a piece featuring jokes and humorous songs that promoted Soviet Jewish resistance and expressed support for the Soviet war effort. These sentiments were indeed popular among the 1.6 million Jews in the Soviet Union, including the 250,000 Polish and Romanian Jewish refugees surviving the war in Kazakhstan and other parts of the Soviet rear.⁵ But it is one thing to agree that Hitler and Nazi Germany are enemies of the Soviet Union and a completely different thing to create entirely politically correct jokes to this effect. Moreover, as we have learned from memoirs and diaries written during the war by Polish Jewish refugees, their fears of the Soviet state often equaled their fears of Nazi Germany, especially since many of them ended up in the Soviet Union precisely because Stalin’s government arrested them shortly after the annexation of Poland and deported them to Soviet jails.⁶

    None of this ambivalence is recorded in songs, jokes, stories, and anecdotes collected between 1941 and 1947 by Soviet Yiddish journalists, historians, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists. Some of these materials appeared in Eynikayt between 1942 and 1947; others, although intended for publication, never made it to print but were instead preserved in the archives of the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture, a Jewish studies research bureau of the Ukrainian Academy of Science.⁷ I argue that the fact that a joke was publishable did not necessarily mean that it was not popular. It also did not mean that people who read it would not find it funny.

    I write this chapter to explore how we can best use the newly found corpus of these patriotic Yiddish jokes and other humorous pieces. Do these jokes indeed give us a sense of what people found funny during the war? Or do they tell us more about what the state ideologues believed people should laugh about? Above all, I argue that these officially approved jokes give us a chance to see what was relevant to Yiddish speakers living in the Soviet Union, many of whom read Eynikayt. Although there is no way of knowing how they reacted to these jokes (laughed, ignored, rolled their eyes), we do know that they understood them. We also know that people who printed these jokes believed that someone should laugh at them or at least approve of them. Discussing Soviet Yiddish jokes also gives us a chance to obtain insight into cultural products that merged the state ideological message with the folkloric forms that were either circulated or designed to be circulated among the people targeted by these ideological messages.

    Uncensored Soviet Yiddish songs, stories, anecdotes, and jokes probably existed, and these would arguably be the most interesting ones because of their spontaneous and uncensored nature. But to date, I have not been able to find them. Therefore, as a point of contrast, I rely on humorous pieces collected outside the Soviet Union but during the war. One collection is by Rabbi Shimon Huberband (1909–1942) in the Warsaw Ghetto, as part of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes initiative;⁸ another one is from the corpus cited by Steve Lipman in his anthology Laughter in Hell.⁹ A comparative analysis of censored Soviet Yiddish jokes, circulating in relative safety, and uncensored Polish Yiddish jokes can help us to determine what people found funny and what the Soviet government thought they should laugh at.

    Some scholars who analyze Holocaust humor suggest that jokes can serve as a window on the zeitgeist of the milieu in which they had been popular. Others argue that ghetto humor is best understood through the prism of spiritual resistance.¹⁰ I believe that studying Yiddish humor published in the Soviet Union during the war does not provide this insight into how Soviet Jews resisted fascism. Instead, it helps us to understand how Soviet ideologues intended to use Yiddish jokes and humorous songs as motivational pieces to fight the enemy. The best approach for contextualizing these pieces, I believe, is thinking about them as an attempt by the state to use Yiddish humor as a weapon against fascism.

    Motivating the population to fight in a war partly by creating a satirical image of the enemy in popular culture is an aspiration of all governments at war.¹¹ But, as sociologist Christie Davies demonstrates, although authorities often succeed in mobilizing artists for the production of patriotic cartoons, jokes, and songs, they actually expend more effort on censoring spontaneous yet subversive humor.¹² This was probably also the case with Soviet Yiddish patriotic humor, although no hard evidence, in the form of letters, directives, or instructions, exists to this effect. The only evidence we can rely on comes from the analytical pieces written by Soviet Jewish ideologues themselves.

    For example, based on the analysis of dozens of songs and jokes that he collected among Jewish refugees and evacuees in Kazakhstan¹³ between 1942 and 1943, Bloshteyn argued that 1943 would be remembered as the year when Soviet Jewish humor blossomed.¹⁴ Today, this assertion seems outrageous. It is indeed strange to think of 1943 in Europe as the year of Jewish laughter; by the beginning of the year the majority of Jews of Poland and Ukraine had been killed, the last surviving French Jews were about to be deported, and others began to learn of the loss of their families and communities. The worst was yet to come for Hungarian Jews. If anything, we tend to think of 1943, as David Roskies has suggested we should, as ground zero of Jewish culture¹⁵—the time when the centuries-old Yiddish civilization was almost completely destroyed in Poland and the Soviet Union.

    From Bloshteyn’s perspective, however, and maybe from the perspective of some Jews who lived then in Soviet Central Asia and had limited information on the scope of the destruction of the Jewish communities in Europe, 1943 could indeed seem more cheerful compared to 1941, when most of these people were on trains traveling to unknown destinations and fates. With the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and encouraging news from the Western Front, 1943 probably marked the moment when the enemy became a lot less scary, a lot less invincible, and easier to mock. This is the time, possibly, when official humor, first designed to motivate soldiers not to be scared of a much better equipped and organized German army, began to resonate. In this sense, the Soviet Jewish humor of 1943 was indeed postwar humor, although the war was still going on.

    Hitler the Haman, Stalin the Hero: Purim Imagery in Soviet Wartime Humor

    Perlina’s song makes fun of German political leaders and ridicules their unsuccessful attempts to invade the Soviet Union. In the context of Soviet satire of the 1940s, her choice of villains is unremarkable, as Hitler, Göring, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and Frick became iconic villains of the Soviet struggle against fascism. Caricatures of these politicians filled the Soviet press, some drawn by professional artists such as Boris Efimov, who wrote in his memoirs that he used his art to nurture antipathy for the enemies.¹⁶

    The comparison between Hitler and Haman, the villain from the Purim story, is less expected in

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