Delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful.
A compendium of jokes that reflect and create a sense of cultural identity.
An affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, Baum (English Literature and Critical Theory/Univ. of Southampton; Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just About Anyone, 2017) brings thoughtful analysis to a lighthearted, appreciative, and very funny survey of Jewish humor. Each pithy chapter abounds with jokes: some “that illustrate the arguments of the essay” and others “that have no obvious place in the essay but were too good to leave out.” The author begins each chapter with a question—e.g., “how do you tell the difference between a blessing and a curse? Jews, Baum asserts, can spot “the gloomier side of good news.” One example: “May you become so rich that your wife’s second husband never has to work a day in his life!” Much Jewish humor takes the perspective of the outsider and—like black humor—recognizes a history of oppression. As Jon Stewart put it: “We’ve come from the same history—two thousand years of persecution—we’ve just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues, Jews complained—we just never thought of putting it to music.” The sentiment of many jokes, Baum writes, reiterates a theme: “if you start worrying now, history will be sure to prove you right.” Take this terse rendering of “the traditional Jewish telegram: Start worrying. Details to follow.” The author includes unattributed jokes that have been retold by generations (some featuring rabbis, Jewish mothers, and, of course, Jewish mothers-in-law) and newer jokes by contemporary comedians, including Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, and Amy Schumer. Considering the debate “over whether Jewish jokes are battling anti-Semitism or are in fact forms of it,” Baum admits that discerning the difference can be “slippery” and sometimes depends on whether a Jew or non-Jew is telling (or interpreting) the joke.
Delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful.Pub Date: May 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-742-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A brutally esoteric philosophical peregrination concerning the prospects for civil society in post-Marxist Eastern and Central Europe. Gellner (Social Anthropology/Cambridge; Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism/Central European Univ., Prague) notes that a call to civil society has become a rallying cry for many nations formerly behind the Iron Curtain. But he is concerned that discussion about the nature of civil society has fallen out of vogue in Western philosophy. He defines civil society as ``a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual.'' Gellner refines this definition by discussing several of civil society's ``rivals,'' most notably, the Marxist state and Islam. He views the failure of the Marxist state primarily as the failure of the first large-scale secular religion, and he develops the notion that the sacralization of the everyday world, particularly the world of work, was an unsustainable venture. As the routinization of daily life began to take hold of Soviet consciousness, retreat into the sacred was made impossible since the sacred had been ideologically inverted into the mundane. This presupposes a sort of Durkheimian functionality with regard to the purpose of ritual and transcendental experience. Gellner's analysis of Islam is no less abstract and seems to capture even less of the spirit and diversity of the religion. In his discussion of the preconditions for civil society, Gellner becomes mired in historical asides that have little to do with current sociopolitical reality and that probably never had much to do with the reality of any period—comparing, for instance, the ideas of Machiavelli and de Tocqueville regarding the relative geographic distribution of social atomization. Whatever insights Gellner may have into specific historical circumstances are obscured by sociological jargon and abstraction.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-7139-9114-3
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
A unique though complicated investigation of Buddhism and feminism. Klein (Religious Studies/Rice Univ.) wants to initiate a conversation between Buddhism and Western feminism in order to tackle questions of selfhood. To do this, she juxtaposes what she sees as the feminist dichotomy between essentialism (self as intrinsic and universal womanhood) and postmodernism (all aspects of self are constructed) against the Buddhist dichotomy between the discovery of enlightenment (enlightenment is intrinsic) and developmental enlightenment (enlightenment can be acquired). According to Klein, Western feminism's emphasis on individualism results in the bifurcation of mind and body, obscuring the potentially fruitful balance between them. One method for maneuvering between connection and separateness is the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, ``the ability to sustain a calm, intense, and steady focus.'' Possible nonlinguistic states, silence, and compassion, she says, also have the potential to bridge the different levels of knowledge and to aid in the resolution of mind and body. The Great Bliss Queen, a well-known mythological female figure in some Buddhist traditions, emerges as important to Klein- -largely because there are so few female role models in Buddhism. But the Bliss Queen doesn't have easy answers to the questions Klein proposes. Repeatedly claiming that the conversation between Buddhism and feminism has the potential to offer insights to both, Klein uses technical language about Buddhist practices that obscures some of the more important discoveries. What does emerge is the falsehood of contemporary Western society's belief that an individual can be completely autonomous, with a self independent of community, a possibility that Buddhism finds absurd. In other words, it is possible to share an essential nature that is partially constructed by time and place. What promises to be a powerful analysis appears more and more to reflect Klein's own struggles to reconcile Buddhism and feminism, not accessible to most readers because of its technicality.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-7306-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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