Jewish in a Gentile World

On the morning of December 26, a Catholic boy, a Protestant boy and a Jewish boy were talking about what their families did for Christmas. The Catholic boy said, "It was wonderful. We all went down to my grandfather's church, and we said mass, and we gathered around the altar and sang Silent Night." The Protestant boy said, "It was wonderful. We all went down to my grandfather's house, and we gathered around the fireplace and roasted chestnuts and sang Jingle Bells." The Jewish boy said, "It was wonderful...

Judaism is made up of different movements , different branches that approach Jewish law and history differently. Here is my favorite joke illustrating the differences between the movements. I like this one because I think hits all three movements equally and fairly, whereas some other jokes of this nature seem to hit one movement more than the other. * * * * * According to American Lung Association, about 1 in 8 smokers die from lung cancer. The question arose, is smoking equivalent to suicide, and therefore a violation of Jewish law? The question was posed to representatives of each of the major movements of American Judaism: Reform , Conservative and Orthodox . The Reform rabbis considered the question and concluded...

Chanukkah is less than a month away -- the Hebrew month of Kislev starts this Friday -- so of course, it's time to start making my practice and experimental batches of latkes! A basic recipe for latkes can be found on my website here . I have also made a video on YouTube that illustrates some of the finer points, like how to tell when latkes are ready to flip. (I'm not entirely satisfied with the way the titles look on YouTube, and I may be replacing that video, but I'll update the link if I do). But every year I experiment with different changes and additions to my latkes, and my co-workers are good enough to serve as test subjects -- er, I mean beta testers -- for my latke experiments... Some experiments that have gone over well: adding half a cup of broccoli florets, asparagus tips or bell peppers (a mix of red, yellow and green peppers was especially pretty) or substituting shredded zucchini or sweet potato for half of the potato. My birth father, who was allergic to e

As I said in the Election Humor post, I'm shifting the direction of this blog to tell Jewish jokes that shed some light on Jewish culture, religion or history. I've found in the few years that I've had this blog that I haven't written much because I can't bring myself to write about a topic without researching it properly and providing references, and I just didn't have the time to do all that. But you don't need to do much research to tell a joke! So maybe I'll be able to get posts up here more frequently. And certainly, the jokes will be vastly more entertaining than my opinions on any serious matters. So lets start with a bit of meta-humor: a Jewish joke about Jews telling jokes. I translated this very loosely from the original Yiddish in the book Royte Pomerantsen , a collection of classic Jewish humor written in transliterated Yiddish (Yiddish written with English letters). * * * * * When you tell a joke to a redneck, he laughs three times: once whe

On Sunday morning, a local news broadcast teased a story by saying that the courts were addressing a conflict between religion and the medical profession. I assumed that the story was the kind we usually see: religious parents refusing treatment of their children because of religious convictions, such as Jehovah's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions or Christian Scientists refusing medical treatment generally. Imagine my surprise when I saw the picture of the boy at issue: clearly a Chasidic Jewish boy, wearing a yarmulke and the long, curly front hair designed to emulate peyot (the untrimmed sideburns that Orthodox adult men wear). Judaism allows any and all treatment to save a life; any Jewish law can be broken, except the laws against murder, idolatry and adultery. How could his parents refuse treatment? It turns out that I had misunderstood the nature of the story: in this case, the family wanted treatment of their child ... and the hospital wanted to discontinue it. The ch

I've been planning for a while now to redirect this blog into posts of Jewish humor that shed light on Jewish religion, history and culture. With election day upon us, I thought this was a good time to start. I promise, this joke includes no one currently running for office, or even anyone in office today. George H. W. Bush (the elder) and Dan Quayle were in a plane with a priest and a rabbi. They came upon rough weather, and the plane was in trouble. The pilot made an announcement: "This plane is going down, and we only have four parachutes. I'm taking one, and you can decide who gets the other three!" The passengers saw the pilot jump from the plane with one of the four parachutes, leaving four people behind with three parachutes. Bush said, "I'm the President of the free world! I have to survive!" He grabbed one of the parachutes and jumped. Quayle said, "If anything happens to George, I'm next in line! I have to survive!" He grabbed ano

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey's Summary of Key Findings begins with the assertion that "most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith." The USA Today article about this survey seemed to interpret this as saying that Americans take a "one from column A, one from column B" approach to religion, where Oprah Winfrey is as much a source of spiritual guidance as any religious leader. But after reading through The Pew Form's statements about the survey, I'm not exactly sure what they meant by "non-dogmatic." Did they mean not "following a dogma [that is, the established teachings of a formal religion]," or did they simply mean not "arrogant, stubborn and bigoted"? In the context of a discussion about religion, I would think the former definition would be more appropriate, and certainly USA Today seemed to run with that notion, but Pew may simply have meant that people are tolerant of other religions. I'd like to lo

According to USA Today, the recent the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey indicates that most Americans have abanded traditional doctrine in favor of vague, fuzzy, "pick one from column A and one from column B" spirituality. However, as I looked through the detailed results of the survey, I found that the notion of "traditional doctrine" in the survey is very biased toward the doctrines of Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. Many of the "traditional doctrines" that Americans are rejecting are not doctrines of Judaism at all -- certainly not doctrines of the liberal movements of Judaism, but in many cases not even the doctrines of Orthodox Judaism! I am also concerned that the answers the survey received Jews may be skewed against traditional religion of any kind because of the way Jews classify ourselves. In this post, I'll focus on the classification issue; I will get into the details of the survey and

At synagogue recently, someone commented that gentiles must get some very strange ideas about Passover when they look at the Passover aisle in the grocery stores. In the average grocery store, you will see three-foot-long packages of matzah, jars gefilte fish and borscht, and shelf after shelf of cookies, cake mixes and candies... and very little else. Do Jews really eat that stuff and nothing else all eight days of Passover? I thought perhaps a little explanation might be in order. Keep in mind that, for the most part, we can eat the same meats, fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk and cheese during Passover that we eat year round. We're not just eating borscht and gefilte fish with matzah; we're eating steak and potatoes, roasted chicken or turkey, beef stew, cheese omlettes, egg salad, tuna fish and so forth, but you don't see that sort of thing in the Passover aisle because for the most part, we buy that the same way we do every day. Those who are strict about Passover ha

Kosher: It's hip, it's hot, it's happenin'. According to an article in this week's U.S. News & World Report, "New Taste for Kosher Foods," "kosher" is now the most popular claim on new food products, more popular than "organic," "all natural" or "no additives or preservatives." According to the article, sales of kosher foods have risen 15 percent a year for the past decade, and only 20 percent of kosher food buyers are Jewish. A sales figure like that should be sufficient to debunk the "Jewish tax" conspiracy theory nonsense, but I'm sure the people who believe in that nonsense will simply attribute the USN&WR article to the Jewish media conspiracy. There are many reasons why people prefer kosher foods, some of which are valid and some of which are... less valid. The biggest advantage to the kosher label is... it actually means something! A label like "organic" doesn't really mean