Jewish in a Gentile World

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...