This, according to Devorah Baum is the world’s most Jewish joke. And she should know. The author of a new book entitled The Jewish Joke, she has written an “essay with examples (less essay, more examples)” which not only contains a lot of jokes, but also an insightful analysis of what lies behind them. (I know what you’re thinking, but, honestly, it doesn’t ruin the humour. Baum’s tone is light and she is never boring).

Yet Feeling Jewish also seeks to convince us that these same feelings have become much more widespread in recent times. According to Baum, “they are increasingly what everyone is feeling in an identity-obsessed and knowledge-driven world, in which globalisation means that everyone is feeling uprooted, looking over their shoulder, not sure what tomorrow will bring. DS. At school. I had no friends until I was fifteen or sixteen, bar one other person who was funny. After that, I don’t know what happened. I went to sixth-form and then I started doing drama, making people laugh, and it’s then that I realized: ‘Well I’m funny.’ I am also a producer and performer in another forthcoming (2023) creative documentary feature film directed by Josh Appignanesi concerning the Extinction Rebellion climate protest movement leading up to the Tufton Street protest by ‘Writers Rebel’ in September 2020, at which I was one of the speakers. We talk about the Jewish propensity to make all of life into a joke, a kind of sitcom, like Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld. It’s something that she and Appignenesi did when she first became pregnant. They wrote in the JC earlier this year about how their “fun experiment”, of documenting the pregnancy in film, turned from a gentle comedy about a neurotic father-to-be, into something very different. Baum was pregnant with twins, but as the film, entitled The New Man, progressed they learned that one would die and the survival of the other was uncertain. The film ends with the birth of their first son, Manny and the burial of his brother, Ben. Throughout modernity, Jews have been subject to a great deal of suspicion and scrutiny and a swirl of unanswerable questions about their identity and belonging. In a fast-changing, globalised, “Facebook world”, these questions and uncertainties are ones that I suggest more and more of us have come to share – along with the insecurities and feelings that can accompany them, like self-hatred, envy, guilt, paranoia, to name a few I look at in the book. In the literature I analyse, these feelings have been quintessentially associated with the Jewish experience, and it places Jewishness at a kind of vanguard for understanding them, now that they’re ever more widespread. So I take examples from books, films, people’s lives, to find out how we’re living these feelings out, and maybe figure out how to live with them better, find out if perhaps they’re not as negative, toxic or unwelcome as they might appear to be at first. Perhaps they’re actually quite necessary and useful, if we can admit them. 2. What do you think readers will take away after reading your book?

Supervision

Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. She draws on a formidably broad frame of reference, from Kant to Fleabag via George Eliot and Nora Ephron, and any number of intriguing detours through less familiar literary and cinematic representations. But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity.” I felt totally alienated from her until the moment when the ritual of getting married under the canopy was over. After that in the blink of an eye it was the best day of my life and she was the greatest person in the world and I was free. I think I needed to literally tie the knot to break out of my cynicism. Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and at the Graduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana). She is the author of numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis and philosophy, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?

Two Jews, Moshe and Itzik, are walking in the Ukrainian forest. In the distance, they see two local guys walking towards them. Moishe turns to Itzik, panics, and says, “Itzik, what should we do? There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!”Sheesh. None of it sounds very romantic. Little wonder Chinese women, even when lured by financial incentives, don’t especially fancy saving global capitalism by means of marriage. Looking at the various ends to which marriage has been recruited, it’s tempting to conclude that marriage itself is nothing but a front for powerful interests that largely contradict those of marrying people themselves. Should we take it, then, that that’s all marriage was ever really about? Another way to put this is that “our feelings tend to have a kind of history. They precede us in lots of ways. They are influenced by things beyond our control and outside us.” A number of feelings that tend to get a bad press – self-hatred, envy, guilt and paranoia – have often been associated with Jews (among others) because of “the particular position of Jews in modernity, emancipated and admitted into society, but still feeling outside as well as inside, not sure of themselves, subject to a particular kind of suspicion”. Baum “likes religion a lot”, but is not currently a member of a synagogue. She grew up Orthodox, the couple were married by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of Masorti and for a time she was involved with the Yakar community. “I am always feeling nostalgic for being deeply religious.”

As for Baum’s original book proposal, that was accepted by Yale University Press, and the resulting monograph, Feeling Jewish (a Book for Just About Anyone), is also published this month, just a week before The Jewish Joke. I wanted to make sure that certain sides of me, of Josh, of our marriage, and of our pregnancy, wouldn’t be shared. And we didn’t share those things. I wanted what we did share to speak to a more universal condition, not the specifics of our case.DB. That was the most anti-comic moment in the panel. All I had was fear. I had nothing else. That’s basically the root of everything for me. Marriage may not be for everyone, but, as a currently married person, I’ve been trying to make it suit me. That doesn’t mean I’ve found it easy (I haven’t), although I have found it gets easier over time. Still, I do occasionally wonder if it is marriage’s very success as an institution that has proven injurious to the lived experience of so many marriages. For if the norms marriage has helped to reproduce have been particularly pernicious for single people, they have not been too kind to couples either. As any psychoanalyst could tell you, when it comes to relationships, the invocation of the ideal tends to summon its own shadow. This is no less true of the spousal relation than it is of the parental one, where the ideal that none of us can live up to has the effect, very often, of inspiring cruel and abusive behaviour under that idealised cover. DB. It turns out that they’re not. That’s what I found out over the last few years since claiming that they were. But that’s just their opinion. Can we talk about your mother? Jokes and the comic, like dreams and slips of the tongue, provided Freud with an important means of investigating the unconscious processes that organise desire and enjoyment. When we are laughing heartily at a joke, we are not in the most suitable state of mind to inquire into its technique. Sigmund Freud That response reminds me of the parable by Kafka about the leopards who break into the temple. The first time they’re horrified, but since the leopards keep breaking in the priests decide to make that disruption a part of the ceremony. Because to me it seems there’s something performative not only about making a film, but in the way you both speak, for example, about hating each other.