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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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