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The Role of Religion in American Jewish Satire

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The Role of Religion in American Jewish Satire Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE 1-1-2015 All Joking Aside: The Role of Religion in American Jewish Satire Jennifer Ann Caplan Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Caplan, Jennifer Ann, "All Joking Aside: The Role of Religion in American Jewish Satire" (2015). Dissertations - ALL. 322. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/322 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT Jewish humor is a well-known, if ill-defined genre. The prevalence and success of Jewish comedians has been a point of pride for American Jews throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What I undertake in this dissertation is to isolate one particular form of humor—namely satire—and use it as a way to analyze the changing relationship of American Jews to traditional religious forms. I look at the trends over three generations, the third generation (who came of age in the 40s and 50s), the Baby Boom generation (who came of age in the 60s and 70s) and the contemporary generation (who came of age in the 80s and 90s). When the satire produced by each generation is analyzed with the depiction of Judaism and Jewish practices in mind a certain pattern emerges. By then reading that pattern through Bill Brown’s Thing Theory it becomes possible to talk about the motivations for and effects of the change over time in a new way. What the analysis revealed is that the third generation related to Judaism as a Thing, which in Brownian terms means it no longer functioned. Some, like Woody Allen and Joseph Heller actively promulgated that way of breaking free from the shackles of piety. Others, like Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud saw the turning of Judaism into a Thing as establishing dangerous precedents for inter-Jewish relationships. The Baby Boom generation lacked their own take on the turning of Judaism into a Thing; early on they matched the third generation, later they matched the contemporary generation. And the contemporary generation, rather than being content with the Judaism-Thing they inherited reversed the process, injecting new life and new purpose into Jewish practices in their texts. All Joking Aside: The Role of Religion in American Jewish Satire by Jennifer Caplan B.A. Wellesley College, 2001 M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School, 2003 M.Phil. Syracuse University, 2011 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion in the Graduate School of Syracuse University Syracuse University August 2015 Copyright © Jennifer Caplan 2015 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are obviously more people to thank than I possibly have room for here. If it takes a village to raise a child it has taken a metropolis to get this dissertation done. I have had the support and assistance of so many mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members over the past 3 years that I am undoubtedly going to forget some people, but if one of them is you please remember that I could not have done this without you, so how on Earth could you imagine I could write these acknowledgements on my own without screwing them up? I wish to thank the Philosophy and Religion departments at both Rollins College and Western Illinois University where the bulk of this dissertation was composed. Those departments, and my chairs while there L. Ryan Musgrave and Gordon Pettit, took a chance on a raw ABD and offered me a job and incredible mentorship and support. You all gave me the time and space to not only grow as a teacher, but also work on my research and writing and it was invaluable. I also had incredible colleagues at both places, and Todd French and Mario D’Amato at Rollins and Amy Carr, Norma Suvak, and Abe Graber at WIU all listened to me, counseled me, commiserated with me, and guided me to this point. I also have to thank everyone (and I mean everyone) at Syracuse. Zachary Braiterman has, of course, been a Godsend as an advisor and I truly and without hyperbole would not be here if it were not for him. He dragged me, sometimes kicking and screaming, to this point and never wavered in his belief in this project even when I iv did. M. Gail Hamner, both as my professor and my long-suffering Director of Graduate Studies, has answered every question and every email and been an ally and support I could not have done without. Ken Frieden has also been along for this entire ride and his calm dedication to my project has meant so much. He always knew exactly which textual battles I should fight and which ones I should walk away from, and without him this dissertation would be either thirty pages long or a thousand, I am not sure which. Thank you to Carson Webb for turning a mess into a manuscript. Debbie Pratt and Jackie Borowve are geniuses at managing people and paperwork and not one person would graduate if it were not for them making sure we can. And every colleague I had in my five years on campus, you are all here. I have to thank Terry Reeder and Wendy DeBoer specially, because they are special to me and listened to more of this process than any person should have had to, but each and every one of you helped me, and this is where I will specifically not name more names so as not to leave anyone out. And finally, my family. Angela Tarango is family at this point. My friend and academic sounding board since 1998, you more than anyone else may take credit for this. After all, if you hadn’t begged me to apply to HDS with you I would be a lawyer today. My mom, dad, sister and brother have been nothing but supportive, and I thank each of you. And Todd, Jake, and Phoebe (z’’l), my little ohana, has moved from Dayton to Syracuse to Florida to Illinois to wherever we head next without complaint and you all kept me sane, balanced, and are the reasons I kept going. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Iv Chapter 1: The State of the Art 1 Current Scholarship on Jewish Humor 12 Humor Theory 19 Thing Theory 38 Chapter 2: Torah (Torah! Torah!) 48 Theories of Parody and Satire 52 Allen and Heller: Some Background 65 Allen’s Fiction 69 Hassidic Tales 76 The Scrolls 86 Heller’s Fiction 94 God Knows 97 Sister Hills 108 Conclusion 115 Chapter 3: God (Is In The Details) 120 Ritual Theory 120 The Circumcision-Background 126 “Royal Deluxe II” 129 “The Bris” 134 Bar Mitzvah-Background 142 A Serious Man 144 vi Death Rituals (Funeral and Shiva)-Background 155 This is Where I Leave You 158 Conclusion 162 Chapter 4: Israel (Is Real!) 166 Roth and Malamud-Background 170 Eli, the Fanatic 182 The Jewbird 197 Interlude 215 Jennifer Westfeldt-Background 219 Kissing Jessica Stein 220 Conclusion 227 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 242 vii 1 CHAPTER 1: THE STATE OF THE ART The wise man went to that country. The wise man made up his mind that he had to know the essence of the country. And how could he know the essence of the country? By the country's jokes. Because when one has to know something, one should know the jokes related to it. —Nachman of Bratslav1 Jews and humor seem to go together like peas and carrots, like peanut butter and jelly, like Burns and Allen. Perhaps it has always been that way, though (as I will discuss in the pages to come) I do not necessarily think so. Somewhere along the way, through their long and winding road, Jews got funny. Not just in an ontological sense, but in a way that was noticeable from the outside, and was a point of pride from the inside. So while this relationship did not appear suddenly, when Time magazine published its now-famous 1978 article “Behavior: Analyzing Jewish Comics” which claimed, among other things, that 80% of the working comedians in America were Jewish (despite Jews being then 3% of the general population) it both came as a shock to people, and also confirmed something people had long known, but had not had quantified for them. In the wake of that article “Jewish humor” became something people wanted to study, but that is a tricky thing to do. First of all, what makes humor Jewish? Sigmund Freud began asking this question all the way back in 1905, and nearly a century later Rabbi Joseph Telushkin was still asking the same question. Does a joke have to be by 1 Nachman of Bratslav, “The Humble King,” in Nachman of Bratslav: The Tales, trans. A. Brand, The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. Richard J. Payne (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 117. 2 Jews, for Jews to qualify (this is Freud’s view)? Telushkin thought a joke just needs “Jewish sensibilities” to qualify. Popularly any joke (or film, or novel) by a Jewish comedian gets labeled “Jewish,” but when the definition is that broad, does it mean anything? Over the course of this dissertation I will not be proposing a new rubric for determining the Jewishness of a cultural artifact. What I will be proposing is a new way of viewing the changes in American Jewish satire over roughly three generations.
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