Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right, marching with MLK at Selma March, 1965 Were he still alive today, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., would be 84 years old. Much of the current buzz surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington centers on speculation about what MLK would believe and where he would lead today. The 1963 March put the political spotlight on achieving color blind public accommodations, job opportunities, and voting rights. Speakers at the 2013 Commemoration emphasized that gains that have been made need to be protected and advanced, while highlighting new issues like racial profiling, immigration reform, and gender equality. Banners were raised in the audience picturing the Rev. King side-by-side with Trayvon Martin. Would King have embraced, in addition to the old liberal agenda, the current progressive agenda? Probably to some degree, but he might have surprised on some issues. One could speculate, for example, that as a Southern Black Baptist Minister, he might not have not been entirely comfortable with abortion rights. (more…)
No Joke “Growing up,” said my son Jacob, “ if you had told me that someone in my family would write a book about Jewish humor, I would have imagined it to be my father, or perhaps my brother, who has something of a legendary wit; certainly not my mother, who was generally regarded as the proverbial straight man in the family.” The nice things he went on to say about me at a launch for the book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor did not contradict his surprise that I should have been drawn to this subject. I surprised myself. When I took up the study of literature in college, I was attracted by what normally appeals to adolescents—death and heartache, sex and romance, and how to navigate the shoals of life. Yiddish that I chose as my field of concentration seemed to me the most consequential branch of literature, haunted as it was by the fate of its speakers in Europe. I wrote my Masters’ thesis on a group of Yiddish prose poems about the final days of the Ghetto of Vilna. My doctoral dissertation on “the schlemiel as modern hero” addressed the same concerns for Jewish fate from a different angle. We tend to think of the schlemiel as a character in Jewish comedy, but the French aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso, author of the original Peter Schlemihl (1814), was an exile most of his life, and his tragicomic hero sells his shadow to the devil with the same unfunny consequences as Goethe’s Faust who sells the devil his soul. The man without a shadow and the man without a country lack what “normal” people are expected to possess. The schlemiel of Yiddish folk culture is likewise a hapless person in a tragic situation. (more…)