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Jewish humor explored from a variety of perspectives, including anthropology, literature, psychology, sociology, and religion.

Table of Contents

Preface by Avner Ziv Introduction: Jewish Humor--A Survey and a Program by Raphael Patai Psychosocial Characteristics of Jewish Humor The Shlemiezel: Black Humor and the Shtetl Tradition by Jay Boyer Sholom Aleichem's Humor of Affirmation and Survival by Emanuel S. Goldsmith Exploring the Thesis of the Self-Deprecating Jewish Sense of Humor by Christie Davies Three Jews and a Blindfold: The Politics of Gallows Humor by Paul Lewis Are Jews Funnier than Non-Jews? by Carolyn Miller Since When Is Jewish Humor Not Anti-Semitic? by Bernard Saper The Origins and Evolution of a Classic Jewish Joke by Richard Raskin Men and Women in Jewish Humor Love Among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody's Women Leave by Richard Freadman Philip Roth and Woody Allen: Freud and the Humor of the Repressed by Sam B. Girgus From Eve to the Jewish-American Princess: The Comic Representation of Women in Jewish Literature by Judith Stora-Sandor The Transactional Implications of the Jewish Marriage Jokes by Anat Zajdman Humor in the Promised Land Jewish Humor in the Service of an Israeli Political Leader: The Case of Levi Eshkol by Ofra Nevo The Development of Humor in Israeli Children's Literature in the Twentieth Century Miri Baruch Selected Bibliography: Books in English about Jewish Humor Index

About the Author

AVNER ZIV is Professor of Psychology in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University, Israel, where his main research specialties are psychology of humor, adolescence, giftedness, and counseling and psychotherapy./e He is the author of eighteen books in Hebrew, English, and French, including Personality and Sense of Humor and National Styles of Humor (Greenwood Press 1988), as well as many dozens of articles in scholarly and professional journals, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries.

ANAT ZAJDMAN is an assistant in the Department of Education at the University of Haifa, Israel, where she is engaged in educational research, particularly on the educational aspects of the use of humor in schools and the implications of humor in interpersonal communication./e She has published on these topics in the Hebrew journals Reading Circles and Studies in Education and, in English, in Humor and Communication and Cognition.