American Sociological Review 2005 Shifman 843 59

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman
Just Call Me Adonai: A Case Study of Ethnic

Humor and Immigrant Assimilation
Limor Shifman
Elihu Katz
University of Oxford
University of Pennsylvania
This article describes a case study of humor created in the course of immigrant
assimilation, specifically regarding the jokes (n = 150) told by Eastern European oldtimers at the expense of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes) who migrated to
Palestine/Israel beginning in the mid-1930s. A taxonomy divides the corpus into jokes
lampooning rigidity, exaggerated deference to authority, difficulty in language
acquisition, and alienation from the new society. The jokes carry a dual message of
welcome to our egalitarian nation, but please note that we, and our norms, were here
first. The ethnic superiority implicit in the latter part of the message turns the tables on
two earlier encountersin Germany and the United Statesin which Jewish immigrants
from Russia and Poland were denigrated for embarrassing their relatively wellestablished German brethren. The Yekke jokes analyzed in this article arose from a third
encounter in Palestine/Israel, where, this time, the Eastern Europeans arrived earlier, as
Zionist pioneers. The jokes, it is argued, constitute a kind of revenge.
A young man, newly arrived from Germany in

the late 1930s, recognizes a former teacher on the
street in Tel Aviv. Coming abreast, the young man
greets the older one with all of the old-world honorifics at his command. Herr Professor, Doktor,
he begins. Responding with pleasure, but conscious of the incongruity, the professor replies,
This is an egalitarian country, my son. Just call
me adonai.1
Direct all correspondence to Limor Shifman,

University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, 1 st.
Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, United Kingdom (limor.shifman@oii.ox.ac.uk). The authors thank Avraham
Frank, Gad Granach, and Andreas Meyer, three proud
Yekkes, for their help in collecting the data for this
article; Henry Wassermann, Aziza Khazzoom, Itzhak
Galnoor for insightful comments; and Nurit Carmel
and Adi Gordon for their translations. The Association
of Olim from Central Europe and The Siegfried
Moses Parents Home kindly provided us with names
of prominent members of the Yekke community for
the interviews.
1 The jokes recounted here are freely translated
from Hebrew. Many are known in somewhat different versions. We take full responsibility for their fundamental accuracy.
donai, in Hebrew, means God. Adoni (ado-nee) simply means mister, and is an
everyday salutation. This is one among our collection of some 150 jokes that stereotype socalled Yekkes, the label given to Jewish
immigrants from Germany and Central Europe
who fled to Palestine from the gathering storm
(Erel 1989). The joke alludes to several elements in the stereotypewhich we elaborate
laterincluding high education, deferent and
formalistic behavior, exaggerated self-esteem,
alienation or estrangement from the new society, and an inability or unwillingness to learn the
new language. The genre flourished for about
two decades from the mid-1930s at least until
the 1950s, when the influx of new immigrants
from other countries generated new waves of
ethnic jokes.
The GermanJewish immigration of the
1930s is counted as the Fifth Aliya, or fifth
wave. It was preceded by four waves of
immigration from Eastern European countries, mostly Russia and Poland, which established a new community in Palestine, guided
by Zionist ideology. This sequence, we argue,
had a crucial influence on power relations
and interactions between Eastern and Western
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AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2005, VOL. 70 (October:843859)

844AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
JewsAshkenazim alland subsequently on

Yekke jokes, told by the Eastern European
veterans at the expense of their new countrymen.
Our article attempts a first analysis of this corpus of jokes as a case study of a wider phenomenon: humor created in the course of
immigrant assimilation.2 In the first part, we
present a new theoretical framework for analyzing immigrant assimilation humor. In the
second part, we describe the sociohistoric background relevant to our case study: the relationship between Eastern and Western European
Jews. In the third part, the pivotal section, we
categorize and analyze the jokes in the light of
the theoretical framework and the sociohistoric
background.
ETHNIC HUMOR AND
IMMIGRANT ASSIMILATION:
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Ethnic humor can be defined roughly as humor
directed at racial and nationality groups, denigrating alleged attributes of those groups
(Schutz 1989:67).3 This kind of humor, which
has been widespread globally for many decades,
is based on ethnic stereotypesshared sets of
beliefs about ethnic groups (Davis 1993). The
analysis of ethnic humor might therefore serve
as a unique key to understanding the ways that
groups perceive and evaluate each other (Apte
1985).
Humorous communication incorporates both
intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects (Juni
and Katz 2000), and ethnic humor has been
studied both from psychological and sociological perspectives. Whereas psychologically oriented works try to explain the motivation of
individuals to create and consume ethnic
humor,4 socially oriented research is interested

in the role this kind of humor plays in intragroup
cohesion and intergroup relations.5
Social stratification is a salient key to these
studies, which further differentiate between
other-directed and self-directed humor.
Members of dominant ethnic groups tend to
tell jokes about others, but not about themselves
(Davies 1990). Such jokes are thought to serve
as control mechanisms, because they enforce the
superiority of the dominant group on minority
groups (Boskin and Dorinson 1985). By contrast, members of minority/subordinate groups
invent and use self-directed humor, which sometimes turns ostensible weaknesses into strengths
and criticism into self-congratulation (Mintz
1986). Thus, minority humor can also serve as
a weapon of liberation (Lowe 1986). This is
evident when minority humor targets the dominant group to expose naked emperors and
reduce their prestige (La Fave 1976:244).
Like other kinds of humor, ethnic humor is
described as having the potential to crystallize
negative stereotypes of enemies while creating
a sense of solidarity and superiority among the
in-group of tellers (Zijderveld 1983). However,
certain scholars have observed that ethnic humor
may function in the opposite way, acting as a
conflict-soothing mechanism that serves as a
mode of communication and conciliation
(Lowe 1986:442). The notion that ethnic humor
is intrinsically linked to social conflict and hostility/aggression has been challenged from
another direction by Davies (1990, 2002), who
claims that ethnic jokes often target groups that
are not in conflict. He argues, for example, that
stupidity jokes may reflect center/periphery
relationships within a common culture, in which
the butts are perceived as a comic version of
the joke tellers themselves. The jokes are there-
2 We
prefer assimilation because it connotes an

expectation of sameness, which applies to our case
and to the period during which the melting pot
ideology was prevalent. Other studies refer to integration and absorption. We use Israel to mean
Palestine/Israel; part of our story occurs before
the state of Israel was established in 1948.
3 We elaborate later on the problematic nature of
mixing nationality, ethnicity, and religion reflected in
this definition and in many other works about ethnic
humor.
.
4 Much work in the psychological field is dedicated
to the motives and functions of self-deprecating

humor. Jewish humor, for example, has been the
subject of extensive research (Grotjahn 1970; Reik
1962; Rosenberg and Shapiro 1958; Ziv 1986).
5 The social-oriented research of ethnic humor
is carried out in many disciplines including folklore,
anthropology, literature, and sociology (Apte 1985).

ETHNIC HUMOR AND IMMIGRANT ASSIMILATION845
fore told within the same family and do not

necessarily reflect ethnic conflict or hostility.6
These contradictory theories about the social
functions of ethnic humor as both hegemonic
and subversive, and as both hostile and benign
derive, to a large extent, from the polysemic
nature of humorous texts. Thus, the very same
jokes that seem hostile to a member of a dominant group may be matters of pride or solace
within the minority group. This idea that jokes
are open texts (Eco 1979), allowing more
than one meaning, is highlighted in the works
of leading researchers of humor such as Davies
(1990, 2002), Oring (1981, 2003), and Palmer
(1987, 1994).
When and where are ethnic jokes told? Are
there certain periods in which ethnic jokes tend
to flourish? Many studies of humor and ethnicity
mention the process of immigrant assimilation
as background for the creation of ethnic jokes
about newcomers. Dorinson and Boskin
(1988:155) notably claim that ethnic jokes flourish when a nation absorbs a large wave of immigrants who are unable or unwilling to assimilate
rapidly. At such moments, ethnic jokes serve as
agents of social control. They are messages that
carry an implicit call for laughter directed at a
group that is different. This is true, a fortiori,
when the immigrant group wants to be different, as in the Yekke case that we explore in this
article. Davies (1990:311) argues that ethnic
jokes during the process of assimilation might
also be told or retold by the immigrants themselves, who pass on jokes about their people to
newly arrived greenhorns or to fractions of the
group who have failed or refused to make the
transition from immigrant to full member of
the new society.
These studies, however, do not define the
features that differentiate immigration from
other situations in which ethnic humor is created and used (wars, for instance). The key, we
suggest, to the exceptional aspect of assimilation humor is that although the jokes are about
ethnicity, they are told within the social frame
of a nation-state, or a nation-state in the making, as we demonstrate in the Israeli case. Thus,
For an illuminating debate on this issue, see the

correspondence between Oring (1991) and Davies
(1991).
nation and ethnicity play a dialectic role in the

very same jokes.
In other words, assimilation humor may be
differentiated from other cases of ethnic humor
in that the dominant groupthe old-timers
typically abandons its own ethnic identity and
assumes the role of standard-bearer for the
nation.7 In their welcoming roles, Wasps are
then Americans, and rather recent Eastern
European immigrants become Israelis. In such
cases, we suggest, ethnic humor may carry a
dual message of welcome to our melting pot,
but notice that it is our ethnicity (and superiority) that defines this nation. Thus, the rhetoric
of deriding newcomers may be at once a welcoming rhetoric of egalitarian togetherness and,
at the same time, a construction of social stratification. Therefore, it might be appropriate to
refer to humor created in the course of immigrant assimilation as a brand of humor that is
both ethnic and national, although the balance
between the two may vary dramatically in different social and historical contexts.8
BROTHERS AND STRANGERS:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
EASTERN AND WESTERN EUROPEAN
JEWRY
Up to the 18th century, Eastern (Polish) and
Western (German) Jews were two parts of a
whole. This unity was expressed in mutual
exchange of rabbis and scholars as well as active
7 This description is probably most relevant to

states defined as countries of immigrants in which
a series of ethnic groups succeed one another. But the
basic duality described earlier between the welcoming and the dominating roles is true also of
old nation-states such as France, which have themselves become nowadays countries of immigration
(Green 1999).
8 A humoristic incarnation of this theoretical argument might be found in a well-known Israeli television sketch from 1973, in which every group of new
immigrants is scorned by its predecessor. In this
scorning chain, the mockers represent a national
point of view, whereby the newcomers are derided for
not living up to the heroic level of earlier contributions to the collectivity. At the same time, it is quite
obvious that what motivates them is their own status
as an ethnic group and not the national well-being.

involvement in one anothers affairs (Bartal

1985). In the course of the 18th century, cultural and social gaps began to evolve between
German and Eastern European Jewry. In the
German countries, the Jews were entering new
occupational fields and increased contact with
the Christian populations, whereas in the East,
severe restrictions were being placed on the
occupational possibilities of Jews who continued to lead an isolated Jewish life. These
changes in the relationship between the two
groups and their neighbors were accompanied
by internal changes in the Jewish communities
themselves. The Enlightenment, which
emerged first in Germany, promoted assimilation into German culture, including the displacement of Yiddish in favor of German. The
diffusion of the Enlightenment in Eastern
Europe was slow and problematic by comparison (Weiss 2000).
During the second half of the 19th century,
many Jews fled from Eastern Europe to emancipated Germany. German Jewry treated the
newcomers as brothers and strangers
(Aschheim 1982). While they tried to help in
various ways, they also behaved arrogantly
and condescendingly to a group they saw as an
obstacle to their aspirations. By this time,
German Jews had already adopted the cultural, moral, and aesthetic values of the German
middle class, a fact that had a critical effect on
their perception of the group they labeled
Ostjuden (Jews of the East). The Ostjude was
considered backward, superstitious, dirty, and
uncivilized, and therefore likely to evoke antiSemitism and to impede the progress of
German Jewry (Aschheim 1982). Satirical
newspapers in Germany often mocked the
Ostjuden, and German Jews, many of whom
worked for these newspapers as writers, editors, and graphic illustrators, joined in
(Wassermann 1990; Wassermann, personal
communication, June 28, 2004).
An ambivalent attitude also developed in the
other direction, from East to West. According
to Bartals (1985) analysis of Eastern European
Jewish literature during the 19th century, the
image of German Jews as carriers of the
Enlightenment led to conflicting views about
them. Whereas the Hasidic groups of Eastern
Europe criticized the German Jews sellout to
the Haskalah (Enlightenment), early Polish
Maskilim (Eastern forerunners who wished

to share in the Enlightenment) enthusiastically endorsed the JewishGerman model. After
the reluctant welcome extended by German
Jewry, however, by the end of the 19th century, this adulation had been replaced by severe
criticism. The German Jews were still being
portrayed as exponents of Western culture,
but admiration was being displaced by negative stereotyping. In the works of Eastern writers such as Shalom Aleichem and Judah L.
Peretz, German Jews were portrayed as cold
and alienbodies without souls. Shalom
Aleichems German Jew, for example,
remembers the fact that he is a Jew only on
Yom Kippur; he speaks funny Yiddish full of
Germanic forms; his beard is shaved and his
side-locks are cut (Bartal 1985:12).
In parallel, the Eastern European Jews who
migrated to the United States from Russia at
the turn of the 20th century were welcomed
once again by the German Jews who had
arrived decades earlier. The former German
Jews were well on the way to political equality and economic success, when they were
embarrassed yet again by their disheveled
co-religionists. Therefore, they mobilized to
help Americanize the newcomers as quickly as
possible. Some of the proudest institutions of
American Judaism, such as the Settlement
Houses and the Jewish Theological Seminary,
were founded or reoriented to speed the socialization of the newcomers (Goren 1982; Sklare
1955). Thus, the same ambivalence that characterized the meeting of East and West in
Germany reemerged on American soil.9
THE MEETING IN ISRAEL
Tension and ambivalence emerged once more
in pre-Israeli Palestine, but now the situation
was reversed. This time, the Eastern European
preceded the German immigration by some
decades. By the time the newcomers arrived,
9 A manifestation of this tension can be found in

American literature. Thus, for instance, Rebecca
Goldstein describes in The Mind Body Problem
(1993) German Jews as ridiculously punctilious and
rigid (or in her words tight-assed), as well as feeling superior to Eastern European Jews.

Eastern European Jews had established the

institutions that would constitute the infrastructure of the incipient Jewish state: the
Labor Federation, the kibbutzim, an underground army, and the Hebrew language.
Ideologically, these institutions expressed the
desire of these former Eastern Europeans to
abandon their Diasporic past to create a
new Hebrew society based on manual labor
and socialism. Apart from the British mandate
over Palestine and the jockeying for advantage
with the indigenous Arabs, the Eastern pioneers were effectively in charge. Of course,
misery afflicted Eastern Europe as well, but
unlike the German Jews, whose migration
was primarily reluctant, the immigration of the
Eastern Europeans was as much pull as
push (Eisenstadt 1954). They were inspired,
variously, by the political, social, and religious promise of Zionism and community.
The main encounter between the two groups
took place, as mentioned earlier, between
1933 and 1939, in the days of the Fifth
Aliya, which brought over 50,000 German
Jews to Palestine. One of the prominent features of this group was its education. Many of
the immigrants were members of the liberal
professions. They were also relatively wealthy.
Many brought considerable amounts of money
from Germany. Another dominant feature of
the immigrants was their intimate connection
to German culture and the German language
(Gelber 1990).
These characteristics had a major influence
on the process of absorption of the fifth
wave. The historic and sociological literature notes a significant gap between their successful economic and professional absorption
and their problematic social and cultural integration (Miron 2004). But even economic
absorption was not easy. A sizable proportion continued to work in their areas of expertise and made significant contributions in
economics and commerce, science and medicine, art and architecture (Stachel 1995).
Because of limited possibilities for employment, however, and despite their education
and experience, many were downgraded,
such that some doctors, for example, became
laborers in the building trade, and some
lawyers retrained themselves as taxi drivers.
In spite of their relative occupational success, the cultural and social absorption of the
Yekkes was characterized by tensions with the
Israelis, most of them veteran immigrants
from Eastern Europe. According to Gordon
(2004), many Yekkes perceived Israel as a
continuation of the Eastern European shtetel. They criticized the Israeli lack of order,
manners, and norms, as well as the Israeli
cultural world. They upheld the supremacy of
European culture, which they refused to abandon when they came to Israel. They also were
very attached to their mother tongue, and
seemingly had great diff iculty learning
Hebrew. The hardships and alienation experienced in the cultural and linguistic realms as
well as the depth of their connection to the
German language and culture brought many
of them to isolate themselves in special Yekke
environments, in which they possessed some
cultural autonomy (Miron 2004).
This desire to preserve old-world culture
and language was not welcomed by the Israelis
of Eastern European descent, who wished to
create a new Jewish community in Israel unified by the renascent Hebrew language and
rejection of the Diaspora. As Sznaider
(1984:23) phrased it: Belonging referred to
the new, Hebrew-speaking Jew who had
returned from exile and had set out to create
a new society rooted in Jewish culture. The
German Jewry in the yishuv were labeled as
the antithesis of this new Jew. They were seen
as culturally handicappedassimilated Jews
who had come to Palestine through force of
circumstance and who had no desire to
immerse themselves in Hebrew language and
culture. Once again, the German Jew was
perceived as arrogant, flaunting his alienation
(Gelber 1990).
The term Yekke itself reflects this multilayered relationship between Eastern and
Western Jews. One suggestion is that it alludes
to the short jackets that differentiated modern German Jews from traditional Eastern
Europeans, who wore long coats (Erel 1989).
Another usage alludes to their literalness and
their naivete, but not quite stupidity, even if
it often was followed by the word potz
(dope) (i.e., Yekke potz) (Getter 1979).
German Jews themselves embraced the term
Yekke, many of them using it in a positive

sense to signify their unique qualities of orderliness, punctuality, responsibility, and aesthetic sensibility.10 In either usage, the term
denoted the perceived uniqueness of the
group, marking it as different.
Thus, the situation created in Israel was in
many ways a mirror image of the encounter
between Eastern and Western Jews elsewhere.
Whereas in Europe and the United States, the
Eastern Jews were relatively disadvantaged as
compared with the Germans, in Israel they
were in charge, in a position of strength. In this
milieu, the old ethnic definitions were reshuffled, and they are the context in which Yekke
jokes (i.e., jokes against Yekkes) originated.
SOURCES OF YEKKE JOKES
Our corpus consists of 150 jokes, some of
which have been preserved in compilations of
Israeli humor, and others that we have collected through interpersonal communication.
Of these 150 jokes, 92 came from books of
jokes. We used these books as our main source
not only because they were available (in fact,
many were out of print and quite difficult to
track down), but also because they gave access
to jokes that might otherwise have been forgotten. Moreover, books of jokes, created primarily for commercial purposes, are designed
to appeal to mass audiences, and therefore are
likely to represent stereotypes and attitudes
that were once current. We used 12 joke books
published between 1939 and 2003, 11 from
which we drew only the jokes dealing with
Yekkes.
Of course, joke books may sometimes fail
to represent the population of jokes in circu-
10
That the term was ultimately embraced by the

German Jews themselves is evident from the name
of an international conference held at Jerusalem in
May 2004. Aiming to highlight the contribution of the
Fifth Aliya to Israeli society, the conference was entitled simply The Yekkes, to the pleasure of all.
11 We browsed all available books of jokes in
Israeli research libraries and chose all the books that
included Yekke jokes. All these books were published
in Israel. Most of themdefinitely the most popular oneswere edited or published by former Eastern
Europeans (Motti Neiger, personal communication,
April 6, 2005).
lation, especially those dealing with taboo subjects such as sexual behavior (Davies 1990).
Therefore, we also collected jokes interpersonally. Most of these derive from interviews
with aging Yekkes in Jerusalem and Naharia (n
= 10).12 The interviewees were asked to recall
as many Yekke jokes as possible, and then to
describe their attitude toward the phenomenon of Yekke humor. In these interviews, 65 different jokes were collected, only 15 of which
also appeared in the books of jokes. However,
a comparison between the jokes provided by
the interviewees and the jokes collected from
joke books showed that they share the same
underlying features and fall readily into our
basic categories.13 In fact, we stopped collecting additional jokes once we felt we were
unlikely to detect further themes.
In addition, we held informal conversations
with people who were not Yekkes: colleagues,
friends, and family members. We used these
conversations mainly to double-check our definition of what constitutes a Yekke joke, and
whether the definition is (still) widely familiar. We learned that the corpus is not much
remembered (except for a dozen or so classics), but that the genre, Yekke joke, is very
much alive and coincides with our definition.14
Once recalled, the old jokes still bring on both
smiles and nostalgia, and even warmth of feeling about the Yekkes themselves!
12 We accessed the interviewees with the aid of two

organizations: the Jerusalem branch of The
Association of Olim from Central Europe and The
Siegfried Moses Parents Home in Jerusalem, which
is occupied by Yekkes. All the interviewees (7 men
and 3 women) were born in Germany and immigrated to Israel during the 1930s and 1940s. One of
the interviewees also provided us with written jokes
that he has collected.
13 The only exceptions to this rule were jokes
about Yekke sexuality that tended to appear in jokes
told orally and not in joke books. However, these
jokes were linked to a wider category that did appear
in joke books, that of rigidity.
14 That the formula is still alive, long after its
prime, is evident in a joke we just heard: A security
guard at the airport asks a Yekke the routine question, Are you carrying a weapon? to which the
Yekke replies I didnt know I was supposed to bring
one.

AN ANATOMY OF YEKKE JOKES

The stereotyped Yekke, it will be recalled, is
preoccupied with orderliness, formality, deference, single-mindedness, literalness, seriousness of purpose, ambivalence aboutif not to
say alienation fromthe new homeland,
attachment to the mother tongue and culture,
and a sense of superiority in these domains. It
seems quite likely that a survey of German Jews
in Israel, at the time, would have confirmed
most of these values, although perhaps in less
extreme form. Literary depictions certainly
allude to them. It is even more likely that a survey of Eastern European Jews in Israel would
have confirmed the stereotyped perception of
the Yekke. But it is too late for such a survey now,
of course.
It will be no surprise, then, that the Eastern
European Jews in Israelwho are not famous
for these traits, but may be famous for
humor15took advantage of their hegemonic
position to make Yekkes the butt of their jokes.
But it should be borne in mind that inventing and
telling these jokes was not just a by-product of
the encounter between the two groupsfor we
have observed these encounters in other places
as wellbut of the specific conditions that
characterized Palestine/Israel at the time.
A thematic analysis of the corpus divides the
jokes into four main categories: rigidity,
language, alienation and deference. Each of
these categories highlights one of the stereotyped characteristics. Of the 150 jokes in our
collection, 125 fall into one or more of these
categories.
RIGIDITY
divided, in turn, into two subgroups: rigidity of

manners and rigidity of mind.
Rigidity of manner jokes depict the Yekke
as someone who follows rules and regulations
very strictly and resents any change in them. The
Yekke is formalistic and obedient. He is altogether lacking in the trait that is the pride of
Israel: improvisation (iltur) (Oring, 1981).16 In
a word, he is oversocialized, single-mindedly
pursuing a task without deviating left or right,
reminding us of the gyroscope that guides
Riesmans (1950) inner-directed personality,
and the linearity that characterizes McLuhans
(1962) typographic man.17
The Yekke personality that emerges from
these rigidity jokes may differ from the personalities described by Riesman and McLuhan
in that the latter seem more explicitly goal-oriented. The Yekke shares the same dogged stepby-step dedication to progress, but his
preoccupation is with means. Indeed, the jokes
suggest that the Yekke may lose sight of the end
altogether, giving all of his attention to procedure. There is an echo here of Max Webers
(1922) distinction between rationality of ends
and rationality of means, and his discussion of
the bureaucratic personality who may well forget that the rules were conceived in service of
a goal.
A typical joke:
A Yekke family wins a refrigerator in the lottery.
When the delivery service rings the doorbell at 2
oclock in the afternoon, the lady of the house
opens the door wearing a robe and refuses to accept
the delivery because it has ar rived in the
16 Oring (1981) attributed this rejection of improv-
The largest group of jokes in our collection (54

jokes) have to do with rigidity. These jokes portray the Yekke as rigid in every possible sense
of the word, and thereby illuminate a common
theme in the array of stereotypical traits that we
have already noticed. Rigidity jokes can be
15 According to a common notion (promoted by

famous advocates such as Freud), one salient feature
of Jewish humor is self-criticism. This notion was
challenged by Ben-Amos (1973), who claimed that
the tellers of Jewish jokes usually mock other social
groups in the Jewish community.
isation to the Yekke striving to remain Western, in

contrast to the effort of the former East Europeans
to adapt a more oriental/native identity.
17 Meyrowitz (2003:191) summarized McLuhans
notion as follows: To McLuhan, text-based thinking meant taking a fixed point of view and searching for a fixed truth; being concerned with linear,
logical sequence; emphasizing the mechanical over
the organic; separating action from reaction and
thought from emotion; focusing on what is happening at the center of the society while ignoring activity at the margins; carefully categorizing and
classifying objects, animals, people, and ideas; working toward a discrete niche for every thing (and every
body), so that all would be in their designated places.

Schlafstunde, the daily hour of rest when no disturbance is permitted.
Another means-oriented joke:

A Yekke was enthralled by a comrades story of how
his newly purchased motorbike gives him a lot
more time for morning chores, and gets him to his
job in Petach-Tikva by 9 AM. Exhilarated by this
news, the Yekke rushes out to buy a motorbike, easily manages his morning chores, and arrives in
Petach-Tikva even earlier than 9 AM. The next
time the friends meet, the Yekke expresses gratitude for the friends advice, proudly recites his
new achievements, and asks, But what is there to
do in Petach-Tikva?
The comic effect of these jokes can be explained

by Bergsons (1899) definition of humor in
terms of the tension between the human and the
mechanical. When a person acts in robotic fashion, he evokes laughter aimed at correcting his
behavior. Rigidity, for Bergson, is comic; laughter is its corrective. The difference between
human and mechanical parallels the distinction
between form and substance. The comic butt is
often a person who, like a robot, is bound by formal frameworks and procedures, ignoring real
human needs and ends.
Although Bergsons theory helps to explain
why these jokes are funny, it does not explain
why they were applied so specifically to Yekkes.
We believe that an answer is to be found in the
national context wherein these jokes were
invented, that is, in the Zionist attempt to dissociate the new Jew from the Diaspora Jew.18 If
the stereotypical Diaspora Jew, like the Yekke,
was well-behaved, polite, highly educated, and
civilized, his antithesis was the Israeli, who
was supposed to be strong, rough, earthy, simple, and sturdy. The new Israeli rejected intellectuality and preferred the physical to the
verbal; better action than words (Almog 2000;
Oring 1981). And if there is talk, it should be
straight shooting without amenities, what
Israelis call dugri (Katriel 1986). The mockery of the Yekkes, therefore, can be read as an
expression of the Israeli attempt to redirect their
thinking and behavior, to urge them to trade in
18 This
attempt brought the Eastern Europeans to

invent a new comic genre, the Chizbat, which differed
from the old traditional Jewish joke. An illuminating
analysis of this genre and its social implications was
conducted by Oring (1981).
their inappropriate personalities and values. In

a word, the ideal of the new Israeli was based
on his improvisational ability (iltur) rather than
on the systematic, meticulous planning of the
Yekke. The Yekke who tends to stick to the rules,
who approaches problems systematically rather
than spontaneously is therefore doomed to be
satirized.
These jokes about rigidity of manners might
be characterized as corrective humor. This
kind of humor is dualistic in nature. On the one
hand, it highlights social borders (in this case,
between veterans and Yekke newcomers), but in
the long term it might help to lower these same
borders by encouraging the newcomers to
assimilate. On a deeper level, rigidity jokes can
be linked to the ethos of the Israeli melting pot,
which is characterized by flexibility and change.
All newcomers must change to become
Israeli. Therefore, if the Yekke cannot or will
not change, he will be ridiculed. In this sense,
the jokes can be read not as attacking the Yekkes,
but as attacking the very concept of ethnicity and
ethnic diversity.
Although the national Israeli context helps us
understand jokes about Yekke rigidity in manners, it does not shed light on the second subcategory of rigidity jokes: jokes dealing with
rigidity of mind, or ostensible stupidity. The
most classic of this category is a joke that is still
well remembered:
A Yekke was asked, How many eggs can you eat
on an empty stomach? The Yekke ponders a while,
and answers, Two eggs. His questioner chides
him, saying, After one egg, your stomach is no
longer empty. Amused, the Yekke returns home
and puts the riddle to his wife. The wife answers,
three eggs, to which the Yekke remorsefully says,
Too bad. If you had answered two eggs, I could
have told you a good joke.
In a word, the Yekkes mind is ritualistic, allowing him to tell the joke only in the exact fashion that it was told to him, and thus, of course,
to miss the point.
This literalness prevents Yekkes not only from
telling jokes, but also from understanding them.
Many jokes portray the Yekke as lacking a sense
of humor. Another snide joke, one that has been
told about other groups as well, is as follows:
A Yekke needs to hear a joke three times: once on
first hearing, a second time when he tries to recall
it in order to pass it on, and a third time when he
finally understands.

The rigid mind theme echoes another of the

explanations for the strange appellation, Yekke.
Thus, one semi humorous explanation is that the
Hebrew letters that spell the name are said to be
an acronym for slow-witted Jew (yehudi kshe
havana).
The rigid mind/stupidity jokes about Yekkes
pose an interpretative challenge, which derives
from the apparent contradiction between the
comic depiction of the Yekkes as stupid and the
high level of educational, professional, and cultural achievement that characterizes the German
Jews in Israel. These jokes also seem to contrast
with the findings of Davies (1990, 1998b, 2002)
extensive research on stupidity jokes. According
to him, stupidity jokes are usually told about
groups of unskilled blue-collar workers, not
about highly educated groups such as the Yekkes.
Addressing this challenge, we suggest that the
rigid mind/stupidity jokes about Yekkes do not
so much reflect the nation-building pressures as
do the rigid mannerism jokes. They are better
explained, we believe, by looking back to 19th
century Europe, when Eastern European Jews
invented jokes about the stupidity of gentiles. In
many Jewish jokes, there is a confrontation
between a Jew and a gentile, which ends with
a Jewish victory achieved with the aid of the
famous Jewish mind. The Jews are depicted
as smart, the gentiles as stupid (Mintz 1986).
The best-known exception to this image of
Jewish smartness is the group of jokes dealing
with the legendary Jews of Chelm, who are
depicted as stupid (for examples, see Droyanov
1939). Their stupidity, however, is of a special
kind, one can even say a Jewish kind, because
it stems from their attempts to find creative
solutions to difficult situations. In this sense, the
Chelmish stupidity can be seen as a mirror
image of Yekkish stupidity, which stems from a
lack of creativeness. Whereas the people of
Chelm are too circular,19 Yekkes are too linear. Chelm people invent (i.e., improvise) irrational means to reach well-specified goals.
Yekkes, as suggested earlier, get lost in the search
for rational means.20
19 Americans will recall the Rube Goldberg car-
toons.
20 According to Davies (1990), jokes about ethnic
groups that are too rational (in the sense of canny)
exist alongside jokes about stupid groups. Both
kinds of jokes flourish in modern societies and function as a reaction to the contradictory pressures on
Therefore, we argue that the Yekkes in the

jokes are the heirs of the non-Jews. Like the gentile, the Yekke is outwitted by the clever Israeli.
Moreover, many jokes about gentiles and Yekkes
are almost identical. For instance, the joke about
the Yekke who cannot understand humor and
therefore needs to hear every joke several times
is told in almost exactly the same way about gentiles. Sometimes, this concludes as follows:
If you tell a Jew a joke he will not laugh at all. He
will interrupt you halfway through and tell it back
to you with a better punch line.
This substitution of German Jews for gentiles

in stupidity jokes can be read as a part of the
broader process described earlier, in which the
tension between Eastern and Western Jews was
reflected in the portrayal of the latter as nonJewish. The most prominent textual evidence
for the argument that this process originated in
Europe, together with the stupidity jokes accompanying it, can be found in the bible of Eastern
European humor: Sefer ha-bedixah ve-ha-xidud
(The Book of Jokes and Sharp Talk), by
Druyanov (1939). Several jokes in this book
portray encounters between German Jews and
Eastern European Jews, in which the Eastern
European outwits the Germans. A prominent
example is the three egg joke presented earlier, originally written about a Russian and a
German Jew. These jokes were imported to
Israel.
Getter (1979) is disappointed by this resemblance between jokes about stupid gentiles and
Yekkes, claiming that whereas the gentile in
Europe possessed power and authority, the Yekke
in Israel was weak and had little power. We
argue that the Yekkes were indeed weak in their
new Israeli environment, but the collective
memory of Eastern European Jews was of being
overlorded by them. Laughter about stupid
Yekkes, therefore, may be treated as the sweet
revenge of the Ostjuden.
LANGUAGE
A still famous joke illustrates the second of our
categories: jokes about the inability or unwill-
the members of these societies to succeed in the

world of work and money, but at the same time to
enjoy life.

ingness of Yekkes to learn the Hebrew language

(48 jokes):
A Yekke calls for help from a stormy sea that was
overwhelming him. He cries, Hoshiu, hoshiu,
which is high Hebrew for save me. A fellow
Yekke, walking along the beach, replies to the
drowning man, If you had spent your time learning how to swim instead of learning Hebrew, youd
be a lot better off.
The language category also divides in two subgroups. The larger subgroup consists of jokes
in which Yekkes try unsuccessfully to speak or
understand Hebrew. The jokes invite us to mock
the Yekkes funny accent, embarrassing mistakes, and deficient understanding. Much of
this is simple punning in which the Yekke is
trying to say or understand one thing, whereas
spoken Hebrew alludes to another. The
adoni/adonai joke that opens this article is a
good example, a less subtle example is:
Somebody asks the Yekke, Do you understand?
[ata me-veen?], and the Yekke replies, No, Im
from Berlin, not from Veen [Vienna].
This subgroup of language jokes answers to

Davies (1990) suggestion that such jokes, which
are widespread in many countries, depict immigrant groups as having a marginal identity: no
longer belonging to their original country, but
not yet fully absorbed into the new country. In
Israel, a country of immigration, this kind of
joke has been told about almost every new ethnic group. However, it seems that the Yekkes
were honored with the largest portion of linguistic humor, a fact that, again, may be
explained on two levels: the immediate (national) Israeli context and the historic (ethnic)
European context.
On the national level, the linguistic jokes
may be seen as part of the process of transforming German-speaking newcomers into
Hebrew-speaking Israelis, that is, as part of the
socializing process we have described. The
revival of Hebrew was an integral part of the
dominant Zionist ideology. Immigrants were
expected to abandon their mother tongues and
to speak only Hebrew (Almog 2000; Shapira
1997). Ethnic jokes about inadequacy in Hebrew
were very popular (Almog 2000), and probably
played an important role in this process. If, as
Bergson (1899) argued, laughter functions as a
social sanction on the deviant, laughter about
linguistic inadequacy may have helped to
enforce the norm of speaking proper Hebrew.

Because the German immigrants had special
problems in this realm, more perhaps than immigrants from elsewhere, these jokes were used to
sanction them, and again, like rigidity of
manner jokes, can be regarded as having had
a corrective function, which also, in the long
term, might have had a unifying role.
But there may be another, ethnic-oriented,
explanation. Let us return once more to 19th
century Europe. One of the main disputes
between Eastern Europeans and Germans at
that time concerned the proper language for
Jews. In Eastern Europe, the Maskilim used
Yiddish and Hebrew, and the population as a
whole spoke mainly Yiddish. The Germans, on
the other hand, wishing to assimilate into
German society, were fully devoted to the
German language. They treated Yiddish disparagingly, referring to it as broken German
(Weiss 2000). In this light, we can argue, once
again, that language jokes also contain the element of revenge. The Yekkes beloved language, German, is portrayed in the jokes as
funny, useless, and inferior to Hebrew, even
while Yekkes sometimes spoke of Hebrew as
the secret language of the Zionists (Die
Geheimsprache der Zionisten).
Not all the jokes referring to language are
derogatory. The second subgroup includes jokes
in which the Yekke may refuse to learn or speak
Hebrew as a matter of choice. As in the joke
about the drowning man presented earlier, these
jokes are more open, or polysemic, which might
explain why they also are funnier. Whereas a
zealous Hebraist might have read some of these
jokes as critical of the alienated Germans, a
Yekke might have read them as expressing pride
in the German language and culture. Some of
these jokes, as we suggest later, were adopted
(and maybe even invented)21 by the Yekkes
themselves. Of course, arguments of this kind
against the dominance of Hebrew alluding to a
sort of cultural pluralism had a subversive ring
at the time (and, to a lesser extent, still do).
21 It is virtually impossible to trace the actual

authors of jokes. However, we do believe that for
some kinds of jokes one can at least estimate the identity of the implied authors.

ALIENATION
A smaller group of jokes (11 jokes) touches
directly on the issue of the Yekkes as uncomfortable in Israel. In these jokes, the Yekkes are
depicted as a nation within a nation, a proud
cultural autonomy living in a foreign country.
This category, like the former ones, can be
read at both the national and ethnic levels. As
mentioned earlier, the Yekkes deep allegiance
to German culture and the difficulties they experienced being absorbed into Israeli society led
many of them to concentrate in segregated geographic areas such as the city of Nahariya and
certain neighborhoods in Haifa, Jerusalem, and
Tel-Aviv. The alienation jokes can therefore be
read as a humorous commentary on this situation:
Anxiety was provoked in a Yekke community over
the news, in 1947, that the United Nations was
planning to partition Palestine. Seeking comfort,
the community consulted one of its prominent
members for the inside story. Dont worry, he
said. Nahariya (a paradigmatic Yekke settlement)
will remain German. (Keine Sorgen! Nahariya
bleibt Deutsch.).
Another example of the alienation theme is

the story of the census-taker who rang the doorbell of a Yekke family. The young daughter who
opened the door called out, Papa, the man
from Israel is here again.
In general, the jokes belonging to the alienation category can be depicted as open texts.
They do not present the alienated Yekke in a
winning or losing position, and thereby open
a window for competing interpretations. These
jokes might have been interpreted both as celebrating the Yekkesdistinct identity and as criticizing it.
Reading these jokes against the European
background of ethnic relations between Eastern
and Western Jews may lead again to a different
interpretation. As mentioned earlier, as a part of
the conflict between Eastern and Western Jews
in Europe, German Jews were somewhat gentilized. This stereotype was reflected in Jewish
jibes from Eastern Europe in the 19th century
depicting Germans Jews as distancing themselves from their Jewish origins. In Sefer habedixah ve-ha-xidud (The Book of Jokes and
Sharp Talk), by Droyanov (1939), some Eastern
European wit questioned the Jewishness of the
Protestant-influenced Reform movement that

had taken root in pre-Nazi Germany:
Pointing to a Reform temple in a German city, a
Jew says to his comrades, The only Jewish things
there are the two (sculpted) lions holding the Ten
Commandments.22
Jokes of this kind, written in the age of

Enlightenment, helped to build a stereotype of
the German Jew as alienated from the very
basics of Jewish identity. The Israeli jokes,
therefore, may perhaps be read as a continuation of those Eastern European jokes. Whereas
in Europe the Germans were portrayed as resistant to dominant elements of Jewish identity
and tradition, in Israel the Germans were depicted as resistant to the dominant Israeli identity.
DEFERENCE
A visitor to Nahariya thought he heard the sound
of a railroad train. Coming closer, he noticed that
the sound was coming from a clearing where residents were building a shelter. As he approached,
he observed a chain of men passing bricks, each
saying to the next, Bitteschoen herr Doktor,
Dankeschoen herr Doktor, Bitteschoen herr
Doktor, Dankeschoen herr Doktor.
This last category (12 jokes) deals with the

social status of the Yekkes and the formality
and seriousness with which they relate to each
other, their titles, and their degrees. It also
depicts a situation in which professionals, and
other highly trained immigrants, do the best
they can to eke out a living and a community
until better days arrive. As mentioned earlier,
although this Aliya was more highly educated
than other immigration waves, many of its members found themselves in blue-collar jobs.
The situation in which doctors had to work
as builders and bus drivers is the subject of several jokes:
A man with the toothache is told by the dentists
wife that her husband has had to supplement their
income by doing construction work. She directs
22
These jokes might find an echo in American

jokes about reform rabbis, who are presented as less
Jewish than their conservative and orthodox colleagues. These clergymen jokes probably began as
jokes about Jews versus gentiles (a priest, a minister, and a rabbi) and were transformed into jokes
about orthodox, conservative, and reform rabbis.

him to a building site some blocks away. The

patient shouts to the workers standing at the top of
the building Doctor, Doctor, and, one by one, all
the workers come down.
Invoking the national context of the new society, we are inclined to suggest that these jokes
express ambivalent attitudes toward class
inequality and toward the incongruous situations
in which these titleholders found themselves.
While they poke fun at the disparity between
dentistry and construction, these jokes may have
been told without remorse if considered in the
light of the ethos of equality championed by
Israeli socialism. There may even have been
some satisfaction that these immigrants, however learned, were engaged in manual labor,
the kind officially preferred by Zionists.
The other type of deference jokes deals with
obedience to authority, and to rules. The Yekkes
are portrayed as obedient to all forms of authority, whether in the private sphere (obedient to a
parent) or in the public sphere. This obedience
is portrayed as a type of blind acceptance, without attention paid to changing circumstances
that might require disobedience or nonconformity:
A Yekke was troubled that the British might withdraw from the country without decreeing an end
to the curfew they had imposed. Why, we wont
be able to go out of our houses at night, the Yekke
agonizes.
Another well-known joke:

A Yekke feels uncomfortable in the train because
the seat he has been assigned is facing in the wrong
direction. After he recounts his plight to a (nonYekke) friend, the friend asks, Why didnt you ask
one of the other passengers to exchange seats with
you? To which the Yekke replies, I was the only
one in the car. There was nobody to ask.
The idea that Yekkes might even take pride in

their obedience is implicit in the following joke:
A father asks his son to see whether he (the father)
is sitting in the caf at the cornerthus to demonstrate to his Eastern European friend what obedience should look like. The boy returns to the living
room to report, Youre not in the caf. Altogether
astonished, the friend takes the boy aside and asks
whether he really went to the caf. To which the
boy answers, Im no dope; I called the caf on the
telephone.
These obedience jokes are relatively closed

texts, in that they direct their hearers to mock
the Yekkes blind obedience (which sometimes

borders on stupidity). These jokes do not open
an option to read the texts sympathetically.
Again, the jokes might be interpreted in two
ways. In the Israeli context, they might be read
as corrective jokes, which try to teach the
Yekkes to forgo some of their respect for authority (in this case, the British mandate). In the light
of the old ethnic rivalry, they might reflect the
tension between the Eastern Europeans, a group
with a long history of suspicion/subversiveness
against external authority, and the German Jews,
a group that overidentified with the German
rules.
DO YEKKES TELL JOKES
ABOUT THEMSELVES?
Although we have presented the four categories
as distinct, it is obvious that many of the jokes
belong in more than one category. This is especially true of the most popular onesjokes that
appeared in more than one collection, some of
which were recounted and remembered by the
Yekkes themselves.23
The stereotype insists that Yekkes have no
sense of humor. They tend to take everything
very seriously, especially themselves and their
status. In this study, we tested the question of
Yekke humor in a preliminary way by asking
Yekkes to tell jokes about their community. In
this pilot research we found that Yekkes are
familiar with the whole range of jokes about
them, and in fact, as mentioned earlier, the
underlying categories of the jokes collected
from Yekkes were not different from those found
in the joke books. However, two jokes were
more prominent than others in this context
because they were cited by almost all those to
whom we spoke. One is the save me joke,
about learning to swim instead of learning
Hebrew. The other is about the doctors in
Nahariya who would not relinquish their titles
and formality even while passing bricks.
23 The fact that many of the jokes include German
phrases or whole sentences lends further support to

the conclusion that at least some of these jokes originated in the Yekke community itself. It is also true,
however, that many critics of the Yekkesthat is,
many East Europeansknew enough German to add
this linguistic touch of authenticity.

In contrast to most of the jokes in our collection, some jokes, like these two, exemplify
a certain degree of cultural pride. The Yekke in
the first joke is not naive or stupid. He has a
sharp tongue, and he uses it to undermine the
priority given to learning to speak Hebrew. The
cynic, in this case, sounds more like the straightforward Israeli than the polite Yekke. The second joke, which can be read as derogatory, can
also be read as a text that expresses cultural
pride. Even in a Levantine environment, proper Yekkes stick to their polite manners.
These readings fit Mintzs (1986) definition
of ironic humor. They turn weaknesses into
strengths and criticism into self-compliments.
In terms of polysemy, or openness, they can be
read (and probably were read) in very different
ways.
These readings also introduce the theme of
Yekke superiority. The feeling that their values, their manners, and their culture are above
those of the others is a compensatory one, not
only a matter of rigidity. Of course, this pose of
superiority then, in turn, becomes the raw material for yet other jokes.
CONCLUSIONS
This article focuses on a particular genre
Israeli jokes about Yekkesas a case study of
ethnic humor in the process of immigrant assimilation. We began our discussion by referring to
the encounters between Westernized German
Jews and the less-well-off Eastern European
Jews who sought to join their co-religionists in
Germany and, again, in the United States. We
pointed to the unease of these situations for the
German Jews, who were well on their way to
assimilation. The encounters produced mutual
humor. The Germans laughed at what they
stereotyped as the uncivilized Ostjuden, and
the Eastern Jews scorned the cold, alienated,
non-Jewish Germans.
In prestate Israel, the same groups met again,
but, this time the Eastern Europeans arrived
earlier as pioneers, and the German Jews came
only later as refugees. The Eastern Europeans,
inspired by Zionist ideology, aimed to create a
new national identity detached from their old
European Jewish identity. In this milieu, a new
genre of ethnic joke arose in which stereotypical Germanic traits of compulsiveness, singlemindedness, deference to authority, and
valorization of German language and culture

were highlighted and scorned.
We divided these jokes into four groups
according to the central scripts underlying them:
rigidity, language, alienation, and deference.
The analysis of these categories demonstrated
our theoretical argument about the dualistic
nature of humor in the process of immigrant
assimilation. On the national level, the jokes
express the ideology of the new nation that the
Eastern Europeans aimed to create. The four categories of Yekke jokes reflect different aspects
of this new identity: Rigidity jokes implicitly
valorize the spontaneous, informal, improvisational behavior (iltur) in which the pioneers
took pride. Language jokes refer to the central
role ascribed to reinstituting Hebrew as the language of the new society. Deference jokes allude
to the egalitarian ideals of the early days. And
finally, alienation jokes point directly to the
normative melting pot.
Most of these jokes, especially those belonging to the rigidity and language categories, can
be analyzed as corrective jokes orienting the
Yekkes to the new norms. These jokes usually are
relatively closed texts, leaving little room for
doubt about their intended direction. The features scorned in them are correctable characteristics such as language inadequacy, and
not essential and unchangeable features such as
stupidity. The majority of jokes, therefore, can
be treated as enforcing the ideology of the dominant group on minority groups.
A minority of jokes, however, seems to bear
a subversive message. These are the more open,
or polysemic, jokes that can also be read as
granting, even expressing, Yekke cultural pride,
and thus mitigating the demand for uniformity
in the aspiring national body. In this sense, the
corpus of jokes may be seen as part of a debate
about the desired character of the new society.
Yet the national context cannot explain the
whole range of the jokes in our corpus. Jokes
about the rigid-minded/stupid Yekkes must also
be understood in relation to the 19th century ethnic tension between Eastern and Western
European Jews. This analysis led us to define
the rigidity/stupidity jokes as revenge jokes,
in which the Eastern Europeans subjected their
former superiors to scornful laughter. The earlier antagonism between the two groups also
helped to explain the other categories of language, alienation, and deference.

The dual framing of the jokes as national

and ethnic, and the admitted difficulty of separating the two, may contribute to the ongoing
debate over the connection between ethnic
humor and hostility. Whereas the national jokes
include a welcoming just be like us, the
revenge jokes derive from more hostile motives.
To repeat, many of these jokes can be interpreted as occupying both levels, and can be
regarded as both hostile and benign.
This tension between the national/welcoming/socializing pole and the ethnic/dominating/stratifying pole is even more apparent in
the jokes told about Moroccans and Russians,
the two largest groups to arrive after the establishment of Israel as a state. As mentioned at the
outset, the 1950s marked the decline of Yekke
jokes in favor of jokes about the new waves of
immigrants. Thus, the Moroccans are portrayed
according to the oriental stereotype as uncultured and impulsive.24 A typical joke:
A senior Israeli politician of Moroccan origin, in
exasperation, called the technician to fix his toaster oven, explaining that he had inserted the chicken and pressed the off button and nothing
happened. (The term off is Hebrew for chicken).
This joke might be read as a corrective joke,

aimed at the lack of cosmopolitan knowledge
ascribed to the Moroccans, as if to invite them
into the new modern society. It also reflects
the cultural change in Israeli society since the
days of the Yekkes. Whereas the Yekkes were
scorned for not knowing Hebrew, the Moroccan
minister is scorned for his lack of knowledge of
English. Yet many other jokes about the
Moroccans cannot be analyzed as corrective
because they deal with ostensibly uncorrectable
features such as stupidity. On the balance, one
gets the impression that most of these jokes
come closer to the ethnic/dominating/stratify-
24
The new wave of jokes about North African

Jews can be explained in terms of Khazzooms (2003)
great chain of orientalism, according to which Jews
all over the world were stigmatized as oriental. Before
immigrating to Israel, she argued, Jews accepted this
stigma, but from the time of immigration, they devoted themselves to the mission of building a Western
country. In the process, they transferred the label
oriental to more recently arrived middle-Eastern
Jews.
ing pole, an observation that of course requires

further research and explanation, for which we
claim no special expertise.
Another phenomenon that requires further
analysis is the gap between the Moroccan stereotype used in jokes and the portrayal of
Moroccans in other comic genres on film and
TV, in which Moroccans still are portrayed as
uncultured and premodern, but also as representatives of the new Israeli who is wily,
warm, and truthful (Shifman 2005).
Like the Yekkes of the 1930s, the Russian
immigrants of the 1990s are reluctant immigrants. They came to Israel when it seemed that
the time had come to escape the old Soviet
Union. Like the stereotyped Yekke, but unlike
the stereotyped Moroccan, they are generally
well educated and claim cultural superiority
over their hosts, even if the hosts are not so
sure. The jokes about the Russians seem to follow two patterns. On the one hand, they
acknowledge the high status of the Russians in
a welcoming, inclusive way reminiscent of the
jokes about the Yekkes:
Question: How do you know that the Russian getting off the plane is a pianist? Answer: Because hes
not carrying a violin.
On the other hand, many of the jokes highlight

the superiority of the Israelis in their portrayal
of the Russians as drunk and promiscuous:
Question: How many Russians does it take to
change a light bulb? Answer: Ten. One holds the
bulb and the other nine wait until the vodka makes
the room spin.
Once again, we are impressed that in the balance

between the welcoming and the dominating, the latter pole is stronger. In considering
the cruder jokes addressed to Moroccans and
Russians, as compared with the kindlier jokes
applied to Yekkes (and other groups, particularly
the Yemenites), we wonder whether a clue to this
difference might not be lurking in the changing
characteristics of the pre- and poststate cultures of Israel. But that task must remain
undone for the time being.
Another general conclusion about humor in
the process of immigrant assimilation that might
be derived from our analysis of Yekke jokes is
related to the jokes absent from our corpus. Of
course, our collection, by definition, points to
the Yekkes as the targets of humor. But in our
larger search for jokes in this period, we did not

discover jokes aimed at Eastern Europeans.25

Following Davies (1998a) notion that ethnic
humor research will benefit from explaining
the absence of certain kinds of expected jokes
(i.e., jokes that could easily be told in a particular society but are not), we tried to understand
the social meaning of this absence. A general
explanation might be that our case study demonstrates the tendency of dominant groups to mock
minority groups in the process of immigrant
assimilation, whereas the reverse process
humor as a weapon of the powerless against
the majoritymay not be realized.
Going back to our case, and overriding the
division of jokes into several subtypesrigidity, language, alienation, and deferencewe
wish to propose, in conclusion, that almost all
of these jokes, in one way or another, are ridiculing rigidity and its expression in behavior,
thought, manners, alienation, and status-consciousness. These jokes condense the Yekke
stereotype into one predominant feature: ritualistic, procedure-oriented rigidity. In contrast
to the jokes that Eastern Europeans told about
German Jews in Europe, criticizing the German
Jews for changing their faith and identity, the
new prestate humor criticized them for adhering to their old manners. In both contexts, the
pivotal concept is change. These jokes, therefore, may be seen as reflecting a much wider
phenomenon, namely, the demand for change
during rites of passage, as well as the fear,
uncertainty, and doubt that it generates.
Limor Shifman is a research fellow at the Oxford
Internet Institute, Oxford University, England. She
investigates various aspects of Internet-based humor.
Her Ph.D. dissertation, in the Department of
Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, focuses on the interaction
between humor, media, and social processes.
Recently, she served as head of research for a tenchapter documentary series on the history of Israeli
humor, now being aired by the Israel Broadcasting
Authority.
25
According to Wasserman (personal communication, June 28, 2004), one can find some jokes and
humorous remarks in autobiographic works of Yekkes,
but they are quite rare. Additionally, one can find
some scornful remarks about the Israeli/Ostjuden
in Yekke newspapers (Gordon 2004), but not humor
per se.
Elihu Katz is Trustee Professor of Communication

at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania,
and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and
Communication at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He is interested in media effects and in the
diffusion of popular culture. His recent books include
Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(with Daniel Dayan), The Export of Meaning: CrossCultural Readings of Dallas (with Tamar Liebes),
and Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There
Any? Should There Be? How About These? (with
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#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

Just Call Me Adonai: A Case Study of Ethnic

A young man, newly arrived from Germany in

Direct all correspondence to Limor Shifman,

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2005, VOL. 70 (October:843859)

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

JewsAshkenazim alland subsequently on

humor,4 socially oriented research is interested

prefer assimilation because it connotes an

to the motives and functions of self-deprecating

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

fore told within the same family and do not

For an illuminating debate on this issue, see the

nation and ethnicity play a dialectic role in the

7 This description is probably most relevant to

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

involvement in one anothers affairs (Bartal

Maskilim (Eastern forerunners who wished

9 A manifestation of this tension can be found in

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

Eastern European Jews had established the

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

That the term was ultimately embraced by the

12 We accessed the interviewees with the aid of two

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

AN ANATOMY OF YEKKE JOKES

divided, in turn, into two subgroups: rigidity of

16 Oring (1981) attributed this rejection of improv-

The largest group of jokes in our collection (54

15 According to a common notion (promoted by

isation to the Yekke striving to remain Western, in

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

Schlafstunde, the daily hour of rest when no disturbance is permitted.

Another means-oriented joke:

The comic effect of these jokes can be explained

attempt brought the Eastern Europeans to

their inappropriate personalities and values. In

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

The rigid mind theme echoes another of the

Therefore, we argue that the Yekkes in the

This substitution of German Jews for gentiles

the members of these societies to succeed in the

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

ingness of Yekkes to learn the Hebrew language

This subgroup of language jokes answers to

enforce the norm of speaking proper Hebrew.

21 It is virtually impossible to trace the actual

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

Another example of the alienation theme is

Protestant-influenced Reform movement that

Jokes of this kind, written in the age of

This last category (12 jokes) deals with the

These jokes might find an echo in American

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman

him to a building site some blocks away. The

Another well-known joke:

The idea that Yekkes might even take pride in

These obedience jokes are relatively closed

the Yekkes blind obedience (which sometimes

23 The fact that many of the jokes include German

phrases or whole sentences lends further support to

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valorization of German language and culture

#2526-ASR 70:5 filename:70506-Shifman