Cultural background:

My informant was born in 1915 in New York City, to immigrant parents—her mother was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, and her father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Describing her childhood, she states that “at that time, New York City had a density that was closer—or more—than that of China. There were so many people jammed together in these old tenement houses—you had a whole floor of people in your apartment, who shared one bathroom. None of them even had windows, except on skylights, or looking out on someone else’s tenement window. So, it was just a very crowded condition. For the most part, people got along very well because they all came more or less from the same place, they were all poor, but, you know, though you didn’t have much, you didn’t think of yourself as poor. . . . Life was spent on the street because the apartments were crowded, dark, and very uninviting. So, we used to spend our time on the street playing hopscotch, jump rope. The little boys were always playing ball in the street. Everything was street-oriented. . . .

“I remember going to school. At that time, I only spoke Yiddish at home, and my mother took me to the teacher, and the teacher said, when did she come from Europe? And my mother said very indignantly, ‘she was born here!’ I’m a citizen! And, I was speaking only Yiddish at home, but I did not struggle with English; I caught onto it very quickly. The classrooms were so crowded that they didn’t have enough seats for everybody. But everybody there was hungry to get educated, and at that time, of course, the emphasis on higher education was only for the boys. Everybody wanted their sons to be doctors or accountants or lawyers. But the girls would wind up being in the factories at sewing machines. The highest honor was to be a teacher. In two years you could become a teacher, and then you would be one of the elite.”

Joke about Jewish Mothers:

“There was a baby carriage with two boys in it. And somebody says, ‘Oh, how wonderful these boys are! What’s their ages?’ And their mother said, ‘The two year old is the doctor and the three year old is the teacher.”

When I asked my informant what it means, she replied, “She had it mapped out, what they were going to be. It’s a joke about Jewish mothers.”

Indeed, Jewish parents are stereotypically overprotective of their children. While this quality is certainly not unique to Jewish culture, Jewish culture does place strong importance upon family values. Parents usually plan carefully for their children, hoping that their children will one day be more successful than they have been. This joke certainly reflects concern for the future; most parents do not map out their toddlers’ career trajectories. Perhaps, Jewish culture is, in part, so oriented toward children because Jews lived as minorities for centuries, preserving their traditions only by teaching younger generations.