Tag Archives: jewish

Joke about Jewish Mothers

Nationality: Jewish-American
Age: 97
Occupation: Retired teacher
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 14, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Yiddish

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.

Superstition about Fixing Clothes

Nationality: Russian-Jewish
Age: 53
Occupation: Mathematician
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 11, 2012
Primary Language: Russian
Language: English, Hebrew

Background: “I grew up in Lithuania, and in Lithuania, you have Poles and Lithuanians who are Catholic, Russians who are Russian Orthodox, and Jews. We were a Jewish family, and I was always told that Jews do not have superstitions. But all my friends were either Polish or Russians, and they had superstitions, and eventually, I felt like, ‘well, it’s safer to believe in it.’”

Superstition about Fixing Clothes: “If something was torn on me and needed to be fixed fast, my mom would take a thread and sew, let’s say a button or something like that. I would be given a little piece of the thread to keep in my mouth, in order not to sew my brain out. If you don’t suck on the thread, then your brain can get sewn onto the garment and you would be stupid.”

Q. Do you know where this came from?

A. That came from my mother, and she came from Belarus, so it must come from Belarus.

Analysis: It is fascinating to compare my informant’s account with a description of this same superstition that Alan Dundes gives in International Folkloristics: “Or take the Jewish superstition that claims it is very bad luck to repair a garment while that garment is being worn by an individual. Once one realizes that the only time a garment is sewn on a person is when a body is being prepared for burial, one can understand the custom. In other words, repairing a garment—for example, by sewing on a button—is enacting a funeral ritual . . . In such instances the person wearing the garment being repaired must chew on bread or thread to counteract the potential danger” (Dundes 115).

When I shared this passage with my informant, she said that his logic makes sense to her, although she had never heard his explanation before; she had always thought the warning about one’s brains being sewn to be silly, but had never been told any better reasons for the tradition. Perhaps, this is because in more recent societies, people are far enough removed from the practices surrounding death that they no longer carry the associations responsible for this superstition. Meanwhile, although my informant comes from a Jewish family, she knows nothing about this superstition being Jewish, only that she learned it from her mother. She also never heard that bread—as opposed to thread—can counteract the potential danger.

“The Principles of Sympathetic Magic.” International Folkloristics. Alan Dundes, ed. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. Print.

Purim Skits

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

Purim Skits & Videos

Tradition/Holiday

 

My informant goes to a Jewish school with 40% Persian Jews, so holidays celebrating Persian Jews are commonplace. One, called Puram, involves making skits.

 

My informant explained, “purim Celebrates the Persian Jews, and traditional has something to do with writing plays or parodies to commemorate the Jews of Persia. I’m not exactly sure how that started, but  nowadays we commemorate the day by doing something along those lines. Every year, in school, groups of students would make videos that made fun of the teachers. The teachers would do the same, theirs taking form of a fake news report (mocking the weekly student news videos).

 

My informant said, “Everybody loved this day, because it was fun to tell the teachers what we didn’t like about them in a not so mean way. The videos were usually very funny, and everybody got excited to see them since the whole school gathered to watch them together.

 

 

These videos are way for students to air their grievances, empowering an otherwise disempowered group. Also, this event brings together the community and reinforces their identities as students or faculty. Most importantly, this is a way for students to criticize the school, but have a good time while doing it.

Bar Mitzfah

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/11/12
Primary Language: English

My informant was raised as a reform Jew in a household with two Jewish parents. He described to me the ritual of his “Bar Mitzfah” when he was thirteen years old. He says that a Bar Mitzfah is an age-old Jewish ritual that all young men undergo (Bat Mitzfah for females), that signifies the transition from being a boy to a man. The tradition carries back to Israel and dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years. My informant said “it used to be easy for kids raised in Israel or that grew up knowing Hebrew, but the hardest part was having to learn to read Hebrew to be able to perform the chants and prayers”. “It was a bitch to learn”, he said.

The tradition, he said, is performed very differently in different levels of the religion. He said that he was thankful that he was a part of a reform synagogue, where the ceremonies last for only an hour and a half at most. On the other hand, ceremonies in conservative temples can run up to 4 or 5 hours, and orthodox temples even longer. My informant discussed how he remembered attending a conservative Bat Mitzfah for one of his friends from synagogue, and that he and his other friends “couldn’t stand it any longer after the first two hours”.

There are a few things that all Bar and Bat Mitzfah’s have in common, he says. Everybody has a Torah portion and a Haf-Torah portion assigned to them, depending on what time of year that the person performs this ritual. That is, for the rest of their life, their Torah and Haf-Torah portion.

“The thing I was most excited about was the party that night, and all of the gifts” said my informant. He stated that it was a tradition, probably American, that the new man or woman celebrate with a party that night, inviting all of his or her friends, Jewish or not.

My interpretation of this ritual is one as an insider as well, because I am also Jewish and have gone through my own Bar Mitzfah. I believe that this has been a long-standing tradition since the time when men would be considered adults and marry as teenagers, and start their families as young as 16 or 17. Both my informant and I distinctly remember feeling too young to be passing through the gates between boyhood and manhood. My informant stated that he hadn’t even hit puberty yet! I believe that this tradition carried on so young from the old days because Jewish people saw it as a tradition and meaningful in their lives and their community. Changing it would go against old tradition.

Passover

Nationality: American
Age: 90
Occupation: Teacher (Retired)
Residence: Portland, OR
Performance Date: 4/18/12
Primary Language: English

1)   My informant for this ritualistic folklore was my grandmother, Sylvia. She was born and raised Jewish, her maiden name being Gelwasser, and discussed with me her family ritual of Passover. She stated that “for as long as I can remember, we’ve always celebrated Passover. For the most part, we’ve always celebrated it the same way”. She says that Passover is the celebration of the Jewish people escaping the wrath of the Egyptian Pharaoh in the time of Moses. She discussed that she remembered that as a child, growing up in New York, she would attend temple in the evening and head to her grandparents house in the Jewish area of the city where her grandmother had made matzah ball soup and beef brisket for a family dinner. They would follow along an old book, performing prayers and rituals with food, wine, and water that would commemorate the days where the Jews were able to escape Egypt. Her grandparents would hide the Afi-Komen, a special piece of matzah, somewhere around the house, and the child that found it was rewarded with a fifty-cent piece.

She says that now, she performs the same rituals and traditions with her children and grandchildren. She prepares the same meals of matzah ball soup and beef brisket, and the family reads a “very similar” prayer book in the evening. She said “I’m sure that many families have begun to celebrate Passover differently or in a more modern family. But for me, I have taken on the exact role of my grandmother, now that I am a grandmother of my own”.

She says that she thinks the tradition is rooted deep in Jewish history and, fact or not, she believes that the biggest part of the tradition is “to have faith and to bring families and friends together”.

For the most part, I agree with Sylvia in believing that this holiday is about keeping tradition and bringing family closer together. I am impressed that the tradition has managed to stay the same over so many generations in her family, and am curious to see whether that will be the case in the coming generations.