How Jerry Lewis’s Comedy Captures the American Jewish Experience

While the late and celebrated comedian and actor rarely made overt reference to Jews or Judaism in his work, Jeremy Dauber argues that his humor embodied something quintessentially Jewish. He finds this quality in Lewis’s collaborations with the singer Dean Martin, in which Lewis was “manic and kinetic” while Martin played “the suave, elegant straight man”—in other words, a stereotypical Jew against a stereotypical Gentile. And the same juxtaposition is evident in one of Lewis’s best-known movies:

The Nutty Professor is a 1963 comedy about a nebbishy, klutzy college professor named Julius Kelp, who, taking a page from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, drinks a serum he concocts in order to turn into somebody else. But while Robert Louis Stevenson’s Victorian doctor wants to allow his less-socially-accepted urges free rein, Lewis’s comical zhlub — a kind of Mad-magazine parody come to life — turns into a cool nightclub singer, Buddy Love. Whether Buddy Love was based on Martin or not (opinion is divided: Lewis said he wasn’t, and almost everyone else believed he was), he was certainly the apotheosis of a kind of American Jewish yearning: the man women wanted; the man men wanted to be. Julius Kelp (note that weedy early-20th-century Jewish name) was who Jews feared everyone thought they were.

After the movie came out, Lewis admitted he was surprised at that one aspect of its success. He had written Buddy Love as a bad guy, as a way to help Kelp (and audiences) learn that you have to like yourself to have others like you. The movie ends with the love interest confessing she preferred the nutty genius to the sexy crooner. But audiences preferred Love, in a big way.

Lewis’s bemusement about that phenomenon spoke to an essential American Jewish truth of the period, wrought truer in his film than perhaps he knew: did a collectively imagined American dream appeal more strongly than . . . personal history? Can you really have both, without a magic potion, or split personality? And if so, which one would you rather give up?

Read more at New York Times

More about: American Jewry, Arts & Culture, Comedy, Film, Jewish humor

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society