What Would God Say? A Comedy Date with David Javerbaum and Michael Krasny
How would God spin 21st-century problems? Emmy award-winning comedy writer David Javerbaum, former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has a few ideas! Javerbaum serves as “God’s ghost writer” in his new book, The Book of Pslams: 97 Divine Diatribes on Humanity’s Total Failure and is a veteran of other “God collaborations”—the Broadway show An Act of God and the popular twitter account @TheTweetofGod. He is in conversation with Michael Krasny, an award-winning journalist and retired public radio host of KQED Forum and the author of Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means. Come prepared to laugh your heart out!
Things Calvin Trillin Forgot To Say
In 1975, journalist and humorist Calvin Trillin wrote about Jacob Schiff and his uncle Ben Daynovsky in the first issue of Moment, trying to figure out why his family entered the United States through Texas and not Ellis Island. Join Calvin, in conversation with Moment’s opinion and book editor Amy E. Schwartz to hear an update on his Jacob Schiff adventures all these years later and what he’s thinking about and working on today.
Funny You Should Ask with Bob Mankoff
Former New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff shows how his Jewish heritage helped him become a successful cartoonist.
Israeli Humor in the Time of Coronavirus
Like most first-world people stuck in their homes, Israelis are using traditional and social media to connect with others and distract themselves. And like everyone...
Book Review | The First Book of Jewish Jokes edited by Elliott Oring
The First Book of Jewish Jokes
Edited by Elliott Oring
Translated by Michaela Lang
Indiana University Press
2018, 176 pp, $65
It’s the inherent vice of joke books that their...
Book Review | Jewish Comedy: A Serious history
Funny Jews: An Epistolary Conversation
Book Interview | Max Brooks
Max Brooks, the only child of Mel Brooks and the late Anne Bancroft, is best known as the world’s foremost zombie expert. “He’s a zombie laureate,” The New York Times once described him.
What Does Jewish Humor Mean Today?
Michael Krasny wants to tell jokes—but he also wants to explain them. “It's important to be analytical about humor,” he says.
The Last Laugh: “Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews” Reviewed
by Andrea Greenbaum
In 1996, I spent a year in smoky comedy clubs in Tampa, Florida to document the rhetorical style of standup comedians. I paid...
Auslander in the Attic
by Sala Levin
The Holocaust, as Michael Scott so wisely taught us, is one thing we just can't joke about. (Scott's other taboos? JFK and AIDS,...
Maccabeats Suffer “Wardrobe Malfunction”
By Doni Kandel
The Yeshiva University Maccabeats, the university’s a capella group that has taken the United States by storm, received one of their first ugly...
Israel Mulls Settler Freeze
By Doni Kandel
With Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu scrambling to gain approval for a three month construction freeze on settlements, Americans, Palestinians and Israelis have...