May 21, 1926
From “Jewish Wit Has Distinctive Quality: A Certain Wistful Sadness Permeates the Humor of the Jewish Race”
It has been said that an Irishman laughs thrice at each joke: once when he hears it, once when he retells it and once when he understands it; an Englishman laughs only twice: once when he hears it and once when he retells it, for he never understands it. But tell a Jew a joke and he says, “Pooh, pooh, listen to this one.” It is true that there is comparative little laughter in Jewish life, but laughter is merely the outward manifestation of happiness, not of humor, and it would be ridiculous to suppose that the Jews lack humor merely because one so rarely sees them laugh. It is but necessary to glance in Hebrew folk-literature to see the wealth of humor inherited by the modern Jew, and the use he has made of it is not hard to find either.
May 30, 1986
From “Bay Area duo founds U.S. magazine for liberal Jews”
A new national Jewish magazine — with a liberal viewpoint that contrasts with Commentary magazine’s conservative leanings — was born in the Bay Area last week.
The publication is named Tikkun (pronounced tee-koon), which in Hebrew means to mend or repair, and, in its largest sense, to transform the world.
Tikkun has drawn an impressive array of Jewish intellectuals who said, in interviews, that no Jewish journal of national stature has existed to publish their work since Commentary went conservative in the early 1970s.
Like Commentary, Tikkun is intended as an intellectual foray — with a predominately Jewish perspective — into the politics, religion and culture of the Jewish and secular worlds. The similarities end there, however.
In the magazine’s founding editorial statement, as in recent half-page ads in the New York Times and New York Review of Books, Tikkun’s founders, Jewish psychotherapists Michael Lerner and Nan Fink, both Berkeley residents, clearly have thrown down the gauntlet before Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz.
“With boring predictability,” writes Lerner, Tikkun’s editor, “Norman Podhoretz leads the monthly charge of Jewish intellectuals clamoring for respectability by endorsing every move the Reagan administration can dream up.”
Lerner claims that Jewish conservatives have embraced contemporary American society, with its renewed emphasis on competition and material wealth as the measurement of success, “as though it were the embodiment of the messianic age.”
He says this view is contrary to the Jewish tradition that urges Jews to bring greater peace and justice to the world through social change.
Tikkun, he writes, “hopes to be a voice … for those Jews and non-Jews alike who are still moved by the radical spirit of the Prophets.”
Those so moved include writers Elie Wiesel and Herbert Gold; Rabbis Wolfe Kelman, executive director of the Rabbinical Assembly of America (Conservative), and Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform); and editors Martin Peretz of The New Republic, and David Twersky of Spectrum Magazine.