TikTok — the viral video app for teens that has been downloaded over one billion times — is an accelerated, exaggerated version of the rest of the internet. Accordingly, it is as warm and inviting a host for white supremacy as a shower curtain is for mold. Calls for genocide are scattered in between dance challenges. But elsewhere on the explosively popular app, Jewish ritual, culture, and people are in good, though often prepubescent, hands. TikTok was launched in under the name Musical. Can Jews find a home on TikTok? I took to my TikTok research with the same blind determination of a dad interrogating his teenage kids about whether they do the new drug he heard about on NPR. I seared my eyeballs in their own socket juices by the blue light of my smartphone, attempting to watch as many Jewish and Judaism TikTok videos as possible. The videos were laugh-out-loud funny, offensive, troubling, self-hating, and self-loving.
J okes, including the Jewish variety, are a staple of Western civilization. A few Jewish jokes have been around designed for centuries and are passed from age band to generation; others might have made their first appearance this week. It turns out that even the Talmud is teeming with surprising zingers. A first-rate Jewish joke—whether told by a Talmudic sage, Sigmund Freud, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman or your grandmother—does more than make you laugh; it illuminates complex corners of the Jewish psyche, culture and history. Adequate warning: Some jokes in this album will make you laugh, others bidding make you groan and grimace, after that many are for mature audiences barely. All will teach you something. We also want to hear your picks. For instance, if I hear a joke about Jews and priests—. Cohen has officially converted to Catholicism afterwards months of study and is invited to address those gathered for Accumulation.
My husband's father and mother are Jews. My parents are both what Mr. Hitler would be pleased to appeal 'Aryan' Germans. I am an American-born girl, and the first to back my Americanism in an argument; but so strong are family ties, after that the memory of a happy thirteen-month sojourn in the Vaterland a a small amount of years ago, that I frequently achieve myself trying to see things as of the Nazis' point of view after that to find excuses for the things they do—to the dismay of our liberal-minded friends and the hurt awkwardness of my husband. Here we are then, Ben and I, a Jew and a German-American, married for four years, supremely happy, with a three-year-old son who has his father's abrupt brown eyes and my yellow beard. Ours was a fervent love agree with, made more fervent by the actuality that we had to wait all the rage secret for two years until Ben earned enough at his profession en route for support a family.