Are Jews the Only Ones Who Need a Thick Skin?

Why would Larry David stride up so confidently on stage and joke about picking up women in a Nazi concentration camp? And why would he wallow in the fact that many of the recently accused sexual aggressors have Jewish names? Hasn’t he heard about anti-Semitism?

Here’s my theory: He assumes Jews can take it. At a time when everyone is allowed to get offended by the smallest slight, Jews are supposed to be, well, different.

College students can get offended by an email about Halloween costumes, but Jews should handle gross jokes about the Holocaust. Any student can yell about a micro-aggression, but Jews are expected to handle macro-aggressions. Maybe David figured Jews are on another level. We’re the chosen ones, right? We’re the sophisticated Americans obsessed with education and with being loved by gentiles. Who has endeared the Jews to America? It’s not the lawyers, believe me. It’s the comedians.

For over a century, from Burns to Benny to Allen to Crystal to Seinfeld, we’ve made America laugh by poking fun at ourselves. And why not? When you’ve been persecuted for 2,000 years and you finally find a place that accepts you, what better way to show your gratitude than by being entertaining?

And Larry David surely is an entertainer. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is my all-time favorite comedy. I love, among other things, that there’s no soundtrack. No one cares whether I laugh or not. I get to eavesdrop on a wacko who obsesses over stuff that makes me squirm.

That’s the key word—eavesdrop.

Last Saturday night, as David was using the Holocaust to try to make me laugh, I wasn’t eavesdropping at all. I was looking straight into the eyes of a standup comic. This was not the David of “Curb” who couldn’t care less what I thought. This was a guy who was pushing my buttons, full frontal.

One of the extraordinary things about Curb was David’s ability to break virtually all taboos. I would often watch an episode and think, “I can’t believe he’s pulling this off.” He’d poke fun at African-Americans, people with disabilities, Palestinian Muslims, and, yes, even Holocaust survivors, and somehow, he’d pull it off.

His mistake last Saturday night was a professional one– he overlooked the context. What works in his Curb bubble doesn’t work under the bright lights of an SNL stage. The sacred cows he could slay on Curb overwhelmed him on stage. On Curb, he was a bumbling fanatic who could get away with murder. On SNL, he was a self-aware comic with no margin of error. That’s not the best time for Holocaust jokes.

After watching his act, part of me wanted to say, “Hey, we’re Jews. We can take it. We have a sense of humor!” The other part wanted to say, “You know what? I’m tired of trying to be better. I want to be offended, just like other Americans.”

That side won out. For one night at least, I wanted to be like those American college students who get easily offended. I wanted to be an activist with Jewish Lives Matter who felt like yelling to his fellow Jew to curb his enthusiasm.

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