Golden age and decline of Jewish humor, in “The Last Jewish Story” published by Denoël, Michel Wieviorka selected unpublished or little-known Jewish stories, to understand beyond Jewish humor, what is the Jewish world.
Published
Update
Reading time: 4 min
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Sociologist Michel Wieviorka dissects well-chosen Jewish stories and their historical trajectories, especially anchored in the world of Eastern Europe, a Yiddish world that has disappeared today, destroyed by the Nazis.
Michel Wieviorka notes that this humor came only from the Jewish community in France and the United States in the early 1960s. He presents some of his stories to us with this humor, most often tinged with self-deprecation. But be careful, reminds the sociologist, laughter always contains an element of malice, and it always tends to be based on stereotypes, and contains a dose of malevolence.
Michel Wieviorka asks: where does Jewish history end and anti-Semitic history begin? And he notes that the author of the story, or the one who tells it, matters a lot, and even changes the way we read it. The book is fascinating, and helps us understand, beyond Jewish humor, what the Jewish world is. With an alarming observation: the peak of Jewish humor during the second half of the 20th century was a golden age for the Jewish world. Its decline today is all the more worrying in the current context.
Whistleblowing animals by Éric Arlix published by Imho
Éric Arlix is not a scientist. His books are not zoology or ethology textbooks. Éric Arlix is an artist who embraces all genres, from stage to writing. Last year, a fiction documentary, as he himself defined it, told us how ring-necked parakeets had settled in the Île de France since the early 1970s. Éric Arlix has documented himself perfectly. The rest is a free interpretation of these animal behaviors, hence the term documentary fiction in Whistleblowing animals.
A small book of around a hundred pages, it tells us about animals whose erratic behavior is for him signals, sent to alert the world about the state of the planet, and about animal precariousness. He first tells us about the unusual journey of a Beluga who went up the Rhine to Bonn, in Germany, in 1966. He also tells us about a very long journey of a group of elephants in China, leaving from its reserve natural in Yunan, to go straight more than 600 km to the north, and finally return to their starting point.
And the author asks himself What did they want? What were they looking for? What logic or need did they respond to? Were these strange journeys intentional or accidental? In any case, these are sufficiently spectacular facts, and perceived as such, that, according to Eric Arlix, these animals are whistleblowers.