I have often thought that if anti-Semites hadn’t used the idea of an “international Jewish conspiracy to rule the world” as an excuse for attempted genocide, the concept would be hysterically funny.
Not only are the odds ridiculous, with only about one of every 450 people on the planet being a Jew; but I know it is hard to get a critical mass of Jews to agree with each other long enough to run a bingo game, much less the world.
Yet it took former Milwaukeean David Deutsch and Joshua Neuman — humor editor and editor-in-chief, respectively, of the irreverent Heeb: The New Jew Review magazine — to perceive the humor of the idea and to inflate it.
The result is “The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies” (St. Martin’s Griffin, paperback, $13.95), which was published in April.
In its 269 pages, the authors smite with satire nearly all the stories Jew-haters have concocted through history from poisoning wells in the Middle Ages to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
In fact, it was Sept. 11 that inspired the idea. Deutsch, 36, said in a telephone interview, “We had this reaction after 9/11 where all this conspiracy stuff was coming out of the Muslim world” about how Jews or Israel were responsible. “Our initial reaction was, ‘This would be absurd if it was not revolting.’ Then we decided it was just absurd.”
While “the traditional responses to anti-Semitism” are serious and condemning, Deutsch and Neuman believe that “the best revenge is to laugh well,” Deutsch said. “Whatever is going on in anti-Semites’ heads, they would rather be condemned than become the butt of a Jewish joke.”
“If you’re feeling powerless, and you paint swastikas and graffiti on buildings or tombstones, and you have all these people condemning you, you feel you have power,” he continued. “But when you vandalize a synagogue and people correct your spelling — that’s the opposite of what they want.”
Still, it took a couple of years before the writing began. Shortly after Deutsch joined the staff of Heeb in the summer of 2003, an agent asked him and Neuman if they had “any ideas” for a book, and “That’s the idea we had,” Deutsch said.
They worked on it from the fall of 2003 to June of 2004. Each would write something and the other would review it. Deutsch said they tried to “write in the same voice,” and succeeded well enough that often they couldn’t remember which one wrote which joke.
Questions of taste
Deutsch acknowledged that some — okay, a lot — of the book’s humor might not be in what many would consider good taste. “We understand that not everybody is going to like this,” he said.
He mentioned particularly a chapter on the Holocaust, which takes off on “the actual claims of Holocaust deniers … We’re not making fun of the Holocaust, but of Holocaust denial.”
As for the book’s frequent sexual humor, “I don’t go for the gratuitous,” Deutsch said. “I do make a distinction between using expletives and sexual images for humor as opposed to arousal. But if a person is aroused by [the book], that person has too many other issues to deal with.”
In any event, taste questions evidently have not stood in the way of the book’s favorable reception in such publications as the New York Jewish Week and the Forward, Deutsch said. “We actually keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and a backlash. But it hasn’t happened.”
Deutsch, son of Suzanne and Henri Zvi Deutsch, was born in Tel Aviv but grew up on Milwaukee’s west side. He graduated from the Hillel Academy, Rufus King High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a history major, then began graduate work in Hebrew and Jewish studies at New York University.
During his graduate studies, he began working as a teacher at a New York City-area yeshiva high school, a position he still holds. He also made some attempts at stand-up comedy.
Ultimately, he found himself “falling out of love with academia” and “I decided my time would be better spent writing pseudo-history rather than real history. And my advisors would probably agree.”
“[My brother is] considerably more diligent than I am,” he said of Nathaniel Deutsch, associate professor of religion at Swarthmore College and author of a real history about “The Maiden of Ludmir,” the sole Hasidic female rebbe.
“I am definitely writing pseudo-history, which I can do from my living room, as opposed to having to schlep to two or three continents, like my brother did.”
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