DISCUSSION OF JEWISH HUMOR: Not Another Jewish
Movie
1. Laughter is often a way of dealing with a problem. There may be serious issues under the
laughter.
Q: What made you laugh most in this film? Why did you laugh?
Q: What tensions may have been released by your laughter?
2. The film addresses, with humor, the serious question of how to negotiate being American and
Jewish at the same time. One of the teenagers says:
It’s a tricky question to ask “Do you see yourself as an American?”
I am kind of more in touch with America because I am kind of mixed… I don’t really have one ethnicity I
associate with. I don’t want to become assimilated, I don’t want to become too American. I still want to
retain some of that old Jewish culture.
Q: How does the film present Jewish and American identities? Are they merged, in
harmony, in conflict?
Q: What kind of identity do you feel you have? How would you describe yourself?
3. The narrator of the film says:
I keep Kosher. So if I go out with my gentile friends and everybody orders cheeseburgers. “Eh, Miles?
You don’t want to eat any cheeseburger?” “ No”. “Why not?” “I can’t eat milk with meat.” “What do you
mean? It’s a cheeseburger. There is no milk involved.”
Q: Do we laugh because of the non-Jewish teenager's lack of understanding of the
cheeseburger’s ingredients? In other words, we’re laughing at them? Or are we
laughing with Miles, the boy who’s saying this?
The “cheeseburger” segment evokes a little scene between friends. We see high school kids
hanging out on the street as the voiceover talks about refusing a cheeseburger. One of them is a
little “different,” because he keeps Kosher, but he’s still among friends.
Q: Do we laugh in relief when he tells his little anecdote?
Without thinking about it, the narrator's friends are encouraging him to break Kosher.
Q: Do we laugh in part because he is resisting it and maintaining his identity—in other
words, we’re laughing in relief? Or is something else involved here?
4. In the segment of the boy wearing a tallith and yarmulke, urinating with his back to us, coming out
of the toilet and bouncing along the hall in a high school, the voiceover states:
If I wore a yarmulke to school I would definitely lose a degree of my coolness. If people see someone
wearing a yarmulke, the first thing they would think would be “He is really concerned about something
which isn’t one of my priorities.”
Q: What did you think of this part of the film? If you laughed or smiled at this, why did
you?
A bouncy teenage boy looking very “American” contrasts with his traditional prayer garments over
ordinary clothes.
Q: Is he inventing a new Jewish identity? Playing with identity? Making fun of traditional
Jewish dress at prayer?
He says: The first thing they would think would be “He is really concerned about something which
isn’t one of my priorities.”
Q: Compare that statement to this one by an American scholar:
“The security of the Jews does not depend on people being non-antisemites; for most people in the
United States, Jews are simply not an issue.” Jerome A. Chanes, “Antisemitism and Jewish Security,”
Roberta Rosenberg Farber & Chaim I. Waxman, eds., Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader,
Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1999, 143.
When the boy wears a yarmulke and tallith in the bathroom, in the hall of the high school and on
the track field, the contrast between his centuries-old traditional costume and the very
contemporary American setting is striking. In one sense, he is expressing his individuality (“I dress
as I please”); in another, he is following a tradition; in still another, he is playing with the tradition…
or is he? There is no definite answer in the film.
Q: What is the symbolism of these scenes?
Q: Do you agree or disagree that wearing a yarmulke (kipa) at a public school is not
cool?