Dedicated to “all the Jews who, if history is any guide, could probably use a laugh right now,” The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting achieves an incredible feat: It covers our entire “epic journey through time, space, and guilt” in 224 pages.
Comedy writer Rob Kutner (winner of Emmy, Peabody, Grammy, and Television Critics Association Awards) accomplishes this with smart humor that tries not to veer into smarty-pants irreverence or inappropriate jokes – a very wobbly high-wire act, especially when navigating the unfunny waters of the Crusades, pogroms, and the Holocaust.
A journey that flies the reader through Jewish history
On a journey that flies the reader (with myriad stopovers) from the Garden of Eden to the security line at Ben-Gurion Airport, Kutner employs a variety of formats and devices to keep the facts flowing in an engaging manner.
Along with punchy personality profiles, he often uses individual or collective historical characters – from “meddling Mesopotamian housewives” to “singing immigrants” – to convey in a lively imagined context whatever was happening in their time.
In this vein, he presents a transcript of the biblical Patriarchs’ and Matriarchs’ Group Therapy Session, pages from Moses’ Secret Diary, and a thread of text messages from “Torqueman” to the “SpanJews” in 1492.
There’s even a series of Rabbi Action Cards (for instance, Yohanan Ben-Zakai, who established “the first-ever center of Jewish learning with no fundraising committee”).
These vehicles and others transmit a whole lot of info – with a few footnotes thrown in for gravitas – without sacrificing the light touch that makes reading fun.
“Fun” doesn’t mean laugh-out-loud hilarious. For me, at least, the book provoked smiles rather than knee slaps. Some of the one-liners fall flat. Others skirt the edge of poor taste. But overall, The Jews is amusing and absorbing.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Then God created the first man, Adam, and – immediately realizing that the guy was just a bucket of neediness – created Eve, a female companion for him. It was history’s first blind date, complete with God overenthusiastically telling them, ‘You two have so much in common…’”
(Spoken by Queen Esther): “So, funny story: Despite Cyrus’s decree, not all of us actually ended up going back to the homeland. Some of us had a pretty good thing going in the Diaspora and stuck around in the Persian Empire. That’s where I lived with my uncle/cousin/genealogy unclear, Mordechai.”
“Islam started in the 600s, several centuries after the Jews left Judea and got back to their beloved hobby of ‘refugeeing.’ This meant there were many Jewish communities and tribes spread out across the Arab world, poised to create eternal battles over who really invented hummus.”
“The hassidim were the wild-eyed, Burning Man attendees of their time, only less tan and with schnapps instead of LSD.”
“There are many theories about how Jews got to Ethiopia, but it’s important to focus on the main point: We got there and found somebody to despise us.”
“The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was considered a grave offense by the Arab nations. Many considered all of Arabia sacred Muslim land that non-Muslims were not permitted to rule. Some considered Israel a puppet colonial enterprise of the Western powers. Others just didn’t do well with sharing. In keeping with one of history’s longest-running traditions, Jews were blamed. Specifically, the Jews who had lived for centuries in their countries.”
Impressively, I found only very few historical/factual errors in this book, probably owing to the advisers whom the author thanks for helping him get it “as ‘close to not-wrong’ as possible.”
Two bloopers that stand out: Kutner identifies Samson’s unnamed mother as Zorah (the name of the city where the family lived) and identifies the Kenite heroine Yael as an Israelite.
Yael is included in the cheeky chapter “Bad and/or Badass Jews,” spanning millennia from biblical bad boy Korah to feminist badass Gloria Steinem.
Among the entertaining passages here is Kutner’s summary of the legacy of Karl Marx: “Decades of college freshmen wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. (Only to be later replaced by Hamas T-shirts)” and an observation about Jesus of Nazareth: “Imagine how long this brown-skinned, long-haired, socialist, pacifist, immigrant, Jew would survive in today’s America.”
Despite its comical approach, this ambitious book obviously required a staggering amount of research and creative thought. Kutner gives a special shout-out to two Israeli educational establishments – the Alexander Muss High School and the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, “Two amazing institutions that managed to teach me a lot of this stuff… and even more shockingly, got it to stick in my brain for decades!”
It’s hard to disagree with his statement of intent for the project: “I think it’s critical for Jews to know our history because it still very much defines who we are today. Almost every issue that affects Jews nowadays is colored, consciously or subconsciously, by our long and specific history of travails, triumphs, and stubborn independence. We are marked by battle scar upon battle scar. Just don’t show them to our mothers – you know they worry.”
THE JEWS, 5,000 YEARS AND COUNTING: By Rob Kutner, Wicked Son (Post Hill Press), 224 pages; $18