Hmm …

… Is Jewish humour the greatest defence mechanism ever created? | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Entertainers tried to make light of Jews being stereotyped as undesirables, arrivistes and greedy swindlers. ‘I’m so sorry, Cohen,’ the old joke goes, ‘I heard about your store burning down yesterday.’ Cohen: ‘Shh! Tomorrow!’ Of course, libels about Jewish avarice long predated that period and still thrive. Take Nigel Farage’s remarks on LBC about Israel and the ‘money and influence’ of the ‘Jewish lobby’; or a filmed incident at an anti-Israel rally in London in 2015 when a Scottish man, later arrested, waved a penny at Jewish counterdemonstrators and told them: ‘You only understand money!’ (These illustrate the problem with the simplistic mantra ‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’: no, it isn’t, except for when it is.)