Wednesday

After recounting all those Jewish jokes and the history of Jewish humor in the United States, Epstein offers this, I think, poignant observation: "[A' epigraph from the English comic novelist Howard Jacobson: 'This is not the place to examine why I, a Jew, feel more threatened by those who would wipe out ethnic jokes than by those who unthinkingly make them. But it may be the place simply to record that I do.'"

I agree with that. Those who would kill ethnic jokes are those who would kill life itself in the name of ideology. Hence, I think, the source of Mr. Jacobson discomfit with such individuals.