I get this question all the time:  How can you let your mother read your blog every day, filled as it is with orgies and naked women?  The answer:  my mother has a good sense of humor, well at least in an old-fashioned Catskills-Jewish sort of way.  Today I’d like to share with you today’s email from my mother, chock full of corny but heart-felt ethnic humor.

My Mother’s Jewish Joke #1 –

Written across the wall of the cave were the following symbols:

It was considered a unique find and the writings were said to be at least three thousand years old!

The piece of stone was removed, brought to the museum, and archaeologists from around the world came to study the ancient symbols. They held a huge meeting after months of conferences to discuss the meaning of the markings.

The President of the society pointed to first drawing and said: “This is a woman. We can see these people held women in high esteem. You can also tell they were intelligent, as the next symbol is a donkey, so they were smart enough to have animals help them till the soil. The next drawing is a shovel, which means they had tools to help them.”

Even further proof of their high intelligence is the fish which means that if a famine hit the earth and food didn’t grow, they seek food from the sea. The last symbol appears to be the Star of David which means they were evidently Hebrews.

The audience applauded enthusiastically.

Then an old Jewish man named Shlomo stood up in the back of the room and said, “Idiots, Hebrew is read from right to left…… It says: “Holy Mackerel, Dig The Ass On That Chick!”

My Mother’s Jewish Joke #2  

(note to the shiksas — horseradish is what you put on the gefilte fish at Passover)

While few of the traditional seder foods trace their origins as far back as matzoh, it should be noted that the lowly horseradish root also crossed the Red Sea with the fleeing Israelites.

As impoverished slaves, they had access to few vegetables and the hard and woody horseradish was a household staple.

While most of the fleeing Israelites carried with them horseradish, there is a story told of one family where, while gathering up their few belongings, discovered that they had no horseradish left in their house. The wife sent her husband into the field to dig up a large horseradish root, but in the darkness and confusion, he unearthed a large ginger root by mistake. 

The story continues that after forty years of wandering in the desert, the Israelites finally entered the promised  land. But it was another year before the family with the ginger arrived to settle among the rest of the Israelites.

When asked where they had been, the matriarch of the family, now grown old, shrugged and answered, “My husband insisted on taking an alternate root.”

Thanks, Mom!