I have been back and forth today with a group of friends over the following Jewish joke, why some of them find it hilarious and why I just don’t. I mean, it’s cute and all, but LOL funny? You decide, and then read some of the exchange about how and why people react to these jokes. By the way, I am sharing it precisely as it was shared with me (including the note at the end), by way of another Orthodox Jew, who received it from a Native American Indian.

The Jewish Indian

There was this family of Schmohawk Indians sitting around the shtetl one night. The papa, Geronowitz; the mama, Pocayenta; and the beautiful young daughter, Minihorwitz.
“So, nu,” says the daughter, “You’ll never believe.”
“What?” says the mama.
” Today, at high noon, I was proposed to in marriage.”
“Yes?” says the mama, “so what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“You said yes?”
“I said yes.”
“That’s wonderful,” says the mama. “She said yes! Did you hear that Geronowitz, Minihorwitz is getting married!”
“I heard,” says the papa, “I’m kvelling. So who’s the lucky boy?”
“Sittin’ Bagel.”
“Sittin’ Bagel?” says the mama, “of the SoSiouxMe tribe?”
“That’s the one,” says Minihorowitz.
“Oy, Geronowitz! The SoSiouxMe’s! There are so many of them! How can we feed them? How can we get them all in our teepee for the wedding?”
“We’ll think of something,” says Geronowitz.

“Geronowitz! Get me a buffalo!” says the mama.
“What, at this hour?”
“No, Geronowitz, for the wedding! I can make buffalo tzimmes from the meat, and we can make an extra teepee from the hide. Get me a buffalo!”
So Geronowitz goes out to hunt a buffalo. A day goes by, and a night and Geronowitz has not come back. Another day and another night, and still no sign of him. Another day and half the night, and Geronowitz comes home
exhausted, staggering and empty-handed..
Geronowitz! I’ve been worried sick. Where have you been? And where’s my buffalo?!”
“It’s like this,” he says. “On my first day out, I hunted high, and I hunted low, and I finally found a buffalo. But this buffalo, he made Mickey Rooney look strong. It was a tiny, scrawny little buffalo, with no meat on his bones for buffalo tzimmes, and barely enough hide for a rain hat. So I settled in for the night to try again the next day. “The second day, I looked high, and I looked low, from this way and that way, and I finally found a buffalo. He was a big buffalo, with lots of meat, and lots of hide, but I tell you, Pocayenta, this was the ugliest buffalo I ever saw in my life. ‘This’, I thought to myself, ‘is not the buffalo for MY daughter’s wedding. So again, I settled in for the night
to try again the next day.
“The third day, I got up early, and I looked high and I looked low, from this way and that way, going up hills und down hills, suddenly, there it was! A magnificent buffalo. It was a big buffalo. It was, as buffalos go,a beautiful buffalo. It was, if I say so myself, the perfect buffalo. This, I says to myself, is the buffalo Pocayenta wants for Minihorowitz’s wedding.
“So I reach into! my backpack quietly for my tomahawk and, as I tiptoe over to the buffalo, I raise my tomahawk slowly over the buffalo’s neck, when suddenly, like a bolt of lightning from the sky, I see it.”
“See what?” says Pocayenta.
“I’ve brought the milchedik tomahawk!
Note: For those that did not get the joke. If you kept a Kosher home in your kitchen you would have two sets of just about everything. For eating meat you used one set of utensils and dishes and another set
for dairy products. (milchedik) dairy.

One friend quickly responded: Laughed out loud at my desk. PS the best part of the joke may well be the phrase “buffalo tzimmes.”
I commented: I am still trying to figure out why the joke is funny. Seriously, how does it work? What cord does it strike in you guys? Why not in me?
Having though more about it, I suspect that if one sees a vast gulf between Native American Indians and Jews, if the ethnic stereotypes around each are compelling and resonate with your experience of either group, especially the one to which you belong, the joke will be quite funny. Since none of that is true for me, I saw it as quaint and slightly silly – nothing more and nothing less. And the more I think about it, the happier I am with that response.
Perhaps with “Jewish jokes”, as with all ethnic humor, the best result is that it neither bothers us nor delights us. Perhaps that what it means to feel normal in one’s ethnic particularity, at least in a world in which it is safe to be that ethnicity. That’s how I feel as an American Jew and it’s probably why this joke was largely lost on me. of course, that strikes me as a really good thing, one not unrelated to the approach of Thanksgiving and the wonder of Jewish experience over the last 300 years in America. Just a thought.