Peninah Taragin Gershman
I once made a Holocaust joke. It was not intentional, and it was not planned, but I said it, and it landed as one.
A close friend of mine is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her mother, of blessed memory, was not an easy person to grow up with. Much of that difficulty, my friend believed, traced back to what her parents endured in surviving the war. The aftereffects persisted well past 1945. They shaped the texture of my friend’s childhood and the atmosphere of her home.
One day, as we were speaking about her mother and the strain that marked their relationship, she said quietly, “Well, you know, she was a survivor.” Wanting to express sympathy, I responded, “Yeah, the Nazis really did a number on her.”
There was a brief silence, and then she burst out laughing. It was not polite laughter, nor forced. It was immediate and surprised, and I found myself laughing too. The phrase I had used, so ordinary in other contexts, suddenly sounded painfully small. In the context of the Holocaust, it also carried an uncomfortable association with the numbers tattooed on prisoners in the camps. The idiom reduced something enormous into something ordinary. The dissonance between tone and reality was palpable. We both felt it.
What unsettled me afterward was not only that I had said it, but that it had provoked laughter at all. The moment felt transgressive and intimate at the same time. Why did that line, which should have been somber, land as humor? Why did her laughter feel both cathartic and faintly shameful? Who was permitted to laugh in that moment, and why? In the space of a single misplaced idiom, I found myself confronting the moral and theological tension that surrounds Holocaust humor. A Holocaust joke is never only a joke. It carries questions about memory, authority, suffering, and power. The laughter it provokes does not resolve those questions – it sharpens them.
Some people respond to Holocaust humor by drawing a boundary around who is allowed to make such jokes. In this view, survivors and their families are permitted to use humor as a way of coping with trauma, but those outside of that circle should refrain from doing so. This instinct is understandable. The Holocaust is not just a historic event, but a legacy of inherited trauma passed from survivors to their descendents. However, the question of the propriety of Holocaust humor cannot be settled simply by identifying who is speaking.
Holocaust humor can be quite unstable. Whether such humor crosses a moral boundary is not merely a question of who is speaking, taste, comfort, or decorum. It operates as a moral-limit case, testing the boundaries of what feels ethically speakable. Some think that the Holocaust should resist ordinary modes of representation such as literature, poetry, or film, even though it has long been represented in each. Laughter seems to cross an even greater threshold. The discomfort it produces is not evidence that the conversation should end. It is part of the phenomenon itself. If Holocaust jokes provoke shame, anger, or unease, those reactions demand examination rather than dismissal. Even humor that feels wrong can expose something about memory, trauma, and the ethical stakes of representation.
Most people assume that Holocaust jokes are distasteful at best and blatantly prejudiced and cruel at worst. Yet Jewish tradition does not treat laughter as simple or innocent. The first laughter in the Torah is not an exclamation of joy but one of astonishment. Abraham laughs when told that he and Sarah will bear a child in their old age.[1] Sarah laughs as well, but hers is quieter and edged with disbelief.[2] When God responds, it is Sarah’s laughter that is questioned, not Abraham’s. From the beginning, Jewish laughter carries tension. It can signal faith, irony, protest, or the inability to absorb what has been said. It is rarely neutral.
Regardless of the long history of Jewish laughter as a response to pain and disbelief, many people still believe that Holocaust jokes are categorically inappropriate, arguing that the unprecedented scale, horror, and nature of the event place it firmly beyond the reach of humor altogether. This argument makes sense: certain tragedies demand reverence, restraint and silence rather than laughter. However, blanket forbiddance does not account for the ongoing existence of Holocaust humor itself, from jokes told by prisoners and survivors to contemporary satire and stand-up comedy. If Holocaust jokes exist, and they clearly do, then a better question is not whether they should exist at all, but what they do. Humor is never neutral. It always has a target, even when that target is implicit. In contemporary terms, one might describe this as the difference between “punching down” and “punching up.” In the context of catastrophe, the direction of the joke matters. Humor that directs its force toward victims, or the powerless, risks reenacting the very dynamics of humiliation and erasure that made the violence possible. By contrast, humor that turns toward perpetrators, ideology, or even God does something different. It shifts the burden upward. It refuses to allow suffering to be the object of ridicule and instead makes power answerable. The distinction is not tidy, and there are gray areas, but the ethical direction of the joke shapes whether it functions as protest or as diminishment.
This distinction becomes visible when we look at humor that emerged during the Holocaust itself. Humor as a threat to Nazi authority came in different forms.[3] For example, one survivor spoke of the physical humiliation and degradation that accompanied the head shavings that occurred upon entry into many concentration camps. The experience was devastating and dehumanizing. She saw friends from her hometown, and they were weeping. Yet as she recalled it, she started to laugh, and said, “This I never had before! A hairdo for free?”[4] Her joke did not deny the horror of what happened – it depended on it. This woman reclaimed the very thing that was so brutally inflicted upon her, and in doing so exposed the limits of Nazi power.
The autonomy preserved through humor – under conditions of total humiliation, pain and torture – points toward something more than psychological survival. Laughter during the Holocaust did not just help victims live on; it provided a moral stance in a world that no longer made sense either ethically or theologically. By using humor to deny the destruction happening to them, victims achieved a form of protest. It was not physical resistance or victory, but an insistence that they retained authority over how their own experiences would be interpreted.[5] This protest was not always directed solely at the Nazi regime. In a world where God appeared silent or absent, the act of laughing at catastrophe also raised theological questions about divine presence, responsibility, and abandonment. In this sense, humor did not explain suffering, but it refused to allow suffering the final word.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks initially expressed skepticism about the claim that humor could keep someone alive during the Holocaust. After one lecture, a survivor approached him and said plainly, “You are wrong,” before recounting how he and another prisoner in Auschwitz made a pact to find something each day to laugh about. Each night they shared it. “A sense of humour,” the survivor insisted, “kept me alive.” R. Sacks later reflected that he found such courage awe-inspiring. The exchange reinforces the claim that humor was experienced not merely as a coping mechanism, but as life-sustaining. It did not remove suffering, but it preserved a measure of agency within circumstances designed to strip it away. [6]
If humor could preserve life under conditions that seemed to defy meaning altogether, then it cannot be dismissed as trivial in the aftermath. Laughter in the camps was not denial; it was a refusal to surrender interpretation to catastrophe. That refusal carries forward. After the Holocaust, humor continues to raise questions that formal theology cannot easily answer.
A contemporary example shows how this tension persists after the Holocaust. Jewish comedian Alex Edelman tells a joke in which a Jewish man arrives in heaven, strikes up a conversation with God, and asks whether He would like to hear a joke. When God agrees, the man tells a Holocaust joke. God responds that He does not find it funny, to which the man replies, “I guess You had to be there, huh?”[7] This joke is deliberately uncomfortable, not because it trivializes the Holocaust, but because it redirects its force upward. The target of the joke is not the victims of the Holocaust, but God Himself, specifically divine absence, silence, and moral authority. By placing God in the position of the one who “doesn’t get it,” the joke exposes the distance between the lived horror and any attempt to judge it from the outside. In doing so, the joke mirrors earlier uses of laughter as resistance, now aimed not at human perpetrators but at divine silence itself.
Edelman’s joke works through a simple but devastating piece of wordplay. When the man tells God, “I guess you had to be there, huh?” the punchline provides two functions. On the surface, it sounds like a familiar response to someone who doesn’t understand an inside joke – “you had to be there.” At the same time, it raises a far more serious question: “Where were you, God, during the Holocaust?” The pain in the question is real, despite the casual way it is phrased. The humor of the joke relies on its double meaning. God is positioned not only as someone who doesn’t “get” the joke, or has a poor sense of humor, but as someone to be implicated in the catastrophe itself. In this way, the joke does not merely offend or provoke; it makes a theological claim. It turns the language of casual explanation into an indictment of divine absence or abandonment. The joke does not resolve this tension, nor does it offer any meaning. Instead, it leaves the question open, using humor to articulate a challenge that theology itself cannot answer. It is a proverbial “mic drop” that comes from pain rather than triumph. The refusal to resolve the tension is not incidental. What that joke offers is not just irreverence, but a form of theological protest found in post-Holocaust humor.[8] After the Holocaust, traditional attempts to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil rang hollow for many survivors and theologians.[9] While this joke can be understood as a form of disbelief, it is really a way to articulate divine failure. The joke ignores age-old theological explanations (such as, “because of our sins, we were exiled from our land”) and instead replaces them with irony and unresolved protest.[10] To the creator of this joke, there is no consolation or explanation. There remains only the ability to protest and to insist that divine silence be confronted rather than justified.
It is important to state explicitly that not all Holocaust humor can be defended on ethical or interpretive grounds. Holocaust humor crosses an ethical boundary when it ignores the very features that once made such humor meaningful and morally defensible. As demonstrated earlier, humor during and after the Holocaust functioned as a form of resistance and moral questioning. When humor instead targets victims rather than perpetrators, power, ideology, or God, it ceases to be a form of protest and begins to enter the realm of dehumanization. Similarly, humor that flattens the complexity of lived experience, or attempts to resolve tension through shock or insult, undermines the moral seriousness of the catastrophe. In these cases, humor no longer confronts devastation, but transforms it into a one-dimensional joke, shifting catastrophe from critique into spectacle.[11]
As Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld argues, one of the central dangers in contemporary Holocaust discourse is not silence, but trivialization: the emotional deadening of the catastrophe through repetition and cultural misuse. Some jokes punch so far down, reducing victims to numbers, bodies, or disposable matter, that they do not function as protest or theologically meaningful at all. Instead, they re-enact the very logic of dehumanization that made the genocide of the Holocaust possible in the first place. When Holocaust language loses its historical particularity and is used instead for shock, entertainment, or casual provocation, it no longer just unsettles ethically, but reinforces the very moral failure at stake. Humor that operates this way does not use subversion as a tool for critique but erodes the meaning itself. [12]
Not all contemporary Holocaust humor operates this way. In one routine, stand-up comic Anthony Jeselnik jokes that his mother once denied the Holocaust and later “did a complete 180. Now she can’t believe it only happened once.”[13] The joke relies on escalation and shock. Its mechanism is inversion. The catastrophe itself becomes the punchline. Unlike humor that turns toward power or toward God, this joke does not challenge anyone or anything. It does not question the perpetrators. It does not question divine silence or moral responsibility. It crudely uses the Holocaust to make the audience gasp. The horror itself becomes the joke. The shock is the whole point. What once functioned as laughter in order to preserve dignity becomes laughter that risks eroding it.[14]
The line between protest and trivialization is not always clear. A different use of contemporary Holocaust humor appears in an episode of the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm, where a Holocaust survivor and a contestant from the reality television show Survivor find themselves, thanks to a misunderstanding of the term, at the same dinner party. The two begin competing over which “survivor” endured greater suffering during their respective experiences. The conversation went like this:
Television Survivor: Look, I’m saying —we spent forty-two days trying to survive, and we had very little rations, no snacks…
Holocaust Survivor: Snacks? What [sic] you talking, “snacks”? We didn’t eat sometimes for a week! For a month! We ate nothing!…
Like much of Curb, the scene trades in secondhand embarrassment. The discomfort is intentional. At first glance, it feels outrageous. The juxtaposition risks flattening incomparable suffering into a joke about semantics. It seems to trivialize the Holocaust by placing it beside reality television.
But the real target of the humor is not the survivor at all. The episode satirizes a culture that casually uses the language of catastrophe to describe inconvenience. By allowing the comparison to spiral into absurdity, the show exposes how easily Holocaust language can lose its specificity and become shorthand for personal grievance. The humor does not deny the Holocaust’s gravity; it reveals how later generations misunderstand it and misuse its language.
Returning to the accidental joke that opens this essay, what made the moment unsettling was not simply that it was funny, but that it was funny in a way that felt morally and theologically charged. The laughter it produced was neither innocent nor dismissive. It exposed a tension: who may joke, who may laugh, and what kind of meaning humor can bear in the shadow of catastrophe.
Holocaust humor cannot be evaluated only in terms of taste or offense. It forces contemporary society to confront the outer boundary of what can be said. During the Holocaust, laughter allowed victims to maintain a semblance of control in a world designed to strip them of dignity and meaning. After the Holocaust, humor can continue to function as protest when it directs its force toward power, ideology, or divine silence – rather than toward victims themselves.
At the same time, these distinctions are not absolute. Not every joke can be neatly divided into protest or trivialization. Intention does not guarantee moral effect, and gray areas remain. What Holocaust humor ultimately exposes is not resolution but the depth of the wound. Its discomfort reflects the ongoing struggle to speak about suffering without diminishing it, and to confront divine silence without explaining it away.
[3] Whitney Carpenter, “Laughter in a Time of Tragedy: Examining Humor during the Holocaust,” Denison Journal of Religion 9 (2010).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Emil L. Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination, ed. Michael L. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[6] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “Happiness: A Jewish Perspective,” Rabbi Sacks Legacy, February 1, 2014, https://rabbisacks.org/archive/happiness-a-jewish-perspective/
[7] Alex Edelman, quoted in Andrew Silow-Carroll, “Alex Edelman and fans of ‘Long Story Short’ may disagree, but a French intellectual says Jewish humor is dying,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 14, 2025, https://www.jta.org/2025/09/14/ideas/alex-edelman-and-fans-of-long-story-short-may-disagree-but-a-french-intellectual-says-jewish-humor-is-dying
[8] Avinoam Patt, “Laughter through Tears: Jewish Humor in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” in A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, ed. Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel N. Finder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[9] Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Holocaust Theology: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
[10] Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust.”
[11] Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)
[12] Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust.
[13] Anthony Jeselnik, “People Can Change,” Instagram video, May 5, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJSC0ynRhcy/
[14] Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust.
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