This book examines political humor as a reaction to the lost war,
the post-war chaos, and antisemitic violence in Hungary between
1918 and 1922. While there is an increased body of literature on
Jewish humor as a form of resistance and a means of resilience
during the Holocaust, only a handful of studies have addressed
Jewish humor as a reaction to physical attacks and increased
discrimination in Europe during and after the First World War. The
majority of studies have approached the issue of Jewish humor from
an anthropological, cultural, or linguistic perspective; they have
been interested in the humor of lower- or lower-middle-class Jews
in the East European shtetles before 1914. On the other hand, this
study follows a historical and political approach to the same topic
and focuses on the reaction of urban, middle-class, and culturally
assimilated Jews to recent events: to the disintegration of the
Dual Monarchy, the collapse of law and order, increased violence,
the reversal of Jewish emancipation and the rise of new and more
pernicious antisemitic prejudices. The study sees humor not only as
a form of entertainment and jokes as literature and a product of
popular culture, but also as a heuristic device to understand the
world and make sense of recent changes, as well as a means to
defend one’s social position, individual and group identity,
strike back at the enemy, and last but not least, to gain the
support and change the hearts and minds of non-Jews and neutral
bystanders. Unlike previous scholarly works on Jewish resistance
during the Holocaust, this study sees Budapest Jewish humor after
WWI as a joint adventure: as a product of urban and Hungarian
culture, in which Jewish not only played an important role but also
cofounded. Finally, the book addressed the issue of continuity in
Hungarian history, the "twisted road to Auschwitz": whether urban
Jewish humor, as a form of escapism, helped to desensitize the
future victims of the Holocaust to the approaching danger, or it
continued to play the same defensive and positive role in the
interwar period, as it had done in the immediate aftermath of the
Great War.
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