Sholem Aleichem wrote humorous stories set against the backdrop of extreme Jewish poverty.
Humour, COVID-19, and the modern Jewish experience
David Slucki, Associate Professor, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University
Could humour be an antidote to the challenges we face during the coronavirus pandemic? What might Jewish history have to teach us about humour as an antidote to distress?
One of the cornerstones of modern Jewish culture is humour. In a century that witnessed the Holocaust, it might seem strange to think that laughter has been a central feature of 20th-century Jewish life. Yet, it’s precisely the suffering that Jews faced that led to some of the most humorous examples of Jewish culture.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, for example, the beloved Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem wrote humorous stories set against the backdrop of extreme Jewish poverty, pogroms, and struggles to reconcile tradition with modernity. In one story from 1900, The Enchanted Tailor , he famously declared that “laughter is healthy. Doctors prescribe laughter,” as he crafted his distinct approach of “laughter through tears”.
Around the same period, Sigmund Freud – whose theories on jokes came to be hugely influential in the study of humour – identified Jews’ special capacity for self-deprecating humour. Jokes, wrote Freud, served to help Jews subvert the aggression of non-Jews against them, and also were a form of self-criticism.
Laughter doesn’t take away from the magnitude of tragedy the world faces today. On the contrary, it can help us navigate through the darkness, and process the difficult situations in which we find ourselves.
Since the late-19th century then, when there was an uptick in antisemitic riots in Europe , Jews have confronted antisemitism and violence with humour. And, as shown by contributors to the recently-released book I edited, Laughter After: Humour and the Holocaust , humour played a range of roles for Jews in coming to terms with the worst tragedy the Jews faced, the Holocaust – a coping mechanism, a tool of empowerment, and an avenue for social and political critique.
The Jewish experience is instructive for thinking about the world in which we find ourselves today. Humour can provide us with moments of relief when the weight of the world seems to be crushing. The memes that float around social media, for example, give us momentary respite in the form of a chuckle.
Watching the regular videos posted to the Broadway Goes Viral Instagram account, where Broadway performers submit COVID 19-related parodies of musicals, helps to make us feel that we’re part of an audience, combating feelings of isolation by creating a sense of community with those to whom we’re connected now only digitally.
Humour can also be aggressive. It can provide an avenue to hold the powerful accountable, and this is certainly a time when the powerful need to be held to account. A well-crafted joke by a late-night TV host , or a parody video from comedian Randy Rainbow might highlight the gravity of our current situation more effectively and succinctly than a 5000-word exposé.
Laughter doesn’t take away from the magnitude of tragedy the world faces today. On the contrary, it can help us navigate through the darkness, and process the difficult situations in which we find ourselves.
American Albert Sabin (standing) and Soviet colleague Mikhail Chumakov (second from right) collaborating on the polio vaccine. Photo: Hauck Center for the Albert B. Sabin Archives, Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, University of Cincinnati Libraries
Medical diplomacy for a troubled time
Paula Michaels, Associate Professor, History, Monash University
The COVID-19 pandemic presents the world with a once-in-a-century global infectious disease event. Yet on 29 May, amid this crisis, President Donald Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organisation. Over the past two months, he had withheld outstanding WHO contributions and threatened to cut off funding permanently . The recent announcement confirms that these expressions of discontent from the organisation’s primary funder were more than mercurial bluster.
The clash between the US and the WHO is the latest in a litany of historical examples of how medicine and health can be instrumentalised in the international arena for political objectives.
During the Cold War, medical diplomacy served a prime asset for the exertion of “soft power” – the effort to win “hearts and minds” through what political scientist Robert Nye describes as an appeal to “the publics of other countries, rather than merely governments”.
The US sent Louis Armstrong to Africa to woo newly decolonised nations away from the developmental promise of Soviet-style socialism. For its part, by bringing to the USSR thousands of medical students from Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, and elsewhere in what was then called “the Third World”, the Soviet government promoted itself at home and abroad as a progressive and generous benefactor.
From its founding in 1948, the WHO had Cold War politics baked into its DNA. Early on it became the site of US-Soviet tussling, culminating in the USSR’s withdrawal in 1949. Multiple factors explain this decision, including political considerations, but, much like Trump, the Soviet government publicly pointed to financial inefficiencies and failed efforts at infectious disease control. With Stalin’s 1953 death, the USSR revitalised its global medical engagement, rejoining the WHO in 1955.
Though not free of problems, the WHO became a venue for meaningful multilateral medical diplomacy, particularly on questions of infectious disease, most notably smallpox . The US and USSR also succeeded in a bilateral quest for a polio vaccine . Whether these efforts translated into winning hearts and minds remains an open question, but preliminary evidence points to the positive impact of such cooperative efforts.
Earlier this month, the US absented itself from a global summit to raise funds for the development and universal deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine. In a striking historical analogy, commentators saw in this withdrawal from medical diplomacy evidence that the coronavirus pandemic may be the United States’ Suez moment – an invocation of how, in retrospect, Great Britain’s inability to resist Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 revealed its diminished standing on the world stage.
America’s retrenchment from medical diplomacy also repudiates one of the most vital lessons of the past for confronting the current crisis: If coronavirus’s spread is to be effectively managed and a vaccine is to be found, the most effective way forward is together.
Future histories of COVID-19 through photography
Susie Protschky, Senior Lecturer, History department, Monash University
How will future understandings of life during the COVID-19 pandemic be shaped by the photographs that are taken during this time?
My research seeks to understand how the frontline camerawork of ordinary witnesses and participants in disaster is crucial for shaping later debates about what we know and how we claim to know it. It shows how narratives of heroism, victimhood, suffering and survival in disaster begin to be formed at the very moment when photographs are made, shown (or hidden), and shared (Protschky 2018 , 2020 ). How will this play out for the current global health crisis?
Searching for visual analogies with past disasters, commentators on the pandemic to date have reached for black-and-white photographs of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic – images showing masked health workers and provisional field hospitals , and queues of unemployed workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s .
Viewed in relation to these images, the acute phase of the current disaster seems to resonate with what we already know from the past. At first glance, it also appears to confirm what scholars of photography often dispute: that images of suffering in disaster can trigger change.
In the Australian case, it certainly seems that images of hospitals in China , Italy and the US overflowing with COVID-19 patients prompted governments toward a stricter lockdown, and that photographs of queues outside our own Centrelink offices hastened the implementation of economic stimulus measures.
In Australia, since we’ve also been careful to honour the dignity and privacy of domestic casualties of the pandemic, we’ve not (yet) seen explicit photographs of our acute phase, even though we have seen such images from overseas . This could have been predicted by scholarship on photography, which shows that news media organisations distinguish between “us” and “them” (foreign victims of disaster) when it comes to showing death and suffering (Zelizer 2010).
My research focuses on amateur photography in past disasters, particularly how it both shapes and diverges from the images we see in news media. It was a century ago, around the 1920s, that amateur photography began to change how disasters are represented, not just for “private” audiences, but for particular publics with their own agendas (Protschky 2019 ).
Long before social media, amateur photographers have been recording and sharing what official venues have not allowed: candid experiences of death, grief and suffering; the travails of social groups whose experience of disaster is shaped by longer histories of inequality and injustice on racial, class or gender grounds; the everyday decisions taken to survive or even prosper that might publicly be censured as shameful.
If the smartphone has prompted any change in the history of photography, it’s been to elevate amateur practice and everyday life above the professional and the exceptional. It will therefore be in photography of the ordinary, taken in the context of disaster, that we will see the rich future histories of this pandemic.
This article was published by Lens .