Bel Kaufman(1911-2014)

She is the granddaughter of Sholom Aleichem, the greatest of all Yiddish authors, whose stories about Tevya (1939) the dairyman were made into the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971).

[on teaching a course on Jewish humor at Hunter College] We were not just telling jokes. We were investigating why so many comedians are Jewish and so many Jewish jokes are so self-accusing. It goes back to immigration from the shtetl, from that poverty, and because the Jew was the object of so much opprobrium and hatred. The jokes were a defense mechanism: 'We're going to talk about ourselves in a more damaging way than you could.'