From Groucho Marx to Seinfeld, Jewish jokes dominate top 100 list

By Ben Sales for JTA

New York magazine’s culture section, Vulture, this week published a mega-listicle, “The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy.” With the help of comedians and historians of comedy, the magazine’s editors compiled the most important jokes ever uttered — from Charlie Chaplin making dinner rolls dance to Louis C.K. dissing his daughter.

And Jews dominate the list.

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Why Playing Chess Is Like Studying the Talmud

Halacha as the Art of Playing Chess – Divine Insanity

By Nathan Lopes Cardozo

There is probably no game as difficult and captivating as chess. Millions of people break their heads over strategies to win this game and spend years learning its ins and outs. It holds them captive as nothing else does. They dream about it and discuss the move of one single pawn as if their lives depend on it. They will follow the most famous chess tournaments and discuss every move of a world champion for days and even years. They replay famous, mind-boggling games of the past, even those that took place as far back as 70 years ago. These chess aficionados try to improve on those games of the distant past, often getting into heated arguments about a brilliant or foolish move that took place 50 years earlier. Thousands of books and tens of thousands of essays have been published on how to improve at playing the game. The rules are set up in the World Chess Federation’s FIDE Handbook. Strategies are developed and tactics suggested; countless combinations have been tried to the point that some typical patterns have their own names, such as “Boden’s Mate” and “Lasker’s Combination”. Mikhail Botvinnik revolutionized the opening theory, which was considered nothing less than a Copernican breakthrough. Famous chess studies, such as the one published by Richard Reti (1921), are revelations of tremendous depth. (He depicted a situation in which it seems impossible for the white king to catch the advanced black pawn while the white pawn can be easily stopped by the black king.)

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China's Search for the Secrets of Jewish Success

In their quest to understand Jews better, popular Chinese authors and bloggers offer up facts and myths about everything from the Talmud to anti-Semitism

By James Ross for Tablet Magazine   

During my first trip to China in the summer of 1985, I visited English Corner in People’s Park in Shanghai one Sunday afternoon. It’s one of the places where young Chinese people used to practice their English with visiting foreigners. Officials from the university where I was teaching in Shanghai escorted me there, and a big crowd quickly gathered to talk with me—a tall, curly-haired foreigner—and pushed closer to shower me with questions.

Some of the questions seemed strange to me (“Do all Americans have AIDS?”) but most were routine, such as, “Where are you from? How do you like China? Are you married? Do you like Chinese girls?” After two months in China, none of this was surprising to me except for one additional question: “What is your religion?”

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1,700-Year-Old Galilee Inscriptions Refer to ‘Rabbis,’ Affirm Jewish Presence

From the algemeiner.com

JNS.org – Three 1,700-year-old funerary inscriptions referring to “rabbis” were discovered in Moshav Zippori in Israel’s Galilee region, a finding that affirms a Jewish presence in Israel during the Roman period, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced Wednesday.

“The importance of the epitaphs lies in the fact that they reflect the everyday life of the Jews of Zippori and their cultural world,” said Dr. Motti Aviam of the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archaeology, which partnered with the IAA on the discovery.

Two of the Aramaic inscriptions were found buried in a cemetery in Zippori, but their names have not yet been deciphered. One of the inscriptions bears the name “The Tiberian,” Aviam said.

“This is already the second instance of someone from Tiberias being buried in the cemetery at Zippori,” said Aviam. “It is quite possible that Jews from various parts of Galilee were brought to Zippori to be buried in the wake of the important activity carried out there by [the Mishnah-era sage] Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi.”

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Meet the Bal Ej, Ethiopia’s Other Jews

By Ilana Sichel for Jewniverse

Americans tend to think of Blacks and Jews as distinct groups: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.; Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner going down South for Freedom Summer. Some evoke the Beta Israel community of Ethiopia, and a minority recall the Igbo Jews of Nigeria, or the Abayudaya of Uganda. But fewer still know of the Bal Ej, a group of Ethiopian Jews that started splitting from the Beta Israel community in Gondar back in the 15th century, to settle in the North Shewa region of Ethiopia.

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