Michael Krasny > Quotes

“We are ultimately unknowable to ourselves and others. Our past and future are mostly unknowable. God is unknowable. For the present the universe - its origins and its destiny - is unknowable, as is whether there are many universes. Infinity is unknowable. These are some of the fundamental reasons why I call myself an agnostic.”
― Michael Krasny, Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest

“Three modern rabbis are arguing about which of the three is the most progressive. “I am definitely the most progressive,” says the first rabbi. “We allow smoking during services.” “That’s nothing,” replies the second rabbi. “We serve pork spareribs during Yom Kippur.” “Not bad,” replies the third rabbi. “But I have you all beat. During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we post signs at my temple—closed for the holidays.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“And then there was Rodney Dangerfield telling us his mother wouldn’t breastfeed him. She only wanted to be friends.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Excuse me, Mr. Kleinman,” Stein says. “I used to live around the corner, and forty years ago I left a pair of shoes with you for repair. Is it possible you still have them?” Kleinman looks at Stein and says, “Vas dey black ving tips?” Stein remembers and says, “Yes. They were!” “And you vanted a half sole mit rubber heels?” “Yes,” says Stein. “That is exactly what I wanted.” “And you vanted taps on the heels only?” “Yes!” says Stein. “Do you still have them?” Mr. Kleinman looks up at him, squints, and says, “Dey be ready Vendsday.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A woman I met told me to go to her house that night. She said no one would be there. I went. No one was there.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A man is half-Jewish and half-Japanese. Every December 7, he attacks Pearl Schwartz.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A new Jewish Japanese restaurant opens. It’s called So Sue Me.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A Jewish immigrant is at Ellis Island entering the United States. He has, among his belongings, four sets of false teeth. All the sets are made of gold and are being examined by an immigration officer. The officer informs the immigrant that he cannot bring in all the gold. There is simply too much. Whereupon the Jewish immigrant tells the officer in English that he is Orthodox and needs all four sets for dietary purposes. The immigration officer looks skeptical. “I know some things about Jews and kosher eating. Why would you need four sets of gold teeth?” The Jewish immigrant responds, “I am very Orthodox. Extremely pious. I use one set for milk products and one for meat and a third for breaking the fast on Yom Kippur, the holiest of all days on the Jewish calendar.” “I see,” says the immigration officer, now looking less skeptical. “You are obviously a very religious man. But you only mentioned three religious occasions. What is the fourth?” “Oh,” the Jewish immigrant muses, “that’s just for when I want a ham sandwich.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Israel is the only country in the world, according to Kishon, where patients give doctors advice, taxi drivers read Spinoza and Maimonides, and small talk is defined as a loud and angry debate over politics.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“When Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. secretary of state, declared that he was first an American, second secretary of state, and third a Jew, Golda Meir supposedly responded to him by saying, “That’s fine, Henry. But in Hebrew everything is written from right to left.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“The stand-up comic London Lee, née Alan Levine, once said he had a German shepherd as a pet until it found out he was Jewish and bit him.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“According to a Jewish headstone, “I told you I was sick.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because, even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“What do you call Jewish foreplay? Twenty minutes of begging.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Two Texans are sitting on a plane going to Dallas with an old Jewish man sitting between them. The first Texan says, “My name is Roger. I own 250,000 acres. I have 1,000 head of cattle and they call my place the Jolly Roger.” The second Texan says, “My name is John. I own 350,000 acres. I have 5,000 head of cattle and they call my place Big John’s.” They both look down at the little old Jewish man, who says, “My name is Lenny Leibowitz and I own only 300 acres.” Roger looks down at him and says, “Three hundred acres? What do you raise?” “Nothing,” says Lenny. “Well then, what do you call it?” asks John. “Downtown Dallas.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Jewish proverb: he that can’t endure the bad will not live to see the good.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“What do you call a Jewish porn film? Debbie Does Nothing.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A couple of landsmen, fellow Jews, see a sign offering a hundred dollars to any Jew who will convert. One of the two Jews, Murray, decides to investigate and asks his friend, Harry, to wait for him. Murray is gone a long time, and when he finally returns, Harry asks, “Well. Did you get the money?” Murray says, “Why is that the first thing you people think about?”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“I always liked Canadian-born comedian David Steinberg’s line about his father never getting to see his dream of an all-Yiddish-speaking Canada come true.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi, all friends, decide together to purchase new cars. The priest and the minister baptize their new cars, while the rabbi takes a hacksaw to his and cuts three inches off the tailpipe.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“the Jewish immigrant taking an oral exam in his English as a Second Language class who is asked to spell “cultivate,” and spells it correctly. He is then asked to use the word in a sentence, and, with a big smile, responds: “Last vinter on a very cold day, I vas vaiting for a bus, but it was too cultivate, so I took the subway.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“The great German writer Heinrich Heine converted from Judaism to Christianity and called his conversion a passport to acceptance.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A son sends his aged father a nubile, attractive prostitute in a G-string. She asks if he is ready for “Super Sex.” The old man takes one look at her up and down and says, “I’ll take the soup.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“A Jew suddenly finds himself by the entrance to a time machine, thrown back to Roman antiquity and placed inside a Roman galley, rowing with other slaves under a Roman soldier’s whip. The Jew turns to the slave next to him and asks, “How much are we supposed to tip the whipper?”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“The definition of “chutzpah”? A kid who kills both his parents and pleads to a judge for leniency because he is an orphan.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“In what could easily be seen as an assimilation joke, my brother Victor tells a tale of working at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center when a young Jewish member, reading an announcement that the center would be closed on the two Jewish holidays of Succoth and Shavuot, asked him: “What does closing the center have to do with suck it and shove it?”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“the Jew who tells his friend he has completely shed his Jewish identity, when the two see a man resembling Quasimodo and the friend says, “And that guy says he’s not a hunchback”).”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Schlemiels, for all their faults and mishaps, tend to be portrayed as resigned to what life metes out to them, often accepting their fate and failures as they stumble through.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity

“Then there is the joke about the Jew reading Der Stürmer, the hateful Nazi paper. A friend and fellow Jew cannot understand why he reads such evil propaganda and asks, “Why are you reading that odious paper Der Stürmer?” The Jew answers, “I read the regular Jewish papers about pogroms, assimilation, riots in Palestine, and then I read Der Stürmer about how we Jews control politics and are taking over the world, and I feel much better.”
― Michael Krasny, Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means – An NPR Host's Hilarious and Enlightening Collection Celebrating Comedy and Cultural Identity