The Sirens of High-Tech and the Second Jew

by David Benjamin

“Who IS this guy? and why is he writing for EE Times?”
— The “SemiSisters”

MADISON, Wis. — Eight women extremely prominent in high technology management and marketing — all better educated than me — have composed a manifesto (https://www.3dincites.com/2021/07/smartphone-addiction-is-not-a-gender-specific-problem/) renouncing an essay published under my byline in the tech journal, EE Times. Their polemic starts by accusing me of “not getting it.”

Humbly, I must differ. This charge somewhat strains credibility because I’m a lifelong kidder, an art I studied under my dad, Big Bill, who was a world-class ironist. By nature and training, kidders are occasionally not gotten, but we almost always get.

To define terms, kidding is an improvisational form of humor that springs spontaneously (and once in a while, cleverly), from the conversational flow. A joke, the offense charged by my team of Sirens, is a set piece, a scripted effort at comedy. When a joke falls flat, isn’t funny, or soars over the heads of its audience, the joke-teller is tempted to ask the question that pounds the final nail into the gag’s coffin: “Get it?”

These are two words that a competent kidder, who’s comfortably flying by the seat of his (or her) pants and pushing the pace, never utters. Nor does a kidder often recite jokes. I remember almost none. Those that stick in my memory contain nuance beyond their punchlines and have the effect of illuminating humanity in ways that can’t be conveyed through serious discourse. The best joke I know goes as follows.

Three Jews are lined up, facing a firing squad. The captain of the squad asks the first Jew, “Would you like a blindfold?” The first Jew accepts the blindfold. Asked the same question, the second Jew takes the blindfold. The captain asks the third Jew, “Would you like a blindfold?” The third Jew refuses.

The captain, surprised, expresses sympathy and tries again. “This is an awful thing to see,” he says. “Are sure you don’t want a blindfold?” The third Jew is adamant. “I don’t want a blindfold.”

The captain presses the issue, asking once more. The third Jew is even more insistent. “No!” he growls. “I don’t want it!”

At this, as the captain begins yet another appeal, the second Jew nudges the third Jew. He says, “Take the blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”

There are three distinct responses to this joke. For Jews, it’s just plain funny. When I told it to Matthew, he spent the next four hours using the blindfold as a metaphor for every stub, blunder, tragedy, and heartbreak in his life. The phrase, “Take the blindfold” remains a motto that reinforces, instantly, our bond as friends.

The allegorical power of the blindfold joke lies in its expression of a Jewish dilemma that dates — at least — to the diaspora that scattered Jews across the face of the earth after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The third Jew seems the hero, bespeaking the resistance of Jews to the suffering — bigotry, slavery, pogroms, inquisition, ghettoization, expulsion, genocide — that has marked their history. The third Jew represents the unquenchable spirit of Jews to defy their oppressors, even as they look down the barrels of a dozen guns.

But what about the second Jew? He accepts the blindfold meekly, apparently symbolizing either the passivity or the wisdom of the Jewish people. They are always an untrusted minority, strangers in a strange land who survived not by trading insult for insult, not by playing David to a thousand Goliaths for three thousand years but by slipping into the background, laying low and fleeing when all other options expired. The second Jew, it seems, takes the blindfold and stands stoic in the face of death so that, perhaps, his children will carry on.

Or, maybe… he’s kidding. What if, as he nudges the third Jew and says, “Don’t make trouble,” he’s sharing an inside joke that only another Jew would get?

If so — and I think so — this is the unique genius of Jewishness, an astounding capacity to respond to the hatred and bloodlust of a remorseless world by kidding around, by laughing in the face of sheer horror.

“Take the blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”

Consider next the firing-squad captain. He represents the second reaction to this joke. He’s not Jewish. He has no awareness or experience with Jews. The deep, lacerating irony of Jewish humor is beyond him. As the second Jew nudges the third Jew, the captain doesn’t get the joke or even know there’s a joke to get.

Finally, there’s a third response the blindfold joke, usually confined to liberals concerned with identity, political semantics and their own virtue. They see the joke, if only because it specifically references an ethnic or religious minority, as racist. If I misjudge the crowd and tell these sensitive souls the story of my three doomed Jews, they recoil and pronounce me — with little more evidence than three Jews and a punchline — anti-Semitic.

Here’s where my eight Sirens come in.

The piece I wrote for EE Times was called “We’re all teenage girls now.” I wasn’t actually — honest to God — writing either favorably or pejoratively about teenage girls. I was using my sister Peg and her best friend Rosie, who were teenage girls in 1960, as a analogy for the universal mobile-phone addiction that has served to isolate 21st-century individuals from the greater human community perhaps more than ever before in history.

You see, like their fellow teenage girls — and like teenage girls I’ve observed all my life — Peg and Rosie would spend hours every evening glued to the phone. They created an electronic cocoon of girlish talk that shut them off from their brothers, their parents, their school, the whole horrible world of strife, war, injustice and adulthood. No one pulled off this emigration from reality better than teenage girls until the invention of tiny mobile handsets made it possible for everyone — girls, boys, men, women, Jews and Gentiles — to sign off from society all the time while staring at a four-inch screen and thumbing a postage-stamp keyboard.

In my essay, I used the term “hermetic human.” I referred to Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, which eloquently traced the impact of television to the withdrawal of people from activities that once bonded them into communities.

Although, grudgingly, the Sirens cited my mobile phone thesis, they nonetheless they ferreted out my real purpose, which was the “misogynist” depiction of teenage girls — and thereby all capable and ambitious women — as gibbering airheads, like Peg and Rosie.

Okay, here’s a little irony.

Peg’s no longer with us. After a career as a capable and ambitious woman, she was taken too young by a series of ordeals that began with lupus and then moved to kidney failure, a brain tumor and a rather merciful death in “memory care.”

A year later, partly to honor Peg’s memory and to make positive use of her legacy, I started a competitive scholarship for young writers at the high school where Peg and I graduated. In four years since then, Peg and I, along with a friend named Kathy Schuster, have given $32,500 to eleven students, nine of whom were — at the time — teenage girls.

A capable and ambitious woman named Cyndi O’Connell helped me design the scholarship program so that it will keep going long after I join Peg and the three Jews on the Other Side. Neither Cyndi nor her impressive daughter Alexis have the slightest notion that I’m a benighted woman-hater. Luckily, they now have a link (see above) that will set them straight.

The beauty part of my encyclical from the eight Sirens (who shall remain nameless here) is that it possesses an irony of its own. My favorite line is where the Sirens summon a stereotype seemingly apropos to me and my ilk, referring to “a bunch of old white guys yukking it up on the golf course.”

Okay, yeah, I’m an old white guy. In my defense, however, I haven’t set foot on a golf course since I was sixteen. When I find myself among the sort of men who talk golf and compare the rough-bordered fairway to life itself, I explain that I gave up golf on “the day I figured out that I could throw the equipment farther than I could kick the ball.”

This is a pretty good line, but it never gets anything but stony silence from golfers, who are as deadly serious about their pastime as the captain about his blindfolds.

Or, as serious as my high-tech Sirens about abusers of teenage girls.

In the peroration of their cri de coeur, they write: “We enjoy a good joke as much as the next person.”

I wonder. What if the next person is the second Jew?