This afternoon I was perusing Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, and came across the following skit of Lenny Bruce about Christ and the Jews:
… you and I know what a Jew is–One Who Killed Our Lord. I don’t know if we got much press on that in Illinois— we did this about two thousand years ago—two thousand years of Polack kids whacking the shit out of us coming home from school. Dear, dear. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagans or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.
And I really searched it out, why we pay the dues. Why do you keep breaking our balls for this crime?
“Why, Jew, because you skirt the issue. You blame it on the Roman soldiers.”
Alright, I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement.
It said: “We killed him . . . signed, Morty.”
And a lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?”
“I dunno . . . it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.”
We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.
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