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L'ebreo che ride (2008) - (The laughing Jew)

Jewish humor in eight lessons and two hundred stories

God laughs. And, having inconsiderately elected themselves as His chosen people, Jews can't help but laugh at themselves.

"The great tradition of Jewish humor has found in Moni Ovadia a unique voice. As written by Giovanni Raboni, «it would be by now impossible for us to try doing without everything Ovadia has managed, in just a few years, to transform from remote and foreign, to familiar and almost our own».

The world Ovadia traverses in his theatre pieces, with the lightness and pathos of a modern storyteller, is narrated in this book from its beginning and original meaning. Alternating the Talmudic story with the striking humorous punch-line, the historical excursus about the shtetl and the ineffable maternal neurosis of the Yiddishe mame transplanted to New York, Ovadia guides us to the discovery of a deeply dialectic humorism which tells of the precariousness and natural diversity of a people born in exile from itself and others, which cultivates its roots without a homeland to recognize itself in. By showing the inseparable bond between Jewish laughter and the divine, Ovadia highlights the irresistible anarchistic and liberating tension of Yiddish humor.

A humor which dismantles the entire patrimony of certainties, ideologies and prejudices in which a community may recognize itself". (from:www.einaudi.it)