A Treasury of American-Jewish Folklore

December 2, 1996
The Koppmans have compiled a wonderfully diverse collection of folklore covering 340 years of the American-Jewish experience. In their introduction, they point out that American-Jewish folklore is unusual because it contains no tales about animals, witches, ghosts or devils. Instead, it is composed of anecdotes, superstitions, eccentric characters and folk humor. The Koppmans have included examples of folklore lampooning the ignorance of non-Jews, who thought Jews were physically different from themselves. The book is well organized, beginning with the lore surrounding Jewish peddlers in the American West and moving to the tales told and collected by European Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York. The collection includes tales about Jewish celebrities like Houdini, George Jessel and George Burns; a glossary of Yiddish expressions; a section of classic American-Jewish humor; and an extensive bibliography of the sources of American-Jewish folklore. The Koppmans have produced an entertaining and valuable anthology that illustrates the positive and negative aspects of the American-Jewish experience through the use of humor.