On stage last Sunday at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the comedian Alex Edelman told a Jewish joke that he said he once read in an academic journal.

It essentially goes like this : A man goes to heaven and meets God. Eager to please, the man asks God if He’d like to hear a joke. “I love jokes,” says God. So the man tells God a Holocaust joke. God doesn’t laugh and says, “I don’t find that funny.” “Well,” says the man. “I guess you had to be there.”

That startling punchline echoed as I read “The Last Jewish Joke,” a new book on the rise and decline of Jewish humor by the eminent French sociologist Michel Wieviorka. The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland who also enjoyed a good Jewish joke, Wieviorka, 79, asserts that after a period of communal security and acceptance that fol

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