Mostly Mishegas by Joel H. Cohen, Available on Amazon, $19.95.
OLDSMAR, Florida — The idea that Donald J. (“John,” not “Jewish”) Trump would even consider converting to Judaism is, on its face, outrageous.
Then again, Joel H. (“Hugh,” not “Hebrew”) Cohen, has plenty of outrageous thoughts about the 45th president of the United States and has, in the past, humorously and unapologetically expressed them in these pages of the San Diego Jewish World in his column, “Just Kidding.”
Now they’ve been compiled by Cohen in Mostly Mishegas: How Trump Tried to Make my People Greater Than Ever.
In the book’s foreword – not to be confused with The Forverts (פֿפֿאָרווערטס), the 113-year-old Yiddish newspaper that began life in New York as the Jewish Daily Forward – this paper’s editor, Donald H. (“Henry,” also not “Hebrew”) Harrison, says Cohen “has an eye for the ridiculous and a wonderful ear for speech patterns,” and, yes, they’re on display in every page of Cohen’s slender volume.
Two chapters are devoted to Trump’s planning an executive order “to make gefilte fish our national fish” and the ensuing protests from the lox and salmon lobbies that “gefilte fish don’t even swim” while salmon swim upstream to spawn – to which Trump says salmon die soon after, while “I prefer fish that survive.”
In the remaining 29 chapters the president critiques the Ten Commandments (“… lessons for all times – not always what you should necessarily follow”), Moses and the Exodus (“… if I’d been leading them, they certainly would have ended up in a place where there was oil”), the Hebrews’ biblical enemy (“the Phyllis Steins”), Yom Kippur (“fast is the wrong word for something that goes so slow”) and sets his sights on purchasing Israeli land like Masada (“an ideal spot for a Trump property”).
And what would a book of Jewish humor be without a groaner or two, old jokes like the time Trump called a rabbi and when told it was the president the rabbi asked, “Of what shul?”
By the way, Trump eventually decides against converting because, well, there’s the matter of a bris, and the president claims he’s a “national treasure, like the Lincoln Memorial. It’s a federal crime to deface any part.”
On the whole, Mostly Mishegas is a clever satirical critique of the 45th president, his family, friends and political appointees. In Cohen’s world, every one of them deserves a zetz and he delivers.
Mostly Mishegas is what one might call a bathroom book, the kind you read one or two chapters at a time, then put down for a while. In San Diego Jewish World, the columns appeared in separate editions, days or weeks apart. Reading them one after another, the jokes can get repetitive. Novels are continuing stories, with plots. With this book, you could plotz.
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Joel H. Cohen, 91, a Columbia School of Journalism graduate, is a freelance writer, author of 35 young-adult books, biographer (Norman Rockwell, Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby), contributor to TV Guide and major newspapers and former humor columnist for The Staten Island Advance, his hometown newspaper.
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Bruce Lowitt, 78, a mostly retired Associated Press sports writer and columnist, author of The Game Isn’t Everything, longtime contributor to San Diego Jewish World and winner of the “Putziler Prize,” is a native of Brooklyn who liked Staten Island a lot more before the Verrazzano Bridge opened in 1964.