“Does anyone have any Jewish jokes?” was Jonathan Safran Foer’s opening line at a lecture at Cornell last night, Heather Klein reports for The Cornell Daily Sun.

He began by looking at laughter through the lens of silence, calling jokes “sacrificial substitutes,� and explaining that they often “stand in place for things we can’t talk about.�
He also spoke on the relationship between laughter and community, commenting on the essential role that humor plays in the Jewish Diaspora. He said that jokes are an “antidote to alienation.�
“[The movie] Borat made me very comfortable. … It’s not that Jews saw themselves in it … Jews were able to form communities around it.�
[…]
To prime himself to write, Foer said, “I used to listen to Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You�… It put me in the place.�
Sefer Cornell, the Jewish book club under the umbrella of the Jewish Student Union, organized the talk as well as the preceding dinner-discussion in Carl Becker House.

Sun reporters Elliot Singer and David Wittenberg also interviewed the Everything Is Illuminated author. He said of that book, which was later turned into a film starring Elijah Wood:

I had absolutely no identification with my Jewish roots, and no desire to identify with them, and then I wrote this book, which is either some evidence that I did or I think I did, or just an aesthetic decision that I made — it would make a nice book. Honest to God I don’t know which one. One would look at this book as an expression of something else, like “Here’s a young American who is not content just to be an American, he wants to identify with what his past has given him, what his family has given him.� I don’t know which it is. I know I haven’t been back, I know I haven’t done any more research. I guess it’s hard even to separate the difference between aesthetic and personal decisions.