Why Jewish Humor Counts: American Jews, Humor, and Seeing the Bright Side in Statistics

About the Lecture: Learn about the way many groups have interpreted data about the health of the American Jewish community with a pessimistic viewpoint rooted in asking the wrong questions about what connects American Jews to their Jewishness. By using humor as a focal point, we can instead make a case that the American Jewish community is thriving, and younger Jews have strong senses of their own Jewishness, they simply need to be captured differently on survey data. The (Jewish) kids, as they say, are alright. 

About the Lecturer: Jennifer Caplan is a scholar of American religion and popular culture and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, where I am the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati Chair in Judaic Studies. She specializes in American Judaism and works extensively with film, television, internet media, humor, graphic novels, video games, board games and other sites of pop culture engagement.