A young man, newly arrived from Germany in the late 1930s, recognizes a former teacher on the street in Tel Aviv. Coming abreast, the young man greets the older one with all of the old-world hon- orifics at his command. “Herr Professor, Doktor,” he begins. Responding with pleasure, but con- scious of the incongruity, the professor replies, “This is an egalitarian country, my son. Just call me adonai.” 1 A donai, in Hebrew, means “God.” Adoni (a- do-nee) simply means “mister,” and is an everyday salutation. This is one among our col- lection of some 150 jokes that stereotype so- called “Yekkes,” the label given to Jewish immigrants from Germany and Central Europe who fled to Palestine from the gathering storm (Erel 1989). The joke alludes to several ele- ments in the stereotype—which we elaborate later—including high education, deferent and formalistic behavior, exaggerated self-esteem, alienation or estrangement from the new soci- ety, and an inability or unwillingness to learn the new language. The genre flourished for about two decades from the mid-1930s at least until the 1950s, when the influx of new immigrants from other countries generated new waves of ethnic jokes. The German–Jewish immigration of the 1930s is counted as the “Fifth Aliya,” or “fifth wave.” It was preceded by four waves of immigration from Eastern European coun- tries, mostly Russia and Poland, which estab- lished a new community in Palestine, guided by Zionist ideology. This sequence, we argue, had a crucial influence on power relations and interactions between Eastern and Western “Just Call Me Adonai”: A Case Study of Ethnic Humor and Immigrant Assimilation Limor Shifman Elihu Katz University of Oxford University of Pennsylvania This article describes a case study of humor created in the course of immigrant assimilation, specifically regarding the jokes (n = 150) told by Eastern European old- timers at the expense of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes) who migrated to Palestine/Israel beginning in the mid-1930s. A taxonomy divides the corpus into jokes lampooning rigidity, exaggerated deference to authority, difficulty in language acquisition, and alienation from the new society. The jokes carry a dual message of welcome to our egalitarian nation, but please note that we, and our norms, were here first. The ethnic superiority implicit in the latter part of the message turns the tables on two earlier encounters—in Germany and the United States—in which Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland were denigrated for “embarrassing” their relatively well- established German brethren. The Yekke jokes analyzed in this article arose from a third encounter in Palestine/Israel, where, this time, the Eastern Europeans arrived earlier, as Zionist pioneers. The jokes, it is argued, constitute a kind of “revenge.” AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2005, VOL. 70 (October:843–859) Direct all correspondence to Limor Shifman, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, 1 st. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, United Kingdom (limor.shif- man@oii.ox.ac.uk). The authors thank Avraham Frank, Gad Granach, and Andreas Meyer, three proud Yekkes, for their help in collecting the data for this article; Henry Wassermann, Aziza Khazzoom, Itzhak Galnoor for insightful comments; and Nurit Carmel and Adi Gordon for their translations. The Association of Olim from Central Europe and The Siegfried Moses Parents Home kindly provided us with names of prominent members of the Yekke community for the interviews. 1 The jokes recounted here are freely translated from Hebrew. Many are known in somewhat differ- ent versions. We take full responsibility for their fun- damental accuracy. Delivered by Ingenta to : Hebrew University of Jerusalem Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:50:43