Purim Spoof Critic

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I am not a subscriber to The Jewish Week, though I have read the paper many times.  I had thought about subscribing and am quite hesitant to do so now. I applaud many of your efforts to force the Jewish community to face some very difficult issues, beginning even as far back as the Baruch Lanner articles. However, I currently have a copy of the Purim issue, and was very disturbed. I had to remove it from the kitchen counter, away from my children. It was neither funny nor appropriate. 

Firstly, after reading it through, if I had not looked at the title, I may have mistaken it for the anti-Semitic propaganda from Germany in the 1930s or from an Arab country. That is not humor.

I removed it from my kitchen counter because in addition to some of the suggestive humor (which my kids would not understand), the word “sex” appeared as the subject of two of the jokes in bold print on the side. It was not hidden within the article. Why does a Jewish paper need to publish such crude humor?

I was quite offended by the book title, “The Shlep” — ‘The Help’ for dyslexics.” In this day and age, in a newspaper that purports to be politically correct, why is it OK to poke fun at a disability? If a haredi newspaper made such a comment about blacks, your newspaper would be all over it.

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