Stan­ley J. Schachter ably demon­strates that any text can become a proof­text for Torah insights in this book, which takes exam­ples of Jew­ish humor and uti­lizes them as illus­tra­tions of mod­els of Jew­ish ethics. Divid­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion into such top­ics as ​“The Dark Side of Mon­ey,” ​“Jew Against Jew,” and ​“The Learned and the Igno­rant,” Schac­ter com­bines an eru­dite knowl­edge of Bib­li­cal and Rab­binic tra­di­tion— and of Jew­ish humor. His the­sis is sim­ple. Based on Freud’s idea that a joke allows ​“the sat­is­fac­tion of an instinct… in the face of an obsta­cle that stands in its way,” Schachter posits that the bat­tle between the yet­zer ha-tov, the innate sense to do good, and the yet­zer hara, the temp­ta­tion to do evil, often sur­faces in the ten­sion of a Jew­ish joke. Although many of the jokes are less fun­ny in the con­text of an eth­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion (and have lost some­thing, by Schachter’s admis­sion, in the trans­la­tion from their orig­i­nal Hebrew or Yid­dish), their point is clear. The book is a wel­come addi­tion not only to the libraries of those look­ing for mate­r­i­al for speech­es, but also to those read­ers, already famil­iar with these jokes, who wel­come a psy­cho­log­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al approach.