The police department job interview

by philg

Herschel Mendelbaum goes to the Boston Police Department and applies for a job. He’s interviewed by Sergeant O’Leary, who concludes by saying, “You will be a strong candidate for the job if you can tell me who killed Jesus.”

“Sorry, I don’t know,” answered Herschel.

“Come on now,” winked Sergeant O’Leary. “Everybody knows who really killed Jesus!”

“Sorry – I still don’t know,” said Mendelbaum.

“Tell you what I’ll do,” O’Leary said. “You go home and ask all your little Jew friends who killed Jesus. Come back after St. Patrick’s Day and if you can tell me the answer, the job is yours!”

Mendelbaum got home and his wife asked, “Did you get the job?”

He answered, “Not yet, but I think I’ve got the inside track. They’ve already got me working on a big murder case!”

aaaaand…. Happy Hanukkah for those who celebrate religious intolerance! (“… everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews. So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism.”)

12 thoughts on “The police department job interview”

  1. Heh. I remember telling – or trying to tell – that joke in mixed company with my boss the law school Dean…who had just converted to Judaism. I figured I was in the clear and beyond reproach or suspicion since I also hung the mezuzahs in the doorways of her home (I was a carpenter!) and served as the majordomo for the reception party after her successful conversion. This was right around the time Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” was in production. Antennae were deployed.

    I recited the FIRST LINE and she shot me a glance that could have frozen Lake Michigan. I stopped, waved my hands crosswise, and regained my footing with the oldie but goodie about the Priest, the Minister and the Rabbi walking into a bar, the one featuring the bear and circumcision. That got a few chuckles. Then it was drinks for everybody and I poured generously.

    Happy Hanukkah and May Peace Be With Us!

  2. Philip – just another soul confused by NYT. What # of this anti – Hanukkah celebration post? Seems to be an annual event on this blog. Hanukkah is a celebration of a victory over religious intolerance of course. Seleucids defiled Jewish Temple in Jerusalem with statures of Greek gods, not the other way around. The uprising started after Seleucid soldiers told Judah Maccabee, a village blacksmith who descended from 1st Temple Cohens, to slaughter pig in service to a Greek god – how more religiously intolerant can it be? And the war the span a generation was between Jewish rebel army and against Seleucid professional army, not against Jewish Hellenistic Army, as an unimaginable construct back then as it is now.

    • LSI: I hope that you don’t mean to suggest that material published in the New York Time is inaccurate!

    • Phil’s glib sacrilege is just his lame attempt at humor so as to generate some controversy & banter — he does it for all the Jewish holidays. The best strategy is probably just to ignore it since if he does not generate controversy one might hope that at some point he will stop — and move on to the other topics his readers more look forward to — like how a woman in Chicago has a one night stand with a proctologist and is thereby set for life.

    • Jack: Based on a quick Google search, it seems as though $700,000/year is a realistic earnings goal for a mid-career proctologist. So a child support entrepreneur in Chicago should be able to garner 20 percent of the after-tax residual. With Uncle Joe’s new taxes, let’s assume that’s 20 percent of $350,000 or a $70,000/year tax-free income ($1.26 million over 18 years).

      (Formula: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Illinois )

      The median hourly wage in Illinois is $21.01 (about $42,000 per year for full time work and that’s pre-tax), so the child support plaintiff that you posit is much more successful economically than the median full-time worker.

    • Well, Rabbit Meir Kahane ZT”L had a take that was similar to NYT’s: https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/felafel-on-rye/down-with-hanukah-by-rabbi-meir-kahane/2019/12/19/

      “What have we here? What kind of religious intolerance and bigotry? What kind of a man [Matityahu] is this for the anti-religious Hashomer Hatzair, the graceful temples of suburbia, the sophisticated intellectuals, the liberal, open-minded Jews and all the drones who have wearied us unto death with the concept of Judaism as a humanistic, open-minded, non-dogmatic, liberal, universalist (if not Marxist) religion, to honor?”

    • Bbtt, I guess all blowhards are similar in disregarding actual events to bend narrative for their perceived goal, even NYT and late Kahane ZT”L, who was taken from us too early.

    • Thanks, Alex, for that reminder of January 2019, before Facebook had truly begun to winnow out the Deplorables! I would love to see an expanded vaccine truth detector applied to the Royal Caribbean photo, e.g., “Facebook Factcheck: not everyone in a feathered headdress is related to Elizabeth Warren”.

    • Posted on January 6th, clearly an insurrection! The artificial intelligence #FactCheck might get confused with 7 vs. 9 arm Menorahs. Happy Hanukkah!

  4. Hey, I’m one of your long-time evangelical Christian readers, also a software engineer who used your Oracle text book. The orthodox Christian view is that all the people separated from God because of Adam’s Fall in Genesis “killed” Jesus. I consider Jews like Ben Shapiro to be closer cultural allies than progressive “Christians”. I’ve listened to Dennis Prager for years, and we love him.

    Please don’t have this feeling of being alienated from Bible-believing Christians like me. I’m very conservative, and I don’t spend a moment thinking of Jews as a group. God has all the power in the world to compel belief, and yet he restrains himself. He clearly favors persuasion by reason and evidence. And so must we.

    Also, I have linked to your blog from my blog.

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