Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives them latitude to call women der… - Hadley Freeman

There's clearly some bias on my part. I'm drawn to Jewish comedy because it's part of my cultural shared language, which is a fancy way of saying that it feels familiar: the neuroticism, the self-deprecation, the self-aware hyper-verbosity. These are all family traits, because they're Jewish traits.
But why *are* so many Jews comedians, given how relatively few of us there are? I’ve collected theories over the years.
The most common one, inevitably, is that comedy is the natural response to all those centuries of persecution, which I guess is possible, although I don't remember hearing about too many comedy clubs in Auschwitz.
Another popular one is that because Jews study the Talmud for meaning, we are used to looking at things from a different perspective, which is the most important quality to a comedian.
I personally suspect it has something to do with our natural lack of athleticism: if you can't be fast in the playground, you'd better be funny. Hey, no one ever saw Mel Brooks jogging, right?
And what has brought more joy to people’s lives, Blazing Saddles or running? We naturally brilliant Jews know the answer to that one.

There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman's Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is.

I understand it's a subject that gets very heated. I've tried to be very calm and measured and look at both sides of it. And what you get from the other side, if you’re just trying to defend what is literally the law in this country, is to be told you're killing children, you're a bigot – this very violent way of talking.