Author and Harvard professor Ruth Wisse will be at Princeton Public Library Thursday, October 17, at 7 p.m. to discuss her book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. Part of the library’s Thinking Allowed series of author talks co-sponsored by the library and Princeton University Press, the talk will be in the library’s Community Room.

Ms. Wisse’s book is about the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. She evokes and applauds the “genius of spontaneous Jewish joking” as well as works by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, she draws attention to the precarious conditions that have called Jewish humor into being — and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.

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