On stage last Sunday at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the comedian Alex Edelman told a Jewish joke that he said he once read in an academic journal.

It essentially goes like this: A man goes to heaven and meets God. Eager to please, the man asks God if He’d like to hear a joke. “I love jokes,” says God. So the man tells God a Holocaust joke. God doesn’t laugh and says, “I don’t find that funny.” “Well,” says the man. “I guess you had to be there.”

That startling punchline echoed as I read “The Last Jewish Joke,” a new book on the rise and decline of Jewish humor by the eminent French sociologist Michel Wieviorka. The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland who also enjoyed a good Jewish joke, Wieviorka, 79, asserts that after a period of communal security and acceptance that followed the horrors of World War II, the conditions that led to the flourishing of Jewish humor have been depleted, both in the United States and France.

“This book is not a catalog of Jewish jokes,” Wieviorka, professor of sociology at EHESS, Paris, told me in an interview. “It’s really an analysis of a golden age which is past.”

I understand what he means, even if I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions. From the 1960s to roughly the year 2000, he suggests, American and French Jews enjoyed a period of openness: antisemitism was in decline, both countries moved toward a form of multiculturalism, there was a general consensus that the Holocaust was bad and that Israel was a force for good.

In such an environment, he writes, “Jewish humor had a very clear and visible place, often found in political debates and also in literary, artistic, and intellectual life.”

The past 25 years, however, saw a rise in antisemitism on both the right and the left. Islamists, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists targeted Jews each in their own ways. Openness fasttracked assimilation, and a waning of engaged secular Jewishness. Israel was on its way to becoming an international pariah state, and Jews lost their status as a historically persecuted minority and were promoted to the status of privileged whites.

“The space for benevolent........

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