Beware of God (5 page)

 

During the Inquisition, thousands of Jews were murdered simply for refusing to convert to Christianity.

 

“And now,” says Rabbi Brier, “you're going to violate the Shabbos?”

 

Houdini was also Jewish. His real name was Erich Weiss. He was an escape artist. One time they locked him in a box and put him underwater and he still managed to escape. The box was even locked from the outside.

 

They called him the King of Handcuffs.

To make yourself look like a Nazi, you can dye your hair blond. Your hair will still be black underneath, so you're not really assimilating.

 

After Kristallnacht, 30,000 Jews were put on cattle cars and sent to concentration camps. Many people suffocated before they even got there.

 

When they put you in a cattle car, try to get a spot near a window.

 

Cattle cars are locked from the outside.

 

Houdini's father was a rabbi. He had his own synagogue in Wisconsin.

 

When the cattle car comes to a stop, the Nazis will make you get out. If you are sick, they will send you to the death camps; if you are healthy, they will send you to the work camps.

 

You need to be in good shape for the Holocaust.

 

Houdini ran ten miles every day.

Bruce Lee ran six miles every day. For meals he mixed milk, eggs, meat and the blood of cows in a blender.

 

If you're kosher you can't have meat in your milkshake.

 

A famous rabbi was taken from his home by the Nazis and sent to a slave labor camp. The Nazis decided to make an example of him. In front of all the Jews, they took him outside and ordered him to eat a piece of nonkosher meat or they would kill him. “I will not eat this meat,” the rabbi said. The Nazis shot him in the head.

 

“And you,” says Rabbi Brier, “you want to eat a cheeseburger.”

 

Fifty thousand Jews were murdered in Austria. Three hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Romania. One hundred and forty thousand Jews were murdered in Germany. Three million Jews were murdered in Poland.

 

Kevin's family is originally from Poland.

H
OW TO MAKE A BOMB FROM A TENNIS BALL
:

1. Drill a hole in the tennis ball.
   
2. Fill the tennis ball with lots of broken-off match heads.
   
3. When you throw the ball, the match heads rub together and ignite, and the ball explodes.
   

Sandy Koufax was a Jew. He was a pitcher for the Dodgers.

Q: How do you know if the firing squad is Polish?

A: They're standing in a circle.

 

One way to survive a firing squad is to fall into the ditch just a split second before the Nazis start shooting. Then, just wait until dark and climb out.

 

A lot of the people in the Holocaust movies moan and groan in the pit; if you do that they'll come over and shoot you, so just be quiet and act dead.

 

Bruce Lee could kill a man three different ways with just one blow:

1. A karate punch to the temple.
   
2. A karate chop to the throat.
   
3. An uppercut to the nose.
   

The ancient Egyptians said that all Jews were lepers. Two thousand years later, so did Voltaire. A hundred years later, so did Karl Marx.

 

Rabbi Brier said that when the Jews were fleeing Egypt, the dogs didn't bark at them and that's why dogs are rewarded with heaven.

 

The Nazis trained their dogs to bite the Jews.

 

Hitler's dog was named Blondie.

 

Voltaire was a founder of something called the Enlightenment.

 

Nazi dogs don't go to heaven.

 

Karl Marx's father was Jewish.

Groucho Marx was Jewish. His real name was Julius Henry Marx. Chico's name was Leonard.

The Nazis did not discern between observant and nonobservant Jews. Anyone with three Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew.

 

“And you,” says Rabbi Brier, “you think you can just take off your yarmulke.”

 

Kevin calls my yarmulke a beanie. I am a Beanie Boy.

 

If Kevin becomes a Nazi, the first place he'll tell the SS to look for me and Deena is in his attic. But we'll be in Florida.

 

Anne Frank was murdered in Bergen-Belsen after someone reported the family to the Nazis, so really—don't tell anyone where you are going.

 

They're not really showers.

 

They'll probably make New York City into a ghetto, like the Warsaw Ghetto. If you live in a big city where there are Jews and one day there's a Holocaust, you should leave right away.

 

These are the other cities I think they'll make into ghettos: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

 

London, too, if they take over England.

 

America in German is ‘Amerika.'

 

The rabbis showed us a movie called
Ambulance
. Some Jewish kids and their schoolteacher are forced into the back of an ambulance. The doctors lock them in, attach a hose from the exhaust pipe of the truck to the back door of the ambulance and drive away.

 

The world record for holding your breath is eight minutes and six seconds. Some people said Houdini could hold his breath for twelve minutes.

 

If you take a glass bottle, fill it with gasoline, shove a rag into the bottle and light it, you can throw it and it explodes like a bomb.

Before the Romans burned Rabbi Chananya at the stake, they wrapped his body in a Torah scroll and placed tufts of water-soaked cotton around his heart to delay his death and prolong his suffering.

 

Houdini's cousin was married to Moe from
The Three Stooges
. Moe's real name was Moses Horowitz. He was Jewish.

So were Larry and Curly.

 

The Mishnah says that it was our forefather Isaac who asked God to bring suffering to the world, since suffering is a great thing. God replied that it is indeed a wonderful idea and so He made Isaac blind.

 

Who would want to kill the Stooges?

 

Sometimes the Nazis set their dogs loose on the Jews who weren't dead yet.

 

To stop a dog from attacking you, shove a finger up its butt.

 

Ninjas called that the Hidden Leaf Technique.

 

I heard that Billy Idol is a Nazi.

 

David Bowie, too.

 

Houdini's father was fired from his congregation for being too religious.

 

Cuba turned away a boat full of 1,000 Jewish refugees. So did the United States. And Turkey. Switzerland sent back 30,000.

 

In 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. The Moors turned them away, too.

 

At the end of the war, Hitler killed himself.

 

When the Americans liberated Dachau, the bodies in the ovens were still burning.

 

A lot of the American soldiers who freed the camps were black.

 

If you are black and Nazis take over, they'll make you get sterilized. That means you can't have children.

 

Before Hitler killed himself, he killed his dog Blondie because he didn't want her to suffer.

 

In a 1943 Gallup poll, 30 percent of people dismissed the news that 2 million Jews had been killed in Europe as a rumor.

 

Karl Brandt was a Nazi doctor. They hung him for war crimes. “It is no shame to stand on this scaffold,” he said.

 

During the Holocaust, a Nazi doctor named Klaus Schilling infected a thousand Jews with malaria. “Please,” he said at the Nuremberg trials, “let me finish my experiments.”

 

A German officer once went to the Passover Seder of a local rabbi. The Seder service was very long, and the German officer was getting very hungry. Finally, the rabbi's wife brought out a tray full of food. The German took one bite and spat it out. “What a stupid people!” he shouted. “Waiting all this time, just to eat bitter herbs!” The German officer walked angrily out the door. “What a fool,” said the rabbi. “If only he had waited a moment more, the bitter herbs would have been followed by a delicious meal.”

 

“And that,” says Rabbi Brier, “is the whole history of the Jews.”

 

Our families will come to Miami, too, if they haven't all been murdered in the camps. Then we'll buy a big house with a tennis court and a pool and a car that's not a Mercedes or a Ford, and maybe if Kevin isn't a Nazi he can come visit us and we can ride bikes on the beach or something.

 

Seven years after the Holocaust, 400,000 Russian Jews were sent to labor camps in Siberia.

 

Today,
Mein Kampf
is a bestseller in the Middle East.

 

Most of the time, Houdini had the keys.

 

Most of
Game of Death
where Bruce Lee fights Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wasn't really Bruce Lee. He was already dead.

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IPS FOR HITCHHIKING
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