Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Berlusconi’s Jewish Joke Draws Rebuke From Vatican

Crossposted from Haaretz

The Vatican journal and the Italian bishops’ daily newsletter yesterday condemned a “Jewish joke” told by Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi on his birthday last week.

Berlusconi, who turned 74, jocularly told well wishers a joke about about a Jew that charged another Jew 3,000 euros a day to hide him during the Holocaust. “The Jew says, the question now is whether we should tell him Hitler is dead and the war is over,” Berlusconi recounted as the punchline.

The joke, which was recorded on video, was quickly distributed on the Internet by major daily La Repubblica.

Read more at Haaretz.com

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.