Jewish Maghrib Jukebox

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Mimouna in Casa - April 16

Mimouna was wonderful. It was my first mimouna in Morocco and it was a special evening. On my way to the celebration I passed Muslims in Place Verte preparing boquets of wheat for the festival.

There were about 30 people at my Mimouna celebration - mostly Muslims who had come to help celebrate. One of my favorite parts of the evening was the storytelling and joketelling. For nearly an hour, individuals jumped at the opportunity to tell joke after joke after joke. And each one was a raging success. Uproarious laughter punctuated the end of every joke. Some jokes were about Moroccans and their peculiarities. Others were about Muslims and Jews. The Muslim-Jewish jokes were obviously of particular interest to me. Those jokes (or at least the ones I understood) were more self-depricating than I had anticipated and actually poked more fun at the Muslim community than the Jewish community. It was a fascinating exchange.