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TAKE MY MA – PLEASE!

A Jewish mother, her lawyer son and his black wife walk into a courtroom …

Unfortunately for New York attorney Mark Zafrin, this is no joke.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Zafrin, whose mom, Ruth, is suing his wife, comedian Sunda Croonquist, claiming that her mother-in-law jokes are defamatory and falsely paint her as a racist.

“I take my wife’s side,” Mark Zafrin, a partner at Abrams, Fensterman, told The Post yesterday.

“Sunda didn’t do anything wrong. She’s telling stories in a humorous fashion. There is no malice. It’s funny!

“It just so happens,” Zafrin said, “that Sunda is mixed-raced [and some of her jokes] are about the strains of bringing a black woman into a Jewish family.”

Croonquist, who is half-black, half-Swedish, and has a Hindu first name, grew up Catholic in rough-and-tumble Paterson, NJ. She converted to Judaism when she married Zafrin 11 years ago.

When he learned of the lawsuit, Zafrin cracked that his reaction was, “What — are you trying to scare us? My wife’s from Paterson!”

In one of her shticks, Croonquist jokes that Ruth Zafrin told another son to “hide her pocketbook” the first time she met her daughter-in-law.

Zafrin’s mom — along with his sister, Shelley Edelman and her husband, Neil — sued Croonquist for defamation in Monmouth County, NJ, federal court, seeking unspecified damages.

Zafrin yesterday said Ruth and Shelley “never even picked up the phone” to voice their displeasure to Croonquist before filing the lawsuit.

“Getting a lawyer, frankly, was outrageous,” Zafrin said. ‘Why would you sue your brother — who is a lawyer?”

He responded by putting three lawyers from his own firm on the case for his wife.

Zafrin said his wife is “a supermom” and “extraordinarily respectful of my mother.”

Of the rift with his family, he said, “I don’t know what happened. I never understood it.”

He added, “I personally don’t believe that anyone has stopped them on the street and said anything about Sunda.”

The Edelmans, who live in Morganville, NJ, didn’t return calls.

Reached in Brooklyn, Ruth Zafrin snapped at a reporter, “You’ve done enough damage.”

jeane.macintosh@nypost.com