Today I thought about a story Jewish boys told at Harvard in the ’70s. The great sculptor Chaim Gross was teaching an art history class at Yale. He showed a slide of the Venus de Milo and said, "That’s a beautiful sculpture. Yes, a beautiful woman. Why? Because of the schmatte, that’s why. Without the schmatte, she’s nothing." Gross was referring to the cloth the Venus wears wrapped around her hips. But the reason it was such a funny story (my friend Mike Brown, from Coney Island, used to tell it in a guttural New York Jewish accent), was that the blond goyim in the class would look around bewildered at one another, and murmur, "What’s a schmatte?" but Gross had already moved on to the next slide.
That story was exciting to us because it was about outsider Jews giving it to the goyim, and of course there’s some superiority in it, too.Chaim Gross was teaching the WASPs about western history.
I thought about the story because after the Episcopalian funeral I attended a few days ago, I rode back to N.Y. with a gentile friend and we got to talking about the Bible, and he excitedly related a Bible story, about David and Bathsheba and Absalom and Uriah (from Samuel). The story had great impact on him, especially the part when the prophet Nathan tells David about the rich man who takes his neighbor’s sheep (a great parable indeed). My friend explained that in his freshman year at Yale, he had walked into a class called "The Bible as History"–taught by a professor Goldstein–and become entranced. He had thrown himself into the course and taken other courses from this guy and shaped his undergraduate career around it.
I’m writing this because it reveals to me, the assimilating Jew, the shadow play that was going on in the 70s between Jew and gentile. We Jews were actually acquiring considerable power and privilege in the WASP establishment. But we didn’t register it. Maybe it was impossible for us to register it, in view of our history of persecution. But it was privilege all the same: intellectual influence. I think at times Jews still fail to understand this. (C.F. Tony Judt on Jewish belief that we are living in 1938.)
Phil – I will take a first crack at this, since you hit on two themes I have some familiarity with, which are Biblical history and the reputation of the Southern (as in southern US) Jew. I'm going to focus on the latter, and while I know you did not refer to Jews from any specific geographical area such as the American South (where you know my roots run deep), you talked about "Jews acquiring considerable power and privilege in the WASP establishment." Indeed, those are the types of Jews I'm familiar with having grown up in the South, and who were personified so well by Dan Ackroyd and Jessica Tandy in the film "Driving Miss Daisy."
Many Jewish families have roots in Southern cities and small towns at least as deep as their WASP counterparts, with plenty of wealth and even some prestige to go along. They represented some of the earliest shipping merchants and financiers from Europe to the New World and kept those roles as they settled into wealthy old southern cities such as Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk and New Orleans. They prospered and produced plenty of offspring who spread out far and wide, following the money in most cases to the southern farm towns and westward behind the edge of the frontier.
It always amazed me how thin they spread themselves out into the small towns especially, as if there some kind of unwritten rule that no more than 2 or 3 Jewish families could establish themselves in any one town, save the bigger cities of course where higher concentrations of wealth permitted higher concentrations of Jews.
Perhaps because of their thinly-spread distribution, the wealth and prestige that Jews have typically enjoyed in this country have almost never been accompanied by political power. Seems that it really wasn't until so many Jews showed up in the lucrative, mass entertainment business in the mid-20th century that they started to enjoy any political power at all, so they are still quite new and naive in that game.
I think most Jewish families, similar to my Scottish ancestors, were historically never that interested in politics, and usually considered it a frivolous diversion from the real business of accumulating wealth. Perhaps partly due to the lack of political power and partly due to the anti-Semitism that many Europeans have harbored for centuries, most Jews have never felt as if they've "arrived" in the American establishment. They aren't the only ethnic or social group to share this stigma.
For many years in this country, only British aristocrats and their offspring really enjoyed top social status. And that's probably just as well, since it caused most other ethnic and social groups to strive to do better, and our American system allows anyone with initiative, determination, and reasonable intelligence to do just that. Which is what still makes the U.S. the best country to inhabit on this planet, despite all of our warts, not the least of which is our flawed and bumbling leadership.
Phil, your post made me think of this Eric Hobsbawm's essay on "Benefits of Diaspora":
Robert,
Historical Jewish residence is in the south is a little different than you described.
There were significant Jewish communities (not a single or two families) in many southern cities. I grew up with a neighbor who was a Jewish woman from Nashville, who occassionally talked about her Nashville Jewish community.
The Jewish story is largely a dialog between the importance of community vs polity.
Jewish religion emphasizes community. The structure and emphasis on long-term diaspora Jewish community over polity was both a survival mechanism and a choice.
But, to those that have rejected the importance of Jewish community, the question is mute, whether those that reject Jewish community are in diaspora or in Israel.
Richard – As you and I noted, there are significant Jewish communities in most all of the major southern cities such as Charlotte (where I live), and Nashville (where I spend some time on business). There are large temples in both of these cities where thriving Jewish communities meet and worship, similar to the Jewish community in Atlanta that was portrayed in "Driving Miss Daisy."
I grew up in a small southern town of only 15,000 or so people in the 1950's (Greenville NC). There was absolutely no evidence of Jewish community there such as a temple or synagogue, yet the town held a handful of prominent Jewish families; in fact, I knew of only two of them. One family was headed by Morris Brody, who owned the most fashionable women's clothing store in town among other businesses, and the other was headed by a court judge, Eli Bloom. They were both proud Jews — erudite and cultured gentlemen who were friends of our family and made a big impression on me as a boy. They and their families were very much part of the small-town community, but were also uniquely set apart from it when it came to their culture and religion. I suspect they held worship and celebrated holidays in each other's homes. No doubt each family also had relatives in nearby, large cities that they would often visit.
I do not believe this situation was atypical of southern towns — especially places with vibrant economies and educational institutions like my home town. I'm glad that a glimpse of Jewish life and success was part of my boyhood, for those Jewish families set a fine example for the rest of us by way of their business successes and their many contributions to the community.
The Brody family, for example, gave so much to the local university over the years that it named its medical school after them (see link: link to ecu.edu
I'm taking the time and trouble to note these personal accounts about the positive influence of Jews on my early life, because I believe it's a typical example of Jewish influence on America — an influence that extends much farther and wider than most urban Americans (and even many Jews) ever knew existed…
"that story was exciting to us because it was about outsider Jews giving it to the goyim, and of coutrse there's some superiority in it, too.Chaim Gross was teaching the WASPs about western history."
Without meaning to sound hypercritical of the proprieter of this blog, is there any hope of seeing an end to(the more genuine types of) anti-semitism as long as Jewish people cheerlead their "superiority." In all candor, it is a natural human reaction to resent those who present themselves as being "superior."
If Jewish cheerleading for their supposed "superiority" is acceptable then let's terminate the pretense that we are all one human race. And please don't protest too loudly when Christian America promotes itself through its own establishment and by cheerleading for its own interests and values.
The last accounts I saw of Jews proclaiming themselves to be "superior" are all in the Old Testament. The typical Jewish personality in my lifetime at least, has generally been one of introspection and self-deprecating humor… Woody Allen's writings and films (at least his earlier ones) being pretty good examples.
Evangelical Christians seem to dominate these days when it comes to self-promotion (in the guise of God-promotion) and yes, even intimations of superiority, I'm sad to say, since I profess to be a Christian myself, albeit a liberal one.
Yet, Jews and Christians (and some would say, Muslims as well) all have our roots in the Judeo-Christian ethic that calls us to be good stewards of the Earth (as well as our earthly bodies) while maintaining a steadfast reverence for God. This common ground gives us incredibly similar mindsets, so where have we gone wrong by focusing so much on our petty differences?
Robert,
You strike a liberal note, which I appreciate. I can remember my first Catholics, and my first blacks. My attitude was curiosity and wonder, not condemnation, and I imagine this is something of the American experience at its best. The small town judge and clothing store owner– this was not so different from the Brandeis family in Louisville, which of course produced a great Supreme Court justice (and Zionist, after being anti-Zionist before the Wilson Administration).
Richard, I think it is fair to put me in the anti-community camp. I'm not going to stop anyone from being a member of a strong community. I'm not going to condemn the Nation of Islam, or the Mormons, and I supported David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in certain key respects, the right not to be shot and burned to death… But I find the mixture of separatist community and political agendas very worrisome. Elliot Abrams is a Jewish community separatist. Elliot Abrams runs our Middle East policy in the White House. Where Did We Go Wrong? (as Bernard Lewis would put it, about Moslems)
I can sympathize with the "blond goyim" at Yale wondering what a schmatte was in Chaim Gross's art history class. I was at Columbia in the sixties. About half the students were Jewish then. It would have been virtually all Jewish but Columbia had geographic quotas in those days–half the students had to come from outside New York City. This tended to create a student population that was half Jews (from New York City) and half gentiles (from everywhere else). Coming from a small town in western Pennsylvania I was astonished both at the Jewish students' comparative sophistication and (in some cases) not very well concealed sense of their own superiority.