Before I went to bed last night I was reading Hannah Arendt's The Jew as Pariah, from 1944. It is an essay about an assimilationist impulse: creative Jews in Europe who "were great enough to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life." These Jews used their imagination to create the idea of the social outcast, or pariah. Heine and Kafka. The essay is marred by the fact that Arendt includes in her quartet of pariahs Charlie Chaplin. Oh sure, he's Irish/gypsy background, but he is drawing on a Jewish idea, she says in a footnote. I'm not sure that works. Though of course Hitler destroyed the gypsies too.
The essay does not endorse the idea of integration in western society. And that makes sense. Assimilation has failed: Jews "did not enjoy political freedom nor full admission to the life of nations... [they] have had practical experience of just how ambiguous is the freedom which emancipation has ensured, and how treacherous the promise of equality which assimilation has held out."
And who can argue with that? It's 1944.
This morning I had a dream about a rich gentile friend. He is from an old Hudson Valley family and in fact he is coming to the Christmas that my wife and I are having this Thursday for her family, along with a bunch of other friends. In the dream I was with him at a party and then driving away in his dead mother's Mercedes. His mother was a great old Hudson River doyenne, and she was driving way too fast, right along a beach. The ocean was on one side and the land on the other. It was very clever of her, but a little scary too. She was telling me how her son's first marriage had broken up. He had married an anorexic, a sick woman. The mother had found this out when the butler had called her from a bar mitzvah to say that her daughter-in-law and her grand-daughter had not eaten their food. The old lady was shocked by this. But she said bar mitzvah as naturally as you might say Christmas.
I read this as an assimilationist dream. The destruction of the Jews that Arendt would have been aware of in 1944 created enormous rage against the very idea of assimilation. It had failed, and in its place grew up a noble Jewish resistance to the liberal west, embodied by Zionism and the Israel lobby. I am sure I would have been down with that program in the 1940s, to one degree or another, as a recovery of Jewish power. But a lot has happened since then, two generations at least. Zionism has worked out as the revisionists' idea of an iron wall against the Arab world, and anti-assimilation here has tried to be an iron wall against the gentiles, even into foreign policy. Each program has worked out and not worked out. And the truth of the Jewish-American experience is that we are not outcasts, and we have actually transformed the Establishment, in joining it.
Sounds like a bad LSD flashback from 1969.
This and even more the other Christmas posts make me wonder if I was an insensitive dolt in 1969. That Christmas, I had a Jewish girlfriend– she came up (from the same suburban Philadelphia where Phil grew up) and stayed at my parents' house in Connecticut for the holiday. She brought presents, and we gave her presents. I don't think it once occurred to me that she might have been uncomfortable. I'm not even sure she was. And so far as we knew, Hannakah hardly existed then. We had lots of discussions– politics, materialism, revolution, the weathermen, racism, the war (but not Israel-Palestine) but absolutely none about Jews and Christmas.
I'm an assimilationist as well. My parent's background is southern WASP but I grew up in te Northeast amidst mostly Irish and Italian catholics. My first summer job was from a family friend. He was Jewish. I'm pretty secular and generally enjoy hanging with Jewish friends and their proclivity to discourse about nearly all things imaginable.
Weiss: "The destruction of the Jews that Arendt would have been aware of in 1944 created enormous rage against the very idea of assimilation. It had failed, and in its place grew up a noble Jewish resistance to the liberal west, embodied by Zionism and the Israel lobbyâ¦But a lot has happened since thenâ¦And the truth of the Jewish-American experience is that we are not outcasts, and we have actually transformed the Establishment, in joining it.â
This is narrative is more false consciousness weaving. The Leninist-Stalinist/Jewish Bolshevik-perpetrated holocaust in the Soviet Union was probably the single largest contributing factor to the Nazi holocaust, as it established the precedents and ground rules by which the Nazis went on to play. Saying that the Holocaust marks a moral failure of the liberal (Christian) West is akin to saying that crude grenades launched by Hamas from Gaza marks a moral failure of all Palestinians, and of de-occupation as a concept: it's more Jewish ethnic-fundamentalist spin.
This does not excuse the reactionary mirroring of the retaliators (components of which opportunistically utilize the opening provided by the original sin to carry out their own malicious aggressive agenda) but there IS such a concept in criminal law as self-defense. And when there is no objective, impartial policing agency holding an aggressor to moral accounts, offensive/preemptory actions are justified, so long as they target only the aggressor network.
The corrupt two-party regime in Washington has held itself up as an objective Mideast arbiter even as it takes money hand over fist through the back door from Zionist bag men and M-I complex war profiteers. This has been the real "transformation" of the greedy US Establishment — from bad to worse.
Weiss, that you would have the chutzpah to even infer that Americaâs experiment in Big Government Capitalist/multi-cultural Socialism as a substitute for the Christian foundations of Western civilization is a resounding success, particularly in our current disastrous environment, is the height of Left-liberal delusionâ¦and very damaging to your own professed cause. You are basically making the Neocon/Neoliberal/liberal interventionist case that the American âmodelâ is a resounding, unambigous success. And it's one small step from there to the case that that success can be easily transferred and duplicated elsewhere. If State Capitalist multi-cultural Socialism can work here, why not world wide? Itâs merely a matter of gun powder and determination.
Thatâs why Jewish ideologues are so dangerous to world peace, whether theyâre hyper Communists, hyper Capitalists, hyper multi-culturalist Socialists, or somewhere in between: theyâre basically children projecting their whimsical fantasies upon the world, and because, collectively, theyâre articulate and good with money, they often have the wherewithal to put the fantasies in play, writ large. But epochal fantasies produced by the emotionally and morally stunted can never succeed, and only bring tragedy to their societies and the world in general.
I have no problem with a Jew being a Jew in the West within the parameters of respect for Western Christian civilization. But if a Jew wants to replace Western Christian civilization with something else, as most ideological Jews do, they should really move to Israel, or be deported there, and experiment on their own kind first. The West isnât their social-engineering experimentation lab/playground. Their social experiments remind me of Nazis doing biological experiments on concentration camp inmates, only on a larger scale.
âThe Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,â âZionism Reconsideredâ was Arendt's important first salvo against official Zionism.
Arendt rejected the sentimental notion that the Jews were innocent victims of history. In her estimation, the identification of the Jews with the absolutist state in the 1700s was an important contributing factor to the formation of modern anti-Semitism.
See Hannah Arendt,
The Jewish Writings
Schocken Books, 2007
Oy Ed – You have a really bad case of jew in my eye. You see everything as relating to jews and you attribute only sinister motives to jews. Sad. Try some memantine.
"Oy Ed – You have a really bad case of jew in my eye."
LOL. Well, I guess it's a little more original than "anti-semite." Good to see you people getting some new material, even if the intended effect is the same.
It's not hard to see why corrupt authoritarian centralizers and organized Jewry have had a long partnership. Together, they come up with a million original ways (some of them even ethnically quaint) to marginalize the opposition in the eyes of the useful idiots.
What is this that makes some Jews uncomfortable about Christmas? I would be chaffed if I was asked to participate in Chinese New Year celebrations, if invited to share the table at Eid al-Adha, if danced on the street at Vaisakhi.
Not wanting to participate in community you live in while simultaneusly complaining about being held to be an eternal stranger holds a contradiction which I could never quite understand.
Is this uniqely about Jesus Christ, or is this just a part of rejection of all celebrations by non-Jews, be it chinese, hindu or rastafarian?
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Christmas bugs the hell out of me and I am (nominally) a Protestant. Over the course of my life, I have never identified myself as a "Christian" (my families never used that term). As a consequence of the ascendancy of the "Evangelicals", I now disavow any identification with "Christians". Enjoy the holidays!
More to the point, do we kick assholes out of The Temple, or continue to bail them out? Do we live life giving equal respect to
all peoples, or parse them by accidents of birth?
Ed: "But if a Jew wants to replace Western Christian civilization with something else"
What exactly do you mean by Christian civilization compared to what we have now? Perhaps if you can explain the fundamentals in the political and social sense.
Compare the America as envisioned and manifested by the Founders, which was the culmination and apex of Free Will Christianity, a beacon of freedom, opportunity, and liberty, with a strictly limited government and an elaborate system of strong State's rights, checks and balances, and a diffusion of power that was the envy of the world, with what we have today, which is an America that is highly centralized, socialistic, Corporatist, corrupt, warmongering, internationalist-universalist-authoritarian, anti-Christian, anti-Western civilization, pro-Zionist, generally crass and greedy, with an increasingly ignorant population that has been deliberately dumbed-down by an ideological public school system. This nasty Frankensteinâs monster was a deliberate, socially-engineered creation, as was the Frankensteinâs monster that Soviet Russia became. And we all know who played a decisive role in engineering each.