One thing I have always enjoyed about winter-camping is that I get to hang out with the Other, in my case privileged gentiles. When I was a kid, people from that tribe ran American institutions and my family was highly suspicious of them. We blamed them for some grievances we had personally suffered. My parents had friends in that clan, but they were exceptional-- proto-hippies, leftwingers, nuclear-test-ban types. We didn't really know the WASPs. Today that cultural chasm is over. I'm sure that some ancestors of my friends were antisemites but it doesn't bother me. My friends all work with Jews and are comfortable doing so. Maybe it griped one or two of them initially, but that's long ago. One of my friends is adopting a black kid. The other day in the hut I asked him half-jokingly whether he'd done an inventory of his heart for racist feelings. He said he had, and he didn't really have any; and I believe him.
I was at my most vehemently anti-gentile when I was in college. Then I came up against gentile institutions myself for the first time and found them intimidating, exclusive. For a while I got hung up on the social clubs at Harvard that had antisemitic traditions that were beginning to crumble even as I was there. The neocons suffered from the same resentment. As Jacob Heilbrunn points out in his book, They Knew They Were Right, the neocons felt excluded from these fancy institutions and the resentment burned like rocket fuel as they built a parallel establishment.
In my case I mingled. My close Jewish friends in college detected in my obsession a deep curiosity about the WASP world, and certainly my trajectory was closer to Ralph Lauren or Mortimer Adler (he was a convert to Protestantism) than to Jeffrey Goldberg, who, mistrusting the gentile world, and understanding the Holocaust as the touchstone of WASP-Jewish relations, made aliyah to Israel from Long Island.
On my first date with my wife I was enthralled by hallmarks of her WASPiness. When she pulled off her sweater at the restaurant, I saw that her old turtleneck had holes in it. She doesn't care about that kind of thing. We have old cars now for the same reason. Back at her place that night, I got her to dig out pictures of her family at their summer compound. She and her sisters were lying out on an old weathered dock on a lake in the middle of nowhere wearing unglamorous bathing suits. It wasn't the beach scene I had grown up in, a very social scientific beach in Woods Hole, Mass. The motto of the Quaker compound they went to was Simplicity, Sincerity and Service; and those values were very different from the place I grew up going to. If I had to pick three words, they'd be, Brilliance, Irony, and Achievement.
That first date with my wife I expressed a fiendish desire to know the gentile world I'd always mistrusted, but said I didn't know if I could overcome the mistrust, and she said, anthropologically (she studied anthropology in college), that the differences between us on cultural grounds would either get bigger or smaller, so we'd soon know if we could overcome them together. I guess black and white couples go through a similar voyage. Barack and Michelle probably did too.
My wife was curious about the Jewish world. Her first Jew had been in elementary school, and she'd had a couple of Jewish boyfriends before me. Neither of them was as Lower East Side as me. When she first visited my apartment on Grand Street that I had lately shared with my grandmother, she was in shock. Before too long she moved in. Her sister told her, All you need is to find a cleaning lady, and I'm sure there are some living in the building.
Later my wife said to me that the challenge was to overcome the myths of Jewishness and Christianity we each had. The family myth and the collective myth. I still think about that a lot. When the writer David Samuels visited this blog a while back, he offered a feeling of Jewish cultural determinism that I've never felt: that we Jews are formed by this great spiritual tradition, that's who we are, and to discover it you have to read the Old Testament. I think of my identity in far more fluid terms, as formed by multiple influence, including some of the gentiles I met in college, including the first ones who I got crushes on. So my wife's idea of Jewishness as a myth has been helpful. Just like all the other myth structures.
My wife readily acknowledged the anti-semitism in her own background. But she came back at me with anti-anti-semitism. (I've written about this before. Forgive me for the repetition.) She saw it in my extended family. For instance my father once called her Brenda Frazier, a reference that only my wife and father, the two most insightful people in my life, would have gotten, to a famous old debutante and participant in society scandal. It was an insult, and helped form my wife's not-so-great relationship with my father. It reflected my father's own sociological arc, of course, born in Brooklyn, on to the City College of the neocons, his parents living in the Queens apartment house outside which Kitty Genovese was murdered as people ignored her cries (a tale that A.M. Rosenthal reconstructed a little jingoistically as a Holocaust fable; but my father understood it as a different kind of Holocaust fable: that his own Jewish parents, who he believed heard her cries, had come away from the Holocaust with a sense that you don't get involved with the goyish world.) Kitty Genovese and Brenda Frazier: these iconic women helped form the myths of my Jewish identity.
The only question for a Jew marrying into a gentile clan--as an old editor friend of mine has put it--is Would they hide you? Would they hide you when the Gestapo came for you? The answer in my case is yes, they would. It's one reason I feel comfortable with my wife's family. They're big on loyalty, they would take risks for me. Those guys in the woods would, too.
My wife, after discovering anti-anti-semitism, has always wondered about the reverse. Would they hide her? If the police were coming for her, would my extended family find an attic for her? And she wonders about that. I would apply the question more broadly, to the holding on to the concern "Is it good for the Jews?" when we have so much power in American society, to the resentful neoconservatives and the Iraq war, to the strain of dual-loyalty that so corrupted foreign-policy making in the last 10 years. Andrew Sullivan's long-delayed epiphany that the neocons were acting for Israel follows on many another's revelation on the same score, Joe Klein's, my own, Tony Judt's, John Judis's, Walt and Mearsheimer's, Colin Powell's. The media haven't touched this question, and probably won't. No, that would involve turning on a religious searchlight on Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Goldberg and Judith Miller, involve a soul-searching by hardworking intellectual action-figures (journalists) who aren't geared for that sort of reflection. They would have to tell us how much suspicion they have of antisemitism in American society, and how much of a belief they have of the necessity for Israel on that basis.
But I think that inventory is going on, silently, agonizingly, in many a Jewish heart.
(Phil Weiss)
And my Palestinian schiksa godess screwed me by converting. There went all my plans of benefiting from everything Jewish while still shitting on everything Jewish.
The first I heard of Brenda Frasier was in the movie "The Fisher King" (directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges).
Phil,
In your inquiry into anti-semitism, you continually ONLY refer to a single assimilated definition of it (whether an individual assimilated Jew would be accepted as a peer).
You IGNORE the anti-semitism that applies to Jews that continue to self-associate as Jews, either in the form of embracing Zionism as the state in which Jews self-govern, and in intentional practice of Judaism.
You know my son is now a Habadnik, a very serious one. I don't know to what he extent he experiences anti-semitism. He is much more conspicuous than you or I were/are.
The other elements that you consistently ignore or minimalize is of Jews from and in Europe. And, of Jews that live in Israel.
There is limited anti-semitism in the old-boy clubs that you encountered the last shadows of at Harvard. There is passive and some active anti-semitism in the prejudices and willing collective contempt for practising partially or non-assimilated Jews.
Also, your wife's Quaker background is the first I've heard of that. Quakers were and are not exactly the nucleus of "wasp" culture. They have always been dissenters from the various protestant approaches (even Richard Nixon's upbringing).
I lived with a Quaker woman for a year. We went to meetings regularly, which were close in spirit to my meditative approach, and did not conflict with Judaism from what I experienced (a couple references to Jesus periodically, but stated as inspiration.)
I think your adventuring spirit is not as much as you previously implied.
Were you aware that my aunt (on Jonathon's insistence) once began attending unitarian services?
"My wife, after discovering anti-anti-semitism, has always wondered about the reverse. Would they hide her? If the police were coming for her, would my extended family find an attic for her?"
This is not a facile question. Jewry has historically been the enabler of totalitiarian, authoritarian, and absolutists states (see Benjamin Ginsberg's 'The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State'), and it is playing that role again today through it's absolutist demands for perpetual US support of Zionism (no matter how fascist Israel becomes) and the never-ending 'war on terror.'
How ironic that Nazism (which was just a variety of the totalitarian structures it had itself helped formulate) became its greatest fear, as has “Islamofascism,” which Israel has played the primary role in creating.
Organized Jewry has always conjured its own enemies, and then demands that the world come to its “rescue.” One day, the world will simply respond: “Screw you,” and it will be the best thing that has ever happened to organized Jewry, as ending the enablement of dysfunction usually is.
Mortimer Adler was a Roman Catholic convert. So were Robert Novak and Lew Lehrman.
What you don't emphasize is the extent to which Jews despise other Jews. Have you heard of DIBs (Dirty Israeli Bastards) and FISH IF**king Israeli Shit Heads)? Would your father have been any nicer if you'd married a Hasid?
Not often that you read such inspired crap. And talking like he came out of Brownsville circa 1938. You have to love the delusion. Phil is just a guy who hates being jewish, can't stand other Jews. And doesn't understand why everybody doesn't feel that way.
Thank you Phil.
As a gentile who grew up in a largely Jewish environment (I can't possibly think of who was my "first Jew"), I think Phil Weiss' reflections on his identity are very strange.
The Jews in my life are not particularly eccentric or special. They are Americans and they are interested in American things, like sports, T.V., video games, drinking, and where to find good Mexican food. Most secular Jews are liberal Democrats, which is nice, and makes them part of America's better half, but that's all. I have been pro-Palestinian since I was twelve and I would love harassing other kids for wearing those olive t-shirts with the IDF crest but it was never a big deal.
Obviously I did not grow up among Orthodox Jews or among the children of a self-consciously Jewish intelligentsia. Maybe it's the Chicago context. All white people are "ethnics" here.
History is just chock full of persecution of Christians by Jews. When exactly was that Ed?
"History is just chock full of persecution of Christians by Jews. When exactly was that Ed?"
When? It began well before 1948, of course, but we could start by discussing the last 61 years and then work backward in time if we want to.
Where? Palestine and Lebanon would be very good examples.
In the seventh century, the Parthians took Jerusalem. The Jews slaughtered several thousand Christians.
Ok, lets start now and work backwards. give me a few examples where Jews shot, hung, gassed, stabbed, large numbers of Christians. Or actually anytime in an organized manner dedicated to exterminating has many Christians has possible. When again would that be Ed.
Thanks, Phil. And your wife is brilliant, too.
the communist russia was where communist jews committed the most number of killings. their massacres set the example for Hitler a decade later.
I grew up in Manhattan and was exposed to just about everybody–so I didn't have too many hangups about different groups.
I also didn't grow up in an ethnic enclave nor identify as either Jewish or Irish. Those were points of personal interest–not an identity I wore on the outside.
Very much still the case, despite my passionate defense of Israel and hatred of anti-semites.
I always loved Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx for their close knit ties to an older world–but at the same time, couldn't help but notice provincial hangups about other ethnic groups. Jews, Italians, Irish, Polish etc…all exhibited this trait just about the same. And all of them hung up on the WASP.
If I had to assess whom I was most comfortable around, it would be Jews for their openness and curiosity about others–and WASPs for being so comfortable in their own skin. Also middle class blacks.
Everybody has their own experience, I guess.
Sword of Gideon: "Phil is just a guy who hates being jewish, can't stand other Jews. And doesn't understand why everybody doesn't feel that way."
SOG is just a guy who hates Jews who are more loyal to America than Israel, can't stand Jews who put America first and doesn't understand why all Jews don't feel that way."
"communist russia was where communist was committed the most number of killings. their massacres set the example for Hitler a decade later."
If it weren't for the millions of Christians and peasants killed by most Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia and the Ukraine, Hitler never could have come to power at all. He fed on the German public's fear of rootless Jews with guns.
Of course, now put the cap back on the bottle and go to bed. There's a good little antisemite.
It is only apparent in retrospect how differently some Jews and Gentiles think. The woman who became my wife knew in the first microsecond after we met that I wasn't Jewish. It didn't dawn on me for six weeks that she actually was. Since then I've become a lot more aware that ancient tribal loyalties play a lot bigger role in relationships than I ever would have dreamed.
One thing is clear. People who think about their own tribe from the time they wake up in the morning only do so because they feel their tribe is infinitely superior and they are not about to ever surrender that just to have equal relationships with people who eat corn dogs.
That describes Phil to at T. Somebody who thinks about this stuff all day every day.
Stalin and Beria were communists. News to me, probably news to them too.
I'm sorry, didn't know that Stalin and Beria were closet Jews.
"I'm sorry, didn't know that Stalin and Beria were closet Jews."
Even Trotsky complained about the needless hostility created among the peasantry by the desecration of churches by arrogant young Bolsheviks.
chris berel: "Of course, now put the cap back on the bottle and go to bed. There's a good little antisemite."
Go read your Soznhenitsyn and Slezkine. After the revolution, Lenin needed ambitious educated apparatchiks to replace the Czarist Russians and Germans who had formerly run the massive state bureaucracies. Naturally he chose Jews, especially those who had so committed such helpful sabotage to bring about the revolution in the first place.
Sword of Gideon, here you go….greatest Jewish hits of the 20th C
Genrikh Yagoda, the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million Russians, majority Christians.
link to ourararat.com
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link to forward.com
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link to balkantravellers.com
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link to jcpa.org
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The Armenians in Armenia say that 3 million were slaughtered, nearly their entire country. US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr in his report to President Wilson complained that the Young Turks studied the worst forms of torture from history in order to inflict the cruelest methods known to man at that time on the Armenians. Morgenthau Sr. called them barbaric. (Read original in London Times archives.)
That's just the 20th C.
With that bit of misinformation, it is clear that there is little on this site of any intellectual bearing or quality.
Mondoweiss has ensured it's place on the list of antisemitic blogs.
Congrats Weiss. You proved that you are an outstanding antisemite. David Irving, Ernst Zundel, David Duke, and Adolf Hitler would all weep with joy.
Grab your copy now, because the original story that Hillel Halkin wrote in The Forward on January 28, 1994. It has been wiped clean from The Forward's site, and from Lexis-Nexis.
This is the story that Hillel Halkin referenced in his July 2007 article (I link to it above) in The New York Sun.
WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL
"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed
by Hillel Halkin, Israel.
http://report-abuse.lahana.org/blog/SHEMA%20YISRAEL.htm
or here:
link to csuchico.edu
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Nice joke. Almost funny. But not as funny as the car joke.
Got it. the Russian Communists were all Jews. ( The fact that the first chance that jews in Russia had a chance to take off they couldn't leave fast enough, not to mention Russian arms flowing to the Arabs ) And the Turks aren't really Moslems either but jews also. Who else?
Phil: "his parents living in the Queens apartment house outside which Kitty Genovese was murdered as people ignored her cries. . . his own Jewish parents, who he believed heard her cries, had come away from the Holocaust with a sense that you don't get involved with the goyish world."
Wow, I always wondered by no one called the cops. It never occurred to me that one reason was "You don't want to get involved with the goyish world."
This, of course, is none of my business (but I'll ask anyway). When you learned that your grandparents heard Kitty Genevese's screams but did nothing, how did you feel? Did you think (at the time) that, all things considered, they did the right thing? Did you see as a tragedy that they had so little connection to the larger community that they couldn't pick up the phone?
In any event, thank you for telling this story. I said in an earlier post that you were brave. And indeed you are.
Witty: "You IGNORE the anti-semitism that applies to Jews that continue to self-associate as Jews, either in the form of embracing Zionism as the state in which Jews self-govern, and in intentional practice of Judaism."
What you call anti-Semitism, most Americans simply see as putting America's interests ahead of those of Israel. America has a long history of tolerating groups (like the Amish) who simply want to live their lives, practice their religion and be left alone.
No one much cares that the Amish prefer their own society because they are a humble people with no desire to pick presidents, dictate American foreign policy, and involve this country in endless foreign wars. Furthermore the Amish do not put the interests of a foreign (and increasingly paranoid) country ahead of those of the United States. Most happily, they don't America's name abroad by shooting white phosphorous shells at UN schools.
Holy shit. Kitty Genovese of the Genovese crime family is stabbed to death, and no one hears anything, sees anything, or chooses to call the cops, over a period of 30 minutes.
Simple cowardice and an unwillingness to interfere in "family business" is a more likely explanation. There IS an interesting side note in that Genovese was living fairly openly as a lesbian, but the family and the killer insisted that had nothing to do with it.
SOG…to continue your question of Ed.
Historian gives credence to blood libel
Toaff's tome, Bloody Passovers: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders, received high praise from another Italian Jewish historian, Sergio Luzzatto, in an article in the Corriere della Serra daily entitled "Those Bloody Passovers."
Luzzatto describes Toaff's work as a "magnificent book of history…Toaff holds that from 1100 to about 1500…several crucifixions of Christian children really happened, bringing about retaliations against entire Jewish communities – punitive massacres of men, women, children. Neither in Trent in 1475 nor in other areas of Europe in the late Middle Ages were Jews always innocent victims."
"A minority of fundamentalist Ashkenazis…carried out human sacrifices," Luzzatto continued.
Toaff offers as an example the case of Saint Simonino of Trent. In March 1475, shortly after a child's body was found in a canal near the Jewish area of Trent, the city's Jews were accused of murdering Simonino and using his blood to make matzot.
[...]
Toaff refers to kabbalistic descriptions of the therapeutic uses of blood and asserts that "a black market flourished on both sides of the Alps, with Jewish merchants selling human blood, complete with rabbinic certification of the product – kosher blood." Israel Shahak writes the same thing with footnoted references. Read the rest here in the JPost:
Duscany. Well said.
I forgot about the Genovese case. That alone qualifies Weiss for psychiatric examination. How did his grandparents know that it wasn't a jewish girl being attacked. It must have taken superhuman power. How did they get those.
Phil Weiss,
This is absolutely fascinating. You have keenly explained why the Jewish residents didn't call the police — they knew that she wasn't Jewish so they didn't care — and now all that is left is to explain why the majority of the building's residents, who weren't jewish, did not call the police either. Were they mistaken and believed the screams to be of a Jewess?
I will spread the word about your incredible finding. I know that social psychologists who have been studying this phenonmen for decades will take great interest in these new findings.
Way to go Phil. Excellent work.