The strongest and earliest of my racist attitudes concerned Christians, as we called the goyim. I thought of the wide world of non-Jews as bland, oppressive, and stupid-- they went in for idol worship. My mother had a reproduction of Rouault’s oil painting of the Crucifixion on the second floor landing, near the Tiffany lamp she had found in a yard sale. But that was art. And Jews loved art.
I call it racism because the difference seemed biological. I was born into one tribe and they into another. Our house was filled with books.
My parents had a number of Christian friends, but they were exceptional, they were honorary Jews. One of my first political memories involved a Christian saint. The week after Norman Morrison burned himself to death on the Pentagon lawn in 1965, outside McNamara’s office, first handing his baby to a stranger, my mother went to his Quaker meeting to honor him. At 10, that seemed noble and thrilling. Not just Morrison’s incredible sacrifice, but my mother’s--to drive across Baltimore to a Christian neighborhood, alone, and to steep herself in an alien ritual (in which very little was said, as she told me later).
Morrison’s death was stamped with Jewishness for me. Jews were against the war, and so my mother was reaching out to a righteous Christian-- up against the bad Christians who had plotted Vietnam.
Of course these are childhood memories, but these racial materials seem to affect my thinking to this day. Repulsion and attraction to Christians has been a large part of my life.
When I got to college, my closest friends were Jews. I was afraid of the preppies and the WASPs, and also of the richer, WASPy Jews, as my family styled Jews who tried to pass. My friend Mike was from a Jewish enclave in Brooklyn and told a great story about the stupid goyim. The sculptor Chaim Gross was teaching art history at Yale and came to a slide of the Venus de Milo. “This is a beautiful woman. Most beautiful woman in the world, why?” Gross said in a heavy accent. “Because of the schmatte, that’s why. Without the schmatte she’s nothing.” Then he moved on to the next slide, and all the stupid goyim looked at one another trying to figure out what he meant.
(And today how many of you don’t understand that Gross was saying that the cloth around the Venus’s hips made her beautiful?)
I spent my time at the college paper, which was almost all Jewish. Halberstam and Lukas had been there before us, Jeffreys Toobin and Zucker came along later. I remember a friend marveling at Steve Chapman, who is now an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, that he could come into that place with his conservative politics and being Christian, and chip out a niche for himself. And I will never forget Mary Ridge, an Irish Catholic from the Boston area, yelling at me—when I was on a tirade about the old Harvard clubs, Porcellian, Fly, Spee, that discriminated against Jews—yelling that I was a member of a Jewish men’s club, the college newspaper.
I understood the truth of that in an instant. We were very exclusive, and how much of our discrimination was based on common culture/religion? It is why I speak about Jewish kinship networks in the American establishment today. We were one elite up against another elite. The other elite had more power than we did, more money, and god knows it was also exclusive. In his book on the neoconservatives, They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn says that neoconservatives were propelled by ethnic resentment about the glass ceiling the WASPS had erected. The Jews had been excluded by Ivy League faculties, or from administrative position, and they were determined to get inside, and so they created a "Parallel Establishment," a Jewish one. That is the establishment that gave us Iraq. And socially, it is the establishment of Larry Summers and Elena Kagan and Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.
I had that ethnic resentment and esprit-de-corps in my bones. My father had lost out on a chairmanship struggle at an old-line school that had a tradition of anti-Semitism, and at Harvard I felt that the highest plums were out of our reach, the Christians held on to them.
Yes but things were changing before our eyes. Michael Walzer, who seemed heroic to me then, was getting Jews all over the Government Department, there were Jews entering Porcellian, the most exclusive club, and there was already that sense that WASPs were walking away from the turrets of the Establishment. "I’m a Preppie, Hate Me," was the sign pinned to the back of the jacket of a classmate trudging ahead of me up the stairs of some dorm. My wife tells me that the last thing you wanted to be in the 70s was a WASP.
I was not prepared for the philosemitism. My parents loved the movie The Heartbreak Kid, which made the shiksa Cybill Shepherd and her father Eddie Albert out to be vapid, but this was a self-protective delusion. The girls I met were smart and also upper middle class, and they were interested in crossing cultures.
That blandness I had learned to despise when I was a kid I now call straightforwardness, and I’m drawn to it, maybe because I have so little straightforwardness myself. My wife says that I am incredibly tricky. Two weeks back, I asked her what she wanted to do with the dogs Saturday night when we are going out of town, and she said that she wanted to take them to the kennel, and I then said that I was seeing about our neighbor looking in on them in our house, and she stormed at me, “You always do this. You are manipulative and creepy.”
Or the other day a Jewish friend said to me, “I don’t get WASP neurosis, are they neurotic?” and later I told my wife, and she said with some venom, Of course we’re neurotic, we just don’t pour it all over you. Like I do? I said. Yes.
When manners clash in my marriage, I think of the Jewish jokes I grew up with that justified trickiness as a way of dealing with the outside world. There is the joke about the two salesmen who run into one another on the train in the old country. One salesman asks the other where he’s going and he says Minsk, then the other sees his ticket getting punched a little later and he blows up. You said Minsk so I would think Pinsk., but now I see your ticket and it's to Minsk! So why did you lie?
We howled about that joke; it justified a way of being. Yes, a Jew is deceiving another Jew in the joke, but for me it is about the reflexive and necessary camouflage that Jews had to adopt for the outside world. We were at a great disadvantage, in numbers, in cultural difference, in language and garb, and subject to persecution, so we devised protective armors of deception. We felt righteous in our suspicion of Christians, but my wife on coming into my community said, Well I always heard about anti-Semitism but I had never heard of anti-anti-Semitism. She saw the prejudice in my community against the bland stupid Christians, as she had seen the prejudice in her own, against blacks and Jews.
The Jewish identity that I am so familiar with, of bookish people at the edge of respectable society, today seems a sort of self-satisfied fraud. We are empowered, but it seems to me my Jewish generation will always be stuck in a delusion about the exclusive clubs, or in Woody Allen shtik about the goyim, about their stupidity and blandness. Even leftwing Jews make jokes about the goyim, or about Jewish powerlessness (Jon Stewart, Larry David); and the jokes keep us from making a simple observation about our incredible privilege in American society.
Which brings me back to the my core concern, the way that Zionism transformed Jewish identity, and, after the birth of Israel, the vital political importance to the Zionists of the American Jewish community, with its access to the powerful. Let me tell you how one Christian sees us.
The story is from this book about the Israel lobby. In 1949, when the Truman administration was insisting on the right of return of the 750,000 Arab refugees as a basic human right in Palestine—just as Truman had based his decision to help establish Israel because of Jewish refugees in Europe—Israeli leaders resisted him again and again and again, by fair and foul means. And toward the start of this unending drama, acting Secretary of State James Webb wrote, “Israel officials have, in fact, informed our representatives… that they intend to bring about a change in the position of the United States Govt. on the above points, through means available to them in the United States. [Webb’s emphasis] There are also indications that the Israelis are prepared to use the implied threat of force to obtain the additional territory which they desire in Palestine.”
That was in 1949. And everything Webb wrote turned out to be true: no refugees returned, more territory grabbed, implied use of force, Jewish domestic pressure on both issues. It is why I always write that Palestinian statelessness is an American Jewish achievement, it is something we sought.
And meanwhile, as my own family agonizes about Zionism, without having ever been over there, the non-Jewish family I married into has offered me only encouragement in the issues I care most about. My mother-in-law smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital. My wife’s cousin lived in Syria for a while, and is going back to Palestine and Israel this fall. They are liberals; they would have been abolitionists, or supported civil rights. They demonstrate more leadership on this issue than my Jewish friends.
The other day I was sitting with someone of my mother’s generation, a rich woman who has met many Jewish members of Obama braintrust, from Pritzkers down, and we got talking about Israel and she said, “I think about Israel all the time.”
Why? “Because I’m always afraid they are going to wipe us out.” That of course is the basis of the Jewish support for Israel in the U.S. (and of Israeli Jewish identity); and it is the basis of my own understanding of the goyim. And it’s not true.
Phil, thanks for your ever-deep honesty: profound, amazing, and–most of all–moving. I’m grateful for your conscience.
Phil wrote:
“I thought of the wide world of non-Jews as bland, oppressive, and stupid– they went in for idol worship.”
I never understood this “idol worship” business so maybe someone can explain. How is “worshipping” before the Cross, say, any different than what I see being done before the Wailing Wall, or the aspiration to build another Temple? Indeed I think I’ve even read that either non-rabbi jews or no jews at all are allowed in some areas thought to be the destroyed Temple, or are not allowed to pray there or some, so fetishizing a mere place far more than, say, any Christian symbols, no?
Otherwise I’d sure like to know whether Phil’s experience was just rather unique to the New York City or East Coast jewish crowd mostly. I must have been an “honorary jew” because in the Midwest (albeit not in big-city Chicago which might be different) I had any number of jewish friends as a kid, and what he writes just doesn’t square with my feel for them and their families. (To the effect that once inside their houses and once their doors were shut they were looking at me and my family and etc. as stupid or ignorant or hostile to them and etc.)
Anyone? On either question?
Re “idol worship” – I have talked with Muslims who bring that up about Christianity, too. They don’t get it that the statues and stained glass windows are inspiration and people are not praying “to” them.
Certainly the presence of crosses, statues and images of saints are one of the reasons why Christianity might be mislabeled as idol worship. But there is a valid reason. God is one, not three and to say that God is both three and one (by some mystery) strikes the pure monotheist as polytheism. God is the creator and alone. Only to him is it worthy to pray. Christianity says that something existed with God from the start and that is the Son and the only way to pray to the father is through the son. This is not monotheism.
The issue of prayer: that God only hears prayers that are channeled through Jesus is particularly galling, if not from the idol worship point of view, then from the “God only hears our prayers” point of view. I’m not sure all Jews would agree with this, but my impression was that the Jewish God had particularly good hearing and even if you prayed to your ancestors (as long as you had a broken heart) God was near to you and heard your prayers.
If God is particularly attentive to prayers at a place (Jerusalem’s temple) or at a time: (Day of Atonement and fast days are when god is particular attentive), these contain elements of impurity: that God has human traits to be attentive at particular times. In fact to attribute to God caring about humans seems to give God a human trait as well. Some Jews (Maimonides) believe that the sacrifices in the Temple were a concession to human frailty and thus were limited to a particular time period. But even Jews who believe that the Temple will be rebuilt and the sacrifices reinstituted, still it is to the one God that the prayers and the sacrifices will be dedicated and aimed.
In fact the two names given to God in the Hebrew Bible- (YHWH) pronounced Adonai (or Adoshem) , meaning Lord and elohim pronounced elokim, meaning God can be taken for the start of a nonmonotheistic train of Judaism. Certainly there are those who see Judaism in its roots to believe in many gods, but that Adonai was the most powerful of the gods. but the Kabbala attributing the element of justice or punishment to the name of elohim and the attribute of mercy to the name Adonai, to this day complicates Judaism’s purity of monotheism.
My own attitude is that God (or the god that I wish would exist) is close to the broken of heart and hears all prayers. I accept that there is a type of intolerance present in monotheism that seems not to be present in polytheism, but because of the emphasis on God’s oneness in the key prayer of the Shma I cannot get past oneness as a key attribute of God and a true understanding of God. These days my God is very laissez- faire and a bit weak as well. I do not accept earthquakes for one as being a necessity, but rather a fact that illustrates the imperfection of God’s creation. I consider the creation of life- from insects to humans to be something that cannot be explained by science and indicates to me some creative force beyond explanation and this I call God. I pray, because I prayed when I was younger. I struggle so that my prayer does not excuse my inaction, but there can be a type of humility that prayer contains and I find the alternative of arrogance at the root of most of humanity’s problems. There are certainly pitfalls contained in belief in God, as in the arrogant believers who believe their God entitles them to oppress others. This is an abyss that may be difficult to avoid. But part of life is a struggle to attain a true assessment of reality and the existence of a god, one god, who hears prayers, (even if he does little about what he hears) is part of the reality that I live in, in my believing moments.
Earthquakes are inherent in the design of a vibrant and volatile earth which would otherwise not be a cradle of such enormous diversity of life. To consider them a sign of “weakness” or “imperfection” is your error, if you believe in a single Creation Deity, and is what you complained of in an earlier paragraph, anthropomorphizing. You need to take the “macro” view which I think is offered by most faiths, that mere mortals are not equipped to understand the actions that they attribute to their God. Short life vs eternity stuff!
Bumblebye, we would’s God’s workings be not easily understandable to WJ? Understandable, heck, painfully obvious is how it must feel to him.
wondering jew,
You’re thinking about it too much; you’re not into the spirit of it, the rote (especially of the sign of the cross). You’ve probably read that a lot of Catholics stopped going to mass when it went from Latin to English. Why was that? When it was all in Latin they could just daydream and follow everyone else kneeling, standing, sitting. I’ve talked with Catholics who were so upset, offended even, by the mass going from Latin to English. Like they understood the Latin better than the English.
Try this on a Roman Catholic: Ask him/her the meaning of the Immaculate Conception (December 8). Most of them will say its the conception of Jesus. Its right before Christmas so how could it be the conception of Jesus! No, its the immaculate conception of Mary; she had to be free of original sin when she was conceived in her mother’s womb. But people don’t think about what they’re hearing and I wouldn’t myself if the priest hadn’t stopped us leaving the church on the Dec. 8 Holy Day of Obligation mass for public school children back when I was in Junior High. He called us back and told us he wanted to explain it so we would know. It must have been in the gospel that day and every December 8, but who was listening?
Much of what constitutes the “Christian” foundation myth is apparently “myth transference” from the Roman god Mithras to Jesus. So, next Dec 25, enjoy Mithras birthday!
Eh, at least I didn’t know the one about the immaculate conception.
“I do not accept earthquakes for one as being a necessity, but rather a fact that illustrates the imperfection of God’s creation. I consider the creation of life- from insects to humans to be something that cannot be explained by science and indicates to me some creative force beyond explanation and this I call God.”
Talk about Miniver Cheevy! You could have saved us a few words and just said “I don’t feel like believing in science, because it won’t support my racial theories.”
Sorry, Wondering Jew, my temper got the better of me. I had forgotten how much of yourself you have invested in these beliefs.
I don’t want to discourage your attempt to add to the Jewish race by Immaculate Conception.
I know one thing, tho- if you were a praying mantis, you would get your head chewed off on the first date.
I know one thing, tho- if you were a praying mantis, you would get your head chewed off on the first date.
not if he dated a nice Catholic girl on that first date.
NOTHING happens on a first date with a nice Catholic girl.
Well thank you so much wondering jew. While you may well have others dilating on this stuff is clearly your metier. After reading it I just wanted more. You are obviously a very learned guy.
>> God is one, not three and to say that God is both three and one (by some mystery) strikes the pure monotheist as polytheism.
Spoken like a person without sufficient faith or, worse, with…*gasp!*…the wrong faith. ;-)
>> God is the creator and alone. Only to him is it worthy to pray.
No one and nothing is worth of prayer and worship. Gawds, religions and “worship” are three of the worst creations humans have ever devised.
“Only to him is it worthy”
Well, looky here, how the syntax and cadence of Southern Gospel preaching has snuck into WJ’s lexicon. Can I get an “amen?
but my impression was that the Jewish God had particularly good hearing and even if you prayed to your ancestors (as long as you had a broken heart) God was near to you and heard your prayers.
First, it isn’t true that Christian need to channel their prayer to God through Jesus. The main Catholic prayer and addresses God directly: the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father/Pater Noster. No need to channel you see ;).
There seems to be agreement among bible scholars that the idea of “trinity” is mainly based on several passages from the “Old Testament” and not from the “New”. You know the “old” one we stole from you. Anyway it starts with the passages that seem to suggest a God in plural (you refer to it partly above), central are also the Three holy’s in Jesaia 6.3.
In what respect is what you write above different from praying to God via Christ?
I cannot really speak for “the Christians”, but my impression was we prayed to Jesus the Child as children, and moved on to pray to God the Father. I do not remember a single prayer to Christ in Church. So it feels you are wrong. And nobody every suggested some kind of channeling via Christ to me.
As a juvenile I read an Eastern scholar that centrally pointed out the difference between Buddha and Jesus. One is fat and seemingly well the other is dead and on the cross. Why he asked were Christian adoring a dead man, a man killed like a criminal? What does it tell about the followers? At the time it felt to me Christianity gave people a chance to pretend righteousness among among empty rituals and that the Christ symbolism was that of a higher scapegoat of freeing his followers of sins. But I grew older, not much wiser though. …
Trinity: God – Son (Mankind) – Spirit = 3.
but my impression was that the Jewish God had particularly good hearing and even if you prayed to your ancestors (as long as you had a broken heart) God was near to you and heard your prayers.
First, it isn’t true that Christian need to channel their prayer to God through Jesus. The main Catholic prayer and addresses God directly: the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father/Pater Noster. No need to channel you see ;).
There seems to be agreement among bible scholars that the idea of “trinity” is mainly based on several passages from the “Old Testament” and not from the “New”. You know the “old” one we stole from you. Anyway it starts with the passages that seem to suggest a God in plural (you refer to it partly above), central are also the Three holy’s in Jesaia 6.3.
In what respect is what you write above different from praying to God via Christ?
I cannot really speak for “the Christians”, but my impression was we prayed to Jesus the Child as children, and moved on to pray to God the Father. I do not remember a single prayer to Christ in Church. So it feels you are wrong. And nobody every suggested some kind of channeling via Christ to me.
As a juvenile I read an Eastern scholar that centrally pointed out the difference between Buddha and Jesus. One is fat and seemingly well the other is dead and on the cross. Why he asked were Christian adoring a dead man, a man killed like a criminal? What does it tell about the followers? At the time it felt to me Christianity gave people a chance to pretend righteousness among empty rituals and that the Christ symbolism was that of a higher scapegoat of freeing his followers of sins. But I grew older, not much wiser though. …
Trinity: God – Son (Mankind) – Spirit = 3.
Felt I sent this already, but it doesn’t show. So sorry if it shows twice. I probably shouldn’t respond at all, wondering j., should I?
Leander- The verse in question regarding God (not) hearing the prayers of those who don’t believe in Jesus is from John 14:6 “no man cometh unto the father but by me.” I guess I was being overly literal in saying that prayers have to pass through Jesus. According to this verse, first comes belief in Jesus (and his sacrifice?) and then you can pray straight to God. Certainly from a Jewish point of view John is not the friendliest of the 4 gospels, probably the least friendly, but that’s a different topic.
I don’t know what about the verse from Isaiah 6 indicates the trinity of God. Saying holy three times need not infer there are 3 gods unless one tends in that direction to begin with.
“I’m not sure all Jews would agree with this, but my impression was that the Jewish God had particularly good hearing and even if you prayed to your ancestors (as long as you had a broken heart) God was near to you and heard your prayers.”
Ah, so God hears your broken-hearted prayers, but the screams of the Holocaust victims He is deaf to?
You don’t need idols, statues, ikons, Wondering Jew. All you need is a mirror, and you’ve got a Temple, and a minyan
“These days my God is very laissez- faire and a bit weak as well.”
Sure, what other explanation can there be for what’s happened to the Jews? Good thing He’s got you on His side.
I think Phil observes the Jews who are the most publicized Jews that he thinks “have made it” and have wealth or influence and translates that to Jews as a whole.
As another poster on here mentioned, the vast majority of Jews aren’t in that catagory any more than most gentiles are. They are part of the lower,middle class and upper middle class of ordinary Americans with the same practical concerns, life style traditions, or expectations and in the same situtations as everyone.
I am also one who thinks elite educations are often overestimated, depending I guess on if you need that bump to get into some arena where it counts. Almost all of my family. for several generations has gone to Harvard, Yale or Duke out of tradition mainly, simply to come back and run their own companies and businesses, not as a stepping stone to some corporate or political career. My two younger brothers are Harvard MBA ‘s and one of them is, I hate to say, truely an idiot in the intellectual curiousity sense or anything outside of his own bizness interest. At the same time two of their friends from a Jewish family both went to the Univ of Flordia to come back and work in their father’s business.
Damn if I know what this means except maybe the choices most people make, besides depending on their financial ability, is determined more by their lives in their own ‘regional’ sphere than some ‘universal’ ethnic or religious attitude.
I had any number of jewish friends as a kid, and what he writes just doesn’t square with my feel for them and their families. (To the effect that once inside their houses and once their doors were shut they were looking at me and my family and etc. as stupid or ignorant or hostile to them and etc.)
this was my experience on the west coast growing up. w/one exception. i didn’t know they were jewish until i grew up and someone explained to me how you could tell a person was jewish (by their name).
i came from a small town and went thru school beginning from kindergarten thru high school with the very same kids. there were lots of jewish kids they just blended like everybody else. i literally grew up not knowing what i jew was, it was not a topic of discussion ever that i recall.
I have to say my experience was pretty much the same. I was a full grown adult before I ever heard anyone allude to the ‘difference’ between gentiles and jews…and oddly enough it came from a Jew concerned about his ‘acceptance’ by someone or some group, I can’t even remember exactly what it was about now. ..but I remember he was dating a gentile girl at one time so maybe it was about being accepted by her family.
He must have worked it out, whatever it was, because he’s still jewish and been married to another gentile girl for 2o some years.
My experience is similiar, the women just will not divorce me. Depriving me of one the normative, touchstone, centering processes of my generation. She only thinks of herself.
woman, not women! Singular! What a mistake to make. I have nightmares about polygamy, from which I awake screaming and sweat-soaked, clutching imaginary credit-card bills.
I think a lot of this can be understood in class terms; the petit-bourgeois pride in being educated, and a set of assumptions about the kinds of jobs educated people should be able to get. But in an imperialist world, class is frequently mixed up with ethnic determinants, quite deliberately, because this is an imperial strategy. The British were especially good at this; for instance, they imported an entire lower middle class from the Indian subcontinent to their possessions in east Africa and the Caribbean. Thus, when a working-class revolt took place, it hit these people, who acted as class buffers, rather than hitting the true colonial and postcolonial rulers, who were absent or well concealed, and the British papers could report it as an outbreak of savage racial hatred, thus obscuring the carefully constructed element of class rule. Now, if you can understand that, you can understand how larger, external forces, driven by a number of empires successively, pushed the Jews into a similar though slightly more elevated position. But the Jews had a choice, a hundred years ago: to join the international movement against imperialism and colonialism, or to become part of it. Had it not been for zionism, the Jews would I think overwhelmingly have joined the anti-imperialist global current. Many of course did.
When I say “a slightly more elevated level” what I mean is that, in the West at least, Jews have tended to be selected in a fairly large proportion for middle-middle class roles. However, the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suffered from a degree of discrimination which prevented this, and subsequently many migrated to Western Europe and the Americas bringing with them a considerable amount of accumulated bitterness.
The middle-middle class includes professional intellectuals, managers, import-export merchants, and medium-ranking officials in the governmental apparatus. Many individual Jews have selected themselves for upper-middle class roles, as bankers in particular. The upper-middle class is the financial elite, excluding the landowners. In the traditional scheme of class stratification, the upper class is entirely composed of hereditary landowners and their families; often their children assume senior positions in the armed forces, the government, or the religious establishment, because under primogeniture they can’t all inherit the landed estates.
The middle-middle class, as its name suggests, is the class pivot of any society. The middle-middle class tend to see themselves as enlightened moderates, perhaps a little dismissive of both the right-wing pretensions of the upper class, and the left-wing pretensions of the working class. Middle-middle class social philosophy reflects this too; it tends to be simultaneously progressive and liberal, which is a combination whose internal contradictions come to the surface in times of extreme social stress.
Just to round out my instant class analysis, let me add that the middle-middle class includes not just ‘professional intellectuals’ but professionals of all sorts. However, the days are gone when all doctors, all teachers, or all lawyers could be defined as ‘professionals’ in this sense; most are clearly lower-middle class, parts of gigantic mass industries in which they have no personal influence or power whatsoever. But senior members of all these professions are middle-middle class; hospital consultants, independent medical specialists, prestigious lawyers, and important academics with public personas. Also, I should have placed industrialists alongside bankers as upper-middle class. The terms ‘middle-middle class’ and ‘upper-middle class’ correspond to the french ‘petit-bourgeois’ and ‘grand-bourgeois’, and of course major industrialists are ‘grands bourgeois’. But it is important to remember two things about industrialists: one, they normally operate on borrowed capital, and are thus dependent on bankers; and two, their relationship to the nation-state is slightly less flexible than that of bankers, who in principle have no national allegiances at all. Nowadays, big industry has been conglomerised and has lost its relationship to the nation-state, which has led to the export of industrial capital to lower-wage parts of the world, one of the main reasons for the breakdown of US society. This could not have happened in Henry Ford’s day. Under certain circumstances, big industrialists can make common cause with landowners against bankers, which is precisely what happened in Germany to bring about the emergence of the nazi ruling coalition.
What I am trying to do here is show the objective determinants of political attitudes, specifically, Jewish ones. If anyone thinks this approach is excessively ‘objective’ and misses something important about ‘the Jewish spirit’, then we can discuss it. I do not exclude subjective factors, even at the level of whole nations, hence my interest in Jung (who burned his own fingers when he discussed this in the 1930s and thereafter kept quiet about it).
Well, yes, Phil has not yet much indicated he is aware of how his parental (and later his own) socio-economic class helped or hindered him in the growth of his awareness of his own racism.
I don’t think these sort of attitudes are any more than rationalisations of class instincts. The basic class instinct is to fear the hostility of those whose class position is beneath one’s own, and to look for acceptably civilised ways of ensuring that their hostility never takes the form of violence.
I wish you lived near me so we could trade taking care of each others dogs. Oh, how many places I could go and would love to go if I could just pick up and go and not worry about these dogs. Taking them to the kennel and back home are big chores. My neighbors are old people; I’d never trust them not to hurt themselves.
There are an awful lot of non-Jews completely left out of your essay! (A lot of Jews, too, I dare say.) Like, the 95% of us who live ordinary lives, work, have families, take care of kids and our homes, don’t aspire to Ivy League schools and elite clubs, watch movies and TV, have worries, retire, get old and spend the a quarter of their lives being old, etc. There is a “striving” quality to the Jewishness you describe. A few years ago, my neighbor, a retired doctor and Jewish who went to an Ivy League school himself, told me that his grandson was going to such-and-such state university because he probably couldn’t get into the Ivy League schools and I didn’t say anything, just nodded, but I can see a lot of reasons for not going to an Ivy League school. I’ve known people who went to Ivy League schools and would have been better off going to the state school. The rest of us do pick up on this nuttiness that if you don’t “get into” an elite college/university, you might as well not go. No, you’ll go through life and have ups and downs and probably the really good things that happen for you as well as the really bad will have nothing to do with where you went to school.
I grew up Roman Catholic in the 50′s and 60′s and that whole “culture” has changed. Around age 18, I knew I didn’t believe it (What happened to the 3 Wise Men? They traveled all that way to see the baby Jesus and then just disappeared?). For a period of over 20 years, I didn’t think about the Catholic Church, until my daughter was in school and knew kids who were Catholic and I talked to their mothers at Girl Scouts, etc. The Catholic religion has TOTALLY changed from what it was when I was a kid. They have general confessions; most people don’t go to mass, even the kids (used to be a mortal sin to miss mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation); dropping the “No meat on Fridays” thing seems to have shaken the faith of a lot of people, weirdly trivial as that seems.
So – I wonder if this Jewishness thing stands out more now because with other groups, the unifying culture has fallen away so much? Because of an effort to unify, some of which is Israel, Jewishness is standing there while the rest of American society mushed out into one (bland?) culture?
Re the Venus de Milo’s schmatte – the Louvre website had a slideshow with audio on the Winged Victory. A lot of description about the masterful carving of the drapery and I could really appreciate what they were talking about. What kind of Yale professor would just say “its the schmatte” when there is SO much he could say? What a boob.
“its the schmatte” when there is SO much he could say? What a boob.”
You can say that again! Thank God that schmatte is so small!
Oy. Did that come out like I was talking about the Venus de Milo’s boob?
Who isn’t? All she’s got is that little schmatte around her hips! I wonder what’s under it?
Pushy parvenues v.s. country club wasps. Jews v.s. Preppies. Sounds like the late ’50s\early ’60s. The Ivy League – what a dull, neurotic hothouse.
Dude, you take the Jewish thing way too seriously. It’s just a beanie and a legend.(“Beanie”refers to the yarmulke, the only had dumber than the beret.) That’s what the great mystery is and what the answer is to all these years of introspection. I call this obsession with all the things Jewish, the Jewish sickness. I have a relatively benign case of it-mainly revealing itself in habits liking reading all the credits of movies. ..
“the yarmulke, the only had dumber than the beret”
Nonsense! The baseball cap is so dumb that just putting one on reduces your IQ by fifteen points. (Turn it round backwards and you lose another fifteen.)
Put on a beret, though, and you instantly turn into a French intellectual and can sit in cafes, drinking cheap red wine, smoking Gauloises, and talking pretentious drivel.
Unless it’s a military beret, in which case you turn into tank commander.
I have a theory about the fashion for wearing baseball caps backwards. I suspect it started with the Nation of Islam. As you know they are given to slightly off-beat interpretations of Muslim practices, of which wearing a brimless cap is one. I think the reason for this is that you can keep it on while praying, which involves putting your forehead to the ground.
Rowan, a fifteen year study, sponsored by the government at a cost of 37.5 million dollars, has determined that when you put a baseball (a “feed cap”) on backwards, it shades the back of your neck.
Even Muslims get sunburned.
And a hat that only shades the back of your neck when you turn it round backwards has to be about as dumb as you can get.
I like your Aussie ones with dangly corks to keep the flies off. Only work if you’ve got flies of course.
The broad brimmed drover’s hat is a sensible and practical item. Mine is made of leather, to give greater protection against the notorious flying snakes.
ah, but we will always have Jackie.
Wearing a pill box on one’s head — the precursor to a generation addicted to popping pills.
Good post, Phil. Nice.
As an outsider married and father-ified in (and with other branches now tangled in the family tree, thanks to an aunt and cousin of recent vintage), I think there is a particular point of absurdity that Jews frequently seem to overlook in wailing of their deprivations in life. Despite a few timid hints at it I never seem to make any headway with it, but I wonder what you think. (You’re much more open-minded than all of my various relatives.)
My point is simply, here you are, at ***Harvard***, bitching and moaning Woe is me because you’re not in some slightly higher perceived niche. Same with my relatives, whose degrees are of the finest possible prestige (you name the Ivy, they went there and collected the certificate to show it). Like you, they bitch and moan that they were and are being discriminated against. I just don’t get it.
Little ol’ me sits back and thinks only of the zillions of Christians (i.e. non-Jews — after all, we all know that Christians is just a codeword) who would thrill to get in to any of these colleges and who would take out second mortgages or prostitute themselves to do it. They can’t believe the stratospheric circles that every Jew they know moves in, and in numbers off-the-charts disproportionate with what you would expect. (One of my relatives swears it is actually *harder* for a Jew to get into an Ivy League college than for a Christian, because admissions committees are trying to limit the number of Jews they take.)
When these Christians hear Jews bitching that they are the objects of discrimination, there’s no special resentment or, as far as I can tell, even much coherent thought about it. It simply doesn’t compute. I have to say, after all these years, it still doesn’t compute with me. Forget the middle class. I live here surrounded by rural white poverty like you cannot imagine, guys and women whose lives are of the proverbial quiet desperation. Their kids’ lives are likely to be worse than what I am seeing here. My sense is, Jews never think of “Christians” as including these people, too — or even the middle classes. Jews want to be at the absolute tip-top of the pyramid, not just stratospherically clustered near the tip. Funny thing is, I still can’t figure out what that would mean. POTUS? Half of the supreme court? Almost there. Barons of the media? Titans of Hollywood? What exactly is the end game?
And yet my family members don’t see things this way at all. They see themselves surrounded by armies of anti-semites, like me, who are conspiring to keep them out. But out of what? I look around and all I see is privilege…
When I was at Columbia back in the sixties, the school used geographic quotas to limit the number of Jews. Fifty percent of the students had to come from outside a 50 mile radius of New York City. Otherwise, the administration feared, the school would have been entirely Jewish, which it largely was anyway.
Phil:
I use the following indicator for self-assessment on some of the points you raise. To me, how much one’s identity is tied to his/her ethnicity is to look a the circle of friends they hang around with. Not colleagues because that is not necessarily a voluntary group. The good thing about this is that it is objective.
As for “Jewishness” of East coast elites, the most illuminating reading I have had is the book by my physics professor, Richard Feynman. Read his “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track”, particularly his letter to an editor, Tina Levitan, starting on page 235.
What this tells me is what we already know.
People get their attitudes mainly from their parents teachings and their closest social circle.
Some question and break out with different ideas, some don’t, maybe for lack of certain brain sparks or experiences or whatever.
As a gentile the main difference I see is gentiles, at least US gentiles, weren’t really ‘obsessed’ with the Jews to the degree the Jews were obsessed with the gentile establishment because of being outsiders. Many gentiles were, as a society, discriminatory of course, but had the majority been as obsessed as insiders as the Jews were as outsiders, which is natural for outsiders, Jews would still be mainly ‘outsiders’.
You would think that inside-outside line would have been more erased in the Jewish community by now and maybe it has by the majority for all practical purposes. But as we see in Phil’s emotional-intellectual battle in the struggle of identity, truth and what is reality and what isn’t, the ghost still lingers.
I wonder how many Jews had paintings of the crucifixion in their homes and what effect this had other than art appreciation.
If you ever turn to Catholicism, here’s a tip to remember: the only saint that really works is Saint Anthony.
“If you ever turn to Catholicism, here’s a tip to remember: the only saint that really works is Saint Anthony.”
I know it’s pretty common, it’s not like he’s unknown, but I’m pretty partial to St Francis of Assisi. For guys like me, he’s the patron.
St Francis is good for guidance and enlightenment. But if you really need to get something done, Saint Anthony is the man. Not quite sure about which candles work best though, experts are still divided on that issue.
Tuyzenfloot, which Anthony do you prefer, the Egyptian first hermit that was the founder of monasticism or the Italian one of Padua that joined Mooser’s Franciscan Order and became Doctor of the Church?
The first is often pictured with a walking stick in the shape of a Tau and pig symbolizing the great impure temptations he survived as a hermit and is the one to light candles to if you catch scurvy or other epidemics, if you want to lead a life of solitude or if you run a deli because he’s the patron saint of the charcutiers.
You light a candle for the Italian one if you lost something and can’t find it; he’ll lead you to it. He’s your patron saint if you’re into ceramics, if you’re wife is sterile or if you’re aspiring for a male heir.
Whatever you do, don’t go for the electric candles, they don’t work so good when you need some help from up there.
Walid, it’s the italian one. It’s an actual quote from the grandmother of a friend. I don’t want to poke fun too much at it because , well, the comfort people have gotten from things like this is very real. It’s straight polytheism though.
“I wonder how many Jews had paintings of the crucifixion in their homes and what effect this had other than art appreciation.”
I walked away from the computer, it took about a half an hour, and than I knew it, I was a very privileged person. I had just seen with my own eyes, the all-time gosh darn stupidest goddam thing anybody has ever said in a comments section, and I didn’t even have to look for it. In at least, oh, a dozen contexts of stupidity, Wondering Jew has hit the bulls-eye, rung the bell, got the ring over the bottle, and is entitled ot a cigar, coco-nut or stuffed animal, according to choice.
Perhaps Wondering Jew could start a non-profit charity to distribute ear-plugs to needy Jewish children the day after Thanksgiving. Jesus, what a corker!
i’m still trying to figure out what “what effect this had other than art appreciation” means.
i have this really cool picture in my house that came in an oval frame w/domed glass (not flat glass) of this really huge thick cross emerging out of a turbulent ocean w/waves crashing and a woman w/a long pink cloak over a red dress is hanging onto the cross for dear life w/her long wavy blond hair hanging down her back. on the bottom edge of image is a small remnant of wooden wreckage being consumed by the waves.
i love it. yard sale find. it never occurred to me to wonder about the impact it had on my kid growing up w/that image hanging in the bathroom.
“i’m still trying to figure out what “what effect this had other than art appreciation” means.”
Wondering Jew will have to tell us whether it’s worse or better than a Christmas tree. He’s always harping about Phil’s Christmas tree.
But it has a wonderful insinuationist quality to it, doesn’t it? As if it was somehow indicative of secret anti-Jewish tendencies on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Weiss.
Nobody, nobody I have ever seen combines ignorance and a sort of credulous omniscience like WJ. Oh, Witty tries, but with WJ you get a really mean, pissy aspect that Witty can’t emulate. Mainly cause his word-lettuce tends to “bolt” on him.
As a kid, I had a Sesame Street “Ernie” finger-puppet. To this day, I’m still not a huge fan of rubber duckies. What went wrong?!
And, no, I don’t indulge in digital penetration of the anus. ;-)
“I wonder how many Jews had paintings of the crucifixion in their homes and what effect this had other than art appreciation.”
Hey, I know! Add up the number of self-haters and anti-Zionists and compare to the number of crucifixion paintings. I bet the numbers will match exactly!
I wonder, should Jewish kids even go outside between Thanksgiving and Christmas? I’d keep ‘em in around Easter, too.
“I wonder how many Jews had paintings of the crucifixion in their homes and what effect this had other than art appreciation.”
“Richard, my son, have you seen my hammer and some nails? Oh, and where is the cat? I’ve been missing the cat. Why are you staring at that painting like that, are you crazy? Where is the cat? Wait Richard, what’s the red stuff on your hands? Richard, where is the cat? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE CAT??? What the hell do you mean saying ‘Fluffy will be back in three days”….
Screams, thumps, and we fade out on the sound of a hammer driving a nail through human flesh.
What kind of art was hung on the walls in your home, Mooser?
Mostly pictures of digs playing poker or shooting pool, and nudes on black velvet in the den. My Mom had a life size Elvis statue, but we kids were not allowed in the master bedroom. She had a sort of shrine, to the King, from what I’ve heard.
But you can’t fit a whole lotta art on the inside of a refrigerator box. And before you make any nasty remarks about we must have been too poor to be Jews, let me inform you, it was from a top-of-the-line Frigidaire side-by-side!
top that!
so wj, what kind of art did you grow up with?
I don’t recall much art hanging in our house. I recall a painting of three men’s faces in closeup praying. The men were at various angles, so that one had to look carefully to see what the painting really was. I remember a painting in my grandparents’ house of ultra Orthodox in Europe in a synagogue setting.
My sister called me up, and informed that was not an Elvis statue, it was a shrine to Nat “King” Cole.
I’m glad I was wrong about that. Way to go, Mom!
“I recall a painting of three men’s faces in closeup praying. “
I’ve seen that “painting” many times, WJ. It’s the “three Wise Men” associated with Christ’s birth. You poor son-of-a-bitch, you are so screwed. And you looked at it, instead of covering your eyes and spitting? What, you didn’t notice that convenient urn? No wonder you are so crazy.
Were you allowed to use the letter “t” when you were growing up?
God, how we suffer! Those Gentiles sneak the Crucifixion into everything! Use your computer, blow the “t” up to about 72pts. plus, and you can see the holes in the cross-bar.
“I remember a painting in my grandparents’ house of ultra Orthodox in Europe in a synagogue setting”
My cousin *** Orthodox, who was “all three”,( brilliant at school, brilliant at schul, and nobody’s fool) had a collection of Playboy magazines in his room, which I stumbled over one Shabbos day. I ratted him out, natch, just to see what would happen. I was about 12, he was oh about 18 or so. Good times.
No more effect than the evil eye of that gypsy woman of lore. She’s been painted how many times? Best to hang her in the bathroom–helps quick disposal, making room for the next.
Thanks for following up on the theme.
My blog posts on the same themes:
link to rwitty.wordpress.com
link to rwitty.wordpress.com
link to rwitty.wordpress.com
I still wish you used more active voice, rather than the passive voice of what you were “formed by”.
We are certainly momentums from the past, and also socialized into and conform to the present, but we are also adults in which our attitudes are free and our own, our teaching our own, our responsibility our own.
I also wish you would consider the prospect of “reverse racism”, yours, to explore. I am not accusing of that. I don’t know one way or another. I definitely believe that you do bear some prejudicial attitudes formed early in your life towards classes of Jews. I know you came to think of the elite accomplishing ivy league Jews as your “we”, but also that you remained alienated from them in ways.
When confronted by the accusation “you are a racist”, part of me recoils and angers at the accuser, and another part me knows that it is my responsibility to inquire if it is true in fact.
When growing up, my grandfather was a fishmonger (not an Ivy Leaguer), who happened to write in only 7 languages actively. My father was a schmatte-dealer as was his father (Edith’s father), and I was when inheriting his business in the mid-90′s while I produced left-wing audiobooks.
So Phil was “following up” on your theme?
Where would he be without you to lead him? It is important to ask though Witty, do you still consider him bought-and-paid-for-by-the-Gazans, as you said earlier? Still consider him “brainwashed” and “coerced”?
You do know what the words “part two” mean?
Oh, take it easy on him, Mooser. It’s not like anyone actually reads his podunk blog anymore, not since he’s got the comments section locked up tighter than the IDF on patrol in East Jerusalem during a Palestinian election.
Witty, don’t worry, you’ll always be the bosses son.
Following up on your theme? On those posts dated 2007?
My posts are dated a day after Phil started the “notes on my racism (part 1).
I took it as a challenge, a sincere inquiry into my current and history of relative racism and in what form.
It included inquiry into my racism towards others, and racism towards those that are named as my own, but I still regarded as others.
For example, if true, I hope Phil acknowledges that he thinks of Zionist Jews as “them”, NOT as “we”.
So, he can honestly inquire into how he thinks of, treats, and proposes to institutionalize treatment of “them”‘s.
Its an important inquiry into how one relates to those of color, Arabs and Muslims more specifically in this case, and to one’s potentially hated “uncles”.
Witty why does your contribution read like an arrid apology from the mountain top while Phil’s reads like an honest sharing together in the cellar?
“Witty why does your contribution read like an arrid apology from the mountain top while Phil’s reads like an honest sharing together in the cellar?”
Nicely said, Citizen
It would be wonderful if all here conducted a sincere self-inquiry into their prejudices, their racism, common or “reverse”.
It would dispel (or at least moderate) some of the accusations of hypocrisy on the part of authors and posters.
I did take a hard look at MY attitudes towards Arabs, Palestinians, Jews, Americans, others of color in my inquiry.
I posed my inquiry in three ways.
1. Looking at my own attitudes
2. Looking at my participation as leader and as follower of others’ attitudes (collective prejudices formed)
3. Looking at the political institutionalization of prejudices into policy and/or war
I expect similar from Phil (in active and personal voice), not what his parents imprinted, not what Harvard imprinted, but his own as his own.
And, I hope for similar from you.
Says the man who denies the Palestinian right of return because, hey, they just ain’t Jewish enough.
Seriously, get over yourself. YOU are the racist. Not us.
Okay, I said I didn’t really understand why Phil wrote these pieces, so I went over to Witty’s and read his.
Now I understand. I could very well see why Phil would want to break the stereotype of Jews as inveterate liars, and intellectual sneak-thieves.
“I did take a hard look at MY…”
You shouldn’t try that at home, Witty, they have machines for it at the doctor’s office. And the barium enema doesn’t hurt at all, from what I’ve heard.
“common or “reverse”.
Yeah, Witty, you just keep working that “reverse racism” angle.
I’m sure all the answers are in there.
I may have grown up in a refrigerator box, but I at least have the comfort of knowing that phrase never came out of my mouth.
I don’t expect any sincere inquiry from you Chaos.
The world would be better if you bothered.
“We are certainly momentums from the past,”
Ah yes, these are momentums to remember. (Talk about crucifixion! What the hell has English ever done to you, Witty?)
Why, that’s Massachusetts English, thank you, and even more, it’s roaming young in childhood there and never meeting anyone who said “heine” or “ass” instead of “tukas.” (Except maybe Witty’s childhood black nanny picked up tukas inside the way there.)
link to rwitty.wordpress.com
haven’t been here much lately. thanks to citizen. i had no idea that RWitty had a blog. but, please, don’t attribute Witty’s English to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. it’s purely personal.
for me it is about the reflexive and necessary camouflage that Jews had to adopt for the outside world. We were at a great disadvantage, in numbers, in cultural difference, in language and garb, and subject to persecution, so we devised protective armors of deception. We felt righteous in our suspicion of Christians
What a bunch…
So you have to permeate or infiltrate the group through crypsis to become part of it. Would they not like you if you were straight with them?
Why become part of it, when your core instinct tells you that they reject you?
Chu, I just started to comment on that same line of thought in Phil’s essay.
The college I went to — a Catholic university — was established well before the first German Jews arrived in the city, in the early 1800s. Those German Jews arrived with a great deal of wealth; the Catholic college was built by immigrants who struggled to create something to make a better life for their children.
The Jews were resentful of the Catholics, that the Catholics had a college and they didn’t. So — and this is all recorded on a video history of German Jews, produced by Jews, in this city — the Jews connived to harm the Catholic college, to cheat it, to blacken its reputation.
“great disadvantage” indeed.
It’s like saying “we had to camouflage ourselves and our intent from the dreaded Christians, so we could penetrate their society, and usurp for our own ethnicity.” What a vengeful way of thinking.
ugh. :(
Psy., that’s a pretty serious charge. C’mon. I want proof, at a minimum the name of the school you went to. My guess is, you went to a place in the midwest, where there were a lot of Germans? Could it be Marquette? I really don’t know but would like to, esp. what this video history is all about.
little closer to the East Coast.
link to amazon.com
Ah, there’s nothin wrong with Phil Weiss a hitch in the service wouldn’t cure! Thank God, I never did one!
Moosie, you don’t need to declare the obvious.
It reads, to me, like a bowdlerised “Portnoy’s Complaint” . Where is the sex? What happened the first time he saw a Gentile girl’s instep? And where the hell is the rebellion?
Anyway, Citizen, as is quite obvious, I don’t really “get” these pieces.
But anyway, Citizen Here’s something to keep you busy
I personally, can’t understand why Phil didn’t get a motorcycle while he was at college. It’s not everything, but it helps, and it’s good transportation, too. If your parents don’t like it, just tell them Bobby Zimmerman has one.
But Bobby rode a scooter. The motorcycle was just for show.
He put on a hell of a show with it, didn’t he?
Convinced me to never, ever, ride without the best helmet I could afford.
And I insist everybody in The Litvaks (my all Jewish sport-bike posse) wear one too. It’s a mitzvah.
this post is fascinating to me phil. in a way i feel sorry your head was so filled w/this kind of concern as a kid but that’s all water under the bridge.
my observation at the time of the vietnam war (60′s and 70′s) is many people were dropping out. being from northern cal i was aware of the communes and people heading for the hills to get down w/nature and having a more ‘meaningful’ organic lifestyle thumbing their noses at prestige. this crawl to the top of the heap wasn’t important or emphasized in my little reality enclave which in retrospect seems rather absurd since i was living in an area that’s considered the top of the heap already. perhaps while some people were dropping out others more concerned w/climbing the ladder found the opportunity to fill that vacuum.
I remember assuming that dropping out would become a mass movement, in which case Marcuse’s theory that the lumpenproletariat would become the new revolutionary class would have been proved to be correct, but clearly it did not.
It’s always been harder to drop out, slide away, when you’re a lump and not part of the drippings.
“I remember assuming that dropping out would become a mass movement, “
But that was before somebody pointed out that the hole in the wall was called a “window” and you should look out of it?
You and Witty, methinks, have a lot in common.
You’ll have to stop trying to be laconic and start trying to be clear, Mooser, if you want me to get even the faintest idea of what you’re saying.
Can’t help it, Rowan, I’m always fighting my essential Jewish characteristics. But I’ll make you a deal, I’ll stop being laconic, and make an effort to be taciturn (those old stereotypes about ungulates are simply not true) if you will tell me how not being Jewish prevented you from getting married. I am very much in favor of marriage, and do it as often as possible.
If the Jews kept you from getting married and having daughters, I will never forgive myself, and will spend my life trying to make restitution.
If you have forgotten in which thread you said this, I can supply a link.
I only said that if I had been Jewish I would probably have been married long ago. Perhaps I would not have become such an impecunious drop-out if I had been Jewish. Certainly there would have been more people eager to suggest to me methods of having it both ways, i.e. being whatever sort of radical I wished and still managing to earn a living. This is not because Jews have some sort of sneaky subterranean support network, simply because Jews are more familiar with these sorts of political career dilemmas than Anglos are.
Rowan,
I am Jewish and “an impecunious drop-out” (although I did manage to get married and have a daughter). Furthermore, we are legion – and we don’t blame it on our “ethnicity”.
Well, there ya go. Being an impecunious drop-out didn’t stop you getting married. Someone else was as crazy as you were. I wasn’t so lucky :-)
Any guys here still fondly remember their old p-38 in the field from their teen years? Or think Robbe-Grillet pretty much handled God without even trying? Maybe I don’t belong in this thread, but I do relate from personal experience with ALL the comments so far, and Phil’s lead article too. I’m writing this at 7:41 PM EST, USA.
“Chaim Gross was teaching art history at Yale ”
Yale employs teachers who can’t speak English?
Pretty gross, eh?
Phil I appreciate your honesty, let me as a “bland” goyim, married in a Jewish family, worked for Jewish run businesses all my life. First Jews physically, by and large are unattractive, they lack the chiselled features of Nordic, the exotic sensuality of South Americans, or the grace of Asians, and the athleticism of Africans. In fact they are dour and ugly for the most part. Their humor is coarse, sarcastic and crude, it lacks wit and sophistication. Christian (Catholic and Eastern) religious services their churches speak to the imagination, and their services to a sacredness buried and hidden almost magical. The various Jewish services Bar Mitzvah, marriages etc, are dull affairs lacking imagination and ritual except for the crazy carrying around of the bride, that seem juvenile. Literature wise I haven’t come across a Jewish writer in the same class as Waugh, Poe, Conrad. Jews are tribal and they overate themselves and their talents
Overall Jews make good accountants, good doctors, scientists, music composers and conductors and thats about it, very dull, I’d say.
freak alert
Ed Zachary what I was thinking. Cray-zee.
‘Sides, he must be blind. Phil himself is a hunk of burning love. Why, WHY, won’t he put up a Steve Walt-type banner?
hunka hunka indeed, ed zackary.
And get a load of Dick Witty; he’s right up there with Conway Twitty!
And ain’t Joe Lieberman a hottie!
link to jokesandhumor.com
silencenolonger, all that is true, and so obvious it’s not even worth discussing. But, thank God, all of those things are so trivial. There is, however, a few things that really do matter, and so I plead with you to answer me; you have admitted that Jews can be good music composers and conductors. I ask you, and you know my continued existence is prerdicated on your answer, can a Jew be a good jazz organist? Or will people just sniff, chortle, and make snide remarks about “graven images”?
If the answer is negatory, there’s nothing left for me but the three R’s!
I know Jews make lousy teachers, I’m talking about the razor, rope or revolver.
snl is crazy, so I will oblige you by answering your question. Yes, Jews can be awesome possum jazz organists, and play a bitchin’ saxophone to boot.
(It’s all to do with sekrit Jewish genes)
Thanks so much Frances, I need all the encouragement I can get.
But look at the forces stacked against me: Jimmy Smith, Groove Holmes, Dr. Lonnie Smith and many others, all Afro American. Okay, than there’sJoey DeFrancesco, and do you want white or red sauce on the linguine? I am pinning my hopes on a guy named Eddie Landsberg but he moved to Japan, so I can’t ask him.
Mooser do you swing, do you have rhythm in your bones…
does Wayne Horvitz qualify…
yeah man, you can be Brother Moose, right in there with Brother Jack. go baby
Brother Jack McDuff? Thanks, you made my day!
Silencelonger
In your case silence should be forever..
To pick just a parcel of your comment and prove you wrong I knew two Jewish girls and both were attractive to very attractive. How do you say bullshit in skinheadish?
This is very interesting, my post was deliberately provocative to see what bells it would set off, I thought the reference to the Jewish ceremonies would have sparked the most, or a remark concerning professions where are the lawyers,nobel prize winners etc or maybe a retort about writers with a list, but what matters more is appearance, any poster here could easily have replied Bar Rafaeli or any young Hollywood actors. Appearance cut deepest.
Narcissism, the neurosis is far deeper than I ever imagined, this is very serious.
Nehru said of the Jews, They believe they’re better than any other people. In this, they’re just like every other people.
And it’s great fun to be religious about it too.
Nehru has a point
RE: “Repulsion and attraction to Christians has been a large part of my life.” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: Mine too. Welcome to The Club™, Phil!
Remember to check out Jane Elliott’s “Blue eye, Brown eye” racism testing programmes.
A few home truths for all of us in these sessions!
Mannie De Saxe
If Jews make lousy teachers, what about Tom Lehrer? Gonna get the bomb, Vatican Rag and so many others – nobody teaches like he does!
Mannie De Saxe
Phil,
Did you yourself want to go to Harvard?
Or, was that imposed on you in some way?
Jezz, talk about desperation! Keep taking those swings in the dark Witty, you’ll hit something sooner or later.
But really, why bother. Why not just put Phil “hates his father” in quotes?
The significance of the question is that one’s own goals are one’s own responsibility.
Many of us Jewish kids were urged to excel.
Some of us “dropped out”, from our own philosophical and political convictions.
“…Palestinian statelessness is an American Jewish achievement, it is something we sought.”
Exactly! The spiritual center of Zionism is Israel, however, the center of Zionist power is the US. American Jewish Zionists have profoundly influenced the political landscape of Israel through their funding of settlements, extremist groups, Israeli political parties and politicians, and through their influence in the US government.
The purpose appears to be the re-invention of the “people that shall dwell apart.” Zionism is the secular equivalent of Judaism, and has come to replace Judaism as the unifier of world Jewry. The highly successful group strategy relies upon extensive organization and in-group discrimination
powered by the potent motivating and directional force of the Zionist ideology. The intent is to achieve organized influence and power over the disorganized host polity. In this regard, it is essential to the success of Zionism that Jews think of themselves as a threatened people apart.
Israel, as a threatened home of the Jews surrounded by hostile Goyim intent upon its destruction, is the symbolic center of the Zionist ideology. Had it not been for the Holocaust, it seems likely that there would not have been a Jewish state, and that Zionism would have faded away.
In reading some of the other comments, I should like to point out that what Phil seems to be doing is to explore some of the dynamics of Jewish success and Jewish attitudes among the Jewish elites. This is both important and relevant in view of Jewish elite over-representation
among the power elite, both in the government (neocons), the financial sector (neoliberals), and the media. To a certain degree, there seems to be a sort of “Zionification” of US foreign policy and cultural mythology. My guess is that Phil is trying to explore this through his own personal
experience as part of this elite. Obviously, his personal experiences will not mirror those of the majority of Jews who are not part of the Jewish elite, however, some of the attitudes he discusses should find a certain resonance with all. In any event, I find the post fascinating and welcome any and all serious discussions of power and power seeking. There are few, if any, topics more vital to understanding the nature of the political economy than that of power: who has it, how they got it, and crucially, how the struggle for power influences policy.
Very insightful