I read some of Marty Peretz’s comments in the New York Magazine piece this week with a filial cringe. They reminded me of stuff my father’s generation always said that reflected Jewish exceptionalism, that we’re smarter, more accomplished. When Peretz told the writer, I happen to believe there are differences between people, he was saying that some people are smarter than others, and I am sure he feels that way about Jews.
I grew up with these attitudes. They were part and parcel of the Jewish explosion into the establishment that took place as Peretz himself was marrying a wealthy woman and leading a gang of acolytes at Harvard and meeting secretly with Kissinger during Israel’s ’73 crisis. Saul Bellow personified that explosion– here we had a heavyweight literary contender who could go 10 rounds with Hemingway (even if Hemingway dissed him as “nothing”)– and Bellow expressed exceptionalist attitudes himself when he said in the 70s, Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? My girlfriend’s father was a scientist and he used to echo Bellow all the time. He said that when Kant and Spinoza were writing their books, Africans were using sticks to pull grubs from a log. I remember him miming the African. His beautiful daughter was appalled by his racism; but he was part of Peretz’s self-congratulatory surge. Neoconservatism itself grew out of these superior feelings to the extent that one of the issues that separated Norman from Norman (Podhoretz from Mailer) was the quota business, and affirmative action– not wanting to give up places to black students in the name of a fairer society.
If Bellow were around today and were to make his Zulu comment, he’d be finished. In mainstream cultural circles, I mean; in the prestige-conferring circles, his career would be damaged. It would be embarrassing. And this is what has happened to Marty Peretz. He has made many statements that are completely acceptable in Israel, where he is now hanging his hat, but not in New York or Washington. People don’t say that stuff any more. Or if they do, they apologize. Peretz won’t even apologize.
The question is, How did Peretz miss the signals that this sort of speech was outre? And the answer, I bet, is that he hung out with only Jews or mainly Jews. There are a lot of Jews of my father’s generation and mine too who genuinely prefer the company of other Jews. I know because I have some of this inclination myself: they’re my kind, I know the cues, I have an ancient comfort around other Jews, and it’s easier. There are places in New York and Washington that you can live and feel very successful and be surrounded by mostly Jews, and have a Jewish-centric life. Peretz doesn’t work well outside his comfort zone, and he stuck with his comfort crowd. No one gave him the news. I bet he only talked to New York Magazine writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells because BWW is Jewish. (I’m guessing, but I remember how persnickety Peretz was about talking to the press, back when; the press was beneath him.)
I don’t mean to trash Peretz though so much as express my identification with him. There were many times in my life that I preferred elite Jewish company, when I enjoyed that meteor feeling my cohort was creating, that we were coming into the fusty establishment, on merit at last. I really believed we were smarter (and even today I will argue that our cultural training with books prepared us for this age, outfitted us for the meritocro-supremacy), and while I was for affirmative action on fairness grounds, I could be privately snarky about it. I read Philip Roth’s Jewish-centric stuff and thought we had really arrived in our glory. Then suddenly we were helping to define the Establishment, define the new character of power in American life, and I lost my interest. About the time 13 years ago that Lanny Davis was championing Bill Clinton and Marty Peretz was championing Al Gore. And now look what the Jewish moment has devolved into: Elena Kagan, who if she has values you could fool me.
Peretz’s world is over. Someone who is as ethnocentric as he is will not survive in the new Establishment. Full stop. Diversity, or a nod to it, is the norm in American elites today. Look at all the black reporters on NBC Nightly News and tell me Obama didn’t make a difference. America changes fast. My cultural attitudes have changed significantly, as have those of more conventionally-successful people than myself. I was reeducated. I came to see the actual beauty of diversity. I saw that with education and training, young people from very different backgrounds and colors to myself (sorry on the grammar; this is a blog) were excelling in ways that I thought of as Jewish, creative and sensitive expression. But I’m old, and I struggle with my old superior attitudes. They’re not so different from Marty Peretz’s, which is why when I hear him expressing them without apology, I feel a filial cringe.
