Two sociological observations about the place of Jews in the American establishment.
Last night on “60 Minutes” correspondent Byron Pitts said of Pakistani-American Shahid Khan’s purchase of the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2011:
That deal made Khan the first ethnic minority to own a team in the NFL.
Many Jews own NFL teams. Marc Tracy says 10 or 11. So let’s be clear about Pitts’s meaning: Jews are not an ethnic minority. When I was growing up, it went without saying that we were. Not any longer, apparently, because we’re viewed as part of the Establishment…
This irritated me. Harvard Magazine has a feature about alumna Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about an odiously-superrich couple called David and Jackie Siegel. Called the Queen of Versailles, the movie focuses on the Siegels’s disgraceful house in Florida. The article repeatedly offers the Siegels as generic Americans: They “were just trying to live the American Dream… ‘If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.'”
Of course I wonder what the Siegels tell us about the new era of Jewish wealth and arrival. Now maybe Greenfield talks about that in the film. But not here:
Greenfield became interested in the lives of the 1 percenters as an undergraduate, where she studied photography under Barbara Norfleet, Ph.D. ’51, then a lecturer and curator of still photography at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, who had produced a book called All the Right People, about the WASPs of the Northeast.
Right. It’s always cool to bash those rich WASPs.
People mix up race and ethnicity.
Jews are about 80% racially white(20% of Jews in America are non-white, often forgotten within the Jewish community due to the total domination of Ashkenazi Jews). However, whichever race you are as a Jew, Jewishness is also an ethnicity, although with increased conversions, that is changing.
There is an interesting discussion about whiteness and Jewishness itself.
I remember reading Weiner’s interview from 2007 just as Mad Men got its start. He noted that as Jews climbed up the ladder of America, “we price we paid was to become white”. Of course, he meant culturally etc. But I disagree with him, but that’s a point I’ll later clarify.
I think Mad Men is so popular among élite Jews precisely because it’s one big “Now We Know Better”(as the London Review of Books stated acidly). It’s a serenade of the new elite over the old elite. All elites need self-confirmation of how noble and good they are.
The only problem is that while Jews are part of the American elite, the WASPs never really got away. Many are intermarried. Just take a guy like Haim Saban, biggest individual donor to the Democratic party for many years and one of the top this year. He’s intermarried, and he compares himself to Lieberman on Israel.
So even ethnocentric Jews like Saban are intermarried, what does that say about the Jewish elite?
The mythical WASP never went away, but they’re still popular to bash. After all, being the challenger is always a lot more fun than being incumbent. True in politics, true in life overall.
As for Weiner’s point about the “price we paid” was to “become white”, I guess he means this in cultural terms as passing for white is something that Ashkenazi Jews do very easily, simply because they/we are white.
As for culture? Well, take the civil rights movement. What happened once a bunch of pro-minority laws were passed? The black-Jewish alliance fell apart. Jews fled en masse into the lily white suburbs. No longer were Jews so isolated in their Brooklyn sthetls. As a result, assimiliation skyrocketed. This was especially true for those Jews who were born during this era, late 60s, early 70s. They were the first to be truly immersed into mainstream American life. Their parents still held out how different they were, but their everyday life experiences told them otherwise.
We know the rest of that story.
By the way, speaking of Jews and diversity. I mentioned the 20% of Jews who are non-white, this is an interesting interview I came across:
http://jewschool.com/2012/09/14/29347/erika-davis-what-im-trying-to-help-people-understand-is-that-jews-are-not-the-same/
The woman is both black and gay, and on top of that Jewish. She’s an Orthodox convert and she speaks openly about the latent racism in the Jewish community. From the automatic assumption that all Jews are white, from being treated as the cleaning lady, asked if she’s “lost” at Jewish gatherings to even being told point blank at numerous occassions that black Jews are not “real Jews”.
She doesn’t bring up all of those things in the interview(she has a decent blog, although it has become less about Judaism and more about Obama in these final weeks), but quite a few she does. It was pretty harrowing for me to read about the time she was in a synagogue and everyone consciously avoided sitting next to her. Her bench was entirely empty except her and everyone else sat on other benches next to each other and made great effort to avoid sitting even on the same bench as her.
I think Jewishness is becomming more and more cool, and I think as a result more people will start to convert. Not just people doing it because it is trendy, but because they are genuinely interested in converting and going that extra mile. As America’s demographics change, more of them will be people of color.
How will the wider Jewish community react, especially the older Jews?
There’s already a lot of young Asian women marrying young Jewish men, many of whom are converting. Some are even becomming rabbis. There’s one Jewish woman of Korean ancestry who is the cantor in a Manhattan synagogue.
What happens as more people of color convert, as intermarriage inevitably becomes more interracial and not just WASP/Jewish?
The Orthodox sections of American Jewry will remain monolithically white(okay, not entirely, about 20 % of them are Sephardic Jews, but many of them tend to be on the same wavelength as Southern Europeans in how they look. A far cry from black or Asian), while the secular streams of American Jewry will become more and more diversied. This will inherently cause more strains in the future, perhaps even an unbridgable rift.
I think Philip Weiss has quietly nailed a key factor in weighing whether Group X is part of the establishment: A group is a member of the permanently privileged if it can be bashed in ethnically specific terms without alarms going off regarding bigotry.
If that criterion is plausible, it’s still more fluid than many imagine. Norfleet’s book came out in 1988 — a lot has changed, but less than claimed by those who insist that the US is the world’s greatest everything. Chomsky wrote that he went to MIT in no small measure because it was well-known at that time that Jews just didn’t get tenure at Harvard. That much has changed. But, if treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans is any sign, we’re losing ground again. One step forward, two steps back.
As a matter of historical curiosity: How was the first instance of a wealthy Jew buying a major sports franchise received? Was it noted at all?
People were upset that Mikhail Prokhorov bought the Nets — a sign of American bigotry, maybe; definitely not a sign that Russians are or were a victimized minority, though they’re certainly an ethnic minority in the US, even if not expressly identified as such.
There are wealthy and powerful African Americans, but it would be absurd to suggest that Blacks are not still a discriminated-against ethnic minority…. But… With the election of Obama, how many people were talking about the “end of racial politics” even as many across the US were brazenly airing grossly racist views? (And as, recently, reports have shown that Americans are _predominantly_ hostile to blacks.)
So all in all, I’d say that whatever ‘standard’ or ‘thinking’ is behind the 60 Minutes assertion, it’s just factually wrong — on several counts.
“CBS no longer categorizes American Jews as ‘ethnic minority’”
Maybe they think of them as an ethnic superiority?
The ethnic superiority is superior to the ethnic minority?
“We should not be astonished if in the cases where we see an inferiority [feeling] complex we find a superiority complex more or less hidden. On the other hand, if we inquire into a superiority complex and study its continuity, we can always find a more or less hidden inferiority [feeling] complex.”
“If a person is a show-off it is only because she or he feels inferior, because she or he does not feel strong enough to compete with others on the useful side of life. That is why she or he stays on the useless side. She or he is not in harmony with society. It seems to be a trait of human nature that when individuals – both children and adults – feel weak, they want to solve the problems of life in such a way as to obtain personal superiority without any admixture of social interest. A superiority complex is a second phase. It is a compensation for the inferiority [feeling] complex.”
– Alfred Adler
Are we allowed to comment on this piece per the new comment policy? I am not sure whether anything I’d have to say about the new mandarins (cf, the nuveau riche Siegels and the jewish baseball teams owners alluded to in the post) could possibly pass muster (comment masters)?
Is it OK BTW to point out just how many of the 1% are Jewish (Hint: percentage wise it’s more than a factor of 10 over the population percentage, and this is being awfully conservative) ? is it OK to suggest that the predominance among the 1% had something to do with the paucity of jewish activists among the OWS people on the ground (yes, there were a few, especially among speech makers, and more than enough to make a raucus about lending support to the quest of palestinians for their rights as humans)?
Shoot. I may have violated the rules now – will await with baited breath to see whether this was the case**.
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** and I am one of the “nice thinking” ones, I think (so use imagination to fill in the blanks)