Today I thought about a story Jewish boys told at Harvard in the ’70s. The great sculptor Chaim Gross was teaching an art history class at Yale. He showed a slide of the Venus de Milo and said, "That’s a beautiful sculpture. Yes, a beautiful woman. Why? Because of the schmatte, that’s why. Without the schmatte, she’s nothing." Gross was referring to the cloth the Venus wears wrapped around her hips. But the reason it was such a funny story (my friend Mike Brown, from Coney Island, used to tell it in a guttural New York Jewish accent), was that the blond goyim in the class would look around bewildered at one another, and murmur, "What’s a schmatte?" but Gross had already moved on to the next slide.
That story was exciting to us because it was about outsider Jews giving it to the goyim, and of course there’s some superiority in it, too.Chaim Gross was teaching the WASPs about western history.
I thought about the story because after the Episcopalian funeral I attended a few days ago, I rode back to N.Y. with a gentile friend and we got to talking about the Bible, and he excitedly related a Bible story, about David and Bathsheba and Absalom and Uriah (from Samuel). The story had great impact on him, especially the part when the prophet Nathan tells David about the rich man who takes his neighbor’s sheep (a great parable indeed). My friend explained that in his freshman year at Yale, he had walked into a class called "The Bible as History"–taught by a professor Goldstein–and become entranced. He had thrown himself into the course and taken other courses from this guy and shaped his undergraduate career around it.
I’m writing this because it reveals to me, the assimilating Jew, the shadow play that was going on in the 70s between Jew and gentile. We Jews were actually acquiring considerable power and privilege in the WASP establishment. But we didn’t register it. Maybe it was impossible for us to register it, in view of our history of persecution. But it was privilege all the same: intellectual influence. I think at times Jews still fail to understand this. (C.F. Tony Judt on Jewish belief that we are living in 1938.)
