Apparently I made a mistake in my last post. A friend says that David Koch, whom I consecrate as one of my people, is not Jewish. Apologies to all, not least my hoodwinked readers.
Charles Keating sent me this post from rense that I think is a year old, in which a Jewish editor, Joe Aaron, celebrates the predominance of Jews in a Vanity Fair list of the most powerful/important/coolest people in the country. There are 3 VF lists that Aaron cites, and we're 51/100 on one list, 15 of 26 on a second, and 8 or 9 on a third. Lot o' Jews. Rense then couples this with a piece showing a greater disparity than ever between the rich and poor in our society. Ergo: when Jews do well, everyone else does poorly. Israel Shamir is quoted. Not very persuasively.
This type of analysis is crudely reductive: Jews have been doing well for a long time, and Jews tend to be social democrats anyway. This is the Jewish century, achievement-wise. The information age suits our cultural programming; and many other cultures are now sharing in these gifts, happily. Which is not to say that Jews shouldn't be interrogating elitist attitudes within Jewish life at a time of such staggering success. Not to mention Zionism…
