A response to the post yesterday on the “meaning of Helen Thomas.”
… it is simply a fact – not less of a fact because anti-Semites turn it into a grievance – that Jews play an important and influential role in American cultural life. We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television mini-series, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with remembering the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large
—Peter Novick, The American National Narrative of the Holocaust; There Isn’t Any” [2003]
It is much easier to talk about the fact that Jews are overrepresented in the upper reaches of Western culture and society if you put it in historical context.
First, you have to chuck out that “lachrymose narrative” that Zionists cling to, and address the hills and valleys of Jewish accomplishment and Jewish persecution.
Robert Wistrich’s theory of antisemitism as “the oldest hatred” is rubbish; misogyny is centuries older and provided a lot of the language of antisemism, to wit, the medieval myth that male Jews menstruate, and other “feminizing” concepts that have informed the bigoted view of Jews for centuries. Read Otto Weininger.
Only when you have debunked Zionist myth-making can you balance out the enormous contributions Jews have made to Western civilization on the one hand, and their easily misconstrued — and sometimes abused — influence on the other.
