Allison Kaplan Sommer in the new firewalled Haaretz wants to talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s intermarriage to Priscilla Chan. Oh please, who cares any more! But Sommer makes an interesting point:
When the movie “The Social Network” came out, Zuckerberg reportedly took great offense with the way in which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin implied that he created Facebook in order to meet girls, specifically non-Jewish girls…
I tend to believe that Zuckerberg – who met Chan at [a Harvard fraternity party like one in the film] didn’t, in fact, intentionally set out in search of a non-Jewish girlfriend or wife. Religion and ethnic identity was and is simply irrelevant to him, and, like it or not, to most of his generation of American Jews. Sorkin – a generation ahead of him – was imposing a narrative on Zuckerberg and his friends that didn’t fit.
In the new online social order Zuckerberg has helped create, we are all friends and we are all networked.
Sommer’s observation that Sorkin was anachronistic is well taken. I went to Harvard in the ’70s; and the social stratification described in The Social Network could have been mine; but the Social Network is set in 2003-2004. A friend who went to Harvard in the ’90s tells me that the era of Jewish outsiderdom at the school was well over even at that point.
Why is this important? Because there is a tendency in American Jewish life to hold on to the injustices of the past and fail to see the new reality. When we “impose a narrative,” it tends to be a narrative of victimization. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the wealthiest men on earth, and his company, god bless it, played a significant role in the liberation of Egypt. He’s a powerful guy, and I don’t think he’s as culturally bound as Aaron Sorkin. So get to work on Palestine, Mark.
Mark is has been quoted recently, saying one should “take note” of anti-Semitism incidents in the USA, and presumably, around Die Welt. In the context of his being a stickler not to interfere with Google’s current system of objectively pulling up all urls related to your search words, such as “Jew.” He’s OK, for now at least, with the Google notice that stuff you may read in your search results may alarm you.
Offensive search results: http://www.google.com/explanation.html
yeah, phil, right. god bless facebook, and god bless tiny mark zuckerberg too. how could i not see the democratic potential of a website designed to reduce human interaction to easily digestible, commercially lucrative bits, all the while big brother trolls just below the surface, hunting for actionable information. omg! wtf was i (not) thinking? well, i’m not the visionary who came up with the idea of a site that allows people to write short notes to friends. and post pictures too? kind of like a bulletin board, but only on your computer. fucking brilliant! and how could i also fail to see the humanitarian potential of the great minds behind the pump and dump that just took place with facebook stock? billions bilked from the little guy by the facebook crew and a select few investers. why i just bet that ‘palestine’ is near the top of the pile in mark’s in-box. he’ll clean up that disaster lickety split right after he feeds his puppy. you did see his puppy, didn’t you?
I continue to believe that you’re unfair against Aaron Sorkin.
The Facebook movie he did was actually quite harsh and he more or less took the Winklevoss twins’ side in the dispute(then again, so did the court the other year, when it rules in their favour, so there is still a great question over just how much ‘his’ company it truly is, and not theirs, but the past is past).
If you look at Aaron Sorkin’s resume you see a broadway play he did in 2007. It’s called “The Farnsworth Invention”.
It’s about a sweet, bright and terribly naive Midwestern WASP kid who invests a lot of stuff regarding television, back when it was new.
The play centers against the struggle on his idealism and the ruthless TV exec who uses his cynicism and power to wrestle the inventions from him and counter-sue him into poverty, and sure enough, the guy dies in alcoholism and neglect.
The TV exec is described as a ‘Russian immigrant’ but you only need to glance over his last name to know what group he comes from, even if he did indeed immigrate from Russia.
Sorkin has been cataloguing the rise of Jewish ascendancy but I think a fair criticism can be made that he has been too harsh, often playing with black/white cultural stereotypes, e.g. the innocent, morally upstanding protestant Anglo who believes in righteousness and the cynical, ruthless Jew who uses his childlike good-heartedness.
Sorkin was actually struggling a lot during the 80s as a playwright and it’s impossible to know what happened when he was young but judging from his career I don’t think he’s that ethnocentric in the sense that Larry Summers is. Summers’s the kind of Jew which fits the ‘Russian Immigrant’ code much better than Zuckerberg.
Zuck’s a pretty cynical guy, but he is not a wild-eye nationalist, to put it mildly.
Also, in terms of sociological botanizing; Zuckerberg mostly surrounded himself with Jews at the early stage, but within even just a few years, he went to a mostly mixed crowd to a firm that is now majority-WASP in it’s higher structure. He has oddly refused to surround himself with Asians, despite their stellar reputation in Silicon Valley, at the highest echelons. Even if he marries one. Just look at the board of directors. Sure, Sandberg’s the COO but if you look at the VP of engineering and many other important execute positions, Zuckerberg’s mostly phased out the Jews.
Moskowitz seemed like the only one he truly got along with.
And from all the VC’s he could choose, he chose Thiel, a German and a conservative Republican. Despite the knowledge of what we know that he is a die-hard liberal Jew.
So this underlines what we’ve previously discussed, the amount to which Jews and WASPs have melded together. True, there is much more Asian/White integration today than even 20 years ago(I’m discounting the lonely Asians who had no other choice), but there is still a long way to go on that front. And so far, at least as I can see, there is actually more WASP/Asian integration in terms of the top in tech. The co-founders of Youtube is a case in point and there are many others like them.
Another example of this weird Jewish/Asian distance, which actually doesn’t make any sense and the intercommunal relations are great from what I can tell, is TechStars NY. It’s a almost completely Jewish tech incubator based in NY, which is now the #2 top in technology, and I just went through the companies and it was just a sea of whiteness, mostly WASPs.
Now, NYC is home to the largest amount of Indian-Americans in the country, which is also the religious group which has the highest SAT score(and not Jews like some think). And as far as I know, Indians have a rep to be pretty tech savvy but it was zilch in that respect.
Another fact of the Jewish rise to “old money status” is this little NYT article. Notice the minority share of WASPs and how most people in the story are either Jewish or born-to-moguls-Asians.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/heirs-to-old-money-plunge-into-tech/
I am interested in the tech scene for other reasons, but I’m also interested in the sociological aspects because tech is the most meritocratic sector, most of the successful people there are self-made middle class folks and as far as I know they are almost all very internationalist/progressive but the social patterns are there regardless.
Big issue here is not whether there is discrimination against Jews (any more, or at Harvard, or whatever) but that some old-timers have a passionate (but incomprehensible to me) desire to keep the “Jewish People” going. As someone who married out (and who was not brought up in a Jewish community in the first place), I don’t share the fear of a race dying away. (Hey, the world is overpopulated anyway and we should ALL be thinking about not having more than 1 (or more than zero) kids).
When I look at Israel’s crimes (yup, that’s what I see when I look at Israel, not all the clever technologists and lofty poets possibly promoted by “brand Israel”), and consider how much USA’s Jews have switched religion from “Judaism” (in some flavor or other) to (non-religious, as I see it) pro-Israelism, I am glad whenever I hear of Jews marrying out.
Oh come on….Mark Zuckerberg started out as a sleeze and you can’t white wash that out.
Some of us do care more about “how” people get their money…..than how ‘much’ they have…call it old fashioned ethics.
Zuckerberg and the Facebook operation started to smell a lot like a Enron to me some time ago.
Let’s see what comes out in the lawsuits and senate investigation into his IPO.
I have a pretty good idea what they’re going to find.
And also a pretty good idea none of the “new’ ethic-less Elite is going to be made to be made to pay for their malfeasance.