Blueberry bagel as subtext

So. Lots of the people on the cultural appropriation is wonderful bandwagon, or adjacent liberal but anti-"PC" bandwagons - and who are at this very moment being called out for their white obliviousness on that topic - are Jewish. This has been the case for the last however many rounds of this topic. Best as I can tell, it's true in the US and Canada alike. What does it all mean?

-The ungenerous interpretation: The Jews in question are white, middle-class or well-off, and but for this one marginalized quality, Jewishness, would be raging alt-right white supremacists, as versus contrarian liberals. They feel as they do because they're white; their Jewishness is incidental. And after all, Jews are also well-represented among this set's critics.

-A more generous interpretation: Those with a liminal, intermediary, ambiguous identity - Jews, but also, to varying degrees, white women, gay men, non-black POC - have unique insights into how it goes for the oppressor and the oppressed. Even if they're not announcing their Jewishness, and instead opining as white people critical of 'identity politics', it's relevant.

-The sympathetic interpretation: Jews have long been oppressed, still are, especially by the newly-revived neo-Nazi movement, but a left framework refuses to acknowledge this one form of oppression makes some Jews feel excluded from the broader anti-oppression struggle and be sort of like, screw you, left and right. (Subtext: 'We never got a chance to complain about the dreadful things done to bagels.') But then you have to choose; some choose the right, whether out of a sense that the left is worse-for-the-Jews or for whichever other (esp. baffling in light of this GOP administration) reasons.

-The meta interpretation: I keep thinking about Item 3 from Bret Stephens's (yes, how apropos) advice to those who "aspire" to write op-eds. It is, in effect, to avoid nuance. That this is what the style does indeed demand means opinion-writing can't ever quite reach the subtleties of opinion-having. A stance that places you on a culture-wars team sells better than one that does not. (I'm still amazed that I got the opportunity to write a book that's critical of privilege discourse, but not team-anti-identity-politics.) To really get into the subtleties of how Jewishness impacts an experience of whiteness, this is something that needs... introspection? A separate study of its own, one not in op-ed format?

As might be obvious (?) I lean towards all of the above. I don't think the answer here is to say that well actually, white opinion-writers A, B, C, etc., are Jewish, both because they're still also white and because the listing of the Jews, no matter the motivation, can feel like a sinister activity. But not mentioning that A, B, and C are Jewish somehow feels - to me, a white Jewish writer a few notches to their left - like missing something important.

Can we *please* stop asking if Jews are white?: a ten trillionth blog-attempt at explaining anti-Semitism

Missed a whole lot of news cycles due to the move, but it seems the question of whether (pale-skinned, usually but not exclusively Ashkenazi) Jews are white has stuck around. Yes, I was weighing in on this before it was... not cool exactly, but you know what I mean. (It's in the book. It's in the WWPD archives. It's in the dissertation. It was, prior to this, already the subject of plenty of attention, scholarly and otherwise, from others.) For that reason, I feel a bit done with the topic. But... I'm not thrilled with how it's getting explained, nor with how I've previously explained it. So, here goes:

It's understood, on the left, that there are various axes of oppression. Yes, they intersect, but trying to superimpose one axis onto another doesn't work. That is: to understand sexism, you don't ask whether women - all women, as women - are disabled. To understand homophobia, you don't ask whether gay people - all gay people, as gay people - are women. You have to look at each form of discrimination in its own terms. Not in isolation - some women are disabled, some gay people are women, and this impacts how they experience sexism and homophobia, respectively - but in its own terms. By which I mean: It's not necessary to claim that sexism exists solely and primarily as a form of some other type of discrimination in order to believe that sexism is real and really a problem.

So. To speak of Jewish difference as a question of whether Jews - all Jews - are "of color" is to make an analogy. It's to insist upon an analogy. To do so is to be left with two answers: Either we're people of color, and therefore oppression against us counts, or we're white, so any claims we make of being oppressed - certainly in cases where the oppressors are themselves people of color - fall under the old "reverse racism" rubric, which is to say, don't count. Or maybe there will be some middle-ground position, where Jews wind up classified as not quite white. More nuance, same terms.

All these possibilities fail to get at the truth, which is that most American Jews are white, and anti-Semitism exists. Yes, there's such a thing as racial anti-Semitism, which overlaps in some ways with the racism that exists against people of color. (See also: Islamophobia, which ostensibly isn't racism, but which has a tendency to impact even secular people of Muslim heritage, or those of other faiths who are perceived of as Muslim.) But anti-Semitism can't be understood simply as bias against groups according to their relative non-resemblance to Scandinavians. Anti-Semitism is not now and has never been about Jewish non-whiteness, not-quite-whiteness, or even, as a 19th century European would have put it, Jews' "Orientalness." It's about Jewish Jewishness.

A post unrelated to shirts

Rather than dwell on the scandals of the social-media moment,* I'm going to revisit a topic I wrote about in 2004. Yes, matzo. Specifically, the question of matzo marketing. Recently I was listening to Dan Pashman's podcast about matzo, which is very much about matzo as a year-round food. One interesting tidbit was that religious Jews are apparently less concerned with matzo flavor-purity than are secular Jews. According to a guest expert, secular Jews think it's not kosher-in-the-colloquial-sense to have flavored matzos, whereas observant Jews will have... whatever is the matzo equivalent of a blueberry bagel, as long as it's kosher-in-the-religious-sense. Also intriguing, if not so surprising, given the year-round availability of matzo in regular supermarkets: lots of people agree that it's a better cracker than that which is sold as crackers.

But I was also struck by Pashman's intro, which consisted of this... almost apology for taking on a Judeo-centric culinary topic. I get that part of it is because he's introducing a Southern Baptist matzo-producer, but he also seems genuinely concerned that he'll have listeners who will be like, 'ugh, what's this Jew doing, telling us about all of this Jew food we don't care about!' That intro reminded me of nothing more than intros to monographs I read in grad school, where the author explains that a book about French Jews is really one about France, apologizing for having dared broach such a particular subject... as though it were possible to write an academic text of that sort that covered France generally. And I kept wondering, would Lynne Rosetto Kasper apologize for an item on Italian-American cuisine? I mean, maybe she does this and I don't notice it? Somehow, though, I doubt it. There's something specifically Jewish, I think, in this fear, this overcompensation for being thought to think we're "chosen." And I mean no disrespect to Pashman - I'm sure I do this as well. I doubt if being aware of it much helps.

Anyway, I'm also remarking on this because: matzo brei! Now that's a food with which to alienate Gentiles, as well as, alas, some Jews.

*OK, one final, personal note: For all the talk of TBTB and so forth, in my own, day-to-day life, I'm surrounded by scientists, most of whom are men, and all of whom dress much better than I do. I think it may relate to their being European. Or just to the number of items in my closet splattered from matzo-brei preparation.

YPIS 8.0

After obsessing about YPIS since forever, I finally had a chance to bring YPIS 2.0 (more like 8.0, I suppose) to an audience. I'd been wanting to write such a piece for so long that it was getting to be a bit like, in grad school, when I had this project going about a really neurotic 1840s half-Jewish anti-Semite, but it didn't quite fit with what ended up being my dissertation topic. But that earlier project kept fascinating me, so I presented it at a conference as more of a stand-alone, and was pleased to have done something with it, even if it didn't end up being quite as extensive as I'd imagined. So, too, with YPIS - no 10,000 word manifesto (not this week, at least), but something I'm pleased with. I'd been searching for the best angle, and then a privilege controversy fell into my metaphorical lap.

And, in case anyone was losing sleep over this, why didn't I bring up the Jews-and-white-privilege angle, which is a topic I've obviously given a good bit of thought? I left that out because nothing in Tal Fortgang's essay really addressed this. He wasn't saying that being Jewish makes him any less white in America today. He wasn't making any claims about Princeton being a place where, unless you're Mayflower stock, even to this day you're considered lesser-than. He discussed the Holocaust, yes, but put it into a kind of generic struggling-white-immigrant narrative.

And I guess the best I could come up with would be that you can't have it both ways. Either you feel that being Jewish is a form of marginalization, in which case the "white privilege" charge is inappropriate (or less appropriate than it would be for someone white and non-Jewish), or you think (white) Jews are just generic white people these days, in which case your objections to the expression "white privilege" have nothing to do with your family's past encounters with anti-Semitism.

"Other girls" and "exception Jews"

So I was thinking some more about the "other girls" meme. Specifically of a parallel I'd thought of earlier but not known quite how to articulate. The Daria-esque nerdy intellectual girl who imagines all other girls to be surgically-enhanced bleach blondes and, in doing so, expresses a kind of general misogyny thinks she's the exception. (See also: the women who simply can't have female friends. Also: the "basic bitch."*) Well! This already exists for Jews, and has for some time. Hannah Arendt wrote about "exception Jews," who, if I remember correctly, imagined that they weren't like other Jews, that anti-Semitism wasn't about Jews like them, who actively shared whichever anti-Jewish sentiments, who were, in a sense, self-hating, but their issue was, they didn't see themselves as the thing they hated. But then Nazis, and lo and behold, it didn't matter what sort of Jew you were, you counted.

This still kind of exists for Jews, if less so, simply because the things that used to make Jews feel exception-ish ("exceptional" seems the wrong word) no longer would make Jews exceptional. Are you intermarried? Secular? Critical of Israel? Celebrate Christmas? Had a BLT on Yom Kippur? Congratulations - you're just like everybody else, or not everyone, but enough other Jews that you aren't alone. You may still feel a bit of an "exception" if you show up unsuspecting at one of those parties where it turns out everybody's Jewish and knows one another from Jewish activities (and it will only get that much more awkward if someone at the party remarks on how great it is that 'everyone here is Jewish,' and you've brought your spouse), but you can always... not go to those parties.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible to hold forth in a self-deprecating "exception" manner about whichever violation of Jewish tradition, when you could call yourself a "bad Jew" by which you meant to express that you were less Jewish - less provincial, more individual - than the rest, but maybe that day has passed? Or maybe not - Jews who are thoroughly involved in Jewish life will have a whole bunch of other, similar Jews around them. Whereas Jews who are not... there may be many of us, but we're less likely to spend our time in a large, only-Jewish group, so we could still think we were exceptions, if we were so inclined. I'm not.

But gender also plays into this - the 'heh, I'm a bad Jew' approach is something I have trouble picturing coming from a woman. I do have some ideas why, but am not planning a second dissertation to figure it out.

*If you spent any part of yesterday driving through suburban New Jersey in a gray hoodie and a ponytail, singing out loud when your favorite top-40 (is it still called that?) song came on the radio, this video may hit too close to home.

Elsewhere

Is this meta enough for you? I wrote a dissertation largely about discussions of intermarriage in 19th century French-Jewish newspapers. And now I've written about intermarriage in 19th century France in an American-Jewish newspaper. Go read it!

Intermarriage news of interest to those writing the 2314 equivalent of my dissertation

Millepied's converting, not because anything for Natalie Portman, but because he loves Israel. Scarlett Johansson - Jewish on her mother's side as every lister-of-beautiful-blondes-who-happen-to-be-Jewish will have you know - chooses seltzer over boycotts. Netanyahu's adult son may or may not be dating a non-Jewish woman who is both blonde and Norwegian, making her, by Portnoy-era standards, extra-Gentile. (Netanyahu Junior is also quite blond, but, as we have discussed on WWPD, Israel isn't in Scandinavia).

42-year-olds will be 42-year-olds

90 minutes from NYC - but thankfully not 90 minutes to the southwest, ahem - it's looking bad for the Jews. So many questions: Is it possible to sue the anti-Semitism out of a community? (Alas, probably not.) Is it clueless to imagine that anyone - or anyone white - can be welcomed as an insider anywhere in America? (Yes.) Is it anti-Semitic for one Jew to refer to a lawsuit regarding acknowledged (!) anti-Semitism as a "money grab"? (Yes.) Should we put a story of widespread communal bigotry( in a traditional Klan stronghold) through the same hoax-o-meter as smaller incidents? (Yes, everything needs to go through the hoax-o-meter, but this unfortunately doesn't sound like a hoax.) Is bringing in Holocaust survivors to speak at a school where the many of the kids are already anti-Semitic like the proverbial bringing in a former bulimic to talk to a bunch of middle-school girls already worried they're fat but not sure what to do about it? (Maybe, but they seem to have already figured out how to be junior Nazi sympathizers just fine.) Are Jews, even secular ones, who move to an area without a synagogue somehow asking to be victims of anti-Semitic attacks? (Huh?)

So, so many questions, but above all, this story riles me up in one particular way, which is that Jews so often stand accused of only wanting to live in cities or Jewish suburbs, of being clannish, etc. Then here are some Jews who want to live in a small town, and a regular small town, not a famous college town anchored by a Lululemon where one's neighbors are European and Israeli academics living in harmony that a couple generations ago might have seemed unthinkable. No, a normal town. ("At the edge of town, a big red barn is painted with a patriotic yellow ribbon. Across the street, a yard decorated with military equipment has a bomb painted with the words, 'God Bless Our Troops.' Billboards advertise 4-H clubs; stores sell tractors, snow blowers and soft-serve ice cream.") And what reward to these Jews get? Bullying at school, because kids, you know? Some "kids" are apparently 42 years old. (Let's just wait until the 'the human brain isn't fully developed until' crowd ups the ante to middle age.)

At that point, a pickup truck pulled up nearby, and a man emerged. The man, John Barker, 42, a mechanic, cautioned that “everybody watches out for everybody.” When asked about the presence of Jewish families, he blurted out, “We don’t want them in our town.” 

“They can’t drive, for number one — and they already have Sullivan County. Who really wants them here? They don’t belong here.”

We can too drive, idiot. Of course, some of us learn later than others, on account of Jewish families settling in NYC proper, on account of the apparently Jew-friendly Sullivan County not possibly having room for all of us.

"[T]wo different Rabbis wanted sex"

As is so often the case, another newspaper comment has managed to outdo the article it's appended to. Not in, like, research, nuance, etc., but in discussion-fodder. Susan Katz Miller's essay on raising children as Christians and Jews is plenty thoughtful, if unlikely to convince anyone whose concern is Jewish demography. Meanwhile, commenter "anonymous12," Jewish on her father's side, has this to say:

As the daughter of a Jewish father who was anti-religon and a mother who was from Christian stock but had no practice, I grew up figuring it out on my own. I have always been drawn to Judaism and in my thirties, I reached for it. I have never figured out if the rejection I experienced was because I was a pretty blonde single women who looked like a Swede ("Are you here for a new husband, dear?"). After making attempts to achieve an Orthodox conversion (and being accused of being a "xtian infiltrator"), I tried a Conservative conversion and wasn't welcome, and then Reform (two different Rabbis wanted sex), I gave up and stayed away. I once went into a shul to ask a question and the two women behind the counter actually nearly broke their necks trying to answer my question to my friend who had given me a ride, because she happened to have dark features--so perhaps Jewish people could drop their own stereotypes. Over and over I experienced a complete disregard for my interest, beliefs, heritage and sincerity.

Recently I moved to a new city and made a casual connection with a very mixed congregation that is very open and liberal. The Orthodox may howl, but I promise you that unless you "look Jewish", show up to convert in order to marry a Jew you already know (no shopping), and/or look like a troll, you're not actually very welcome at all. 

Every person deserves a faith community and after years of loneliness I have a place to go for the holidays where I am welcome.

For those who don't read the block-quotes, the commenter's claim is that her prettiness and blondness prevented her from being welcome in Jewish communities. Well, except that some rabbis wanted to sleep with her. (Wasn't there a "Seinfeld" about this?) She was simply too sexily non-Jewish for all but the most progressive of congregations.

Having never experienced life as a non-Jew, or as a stunning blonde, who am I to say if that's how it might have gone? Conversion to traditionalist forms of Judaism is a notoriously difficult process. And Jews aren't somehow magically immune to broader societal racism, so if someone non-white had a tough time, unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised.

But in this case, allow me some skepticism. The sticklers for Jewish law aren't concerned with your hair color (note the number of blond Hasids! and I don't mean married women with blond wigs), just with your mother's Judaism or lack thereof. Nor do you receive automatic Jewish status if you "look like a troll." (Sheesh!) I don't believe Bar Refaeli, Natalie Portman, etc. have been excommunicated.

There's a lot of particularity out there, and some of it's easy to take personally if you don't see that it applies across the board. A bit like when people will fly to Israel and think that the airport security were sizing up them for insufficient Jewishness, when it's like, no, they do this to everyone. That, and it's so ingrained in the culture that Jewish men would be weird around Swedish-looking women that a woman who fits that description may well attribute any weirdness she does experience to her physical features. Meanwhile, says Science, men are only looking at us from the neck down anyway.

Time travel

The Atlantic posted a personal essay by a Nazi sympathizer - an American of German "Aryan" origin, as she puts it - married to a Jew. She doesn't understand why Jews make such a fuss about that nice Mr. Hitler, who's only just trying to solve Germany's Jewish problem. Those around her are fascinated by her "interracial" (as she puts it) marriage to a Jew, so she's decided to head to her typewriter and tell the world about her very exotic experience.

In case the typewriter didn't give it away, the article's not recent. It's from 1939, but it seems when the magazine first put it online, in 2011, that wasn't entirely clear. (There's now an editor's note in addition to a small-print dateline.) And so brings us the convergence of all my interests: Modern Jewish history! Historical intermarriage! Internet comments! Where oh where to begin?

-We kind of have to begin with the fact that some commenters - that is, commenters today, what with the scarcity of internet commenters in 1939 - agree with the author. As in, they think they're reading a new article, and it's one they agree with. And you know what? I can sort of see why they think it's a regular Atlantic article, not from the archives. It's a personal essay, a relationship essay, by a woman, written in a conversational tone. That to me says 2011 more than 1939. It's the agreement that's unsettling.

-Then there's the tremendous difference between what the article tells us about the author given when it was written, and what it would tell us about her if it had been written even a few years later, let alone in 2011. If you take a look at a timeline from the period, that whole invading-Poland thing hadn't happened yet. The U.S. wouldn't enter the war for quite a while. And if you consider the lag between when something was written and when it was published back in the age of print journalism, that this appeared in a January 1939 issue means it was written, almost certainly, in 1938. So plausibly before Kristallnacht. Point being, what "Nazis" meant to an American at that time, what Nazis were at that time, was radically different from what we hear when we hear that word.

-But, but, the author and her husband did argue about Nazi anti-Jewish policy! Evidently someone saw the Nazis for what they were! But here's the thing: Political anti-Semitism wasn't yet associated with death camps, what with that having not happened yet. By 1938, even, it was plenty clear Nazis weren't fond of Jews, but not remotely clear what they were going to do about it. When you read today about a regime with a repressive policy towards gays or Roma, you may disapprove or protest, but you're probably not in all-out panic that gas chambers are being set up. While it would have been a nice gesture for the author to condemn a regime abroad that had it in for her husband, her level of callousness isn't as extreme as it seems, reading the essay today.

-If the essay is about Jewish assimilation in America, it's also, in a more subtle way, about German-American particularity. The author describes a very specific kind of family culture, something about vacationing in the mountains and not having a warm relationship with relatives, as if that's just American, which, no. I can think of plenty of groups, apart from Jews, who'd be more "Jewish" than "German" in this regard. (See: many groups of non-German Catholics.) I venture to say there'd have been culture clash had this woman married into an Italian or a Belgian family.

-While reading the essay is a lesson in avoiding anachronism, it's also a reminder that, well, that there's a reason 'some of my best friends are X' has taken on the meaning it has. It's entirely possible for your best friend or spouse to be X, and for you to be intensely bigoted against that group. While we have no reason to think the author would have supported the Final Solution, there's not much of a sense, either, that being married to a Jew in some way stopped her from holding anti-Semitic views typical of her era. Or even above and beyond. She has quite the deeply-theorized anti-Semitism going, and has clearly given The Jew a lot of thought:

'But look at the matter from the political side,' I advise Ben. 'When a Swede or a Chinese settles down in a foreign land, such as the United States, the Swede makes haste to become a thorough American—at any rate he lets his children become thorough Americans; the Chinese, realizing that this is impossible, lives aloofly in Chinatown, minds his own business, and keeps out of American political affairs. The Jew, however, wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Like the Chinese, he clings to his own race, culture, and tradition; he trains his children to cling to these just as tenaciously. Then, like the Swede, he sets out to annex all the privileges of Americanism. He wants to rise to the top of the Gentile social structure, to wield power in Gentile politics of the community, state and nation. He wants to be left alone, but he also wants the country in which he lives to take good care of him. He wants to have full citizenship in that country, yet retain his citizenship in the Jewish nation.

I think the proper response here, the only one that can properly, and in a nuanced way, comment on this is: oy. 

Not so post-racial after all

-Count me among those who had no idea that in 1887, some Germans founded a colony in Paraguay based around the idea of Jews being awful. 1887. I need to remember that not everyone else is over-steeped in modern Jewish history, and thus not everyone is thinking, huh, so a year after Drumont's La France juive. Hitler didn't take power until 1933. The Dreyfus Affair? 1894-1906. 1887! Asylum-seekers, it seems, from the Jewish menace. Which is an often-forgotten angle, right? Anti-Semites weren't - aren't - just people who think they're better than Jews. They're people who think they're being oppressed by Jews.

-A reader sent me this story about being Jewish in a U.S. prison. It should be read in conjunction with Nick's post here (discussed here). Sample passage:

It is an inviolate rule that different races may not break bread together under any circumstances. Violating this rule leads to harsh consequences. If you eat at the same table as another race, you'll get beaten down. If you eat from the same tray as another race, you'll be put in the hospital. And if you eat from the same food item as another race, that is, after another race has already taken a bite of it, you can get killed. This is one area where even the heads don't have any play. 

This makes it difficult for me, of course, to fit into the chow hall. Jews, as we all know, are not white but imposters who don white skin and hide inside it for the purpose of polluting and taking over the white race. The skinheads simply can't allow me to eat with them: that would make them traitors of the worst kind — race traitors! But my milky skin and pasty complexion, characteristic of the Eastern European Ashkenazi, make it impossible for me to eat with other races who don't understand the subtleties of my treachery and take me for just another [white person]. So the compromise is that I may sit at certain white tables after all the whites have finished eating.

There's a whole lot to say about this, but one interesting takeaway is the reminder that anti-Semitism is listed separately from racism for a reason. The problem for anti-Semites is sometimes that Jews look different (the affront to blondness - see above), but it's also sometimes that Jews don't look different.

-And in more "traditional" racism, the cure to the late-20s, where-is-my-life-going Westerners' blues is apparently treating African women and children like zoo animals. Writes a British advice columnist:

Visiting some of the most challenged areas in Africa, rechristened by Bob Geldof the "Luminous Continent", you're surprised by an infectious degree of joy among women and children that's in direct contrast to their circumstances. Whether it's at a refugee camp in Chad or a malarial ward in Mozambique, kids kicking an air-filled plastic bag in lieu of a football in the slums of Nairobi or market women in central Monrovia packing up after an 18-hour day, the laughter is irresistible. 

Here we struggle to achieve similar degrees of happiness, pop antidepressants to get through the day and squander time living vicariously through soap-opera storylines and celebrity elevation and decline.

While snap-out-of-it advice may have been called for in this particular situation (or not - some funks are deeper and more biochemical than others), it's unclear what this digression adds, yet abundantly clear what it detracts.

-Thank you, Michael Pollan! said the Hasid with the bacon

Here's one for the food-is-the-new-religion crowd: Michael Pollan just (well, pre-recorded jogging-ready podcast) told Leonard Lopate that he (Pollan) thinks pork should be kosher. Pork, Pollan explains, can be eaten ethically, and kosher eating is about eating ethically. This sounded to me on the cusp of, Michael Pollan thinks he is in fact God (not that I, an atheist, object on anything but that's-kinda-arrogant grounds). And even Lopate, food-movement adherent and apparent Pollan enthusiast that he is, seemed skeptical, noting the thousands of years of tradition Pollan was readily dismissing. Chutzpah, I believe, is the technical term.

As for analogies... one might see where the anti-circumcision people are coming from, as in the ones who think Judaism needs to scrap that requirement. If you believe circumcision constitutes harm (maybe? maybe not?), then it might go in the way that whichever other now-we-know religious practices did as well. But what exactly is the harm done from not eating a certain kind of animal? It would seem that there's harm in eating too much meat, or unethically-farmed meat. Maybe there's some argument that certain types of shellfish actually help aquatic ecosystems and as such humans are under some kind of earth-saving duty that trumps religious conviction to eat more of them, although that's a stretch. (See: the vegans-should-eat-oysters argument.) But pork?

Not seeing it. Pork as is generally available is not something one's under a secular ethical obligation to eat - quite the contrary. That there exists (relatively - vegetarians will disagree) ethically produced pork doesn't make pork vegetarian, because "vegetarian" doesn't mean eating what Michael Pollan thinks is OK. It means not eating meat. "Kosher" means, among other things, avoiding pork.

There would need to be a compelling reason to eat whichever less-problematic pork, as opposed to a lack of a compelling ethical reason not to do so. And the existence of some feral hogs in some parts of the country (this had come up earlier on the same podcast) doesn't seem as though it would obligate whichever % of an already-tiny minority actually avoids pork to start eating it. There may be no good health reason in this day and age for non-vegetarians to refuse to eat pork, but so what? Isn't Pollan always saying that we'd do better to eat traditionally - in really whichever tradition - because seemingly arbitrary restrictions are what keep us eating reasonable amounts and balanced meals? Wouldn't that make a dietary system like keeping kosher - even if there's no specific reason not to combine meat and milk, say - advisable under his own view? Simply the fact of restrictions - of qualms - keeps people in line. Why couldn't Pollan stop while he was ahead, promoting home-cooking, being sensible?

Out of one's comfort zone

The latest teacher to fancy himself Robin "Dead Poets Society" Williams is one in Albany who asked students to think outside the box (heh) and explain, from the perspective of a Nazi, why Jews are evil. (Via.) Because doesn't it just make you think? Aren't a bunch of bourgeois panties in a twist? Because that, you see, is the purpose of teaching - making students and their stuffy parents (never hip, like the teacher) uncomfortable. Obviously - and I say this as a sometimes-teacher - most teachers don't think like that. But, as a former high school student, I must say that a certain number do. Apart from truly evil (molestation) and incompetent (not showing up; conducting class by silently copying the textbook onto the blackboard; spending all of class telling off-topic personal anecdotes) behavior, this is my least favorite pedagogical approach. Proper teaching should itself be enough to give students a new perspective. But that sort of me-vs.-your-presumed-naivete attitude is irritating at best, and cultish at worst.

Anyway, what's challenging about this story is that once one gets past one's initial reaction (as a friend of mine put it on Facebook, and it couldn't be put better: "WTF?"), one is left trying to pin down exactly why this crossed a line. Because it wasn't that the teacher tried to demonstrate that Nazis were humans, not monsters. After all, 'why did Nazis/so many other otherwise ordinary people throughout history hate Jews?' is a valid question to ask. Much serious research is done on this topic, little of it by Nazi sympathizers. Lots by Jewish scholars. Historians and others will not ask why some essential They hated The Jews, but rather why a specific time and place was conducive to anti-Semitism.

But the factors tended to have little to do with real-life Jews. The ancient Hebrews are rather significant in Christianity, but Jews have tended to be a tiny minority if present at all in the West. And then of course there was the question of which Jews, if any, Gentiles had contact with. If we're talking mid-19th C France... financiers, prostitutes, yes. Village-dwelling peddlers, not so much. This led to a warped perspective. Point being, the question isn't 'what's so dreadful about Jews, now and always?' but rather 'how did Jews come to symbolize materialism, urbanization, secularism, or whatever else anti-Semitism functioned as at a given moment?' So the teacher's demand doesn't even make sense as a history lesson.

So that's one problem with the assignment - Nazi anti-Semitism was not some kind of rational response to Jewish misdeeds. Nice touch, btw, that the teacher asked students to look to their own lives for examples of... Jews' evilness? Anti-Semitism? Unclear.

But the bigger problem is hello, these are high school students. They're not history grad students being trained to teach courses on anti-Semitism. They don't need to really, intensely get what a midcentury anti-Semite would have had against Jews. They don't need to learn about racist strains of romanticism, about nostalgia for an agrarian past. (Not that this assignment would make sense for grad students, either - see above.) Since when isn't it enough to tell high school kids that Nazism was a racist ideology, to give whichever standard and not inaccurate explanations depending the level of the students (economic resentment ignoring the existence of poor Jews, longstanding religious intolerance, various factors unrelated to Jews making fascism appealing to many at that time)? And if one wishes to make the point that Nazis were ordinary citizens, one might bring up the "banality of evil" argument, toss Arendt's name onto the board, and be done with it. Students can - will! - make the leap on their own and realize that if they'd been "Aryan" in Nazi Germany, chances are they wouldn't have done the right thing, either.

Insisting they write essays on Jews' horribleness is... well, it reminds me of when they bring in a former bulimic to warn teen girls, and then half the class is like, 'huh, you can throw up after meals to lose weight?', and a quarter of the class goes and does just that. Americans in 2013 aren't giving all that much thought to Jews either way, so this is a case of dumb-idea-planting.

And yeah, Jewish students may have been in the class. (To quote my friend once more: "WTF?") There's a scene in Arnon Grunberg's The Jewish Messiah, a Dutch (translated!) novel I read recently, in which a young Jewish character readily agrees with a postwar Nazi sympathizer that the world would have been better had he - and all other Jews - never been born. This in the context of a truly out-there novel about postwar Europe confronting that era, one whose title character is - spoiler alert, nausea alert - a testicle in a jar. But back on earth, kids - adults! - tend not to dispassionately ponder their own extermination. An assignment that would remove all students (save whichever budding neo-Nazis?) from their comfort zone would be altogether traumatic, even incomprehensible, for Jewish kids. It's not a lesson the entire class would be able to complete.

On "Josh" and "Seth"

I will admit that I first read this reference to TV writers as "white dudes with names like Josh or Seth" as a bit Jews-control-the-media. But then I thought about it and wasn't sure. Is Seth a Jewish name in this context? Maybe yes, maybe no. (I have no Jewdar, as Seth Adam Meyers is apparently not Jewish.) While half of all Jewish men of my generation are named Josh (I exaggerate, but slightly), it's just a common name all-around. Right?

But if not "Jewish," what are those names meant to indicate? "White," maybe, but since that's already in there, it would be redundant. But these things are complicated. If I can't say offhand whether "Seth" and "Josh" mean "Jewish" to most Americans, how on earth do I know if this Jezebel writer (whose name only tells me "female") is or is not someone who'd even know that these names would read that way to many people, that this would fit into a really fundamental anti-Semitic accusation. And not just some accusation one reads about in history textbooks - I've seen this criticism recently regarding the writing staff of "Girls" - that the show is not merely white but Jewish apparently does the opposite of mitigate the problem for some observers. Hmm.

Back to Jezebel. A reply to a comment calling this post anti-Semitic is both helpful-ish and itself possibly offensive: "This tells me that you have never been in the US of A ever. Josh and Seth are pretty stereotypical White non-Jewish frat boy names these days, just like Zack." The second sentence, helpful. (Old-Testament first names are confusing! If you're Jewish and you mostly know other Jews, or know mainly Catholics, these sound to you like Jewish names. And then you start wondering whether all the British Davids and Rachels could possibly be Jewish, and you realize, ah, Protestants!) The first, purest anti-Semitic assholery - a provincial American Jew from whichever Jewish coastal/suburban enclave is just as American as a provincial Methodist from Kansas. Ugh that this needs to be pointed out.

"On paper" UPDATED

Sometimes we all make assumptions. For instance, I'd assume an American Jewish woman of a certain generation would be familiar with what the "Jewish American Princess" stereotype consists of. As I have been informed that not all readers of my blog are American Jewish women around my mother's age (that my blog is read by more than just my mother), I will link to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, which is incomplete but gives some sense. What it doesn't get into is the sexual aspect of the "JAP" cliché. The "JAP," according to tradition, wants a husband desperately for money and status, but is frigid and uptight. She's preoccupied with what she looks like, but her husband needs to be a hard-working pushover, and Jewish, and that's about it. 

Which is why I'm completely flummoxed by (JTL, avert your eyes) this recent Dear Prudence exchange:

Dear Prudence, 

I am a 31-year-old American Jewish woman who has been studying veterinary medicine and working in London for the past several years. I am ready to start a family. I recently ended a casual relationship with a man I desperately loved, but who wasn’t ready to commit. Enter David, a tall, blue-eyed Jewish doctor I would be proud to introduce to my family (the antithesis of the dark, hipster man I still think about). David is sweet and kind and everything I could ask for, on paper. We are a couple of months in and he wants to meet my mom, but I'm scared my family will love him so much I will be pressured into marrying him. Here’s my problem: He's bald. When we have sex it just sometimes feels like I'm banging an infant or grandpa and I get weirded out. I have never imagined being with a bald man for the rest of my life. I'd also like him to work out more than he does—I’m a workout junkie. All superficial things, but isn't passion and attraction an essential ingredient to a happy relationship? How do I improve a man without demoralizing his ego? How do I get past the baldness without resorting to asking him to wear a hat?

—Self-professed JAP

Dear Self,

I despise the Jewish American Princess stereotype, but in your case, you deserve the crown and scepter. Out of nowhere, just as you feel your egg timer ticking, comes a tall, kind, blue-eyed Jewish doctor who’s crazy about you. I’m ready to plotz! But you want to kick him out of bed because of a weak follicular showing. Surely you know that one day, no matter how much you can bench press, your breasts will deflate. I sincerely hope that your husband—if you find one—won’t complain that he feels as if he’s having sex with his grandmother. [....]

OK, so. Several issues here. One being that baldness and/or paunch are kind of the name of the game if you're a heterosexual woman over the age of 16 and not a supermodel. Heck, even if you are a supermodel. And even if your dude is currently musclebound and with a full head of hair, look around at men of various ages and it will become clear that what's common at 20 is less so at 50. So I wouldn't think to anchor male beauty to either of these. As Yoffe notes, aging happens to us all, and in predictable enough ways. That said, men don't seem to have a problem anchoring female beauty to qualities more often found in the young, even when assessing women they perfectly well know to be middle-aged. A further that-said: there's a case for being attracted to your partner initially, and then taking what comes aging-wise later on. Blather blather blather, but allow me to get to the point:

How does Yoffe, given her professed familiarity with the stereotype (and she's from the generation most plagued by it, I suppose), not see that it is in no way "jappy" to care what a man you're intimately involved with looks like? The "JAP" is utterly uninterested in intimacy or sexual pleasure. It is the precise opposite of the "JAP" stereotype to meet a nice Jewish doctor and think not, OMG when am I getting the ring, but, does he do it for me physically? And life being unfair, part of sexual attraction for the non-blind is, do you like looking at this person while you're having sex with them? Does this add to or detract from the experience? Obviously, not all women will consider baldness and paunch detractions - just as there are gay men who prefer the bear look, there are probably that many more straight women who simply associate that look with masculinity and would be suspicious of a never-aging Keanu Reeves type. (Poor Keanu, must be tough for him to get a date.) But the letter-writer, for whatever reason, is not one of those women. She spells out that she does not like looking at this guy while they are having sex.

These are, then, two separate questions: a) is she being a "JAP"? and b) is she being reasonable? Re: the first, it's an obvious no, this is exactly what a "JAP" does not do. If she cared what he looked like to her friends, if there were a status angle, maybe, but if this is about their most private moments together, nope, definitely not. Re: the second, it's less straightforward. It kind of hinges on whether "I am ready to start a family" refers to her desire to do so, in which case it might be time to reconsider an aversion to what heterosexual men in a 31-year-old woman's dating pool tend to look like, or whether this is something she feels she must say, but the occasional fling with a Keanu would be more to her liking. And I'd kind of guess the latter - the 'too-picky' single woman is often enough a woman who doesn't want domesticity but feels somehow obliged to pretend that she does.

UPDATE

So the consensus in the comments (which are, btw, impossible to read what with the scrolling, and mostly about the other letters) seems to be that a Jewish doctor with a British accent is the prize of the millenium. There are female commenters prepared to run off with him sight unseen. And it's readily agreed that this woman is a "JAP," because apparently "JAP" just means a single Jewish woman not aware that her kind ("JAPs" or Jewish women generally?) is so repugnant to men that she must take what she can get. The consensus is that a woman who expresses preferences for what the man she's sleeping with looks like is being superficial, that these preferences are something to be embarrassed about.

The only reasonable points around were that a) the guy deserves to be with someone who finds him attractive (although the reasonableness was mitigated by the accompanying assertion that this guy - sight unseen, remember! we have not heard him speak, observed his manner... - would have a million women lined up to marry him), and b) she might want to hold off introducing this man to her family.

Mostly, though, it's the usual man-shortage nonsense directed at single women generally and single Jewish women in particular. All of which leads me to revise my initial take - this woman should move on. Better for everyone involved.

Today in schnozzery

Via Refinery29, a Guardian story on how Iran has the highest per-capita rate of nose jobs. Interest in international primping trends is maybe on the rise, what with the "This American Life" bit on Korea and the not uncontroversial Jezebel post on the same. And Iranian nose-alteration is apparently not a new story, but the degree of this surgery's popularity might be. And it appears to extend to some Iranian-Americans as well.

Now, hopefully no one's coming to WWPD for cutting-edge reporting on Iran. (On a good day I make it all the way to Wegmans.) But re: noses, I have some thoughts, coming as I do from the people most stereotyped as schnozztastic. With Jews and noses, my sense is that once the thinking is that Jews have big noses, even if no more Jews have 'em (Western Europe not being the sea of button noses one might imagine from Great Neck), those who do will feel this is a Jewish trait, and be more inclined to do something about it. As in, white non-Jews would get them as well, but only if they actually had (or, via a mental illness, mistakenly believed they had) remarkable noses. And - permit the digression - it's worth remembering that the definitive "Jewish" features vary by time and place. In the 19th C French documents I know so well, it's all about how Jews have "Oriental"-looking eyes. I'm not even sure what that entailed - not East Asian-looking, presumably. Point being, it hardly matters if the features in question are more common among whichever minority, if the main issue is what's associated with the group in question.

Although... do Jews still get nose jobs, outside the entertainment industry where seemingly everyone does? From what I can tell, and apparently the evidence agrees, the era of the Jewish teen nose-job has ended. No one, to my knowledge, showed up at my high school with a new nose, and what were we if not Jewish and Korean? And yet, in Iran, the de-schnozzification lives on. Why? 

Again, it could be that there's some obvious answer, albeit one someone as Iran-ignorant as I am would never come up with, but if there is, it's not in the Guardian piece. We do get a few clues, such as that if only one's face is revealed, one's nose is particularly key, and there are some hints that this is a desire to look more Western, as if in protest against a not-so-Western regime. (No reference to the possibility that what with Ahmadinejad, it's frowned upon to look Jewish, likely because that's not what this is about.) But in general, reasons given are not nation-or ethnicity-specific. In which part of the world do women not want to look beautiful, do women not think being beautiful will help them on the marriage market? Why noses?

My best guess would be that there's this sense, for Jews, and perhaps for Iranians as well, that one is this close to looking white, to 'passing.' If your ancestors are from China or Kenya, you on some level realize that even if you'd like to look Swedish, it's not gonna happen. But this still doesn't quite explain it - for postwar American Jews, the idea was to blend in with the non-Jews around you. And there were of course the unstated anxieties about what it meant to look Jewish not so many years prior, not so far away. Presumably there's no stigma in Iran on looking identifiably Iranian. Is there even a stereotype about Iranians and noses? (This is what I would have wanted from the Guardian piece.) There's at any rate no concern, as far as I know, that one will be rounded up and murdered if one has a big nose, but not if one does not.

Requisite Jewish Christmas post

If you're Jewish, and do the thing of treating non-celebration-of-Christmas as the major, definitive Jewish holiday, what actually goes on on this day for those who do acknowledge it remains something of a mystery. That it is often a drag, or just something like Thanksgiving, never occurs to you. It must all be really magical, or else why are Jews obligated to show their non-celebration of the day by being miserable? By bemoaning the fact that nothing is open, even things that you would never notice weren't open on some random weekend?

It was only as an adult, I think, that I realized there was a whole tradition of Jewish Christmas, a cheery day with Chinese food, movies, and of course singles mixers, so that more non-Christmas-observing babies might be born. Although it's possible my family did this (not the singles mixers, just the dumplings) and I somehow never put it together that this was part of some larger tradition, and assumed it was that one would year after year run through all the things that weren't possible and come up with Chinatown and movie theaters by process of elimination. (Childhood's a bit of a blur, I suppose. No "Angela's Ashes" coming from me.)

Also as an adult, it's something of a fluke that I don't celebrate Christmas - my husband's family does, but they live far away, off in Gérard Depardieu territory - well, the same country. If I were one of the Jews who had always dreamed of celebrating the holiday, I could do as apparently many in my situation do and use intermarriage as an excuse to go all-out. This is, if the social-media site mentioned below is any guide, a thing. The quasi-guilty, massively-enthusiastic celebration of that which was once taboo. But I don't really get this - it's precisely because the non-Jewish world is no longer a mystery that Christmas is no longer a mystery, just a holiday my husband's family does and mine doesn't acknowledge, much like his family, not being American, doesn't do Thanksgiving. Not exactly the same - it's different to be Jewish in a majority-Christian country. But not all that different. If I were in Belgium this time of year, I'd go in for it, especially given that the "it" of all Belgian celebrations involves eating copious amounts of delicious pie. Although Easter's somewhat more intriguing, what with the chocolates. And because non-celebration-of-Easter isn't one of the major laws of secular Judaism, I can eat as many white-chocolate-praliné eggs as I want guilt-free. Jewish-guilt-free, at least.

But the weirdness of December 25th for the likes of me, it really is about being Jewish, not merely non-Christian. It might be PC to frame it as time of the year is for non-Christians, but from what I can tell, other non-Christians either just don't care or celebrate it as a secular holiday. And obviously not all Jews care - some go in for it (old-time German Jews, more recent Russian-Jewish immigrants) even without an intermarriage as cover. But I do wish - as I think I ask every year - that the secular-of-Christian-extraction community would get that this is and is likely to remain a thing for some Jews, and would not insist that Christmas is a secular rather than a religious holiday, get-over-yourselves-already. And that this isn't because Jews are being difficult, but because Jews are projecting onto Christianity that same blurry is-it-a-culture-or-a-religion identity that constitutes Judaism. Christmas, to many Jews, feels Christian, is Christian, even if it's a secular/cultural/"pagan" variant. Along the same lines, even if you-the-secular-but-of-Christian-extraction don't identify as Christian, you may be identified as such by Jews, who are merely responding to the fact that they get identified as Jews regardless of religious affiliation. If any of that makes sense.

At any rate, a holiday that involves putting up a decorated tree and placing gifts under it doesn't seem even remotely compatible with ownership of a naughty and hyperactive (impervious to dog runs, woods walks...) miniature poodle. No menorah, alas, for the same reason.

The tristate area

Cropped for emphasis. The "are you Jewish" set were way off their game that day, going right past me twice and asking the question instead of baffled European and/or Latin American tourists. 

On the Upper East Side, handbags are babies. I think that's the message this window display wants us to come away with.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania... Idiot that I am, I saw this billboard and thought, yay Obama! The small-when-you're-driving-by-it print suggests that is not the intended message.

Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, there's nothing silly happening whatsoever. No poodle fresh from the groomers', no Halloween-themed bandana. This is entirely in your imagination.

WWPD elsewhere

Want to know where Woody Allen meets fashion-bloggery? Click here. 

This is most exciting, both because it's been ages since I've gotten off my grad-student behind to do some freelance writing, and because my dissertation is largely about articles in the (nineteenth-century, French) Jewish press. I am at one with my subjects! Someone can cite me as a primary source in their dissertation 150 years from now!

New York City, 2012

-A missing-person sign up in and around Penn Station indicates that the young man "is not wearing a yarmulke."

-One Facebook friend has a post complaining about being asked to work unpaid. Another has a posting that her employer is looking for unpaid interns, for college credit or recent grads willing to work for nothing.

-Squeamishness regained: I made the rookie mistake (it's like I didn't grow up here!) of getting lunch on St. Marks Place. In the manner of, "Fool me once...", if you see one shall-not-be-mentioned crawling around, you may forgive and think it must have crawled in from outside. But when two are charging at your plate of vegetarian (ha!) stir-fry, you will throw out what remains of the food and leave.