WWPD is apparently worthy of being nominated for the 2005 Jewish and Israeli Blog awards. At least according to one other blogger, but as this other blogger is a) not someone I'd heard of until seeing from my sitemeter that people had gotten here via her blog, and, relatedly, b) not a member of my immediate family, this should be taken seriously. Nominate away!
If I'm bringing Jewish news to these fair internets, I should offer up one bit of information that I had not known until today: according to the new book on UChicago's Latke-Hamentach debate, Chicago did, in fact, have quotas for Jews, in the 1930s. The word on the street/quad/whatever was always that Chicago never had quotas of any kind, but according to the book, Chicago's quotas weren't as severe as those at other top schools. I guess this is sort of like learning that grade inflation exists, albeit to a more limited extent, at Chicago just as it does elsewhere. Learning things like this is as close as I will ever come to the experience of learning that there's no Santa Claus.
The nominating business, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteBut you should read this interview with Philip Roth if you haven't already. It's full of Jews not being special and Derbyshire man-child lovin.
"It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish, and it's really not interesting. I'm an American. You can't talk about this without walking straight out into horrible cliches that say nothing about human beings. America is first and foremost ... it's my language. And identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone actually experiences life."
"That author asked for it. Did he really write about how he had sex with the girl in his master bedroom? Yes, that's interesting. It turned political. If it was an affair with a 25-year-old student at the university in Port-au-Prince, it wouldn't have been a problem."
The link is Roth Interview.
ReplyDeleteI'll take a look, that does look interesting. But as for not knowing about "the nominating business," I'll say this much: when you're Philip Roth, you can worry about not wanting to be put into a box.
ReplyDelete