Jew[ish]

by Matt Greene

. But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps

What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.

Being Jewish, as far as I could tell, was like being grounded.

Syrian

Greek!

The miracle is resource management, and our celebrations reflected this moral.

since what this service amounted to was the world’s slowest and most depressing drinking game.

I spent a month with him one afternoon.

Drama requires desire but comedy can come from acceptance.

‘These are my principles and if you don’t like them I have others,’ quipped Groucho,

no other joke cuts quicker to the heart of comedy as survival. Comedy requires polysemy, being in two places at once, and

Claire Dederer’s brilliant essay in the November 2017 issue of The Paris Review, ‘What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?’

Paranoid because hating Jews had long since gone out of fashion, probably permanently, like cargo shorts or eyebrow bolts.

Unfortunately for us, hating jews is one thing that NEVER goes out of fashion...

a contrarian streak that was at the centre of what I thought it meant to be Jewish,

the Jew Crew,

to compensate I talked at length about Seinfeld, occasionally said ‘oy’ and read a lot of Philip Roth (the whole Zuckerman Bound trilogy, including The Prague Orgy).

the Morgenthau Plan (which proposed reducing Germany’s industrial capacity to the level of subsistence farming),

By the start of 1946, American newspapers had stopped calling for justice for the Jews of Europe and started calling instead for the return home of troops who’d been left behind to process questionnaires.

that by 1948, through a combination of collusion, corruption and bureaucratic malfeasance, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Nazis had been quietly folded back into German society.

And anti-Semitism, the idea that someone would hate Jews, seemed no less anachronistic.

How naive!!!

Because we needed an excuse for failing to integrate fully into a society that didn’t see us as different.

Again, naive...

But versions of this view – that intermarriage is to be avoided or at best tolerated – are common and filter down through several strata of Jewish cultural belief.

This is very common among most religions and nations and not at all specific to the Jewish faith

but no Jew can get too far before they’re forced to engage with Israel in one form or the other.

the birthplace of Eyal Berkovic;

What???

Israel was an illegitimate state built on land stolen from its indigenous people on a scale unprecedented in all of human history.

The Unired States? Canada? Australia? Etc...

‘The thing about being Jewish is you always need to be vigilant. If you think you’re safe, you’re probably being complacent.

‘There have been Jews in Israel since the twelfth century BC.’

More like since the 30th BC more or less...

Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Actually...forces from 21 or 22 Arab countries...including Iraq, Libya, Yemen etc

‘Israel provides every Jew with an essential cloak of security. Having this security enables us to voice our views, to display our heritage, to hold our heads high . . . The existence of Israel gives you the strength, consciously or unconsciously, to express your views in print.’

Israel exists because the Holocaust happened, not because it might happen again; once was enough.

Anti-Semitism created Israel, and not, as some would have it, the other way around.

Very true!

“The day of judgment will not come until Muslims kill the Jews. When the Jews will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”’

It actually calls for the conversion of all people to Islam and the annihilation of all the rest *except for Jews."

Over blanched-out footage of the prominent Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros – a long-time bogeyman for the Republican right who has been variously accused of fixing elections and funding anti-Trump protests, a man who at fourteen saw his native Hungary overrun by the Nazis – the soon-to-be commander-in-chief’s narration warned that ‘[t]he establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election, for those who control the levers of

In all but exceptional cases, my Jewishness is something I can choose to disclose, which brings an element of self-determination denied the victim of more traditional racial prejudice because I can control if and when to ‘out’

myself as Jewish and, therefore, the effect my Jewishness has over a given situation.

You may think so - but, most likely, you're awfully wrong...

Jews are at once weak beyond pity and powerful beyond belief.

That Jews are white

You keep repeating this wrong assertion - Jews come in all "colors," you just happen to have a very Anglo-centric view...!

a line most often attributed to Groucho Marx but one that, as Alvy knows, first appears in Freud’s Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious: ‘I’d never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.’

you don’t oppose anti-Semitism at the expense of decrying Islamophobia, or vice versa. (As

Kakutani writes in The Death of Truth

the internet is decreasingly a window and increasingly a mirror.

it’s a portal into our own subconscious.

Through the promise of connecting us with like-minded people, the internet has filtered out interactions with those we disagree with (or limited it to the level of trolling).

a perfect incubator for conspiratorial thinking.

benign or otherwise, all conspiracy theories have something significant in common: they are all inherently undisprovable.

Challenging a conspiracy theorist, even with evidence that appears empirical, will only embolden them. A conspiracy theory is a one-man human centipede: endlessly feeding on its own cycle of infinitely reconstituted shit. Conspiracy is self-sustaining. It’s self-generative.

So so true

just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not out to get you.

There’s a great joke about a Holocaust survivor who gets to heaven and tells God a Holocaust joke. ‘That’s not funny,’ God chastises him, to which the survivor shrugs. ‘Yeah, I guess you had to be there.’ The implication being, He wasn’t.

even if the only real lesson is that man is capable of acts of staggering inhumanity.

By the end of 1941, 80 per cent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive; by the end of 1942, 80 per cent were dead. This statistical inversion is largely down to camps like Belzec, which were built with the exclusive purpose of murdering Jews.86

To say to say it’s surreal is an understatement is an understatement.