Pride and Privilege, Paranoia and Prejudice
The late Alan King - one of the greatest of all Jewish comedians - once quipped “Here’s a brief summary of every Jewish holiday: ‘They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!’”
Mathematician/topical song writer Tom Lehrer wrote a well-known satiric piece called “National Brotherhood Week,” the opening lyrics of which go: “Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Moslems, and everybody hates the Jews.”
In 1923, the Welsh-born, sober-sided David Lloyd George, who served as British Prime Minister from 1916-1922, noted: Of all the extreme fanaticism which plays havoc in man’s nature, there is not one as irrational as anti-Semitism. … If the Jews are rich [these fanatics] are victims of theft. If they are poor, they are victims of ridicule. If they take sides in a war, it is because they wish to take advantage from the spilling of non-Jewish blood. If they espouse peace, it is because they are scared by their natures or traitors. If the Jew dwells in a foreign land he is persecuted and expelled. If he wishes to return to his own land, he is prevented from doing so.” Then too, there was an anonymous wit who once proclaimed “I don’t know which came first: the Jews or the anti-Semites. It seems to me that if G-d hadn’t, in his great wisdom created the ‘Chosen People,’ anti-Semites would have, in order to have an eternal target for their deranged animosity.”
To my mind, the best of all quotes about the Jews comes from the pen of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens): "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.
His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.
The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmaties, of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Between the humor of comedian King and the wit of satirist Lehrer one gets an insider’s grasp of the irrepressible, self-deprecating wit of the Children of Abraham and Sarah. Likewise, the brilliant insights of two non-Jews - Lloyd George and Mark Twain shine a blinding white light on the historic enigma of this people who are about to enter the year 5782 with prayers of hope and forgiveness, as well as historic pride and tearful remembrance.
Without question, there are tons and tons of things to be proud of when it comes to the accomplishments of Jewish people. Hell’s bells, a brief ramble through the pages of movie history, broken down into producers, directors, screenwriters, composers and stars is enough to make one’s chest puff up to the point of exploding. Then too, the number of Jewish brothers and sisters involved in medical research, physics, chemistry, biology and various sciences we cannot even pronounce is legion. In the world of politics, the Senate Majority Leader (New York’s Chuck Schumer) and the floor leaders of both Trump impeachment trials (California’s Adam Schiff and Maryland’s Jaimie Raskin) are all "MOT” (members of the tribe). Within the Biden Administration we can identify far more than a minyan occupying important posts:
Ron Klain: Chief of Staff
Janet Yellin Secretary of Treasury
Alejandro Mayorkas: Secretary of Homeland Security
Tony Blinken Secretary of State
Merrick Brian Garland: Attorney General
Jared Bernstein: Council of Economic Advisers
Rochelle Walensky: Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Wendy Sherman: Deputy Secretary of State
Anne Neuberger Deputy National Security Adviser for Cybersecurity
Jeffrey Zients: COVID-19 Response Coordinator
David Kessler: Co-chair of the COVID-19 Advisory Board and Head of Operation Warp Speed
David Cohen: CIA Deputy Director
Rachel Levine: Deputy Health Secretary
Jennifer Klein: Co-chair Council on Gender Policy
Jessica Rosenworcel: Chair of the Federal Communications Commission
Stephanie Pollack: Deputy Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration
Polly Trottenberg: Deputy Secretary of Transportation
Mira Resnick: State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regional Security
Roberta Jacobson: National Security Council “border czar”
Gary Gensler: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman*
Genine Macks Fidler: National Council on the Humanities
Chanan Weissman: Director for Technology and Democracy at National Security Council
Thomas Nides U.S. Ambassador to Israel [to be confirmed]
Eric Garcetti U.S. Ambassador to India [to be confirmed]
David Cohen: U.S. Ambassador to Canada [to be confirmed]
Mark Gitenstein: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union [to be confirmed]
Deborah Lipstadt: Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism [to be confirmed]
Jonathan Kaplan: U.S. Ambassador to Singapore [to be confirmed]
Marc Stanley: U.S. Ambassador to Argentina [to be confirmed]
Rahm Emanuel U.S. Ambassador to Japan [to be confirmed]
Sharon Kleinbaum: Commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
Thankfully, to date, there has been precious little chatter from cyber anti-Semites about the overwhelming number of Jewish men and women serving the country in top-line posts. Historically, those who hate Jews need little reason for their conspiratorial animosity. Historically, the reasons why people hate Jews falls into roughly six categories:
Economic -- "We hate Jews because they possess too much wealth and power."
Chosen People -- "We hate Jews because they arrogantly claim that they are the chosen people."
Scapegoat -- "Jews are a convenient group to single out and blame for our troubles."
Deicide -- "We hate Jews because they killed Jesus."
Outsiders -- "We hate Jews because they are different than us." (The dislike of the unlike.)
Racial Theory -- "We hate Jews because they are an inferior race."
Every other hated group is hated for a relatively defined reason. We Jews, however, are hated in paradoxes: Jews are hated for being a lazy and inferior race - but also for dominating the economy and taking over the world. We are hated for stubbornly maintaining our separateness - and, when we do assimilate - for posing a threat to racial purity through intermarriages. We are seen as pacifists and as warmongers; as capitalist exploiters and as revolutionary communists; possessed of a Chosen-People mentality, as well as of an inferiority complex. It seems that we just can't win.
Over the past year or so, there has been an obvious rise in the number of anti-Semitic events in both the United States and Europe, as well as throughout much of the rest of the world. Much of it has been focused on Israel and the spread of COVID-19. In a sense, history is repeating itself; much of Europe blamed the Jew for the spread of the so-called “Black Death” of the early Middle Ages. And yet, if there are any bright spots on the horizon when it comes to COVID-19 and its Delta variant, they emanate from Jewish scientists, immunologists and infectious disease specialists in America, Europe and Israel. As Jews, we can be proud, knowing that our sons and daughters have been largely at the forefront of containing the worst, most lethal pandemic of the past century. But at the same time, we are both puzzled and frightened by the response of professional Jew-haters who tell their followers that we are largely responsible for its spread.
It is one of the great ironies of human history that virtually every powerful culture or civilization which sought to eliminate the Jews from the face of time are now extinct . . . to be found mostly in museums or libraries. It is even more ironic that the great and literate histories of their growth, decline and fall, have been written primarily by Jewish historians. Perhaps. when all is said and done, the underlying truth of being part of the “Chosen People” is precisely this: that we have been “chosen” to exist throughout time . . . to continue adding to human history regardless of what our enemies - both ancient and more contemporary - might have wished.
I for one am more than amazed that few professional anti-Semites have yet to figure out that the vast majority of the people serving in the current administration are either Jewish or Catholic. If they had, the level of finger pointing and ethno-religious animosity would be far, more virulent than it already is.
We are by no means a people without flaws. Like any people, we have our historic and contemporary embarrassments. From the phony “Messiah” Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676) and the man who continued Zevi’s cult, Jacob Frank (1726-1791) and from such psychopathic American gangsters as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegal (1906-1941) Mickey Cohen (1913-1976) and America’s greatest/worst fraudster Bernard “Bernie” Madoff (1938-2021) Jews have plenty of MOT (“Members of the Tribe”) to be embarrassed by. Then too, we have provided the world with more medical discoveries, scientific breakthroughs, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as Emmy, Oscar and Tony winners and MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”) recipients than any other tiny family on the face of the earth.
As we enter this New Year, we have much to be proud of . . . and much to worry about. Those who hate despise and dream up noxious conspiracies about the children of Abraham and Sarah not about to disappear from the human equation. Then again, their pernicious derangement isn’t about to stop us from doing everything in our power to make the world a better, saner, more healthy place. It’s just part of the price we pay for being “chosen.” Pride comes with privilege; paranoia always runs alongside prejudice.
So be it.
Copyright ©2021 Kurt F. Stone