The Atlantic - Latest Comments in We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Limon Hossain — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:27:59 -0000

That was the rallying cry for the nationalists back in the day--"That's
the problem with black folks--we can't stick together. We need to be
like the Jews! Though don't ever bad-mouth each other in public. And
they stick together!"joomla

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

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Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

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Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Guest — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:55:57 -0000

I gotta say, as a left Jew with a strong interest in race and a growing disgust with Israel's endless assault on the Palestinians, that US Jews are disgracing themselves (ourselves) with their/our complacency on this matter. That Obama felt moved to dismiss the Goldstone report, for example, indicates how little we Jews (who supposedly favor a two-state solution, according to polling data, by more than two to one) are getting our collective asses in gear to challenge the despots in Israel.

I think it's a combination of intimidation and complacency. AIPAC, ADL, Abe Foxman, the David Project, Stand With Us, Daniel Pipes, the list of pro-Zionist anti-democratic thugs goes on forever. That's the intimidation: who wants to be called a self-hating Jew? Even though "true" Jews who adopt and feel a deep Jewish ethic should be screaming. The second part, complacency, has to do with having it good in the US, and with having been admitted, more or less, into the white club.

Time to raise hell, fellow Jews. These are our cousins whom we are grinding into the dust. Don't claim to be such a progressive on everything, when the Middle East is freezing your/our heart and rotting your/our brain. Push Obama! If he just started ending aid to Israel (military aid and civil aid) it would make a big difference over there. Support the boycott of Israel. What makes it so different from South Africa, other than that the people in charge are Jews?

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

eric — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:19:52 -0000

A friend of mine married a woman from Poland. Here non-English speaking parents gave them a traditional good luck symbol to hang over their doorway. It was a picture of a rabbi counting gold coins.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

eric — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:06:57 -0000

Jews as white is a fairly recent thing. I'm not Jewish, but my wife and a bunch of family friends are. The majority of the older generation, although well-educated, tended to work as civil servants because most large private companies simply would not hire Jews. Similarly, my wife's family lived in a rural part of Maryland where they were the only Jews, and generally kept that to themselves, because no good was going to come of people knowing.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

PuppaX — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:24:49 -0000

I don't think that the perceived reticence of Jews to publicly criticize each other is what it appears to be. In my opinion, it's not that Jews won't criticize each other, it's that there exist no counterparts in the Jewish community to the community leaders you find in other ethnic groups, and no real issues about which these public disagreements would be had.

Jews have never had it nearly as tough as most other minorities in this country and have never really needed to band together to fight for social justice for themselves. Without this need, there have never really been opportunities for national Jewish leaders to emerge.

The only issue that Jews have as common in America is Israel, and even with that, most people's involvement is personal or familial, rather than communal or political.

Certainly, there are many Jewish leaders in the country - in business, politics, media - but their leadership positions don't have anything to do with their Jewishness. The thought of Rahm Emanuel and Eric Cantor fighting over a political matter seems perfectly natural to me, but I can't even think of anything related to their Jewishness or the Jewish community about which either would be considered leaders.

This isn't really the case with black or other minority leaders, as far as I can tell. Thanks to the many remaining issues that often face their communities, it's very hard to be a black politician without at least partially being a "black" politician.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Faivel — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:03:17 -0000

No, you're right. Partly: I don't know if French or British or even Israeli Jews ordinarily walk to shul. My larger point was that most ethnic groups clump together in the US.

As for Jews being unique in combining a national identity with a belief system, I'm going to have to disagree. I don't quite know what you mean by "national identity" -- me, I'm American. But combining a racial or ethnic identity with a belief system is not at all uncommon. Consider Tibetan Buddhists, most Native American tribes, and indeed many indigenous peoples. You can't really "convert" to being Navajo, either.

Apologies for making assumptions based on your name. I don;t have a Jewish name -- first or last -- either, and it always bugs me when people do to me what I just did to you.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Sean Healy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:50:43 -0000

It's not obvious from my handle, but my recent ancestors came from the Pale.

Yes, you only need 10 men for a minyan, but you'd live a pretty impoverished religious life without a larger community and fully-functioning shul. I'm speaking of Jews universally and not strictly in the American context. Outside of US-style Reform/Conservative communities, Jews still walk to shul. That practice, as I'm sure you know, arises out of specific prohibitions that are part of the core belief system.

But I was trying to make a broader point - which I think is hard to a refute - that Jews are unique in that we combine a national identity with a belief system. It's my opinion that this contributes to group cohesion. Do you think it is a neutral factor?

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Faivel — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:11:27 -0000

Er, it's not our belief system that makes or made us live together. As long as you have 10 men to form a minyan, you can settle wherever you want. More significant is the fact that in Eastern Europe at least, where many of us come from, we weren't allowed to live anywhere else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement.

Beyond that, it's always been American immigration policy -- and in many ways a wise one -- to encourage newly arrived groups to settle in the US together. And besides, every group tends to clump: Consider the Palestinians in Dearborn, the Somalis in Maine and elsewhere, the Portuguese in Providence, the Irish in Boston, Poles in Chicago, and so on.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Sean Healy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:57:58 -0000

Is this really that hard to figure out? Jews have high levels of group cohesion because they share a belief system that has lasted for thousands of years - a belief system which pretty much requires living close to other Jews. So Jews combine both ethnic and ideological/religious continuity with geographic proximity. This explains why Jews can win seats in Congress, but the White House might remain out of reach.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Deborah — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:42:32 -0000

C'mon, Funk. In Belfast people were bitterly hating the white person in the apartment above them, or 2 feet over. Hating on a different state that has a different language, a different culture, and most of the people in it live hundreds of miles from you is very different. Sure, between France and Germany some people spoke the language, some had intermarried, but for most people it was very much one of the other, with "other" far away. In Ireland the other was living one street over and had for generations. France and Germany fought a bunch of wars but don't have anything along the lines of Color Days.

Plus state v state is very different from bitter hatred between 2 parts of what is ostensibly one state.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Darkrose — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:08:24 -0000

I really had a hard time understanding Northern Ireland as a kid, because what? They're both white--what do they have to fight about?

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Faivel — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:21:57 -0000

What a quote. Daily News, hunh?

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Faivel — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:17:05 -0000

@Lon: It may be a gross generalization, but I think it may have some truth to it: a Jesuit education is an impressive thing, and it may be that for a position as intellectual demanding as the Supreme Court, Catholics provide the most respectable face of social conservativism.

On the other hand, the Dems were trying to appoint Mario Cuomo, at one point (he ultimately turned it down), so maybe it has nothing to with where they fall on the political spectrum.

Sorry, y'all, for thread hijacking.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

DeMiurge — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:15:52 -0000

It is true that when we do criticize each other publicly we can be caustic. But that is jut our style.

Ours too.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

C-Springs — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:11:30 -0000

But more important question is: Can we, the Black Community with its history of Top-Down, "messianic" leadership afford to "Be like the Jews"? Not to mention the "myth of the Black monolith" meaning the Black community is very diverse. Black leaders have taken advantage of this unspoken rule of not criticizing them in public.

Raised out west, I remember falling out laughing when taking with a group a native New Yorkers in Harlem because they used the term "Black-Owned Church". All of my life, every Black church I knew of was owned by its members, yet it was in Harlem of all places that I learned Black churches aren't owned by their members and have paid rent for years.!?

No I don't think that we can afford to be like the Jews: especially here in New York City

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

orgomind — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:04:14 -0000

Sorry to be ignorant, but can someone explain the black people and dancing thing?

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Jennifer D. — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:03:56 -0000

God, where do you live? Who ARE these people?! I am constantly amazed by the stories I hear on this blog about what black/mixed people are asked when going about their daily lives.

Thanks for your thoughts. I liked what you had to say.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

eric k — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:44:12 -0000

2 things

1) Democrats do deliver on the issues Black people care about, which is why they keep voting for them.

2) You have the causation backwards. Conservatives always seem to say to Blacks "hey if you didn't vote 90% for the other guys we'd support your issues too" Uh normally in a democracy the idea is you support the issues people care about and then they vote for you, not the other way around.

There are lots of groups that vote overwhelmingly for 1 party or the other, I'd imagine 100% of Oil industry CEOs and top executives vote GOP for example. That is how it should be, there should be meaningful differences between the parties. Really the only group I can think of who is regularly hosed by supporting one party and having nothing to show for it are Pro Lifers.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

funkasmellic — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:29:19 -0000

You're confusing wars between nation-states, which primarily occur because of socio/political/economic reasons, and wars of ethnic conflict/hatred (whether declared or guerilla)

But the fact is, there simply was no theatre of battle in either of the World Wars where it would be possible to completely separate the twin forces of ethnic conflict and great-power economic interests. So if I'm "confusing" anything, it's because all war is an inherently confused clusterf*ck of mixed motivations and hatreds, on behalf of the wealthy and the common people alike.

And that extends to the Cold War and the "War On Terror" too.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

LonBecker — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:23:25 -0000

@Faivel

You might be right about the Presidency. I don't have a strong sense either way. One thing that seems clear is that it still is easier for a non-WASP president to get by as a democrat because most of the wouldn't vote for an X voters wouldn't vote for a democratic candidate anyway.

A democratic mormon would likely do better than Romney did last time around on that basis. (I think there are now 6 mormon senators 3 from each party).

And Obama got elected in a perfect storm of a year. He would not have had a chance in 2004 if he had the same record he did by 2008.

As for the Catholic thing in the Supreme Court. I think that is actually a result of the anti-intellectual nature of the right wing evangelical movement. The biggest block of those catholic justices is the right wing intellectual block. Harriet Meirs was originally picked, I think, primarily to counter that. But the fact that to find a protestant evangelical candidate for that slot they had to dip down to Miers shows what a bare field it is. Right wing Catholics seem to be more intellectually minded at this point. I know that seems to be a gross over generalization. But that seems to be the experience. If democratic presidents were inclined to nominate protestants, or even moderate republican presidents, I don't think they would have the same difficulty.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

Pesto — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:03:47 -0000

Who could forget that we used to dominate as cagers?

New York Daily News sports editor Paul Gallico wrote in the mid-1930s that basketball “appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background [because] the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smartaleckness.”

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

zacksback — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:02:19 -0000

You're confusing wars between nation-states, which primarily occur because of socio/political/economic reasons, and wars of ethnic conflict/hatred (whether declared or guerilla). This is why France and Germany have a different relationship today than, say, Greece and Turkey.

Re: We Need To Be More Like The Jews!

M.C. — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:58:08 -0000

I don't see that there's anything too terrible about wanting to emulate a different ethnic group in terms of family values, value placed on education, community self-help, forms of artistic expression, or whatever. Every culture has some area where it pulls way ahead of everyone else and sets the bar a notch higher, and nobody's ethnic group has a monopoly on all the best traits. Diversity lets us observe other ways of life and see what aspects of them we want to take on ourselves.

But it's important to state occasionally that talking about traits in terms of ethnic groups that have them is a shorthand. We all sort of know that there are dumb Jewish people who flunk out of college, Latinos and Italians who don't do the big extended family thing, and so on. People who talk that way are discussing the traits, though, and very few traits are truly unique to a single ethnic group. It's a matter of what people emphasize, on average, rather than absolutely distinct kinds of people.