On the Passivity of Jews By David Mamet And the danger of assimilation*****
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/on-the-passivity-of-jews/
Jabotinsky was one of the founders of the Jewish state. He was a Russian Jew living in England. He enlisted in the British Army during World War I, and negotiated, with the British government, to allow Russian-immigrant Jews to fight in the Mideast, known then as “Palestine.” He succeeded in getting a special but limited dispensation for the Jews: They would not be allowed to fight, but could be enlisted as mule drivers. They were formed into the Zion Mule Corps under the direction of a Colonel Patterson, fought at Gallipoli, and, reconstituted as the Jewish Legion, were, it seems, responsible for most of the victories attributed to Lawrence in the dime-novel journalism of Lowell Thomas.
Jabotinsky was the colleague of Josef Trumpeldor, an ex-colonel of the czarist army. Trumpeldor was the first Zionist to advocate, and practice, self-defense as an inalienable right. He, a Jew, rose to high rank in an anti-Semitic army through determination and strength, and he quite simply did not understand how his fellow Jews hoped to thrive in a hostile world without these qualities. Jabotinsky was his protégé. He said, “You can take the Jew out of exile, but you can’t take the exile out of the Jew.”
We Jews, individually, are human beings capable of heroism; but as a group, we are trained, first and most importantly, to escape notice. For notice has, for thousands of years, equaled death. I exempt from indictment for “camouflage” not only the Jews of Israel but the Orthodox communities of the Diaspora. And now my exemptions are complete.
I was stunned, last year, to see a television commercial proclaiming the universal appeal of its product. There were happy young and old, black and white, straight and gay, and, mirabile dictu, a young Jewish couple, identifiable by the man’s yarmulke.
Who had seen the like before? Not I.
Were Jews, in violation of all historical norms, being presented as human beings? No. They were being appealed to as consumers.
Here was Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand at its least deniable. For one could argue free-market economies, and produce or confect disprobative statistics, but here it was in practice.
The free market is the practice of self-betterment through trade. Adam Smith’s beneficent Invisible Hand was operating here. For the aim of the ad was not to improve the lot of the Jews but to enlarge the market of the purveyors. But the effect of the ad would be the former as, whether or not more widgets were sold, the desire to sell more would change the perception of the populace.
Just as it had with the depiction of blacks, Asians, and gays, the outreach to a broader consumer base was recognizing a marginalized populace as human beings and backing up their recognition with good hard cash.
Newspapers have, very recently, ceased identifying individual blacks, and only blacks, by the addition of the modifier. White men were “men,” black men were “black men.”
The newspapers changed, I believe, as an act of conscience. But conscience never was at work in the ad industry. The “socially conscious” adjectives, “fair-trade,” “free-trade,” “cruelty-free,” exist only to entice, replacing the more ancient but no less factitious “new” and “improved.”
The ad’s depiction of the religious Jews may have done more for Jewish pride than Exodus, The Diary of Anne Frank, Camp David, Oslo, and all the good-willed, sententious, and destructive offers of “tolerance.” These offers, of course, can come only from those both parties agree are their superiors. Absent the agreement of the so-addressed, offers of tolerance are, of course, insults.
One might insult a political fool; and one might attempt to hoodwink, but who would insult, a potential buyer?
Now, if you cut us we do bleed, and if you tickle us we do laugh; but, with apologies to the Bard, if you wronged us, we would not, historically, revenge. We differ from Shylock’s assertion of humanity in this: Asked, “If flattered do we not smile?” he would respond, “Who would flatter us?” That’s my response, too.
After the fall of Jerusalem, and through this day, no one flatters the Jews. One may be awarded status as an individual only. Early years had this or that celebrity signaled out as a Credit to His Race, but this only meant, “In spite of his race.” If you flattered us, would we not lie down and submit to your blandishments and request you to scratch our belly? We were never put to the test. But, like many another unbalanced organism, we availed ourselves of imaginary benefits.
American Jews discovered self-flattery in the era of civil rights. Prior to the post-war prosperity of the Ashkenazi immigrants, we devoted our energy to piecework, study, wonder at the blessed absence of Cossacks, and acute listening for their no doubt imminent arrival.
Now, after the Depression, back from the war, graduated from college, and beginning in the professions, we had energy and leisure to expend, and spent them not only on entertainment but on the delighted exercise of status. Still too poor for philanthropy, we found benevolence within our reach.
But to whom could we feel superior?
Enter the NAACP.
I know nothing about it but its name, and its aim: the betterment of black Americans.
I’m writing only of the reaction of my parents’ generation of Jews.
They were supporters of (re-donors to) the NAACP. I don’t know how this advanced the cause of human rights for black Americans, but I am sure it did not hurt.
The Jews of my parents’ group were one generation from the Torah study of Eastern Europe. They grew up reading and hearing the Torah and the most often repeated of God’s admonitions: I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the House of Bondage; be kind to the slave, as you were once slaves yourselves; you must not return a runaway slave to his master; and so on.
This admonition was, and is, the Big Gun of God’s Arsenal. (See also, “I took you back after I discovered you boffing the maid.”) We Jews were schooled in justice (which is to say, making difficult decisions based upon divine law) before it became “social justice,” that is, “following your feelings because they, belonging to a superior being, will always be right.”
So I will not discount my parents’ wish to pursue justice, nor the wisdom, nor efficacy, of donating to the NAACP. But there was another element in their support. It was pity.
My parents, just removed from the Black Hundreds, the Cossacks, the death camps and pogroms, pitied the blacks for the color of their skins. The Jews found the physical fact of skin color unfortunate as it deprived blacks of the one benefit the Jews believed they possessed: the ability to pass.
We could not, and can not, pass. The world susses out the Jew, however prettified or acculturated, with the same immediacy with which the Jew identifies the Christian. To ensure his identification is complete, the Jew will confess. Even today, this or that assimilationist, leftist, and so on will, criticizing Israel, append “. . . and I’m a Jew.” But the Jew believed the blacks worthy of pity, if not compassion, because they were doomed.
It was not that they were an inferior race, but that they were through no fault of their own to be always subject to the whims of racists. While we Jews, we thought, were not; and the blacks afforded us an actual proof of our assertion.
Jews didn’t wish ill for the blacks; but, identifying assimilation as the summum bonum, we wished it upon ourselves and enjoyed it as “Jewish guilt,” a luxury open to the newly prosperous.
But if “systemic racism” is a chimera, to whom might we poor Jews feel superior?
Assimilationists run here and there, fearing their toy will be taken from them, and lament the only president who treated Jews as human beings. They say, “He is being unfair to the Palestinians,” but they mean, “He is making it hard on the rest of us.”
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