"Since the last great wave," says Woocher, "of social activism in America in the 1960's, the rhetoric of Jewish pursuit o

"Since the last great wave," says Woocher, "of social activism in America in the 1960's, the rhetoric of Jewish pursuit of social justice has been somewhat muted within the polity. Greater attention has been paid to the tasks of Jewish self-preservation; the polity has, in the view of many observers, 'turned inward.' [WOOCHER, p. 87] In other words, as the Jewish community achieves increasing influence in the American economic and political worlds, it is inevitably gravitating back to the ideological base that has served Jews throughout history: the insular preoccupation with "being Jewish," Jewish self-promotion at others' expense, and the refocusing of a delineation between Jewish selves and outsiders. "For most of [American] history," says Gordon Lafar,

"American Jewry avoided the conflict between universalism and

particularism by identifying its selfish interests with the broader

dictates of liberal universalism. Indeed, in the early part of this

century, the circumstances of American politics conspired to offer

Jews an easy congruence between the general principles of liberalism

and their particular economic and social interest ... In recent years,

however, the marriage between liberal universalism and Jewish

particularism has unraveled ... It has become increasingly apparent

that the community's selfish interests diverge from the dictates of

abstract universalism, leading the Central Conference of American

Rabbis to note in 1976 that 'until the recent past our obligations to

the Jewish people and all humanity seemed congruent. At times now

these two perspectives appear to conflict.'" [LAFAR, p. 181]

"Even during the Berkeley sit-in of 1964," notes Stephen Whitfield, "according to one report, Hatvikah [the Israeli national anthem] was sung; and Students for a Democratic Society was packed with Jews, whose Jewish identity was often disguised or downplayed." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 114]

Using the always reliable Jewish device pointing to an irrational, endemic anti-Semitism as an omnipotent threat to Jews, Ruth Wisse in 1992 framed her move to political conservatism in terms of Jewish self-protection:

"Gentiles invented ... [anti-Semitism]. Its defeat requires, on the part of

the victims and onlookers, a temporary sacrifice of the liberal optimism

upon which the whole of democratic society is founded." [WISSE, p.

Large scale Jewish abandonment of social justice movements was evidenced during the wake of the Vietnam war era, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. There were many Jews active in leftist political organizations, but with the state of Israel increasingly understood by the Left to be an imperialist and/or colonialist nation positioned against Third World struggles, "faced with the choice," says Seymour Lipset, "of giving up their attachments to Israel or dropping their ties to the Left ... a significant and visible number of Jewish leftists dropped out of the New Left." [LIPSET, p. 158] "Jews who had thought that being Jewish did not matter," says Charles Silberman, "... discovered in 1967 that Jewishness lay at the heart of their being." [SILBERMAN, p. 201] "We believe," proclaimed a Jewish socialist group called Chutzpah, "that the form and content of most Left criticism [of Israel] is inescapably anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A, ANTISEM, p. 350] A Jewish sociologist in France, Raymond Aron, even declared that "If Israel disappears, I do not wish to survive." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 9]

      "Resigning in droves," notes J.J. Goldberg, "from liberal and left-wing groups, [Jews] attacked those who did not do so as traitors to their own kind." [GOLDBERG, p. 140] "[Jews] were forced to choose," says Arthur Liebman, "between their ethnic identification and community and their universalist political movement ... Most chose their ethnic identity." [LIEBMAN, A. p. 526] "When universalistic policies conflicted with ethnic imperatives," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "as in the case of radical critiques of Israel, Jews were torn in opposite directions, and their attachment to radicalism was weakened." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 114] "After 1967," remarks Gerald Sorin, "support for Israel became the common denominator of American Jewish life, so much so that no Jew who was not a staunch advocate for the Jewish state could expect to occupy a responsible position in any major Jewish organization." [SORKIN, p. 215] "A number of ex-revolutionary Marxists of Jewish background," says Alan Wald, "had become pro-Israel after 1948 and had substituted either Zionism or some other form of Jewish ethnic identity for the revolutionary internationalism to which they had once adhered." [WALD, p. 15]

     A 1996 book about convicted anti-Arab terrorist Era Rapaport even begins: "How does a nice Jewish boy from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, a gifted social worker, a marcher for civil rights, a loving husband and father, end up blowing off the legs of the PLO mayor of Nablus [in Israel]?" [RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 1] "Ezra," wrote an old friend to him in prison, "what did Israel do to you? You, the freedom fighter. You who walked arm in arm with thousands of Blacks in D.C. You, one of the best drug-prevention workers I've chanced on. The devoted social worker who could make a desolate human being feel like this life was worth living. Who got beaten up for defending the underprivileged. What happened to you? How could you? Are Arabs not people?" [RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 22]

     Left-wing journalist (Village Voice) Paul Cowan recalls being in the Peace Corps when the 1967 war began:

     "I remember walking down to the Peace Corps office, and feeling quite lonely
     when I realized that none of the other volunteers was as disturbed as I was. I
     decided to go to the Israeli Embassy, and volunteer to serve ... When I got back
     to the United States, and became part of the [Vietnam] anti-war movement, I
     found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the left's attitude toward
     Israel. I was a dove, but sometimes [non-Jewish girlfriend] Rachel and I
     would hear a criticism of Israeli military policy and find ourselves reacting very
     differently. She would assume that Israel was partly to blame; I'd
     wonder whether the criticisms contained a hint of anti-Semitism."
     [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 19]

Israel's 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "evoked a sense of Jewish solidarity on the one hand, and distinctiveness from the gentile nations on the other. It strengthened deeply rooted tendencies in the Jewish tradition to stress the uniqueness and isolation of the Jewish people." [SAIDEL, p. 19] In 1969, in the midst of this Jewish exodus from universalist ideals, Leonard Fein surveyed his people and wrote that "the overwhelming ambiguity -- one might even say contradiction -- of the modern era may be stated as follows: precisely at a time when the rhetoric of universalism has reached an unprecedented peak, and precisely at a time when the myths associated with universalism have become part of conventional wisdom, the tribal instinct has reasserted itself with overwhelming vigor." [FEIN, ISRAEL, p. 3]

By the late sixties, says Common Cause president David Cohen, "the Jewish community began to look inward and deal with its own interests." [STANFIELD, p. 1849] By the early seventies, says Jack Porter and Peter Drexler, "the Jewish Left concern[ed] itself primarily with four basic issues: Israel, Soviet Jewry, the Jewish Establishment, and Jewish oppression in America [sic: the alleged oppression of Jews]. A conspicuous phenomena [was] the revival of the Zionist ideology on campus." [PORTER, p. xxx]

     Jonathan Sacks also noted Jewry's trend towards turning back to traditional Jewish religion (and its "particularism") in 1994: "In the past two decades [Jewish] orthodoxy has risen to great prominence within most Jewish communities throughout the world, most strikingly within Israel and the United States, two communities where it had previously seemed a marginal presence destined for eclipse. In part this has been due to demographic factors, in part to the clarity of orthodoxy's beliefs and the high level of commitment it evokes from its adherents." [SACKS, J., p. ix] "Orthodox Jews," noted Jack Wertheimer in 1993,

     "have assumed unprecedented positions of power and influence within the Jewish
     the organized Jewish community. Since the mid-1970s individual Orthodox Jews
     have risen to leading administrative posts in the Council of Jewish Federations,
     the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Conference
     of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress, and a
     range of local federations and other Jewish agencies. Their presence is symptomatic
     of a shift in priorities in these organizations to what have been deemed 'survivalist'
     issues' and away from the traditional 'integrationist' agendas." [WERTHEMIER, J.,
     1993, p. 122]

      Even the Reform Judaism movement, the largest and most liberal Jewish religious branch in America, by 1999 was formally turning back to the past. Its Central Conference of American Rabbis, by a 324-68 vote, "endorsed a return to traditional practices such as wearing yarmulkes, keeping kosher, and praying in Hebrew" which reflected "a yearn for a return to some of the old ways." [STORY, P., 5-27-99, p. A3]

    In 2001, David Berger noted the extraordinary presence of the international ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Chabad movement:

     "I was recently taken aback to learn, for example, that Chabad rabbis constitute
     50 percent of the rabbinate in England. In Italy, Milan has a powerful Chabad
     presence ... Any Jewish traveler in France, where the Lubavitcher directory lists
     35 major emissaries, will testify to the visibility and significance of Chabad
     institutions and services there. 13 of 26 synagogues in Sydney, Australia, are
     led by Chabad rabbis, and the kashrut authority in that city, in the words of my
     informant, 'is supervised by one rabbi only -- Chabad of course.' A Dutch Jewish
     journalist infomrs me that more than half of the major Orthodox rabbis in Holland
     are Lubavitch Hasidim. The head of the rabbinic court for the entire city of Montreal
     is a Chabad rabbi. The Lubavitch directory lists eighteen major centers in
     Brazil ... In a significant number of Amreican communities anyone seeking an
     Orthodox presence -- sometimes any religious Jewish presence -- will find it only
     in Chabad. As for Israel, the movement is disproportionately represented there
     among the country's rabbis and religious functionaries and its political influence
     testifies to its impact. Finally, the role of Chabad in the former Soviet Union, a vast
     territory with a population of a half-million Jews, deserves special mention. The
     recently formed federation of Jewish communities has intalled a Chabad emissary
     named Berel Lazar as the country's chief rabbi ... The activities of Chabad dwarf
     those of all other Jewish religious kmovements. According to one very informed
     Russian Jew, Chabad will before long come to be seen in his couintry as synonymous
     with Judaism, and all other Jewish religious groups will be perceived as sects."
     [BERGER, D., 2001, p. 25]

Reflecting a growing chauvinist sentiment in the United States -- Eugene Borowitz argued in the 1970s that it was time for a Jewish unmasking, a shedding of self-deceptions, a removal of inauthentic American assimilationist skins in a return to a fundamental, and primal Jewish identity. Borowitz wrote that the traditional melting pot ideal (of all immigrants coming to America to mix into a collective cultural soup) was malevolently conceived. "The melting pot ideal," he said, "[is] a maneuver by WASPS to maintain power by making themselves the image of American life, thereby relegating all other groups to inferior status ... the individual remains the legal recipient of civil rights, but his community now demands proper recognition and significant power." [BOROWITZ, . 50]

Borowitz is reflecting here on modern Jewish power shifts in changing traditional Jewish aims to hide in public the private Jewish identity. As one old "Jewish aphorism" phrases it: "Be a person when you go out in the street and a Jew in your home." [HEILMAN, C., 19992, p. 16]

In modern days, this clandestine approach to Jewish identity has been completely reversed -- "being Jewish" is openly celebrated everywhere in popular culture at-large. Howard Jacobson notes his own experience in renewing, to obsessive degree, like so many, his Jewish identity:

"My own progression from thinking I must have been a switched

baby, so Jewish didn't I feel, to knowing myself to be so exclusively

Jewish that I barely had room to know anything else, was not

entirely welcome to me. Jew, Jew, Jew. The word hurt my eyes.

Friends -- even Jew, Jew, Jew friends -- began to wonder whether

I had other subjects of conversation. [JACOBSON, H., 1993/1995,

"It may be hard to recollect -- or, for younger people, even to imagine," wrote Jewish professor Paul Lauter in 1996, "but a quarter century ago few Jewish-American intellectuals, where ever they located themselves on the political spectrum, saw Israel as central to their political, much less personal, identity. Within a year or two, however, the state of Israel launched its quite successful effort to convert American Jewish identity with Israeli nationalism ... The sharply secular Jewishness that had shaped my conscience flagged before the revival of an organized piety generally linked to a fevered Zionism." [LAUTER, p. 43]

Spearheading "Jewish revival," American Jewish institutions are even active in pulling Jews who had successfully assimilated into other peoples in other lands back into the international tribe. In Poland, for example, many of the few Jews remaining there in the communist era after World War II married non-Jews and raised their children as Poles. With the return of capitalism to the Polish state in the 1990s, however, American Jewish cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder (founder of the "Ronald Lauder Foundation") and "his advisor, Rabbi Chaskel Besser, believe in the viability of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and emphasize the return of assimilated youth to the Jewish fold." [Weinbaum, p. 27] This includes Lauder's establishment of a Jewish school, summer camps, publications, genealogy projects to trace lost Jewish roots, and other programs. "Indeed," notes Laurence Weinbaum, "in recent years the Lauder Foundation and Jewish communal life in Poland may have become synonymous." [WEINBAUM, p. 27] Lauder, an avid Zionist, has also been a key economic supporter of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1998, during a visit to Poland, Netanyahu "called on young Polish Jews to learn Hebrew and move to Israel." [WEINBAUM, p. 8] The dimensions of this new-found Jewishness struggling to be reborn in Poland may be clearly noted in the subtext of this observation of Laurence Weinbaum:

"A heated debate erupted [at the Jewish Community of Warsaw

organization] over whether or not non-Jewish spouses of Jews

could qualify for membership [in the JCW]. The most interesting

aspect of this debate was the fact that many of the younger Jews

-- who had come out of the closet more recently -- were the most

adamant in refusing to admit the non-Jewish spouses. This new-found

orthodoxy mirrors trends that can be found in other Jewish

communities that have undergone revival." [WEINBAUM, p. 43]

[Among the pioneers of the Jewish orthodox revival in Poland

is Konstanty Gebert, editor of the Jewish journal Midrash and

a journalist who writes for one of Poland's largest newspapers,

under the name of Dawid Warszawski.] [WEINBAUM, p. 32] )

"Many Jews," says Lucy Dawidowicz, "found [that] their ideas of war, which had been shaped by Vietnam, were irrelevant to Israel. Views on pacifism, civil disobedience, resistance to government, and the inherent evil of military might were suddenly questioned." [GLAZER, AMERICAN, p. 171] "In 1967," wrote Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, "I was trying to learn how to be a pacifist ... Then came the Six Day War. 'How are we doing?' I'd ask .... I wasn't asking about the state of nonviolence in the world." [BRENNER, p. 341]

Hence, as is so common throughout their long history, another Jewish moral double standard was asserted: arm Israel to the teeth and cut back American military spending. "Though it is true that Jews," says Seymour Lipset, "almost to a person, are supportive of Israel against the Arabs, and favour giving military and economic aid to Israel, they, more than any other identifiable ethno-religious group, also tend to be against a strong American military posture and a high spending level for Americans armaments." [LIPSET, p. 153] During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson complained that "a bunch of rabbis came here one day in 1967 to tell me that I ought not send a single screwdriver to Viet Nam, but on the other hand, [the United States] should push all our aircraft carriers through the Strait of Tiran to help Israel." [HERSH, p. 191] The results of a Carnegie Commission of Higher Education study in 1975 noted that "the proportion of Jews favoring immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as of spring 1969 was twice that of non-Jews." [LADD/LIPSET, p. 159]

Yet, notes Chaim Waxman, "American Jews who subscribe to the basic tenets of political liberalism do not apply the same rules to Israel ... Israel is not subject to the same rules that apply to political entities, but rather to what may be called 'family rules.'" [WAXMAN, p. 142] "In other words," says Charles Silberman, "the rules of genteel civility are limited to Gentile society; the rules of personalistic familism apply to the extended Jewish family, to all members, rich or poor." [LEIBMAN/COHEN, p. 21] This double standard of "family rules" is dramatically illustrated by a Canadian Jew, Mordechai Nisan (who was raised in western democracy) and his views of non-Jews in his second homeland, Israel. Writing for the World Zionist Organization, Nisan says:

"The Land was the special divinely granted territorial promise of

Abraham and his seed ... Non-Jews, without a role on the highest plane

of religious endeavor, are thus without a role on the plane of public

activity ... Those of 'the tribe' are the sole bearers of authority to

determine national affairs in the state of Israel." [HARKABI, p. 154]

"I don't know how many Jews share his belief," wrote Yehoshafat Harkabi in 1989, "but the publication [of Nisan's] article in a leading Zionist periodical is cause for grave concern." [HARKABI, p. 154] Even in an "American issues" context, the Jewish double moral standard is blatant. "It is remarkable," wrote Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "how some secular Jews who regard United States senator Jesse Helms as a Neanderthal, regard the Lubavitcher [an Orthodox Judaism movement] rabbi -- who shares Helm's right-wing views on virtually every issue -- as the epitome of wisdom." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 335]

Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen are especially critical about American Jewry and its in-group chauvinism. In 1990 they wrote that

"American Jews need to square their Jewish familistic sentiment with

American conceptions of equality and western conceptions of liberalism

and humanism. In these conceptions there is something archaic,

unenlightened, and intolerant about asserting the primacy of one's kin or

clan ... The primary attachments ought to be their friends or coworkers

or to those with whom they share acquired traits, not to those among

whom they happen to be born. Jews in the United States have to answer

for the implicit particularism of the Jewish tradition, not to mention the

notion of chosenness, which has implications of superiority."

      Many observers even argue that the presumed Jewish altruism and social activism in the American civil rights movement of the 1960's had baser motives. Benjamin Ginsberg argues that the multicultural coalitions spearheaded by Jews in the civil rights era "was a political tactic" to "undermine the power" of those establishment social forces that hindered further Jewish socio-economic advancement. [GINSBERG, p. 125] In 1975 Hasia Dinner wrote a PhD thesis about the way that "Jewish support for black causes was a way for Jews to broaden their own rights without becoming conspicuous by advocating their group interests." [FEINGOLD, p. 130] "Jewish leaders," wrote Diner, "representing different socio-economic classes, ideologies, and cultural experiences committed themselves to black betterment and gave time, money, and energy to black organizations. The spectrum was so wide and the involvement so extensive that one must conclude that these leaders acted out of peculiarly Jewish motives ... [My] book demonstrates that Jewish ends were secured by involvement with blacks." [DINER, p. xiv, xii]

     (Similarly, Jewish author Peter Novick notes the changing Jewish strategy in using massive Jewish attack against generic prejudice as a tool in fending off specific anti-Jewish hostility:

    "In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations have invoked the Holocaust
     to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively virulent and murderous form of
     hatred. But in the first postwar decades their emphasis -- powerfully reinforced
     by contemporary scholarly opinion -- was on the common psychological roots
     of all forms of prejudice. Their research, educational, and political action programs      consistently minimized diffrences between different targets of discrimination. If      prejudice and discrimination were all of a piece, they reasoned that they could
     serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and
     discrimination against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism directly.") [NOVICK., P.,      1999, p. 116]

     As Jonathan Reider frames this issue: "Jewish liberalism can also be seen as a self-protective device of a minority caught in a hostile plural society. Milton Himmelfarb has described this logic as 'that Jewish particularism which likes to regard itself as universalism." [sic] [REDIER, J., 1985, p. 48]

"The Jewish struggle for equality and fair treatment," says Jonathan Kaufman, "was linked to the struggles of Blacks for greater opportunity. It was not a struggle of equals; Jews did not consider their plight equal to that of Blacks. But they recognized in the Black struggle for civil rights elements that could benefit them and conditions with which they sympathized." [MARTIN, p. 131] Hence, perhaps three-quarters of the funding for the three major civil rights organizations -- the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, The Congress of Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference is attributed to Jewish sponsorship. [MARTIN, p. 132]

     "Any support of human rights in general by Jews," says Israel Shahak, "which does not include the support of human rights of non-Jews whose rights are being violated by [Israel] is deceitful ... [Jewish] support of Blacks in the South was motivated only by consideration of Jewish self-interest." [SHAHAK, p. 103] "The major role [that Jews] once played in the civil rights movement," says Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen, "[is a] myth ... [that] enhances the self-image of a Jew as a caring and sensitive minority selflessly contributing to improve the lot of other minorities." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 17] "Among the many myths life and history have imposed on Negroes," wrote Black author Harold Cruse in 1967, "... is the myth that the Negroes' best friend is the Jew." [CRUSE, p. 476] "The Jews who were to become neoconservatives re-examined their relationship to blacks," obseved Jewish commentator Earl Shorris, in 1982,

    "They had always agreed with Cervantes' decription of the world as composed
      of two families, the Haves and the Have-Nots, but they realized that Jews in
      America had moved into a new family and blacks had not. The interests of the
      Haves are different than the Have-Nots ... The new attitude toward blacks led to
      a new attitude toward affirmative action and public welfare ... A return to quotas       ["affirmative action"] would have the effect of displacing many Jews ... Only a
      large and very powerful central government could redistribute wealth on an
      qual basis, and the Jews stood to lose a great deal in the equalizing of wealth.
      In the language of the neoconservatives, all of this had to do with Jewish interests
      ... Among the chief Jewish interests, said the neoconservatives, was Israel."      [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 23-24]

Jews in the academic world have had a well-known reputation for political liberalism, a tendency confirmed in American academia by a 1975 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education study that surveyed 60,000 American college and university faculty members. Jewish professors, for example, were found to be about twice as likely as their Catholic and Protestant counterparts to support the legalization of marijuana. They were significantly higher in support of "student radicalism" on campus and other deconstructions of the WASP-created status quo of society. Yet, when Jewish faculty members were questioned about issues that were more poignantly closer to home (i.e., the "standards" of the American university system itself of which Jewish professors now had a power stake), "it is striking," noted the authors of the Commission study, "that the gap between Jewish and non-Jewish faculty is smaller for items which pertain to academic standards. Jews were only moderately more willing than others to waive academic standards in appointing members of minority groups to the faculty, or in admitting them to the student body. Jewish faculty were only slightly more favorable than the faculty as a whole to offering a program of black studies." [LADD/LIPSET, p. 159]

"In candor," wrote Arthur Hertzberg in 1964 about American Jewry in general, "it need be added that the Jewish masses appear to be moving toward a position on race less liberal than the views of their leaders and more akin to the outlook that is conventional in comparable segments of the gentile community." [HERTZBERG, p. 286]

Not quite. In fact, according to a Harris survey in 1978, full in the face of the Jewish myth of their exceptional concern for pan-human justice, Jews were significantly more inclined to racist attitudes than other ("non-Jewish") whites:

"Jews were less likely to state that they wanted their children to go to

school with blacks (21% of Jews, 32% of non-Jewish whites), and more

likely to say that they did not want their children to go to school with

blacks (21% of Jews, 14% of non-Jewish whites), less likely to favour

residential integration than non-Jewish whites (46% versus 39%), [and]

less likely to favour full racial integration than non-Jewish whites (25%

versus 35%)." [RUBINSTEIN, p. 144]

[Note also the Israel chapter, where anti-black racism against Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to the state is endemic, and the Black Hebrew (African-American immigrants) have been for years refused land for a cemetery: they have been forced to bury their dead in the local dump]. [ARBELI, 10-3-99]

In 1998 two Jewish researchers reported the results of their study of ethnocentrism among 330 students at Canada's York University. Citing "intrafamilial nepotism" as "sometimes referred to as kin selection," Jews (among WASPS, Asians, Italians, Blacks, and "other Europeans") were found to have the highest "mean ethnocentrism scores" -- i.e., were the most ethnocentric in perception. [SILVERMAN/CASE, p. 400] "WASPS" were the least ethnocentric of all groups measured.

In a 1960's civil rights era study, three researchers, notes Seymour Lipset, "isolated a large sample of Jews" and "discovered, among other things, that at the same middle-class income level, 40 to 60% of the Jews had part time servants, as against 0 to 5% of the Protestants. People outside the South who had a full-time servant were preponderantly Jewish. Relatively few Christians had one ... Since these servants are almost invariably Negro, this fact reinforces the image in the Black community of the Jew as economic exploiter." [LIPSET, The Soc of, p. 124]

     The severe class-conscious tradition of having non-Jews do their menial work goes back far into Jewish history. Even as early as 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau found that 70% of the 10,000 Jewish American families surveyed had at least one servant. [SILBERMAN, p. 45; HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 9] ] And, as Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note about the Jews of Germany:

     "While most Irishmen were still day laborers in the 1880s, only one in
     eight German Jews was a manual laborer ... The fact that 40 percent of
     German Jewish families had at least one servant indicates that many were
     'making it.'" [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 95]

Jewish author Ann Roiphe wrote in 1981 about her childhood:

"I have a picture of myself at a birthday party. I am perhaps three

or four. I am watching a magician with a group of other children.

My governess stands in the doorway with the other governesses.

They are all wearing white uniforms. They are smiling at the

magician. I am in velvet and party shoes and my hair has been

brushed as straight as possible. I look at the other governesses:

Shinke, Ilse, Greta, and Hanna. Guardians of my childhood

companions. All the governesses are German and all the children

are Jewish and the year is 1938." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 127]

Roiphe was from a very wealthy family. Not all Jews could afford German maids. "On the eve of the Depression," writes Roberta Feuerlicht,

"more than half of working Black women and a quarter of working

Black men were servants. In the 1930s, when most Black women

were unemployed because of the Depression, on certain corners

of the Bronx there existed what was called the Bronx Slave Market.

Black women gathered at 8 AM, rain or shine, summer or winter,

hoping to be hired by Bronx women to do housework for fifteen

to thirty cents an hour. Most of these housewives were Jewish;

business was best before the Jewish holidays ... Most middle-class

Jews grew up with the 'schvartze' (literally, 'black,' but actually 'nigger')

who came to clean once or twice a week. She never really had a name;

she was always the 'schvartze.' Women used to ask each other, 'Is

your schvartze free on Thursday? My schvartze didn't come in this

week." [FEUERLICHT, p. 190-191]

Another Jewish author, B. Z. Goldberg, portraying employing Jews and employed Blacks as somehow economic equals, wrote the following apologetic about the Jewish-dominated "slave market":

"These slave markets were located in the poorer Jewish neighborhoods.

Many of the women coming to select Negro help had never had

their housework done for them -- they now first came to the market

because of the cheapness of the labor. Poor themselves they had

the Negro woman do the heavy work, the easier chores they did

for themselves, and they were stern taskmasters." [GOLDBERG,

In 1935, the NAACP magazine The Crisis featured an article entitled "The Bronx Slave Trade." "Fortunate indeed," it noted, "is she who gets the full hourly rate promised. Often, her day's slavery is rewarded with a single dollar bill or whatever her unscrupulous employer pleases to pay. More often, the clock is set back for an hour or more. Too often, she is sent away without any pay at all." [MAGIDA, p. 165] "Some Negro domestics," wrote Black scholar Kennth Clark in 1946, "assert that Jewish housewives who employ them are unreasonably and brazenly exploitive." [GLAZER, Negroes, p. 29] Whatever the case, remarked Jewish observer Lenni Brenner about the Jewish community in the 1980s, "It may be said with scientific certainty, that in this day and age a social stratum with such a vastly disproportionate addiction for maids can never again be the cutting edge of ideological progress." [BRENNER, p. 81]

The Jewish author of a biography on Nation of Islam leader Lewis Farrakhan "believes [that Farrakhan's] Depression-era childhood and his mother's employment in the service of Jewish families may have sparked his early gripes against Jews." [KATZ, p. 4] "Quite possibly," says this biographer, Arthur Magida, "Farrakhan ... absorbed his mother's attitudes towards Jews ... She and other black women congregated on street corners and bargained with mostly Jewish middle-class housewives for their services as day laborers." [MAGIDA, p. 165]

"For most Jews," noted James Yaffe in 1968, "the only Negroes they ever meet are either domestic servants, menial employees or delivery boys. The [Jewish] immigrant housewife used to refer to the Negro woman who helped her around the house as the schwartse -- a Yiddish word meaning 'the black one.' It wasn't a term of hatred but of contempt, and its connotations remain in the minds of many Jews today." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 263]

     "Like many Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox Jews]," says Stephen Bloom in his book about the Chabad organization in Iowa,

      "Lazar made no point in concealing his dislike of 'the niggers,' as he called them.
      They were not only goyim, they were black -- two of the worst characteristics
      anyone could possess ... Lazar's reference to shvartzers brought back a memory
      from long ago. During the summers I spent in Miami Beach as a boy, my
     grandparents automatically referred to blacks as shvartzers, as did millions
    of American Jews at the time, and as some American Jews still do ... Grandma
      Rose told me that 'the shvartzeh' was coming. 'Whose that?' I asked. 'You know,
      the cleaning lady,' she replied." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 231]

"Anti-Negro sentiments," notes Hasia Diner, "was a subject of real pain in [New York's] Yiddish newspapers and they took every possible opportunity to expose and condemn it." [DINER, p. 71] In recent history, the first time John Grethren, a Black convert to Judaism, entered a synagogue, "he had barely advanced a few steps before he was handed a coat and hat by an older woman, who sweetly asked him to 'take care of it' for her." [ROMANOFF, p. 215] (And who too often are the security guards and janitors at Jewish synagogues and other communal sites? Howard Jacobson's travels, for instance, led him to African-American guards at a gay synagogue in Los Angeles, and a Black janitor at the World Lubavitch Headquarters synagogue in New York City. [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 147, 197-198] The Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center likewise employs African-Americans to physically protect visitors and staff).

     When Nina Skopnic told her parents that she was romantically involved with a Black man, "they were appalled -- they stopped paying my college tuition and wouldn't return my phone calls. Even later, when Jim decided to convert [to Judaism], they wanted nothing to do with us. It was very painful.... [My] parents had always been active in liberal causes, particularly in cultivating Black-Jewish relations in my home town. I really had no idea they were bigots ... I had not only lost my parents, but I lost total faith in everything they had taught me to believe in." [ROMANOFF, p. 214]

     Edwin Diamond notes the comments of the chief editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, when he spok eat the Sutton Place Synagogue in 1988 -- soon after Jesse Jackson's well-publicized reference to New York City as "Hymietown":

     "'I advised Jesse to make a healing gesture,' perhaps by meeting with Jewish
     leaders to counteract the effects of his 'Hymietown' reference to New York. 'But
     he couldn't rise to it, and that was pity. The proper question is, 'What can we do
     to heal the rift between these historic allies, Jews and blacks?' Several members of
     the audience were visibly displeased. Rosenthal sought to reassure them. 'The
     Hymietown remark was disgusting,' Rosenthal said, 'But has no one in this room
     ever made an antiblack remark?' A woman quickly shouted, 'No!' Rosenthal
     just as quickly turned to her, and said with the fast mouth of a New Yorker, 'Then
     you should run for president." [DIAMOND, E., 1993, p. 172]

In 1998, the New York Daily News reviewed an autobiography of Edgar Bronfman, the head of the World Jewish Congress (one of the most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations), starting out by noting that:

"Billionaire Edgar Bronfman has campaigned vigorously against

anti-Semitism, but the Seagram's chairman saw red when his son

wanted to marry a black woman. 'Sherry offered to convert [to

Judaism],' wrote Bronfman, 'which, though well intentioned, was

       not the point.'" [RUSH, p. 14]

      In June 2001, Mel Lastman, the New York-born Jewish mayor of Toronto, made the international news with a racist statement that effectively destroyed that city's bid for the Olympic games. As Canada's National Post reported:

     "An 'ignorant, racist' joke by Toronto's Mayor may have sunk the city's bid
     for the 2008 Olympics, Canadian politicans and communityg roups say. Before
     leaving on a goodwill visit to Kenya this month to promote the city's quest for
     for the Summer Games, Mel Lastman spoke to a freelance journalist about the
     trip. 'What the hell do I want to go to place like Mombasa [for]?' Mr. Lastman
     asked. 'Snakes scare the hell out of me. I'm scared about going there, but the
     wife is really nervous,' he said. 'I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all
     these natives dancing around me.' The remarks met universal condemnation
     yesterday." [WALLACE/WANAGAS, 6-21-01]

     Marx Kahende, Kenya's deputy ambassador to the United Nations complained that "the racial intonation of his statement speaks well of his state of mind. I think he is deranged." Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Centre, added that Lastman's comment was "not only uninformed [and] ignorant but it is also racist ... He should know in this day and age that these kinds of remarks are not acceptable." [WALLACE/WANAGAS, 6-21-01]

      Also in 2001, the coach (Phil Gershon) of Israel's champion basketball team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, spoke to a group of Israeli military officers. While discussing African-Americans who play in Israel's professional league, an Israeli newspaper noted his comments:

     "'Even among blacks there are different colors. There is dark black, and there is
     is mocha. The mocha type are more clever, and the darker color usually come
     from the street.' The report said that the often overly-vivacious Gerson drew
     laughter from his listeners. He then continued unfazed: 'I am not joking. You
     can see the standing of those with a bit more mixture in their color, such as Andrew
     Kennedy. You can see his personality. He will check you out, he is clever.
     The other (darker) blacks are stupid. They will do whatever you tell them,
     like slaves." [ALON, G., 7-4-01]

Jonathan Kaufman notes that African American author Alice Walker ("The Color Purple") is married to Mel Levanthol, a civil rights lawyer but that

"One day, she traveled to Brooklyn where Levanthol was cleaning

out his apartment, and she was shocked by how coldly his family

treated her. A woman on the street -- who, she said, was not

Levanthol's grandmother but 'could have been' -- came up to her

and said, 'You don't belong here.' It was her first exposure to Jews

who could be bigots like white southerners." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,

     p. 262]

     "A new focus has been found for racial hatreds," wrote Chaim Bermant in 1977,

     "and possibly next to a Black or a Hindu even the immigrant Jew can feel
     more like a WASP or an Englishman. In any case few Jews are now immigrants
     and they are established sufficiently to regard themselves as part of the host
      society and, indeed, to share in its prejudices. If some Jews ... were in
     the vanguard of the movement for racial equalities, not a few have the disdain
     for the schwartzes (Blacks) which they used to have for the Ukrainian
     peasant and may, indeed, feel the more integrated in the host society for
     sharing its antipathies." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 37]

With the rise of Nelson Mandela and black power against white hegemony in South Africa, an estimated 40,000 of the 130,000 Jews of that country emigrated elsewhere. [KRAMER, L., 11-27-98, p. 24a] In 1997, South African Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris, now that white rule had collapsed, found it expeditious to formally apologize to the Black community around them: "The Jewish community of South Africa confesses to a collective failure to protest against apartheid. Distancing oneself from the anguished cry of the majority and myopically pursuing one's own interests can never be morally justified." [BELLING, p. 11] This echoes the Jewish community's self-protective neglect of human rights issues for Blacks in America's Civil War era. "The oldest fraternal organization in America," wrote Black author Harold Cruse, "the Germanic B'nai B'rith, established in 1843, never involved itself even in the moral crusade of the [anti-slavery] abolitionists. As a body, American Jewry took no actions, either pro or con, even while the Christian churches were vent by warring factions over the issue." [CRUSE, p. 478]

"Racial intolerance is the Jewish community's dirty little secret," wrote Michael Davis, the editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, in 1994, "... Let's acknowledge that there are men and women in our community who would not abide stereotypical comments about Jews, but would not hesitate in making stereotypical remarks about their neighbors half a mile away." [DAVIS, M., p. 17] Perhaps real estate giant William Levitt was the kind of Jew the Baltimore Jewish Times had in mind. The highly public Levitt maintained a "policy of racial exclusion" in his famous Levittown development tracts in the 1950s, refusing the allow African-Americans to purchase homes. He lost a lawsuit about the issue in 1959. [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 104-106]

"The image of Judaism I grew up with was almost all negative," wrote Village Voice senior editor Jack Newfield, "I grew up in a house owned by my grandfather who would not let Blacks into the house. He was a religious bigot ... But I think I have always been very positive about Jewish culture and Israel ... I was always instinctively a supporter of Israel." [BRENNER, p. 340]

"One is driven to the hypothesis," says Israel Shahak, "that quite a few of Martin Luther King's rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons (wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for Israel) or were accomplished hypocrites." [SHAHAK, p. 26] "[Jewish] loyalists," declared Thelma Thomas Dalevy, president of the mostly Black Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1979, "are not compatible with the struggle of black Americans for equal opportunity under the law. Indeed, we question whether their loyalties are first with the state of Israel or the United States." [STANFIELD, p. 1849]

Yet, "Jews cannot afford to engage in or tolerate political tactics or public rhetoric that seriously threatens to discredit blacks," observes Benjamin Ginzburg, "This is one of the major reasons that Jewish racism, often expressed privately, seldom manifests itself publicly. African-Americans are simply too important to the legitimacy of the American domestic state. If Jews engage in attacks on blacks or permit doubts to be raised about the merits of their political claims, then Jews are, in effect, undermining a major moral prop supporting the institutions from which they themselves derive enormous benefits and through which they exercise considerable power." [GINZBURG, p. 153]

Harold Rosenberg, reflecting on the largely Jewish leftist intellectual circles around him remarked in 1959 that

"The new [leftist] elite was less concerned with social criticism

that with the imminent rewards of bonding together. The fact that a

new togetherness, not new ideas, was its aim accounts for the murderous

style of its factional fights and its vile treatment of dissident individuals."

[in KOSTELANETZ, p. 71]

Many Jews, says African-American scholar C. Eric Lincoln, expect that "support of black causes in the past should in effect provide them with some immunity from black rage when Jews themselves assume the role of oppressor. But Blacks are likely to view any Jewish oppression as being doubly damning because it is two-faced." [LINCOLN, p. 178]

      Jewish author Milton Plesur leans on some old stereotypes to explain Black-Jewish tensions this way:

    "Negroes and Jews, despite a common alliance in past years against discrimination,
     have evidently gone separate ways. The Jew, using education as a leverage,
     has become one of the most successful minorities from the point of view of
     assimilation, and the anti-intellectual blacks, the least successful. Another
     explanation for negative Jewish-Black feelings is that even though Jews have
     real concern for the rights of the Negro, many disdain what they perceive as
     their carefree and careless life, seemingly the very antithesis of the work ethic that
     most Jews cherish." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 129-130]

The many laws resulting from Jewish efforts to aid the Black underclass in attaining a fair "piece of the American pie" can -- and have been -- used, and exploited, by the Jewish middle and upper-class to further their own already existent economic advantages and secure even more pie slices for themselves. By the end of the twentieth century Jews have created a very comfortable and profitable socio-economic niche for themselves: they self-configure as part of the "white" establishment power structure or, alternatively, as a hideously oppressed minority, depending upon the benefits or disadvantages of any given situation. "It is no accident," notes Naomi Seidman, "that a film like the recent Zebrahead (1992) portrays a Jewish adolescent in the role of would-be African-American, or that Woody Allen's Zelig (1983) wryly describes its protagonist as a Jewish man who is able to transform himself into a Negro or an Indian." [SEIDMAN, p. 256] "We must learn to live," advises Felice Yeskel, "in this contradictory position of relatively privileged insiders, who are also invisible outsiders." [YESKEL, p. 3]

"The consciousness Jews have of themselves," noted David Biale in 1998,

"[is that of] occupying an anomalous status: insiders who are outsiders

or outsiders who are insiders ... In contemporary America their historical

dualism has reached its greatest extremes. Never before have so few

barriers existed to Jews entering the corridors of political, cultural, and

economic power. Yet the path to integration has also created enormous

contradictions in Jewish self-consciousness ... At a time when Jews are

enjoying their greatest acceptance as part of the majority, never before

has Jewish identity been founded so centrally on a history of

victimization." [BIALE, D., 1998, p. 5]

This two-faced capacity -- as "insider" and "outsider" -- is evident, for example, in the academic world. Numerically empowered (profoundly disproportionately represented: see numbers elsewhere) throughout America's prominent universities as faculty members and administrators, some in the Jewish community see themselves and their "particularity" as integral to western culture and are demanding inclusion in academe at the most powerful levels: in the so-called "canon," that core of literature western universities have always required of its students as essential to the comprehension -- and continuance -- of western civilization. Professor Bennett Graff, for instance, demands the "opening of the canon to Jewish works"; he objects that the many Jewish studies programs proliferating across America thanks to rich Jewish sponsors are "merely ghettos that gentiles visit once and a while." He wants Jews to "fight" for the place of Jewishness in the core requirements of the modern university. [GRAFF, p. 8-9] Lisa Bean at the University of Michigan throws a feminist slant on the issue; she's disturbed by the "regular diet of white, Christian male authors [in] ... courses in the university setting ... I have been somewhat resentful." [BEAN, p. ] David Kaufman at Brandeis University wonders, "Should not every student be required to study the Holocaust, for instance?" [KAUFMAN, p. 14] Stuart Svonkin at Columbia University also suggests that "only an environment which fosters an appreciation of Jewish contribution to American culture among Jews and non-Jews alike can alleviate anti-Semitism which [engenders] stereotypes [of Jews]." [SVONKIN, p. 16]

These, of course, are the growlings of a powerful community (but only 2.5% of the American population) at the top of the socio-economic pyramid demanding changes of traditional standards of knowledge to suit their own world view. On the other hand, while Jews demand pre-eminence for their own sense of themselves as a kind of communal centerpiece in western -- and human -- history, they also attempt to self-adjust to a role as a marginalized, oppressed minority in order to reap attendant benefits there. Few Jews can understand that the authentically oppressed and marginalized ethnic Americans don't want to share scraps with Jews who are so socially, economically, and culturally predominant as oppressors themselves.

A Jewish professor, Edward Alexander, expressed his bewilderment and indignation when Jews were unanimously rejected for inclusion by a coalition of multicultural groups at the University of Washington:

"Although someone schooled in the ways of diversity-training might

suppose that such questions as whether the Jews are a minority in this

country and whether anti-Semitism is a form of racism are hardly

abstruse, they aroused intense debate. All the minority student groups

-- African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and

Chicano/Latino --vigorously opposed the inclusion of Jews [for an

Ethnic Studies course requirement] because they are not 'people of

color.'" [ALEXANDER, p. 7]

As noted here, despite affluent Jewry's claim to still be minority victims, Jewish men are easily understood by Third World coalition groups as "white" males. And, as Cheryl Greenberg notes, "little can be generalized about multiculturalism beyond its commitment to dethroning the white male voice." [GREENBERG, C., 1998, p. 56]

Jewish sociologist Irving Horowitz even declares an "anti-Semitic" element underpinning such rejection: "It is a matter of historical irony that a profession [sociology] mired in genteel right-wing anti-Semitism at the beginning of the century should now find itself enmeshed in a far more acerbic left-oriented anti-Semitism by the end of the century. Thus, well-respected figures in sociology like Joseph Scott vigorously oppose the inclusion of Jews in minority student groups because they are not 'people of color.'" [HOROWITZ, I., p. 92]

Kicked out of the "minority" world, Jews are thereby lumped together with their historical enemies, largely "whites" of European heritage. And once frozen out of the coveted victim circle, some Jews get mad. In 1999, for example, another Horowitz, this one David, faced -- and embraced -- the inevitability of Jewish "whiteness" in the American cultural milieu. Horowitz, a former 1960s leftist now-turned Republican, wrote a book (Hating Whitey) that evidences and assails endemic African-American racism against generic "white' people, of which Jews are now considered so much a part. Horowitz, angered by Black racism and the profound double standard in American culture, as he argues, against examining it (while "white" racism is highlighted at every turn), nonetheless is silent about the way that "anti-Semitism" is constantly used as a device against all others in quite the same way. Horowitz even wields the charge of anti-Semitism as part of his own "white" polemic. Complaining about the endless insistence of African-American demand, he heralds (in contradistinction) his successful Jewish identity, declaring that:

"Ask the Jews. For two thousand years Jews of the diaspora have

not been able to free their destiny from the power of gentiles. But

in America, they have done very well, thank you, and do not feel

oppressed." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 83]

This assertion, that "Jews don't feel oppressed," is absurd. Four pages later, Horowitz admits as much, declaring that "the racial left wants to redistribute social goods according to its own plan and its own standards of 'justice,' which exclude persecuted minorities like Asians, Armenians, and Jews." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 87] Suddenly Horowitz's Jews go from "do not feel oppressed" to being "persecuted minorities." (And Asians and Armenians are "persecuted" in America?) The socio-psycho-political foundation of "being Jewish," to this day, is after all a claim that anti-Semitism in America (even when it is by all evidence nonexistent) is omnipresent and everywhere a threat. This Jewish world view is exploited as a political device and is an exact parallel to Black demands about the omnipresence of white racism, and the continuous demand for amends. Horowitz declares the Black claim to be an erroneous crutch; but he cannot grasp the same fiber in his own heritage. Indeed, African-American collectivist demands follow the well-hewn Jewish model.

"Although our self-perception is that the Jewish people in America are a minority and subject to exclusion and/or discrimination in various contexts," bemoaned Jewish professor Charles Sheer, "the ethnic groups involved in the multi-culturalism movement do not view us in this fashion. Often they go to great lengths to exclude us." [SHEER, p. 6] "Most Jews," observes Cheryl Greenberg, "do not see themselves as privileged, as simply white people, as insiders in American society. Instead, they view themselves as outsiders who belong beneath the multicultural umbrella as an insecure minority with a separate culture and set of beliefs and values." [GREENBERG, p. 60] "My natural allies [African Americans, Hispanics, etc.]" says Sara Horowitz, "do not always seek dialogue with me. Increasingly I and a growing number of progressive critics and scholars in Jewish studies notice that we are talking almost exclusively to each other." [HOROWITZ, S., 1998, p. 118-119] In a testament to Jewish power and chutzpah, the exception that proves the rule, another Jewish professor, Stephen Whitfield, notes that "multiculturalism represents the only formulation in this century from which Jews have largely been excluded." [WHITFIELD, Most p. 8,]

This kind of rejection is hard to swallow for most Jews, since the "oppressed, persecuted minority group" template demanding power is, after all, quintessentially Jewish. In 1992 Charles Sykes wrote a popular book entitled A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character. The first chapter has the following observations:

"Something extraordinary is happening in American society ... American

life is increasingly characterized by the plaintive insistence, I am a victim

... The mantra of the victims is the same: I am not responsible; it's not

my fault ...The ethos of victimization has an endless capacity not only for

exculpating one's self from blame, washing away responsibility ... but

also for projecting guilt onto others ... The new culture reflects a

readiness not merely to feel sorry for oneself but to wield one's

resentments as weapons of social advantage ... The route to moral

superiority and premier griping rights can be gained more efficiently

through being a victim ... [SYKES, p. 11] ... Tragically, a victim's rage

that is redirected from the oppressor toward rival victim groups

ultimately turns against the victim himself. For self-hatred is the final

destination of any attempt to yoke one's sense of identity and power to

one's weaknesses, deficiencies, and perceived victimization." [SYKES,

All such jargon describing the victimhood cosmology -- self-hatred, the eschewing of responsibility, ascribing blame to others, instilling guilt in others to assuage one's own, wielding resentments as "weapons of social advantage," the claim to moral superiority, et al, is -- as we have more than amply seen earlier -- historically and seminally Jewish. These are notions that have been developed, nurtured, and cultivated for many hundreds of years from the very roots of the Jewish martyrological and chosen sufferer traditions. The Jewish victimhood mythos, however, is enforced and afforded a special strata for itself and cannot be itself criticized, investigated, or even noted in respectable discourse. Even Sykes overlooks (or intentionally skirts) the important Jewish dimensions of his discussion about modern America's obsession with psychotherapy, a lawyer-ridden society that seeks to dismiss personal responsibility for profit, and the full-blown expression of the victimhood syndrome in America; Sykes falls prey to one of his own insights into current censorship:

"Victimspeak insists upon moral superiority and moral absolutism and

thus tends to put an abrupt end to conversation; the threat of deployment

is usually enough to keep others from ever considering raising a

controversial subject." [SYKES, p. 16]

American victim culture is a relatively recent historical development, born only after World War II, taking firm hold in the 1960s, and spreading in the wake of the systematically developed Jewish Holocaust model that is manipulated as a moral control prestige system over all others. Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, and later the handicapped, fat people, short people, and virtually anyone else who dreams of some impairment later joined the struggle for entrée into the Victimhood Galaxy and its attendant homage. And rewards. In the ratings system of victimhood power, note the feelings of Gene Oishi, a Japanese American, about his internment in a camp for those of Japanese descent during World War II:

"It occurred to me ... that I did not like talking about the experience not

because it was so bad, but because it was not bad enough ... I envied the

survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps for the stories of brutal

mistreatment they had to tell. I even envied the Jews for what they

suffered in the German concentration camps." [AMATO, p. 183]

"Odd as this sounds," says Terence de Pres, "there is among us an envy of suffering. It increases with education, and it reveals the bitterness felt when history renders our own pain trivial." [AMATO, p. 183] "The all-pervasive claim to victimhood," notes art critic Robert Hughes, "tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics ... To be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power ..." [HUGHES, p. 9] "Jews cherish feelings of exclusion [from American mainstream society]," says Philip Weiss, "not just because there is wisdom in foreboding but because these feelings are useful. They preserve our position as outsiders, a status that has certain moral and practical advantages. As an outsider you have motivation: to get in. And you get to be demanding without any sense of reciprocity." [WEISS, p. 30]

Post-Holocaust, popular western culture reflects ancient Jewish religious self-identity in rendering the world's Jews, categorically, as a persecuted and marginalized underclass. In Germany, where German guilt for World War II crimes remains so high, Carmelite prioress Anna Maria Strehle equates the modern misery of the world's drug addicts, the homeless, and other disempowered people with generic Jewry, the wealthiest ethnic strata in most countries in which they exist in any sizeable number:

"What is our attitude toward Jews and other minorities, guest workers

and refugees, toward the ever-growing number of unemployed, drug

addicts, homeless? Do we feel solidarity with them, do we take their

part even when it leads to disadvantages for us?" [STREHLE, A., 1998,

(Ms. Strehle, it would seem, has it in reverse. What "disadvantages" are in store for those who are inclined to not rally around Jewish victimhood mythologies?)

     "Identifying oneself with the 'real suffering' of a chosen class," notes Joseph Amato, subtly alluding to the Chosen People ethos, "people, group, race, sex, or historical victim is the communion call of the twentieth century individual. It is his sincerity, his holiness, his martyrdom." [SYKES, p. 16] "In the waning years of the twentieth century," notes Shalom Carmy, "as other sources of authority have lost their power, victimhood has come into its own ... Members of groups, with access to some historical grievance, find it convenient to be judged not by the color of their skin, nor by the content of their character, but by the size of the chip on their shoulder." [CARMY, p. 61] "Victimhood," notes David Klinghoffer, "used to be considered something about which a normal person would feel ashamed. No longer. Amid the clamoring of would-be victims we find -- ourselves, American Jews." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]

      Famous talk show moralist "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger demonstrates the powerful lure of the Jewish victim mythos precisely -- how she suddenly decided that she was Jewish (her father's heritage, not her mother's) while watching a TV program about the Holocaust:

    "Suddenly, we're hearing Elizabeth Taylor's voice-over as they're showing
     actual footage of the Nazis lining up women with their babies, and mowing them
     down into a pit. My son says, 'What is this? Who are they?' And I say, 'Those
     are Nazi soldiers.' And he says, 'What are they doing?' And I say, 'They're
     murdering Jews.' He say, 'What are Jews?' And I say, 'Our people.' He turns
     to me and says, 'What are you talking about?' And at that moment I thought, It's
     time I claim my heritage." [BANE, V., 1999, p. 184]

      Jewish author Earl Shorris frames premiere (Jewish) victimhood identity this way, wrapped in pseudo-religiosity: "To be a Jew gives a man a hint of how to live as if he were made in the image of a perfect being. If there is no justice, he will be the first to suffer injustice. If there is no mercy, he will be the first to suffer cruelty." [SHORRIS, E. 1982, p. 46]

     Yet Jewish scholar Peter Novick notes the absurdity of considering American Jews today as "victims":

     "By the 1980s and 1990s many Jews, for various reasons, wanted to establish
     that they too were members of a 'victim community.' Their contemporary
     situation offered little in the way of credentials. American Jews were by far
     the wealthiest, best educated, most influential, in-every-way-most-successful
     group in American society -- a group that, compared to most other identifiable
     minority groups, suffered no measurable discrimination and no disadvantages
     on account of their minority status. But insofar as Jewish identity could be
     anchored in the agony [Holocaust] of European Jewry, certification as (vicarious)      victims could be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such
     certification." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8-9]

Hence, being a child of Holocaust survivors frees feminist Evie Litwok, for instance, to feel comfortable in being completely obnoxious to other people. And she knows she's obnoxious. The world owes her, after all. "I'm perceived as intimidating and overbearing: in other words, Jewish," she says, "Well, my style is the result of my being a child of survivors of the Holocaust. I was brought up to take risks. That style is a threat to some women. They've tried to destroy the behavior I need to survive." [POGREBIN, p. 64] "One woman, addressing a Jewish conference," notes Susan Schneider, "astonished her audience by comparing her outcast status as a lesbian to the characteristic alienation of the Jews. 'What's most lesbian about me is also what is most Jewish about me.'" [SCHNEIDER, p. 315]