In Hebrew, the word is “Ivri,” which translates as “the other”
September 22, 2015 1:34 PM   Subscribe

 
Nope. Those of us Jews who are actually white (and some Jews aren't) don't get to just shove aside privilege because we want to. We have it. It is attached to our skin. He says it himself:

"Of course, the racist power structures that we need to fight against are not so easily cast aside. No matter whether we call ourselves white or not, Jews will still be less likely than people of color to be stopped — or shot — by police, will still be unlikely to face discrimination in school, at work, in real estate, from banks."

We don't get to give up whiteness, no matter how much we want to. We cop to the privilege we have, we hopefully fight for justice (Tzedek, tzedek, tirdorf) and we stand along side Jews and non-Jews who don't have the privilege we do, but we don't just get to give it up.
posted by Sophie1 at 1:52 PM on September 22, 2015 [38 favorites]




Ferguson/Fargesn, by Rabbi Michael Rothbaum of Oakland, CA.
posted by oceanjesse at 1:55 PM on September 22, 2015 [15 favorites]


This is something I struggle with a lot and something I've been thinking a lot about ever since Ferguson and when a solid chunk of Jews I am friends on Facebook with (some relatives, quasi-relatives and so on) basically only took time out of their day for #BlackLivesMatter or similar things to criticize and condemn. Most, if not all, of them know the unfortunate parts of Jewish history -- diaspora, pogroms, the Holocaust -- but they seem forget why these things were inflicted on Jews, and they seem to forget what happened to Jews in the past (and, for a lot of them, what they consider to be happening to Jews in Israel) happens right outside their door to people of color every damn day.

I don't know about the utility or realism of Steinlauf's "[we] must cease to consider ourselves to be part of the social construct of whiteness, despite all the white privilege that America affords us." But I was definitely raised in the way he thinks Jews should be raised: to consider themselves Jewish and not white, or at least Jewish far, far before anything else. I was raised to remember that regardless of where I go or what I do, there's a large chunk of the world that has some shitty ideas about me and will act toward me based on those shitty ideas whether they mean to or not. And I always try to remember that when I see racial or ethnic strife: that my family got out of the shit and moved up the the racial/ethnic caste system but others don't have the same privilege. So I can't shrug off the whiteness I didn't ask for but, honestly, I shouldn't because while my Jewishness affords me a perspective, the whiteness affords me power, and power can and should be used for good.

By its history alone, one's Jewishness should be a source of unending empathy for the dispossessed and the alienated and the repressed and the disenfranchised because all those things are part of the cultural and ethnic heritage of the Jews. It frequently isn't, but it should be.
posted by griphus at 1:57 PM on September 22, 2015 [65 favorites]


For the racism that we allowed by failing to take proactive steps to end oppression
and for the racism that we allowed by failing to speak up after violence was perpetrated.

Al cheit shechatanu lefanecha.
posted by Sophie1 at 2:02 PM on September 22, 2015 [22 favorites]


There's also a, I'm not sure what to call it, a more or teaching or cultural value that Jews shouldn't draw negative attention to themselves and that they should represent themselves as model citizens to people who are or were an oppressor. And in Europe, that may have been a useful thing (until it very much wasn't.)

But in America, that's what should be shrugged off, in my opinion. In America, progressive cultural change comes very much from "negative" attention: protests, sit-ins, boycotts and so on. And while Jews certainly took part in such things throughout American history, you can very much see the aversion to it (blended, of course, with the inherent racism of the white American) when #BlackLivesMatter is part of the conversation.
posted by griphus at 2:07 PM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


By its history alone, one's Jewishness should be a source of unending empathy for the dispossessed and the alienated and the repressed and the disenfranchised because all those things are part of the cultural and ethnic heritage of the Jews. It frequently isn't, but it should be.

Alas, that's not how human psychology works. Far too often, the difference between heaven and hell is which side of the pitchfork one is on. Winners are grinners, hear the lamentations of their women, and so on.
posted by acb at 2:41 PM on September 22, 2015


There's also a, I'm not sure what to call it, a more or teaching or cultural value that Jews shouldn't draw negative attention to themselves and that they should represent themselves as model citizens to people who are or were an oppressor.

hereditary paranoia.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:51 PM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


Cultural value that Jews shouldn't draw negative attention to themselves...

This is chillul Hashem and it is the teaching to not bring shame to God by the actions of a Jewish person or people.
posted by Sophie1 at 2:56 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Hereditary paranoia

That too.
posted by Sophie1 at 2:57 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I guess I'm not entirely sure what he's proposing. I don't think I can opt out of being white. I get white privilege, whether I want it or not. I feel like, if I were to say that I wasn't white because I'm Jewish, I would be denying that privilege, rather than opting out of it. He recognizes that the privilege exists and that you get it whether you want it or not, but I'm not sure I understand what whiteness is other than white privilege. For me, it seems more meaningful to think of myself as a white person who wants to dismantle white privilege, rather than a non-white person who nonetheless gets white privilege.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:17 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Agreeing with Sophie1, the premise seems flawed. I don't get how this amounts to more than "check your privilege" but with added historical context. Privilege is essentially external, how others treat you and expect you to act/be. You can't give that up any more than you can give up someone elses opinion.
posted by Ferreous at 3:22 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


G'mar chatimah tova, Jews of MetaFilter.
posted by Sophie1 at 3:22 PM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]


Let's just ask everyone to be good, and not to be better than anyone else.
posted by cell divide at 3:31 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I agree that the "giving up whiteness" concept is strange; whiteness may be biologically arbitrary and subject to change over time, as it was with Jews, but its privileges are not something you can "give up" while remaining in the same culture. That's the whole thing about privilege: you can get it and swim in it without knowing the first thing about where it came from. And the piece seems very Ashkenazim-centric and scarcely acknowledges the Jewish POC for whom racism is not an intellectual question. But I appreciate his point that more Jews should be out there fighting racism by history and by Torah. It's a good thing to think about for Yom Kippur, if weirdly expressed.
posted by thetortoise at 3:38 PM on September 22, 2015


Also, thanks so much for that link, ChuraChura. I hadn't seen that vidui (have yet to find a congregation where I live now) and plan to use it.
posted by thetortoise at 3:45 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


IMHO, the best way to rid yourself of white privilege is to, as the article suggests, defend things like the BLM movement. Call people out when they complain about riots. Stop acting like the pejorative white population has done for the past 300 years.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:48 PM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


I found this article somewhat bizarre. Ashkenazi Jews are a white European ethnicity. yes, we were subject to all kinds of vicious and brutal discrimination in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, but that no more makes us non-white and non-European than the Irish history with British oppression makes them not white. When we came to America Jews shared the advantages of other white European ethnicities who got to make a fresh start here. (I find his statements about not being let into country clubs and the like borderline offensive -- it annoys me when Jews mention quotas at Harvard and country clubs like it's anything vaguely comparable to the black history in America).

Also, this statement is more than borderline offensive in its level of self-congratulatory obtuseness:

"The brilliance of being Jewish, though, is that we stubbornly refuse to fit into any social construct of power or oppression."

Way to totally erase the entire Israeli/Palestinian conflict! I mean, he doesn't have to declare solidarity with oppressed Palestinians in Gaza, but he should at least refrain from claiming that Jews are somehow magically immune to ever being the oppressor.
posted by zipadee at 4:10 PM on September 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


"The brilliance of being Jewish, though, is that we stubbornly refuse to fit into any social construct of power or oppression."

Way to totally erase the entire Israeli/Palestinian conflict! I mean, he doesn't have to declare solidarity with oppressed Palestinians in Gaza, but he should at least refrain from claiming that Jews are somehow magically immune to ever being the oppressor.


I know Israel/Palestine is super-touchy on Metafilter, so I don't want to get into this too much, but to me this line is symptomatic of a problem of understanding Palestine that I've noticed with some other Jewish community leaders and thinkers. Jews have historically so thoroughly often been on the oppressed side in oppressor/oppressed relationships that it doesn't occur to some writers that it's possible for them to play the role of oppressor. It's something I've also seen in works about Jewish/Black relationships in the U.S. before civil rights. James Baldwin has a great essay where he talks about this.
posted by thetortoise at 4:28 PM on September 22, 2015 [12 favorites]


he should at least refrain from claiming that Jews are somehow magically immune to ever being the oppressor

Considering that he says "devoted to Israel, devoted to good causes" in a single breath, as if the two are fully synonymous, I doubt he acknowledges the apartheid state or oppression of the Palestinan people at all.
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:31 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of the last people to be publicly lynched in the US, Leo Frank, was Jewish. In 1914, just before my grandparents emigrated to the US (and South Africa), Leo was framed for the rape and murder of one of his white female mill employees. Jews may now have white skin privilege, but it's only come in my parent's lifetimes.

If traditional Jewish ethics of justice are not sufficient, Jews MUST use our privilege to help bring equality for pragmatic reasons. The US will no longer have a white majority, but a plurality of ethnicities, within most of our lifetimes (I should live so long!). People remember who their allies are for a brief while, but never forget their oppressors or those who stood by and allowed oppression.
posted by Dreidl at 5:39 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


In Hebrew, the word is “Ivri,” which translates as “the other”

Again with the etymological fallacy/bullshit! The Hebrew word translates as "Hebrew"; it may be related to a word meaning 'region on the other or opposite side,' but 1) that's not the same as the Other in this breathless sense, 2) it's a different word, and 3) it's only a possibility. Not to mention that etymology is irrelevant to anything but etymology. I'm starting to think that word histories should be kept behind lock and key and not released to anyone but people who can show proof of successful completion of a linguistics course so they're likely to use as directed. Grr.

Ahem. Back to your (remarkably good-tempered!) discussion of TFA.
posted by languagehat at 5:43 PM on September 22, 2015 [17 favorites]


> One of the last people to be publicly lynched in the US, Leo Frank, was Jewish.

Excuse me?! People (overwhelmingly black people) were lynched for decades after that. Do your research: you can start here and here.
posted by languagehat at 5:48 PM on September 22, 2015 [10 favorites]


My mom's family arrived in the US in the very early 20th century and settled in the South. There was definitely antisemitism, but they were also definitely white. There wasn't any ambiguity about that. My grandmother and mother attended segregated, white-only public schools. They watched movies in the white section, drank from whites-only water fountains, and sat in the front of the bus.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:01 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


but that no more makes us non-white and non-European than the Irish history with British oppression makes them not white

I mean, for huge chunks of American history Irish people weren't considered white, just like Jews weren't considered white. Whiteness is a social construct, and what exactly 'counts' as white has changed wildly over time in ways that were often very disconnected from skin color.

By the early 20th century Jews were very firmly seen as white (or at least not not white) most of the time, but for the overwhelming part of American (to say nothing of European) history it was a very different story.
posted by Itaxpica at 6:47 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


> One of the last people to be publicly lynched in the US, Leo Frank, was Jewish.

Excuse me?! People (overwhelmingly black people) were lynched for decades after that. Do your research: you can start here and here.
Absolutely true - but, on the other hand, two of the three victims of arguably the last public lynching in the US, as compiled in this Tuskegee Institute dataset, were Jewish. (The third was african-american, all three were members of the civil-rights group CORE.)
posted by kickingtheground at 6:49 PM on September 22, 2015


I totally agree, of course, that we have responsibility to stand up for the downtrodden, regardless of race. I never really thought of myself as "white," per se... certainly not as a cracker. It's hard to see how we've "benefited from racism," given the horrible things that have been done to us. If you look at our history in America, we were far from welcome guests at the beginning. Rather, our forefathers kicked in doors and we forced our way in. It often wasn't pretty -- one doesn't have to dig too deeply into the history of Jewish gangsters to see that was plainly true.
posted by ph00dz at 7:07 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


But in modern America you read as white, you get white privilege. The benefits of racism you've gained are similar to the ones that white people have. The way that figure of authorities read you, you don't have to worry about cops treating you like a suspect for no good reason, people don't fear you. All the other things that come with being viewed as white.

Referring to acts in the past as claims to lack of privilege in the present isn't an effective defense.
posted by Ferreous at 7:13 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I mean, for huge chunks of American history Irish people weren't considered white, just like Jews weren't considered white. Whiteness is a social construct, and what exactly 'counts' as white has changed wildly over time in ways that were often very disconnected from skin color.
Honestly, that's just not true. I know that Noel Ignatiev said it was true, but Ignatiev was kind of wrong, because he didn't understand what kind of category whiteness was for most of American history. Whiteness has been, since at least 1790, a legal category in the US, and both European-descended Jews and Irish people were always legally white. Like I said: this was not ambiguous. You can look at census, naturalization and court records going back to the first census, and they'll list Irish and Jewish people as white. There was a sense that there were races within whiteness and that Irish and Jewish people were racialized, but they were always white. And that mattered, because there were basic legal rights that were reserved for white people, rights that Irish and European-descended Jewish people were never denied on the basis of race.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:19 PM on September 22, 2015 [17 favorites]


So, this is really interesting to me because I made an FPP about an article that was written in a very similar spirit, but for Asian Americans. (The relationship between Jewishness and whiteness came up a couple times in the resulting discussion, as people tried to find parallels to other ethnic groups.) And in the comments, some people seemed to get hung up on "but Asians are definitely not white, so this doesn't make sense" just as here, some people seem to be getting hung up on "but [Ashkenazi] Jews definitely ARE white, so this doesn't make sense." And some of the language in both articles does lead to this debate of who gets to be white, but I honestly think that that's missing the point. The authors of this article and the one I posted are simply pointing out that both groups have a choice, now, of who we want to be aligned with in the American racial landscape, and they're urging us not to choose the side of the oppressor just because we can.
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:44 PM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


This is chillul Hashem and it is the teaching to not bring shame to God by the actions of a Jewish person or people.

To always be watchful against being a shonda fer die goyim.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 8:52 PM on September 22, 2015


It's complicated. No, most Jews in the US do not face discrimination on a daily basis. But the most elite country clubs and WASPiest suburbs most certainly are not accepting of Jewish families. If you scratch the surface, there is a tremendous amount of latent antisemitism in many different contexts. That is not an excuse to feel aggrieved, that is a reason to fight for social justice for all.
posted by miyabo at 9:28 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Passing for white doesn't make me "white." I mean... it's probably beyond my ability to articulate effectively, but let me put it this way: when you don't celebrate Christmas, you are definitely part of the "other" in America.

ArbitraryAndCapricious: Jews were absolutely denied equal rights due to race. "No Dogs. No Blacks. No Jews." You don't actually see that sign so explicitly anymore, but antisemitism is definitely alive and well. There are still plenty of places where we are absolutely not welcome and our struggle is far from over.

Anyway, I wrote my comment before attending services tonight, but this was the very topic of the Rabbi's sermon. I wish I could reproduce his thoughts fully, but he did a really good job of laying out the Jewish case for action against racism. Interesting fact that I kinda knew, but not really: lots of the founding members of the NAACP were Jewish. I think that's something we should be proud of, and a tradition we should continue. We should always be toppling Pharaohs wherever we find them.
posted by ph00dz at 10:13 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


There were a number of high ranking Jews in the Confederacy. I'm pretty sure they were white.

The authors of this article and the one I posted are simply pointing out that both groups have a choice, now, of who we want to be aligned with in the American racial landscape, and they're urging us not to choose the side of the oppressor just because we can.

I think individuals have a choice about what kinds of actions and policies they want to support. I don't think 'groups' have a choice to decide that their history and heritage is not what it actually is. Ashkenazi Jews *actually are* are a white European ethnicity, there's a fact of the matter about it. Society can redefine words I suppose, but two thousand years of ethnic history since the fall of the Temple won't be changed by that. Jews have been successful in the US because of the cultural capital that came from that history, and the fact of close biological relationship to other Europeans has had many obvious benefits in a society where privilege was aligned with skin color.

As for 'choosing the side of the oppressor', being white doesn't make you the oppressor, any more than being Jewish makes you automatically the oppressor when it comes to treatment of the four and a half million people held under Israeli occupation. Your own personal choices do that. Structural racism is real, but it is 'structural racism' precisely because it's a different thing than individual choice. Being born into a position of structural privilege is a different thing than being 'the oppressor'.
posted by zipadee at 10:21 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've said this before, but nothing makes you realize you're not quite white quicker than being a Jew in a bluegrass band.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:29 PM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


There is a rich history of Jewish social activism in this country that is, I think, largely over. The anarchist, socialist and labor movements of the 20th century were all extremely Jewish, as was the Civil Rights movement of the '50s and '60s. But the alliance between black and Jewish activists broke down in the late '60s, for complicated reasons I don't really understand. (I wrote a history paper about this in high school that I can't find anymore; if I had any good answers then, I don't remember them.)

Since then, the assimilation of Jews into the relative upper classes, the relative abatement of anti-Jewish racism, the continuing presence of Israel -- and the designation of Jews as "white" if you want to put it in those terms -- these developments have I think removed the conditions that made American Jews such fierce organizers for several decades. I know my life is very different from my elders, who were repeatedly named before HUAC and denied jobs because of their radicalism.

Jews' radical history is both gone and sort of forgotten, I think. Now when we remember the Civil Rights movement, it doesn't seem Jewish at all. My friend Susannah Heschel wrote a rather powerful piece about this, discussing the recent Selma film (for me the important part is not the omission of a single man, or of the spiritual perspective, but of the role of an entire people).
posted by grobstein at 11:24 PM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]


There were always Jews fighting racism and always Jews fighting to be at the top of the hierarchical heap and also always Jews trying to make the best of things and not paying very much attention.

I get frustrated with the romanticism of the history of Jewish social activism you have recounted, grobstein. I have yet to see an actual historical analysis of how representative and mainstream activist Jews were seen by their own contemporaries then as opposed to now.
posted by Salamandrous at 4:02 AM on September 23, 2015


As Grobstein says, there was definitely a period when the very same instruments and powers (e.g., residential housing classification) that were used to discriminate against Blacks, were used to discriminate against Jews. It was undoubtedly easier to be Jewish than Black, but the persecution was often of the same kind. There are still vestiges of this sort of thing, but rarely at a publicly-identifiable level. I think the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and particularly 1968 had a lot to do with this. Once those barriers were formally lifted, the gap between Jews and Blacks widened further, probably because there was a lot more genuine prejudice against Blacks than Jews.

From the article: In America’s racist social construct, Jews are very much white people, but we must never again think of ourselves that way [...]

There are lots of African-American Jews, as well as many Latin American ones, and very many more of Sephardi or Mizrachi origin who do not in fact benefit from white privilege. Some of them, African-American Jews particularly, are frequently the victims of intolerance within the Jewish community. Writing them out of existence in an article about Jewish sympathy to the oppressed is a double insult.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:08 AM on September 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


As Grobstein says, there was definitely a period when the very same instruments and powers (e.g., residential housing classification) that were used to discriminate against Blacks, were used to discriminate against Jews. It was undoubtedly easier to be Jewish than Black, but the persecution was often of the same kind.
What period was that exactly? Can you give me some years? I am not looking for instances of discrimination: I am looking for the period when you think the same instruments and powers used against black Americans were also used against Jewish Americans. Was that 1850? 1890? 1930? 1950?

I would consider that statement really shockingly ignorant and offensive, but you're not American, and it's probably unfair to expect you to know much about American history. But no, that is very wrong. You can find instances of the same instruments and power being used against African-Americans and Jews: both Jews and African-Americans were targets of restrictive housing covenants, for instance. But there were always, in every period, a whole lot of instruments used against African-Americans that were not used against Jews. It was never legal to own Jews as slaves. Jews were never denied the vote on the grounds of race. Jews were always white under Jim Crow laws, which gave them (us) access to better schools and jobs in big parts of the country, including the part where this rabbi's congregation is located. I promise you that there are members of Adas Israel's congregation who attended white schools in D.C.'s public school system, which was formally, legally racially segregated until 1954.

You don't have to deny the existence of historical or contemporary antisemitism in order to acknowledge that Jews in the US have always been defined as white. But Jews in the US have always been defined as white, and that has totally shaped our historical experience. To deny that is, I think, just to get the facts wrong.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:12 AM on September 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


I qualified my statement pretty heavily: It was undoubtedly easier to be Jewish than Black, but the persecution was often of the same kind.

It's the type I'm referring to, not the degree.

Yes, I'm talking about things like restrictive housing covenants which (as TNC demonstrates) were part of a system that involved eligibility for Federal homowners' grants and insurance coverage, which meant that unrestricted housing was inferior and more expensive. I'm also talking about the power of trustees and similar bodies to enforce discrimination. This is important, not because of a "but we suffered too!" straw man, but to help explain why the level of Jewish social activism seems to have fallen. Regrettably, it's easier to be an activist when you have a stake in the issue.

You don't have to deny the existence of historical or contemporary antisemitism in order to acknowledge that Jews in the US have always been defined as white.

Not black Jews, obviously.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:56 AM on September 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


It sounds like we all basically agree... we've long been considered white, but... you know, not really white.

Anyway, the point of the Rabbi's talk last night wasn't to make this into some kind of "who's more oppressed?" drag race, but to point out that while that social activism among Jews has dropped, it isn't dead and it didn't end with the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago. He, along with 200 other Reform Rabbis joined the marchers in the South over the summer, to show their continued solidarity. He implored us not forget about our own struggle for equality and to consider the plight of black people in America as part of our own mission of tikkun olam.

It's an interesting question, though, why it seems to be true that Jews and blacks no longer seem united against a common enemy. I suspect there's something to be said for our integration into American society in the 70s and beyond. Also, while MLK welcomed a large delegation of Rabbis as brothers, some of the leaders after him, particularly the ones influenced by Islam like Farrakhan, actively targeted us as their enemies.

Question: is Bernie Sanders sort of a throwback to that "lost" history of Jewish activism?
posted by ph00dz at 7:19 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think the rabbi's premise is overstated, especially in these times, but I think being othered is something that Jews still deeply understand and sometimes feel. And I think leaving that awareness behind would be not only shameful but also unwise, because without it we can be lulled into complacency.
posted by GrammarMoses at 7:23 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm Jewish, and my reading of things is that Jews were never genuinely oppressed in America. You can go back to the 18th century and find George Washington, in his great speech to the Rhode Island synagogue, giving a ringing endorsement of Jewish equality and citizenship. Conversely, around the same time you can find Ben Franklin questioning whether German immigrants could ever really assimilate to America -- something that shows you that there has always been an assimilation process for new European ethnic groups in which they were subject to some form of questioning. That doesn't amount to oppression, and I'm not sure Jews had it really worse than other European ethnic groups as they entered. Yes, anti-semitism exists on an individual level, I've experienced it on an interpersonal level, but it never appeared to be a significant barrier to Jew success in America.

We tend to exaggerate early 20th century examples of Jewish exclusion. For example, in the early 20th century Harvard did have Jewish quotas -- but they had them because by the teens and 20s Jews were *already* massively overrepresented in Ivy League colleges compared to their population percentage. I'm not sure that those quotas were so different than the unofficial Asian quotas that appear to exist at major Ivy League universities today. As for country clubs and housing, residential and leisure segregation by ethnicity used to be a lot more accepted than it is today.
posted by zipadee at 7:56 AM on September 23, 2015


I'm black and Jewish, and it's not by choice. At least from my own limited experience, the African American community (yes I know it's not monolithic) has a better handle on mixed people and can integrate their experiences. Not so much on the other side, though it's getting better. On a less personal note, the article reminded me a bit of the New Yorker piece "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's."
posted by knuspermanatee at 7:56 AM on September 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the rabbi's premise is overstated, especially in these times, but I think being othered is something that Jews still deeply understand and sometimes feel.

this is fair enough but I really question the equation between being 'othered' and being oppressed. It seems to me oppression has to include the imposition of serious disadvantage in some material and tangible sense. Being 'othered' is not really always a disadvantage. In fact, if you look at Jewish history in America especially, you can see it as in some ways an advantage.
posted by zipadee at 7:59 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I really question the equation between being 'othered' and being oppressed.... Being 'othered' is not really always a disadvantage. In fact, if you look at Jewish history in America especially, you can see it as in some ways an advantage.

"Advantage" is not quite the word I'd use, but I concur that being outside the American mainstream (qv note how many people think the US is a "Christian" country) is a good thing. I doubt it was conferred upon us as a favor, though.
posted by GrammarMoses at 8:14 AM on September 23, 2015


And to some people, "different" always means "inferior" or "weird."
posted by GrammarMoses at 8:15 AM on September 23, 2015


I have been so frustrated by the historical generalizations afloat in the comments here that I have started and deleted several posts because they would be...uncivil. Colonial and nineteenth-century American Jewish experience cannot be equated to early twentieth-century American Jewish experience, because we were a largely invisible minority until Ashkenazi Jews started fleeing Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. The Jewish population in the USA went from about a couple of hundred thousand to well over two million in the space of about three decades. As is so often the case with prejudice against minorities, people were nicer to us when there were a lot fewer of us. Hence the antisemitic hysteria associated with the "Jewish Question" (Henry Ford et al.) and, eventually, the Immigration Act of 1824 (targeted against Jews and other races who supposedly could not be "domesticated" as true Americans). Moreover, Jewish "racial" identity had undergone a massive sea change by the end of the 19th c. In the USA and parts of Europe, Ashkenazi Jews were light-skinned but not "Anglo-Saxon," which was an important difference when it came to racist activism and policy-making. Ashkenazi Jews were not "white like us" in most parts of the USA until after WWII; even today, an Ashkenazi Jew from Louisiana may not have the same experience as an Ashkenazi Jew from California. Actual white supremacists, like the guy who tried to murder a bunch of us at a Jewish Community Center last year, do not think we're white at all (we're plotting genocide against the white race, apparently).

For example, in the early 20th century Harvard did have Jewish quotas -- but they had them because by the teens and 20s Jews were *already* massively overrepresented in Ivy League colleges compared to their population percentage. I'm not sure that those quotas were so different than the unofficial Asian quotas that appear to exist at major Ivy League universities today.

That...omits rather a lot about why Harvard, along with Yale, Columbia, and the other Ivy League institutions, were so upset about all those Jews. (You know, like our plot to destroy the American way of life.) It also omits the history of antisemitic hiring quotas in universities (see, for example, the amount of pressure it took for Lionel Trilling to get and keep a job at Columbia), and not just at prestigious ones: when my father was hired at Cal State Los Angeles in 1968, "the first Jew we hired" was still something discussed by the older faculty. (Let's not even get started on St. Cloud State University.) Outside of the business world, Jews were effectively shut out of most middle-class professions until after WWII--as Arthur Hertzberg quips, the point of Jewish hospitals was "to provide places in which Jewish doctors could practice," not to serve a specifically Jewish clientele.
posted by thomas j wise at 9:20 AM on September 23, 2015 [15 favorites]


Whaaat? Saying that Jews were 'effectively shut out' of middle class professions until after WWII is a whopper of major proportions. I'm open to the idea that I was minimizing some things, but American Jews had a tremendous amount of success and influence well before WWII. Ever heard of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Paul Warburg, Ben Cardozo? Or for that matter, the Guggenheims and Lehman Brothers? I'm really not sure how you get Federal Reserve governors, supreme court justices, major investment banks, and some of the wealthiest people in America while being effectively banned from the professions. And medical school quotas were real, but as I understand it Columbia medical school was something like half Jewish students before they instituted quotas in the 1920s.

Also, in discussing education and the professions, it is useful to remember that graduate education was not as central to American economic life as it is today. I named the people above because of the professional connection, but dominating major industries like the film industry is a big deal too.
posted by zipadee at 10:16 AM on September 23, 2015


Let's not even get started on St. Cloud State University

Wow, interesting, I know two Jewish recent graduates of St. Cloud State and they've both talked about how great the rabbi is there. I wonder if they've totally turned around in 8 years....
posted by miyabo at 10:24 AM on September 23, 2015


1924, oy.

I wonder if they've totally turned around in 8 years....

From what I understand, the university put in a lot of effort to change the campus culture after the end of the last lawsuit. One of my father's former colleagues, also Jewish, had the great displeasure of teaching there for a short time (in the early 90s or late 80s, I think), and was on the receiving end of open antisemitism from the other faculty.
posted by thomas j wise at 10:46 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Saying that Jews were 'effectively shut out' of middle class professions until after WWII is a whopper of major proportions.

It's a "whopper" shared by every historian of the American Jewish experience? To take a representative but random example, here's a recent summary by Hasia Diner: "In many professions, particularly those to which American Jews aspired, various degrees of restriction barred their entry. Some hospitals refused to give privileges of treating patients to Jewish doctors. The most prestigious law firms would not consider hiring Jewish attorneys. Banks and public utilties refused to employ Jews, regardless of their skills. Through the early 1930s no more than one hundred Jews held professorial positions in American universities, while many of the daughters of Jewish immigrants, eager to enter white-collar occupations, encountered advertisements for secretarial positions specifying 'Gentile' as a qualification" (Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 [University of California Press, 2004], 230). Individual successes have nothing to do with discriminatory efforts directed against the group as a whole, as is evident from our Black president, Black Supreme Court justice &c. (Lois Waldman's "Employment Discrimination against Jews--1955," published in 1956, reveals that a surprising number of professional/civil-service jobs were still explicitly discriminating against Jews in job ads in the early 50s--and that was before she got around to discussing employment discrimination that wasn't advertised.)

To take law as an example, of course there were successful Jewish lawyers like Brandeis and Cardozo--both of whom first achieved influence in firms they either started (Brandeis) or belonged to their family (Cardozo), and both of whom pursued a different clientele than their Gentile peers. Eli Wald* has an interesting discussion of the rise of big Jewish law firms during the 50s and 60s; as he points out, earlier Jewish lawyers were "concentrated in the lower sphere's of the city's bar as solo practitioners and members of small law firms" (1828), but later, big Jewish firms emerged not only in reaction to conscious and structural discrimination at the "WASP" firms, but also by moving into areas that the WASPs wouldn't touch, like real estate law (1834). If we're going to talk representation percentages, Wald notes that in the early 1960s, Jews were 60% of the NY bar but couldn't get arrested by the big firms, whereas Protestants were 18% of the bar yet 43% of the big firms... (1836). Similarly, the prominence of Jewish lawyers in early civil rights legislation efforts partly had to do with what constituted prestigious legal practice and what didn't (representing minorities and working-class clients = not prestigious). Jewish lawyers generally practiced law in Jewish-owned firms for a reason, just as Jewish doctors wound up in Jewish hospitals and Jewish professors...er, actually, it was near-impossible to be a Jewish professor. (Jewish academics fleeing Nazi Germany were in for an unpleasant surprise when they reached the USA, although some stars, like Kristeller, succeeded.) In other words, Jews who managed to be successful in these areas did so by entering ethnoreligious/racial-specific niches, which is one of the traditional ways of handling discrimination, right?

* Eli Wald, "The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms," Stanford Law Review 60.6 (2008): 1803-66. Wald also notes in a passing footnote that Jews who managed to get hired at big firms were usually of German ancestry, not Eastern European (1839); interestingly, that reflects relative prestige within Ashkenazi Jewish communities as well (German Jews didn't particularly like the Eastern European immigrants).
posted by thomas j wise at 12:23 PM on September 23, 2015 [11 favorites]


Yes, it's absolutely a whopper of major proportions. To say for example that 'banks refused to employ Jews' at a time when a key Federal Reserve governor was Jewish and several of the most wealthy and significant investment banking firms on Wall Street were founded by Jews doesn't pass the laugh test.

Let's put it another way, to perhaps sidestep some of our disagreement here. I'll bet that many of the WASP law firms you refer to would also have refused to hire first generation Italian Catholic immigrants, and I'll also bet that many immigrant ethnic groups could also point to initial successes in 'ethnoreligious/racial-specific niches'. Can we agree that such forms of ethnic discrimination are very dissimilar to what black Americans suffered in slavery? Indeed, the capacity to freely create 'ethnoreligious niches' that quickly bring great influence, wealth, and success -- which Jews certainly gained rapidly -- is what some might call the promise of America or the American dream.
posted by zipadee at 2:31 PM on September 23, 2015


Can we agree that such forms of ethnic discrimination are very dissimilar to what black Americans suffered in slavery? Indeed, the capacity to freely create 'ethnoreligious niches' that quickly bring great influence, wealth, and success -- which Jews certainly gained rapidly -- is what some might call the promise of America or the American dream.

No one here is arguing that antisemitism in the U.S. is equivalent to anti-Black racism, at all. Even Joe in Australia's comment about the same instruments being used (which I would disagree with) is more modest than that. But yes, I would completely agree with you on that point. On your disregarding the ample evidence of institutional antisemitism and discrimination presented by thomas j wise and your claim that it's a net positive for the American dream (really?!), you're on your own.
posted by thetortoise at 3:33 PM on September 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


several of the most wealthy and significant investment banking firms on Wall Street were founded by Jews

Read that sentence again. That's precisely the point I just made! In the wake of Eastern European immigration, Jews were excluded from commercial banks (we had been doing much better in the nineteenth century...when the Gentiles didn't see us very often). As Gerald Sorin points out, even the more successful German Jewish community, which had had an easier time of assimilating in the nineteenth century, was excluded from "the major heavy industries, Wall Street, and banking and insurance" (Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America, 90). That didn't stop Jews from founding banks themselves. Acceptance of Jews in commercial banks not owned and operated by Jews is recent. As in it was considered newsworthy in the 1980s (see Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 238).

Can we agree that such forms of ethnic discrimination are very dissimilar to what black Americans suffered in slavery?

I didn't argue otherwise?

I'm afraid we're at cross purposes here. I don't think that having to develop a parallel universe of professional and other institutions so that you and your fellow minority group members can be employed counts as "not being oppressed," whether or not individual group members managed to cross over into mainstream environments dominated by Gentiles. You keep saying "look, individual!" That's nice, but as far as I can tell, there's uniform consensus among historians that if you were a Jew trying to be a lawyer, insurance agent, doctor, corporate executive, college professor, or banker from roughly the post-WWI era until the 1950s (and, in some fields, even later), then you were going to be actively discriminated against unless you could get other Jews to hire you, or went into business on your own (which, obviously, was not much help if you wanted to be a professor). This was partly because the Jews had actually been doing quite a good job of moving into those professions, and the Gentile majority decided that enough was enough. Nor did you have any legal protections until the 1940s. If you were a star and had the cultural capital to make the right connections, then you might well be on the Supreme Court. If you were average Shmuel (or Rivka), then that was not your experience. Similarly, the historical consensus is that this phase of the (Ashkenazi) American Jewish experience pretty much ended in the 1960s. Pointing out that Jews (especially Eastern European Jews) were discriminated against in middle- and upper-class professions, especially during the interbellum period, and that there was a lot of antisemitic hysteria leading to ugly behavior (refusing to relax the 1924 Act to accept Jewish refugees from the Nazis being the nadir), is in no way saying that Jews experienced or experience the same kind of pervasive racism and systematic violence that African-Americans were and are. I think that's the end of my contribution here.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:25 PM on September 23, 2015 [9 favorites]


Jews never had to invent a 'parallel universe' of institutions in order to be employed -- that is another huge whopper. When Paul Warburg and Albert Strauss helped found the Federal Reserve, or when Bernard Baruch played a key role in organizing US industrial production during WWI, they weren't operating in a parallel universe, they were at the center of American power. You now state the numerous examples of powerful and influential Jews I cite in the professions that you claim were somehow 'barred' to Jews are 'just individuals' and somehow shouldn't count. That seems bizarre to me, but let's talk about institutions and populations. When Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs helped invent modern securities underwriting at the beginning of the 20th century, they weren't operating in a 'parallel universe', they were major players in the center of Wall Street, and their clientele included numerous major American corporations. When Jews dominated the New York garment district in the early 20th century, they weren't in a 'parallel universe' making clothes only for other Jews, they were the key players in a central American industry that employed fully one quarter of New York City's industrial workforce. Similarly, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wasn't in a 'parallel universe' making movies only for other Jews, they were creating Hollywood, the center of the American entertainment industry. In 1925, fully 30 percent of Harvard's entering class was Jewish; Harvard University is not a 'parallel universe'. Harvard then moved toward restricting Jewish entrance -- but the changes in admission policies to de-emphasize exams only reduced the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard to 15 percent, roughly five to seven times over-representation compared to the Jewish percentage of the US population, where it stayed through the 1930s. Being massively over-represented at the central prestige institution of American higher education is not being exiled into a parallel universe.

And the claim that the refusal in the 1930s to change US law to provide special privileges to Jewish refugees as opposed to refugees of other ethnicity or religion reflects 'anti-semitic hysteria' seems quite arrogant to me. This had tragic results (some of my relatives were refused in this period and were lucky to survive) but it is hardly anti-semitic to refuse to provide Jews special benefits that others do not get.

My claim is obviously not just that Jews were not treated as badly as blacks. Jews were *massively successful* prior to WWII, compared not just to other minorities but to the broader white population, and unless you believe that we somehow innately deserve by virtue of our intelligence and drive to be even more disproportionately successful than we were that level of success is simply incompatible with any broad claim of 'oppression'. Certainly there were individual cases of anti-semitism ('look, individual!') and there were some scary anti-semitic propagandists like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. But they were not the central story. I find it distasteful to take stories about how Lionel Trilling didn't get his Columbia appointment until a few years after he probably should have or how your grandfather's brother got frozen out at the WASP country club in the 1950s and use it to portray Jews as an oppressed minority in America. Part of this might be an anachronistic tendency to judge previous times according to our current horror at any form of ethnic discrimination whatsoever -- ethnic self-segregation was much more common once upon a time than it is today, affected various Christian ethnicities as well as Jews, and in many cases, manifestly in the case of the Jews, was not a barrier to upward mobility and success. But I fear that part of it is a self-regarding and frankly rather self-pitying tendency among our community to make oppression claims completely central to Jewish identity. One can see that in the Post article that started this thread.
posted by zipadee at 7:30 PM on September 23, 2015


I think it would be silly to say that there has been no significant antisemitism in the US. Clearly, there has been. But that's not what the rabbi argued. He didn't say that Jews should recognize that we had been subject to prejudice or victims of discrimination or racially othered. He said that we should consider ourselves Jewish, not white, because our ancestors didn't have white privilege. And I don't think that's supportable, even though I don't deny that my ancestors faced antisemitism.

I think it might be useful to compare Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants with another immigrant group that really didn't have white privilege: Chinese people. According to the courts and the governments, people of Chinese descent weren't white. This really, really mattered, because American naturalization law recognized white people as a privileged group. The first naturalization law, passed in 1790, said that only free white persons could become American citizens. After the Civil War that was changed to say "free white persons and persons of African descent." Since Chinese people were neither white nor African, they weren't eligible for citizenship. They couldn't vote, run for office, work at jobs that were reserved for citizens, or do many, many other things that the overwhelming majority of Jewish immigrants could eventually do.

In the places where most Chinese immigrants lived, there were lots of laws that explicitly denied Chinese people many of the rights that white people had. For instance, starting in the 19th century, Chinese people couldn't own land. Eventually, in 1913, California passed a law that said "aliens ineligible for citizenship" couldn't own land, and aliens ineligible for citizenship were those who weren't white or of African descent. Many other states followed California's lead and passed similar laws, which effectively denied Asian immigrants the right to own property. These laws weren't ruled unconstitutional until the 1950s.

In 1875, Congress passed something called the Page Act, which was ostensibly intended to prevent the immigration of prostitutes. But the text of the law made it clear that it was targeted against women coming from China and Japan, and in practice any Asian woman was assumed to be a prostitute and forced to prove that she wasn't. Asian women were kept in detention while they and their relatives attempted to prove they weren't prostitutes. This law had the intended effect, which was to prevent the immigration of women from China, because nobody wanted to be subject to that expensive, humiliating, and often fruitless ordeal. Chinese men were subject to anti-miscegenation laws, so they weren't able to marry white women. So even though the US had birthright citizenship, there weren't a lot of American-born Chinese-American citizens, because many Chinese men were unable to find partners with whom to have children. And of course, there weren't any naturalized citizens from China, because Chinese people were racially ineligible to naturalize.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred all Chinese people from immigrating to the US. That ban was continued in the 1924 immigration act and wasn't repealed until 1943, when Congress set a quota of a whopping 105 annual immigrants from China. It wasn't until 1965 that Congress allowed significant immigration from China. The 1924 act discriminated against Eastern and Southern European immigrants, setting low quotas for them, but it included no quota for people from Asia. They were considered not just racially undesirable, like Jews and Italians were, but racially unfit to live in the US and racially incapable of American citizenship.

So let's review some ways that being Jewish in the late 19th and early 20th century was different from being Chinese:

1. Jews were able to immigrate freely to the US between 1882 and 1929, when the 1924 law actually went into effect, and Chinese people couldn't. Raise your hand, Jewish-American Mefites, if any of your ancestors came here between 1882 and 1929. My guess is that's most of us.

2. Jewish immigrants, because almost all of them were legally white, were able to become citizens. They could exercise the privileges of citizenship, such as voting, serving on juries, and holding office.

3. Jews were not subject to laws aimed at "aliens ineligible for citizenship," such as bans on owning land.

4. Jewish women could immigrate to the US, allowing for the existence of Jewish-American families and the continuation of the Jewish-American community.

5. There were a whole lot of other racial laws aimed at Chinese people which have no counterparts for Jews: laws saying that they couldn't testify in court, for instance, or that Chinese and Chinese-American children couldn't attend school with white children.

Whiteness defined the Jewish-American experience. It allowed us to get a foothold in American society. It's not some trivial detail. The American government could have decided that European-descended Jews weren't white, and our history would be totally different. They didn't, though, and it's wrong to pretend that's not important.
And the claim that the refusal in the 1930s to change US law to provide special privileges to Jewish refugees as opposed to refugees of other ethnicity or religion reflects 'anti-semitic hysteria' seems quite arrogant to me.
Dude, you must be kidding me. The quota system was explicitly (although not exclusively) antisemitic in intent, and it was administered in implicitly antisemitic ways. And accepting refugees whose lives are in danger is not "special privileges." I mean, seriously.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:00 PM on September 23, 2015 [7 favorites]


If there were a USA Oppression Olympics then African-Americans would win, probably followed by Native Americans and Mexicans. But that's a zero-sum game that doesn't really help us understand or combat prejudice.

There really was significant and substantial anti-Jewish prejudice in the USA. It was different and less harmful than anti-Black prejudice, but it cannot and should not be dismissed. The 1947 film Gentlemans' Agreement shows that it was a well-recognised issue even then; but such a film could only have been made once there was an audience that was ready to acknowledge the problem. And, if you read the production history, and the reluctance of Jews to be involved, you can see how anti-Semitism even prevented the discussion of anti-Semitism.

You're making weird, tendentious arguments when you say things like
When Jews dominated the New York garment district in the early 20th century, they weren't in a 'parallel universe' making clothes only for other Jews [...]
No; they were mostly making clothes for more fortunate Americans who didn't have to labor in sweatshops. Jews dominated the garment-making industry in the way that various Asian countries do today: it's a subordinated position, not a superior one, and it's not as though garment-making was seen as especially significant or powerful. It's just that it happens to be one area with a concentration of Jews.

Finally, as ArbitraryAndCapricious says:
the quota [of the 1930s] system was explicitly (although not exclusively) antisemitic in intent, and it was administered in implicitly antisemitic ways.
There was a deliberate decision to keep Jews out, even though the German and Polish quotas were not filled. Even if they had been filled, the proper thing to do would have been to admit refugees. The Jewish Virtual Library has many documents on the subject of FDR's relationship with Jews; it's especially worth reading the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this [the FDR] Government in the Murder of the Jews, which was an internal document prepared for the administration in 1944. They recognised it; you should really be ready to do the same.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:25 PM on September 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


True the garment industry is a complex example because Jews were both an exploited workforce and very successful entrepreneurial owners. My reference is to Jewish ownership of the industry. In 1885, over 95% of garment factories in NYC were owned by Jews (mostly German at that time). Jews practically invented the ready-to-wear industry; think Levi Strauss and Hart Schaffner and Marx. This is a rather different situation than Asian sweatshops toiling for international conglomerates.

As for Jewish professionals, what are we really talking about here? Is the complaint that Russian Jewish immigrants didn't go straight from the shtetl to white-shoe law firms? If the initial immigrant generation weren't professionals, their kids were. Per Thomas Sowell, citing Sidney Goldstein, by 1950 20 percent of Jews were professionals, which is double the national average at the time, and the majority of Jews were white collar workers when the majority of other white Americans were still blue collar. Those figures, to say nothing of all the other evidence above, are really not compatible with an organized and effective effort to deprive Jews of economic opportunity.

The immigration situation in the 30s was tragic, but it was driven far more by Hoover's decision in the face of mass Depression-era unemployment to ban immigrants and refugees who didn't have assured employment than by anti-semitism. That policy was applied to all immigrants, not just Jews. The report Joe cites refers a different issue, the failure of the US government to rescue Jews from the camps during WWII itself, when Hitler's extermination policy became clear. That was a stunningly callous and borderline criminal decision, but given that it was an executive decision by the Roosevelt Administration, and Roosevelt certainly was no anti-semite, I'm not sure it's an expression of pure anti-semitism.

Anyway, I've made my views pretty clear, so that's all.
posted by zipadee at 9:26 PM on September 23, 2015


To me it's almost two different questions. One is whether Jews whose skin is more like white than not can/should be considered white/consider themselves white.

Another one is how Jewish anti-racist leaders can/should leverage the *fact* that, rightly or wrongly, many (white) Jews actually do seem to have a complicated and problematic relationship with whiteness - to serve anti-racist work. To me that is a more pragmatic question of how can you meet people where they are without perpetuating/affirming problematic narratives.

I read this article as reaching for that but not really succeeding, in part because I think as much as it is trying to be anti-racist, it has an unstated but at least equally if not more powerful 'keruv' agenda -- trying to encourage young people who are Jewish by heritage to identify strongly, if not first and foremost, as Jewish. I don't think I actually have a problem with that in itself, but in this context - and especially because it is unstated - I feel it definitely undermines Steinlauf's explicit arguments.

I think that there is a big segment of (mostly older) liberal American white-colored Jews who struggle to see themselves as white, and these are likely the ones paying Steinlauf's salary and publishing him in the Washington Post. And now there is a growing segment of (mostly younger) liberal American white-colored Jews who do see themselves as white (in my opinion an ultimately more correct and promising basis for good intersectional anti-racist work) and who struggle to see themselves as connected to the American Jewish community. I think Steinlauf is trying to bridge that gap.

In itself that's not a bad thing to try, but he does it in a kind of disguised way that I think is off-putting and problematic in multiple ways.

I wish/hope that white American Jews will be able to be allies in the Black Lives Matter movement without making it all about us. (This is the same criticism I have seen made, rightly in my opinion, of Susannah Heschel's critique of Selma).
posted by Salamandrous at 7:50 AM on September 24, 2015 [7 favorites]


I also want to link Sigal Samuel's much more interesting, thought provoking, and powerful (in my opinion) thoughts about being a Jew, being anti-racist, and not being quite white: "I'm a Mizrahi Jew. Do I Count as a Person of Color?"
posted by Salamandrous at 7:58 AM on September 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


I wish/hope that white American Jews will be able to be allies in the Black Lives Matter movement without making it all about us.

If only I could favorite that a thousand times.
posted by Sophie1 at 8:46 AM on September 24, 2015 [6 favorites]


> that is another huge whopper

> seems quite arrogant to me

> a self-regarding and frankly rather self-pitying tendency

You may not realize it, but you're coming off as belligerent, contemptuous, and, yes, arrogant yourself. You might start out by recognizing that you're not the only person who has thought about this topic and amassed information about it, and have a little respect for people who don't share your opinion.
posted by languagehat at 8:52 AM on September 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


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