• Money-grubbing crooks only out for their own kind.

• Judases willing to betray their own for a quick buck.

• An alliance more threatening than the Freemasons and more enmeshed in society than that secret society.

• Big nosed, free air swilling, free pork pondering, copper wire inventing, wandering the desert for 40 years looking for a quarter someone dropped, rich, cheap, greedy, controlling, dishonest shysters.

At best these are harmless playground taunts, the standard go to insult hurled by those who have no idea where these stereotypes originated. At their worst they’ve been the rationale for shifting the blame of faltering economies and civil unrest. One need look no further than Weimar-era Germany to see how that story played out.

Throughout history Jews have been pushed to the fringes and relegated to certain trades either by religious decree–someone else’s religious decree mind you–or by virtue of no one else wanting to do the dirty work. The business of money has tended to be that profession. Stick with something for long enough and you’ll develop an acumen. But nobody likes shelling out a cut for the taxman and when the business of money is your stock in trade you’re bound to be maligned; the shylock coming to collect you’re figurative pound of flesh; an economic scourge

In the new book Jews & Money: The Story of a Stereotype (Palgrave-Macmillan) Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, traces the roots of society’s long-held attitudes towards the aforementioned subjects and seeks to determine who and what drives them and what can be done to reverse certain negative sentiments. At its best we get a praiseworthy history of society’s contempt towards Jews and their money, one that stretches from the ancient biblical temple moneychangers through Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and on up through the 20th and 21st centuries. At its worst Foxman’s pointed attacks rely too heavily on assumptions and inferences drawn from the three main tenets of anti-semitism—deicide, disloyalty to anyone but themselves, and a penchant for manipulating the world around them through financial means—attacks that fall flat, especially in light of recent events.

To be fair, the finger wagging goes every which way: towards conspiracy theorists who posit Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke are pulling the strings of finance for the benefit of world Jewery; towards fringe groups to the far left and far right; towards mainstream media and their perceived biases–Matt Taibbi in particular is taken to task for his 2009 assault on Goldman Sachs and, Foxman insinuates, the Jews who run it as a “blood-funneling and money-sniffing vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”; towards comedians like Woody Allen, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Fran Drescher (though Drescher should be held accountable for the atrocities her sitcom The Nanny wrought on the television viewing public); towards the gonif Bernie Madoff.

Madoff was a crook and the truth about fantastic conspiracies is that they don’t really exist and in normal times that would be all well and good but these aren’t normal times we live in.

The unrest from insurgent factions on the far right has created a volatile political climate. In 2008 the bottom fell out on the speculative housing market. Credit lines tightened in markets across the globe. Thousands of jobs evaporated over the next few months. Iceland fell apart. Greece is still a teetering column. The last days of the Bush administration and much of the current one saw the U.S. government extend unprecedented bailout loans to Wall Street firms. Deep seeds of resentment have given rise to the Tea Party. Though Foxman pays America’s newest political party a nod as “one to watch” whether deliberately or not he completely overlooks the eventual threat this group, whose lightning rod moment was the government bailouts to big Wall Street firms, poses to the Jews.

Let us consider for a second the modern Jew in business who shares only the vaguest connection with their old world and biblical ancestors. They are the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of the wave of Jews that fled to America to escape pogroms. They came to America with nothing and instilled a work ethic to move out off the ghettos of the Lower East Side (where coincidentally some have now returned to and resettled though at a much inflated cost). They have their elaborate coming of age rituals—the ones that include a kiddush luncheon with the honoree’s name is spelled out in giant block letters of cream cheese, hardly what the great tzadikim had in mind.

And anyone who has done a turn on the bar and bat mitzvah circuit will tell you that the ostentatious cocktail parties that have become a rite of passage for large swaths of conservative and reform Jews in America serve a distinct purpose: they are a finishing school for the future moneyed class; a year and a half long immersion course where tomorrow’s doctors, attorneys, and Wall Street hot shots learn how to schmooze it up.

We are potentially on the verge of the worst era of anti-semetism since, well, since the last spat of severe anti Jewish sentiment brought on by a faltering economy and a need to play the blame game. Thus far there has been an uneasy truce between the freshly minted Tea Party—spin-masters who have successfully recast the current president, a black progressive liberal from Chicago, as a Marxist Manchurian Candidate…where have you heard that one before?—and Zionist and moderate Jews who love Israel for their own personal reasons. One group votes like Puerto Ricans—though they are said to earn like Episcopalians—while the other would prefer to keep Puerto Ricans off mainland U.S. shores if only they could legally figure out how. Calling the plays as they come, both share a common enemy in fundamentalist Islam and, some would say, to a greater extent, Islam as a whole. The party’s ire over the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center in New York gave a preview of what it is capable of. But the shaky unspoken peace between the New Right and American Jews is worrisome and completely unsustainable. If and when the Muslims—even the most moderate ones—are no longer seen as a threat it is not so far-fetched to imagine that same rage coming down on the Jews who are perceived to control Wall Street; the Jews who Foxman alleges that Taibbi insinuates are the ones that pushed complicated financial products on trusting investors, pensions funds, and the central banks of several nations; the Jews whose alleged grasp on the monetary system has wrought so much havoc on world economies. Through much conjecture wherein any reference to financial institutions, blood, snakes, or other images used at one time or another to disparage Jews is treated as a direct affront Jews & Money seems to completely miss this obvious and looming point.

On a recent Sunday afternoon a man making copies at a local Kinko’s was approached by two Hassidic gentlemen in coat and black hat who asked if he was a Jew. Indeed he was. They inquired as to what he was making copies of and finding out it was for something other than a commercial venture the first Hassid advised the man that he ought to focus his energies in other directions. “We all have our hobbies and mine is making money,” the second Hassidic intoned in a thick guttural Yiddish accent.

Those unsolicited remarks may be little more than a minor PR disaster for someone looking to dispel old stereotypes—they’re certainly not doing anyone any favors—but are they the ones to be held accountable for the stigma of Jews as monsters with an insatiable hunger for lucre?

The post A Dilemma Bigger Than Free Pork: A Rambling Review of Abe Foxman’s New Book <i>Jews & Money</i> appeared first on Jewcy.

Emily Gould’s memoir And the Heart Says Whatever is out this month from Free Press. A cautionary tale on the perils of the overshare the book was already making serious news amongst a certain set before it was actually even a book. New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer nabbed a few coveted pages from the proposal and numerous bloggers bragged about their “status galleys”.

The once maligned former Gawker editor described by Nick Denton as “one of the most untrammeled writers the site has ever had” keeps a lower profile these days at least so far as that pertains to putting way too much personal info out to thousands of strangers. She’s still regularly maintaining four blogs here, here, here, and here and hosting episodes of the brilliant literary-themed Cooking The Books over at The Awl.

We met up at a Clinton Hill cafe to talk about the book, the online platforms that made the story possible, the anonymous people that both love and loathe it, and food blogging.

Do you feel there is a quantifiable number you could assign to the type of recognition you’ve gotten from living your personal life in a very public venue?

I know it probably sounds disingenuous saying this and obviously the various ways that I’ve been in public and whether its been exalted or humiliated have enabled me to make a living but that’s really all its done. That shouldn’t be a thing that is so unusual or special.

Without anyone noticing it we’ve entered into a new era and the fact that no one realizes it is key because there are still all these people who are really overtly pursuing fame and recognition for its own sake. Like everyone who vies too be on reality shows for half a second because they think ‘oh, I’m going to make it and then I’ll be set for just having been on TV with Bret Michaels for that two episode arc before he didn’t select me to be his love’ is going to somehow make their life better and inevitably it doesn’t and people just keep just not learning that lesson that it doesn’t make any difference to their lives. Not to be totally college but I think that fame is just a signifier that has become completely disassociated from what it used to signify; just the idea that you can have some kind of renown and it automatically means that money and power would accrue to you. Let’s just be real here.

When you have been doing the publicity for this book-which is much more permanent than a blog post-you’ve found a way to engage more directly with readers and maybe that has deflected some of the criticism that would have come your way.

My whole point is that it’s just a false distinction between me and the public like you just said. I don’t see any difference like I am this exalted speaker and you are the audience and your job is just to shut up and listen. The thing that is totally surprising me is that people come up to me and they are so much younger than I thought they’d be-they’re in high school or in their really early 20s or just getting to college-those are the people that are having really intense connection in a way that I feel like I have a connection with my favorite album. Its like their headphone jams and they have this intense private communion with and they don’t really give a fuck what some 37 year old book critic thinks about it.

What is it that gives people a license too hide behind some wall of virtual anonymity and really just rip into someone else?

When my boyfriend’s book came out he did this great interview with Young Manhattanite and he said something that I think about a lot, which is that “I know exactly what kind of asshole I am, and it’s a different kind of asshole from the one depicted on Gawker, etc.”.  It’s hard to have insight into why people feel they have license to be so awful and also just as hard to see why people also have such really extreme intense positive reactions, which happen in equal measure although the people with the really positive reactions don’t seem to be as vocal on the internet because they are sane and happy. There is all this stuff swirling around about this horrible fear that people have about the amateurization of what used to be a professional field which is writing and also issues that people have about women being honest about things like sex and money where fear just gets transformed into hate.

Interestingly enough I am sure you’ve seen this article from one of your own former colleagues about the duality that both women and bloggers-and by extension, one would assume, women bloggers-face both professionally and in life.

It’s really great! I printed it out so that I could focus on parts of it. Moe [Tkacik] really felt that duality but in my experience the idea of constructing a persona consciously is completely alien and I think that is probably what got me in trouble, psychologically at least. I didn’t really have a protective shield up like ‘oh the people attacking me are attacking a persona they’re not really attacking me’ and maybe they thought that they were attacking a persona and not really me. I’ve never been anything other than unguardedly completely 100% myself in every interaction for better or for worse-often for the worse. I feel that’s what’s bitten me in the ass a million times but it is also hat I have to thank for everything good that’s happened in my career.

You and I are only a year or so apart, roughly in the same peer group, and we are the last generation to remember what life was like before the internet and just total information overload 24/7 but we are also the first generation to grow up with it and know what it was like to be in high school or college and have access to so much.

From what I see people who are younger than us deal with it so much better because it is all they know and they have the rules so much more internalized. We had to learn the way that you learn a second language. I feel, and I think you probably feel this way too, you’re sort of bi-lingual in a way. You have one foot in the culture and you understand the rules of it and more and more there are rules that really don’t apply to what you’re doing with your everyday life. But for people who are teenagers right now that’s the only world they’ll ever know so of course they’ll be able to handle it better. A lot of times I feel I have a lot more in common with people in their early 20s because it is just so second nature to the point where they don’t even have to process it in a conscious way.

Now that this book is done you have a food blog and a recurring series on The Awl called Cooking The Books with other authors. So what’s happening next with that?

I have big plans with my food TV show empire and I just think its getting better and better. I’ve totally lucked into working with the best people who have just made the show that much more tight and professional. Upcoming we have episodes with Will Leitch, Julie Klausner, David Goodwillie who wrote this book American Subversive and Malena Watrous, who wrote this amazing novel about teaching English in Japan and the dissolution of your first real important relationship. I am completely in love with the show and all the people who have been on it and good things are happening, I can’t say anything for sure right now but something good is definitely gonna come of it.

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