Guess what! My new book, Love Me, just came out this week, and I am relatively confident that you are going to. Love it, that is. (I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy and I no longer need you to personally love me.)

It’s the scintillating sequel to my book Starstruck, which came out last year, and the second in my YA series set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. That “scintillating” is the precise word used by Kirkus Reviews to describe it, and if you’re at all familiar with how Kirkus normally reviews things, you’ll know that really means something. They also called it “sizzling,” “with more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive,” and a variety of other nice things. I’m sorry. I’m not a braggart by nature, but my grandmother is dead so now I have to tell you these things myself.

The bottom line is you should buy it, and you should also buy the first book in the series so you’ll know what’s going on. Let me put it this way, if you loved Valley of the Dolls, but thought what was really missing from it was a scene where your Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother complained to her Oscar nominated son about the fruit in her hotel (“it’s too shiny!”), then this is the book for you.

Anyway, in honor of the holiday we’re observing today, the delightful people here at Jewcy asked me to share my knowledge on how to celebrate a real old-fashioned Valentine’s Day in Hollywood, 1939. Ready? Here goes!

Wake up face down on the floor of a hotel, still fully clothed from the night before. Stagger to the bathroom and throw up. Ugh, is that really you in the mirror? Well, they can fix it in make-up. Light up a cigarette. Call the studio and have them send a car over and an errand boy with a change of clothes for you to leave in. Is the boy blind? No? Can they get a blind one? Well, can they blind him specially? Because seriously, no one can see you like this and live. Seriously.

Finish screaming at the secretary who refuses to cooperate. You’ll get her fired later today. Light another cigarette. Call down to order a huge elaborate breakfast, which you’ll charge to the studio. When it comes, send the whole thing away again immediately and pop a couple of those little green pills Dr. Lipkin prescribes to keep you up, up, up, peppy peppypeppy. And thin. Don’t forget thin. But you still have a headache, so you have to look around for some Scotch. Oh, there it is, under the bed. It spilled, but you can mop most of it up with a handkerchief and wring it into your mouth, the way you fed milk to the orphaned baby bird you found in the barn that time, back on your parents withered farm in the Dust Bowl, when you were a different person with a different name.

The studio car arrives with the blindfolded boy (it was the best they could do, you guess) who brings your clothes up to the room. He’s docile and surprisingly good-looking, and you briefly consider seducing him, but there’s no time. You have to get home for a Valentine’s Day photo shoot with your studio-mandated co-star in life and art. You despise each other, but manage to look convincingly in love for the cameras, as you always do. After the shoot his over, your co-star propositions you, “because it’s Valentine’s Day, what the hell.” You’ve got a throbbing pounding headache, but you figure, why not? Might as well go through with it once, just to see what you’re not missing.

It’s over quick, although you managed to make a lot of noise so the photographers packing up outside can go spread it all over town how you two are really in love. After a few final insults, you leave, feeling completely disgusted with yourself and the lie your life as become, and pop a few more green pills before you take the car over to see your actual lover, which has to be done in complete secrecy because a) you’re married b) they’re married c) you are of the same sex or d) they can’t do anything for your career. You spend a blissful few hours together indoors and in bed, fantasizing aloud about why you can’t do this all the time. Why you can’t just run away together and live on a farm or something. But you can’t, because then you wouldn’t be famous anymore, and you would rather be dead.

Oh, and you should probably fret out loud about Hitler and whether he’s really going to invade Poland or not, because this is 1939 and his decision could have serious repercussions for the whole world. You know?

That evening, the studio sends you on another date at the Cocoanut Grove with the despised co-star you nonetheless slept with that morning. You feel disgusted with yourself and full of self-hatred for this double life you’re leading. But the cameras, oh, the cameras. Pepped up on pills, you know you’re talking too fast, so you have a bottle of Scotch to slow you down. But things are going badly, and you know you’re acting not quite right, so you decide to leave. I mean, not before you manage to spill a plate of Lobster Newburg all over yourself and then vomit right at the feet of the coat check girl. You get in your car and immediately crash it straight into the wall of the Ambassador Hotel, possibly injuring or even killing an innocent bellman. Don’t worry, the studio fixers will take care of that and make sure his remains are returned to his loved one.

In the meantime, you figure you might as well get a room for the night and we find you in the morning exactly as you were at the beginning of this day. It’s just like Inside Llewyn Davis.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Buy LOVE ME for whoever you love!

Rachel Shukert, a Tablet Magazine columnist on pop culture, is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great. Love Me, the second in a series of three novels, is new from Random House. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.

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Like a lot of Jewish parents, my mother and father felt the the best way to imbue me with a strong Jewish identity was to deny me a Christmas tree, visits to Santa, and any other aspect of mainstream holiday cheer.  This policy had the unwelcome effect of turning me into this crazed Christmas fanatic, like how if you deny your kids sugar they grow up to be compulsive secret eaters.  When I got a little older, I was sometimes invited on Christmas day to the house of a sympathetic Gentile friend.  I would sit there sadly, watching the Gentiles open all their mountains of presents.  Sometimes they would give me a little something, which was almost always an ornament for the tree I wasn’t allowed to have.  Once I pointed that out, I said: “You know, I don’t have a Christmas tree because I’m Jewish,” and the grandma said, “Oh, well, then I guess you can just put it on the thing that opens the blinds.”  ON THE THING THAT OPENS THE BLINDS.  Fuck you, Gentile Grandma.

To this day, I still desperately want a Christmas tree.  My husband won’t let me have one.  We’ve had no fewer than three screaming fights on this subject this season alone, all of which have included the phrases: “Maybe you should go marry some goy then!!!” and “MAYBE I WILL!!!!”  It’s stupid.  We both know my parents would never have paid for the wedding if I’d married a non-Jew.  For sure they wouldn’t have sprung for a sit-down dinner.

We’ll probably have this fight again on Christmas day this year.  Then we’ll probably go to a movie neither one of us really wants to see, and then we’ll go wait in line at Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown in the freezing cold until we give up and go eat at some shittier place around the corner.  Wait, I forgot–this year I want to go see the re-release of Shoah. It’s playing at Lincoln Plaza and it’s nine-and-a-half hours long, so by the time we get all the way downtown the crowds will have died down, and we might get a decent freaking soup dumpling for once.  Ho ho ho.

Rachel Shukert’s latest book is Everything is Going to be Great: An Underfunded, Overexposed European Grand Tour

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Well folks, my summer of traveling just ended with a brief visit to my ancestral home of Omaha, Nebraska.  Despite the fact that I was there for ostensibly professional reasons (I was honored to participate in the fantastic annual Omaha Lit Fest, which is turning into quite a major event) the trip was fraught as usual with the ghosts of the past; despite the disconcerting presence of a new American Apparel, it’s still my hometown, and being there, I couldn’t help but reflect on my childhood and adolescence, and for probably the millionth time, what it was like growing up Jewish in a place where being Jewish is still at least semi-weird. I’ve written extensively about this (it’s so comfortable to revisit postions we’ve already taken, isn’t it?) and I’m not going to go into my personal experience here; if you’re interested, you can read my book.  But being home reminded me of a strange little news item I caught sight of a couple of weeks ago, and have since meant to call to your attention. Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services is offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, Alabama—a town of 58,000 known as the Peanut Capital of the World (although I think a few towns in Georgia might dare to differ).  It’s a kind of yiddische Homestead Act set smack in the cradle of Dixie, and the terms are simple: the families stay at least five years, become active in the local synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, and the money never has to be repaid.   Jews in the South are nothing new, and historically, were in some ways more visible and prominent than their co-religionists in the North.  The oldest continual Jewish community in the United States is in Charleston, South Carolina, where a group Portuguese Jews first settled 300 years ago.  Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State of the short-lived Confederate States of America was a Jew (a fact conveniently forgotten by so many of today’s good ol’ boys who proudly emblazon the Stars and Bars on the sides of their pick-up trucks and semi-automatic weapons); and during my stopover in the Memphis airport on my way back to New York, I counted as many yarmulkes as one might see in, if not New York, than certainly Chicago. 

Today, more Jews than ever—almost 400,000—are making their homes in the South, but they tend to be Northern transplants clustered in urban areas like Atlanta and Birmingham (rather than in the kinds of towns we Yankees are used to viewing in sepia toned movies, accompanied by haunting shots of live oaks draped in Spanish moss and the sound of somebody throatily humming the word “Jesus” over and over again off screen—a sure sign in the language of film that something bad, sinister, and racially tinged is about to happen.)  As a result, small-town synagogues are closing, and once close-knit communities have dissolved.  In the article I read, a woman named Thelma Nomberg, who grew up in nearby Ozark and was the only Jewish student in the region’s public schools in the 1940’s put it simply: “We are dying.” This is undoubtedly true and painful to the men and women watching their communities wither and disappear, and the Blumberg organization is to be commended for their attempt to recognize and revitalize the history and heritage of the Jewish South.

That said, I can’t help but feel that the city elders of Dothan, who have expressed enthusiasm about the plan, have slightly different motives here.   As someone who grew up in a rural state (admittedly not Southern, but a population of 58,000 is practically a megalopolis for some parts of Nebraska), I feel I can safely say that the death of small town America is hardly an exclusively Jewish problem.  Jews may have disappeared from small towns, but so have people.  As big-box retailers curtail and eventually murder local businesses, as factories shut down, as opportunities grow ever scarcer, talented and ambitious young people take flight, seeking their fortunes elsewhere, and never come back. 

They call it the brain drain.  Left behind are the elderly and those with few other options. To survive, such towns (and I’m not speaking of Dothan in particular, but depressed areas in general), require new residents with the skills and energy to attract business rather than drive it away, and in some cases, radically remake the fabric of the community. In the Midwest, a new influx of Latino immigrants has helped to correct some of the imbalance, bringing new vitality to stagnant areas, but in the conservative South where xenophobic fervor tends to run high, this option is perhaps seen as less tenable.   You need a middle class?  Bring in the Jews.  Any student of Jewish history might feel a faint quiver of recognition. In the twelfth century, when Jews were massacred and eventually expelled from England and France, the Polish prince Boleslaus III had an idea: why not invite them to Poland?  He was struggling to transform his country into a mercantile culture, Jews were educated and good with money and needed a place to live.  At the time, Lithuania, which comprised much of Poland was still officially a pagan state (it would remain so until 1386, when Poland offered its crown to the Lithuanian Grand Duke, and was the last country in Europe to Christianize); there would be no significant religious obstacle from its people.  Rich in resources and underdeveloped, Poland was ready and waiting for the beleaguered and brainy Hebrews.  
As they say in Fiddler on the Roof, it was a perfect match.  Over the next two hundred years, Jews flooded into Poland, almost exclusively forming the middle class—a liaison between the agrarian peasants and the cultured aristocracy.  The odd flare-up of anti-Semitic violence certainly occurred, but compared to the horrors Jews had endured in Crusades-mad Western Europe, these hardly seemed reason for pause.  In 1264, Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz, which officially granted all Jews the freedom of worship, travel, and most importantly, trade.  Poland became the center of Jewish life in Europe, culminating under the beloved proto-liberal Casimir the Great (1303-1370) who expanded Jewish rights and protection to such an extent that he was known as “Casimir, King of the Serfs and Jews.”   Unfortunately, if you’ll remember, it went downhill, or we’d all be speaking Polish right now.   Thus far, Dothan has not proved nearly as attractive to urban Jews as medieval Poland, and unless the approximately seventeen gentiles in Great Neck lose their minds and start a riot against the Silvermans next door, this seems unlikely.  But the Jews who have settled in Dothan seem to find an extremely hospitable place.  As Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El points out: “The Northeast has a very warped perception of what the South is all about….the South is a wonderful place to be.  The people are warm and friendly.  There’s very little traffic, and best of all, there’s no snow.” Let’s just hope she’s singing the same tune 500 years from now.

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Hello, and welcome to “Anti-Semites We Love!”

It’s a new semi-regular feature here in the Protocols, when every few weeks I’ll take some time out from furiously cataloguing the various ways in which Jews hate themselves and give some attention to the people who keep making sure that we do.  Namely, those writers, musicians, and artists that we have admired and even loved over the years, found in them a kindred spirit, and then come across a passage in one of their works, or a troublesome quote, (my mother had a day planner given out free by the ADL, I believe, that was full of such chestnuts—a Jew-hating maxim for every day of the week.  I wish I was joking, but I’m seriously not), or the telltale section in their Wikipedia entry entitled something like “5. Controversies; 5.1: Anti-Semitism” and realized that not only were we not kindred spirits, but said idol would detest us for no reason other than an accident of birth. 

An idol such as this might be perfectly polite to our face as we proclaim our admiration and excitement at meeting them, all the while silently, relentlessly scrutinizing our behavior, pens poised, ready at some later date to hold up our too-loud laughter, the too small (cheap) or too big (showy) tip we left for the bartender, or our unfortunate propensity to spray them with crumbs as we speak as evidence of the inherent inferiority of our religion and race.  Later, over a glass of port with similarly inclined friends, they will mock our names, our noses, our manners, our almost touching—that is, if it wasn’t so ludicrously reprehensible—delusion that we could ever belong. 

You may surmise, reading this above paragraph, for this purpose my typical anti-Semite is rather a genteel one, the kind that stand around in country clubs in pressed white linen and tennis clothes, drinking cocktails and flashing their pearly teeth like some kind of advertisement for Presbyterian toothpaste.  This is not accidental.  Like many of my co-religionists (Ralph Lauren, Aaron Spelling, Joseph Lieberman), I harbor a furious and obsessive love for congenially hostile WASPs and their culture that borders on the self-destructive—the way an adolescent girl, feverishly inscribing the name of her crush on the cover of her notebook in ever deepening gouges of ballpoint, suddenly wonders what it would feel like to do the same thing with a razor blade, on the inside of her arm.  

But here the plan is to stay away from the professionally bigoted—those whose antipathy toward my race is a raison d’etre—your David Irvings, your Hassan Nasrallahs, your Adolf Hitlers.  We don’t love them.  Nor will I be reaching too far back into the sands of time—I’m not interested in waxing nostalgic on the virtues of Pharaoh, for example, or Haman or Antiochus; I filled in enough coloring pages of these villains in elementary school to last a lifetime.  

Instead, I shall focus on those that have had a lasting, positive effect on humanity.  Those that have left behind ideas and works or transcendant beauty (or at least impressive cleverness) and are exceptional (or at least amusing) in every way, yet happen to be tarred forever with the brush of disdain for the Chosen People.  The evidence may be no more than an incriminating joke or the recollection of a colleague; or it may be something more insidious, and some of these may have even contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to something that may have helped the objects of their derision. Henry Ford gave us the Dearborn Independent, but he also gave us the car. You get the idea.  For every cloud there is silver lining—for every anti-Semite there is something, somewhere that is good for the Jews.  

The honorees on this page will not only receive the honor (or ignominy) of my humble musing on their lives; they or their heirs, should they choose to claim it, will receive one (1) signed and dated certificate, suitable for framing, decorated with all the Judiaca-themed clip art my 1991 PC edition of Print Shop has to offer.  Also, each honoree will have a tree planted in their honor in the newly endowed Garden of Intolerance in the Jewcy offices, if by planting a tree you mean we’ll write their name in crayon on a Styrofoam cup filled with dirt, shove a kidney bean inside and hope for the best.  (I got a lot of bean sprouts this way as part of my third grade science project, so there you go.)  We’re also looking for suggestions for future honorees, so if you or someone you love is an anti-Semite, don’t hesitate to let us know!  

And with that, allow me to introduce you to Anti-Semites We Love, edition one: ladies and gentlemen, RICHARD WAGNER.

Every little girl fantasizes about her wedding day: the dress, the flowers, the cake, the music.  And every little Jewish girl remembers the day she figured out that her wedding wouldn’t be like the ones in the movies.  Why?

No "Here Comes the Bride."  Because Richard Wagner wrote it, and Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Such an anti-Semite, that despite being one of the most influential composers the world has ever produced, his work has never been given a public performance in the State of Israel. (It has been broadcast on the radio, for the well-known opera buffs of Hamas.)

Such an anti-Semite that he authored an entire, widely distributed essay on the subject (which he published under a pseudonym) entitled: Das Judenthem in der Musik (Judaism in Music), in which he savages Jews in general and Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular, deeming them a negative, alien influence harmful to German music and Germany in general.  While his language in this pamphlet is certainly offensive, it is worth noting that Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were not only Jews but also contemporaries and rivals, with Meyerbeer in particular being far more commercially successful and beloved by audiences (and truly, less gifted) than his antagonist.

It is true that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, and that the Nazis appropriated some of the kitschier aspects of his theatrical ideas for staging their own rallies; as well as co-opting some of his stickier ones about race and German identity.  However, even as the Nazis celebrated some of Wagner’s racial theories (as they similarly bastardized elements of Charles Darwin’s, but that doesn’t seem to bother us as much—after all, creationists don’t tend to perform very well on their MCATS), they aggressively suppressed other memes in his work—his pacifism, for example, and while Wagner’s writings and work may have been an influence on some of the Nazi’s loftier (and more ludicrous) mythological sentiments, he did have the good taste to die some 50 years before Hitler came to power.  

And if he had not?  Who knows what would become of him.  Wagner certainly was no friend of the Jews.  But he was also a genius; an irascible, iconoclastic man who might have had quite a bit of trouble adapting to totalitarian rule, which does not tend to look kindly on individual brilliance.  It seems fairly likely that Wagner, while an idol of the Nationalist Socialists in theory, might have run rather afoul of them in practice.  

But let’s look at what matters: his work.  Wagner, in his operas, was among the first artists to make use of cultural and nationalistic tropes as subject matter—not in purely folkloric terms, but as the underpinnings for transcendent high art.  In retrospect, the canonization of these old Germanic legends of Nordic heroes makes us (especially as Jews) cringe, having seen such names and archetypes splashed liberally across the primitive websites of white supremacists and people who sell SS paraphernalia on eBay.  But substitute Siegfried and the Valkyries for more comforting cultural archetypes—the larger than life characters of the American West, for example–and one begins to see how Wagner nudged open the door for countless artists using their own cultural identities as the inspiration for works that at once defined and transcended the realm of personal experience.

In addition to stretching the limits of tonal music (and arguably anticipating the modernist atonality that would dominate the beginning of twentieth century musical composition), Wagner also wrote extensively on his theories of performance, most specifically on his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total art,” in which music, dance, story, and stagecraft would be united into one complete whole.  Many scholars have written that cinema takes this concept to its ultimate and highest level, but I beg to differ. To me, the best example of “total art” as Wagner might have recognized it (and probably also hated it), of story, dance, music, and visualization coming together has a seamless whole for the participatory audience, is that most Jewish of art forms: the American musical theater.

Do you see where this is going?  I realize it’s a giant rhetorical leap, but stay with me for the sake of humor.  You take a cultural archetype from a storied (and comforting) past—say a jovial Jewish dairyman with five troublesome daughters.  You add a little Americanized Gesamtkunstwerk, a dash of New York chutzpah…and bam! 

That’s right.  Without Richard Wagner there would be no Fiddler on the Roof.

And then what the hell would anybody play at their wedding?

Richard Wagner, we salute you.  You are an anti-Semite we love. 

The post The Protocols: Anti-Semites We Love appeared first on Jewcy.

Hello Semites and anti-Semites! (Is that like matter and antimatter? Kind of, except instead of totally and mutually annihilating each other they seem to have maintained an antagonistic, yet symbiotic relationship for centuries, deathless and regenerating, occupying the others mind and heart, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. I talk about Harry Potter a lot, don’t I? I think it’s because it makes me sound younger.) Sorry! Wandered off there for a second. You see, I’m in Amsterdam. Yes, that Amsterdam, where last weekend I had the singular experience of watching You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch people—Dutch, except for the dozen or so Germans parked behind us, loudly expressing their befuddlement at every cry of “Disco Disco,” and at Lainie Kazan, naked and resplendent, throwing her arms around Adam Sandler and cooing, “Oh honey! You are good at everything that you do,” before she dunks her hunk of pound cake in his coffee and shoves it in her mouth. Were they really allowed to laugh at this? The New Jew Revolution–this reflexive self-mockery, the transformation of our own stereotypes and internalized self-loathing into something like pride–hasn’t quite gotten here yet. This can make for some intriguing exchanges. When one Dutch woman, somewhat haughtily, asked me why I hadn’t changed my last name upon marriage to Mr. Abramowitz, “subsuming my identity like most American women,” I replied: “Well, I guess I could feed you a bunch of lines about having already established my professional identity and not wanting to go through all the paperwork, but honestly? I just wasn’t prepared for my name to sound that Jewish.”

She looked at me with undisguised shock. I know it’s difficult to detect irony when you’re not speaking in your first language, and standing just blocks away from the train station that processed the transports to Westerbork, I really should have known better. But before I could tell her I was kidding, she jumped in. “But your last name is Shukert. That is a already a Jewish name.” “Kind of,” I said. “In America it’s sort of neutral. In Nebraska, where I grew up, it’s just kind of German.” “Well,” she said. “In Holland, it’s very, very Jewish.” Ah! The ghosts of the past!

In regards to Jewish identity, Amsterdam is special. It has a special name, Mokum, bestowed upon it years ago by its Jewish inhabitants, and has many Jewish leaders, including the popular current mayor, Job Cohen. The old Jewish Quarter boasts kosher restaurants and a pristine Jewish Museum. There are several synagogues and Jewish cemeteries still in use, and the Anne Frank House, with an appropriately solemn façade of glass and steel, attracts thousands of visitors each year. And then there are the Amsterdam Joden. The Amsterdam football (or soccer, for those of you hopelessly unversed in the ways of the Continent) team, Ajax, is one of the three main Dutch football clubs, and like many such teams, inspires almost cult-like devotion in it’s supporters who call themselves… wait for it… the Jews. At games, they drape themselves in makeshift, sometimes homemade, Star of David flags and wear hats and jerseys with Hebrew writing. Some die-hard fans (most of whom, like the players, are not Jewish) set “Hava Nagilah” as their ringtones, or even go the extra mile and have the word Jood (if you went on a field trip with your Hebrew school class to that traveling Anne Frank exhibit in the late 1980’s, your remember as the Dutch word for Jew), often accompanied by a Star of David, tattooed on their bodies. When the team makes a successful play deserving of praise, or a serious bungle requiring encouragement (or reproach) their supported shout "Joden! Joden!" (Jews! Jews!) down at the field. I thought it might be funny to take up a similar chant whenever Adam Sandler or Robert Smigel appeared on the screen, but managed, thankfully to restrain myself. In the years since World War II, we’ve gone from martyrs to mascots.
But it doesn’t just stop there! American sports fans may argue over the Yankees vs. Red Sox with conviction and fervor, but rarely does it come to bloodshed. Nor have we perfected the kind of taunting verbal warfare, forged in the crucible of centuries of painful and violent history, that European teams unleash on each other. When some teams play Rotterdam, they sing a song referencing the brutal bombing campaign inflicted on the city by the Germans in 1940: “When the spring comes, we will bomb Rotterdam.” Dutch fans scream at German teams: “Give us back our bikes!” (Interestingly, I don’t believe there are many cases of Israeli fans screaming at the same teams: “Give me back my grandmother!”) When The Hague plays Ajax, they often shout “Hamas! Hamas!” while they goosestep in place and salute straight-armed at the opposing stands. And most famously, and creatively, when the Ajax Joden take the field, you can hear a loud hissing sound come from the Rotterdam stands. This is not a hiss of derision. It is meant to sound like the hiss of the gas. Jews to the gas. I know. I’d be offended if I didn’t sort of think it was a little bit hilarious. That’s Holland for you. Jews making Jewish jokes (for example, moi) are goggled at and strangely reprimanded. Non-Jews, however, use the Holocaust as a football chant, and it’s basically fine. (I say basically, because now and then a politician or civic leader plays lip service to how terrible it all is, but it doesn’t make much difference.)

More interesting to me is the evolution. Jews have gone from a being a despised minority to being sainted martyrs, and finally, mascots. I think of a story my mother told me, when we toured the old Jewish quarter of Prague, and came upon a group of elderly women selling little figurines of Orthodox Jews outside the ancient and abandoned synagogue. As one of the women tried to press a ceramic Chasid into her hand, my mother asked her if she was Jewish. “Oh no!” said the woman. “What happened to all the Jews then?” my mother asked. “Oh!” The woman fluttered her hand in the air breezily. “They all moved away.” A vanished people from a long-past time, whose once reviled customs (and existence) seem quaint and picturesque, now that they’re all gone. How strange to be part of a group filed away into irrelevance by the prevailing culture, the rough, unpleasant edges sanded and swept away by the passing of time. It put me in mind of another group of people similarly removed from lands that they had lived on for millennia, that we in America currently use as mascots and souvenirs. The Native Americans. Is there really so much difference between the “Tomahawk Chop” and the hissing of the gas? Do these cultural appropriations only sting when they appropriate our culture? The only answer, I think, is to just take them back. In the words of Amitai Sandy, the Israeli graphic artist and comic book publisher, in response to the anti-Semitic cartoon contest sponsored by an Iranian newspaper: “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian is going to beat us on our home turf!” Personally, I’d love to see a version of how the Dancing Mascot of the Amsterdam Joden might look. My guess is that it wouldn’t be like Zohan.

The post The Protocols: How the Jews of Europe Became Mascots and Souvenirs appeared first on Jewcy.

I’m sorry. I really am. I had an entirely different column outlined for this week, all about interpreting the book and recent film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited through the lens of the twentieth century American Jewish experience (the striving, the trying to fit in with people who don’t really see you as an equal, the getting by on sheer talent, the masochistic self-loathing); a piece of literary criticism that would have surely made the genteelly anti-Semitic Evelyn Waugh (who for years was desperately, unrequitedly in love with the notorious Diana Mitford Mosley, Britain’s most glamorous Nazi) turn in his grave. It was going to have a beginning, middle and end; it would have had a coherent thesis and concluding statement.

But that was before the Olympics melted my analytic mind, turning it into a messy, manic carnival of nationalistic synapses. And now, I’m too excited to write (or even think) about anything else.

Specifically, about anything but the Men’s 4×100 meter freestyle final on Monday, where the team of Michael Phelps, Garret Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones, and Jason Lezak pulled out a gold medal win in what commentators are already terming one of the most spectacular Olympic races ever and bested the heavily favored French, who had been the very picture of snide Gallic arrogance in the days leading up to the race, talking what the American team delicately referred to as “stuff” to whomever would take dictation.

“We will smash the Americans,” declared world record holder Alain Bernard. “It’s what we came for.”

I don’t think I have to recount what happened, except that for once the commentators were right. I was jumping up and down in my living room, screaming my head off (albeit silently, like an actor in a piece of embarrassingly emotive experimental theater, so as not to wake up the baby that lives next door and condemn myself to a week of elevator harassment from said baby’s parents), as Jason Lezak surged on the anchor leg, completing the fastest 100 meter relay split of all time and dispatching the boastful Bernard with an expert touch of the wall. On the deck, Michael Phelps let out a primal scream of victory, his giant arms bulging before him. In my apartment, the phone started to ring like crazy.

“They did it!” I screamed, before the person on the other end could speak. “They did it, they did it, they did it!”

“I know!” My mother shouted back. “And they’re Jews!”

“Who?” I said, momentarily disoriented.

“Jason Lezak!” she shrieked. “And the other one, with the hyphen. Weber something”

There was a rustle as my father wrested the phone from my mother’s hand. My father was up past 9:30 on a Sunday night? This was an historic event.

“Amazing!” he cried, hysterical with glee. “They showed those frogs who’s boss!”

My father despises the French for the Dreyfus Affair, the absence of vegetarian options on their menus, and the fact that the intricacies of their language were responsible for the only “B” of his high school career, although not necessarily in that order. When I pointed out to him that Thomas Jefferson, one of his great heroes, was a committed Francophile, he simply sniffed: “Well. I guess they never made him pay to sit on a public park bench.”

“What a team!” Truly, my father was in raptures. “Two Jews, a black guy, and a porpoise. That’s America! I love this country!”

After a few more such platitudes, I hung up the phone. I still was too wound up from the race to go to sleep, so I did a little research on the swimmers in question. It’s true. Jason Lezak and Garrett Weber-Gale are indeed M.O.T.’s, as are Ben Wildman-Tobriner, part of the world record breaking team in the preliminary 4×100 freestyle, and Dara Torres, who at 41 is the oldest ever American female swimmer to participate in the Olympics (the 2008 Games are her 5th.) And let’s not forget the legendary Mark Spitz, the one who started it all, whose record seven gold medals in a single Games Michael Phelps looks likely to surmount.

So all this begs the question: Is swimming our sport? Are Jews to aquatics what African-Americans are to basketball? Is there something about us that makes us great swimmers? Lung capacity? Discipline? Our traditional love of fish?

An hour later, after delving a little further into the backgrounds of our newly minted aquatic heroes (and having crossed over into full-blown insomnia) I thought I had the answer. Jews are good at swimming for the same reason I used to be good at giving hand jobs.

Camp.

I even learned that Garrett Weber-Gale had also attended a Jewish summer camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin; had perhaps swum in the same lake where I contracted the swimmer’s itch that sent me to the infirmary for a record three days. I am deeply honored to have shared a parasite with this newly minted Olympic champion.

African-American basketball greats hone their skills in neighborhood pick-up games. Countless soccer greats first learned to play in the favelas of Brazil. American Jewish kids get shipped off to denominational sleep-away camp for two months every summer (two months! An eternity!) and are made to swim. And swim. And swim. At my camp, it was the only activity that was strictly mandatory. Horseback riding you could skip, tennis was optional—you could even get out of the song sessions after every meal if you were inconspicuous and/or good at faking a severe stomach cramp. But swimming—no way. I still shudder at the memory of suiting up three times a day—once for the morning Polar Bear session, a dip in freezing water at the crack of dawn; the morning training lessons, when campers would be sorted according to ability and forced to perform feats of endurance, and the free swim in the afternoon, a feat of Darwinian survival when lesser specimens would be dunked, pushed, and held under water for terrifying lengths of time by their evolutionary betters.

Swimming was a pragmatic solution to several problems. On the days when we weren’t being drenched in torrential rainfall, the weather was unbearably hot, and a cold dip was a good way to cool down. Swimming was also physically exhausting. Force a bunch of rowdy campers into the water three times a day, and they were going to be good and tired by night, enabling their teenage minders to smoke cigarettes and go on beer runs without fear of waking them. Also, swimming is not a contact sport, with the rate of serious injury almost non-existent (unless somebody drowns, but that’s another story.) Even the kid with the glass eye could go swimming. When the orthodontia is safe, the Jewish mothers breathe a sigh of relief.

But after all those years of camp and lessons and Polar Bears, I still can barely swim to save my life–and I mean that in the most literal way. So what do I know?

I watched the medal ceremony again when I woke up the morning after the race. I watched our four swimmers on the podium as the American flag was raised and the anthem played. And I was filled with pride—not just for the two men on the podium who shared my religion; but for my country. Our internal divisions aside, the United States may be the only nation where two Jews, a black guy, and a porpoise can share a winning podium in front of the whole world. So maybe Jews are good at swimming, I thought. Who cares? So what? So maybe African-Americans are good at Track and Field, and Chinese are good at gymnastics, and Greek billionaire orphans are good at the Equestrian stuff. So what? Don’t call me anymore to tell me who is Jewish, Mom! That’s not what the Olympics are about! The Olympics are about putting what divides us aside and celebrating what we are together. It’s not about being Jewish, or black, or a Greek billionaire orphan* or even part Porpoise, but American. And Human! Morgan Freeman says so, in that Nike commercial!

We are all humans at the Olympics, I thought blearily, near psychotic from lack of sleep. And if the French, or any Europeans for that matter, are mad at the nice Jewish boys who just won the 4×100 meter freestyle, well maybe they should have been a little bit more hospitable to us 100 years ago.

And with that final defiant sentiment, I fell at last into bed.

* Athina Roussel, granddaughter of Aristotle Onassis and the Greek billionaire orphan to whom I am referring is not strictly American.

The post The Protocols: Are Jews to Aquatics what African-Americans are to Basketball? appeared first on Jewcy.

“Guess what?” My mother sounded positively bubbly–I hadn’t heard her this excited since her latest colonoscopy came back clean. “Harry Potter is Jewish!”

“Harry Potter is a fictional character,” I explained patiently. “But if Harry Potter had a religion, I’m pretty sure it would be some kind of magical Druidic paganism or something. Isn’t that what the Fundies were all up in arms about?”

“Well, not the real-life Harry Potter,” my mother replied, imbuing this paradoxical statement with all the disdainful petulance of a thwarted middle-schooler. “The actor. I just read an interview with his Bubbe in the Jewish Press. What’s his name?”

“Daniel Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe, huh? I wonder what it used to be.”

“It’s his mother that’s Jewish,” I said automatically. “His father isn’t.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. But she soon brightened again. “But if his mother is Jewish, then he’s Jewish! And you already knew!”

Yes. I had known the truth about young Mr. Radcliffe for some time, since my usual procrastination technique of looking up random bits of useless knowledge on the internet had seized me with a burning need to know whether it was Alicia Spinnet or Katie Bell who played Chaser for the Gryffindor Quidditch Team (answer: both did!) which led me to the Harry Potter Lexicon, which led me to Daniel Radcliffe’s Wikipedia page, which led me to the “List of English Jews” where I spent a full two hours glorying in the achievements of Matt Lucas, Nigella Lawson and Vanessa Feltz until I pulled myself together enough to go to the bodega for my seventeenth diet Coke of the day.

This kind of behavior is hardly atypical. Before my grandmother passed to that giant entertainment center in the sky, she used to adore cataloguing the co-religionists on her favorite television programs, pointing a knobby finger at the screen as the stale rugelach crumbs spilled down her housedress. “That Paul Reiser is just adorable! And he’s a Jew!” (Really? Paul Reiser? You don’t say.) As a child, I often shut myself in my bedroom, poring over the copy of Great Jews of the Stage and Screen, the soothing presence in those pages of Debra Winger and Jill St. John assured me that I could still be rich and famous, without having blond hair or being able to do a complete split. Despite the fact that my sister possessed a fine head of pale, buttery ringlets, and nearly every girl in my ballet class at the JCC was suppler than me, at the time I associated my failings in this area, like everything else I disliked about myself, with my Jewishness. Lauren Bacall gave me hope.

We lived in Nebraska, where Jews were thin on the ground, but had we dwelt in Great Neck or Tel Aviv I hardly think my mother’s delight that a Jewish boy had been chosen to portray the world’s most beloved teenage wizard would have been more acute.

There is only one other group of people that monitors the identities of prominent Jews as assiduously as the Jews themselves; who can, off the top of their heads, rattle off the names of each Jewish member of the United States Senate (thirteen, if you count Joe Lieberman) and Nobel Prize winner.

These people are white supremacists.

Thanks to the Internet, climbing into the mind of your friendly neighborhood neo-Nazi is easier than ever. Simply type in the name of any celebrity or public figure you believe or suspect to be a landsman into a search engine, along with the word Jewish. You’ll find glowing-with-naches profiles a la Harry Potter’s proud grandma, but you’ll also immediately be directed to David Duke’s website or the aptly named Jew Watch, which will assure you (accompanied by detailed genealogical charts) of the problematic ancestry of dangerous and powerful Semites like Estelle Getty, Scarlett Johanssen, and Kyle Broflovski. The attention to detail is so astounding—Robin Williams appears on the list, with the caveat that he once mentioned that he was Jewish on Oprah, but was “most likely joking and is of probable Christian ancestry” which is a relief, since the organizers of the next Aryan Brotherhood Autumn Retreat had already a Bicentennial Man/The World According to Garp double feature for Movie Night. Other heroes of American comedy don’t get off so easy; although the author acknowledges that “he is a funny motherfucker” and that he has “laughed his fucking ass off as some of his shit before”, Larry David is most certainly a Jew and none of us should forget get it.

Don’t worry, dude. We won’t.

Lists of names feature prominently in Jewish culture. The Book of Genesis teems endlessly with long recitatives of who begat who. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we pray with our eyes trained on the Book of Life, a kind of gargantuan cosmic database cataloguing all our virtues and trespasses that judges us accordingly (growing up, I always explained it to my Gentile friends as something like Santa’s naughty-and-nice list, except that the punishment for naughtiness was not fewer toys, but death. Is it any wonder we don’t attract more converts?) The names of the deceased are printed in pamphlets and solemnly read aloud on the anniversaries of their passes, and the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem has taken on almost talismanic properties—at once a memorial and an affirmation of existence. After all, the Nazis had their lists too. And apparently, they still do.

Perhaps what is most interesting (and eerie) is that whether these lists of famous Jews are available in glossy coffee table books and sold at the gift shop of the Jewish Museum on 5th Avenue, or posted in inept HTML on a website festooned with German Eagles and misspelled quotes from David Irving, they serve a roughly analogous purpose: to document the influence and reach of a people whose dizzying level of achievement on the world-stage is vastly disproportionate to their relatively miniscule numbers. Of the major world religions, we outnumber only the Ba’hai, and not by much. And how many Ba’hai are staff writers on The Daily Show?

For Jews, this legacy of prominence is a cause for celebrations, for the triumphs of a people that, to put it gently, the world has been rough with. For our antagonists, this never-ending parade of Jews in the news is evidence of precisely that—of a people of undue influence, an encroaching threat, a giant yarmulke-wearing octopus that gouging the world in its tentacles. And it’s precisely this sentiment that lends the streak of buried melancholy to Aunt Sharon’s discovery of the Beastie Boys, to Adam Sandler’s Hanukah Song, and to the doctrine of Jewish overachieving in general. If we can only keep churning out doctors, lawyers, rock stars, Nobel laureates, and ribald comedies about tubby, curly-headed stoners and the Gentile women who reluctantly love them, we will at last make ourselves indispensable. To committed populists like Kennebunkport’s own George W. Bush, elitism is a term of contempt. But for Jews it means something quite different. We know that even the Nazis let some of the elite—scientists, musicians, artists—slip through the cracks.

The elite survive. When we are all elite, then we will all be safe.

And on a personal note, I’m still trying to make it there myself, so Jew Watch, if you’re reading, put me on your list! Keep an eye out for my nefarious doings—I beg you! I’ll send you any biographical information that you need. And if you’d like to link to my Amazon page as well, who am I to stop you? I don’t care if you burn my book, as long as you buy it.

The post The Protocols: Harry Potter and the Order of the Jews appeared first on Jewcy.

Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t precisely clear to me what a Semite was, but I knew what it meant to be anti one. It meant you hated Jews and wanted them dead.

The existence of such a prejudice was hardly news; the bookshelves in my room groaned under the weight of solemn tales of the Holocaust and the pogroms, stories festooned with grim illustrations of terrified children laden with bundles, peering helplessly through pen and ink fence of barbed wire. My parents had their own stories: anti-Semitism was the reason my immigrant grandmother refused to let her children go swimming with the non-Jewish neighbors, why my father had been beaten up several times a week on his way home from junior high by roaming gangs of feral Gentile children.

But that was years ago.

“I’m not saying it will happen,” she continued, “but I want you to prepare for it if it does.”

As I had not yet learned that my mother’s general pessimism towards the human race was not always based in tangible reality, her warnings filled me with a consuming, atavistic sense of dread. When would the assault come, and in what form? Would I be shunned in the cafeteria or disinvited from birthday parties? Would I be physically attacked: trapped in lockers or forced to gather change from the floor as a gang of Esprit-clad Aryans mocked the parsimoniousness of my race? At the very least, I assumed I would be taunted verbally with cries of “kike” and “yid”; “heebie” and “hook-nose” and “Red Sea pedestrian” and other racial epithets I learned from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

“You forgot sheeny,” said my mother.

“I thought that was an Irish person.”

“Nope. You’re a sheeny.”

As time passed, I would hear all those words and more. What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

Everywhere, young Jews are eagerly, even gleefully appropriating the traditional iconography and language of anti-Semites faster than you can say “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We howled with laughter at Borat, at the grotesque puppet in “The Running of the Jew” laying its “filthy Jew-egg” as Sacha Baron Cohen spewed der Sturmer-worthy invective in pidgin Hebrew. We read publications with names like Heeb and Jewcy, and cheerfully throw around terms and stereotypes that would have sent previous generations straight to the local ADL office. Recently, I was watching TV at home when I received a phone call from a co-religionist friend.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m at home, watching The Jewish Americans on PBS.”

“Yeah? What’s happening?”

“Oh, I guess this episode is on Leo Frank. But as far I as can see, the whole thing is mostly about how we’re ugly and everybody hates us.” We dissolved with laughter.

There are a number of possible reasons for this change in attitude. The age we are living in is a peculiar one, equal parts irony and genuine turmoil. Festering internecine and tribal hatreds have once again become a very real part of how the world operates; as a result, political correctness has died an unceremonious death, while multiculturalism is dying a somewhat more tortuous one. At the same time, overt intolerance has become nearly obsolete, to the point that one can perpetuate almost any form of prejudice with the implicit understanding that if the speaker is of a certain social class or education level, he or she cannot possibly be a bigot. On a strictly Jewish level, I think my generation has simply lost patience with our Hebrew school educations, with the constant focus on victimhood and hardship, and the sometimes reactionary politics of the Jewish establishment—with the powerful lobbies and their professional outrage, the shell-shocked parents and grandparents ever at the ready to pick up a phone or file a formal complaint the second a Jewish child is made to sing “Silent Night” or assigned a biology midterm on Yom Kippur (I speak from personal experience here.) There are better things to do with one’s time than to be constantly on guard against closet Nazis. Or maybe after 5000 years of the being on the wrong end of the world’s general shittiness, we’ve just stopped taking it so personally.

But to borrow a phrase from David Mamet in The Wicked Son, his provocative and occasionally infuriating book on the subject, “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Fine.

In this, my mother was right. All of our mothers were right. My generation, we American Jews in our 20’s and 30’s, may have missed having taunts and dirt clods thrown at our heads as we waited for the school bus, but you don’t have to look very far to find our people held in general contempt. In fact, don’t look hard at all—just look in the comments section of any major internet blog that so much as mentions the State of Israel, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, or boiled chicken.

So welcome to The Protocols, named of course for the famous (and forged) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or as I like to think of it, the book that started the international craze, the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. Here, I’ll strive to answer the important questions—not so much “Why do they hate us?” but “So what if they hate us?” I’ll look at how Jews have, for better and for worse, internalized the tenets of anti-Semitism and turned them inside out, how Jews judge other Jews, and what it means to be a self-hating Jew (as opposed to a Jewish self-hater.) I’ll examine anti-Semites through history, anti-Semites in the news, and once every few weeks or so, anti-Semites we love. (And yes, I’m taking recommendations.)

My qualifications for this mighty task, taken on by everyone from Moses Maimonides, Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Adolf Hitler? None whatsoever; except I’ma writer, I’m a Jew, and I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life worrying about who doesn’t like me.

So, my fellow filthy Christ-killers, if you can stop counting your golden ingots and draining your neighbor’s kids of their blood long enough to actually read something, I hope you’ll join me. We may not win any hearts and minds, but in the words of the immortal G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

And after all, we’re supposed to be so smart.

The post The Protocols: An Introduction appeared first on Jewcy.