When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE (PT. 1)
Erich Kahler recalls and incident involving a fellow Jew (poet Richard Beer-
Hofmann) in Berlin:
“His face was wrapped in a woolen scarf [against the cold] so that only
his eyes could be seen. An old orthodox Jew in his caftan came down the
stairs and stopped him. ‘The gentleman is one of us (Der Herr ist einer
von uns),’ he said to Beer-Hofmann, ‘he will tell me how I can get to the
Nollendorfplatz.’ The eyes alone were enough to reveal a Jew to a Jew.”
[KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 6]
Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel notes the following
in his autobiography:
“The best reporters and editors normally have no race, sex, or religion.
They may charm or muscle their way into strange places, but they
try not to THINK male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there always
comes a time for exceptions. I remember reliving the shudders of refugee
life at the sight of Hungarians trudging across a frozen frontier
swamp. I never totally banished that twinge of smug American security
when interviewing high-ranking Germans. And there’s no denying the
conspiratorial bond that suddenly appeared when an old man on a park
bench in Kiev whispered, Bist ah yid? Are you a Jew? was a question often
put to me, and with decidedly different inflections. In Communist
countries, it came from Jews who meant thereby to ask whether they
could trust me with seditious conversation. In Israel, it was asked to discover
whether I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish state ahead of
my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials at the Times,
the question was usually hurled with contempt; I was obviously a Jew,
but in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy one for daring to criticize the
Israeli government. So whenever I turned to the subject of Israel, there
was no escaping my skin.” [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 397]
“Jewish civilization should have vanished a long time ago,” says Henry Feingold,
“that it did not and does not may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism. It
may well be that Judaism is governed by different rules … Jews are a subgroup
in this dynamic society; but they are also more Jewish, as measured by the concern
for Jewish people throughout the world.” [FEINGOLD, p. 52] “90% [of
American Jews] claim to feel ‘very close’ or ‘fairly close’ to other Jews,” noted
Alan Zuckerman in 1991, “ … Even when they select non-Jews [as spouses and
friends], most Jews have strong ties which pull them back to the Jewish community.”
[ZUCKERMAN, p. 27]
In 1993 Joel Kotkin noted that “an estimated 50 per cent or more of American
Jews send their children to an ethnic school, and over three-quarters of
young men undergo the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast, counterpart
systems promoting specifically Italian or German language, culture, and
history largely have disappeared in most major countries of immigration. Even
among inter-married couples … a large majority claim that most of their
friends were Jews.” [KOTKIN, p. 35] In 1988 eight of ten American Jews still
participated in some sort of yearly Passover ritual. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN,
748