[Jewish intellectuals] are good at coming up with intellectual rationalizations for adolescent emotions.
Jewish insecurity dropped sharply after the Six Days War of June 1967. There is a variety of evidence suggesting that the Six Days War was the turning point in launching the subsequent propaganda War on WASPs. (My piece of “The Graduate” of 1967 lays out some circumstantial evidence.)
Instead, Jewish security and accomplishment, as symbolized by victory the Six Days War, unleashed a lot of feelings of ethnic superiority that had been bottled up through 1966. What Gould and Co. did in the 1970s was like a highbrow version of a victory riot by sports fans.
Neoconservatism didn’t really exist until after the Six Days War. Norman Podhoretz goes 300 pages in his 1960s memoir without mentioning Israel until Israel wins the war, when suddenly he becomes a huge fan.
But hatin’ on old WASP scientists was something that could bring together ideologically conflicting elements of the Jewish community. Lewontin was pretty much of a Communist and Gould was generally some kind of socialist, but being mad at old WASP scientists over the 1924 immigration cutoff appealed to neoconservatives too.
The Jewish community is adept at papering over their divisions by finding some non-Jewish bad guy for everybody to get mad at. For example, the rise of feminism in the 1960s had a lot to do with the increase in Jewish guys divorcing their first wives and marrying shiksas. But rather than take a stand on what was really bugging them, it was quickly turned into a war on men in general, with no particular Jewish aspect to the bad guys (although Norman Mailer kept volunteering for the role).
* I can’t imagine that any gentile, even the supremely gifted Updike, could get away today with writing three Bech novels poking gentle fun at a Jewish writer.
* Chabon did about as much as humanly possible with the idea of superheroes as a solely cultural (or maybe genetic) inheritance of the Jews. Kavalier & Clay is an impressive work.
But the idea of The Golem as awesome is awfully lame.
