* Jews are the most intellectually aggressive people in this earth, the big two religions (Christianity and Islam) are influenced by Judaism but with less tribalism and more universalism. Jews can also do universalism, Marxism has conquered the World, most political movements that gained traction worldwide have been created and promoted by jews.
* I paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on Monday. During the course of my 3+ hour visit I made some observations of visitor demographics that may be of interest.
It was a surprisingly young crowd, I would estimate the average age in the 25 to 30 range. Who says young people don’t appreciate culture?
As for race, my best guess is 60% white, 35% East Asian, 5% everything else. I’m counting as white some Spanish speaking people of fully European appearance. There were very few visible Hispanics and surprisingly few South Asians. The typical black visitor was a young lady in her teens or early 20′s in a group with a few white girls her age, though I also saw a few older black women by themselves. I saw some Orthodox Jewish men, identified by their yamulkes. No Hasidim, though they probably would be forbidden to view sometimes improper images (though there were a few headscarf wearing Muslim women, whom one would think would be under similar restrictions).
While there were many couples and some families (the MoMA isn’t really a place for children), among singles and people in groups of friends I would say that females outnumbered males by at least 5 to 1.
Almost all of the guards in the galleries were black men. That surprised me a bit, surely people of all races would want what’s probably a decent paying and reasonably prestigious job. It then occurred to me that perhaps management thinks that black men have a more intimidating appearance, with their mere presence discouraging visitors from trying to touch the artworks. Sort of the same concept as when nightclubs hire black bouncers. Though I noted with some amusement that the skinniest, nerdiest guard in the whole place was watching over its most famous work, Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
* I recall that you once mentioned that German Jews kept Russian Jews out of their country clubs. So modern Jews have retconned history to make it seem like Russian Jews were actually excluded from country clubs by WASPs. That had the benefit of smoothing over intragroup Jewish conflict while also maintaining Jewish solidarity against the “anti-semitic” WASP bogeyman.
* Two separate issues are being conflated. There was harassment of the small number of liberal Jewish kids by other schoolchildren and there is also resistance amongst the broader community (both Jewish and Other) to developments proposed by the Satmar. The existence of the Hasidic community at Kiras J seems to have increased tensions and its possible that the Jewish children in various Pine Bush schools bore the brunt of this. It is also possible that someone in the Satmar community fed the story to the NYT thinking it would pressure the town into treating its own claims more favorably.
* Within modern-era Jewish literature/plays/TV there is a well-mined fissure of grating & chafing in matters of divergent customs/tastes between the shtetl people and the pedigreed Mitteleuropa types (though usually from the down-punching perspective of the latter): food, clothes, manners– all the status-nitpicking staples. If they don’t seem to spend much time explaining the bit to gentiles, it’s probably less to do with “retconning” than the question of why anyone not part of such supersubtle intramural rubes-toffs rivalry would be expected to understand or care. Identifying the common outgroup enemy, by contrast, requires no such explication. At any rate the cultural narcissism of small differences runs both ways. Take Amory Blaine’s ridiculous list of Yale/Princeton distinctions in “This Side of Paradise,” over which no one not from that circle would be partisan or even have an opinion. I bet there’s some Chinese teen in San Gabriel scrutinizing it like Confucian dialectics though.
* I’m told by a Jewish resident of the neighborhood that Lamm’s buldings were built in blatant violation of the building codes, and that the Hasidim targeted Bloomingburg because it had a small, easily overwhelmed voting base and its municipal organization didn’t give it the means to fight off the tactics of Lamm and the Hasidim.
* Various kinds of Jews squabble with each other all the time, but they are very good at closing ranks and uniting over blaming outsiders before the poor dumb outsiders notice the quite good reasons for the internal divisions.
