Why does it feel like there are a disproportionate number of Jews in every form of societal insanity (as well as brilliance)?
Oy. Is this lady good for the Jews?
She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. The relationship that followed would lead to a criminal trial.
Anna didn’t want to keep her feelings secret. As far as she knew, neither did D.J. In recent weeks, their relationship had changed, and it wasn’t clear when or how to share the news. ‘‘It’s your call,’’ she said to him in the lead-up to a meeting with his mother and older brother. ‘‘It’s your family. It’s up to you.’’
When she arrived at the house on Memorial Day in 2011, Anna didn’t know what D.J. planned to do. His brother, Wesley, was working in the garden, so she went straight inside to speak with D.J. and his mother, P. They chatted for a while at the dining table about D.J.’s plans for school and for getting his own apartment. Then there was a lull in the conversation after Wesley came back in, and Anna took hold of D.J.’s hand. ‘‘We have something to tell you,’’ they announced at last. ‘‘We’re in love.’’
‘‘What do you mean, in love?’’ P. asked, the color draining from her face.
To Wesley, she looked pale and weak, like ‘‘Caesar when he found out that Brutus betrayed him.’’ He felt sick to his stomach. What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler…
Anna shared this interest in disabilities: As a high-school student, she studied Braille and learned the alphabet in sign language. But as a junior academic, she would apply the mandate of tikkun olam to a different focus — the fight for racial justice. Since getting her Ph.D. in 2000, she has become a prominent scholar in the field of Africana philosophy, has published widely on race and ethics and has served as the chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers — the first and only white scholar ever to have done so. ‘‘Our world is in shambles,’’ she wrote in ‘‘Ethics Along the Color Line.’’ ‘‘White supremacy is central to this state of affairs, and we cannot repair the world without ending it.’’
Her own family is mixed-race — she has two children with her ex-husband, Roger Stubblefield, a black tuba player and classical composer. For 11 years, she served on the faculty at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, whose student body is among the nation’s most diverse. Yet for all her work on behalf of African-Americans, she worried that she might be ambushed by the ‘‘habits of racism.’’ ‘‘Even in well-intentioned quests to be antiracist,’’ she wrote, ‘‘white people all too often invade or destroy the space of nonwhite people.’’ The same essay lays out what could be a thesis statement for her whole career: It is crucial, she wrote, for white philosophers ‘‘to wrestle with the horrors and conundrums of whiteness.’’
A Jewish friend says:
There is just so much wrong that is going on there. Like it is the ultimate distillation of what is wrong with our world.
A Thought Experiment: Suppose the Jews had collectively decided in the first Millennium that it sucked being a Jew, and that conversion to whichever was the dominant religion in the area was the way to go. Let us assume that the last identifiable Jewish community dies out by 1492. Would the world of today be a better place?
There would be no loss in the arts.
But in the sciences of the last 150 years there would have been a huge impact.
There still would have been a WW 1, since the Jews had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But still, it is hard to see how America would have ended up as sick as it now is without the Jewish do-gooders of 100 years ago through to the present. When a Jew leaves the Torah Corral horrible things happen.
This NYT Magazine story makes me want to vomit. Every element of it.
Chaim Amalek writes: “Here is the set-up for today: The Rapture occurs just as the Christian eschatologists say it will except ONLY the Jews are taken. So we end up with a world without Jews. First thing that happens is once they figure out what has happened, the arabs swarm over Israel. And then various arab armies invade to see who gets to control it.”
