New York Post:
Obama may get rejected from golf club over Israel policies
By Daniel Halper January 10, 2017 | 9:49pm
President Obama’s clashes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may cost him a membership at an exclusive golf club, sources said.
Obama is looking to join the elite Woodmont Country Club in Maryland once he becomes a private citizen.
But members of the mostly Jewish club are at each other’s throats over whether to accept the golf-loving president, with many saying he deserves to be snubbed for not blocking an anti-Israel vote at the United Nations, according to the sources. …
“In light of the votes at the UN and the Kerry speech and everything else, there’s this major uproar with having him part of the club, and a significant portion of the club has opposed offering him membership,” a source told The Post.
Steve Sailer writes: “Or perhaps Jews enjoyed the company of their fellow Jews and wished to facilitate their young marrying each other by providing a romantic country estate for socializing?”
“Jackie Robinson tried to create a black country club in the New York suburbs around c. 1960, but it didn’t happen. It seems like a constructive solution.
Big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles often have a municipal golf course that’s de facto recognized as the black course. Golf tends to bring out the territorial urge in groups of people.
The daily fee course on Martha’s Vineyard where Obama plays every August is perhaps the blackest upscale (although not private) course in the country. It’s near the Talented Tenth colony on the island.”
“One privilege in belonging to a country club is that you don’t have to schedule your time to play golf. You just show up when you feel like it and they match you up with a few other members into a foursome and off you go.
Of course, that requires the number of members be kept way below capacity. I don’t know about other states, but California has a law privileging golf courses so their property taxes don’t get raised to the “highest and best use” of the land. Thus, for example, L.A. Country Club on Wilshire Blvd. between Beverly Hills and Westwood (probably the most valuable real estate in the country devoted to golf), has a modest property tax bill so the members don’t need to admit more members.”
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* Was way too young when I first saw Caddyshack & the Rodney Dangerfield character to have any clue to its origins in real life (or in the fertile imagination of the screenplay author & director). Now that you point this out, it is quite funny. Just another instance of tacky nouveau riche/declasse types giving the genteel old guard the cringes. Or intra-ethnic status jockeying.
* Caddyshack was a romanticized replay of Brian Doyle Murray’s years as a caddy at Indian Hill Golf Club in Winnetka Illinois. While many courses keep a low profile, Indian Hill and Onwentsia are the only clubs in Chicagoland that actively deny their own existence. Most characters in Caddyshack were based on real people.
* Jews have *always* tried to associate with the broader community they were in. They’ve never had any policies or practices to keep to themselves, but have always been champions of integration. If you don’t know that just ask them!
* ‘Red Oaks’ is a series about a Jewish c.c., which is a concept that nobody who doesn’t read iSteve has ever even thought about for one second. The creatives are stealing from you now, Steve. There’s more emphasis on tennis, played by shifty inside-trader guy from Mad About You.
* Obama, as the affirmative action black, has always just been given top honors for showing up. He probably had very little shock at receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, because he just figured his own election was the capstone of humanity. Remember this guy was given the presidency of the Harvard Law Review when it was already promised to a student who’d gotten the requisite best grades–just because Obama was black and the black students made a fuss. (and then promptly became the first Law Review president in history not to write the requisite Student Note, because he was too lazy).
But Obama likes awards; like most blacks, he associates the award with actual accomplishment. He expects to be given membership at any club he applies to, and have it happen right away, no waiting.
* In St. Louis there are two Jewish clubs. Westwood (old money German Jews) and Meadowbrook (Russian/Polish Jews). Of course Meadowbrook was founded because German Jews looked down on the Russian/Polish/Al Cvervik Jews. I would bet that there has never been a black or gentile member at Westwood, but Meadowbrook has been trying to go mainstream recently.
Funny that these oppressed people start one or two country clubs in just about every major American city.
* I read that the gentile country clubs admitted Jews before the large immigration of eastern Jews. The German Jews got caught in that so they started their own clubs. It makes sense that most actual rejection stories would be eastern Jews from German Jew clubs because any Jew back then would have known not to apply to the gentile club.
When I was a kid my uncle told me his rationalization for the local Jewish country club rejecting Michael Jordan of all people. The only thing I learned that day was that Jews were a lot more racist than we tell ourselves.
* When Michael Jordan was playing for the Bulls he applied for membership at three Jewish country clubs and was denied at each one.
* The old German-Jewish families of the late nineteenth and early 20th Century, collectively referred to in New York as “Our Crowd,” were highly assimilated and extremely patriotic. They had no trouble gaining entry into IV League colleges and WASP dominated country clubs. However, because of their level of assimilation, they risked losing their Jewishness, ideally preserved through marriage and family life. Example: Robert Moses, the Master Builder of NYC. He was born to wealthy Jewish parents, raised in a secular Jewish home, attended Yale, and started off as a liberal progressive reformer, eventually switching to urban planning and setting up public benefit corporations in NYC that left a monumental legacy in the city. But he ended up marrying an Episcopalian and converting to Christianity. After that, he became virulently hated by the Jewish Left, notably dominated by non-”Our Crowd” Jews. Based on my one data point, I believe Steve that the Our Crowd Jews may have established country clubs like Woodmont to prevent defection of their highest achievers to the Christian gentile masses, with whom they comfortably mingled — perhaps too comfortably.
* I’m Jewish and see nothing wrong with non-Jews preferring, for whatever the reason, to exclude Jews from their country clubs, and with doing just that.
Jews have no sort of right to the company of others–or even to just their good will; and any law saying otherwise is an infringement, blatant and outrageous, on the inalienable right to freedom of association.
Same goes for any other people, including the Blacks.
* You know, it takes a hell of a lot of gall for a jew to complain about exclusion and exclusivity, when jewishness itself–from the Torah to contemporary practices–had been all about exclusion and exclusivity.
As if jews in 1913–and now–don’t exclude Gentiles from their own social circles and to boot hold racist views about intermarriage. Give us a break.
Everyone (even the WASPS)
Why should we blame Anglo-Saxons for being somewhat circumspect about people who use racial slurs against them?
Suddenly people got interested in whether their ancestors had come on the Mayflower or fought in the revolution.
As if jews don’t obsess over their alleged ancestors. Pick the holiday.
WASP clubs excluded Jews (and not only Jews but Catholics and the “wrong sort” of Protestants, etc.) AND German Jewish clubs excluded Russian Jews, etc.
And jews exclude Gentiles from their identity group and social circles. The issue here is and has been for centuries that jews seek all the privileges of membership in groups while refusing to become full members of such groups and bear the concomitant burdens of membership.
The whole POINT of having a club was excluding as many people as possible (any 4th grader could tell you that).
That is the whole point of Judaism, actually. It is perhaps one of the most sophisticated systems of social exclusion ever devised. You have a lot of gall, my friend.
* Jews ain’t blacks. They’re not fighting to sit at lunch counters. They started with “Let me into Harvard or else!” and have only set their sights higher since.
* People should go back and watch “Gentleman’s Agreement” or even the relatively recent (1994) “Quiz Show”: German Jews were assimilated and were not particularly noticed for being Jewish, Eastern Jews (from Russian Empire/Poland) were stereotyped as loud, obnoxious, and whiny. I think that was the root of the exclusion policies, I don’t think it had much of anything to do with religious confession.
Same thing applied to other groups, Irish, Italians, in other degrees. If you weren’t “with it” (sedate, calm, patrician as per WASP, Dutch and assimilated German stereotypes) people didn’t want you around. And, BTW, the same perception applies to blacks, not only here, but in Asia as well, to this day. Again, in all of these cases the minorities were excluded and looked down upon because they were considered loud, (often drunk), predisposed to violent outbursts, lacking gentility, etc. And BTW it’s a common (or was) source of friction among Jews, as well, Eastern Jews considered “Yekes” (German Jews) stuck up and ridiculously tight, while German Jews considered Eastern Jews to be loud and obnoxious trouble makers. (Compare the two leads in “The Odd Couple” and/or “The In Laws” (1979) to get a sense of the stereotypes, or even the lead in “A Serious Man” versus the guy who takes his wife.)
Bottom line, the US is generally a relaxed and quiet culture and the demonstrativeness of other cultures rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
There may be some undercurrent of anti-Semitism about how “Jews run everything /Jews want to turn America into something more advantageous to themselves, etc.” type beliefs out there, historically, and now, but I don’t think they’ve ever been particularly prominent, and as for Deicide/Blood Libel stuff, hardly at all. And I don’t think either of those had anything to do with the exclusionary rules in country clubs.
* Cf James Michener’s Caravans. The narrator, a German Jewish foreign service guy named Mark Miller, notes that he got his job because, post-WW2, the State Department was under pressure to start hiring more Jews. So, to avoid having “socially unacceptable” Jews thrust upon them, they went out looking for “socially acceptable,” clubbable Jews like himself.
* There is a sort of an alt-right mythology that discrimination in America (if it ever even existed at all and is not 100% retconned) belongs to a dim distant past beyond all living memory so that whoever brings it up is just picking at old scabs that should have been healed over by now.
* Judaism is one of the most sophisticated systems of social discrimination ever devised. Why don’t you focus on dismantling that?
* What I heard from a member of a country club that turned down Michael Jordan around 1990 was that he was welcome to play there anytime — just show up and he’d be put into a foursome with members. But the members weren’t crazy about the idea of Jordan as a member being able to invite his own friends, who tended to be professional gambler lowlifes and the like.
Michael Jordan eventually joined a brand new club in the Chicago suburbs where anybody with money could join.
By the way, speaking about body guards and security, Michael Jordan employs his old teammate Charles Oakley, a 6’10″ power forward, as his traveling companion, card-playing partner, and bodyguard, just in case some drunk wants to boast that he punched Michael Jordan. No drunk wants to recount that he got whaled on by Charles Oakley before he could even land a finger on Jordan.
* I was just reading Philip Roth’s Indignation, wherein the main character is a studious, standoffish, Jewish kid at a mostly white liberal arts college in 1950s Ohio. He spends a lot of time resenting the frat boys he has to serve at his job at a local watering hole. He’s asked to join the Jewish fraternity by an alpha male type he later learns has ties to his family back in New Jersey. He resents that. He resents a lot of things.
He is also asked to pledge at a fraternity full of socially marginal figures, which he turns down. He’d rather be alone. The book is mostly about sex, as it turns out. (Big surprise.) But the Jewish fraternity resentment, much like country club resentment, is thick.
No one treats him harshly for his Otherness, as I recall, only his personality. In the hands of another author I can imagine he’d like the jockiest, blondest, WASPyish Big Man on Campus to personally ask him to join his frat just so he could turn him down. But here I get the honest feeling he just wants not to be bothered.
Still, there is the particular way in which he’s bothered that speaks to his limitations as racially resentful.
* There is not really that much of a market for Jewish self-awareness. It’s not as if a novelist as talented as Roth is incapable of it, but there’s simply little demand these days for Roth to go very deep into these kind of patterns.
* I once read a book about the Freud’s psychoanalysis mythology as being partly cooked up because of his anxiety in mixed company over embarrassing, crude, unassimilated Jews. Which was sort of a Vienna vs. Russian countryside thing. In the author’s formulation, id = yid, and the idea was that Freud tried to convince gentlemanly gentiles that within each of them is an embarrassing village Jew waiting to get out. So who are they to judge?
Which sounds ridiculous, though the book as I recall was better than I’m describing. The main point was that Freud definitely looked down on his co-ethnics.
* They’re private clubs for a reason. You don’t like the idea–don’t join. Last I checked the first amendment right to assembly is understood to mean a right to association with whom one chooses. They’re social membership clubs, after all. The Harvard Club wouldn’t accept me as a member–why is their private right of association (exclusion, discrimination) any different than any other private club?
