* “I got all angsty and neurotic and paranoid about what the goyim think about me, and I decided to stop annoying them,” said no Jew, ever. Nope, he got all angsty and neurotic and paranoid about the goyim, because they need to change.
* I think here in Israel we have only one country club and I don’t think we have any Arab members. Maybe that should change?
* There is a certain type of Jewish man who is “not handy”. I think they regard it as a point of pride that they are incapable of so much as hammering a nail. It confirms to themselves their identity as knowledge workers who don’t have to get their hands dirty and who can afford to pay others to do such menial work that is beneath their dignity as professionals. Maybe it also gets them out of having to do stuff around the house – they just tell their wives to call the plumber while they go golfing.
Also consider many Jews are germophobes like Trump. If you have ever snaked a drain (I have), what comes out of the far end of the snake is not very sanitary.
* Not being handy extends to automotive activities. My wife’s classmate was driving them to an event and got a flat tire. He laughed off the inability to change the tire and waved his cell phone to say he’d just call the auto club. What if he had been out of cell range? Who does not plan ahead, or learn basic life skills?
* Let’s say you were a plumber or a mechanic and urgently needed an explication of dialectical materialism. Would you read the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and A Short Course on the History of the CPSU, (J. Stalin, author) or would you just call up a Jewish intellectual to explain it to you?
* What has always puzzled me about “Great-Grandpa Sy’s story” is why, when he suffered the injustice of exclusion from a restricted club, he went out and started his own exclusive and restricted club.
Why didn’t Sy start a non-exclusive and unrestricted country club?
* I share Ned Resnikoff’s anxiety in reverse nowadays: I meet someone of my own class (if not Jewish then at least overeducated), I have an interest in his liking me, but as he makes doomsday comments about the coming era of Trump (a common form of icebreaking these days) I wonder if he has any inkling that inside I’m laughing.
* kike (n.)
derogatory slang for “a Jew,” by 1901, American English; early evidence supports the belief that it was used at first among German-American Jews in reference to newcomers from Eastern Europe, perhaps because the names of the latter ended in -ki or -ky.
“There is no charity organization of any kind here [a small city in Pennsylvania] and, what is sadder to relate, the Jews in this city will not form one; that is, if the present temper of the people can be used as a criterion. The German Jews are bitterly opposed to the “Kikes,” as they persist in calling the Russian Jews …. ”
[“Report of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States,” Cleveland, 1912]
* Steve’s link says his understanding is:
“Contrary to mythos, as far as I can tell:
First, as early as 1925, a higher percentage of Jews than gentiles may have belonged to country clubs.
Second, Jewish country clubs were, on average, more luxurious and expensive than gentile clubs.
Third, a 1962 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that Jewish country clubs were more discriminatory than Christian clubs.
Fourth, historically, Jewish applicants were mostly excluded for ethnic reasons by Jewish country clubs.”
About German Jews vs other Jews:
“Sports Illustrated reported in 1962:
In larger cities one sometimes finds two or more Jewish clubs, the top one composed principally of German Jews who tend to find eastern European Jews unacceptable.”
And:
“According to the Encyclopedia Judaica:
Since Jews were frozen out of local country clubs, they established the Hillcrest in 1883 for German Jews, and the Fairmont in 1920, for East European Jews.”
And:
“Stephen Birmingham writes:
But now, in nearly every American city of any size, there were at least two Jewish country clubs—the “good” one (German), and the less good (Russian). In New York, the best Jewish country club was the Germans’ Century Country Club in suburban White Plains [now Purchase]. The second-best was the Russians’ Sunningdale Golf Club in Scarsdale.
Birmingham observed in “Our Crowd”:
For years the Century was an almost exclusively German club, with an unwritten rule against “Orientals.”
The Century Country Club built its first golf course in 1908 (Sunningdale’s course opened in 1918), but didn’t begin to admit Russian Jews until after World War II. Birmingham notes in The Rest of Us:
Bastions of German-Jewish supremacy were falling on all sides by the 1940s. … At the Century Country Club, which considered itself not only the best Jewish club in New York but the best Jewish country club on earth, and where the anti-Russian bias had been all but written into the bylaws for generations, a few Russians were now being cautiously taken in as members, and one of the first of these, in 1948, was the Flatbush-born Dr. Herman Tarnower, the son of Russian immigrants.”
* The 1962 Sports Illustrated article on country clubs looked at Springfield, MA where there were four country clubs. The Jewish club was the most expensive and snazziest, the WASP club (with a few Catholics) was the most prestigious, the Irish Catholic club was a tier down, and the Italian, Polish, French Canadian club was a tier below that.
* 1/ So you now accept there were two types of country clubs, with at least one (German) Jewish and one waspy in each town. Which do you think Eastern Jews primarily aspired to join?
2/ Even assuming that they wanted to join the waspy club (probably after being rejected by the German Jewish one), how disingenuous it is to accuse WASPs of anti-Semitism when they were perfectly aware how Jewish clubs were even more exclusive? Do they think that while it’s perfectly normal for Jews to be super-exclusive (to the point of excluding even most fellow Jews), it’s abnormal for gentiles to be so? Of the super-exclusiveness of Jewish clubs is now totally forgotten, i.e. retconned out of existence, so that no cognitive dissonance will have to occur. (Not that most Jews would even understand the contradiction of calling exclusive waspy clubs anti-Semitic while finding super-exclusive German Jewish clubs perfectly normal.)
3/ Let me go out on a limb and without knowing much of US country club history propose that probably waspy country clubs excluded other non-WASPs like the Irish or Italians. (I’m not sure if there were many rich Catholic Hungarian gentiles at the time, but I guess they would not have been welcome either.) Calling a simple ethnic preference for their own (which, as we are well aware, was also characteristic of Jews) as anti-Semitic implies that Jews were somehow singled out. Surely that was not the case.
* Catholicism, over the course of the Middle Ages, came to been seen in many Northern European nations as pernicious foreign influence. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out why.
The key word here is foreign.
In England, especially, Catholics were viewed as fifth-columnists, traitors, etc. It didn’t help that some of the most staunchly Catholic nations were England’s traditional enemies (France, Spain, the Irish).
The Puritans were called “Puritans” by their opponents because they wanted to purge Popery from the CoE.
Connect the dots.
* Virtually all of us are obliged in the course of our day to day lives to deal with strangers – that is persons with whom we were are quite unfamiliar and with whom we were never raised, or at least, known for a long course of time so that we are familiar with their personalities, habits, character, characteristics, thought processes etc. As we all know, individuals differ markedly in all of these attributes – and with the ‘stranger’ we will never ever but know the experiences, nurturing or lack of it, traumas, imparted prejudices, customs, culture etc with which he was raised – despite all the best of intentions, and even if the individual is of a similar background and ethnicity to oneself.
The way that humans cope with this, especially in the way that today’s world throws disparate people together in the world of work, education etc, is by a common understood protocol of manners and etiquette, at least until individuals are able to ‘lower their guard’ somewhat by having an internalized understanding of each other.
But I’m afraid, once people start behaving like Resnikoff and start to fear strangers like one would fear a wild animal, the whole system breaks down, and interactions between the unfamiliar – think of all the good that has come from them, from Lennon and MacCartney upwards – simply become impossible due to the fear factor.
Then the ‘relationship’ becomes no better than that between a rabbit and a fox.
* In the South there were NO white hotels that would take colored. Blacks stayed in rooming houses in their end of town. It didn’t even occur to them that they could stay in white hotels.
The same legend exists for the park near the Bund in Shanghai (“NO DOGS OR CHINESE”) but in real life, there was a sign with maybe 10 different rules on it (you’ve seen these signs posted at park entrances) and maybe rule #3 was “the park is reserved for members of the foreign community” and #7 was “dogs are not permitted”. Outside of Nazi Germany, racism usually wore a “polite” face .
There’s also a legend that some hotel advertised “Always a view, never a Jew” but I’ve never seen proof of that either. It was usually done very discretely with a little “restricted” plaque in the ads (as you can see) and behind the check-in desk. Jews at the time knew what was going on and would take the hint – everyone knew what restricted meant. If a Jewish customer wandered in by mistake, they’d be told “I’m afraid there’s no room available for you Mr. Goldberg.
* Most of my Hungarian friends think that being opposed to immigration means I’m a literal Nazi who wants to gas six million Jews and mass murder anyone not having blue eyes and light hair. Also having a fetish for Nazi uniforms and doing the Roman salute several times a day.
* The “New World Order” became more apparent during Clinton and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was the first shot at Russia. During GHWB’s term it still looked as if a “friendship with Russia” was possible.
There is something about GHWB that makes me think that he actually did not want to go along with the Big Plan. He was not really eager to attack Iraq. Then he stopped and did not conquer whole of Iraq. He was sincere about peace dividends. He tried to curtail funding of Israel. So it should not be surprising that he was not reelected. Perrot role was similar to that of Teddy Roosevelt when Wilson run against the incumbent Taft. This is the reason Clinton won. GHWB knew he was not supposed to win. He showed impatience and irritation during debates (looked at his watch). GWB was upset that his father did no win and he knew exactly who was responsible for it. Seven years later Prince Bandar told GWB that he can outfox the people who did not like his father by pretending that he will go along with their plans but it was GWB who was outfoxed by them.
* Whatever his flaws, Bush I handled the meltdown of the Warsaw Pact/Soviet Union so well he made it look easy. So easy, he doesn’t get credit for the US part in making sure nothing went sideways.
I always thought the world beat the odds by getting through that era of history without a single nuke or other WMD going off anywhere. Things were totally out of control there, read about the Soviet bio-weapons program, in complete violation of treaty, for an example.
* Tradesmen in the San Fernando Valley are now frequently Israelis.
* Jews have a long and strong tradition of quickly forgetting their own sins (unless they should make it into a Jewish religious text, a practice I assume has been moribund for centuries), and a similar tradition of forgetting no one’s sins against them; why should they be any different on this issue?
I’m not sure anyone is saying that there was no White-on-Jew discrimination, or that all White-on-Jewish discrimination is retconned Jewish-on-Jewish discrimination. It seems to me that people are saying that Jews will have a strong tendency, the further they get from the actual events, to displace the blame for Jew-on-Jew discrimination from Jews, to Whites. And that a significant portion of what is “remembered” as White-on-Jewish discrimination, was actually Jewish-on-Jewish.
* Long ago I worked for a guy in his late 20s who told me, rather smugly, that all in all he considered himself a Marxist. I said, “Great! I’ve wanted to meet someone who could explain dialectical materialism and the labor theory of value.”
Unsurprisingly, he had no idea what I was talking about.
* “San Francisco provides an example of how some Jews can ignore reality. Polls taken by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation found that one-third of Jewish residents believed that a Jew could not be elected to Congress from San Francisco. The poll reported these results in 1985 at a time all three members of Congress from the city were Jewish as were two state senators, the mayor and a plurality of the city council.”
Seymour Lipset,
American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, 1990,
p. 156
* And then there’s the time that I was talking to a Jewish Democratic Party organizer….He told me that, prior to the 1960s, Jews could not hold office in the South, that the people there would never vote for a Jew….He was flabbergasted when I told him about Judah P Benjamin.
* I have noticed more than a few Jewish urban legends over the years…..For example, I’ve actually had colleagues (people with phds in English lit) tell me that Jews could not get into Harvard in the 1930s. They were quite shocked when I told them that that was simply untrue:
“Although many minority groups were negatively impacted by these policies, one of the groups affected was Jewish applicants, whose admission to some New England and New York City-area liberal arts universities fell significantly between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s.[12] For instance, the admission to Harvard University during that period fell from 27.6% to 17.1% and in Columbia University from 32.7% to 14.6%.”
* What a cocoon Mr Resnikoff lives in – despite making a living aggressively proposing policy for the entire country. He is so rarely in the company of a middle-aged, white southern gentleman that he feels the experience is worth sharing. Even though the white southerner is a “consummate professional” and “perfectly nice”, Resnikoff feels a sense of danger, insecurity and unpredictability that he expects never to be able to shake off.
If he had posted something like this about the visit of a black tradesman, he would not only lose his job, he would never work again in any role with public visibility.
Mr Resnikoff is not only racist and proudly so, he is privileged in ways that he cannot even imagine.
* It’s an article of faith among Irish-Americans that the Irish were mistreated horribly in 19th-century America. America, not England!
It’s certainly not hard to believe that many Irish people have been mistreated, in America and elsewhere. Every ‘people’ has met with mistreatment over the centuries.
Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neil both related personal memories of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in furtherance of their political objectives. Likewise the “No negroes, no dogs, no Irish” signs which never actually existed, but have been physically retconned into existence by purveyors of cutesie wall-hangings by which modern people of Irish descent can advertise their victim status.
Don’t believe me! But if you are interested, read Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429
“No Irish Need Apply”: A Myth of Victimization Richard Jensen
…there’s no quicker way to infuriate an ethnic partisan than to question his sacred remembrance of discrimination. Even if (or particularly if) said remembrance is actually hearsay upon hearsay. It’ll infuriate him because in modern America no status is remotely comparable to official victim status. It’s to be protected at all costs, because from it all good things come.
* What has always puzzled me about Jews’ supposed “leftism” is why, after all the injustice they claim to have endured, and all their advocating for leftism and anti-ethnocentrism in the diaspora, they went out and started their own right-wing ethno-state in Israel?
* Speaking of “Great Moments in Self-Awareness” here’s the NYT on the new “World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half of Global Population” meme.
Simply by divesting these eight men, we could double the wealth of half of humanity! What’s not to love?
Only four or five of them are of the Tribe, depending on how you’re counting.
* If you were an arriviste Russian-Jew in the 1920s, would you even try to join the WASP club?No, you would know that you would be turned down. So, you give the German-Jewish club a shot….and they turn you down…..and maybe you remember them snickering “mockie” as you leave….And then, via generational Telephone/Chinese Whispers, your great-grandchildren tell stories about how the WASPs wouldn’t let great-grandpa in…
* I think there is a general weariness towards ethnic grievances and complaining.
The more of obnoxious of these grievances are Jews complaining that their grandfathers couldn’t join a country club even though he was rich enough to pay all the dues. He had to build his own golf course from scratch, don’t ya know! I don’t resent successful people but I think they need to have some self-awareness.
So yes, colleges, golf courses, resorts, and luxury coops did discriminate against Jews. No its not OK. But USA got over its antisemitism. US Jews need to get over their grievances.
I attended a high school graduation last year. The valedictorian was Jewish. He congratulated himself of being valedictorian “as the great grandson of a Jewish immigrant.” Enough already.
* I’m one of those guys who uses the phone to unplug my drain, and I’m not Jewish. Overeducated and underskilled, I’d say. A Jewish friend from NYC used to use our house in semi rural MA for his summer place when we were away. I asked him to cut the lawn- he did, but told me the clippings kept falling out the side. I asked him if he’ emptied the bag periodically – he said no. I then asked him if he’d ever cut a lawn before- his reply was something like “Jews hire people like you to do that sort of thing”.
