<p>Hello,</p>
<p>Recently I have seen increasing number of Jewish comments at my school. The media isn’t helping either with the Harold and Kumar series. Remarks about the greediness and the wickness of Jews are rampant where I go to school.</p>
<p>Can anyone attempt to explain this phenomenon?</p>
<p>Surely you understand that this has been going on since Christian doctrine blamed Jews for the death of Christ. Jews were “expelled” from almost every European country in the Middle Ages. And on and on.</p>
<p>But Jesus was… Jewish.</p>
<p>Also, can we just focus on modern day America?</p>
<p>I can explain the phenomenon!</p>
<p>You have bad friends.</p>
<p>OK - I’ll take the bait. I’m not Jewish but grew up in a town that had a large percentage of Jews. These are my observations from growing up in this town and dealing with many who are Jewish. I’m sure some will argue that these are stereotypes:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Jewish people tend to value education a lot more than many other cultures. In the high school where I graduated, they were always at the top at graduation time. Perhaps since Jews have been discriminated against so much in the past and education is something that can never be taken away, they value it. I think a lot of people are also jealous of their success. Since they were different religiously, they were a convenient scapegoat such as during the Hitler era in Germany.</p></li>
<li><p>Some for whatever religious reasons (Christians) dicriminate against them because of a lot of false notions in regards to their role in Jesus’s death. Why they’re held accountable rather than the Romans is beyond me.</p></li>
<li><p>I have a theory that since most people are more familiar with Jews than a lot of other middle eastern cultures, their perceived “greediness” associated with business is looked at disfavorably when it is really just common sense accepted business practise in the middle east.</p></li>
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<p>I think this comes more from medieval Europe when Jews were often forbidden by law from owning land or enaging in many trades. So they commonly turned to one the few things open to them: money lending. So from that they become associated with odious concepts like usery and other sharp business practices. You see this negative stereotype expressed in the form of Shakespeare’s Shylock.</p>
<p>…we don’t?</p>
<p>I absolutely love Jewish people…I just happen to love borderline anti-semitic jokes just as much. Of course my idea of a ‘borderline anti-semitic joke’ involves bagels and Hanukkah bushes instead of greed and wickedness…</p>
<p>We encourage and reward diversity on our college campuses, yet it rarely occurs. On the campus I teach, there is a fair amount of diversity. Yet, all I see is Asians hanging w/ Asians, African Americans hanging w/ African Americans, Whites w/ whites, etc.</p>
<p>So what if we integrate campuses and segregation still occurs. How do we truly integrate???</p>
<p>It’s my friend Becky’s fault. She’s Jewish, and she’s one of the most fabulous people I know, and she would always walk up to us at the lunch table in high school and say, “Can I sit here with you guys?” and we’d roll our eyes, because she was one of our best friends and she can sit with us whenever she darned well pleases, and we’d say, “Noooo, you can’t,” all sarcastically, and she’d say, “It’s because I’m Jewish, isn’t it?” so we would naturally say yes, it’s because you’re a silly, silly Jew. She would egg us on and make a comment about her silly Jewish nose and we’d respond that it was really because she used too much Yiddish and she’d say that we were all meshugga little shiksas and we’d get on with our day. And then she’d invite us over for Passover Seder and we’d nearly rupture ourselves engorging on brisket and potatoes and all the rest of her incredible cooking, because Becky is an amazing chef. Becky also played college hockey-- she is just that cool.</p>
<p>So. If I expand that truth to be universal, people just hate Jews because my friend Becky is awesome and they’re just jealous. My other Jewish friends are also awesome, so maybe people have run into them, too.</p>
<p>(I really don’t perceive that people hate Jews… But then again, I’m not Jewish, so I wouldn’t perceive that, I guess…)</p>
<p>And I guess my point was jews still hangout with jews.</p>
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<p>Huh?</p>
<p>Where? At what colleges?</p>
<p>I know there’s a lot of self-segregation on college campuses, but at the colleges I am most familiar with, this doesn’t seem to apply to the Jewish students. They don’t self-segregate in the way that many Asian and black students do. And this isn’t just true now – it was true when I went to college back in the 1970s. </p>
<p>But perhaps the colleges I am familiar with are atypical. They have large Jewish populations. Being Jewish at these schools doesn’t mean being “different”; it means being mainstream. Things may be different on campuses where Jewish students are rare.</p>
<p>I have never understood the hatred of Jews. So many of the stereotypes of Jews are actually good qualities for people to have. Hardworking, thrifty, family oriented, valuing eduction are some of the qualities everyone should have. So why pick on the Jews? I don’t get it.</p>
<p>And if the Jews killed Christ, those Jews are long dead. There is no reason to blame today’s Jews for killing Christ.</p>
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I agree wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>Envious of the success?</p>
<p>To give a serious answer, you have to begin with the New Testament and then what happened in the early centuries of Christianity. Much of the vituperative hate seems to have grown out of a couple of threads within Christianity. One was purification, meaning the distancing from Jewish practice and beliefs, and an excellent example is John Chrysostum, who preached the destruction of Jewish books of learning, etc. (I find it somewhat amazing that a man who preached abject hatred is still revered - and there’s a church to his name near me.) </p>
<p>Another thread in Christianity is that as the Church intertwined with the Imperial state - and the imagery became Imperial - the force of doctrine became imbued with the same ruthless power that had formerly been used against Christians by Rome. An empire doesn’t tolerate dissent well and the Empire became dramatically Christian and switched from persecuted to persecutor. Think of the context; it’s estimated that over 10% of the ancient Empire was Jewish, with almost all of those people concentrated in the cities of the East (and in Rome itself). There was an Imperial need to encourage conversion and to persecute the Jews and this was made manifest to Imperial authorities by the Jews refusal to surrender completely to their power in the ancient land of Israel. </p>
<p>To skip ahead, Christians prohibited lending at interest but allowed Jews to lend at interest so Jews became moneylenders. No one likes bankers much. Note that even in The Merchant of Venice, Antonio borrows from Shylock only because the Christian lenders refuse him. The concept of a “pound of flesh” is a version of the so-called “blood libel,” which is a weird distortion of Christian belief about the transformation of wine into Christ’s blood into a completely made up idea that Jews need Christian blood to make matzah for Passover. The idea conflates the 10th plague of the Passover with Christian communion to make something no Jew has ever recognized. (Matza, btw, is explicitly required to be only water and flour.) </p>
<p>Christians placed themselves under a number of what now seem silly restrictions. You can read all sorts of laws that prevented Christians from using numbers in transactions, meaning they had to do bookkeeping in longhand, writing out the numbers. Christians lost the accounting knowledge developed in Rome, but Jews kept it and so they were accused of having secret knowledge and of manipulating figures.</p>
<p>In modern times, a major issue has been what’s commonly called assimilation. Until Napoleon, Jews were mostly locked in streets at night - in German, the ghetto - and it wasn’t until Napoleon that they were allowed to be citizens anywhere. Over time, Jews became Germans, Danes, French - not Poles, btw, never Poles and never Russians. One need only read Wagner’s incoherent ravings to understand the problem of people worried about ethnic purity. Wagner merely took it to a mythic level, one that the Nazi’s then used; in his imagining, Jesus did not need to appear to the pure Aryan race because they were pure but then were polluted … and guess what is a symptom of pollution? It’s always been a rather strange thing that defensiveness over not receiving the original message of The Christ must be transformed into a story that not only explains why but then blames The Christ’s own people.</p>
<p>Finally, I’m going to address a bit that’s more controversial. The “problem” is that Jews are extremely successful beyond their numbers. About 20% of all Nobels have been won by Jews - and in some fields like Chemistry, it’s a third. The same is true of most prizes and Jews are again highly successful beyond their numbers in a wide variety of creative fields - as well as in finance. What are the possible explanations? The sick and deluded take the insane view and go with an international Jewish conspiracy. Besides being stupid, imagining a conspiracy doesn’t explain why Jews are so creative. A conspiracy doesn’t explain the many Jewish physicists like Oppenheimer or Teller because a conspiracy can’t come up with new science. </p>
<p>A second group takes the nearly as illogical position that heredity is the difference. There has been a small bit of research that traces mitochondrial DNA in male Jews and which thus purports to show some form of continuity. How that translates into intelligence is a huge leap wholly unjustified by anything. I don’t really need to talk about this idea because it’s not a favorite of Jew haters.</p>
<p>Totally agree with you, razorsharp. I don’t get it either.
What I admire the most about Jews that they stick together. In today’s paper, I saw an article that Sergei Brin, one of the Google’s founders, gave $1M to the Jewish foundation that heped his family escape to the US when he was 6. Good job, Sergei. Keep it up.</p>
<p>Is being clannish an admirable quality?</p>
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<p>True or not true, provable or not provable, I don’t think this can be called “illogical”. It is plausible that a mostly group within which intellectual success is highly rewarded can gradually become, on average, more and more intelligent. For example, unintelligent Jews (in Medieval Europe) may have been (much?) more likely to abandon the the Jewish community (assimilate) than the more intelligent.</p>
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<p>Something similar explains a lot of the resentment of Asians that you sometimes see in the United States and on this board. And I don’t think you need complicated explanations for the success of either group. In general, most Asian groups, like Jews, value education. This gives the potential high intellectual achievers an opportunity to discover their talents and be successful with them. There are probably just as many potential high achievers in every other ethnic group, but if nobody fosters their talents, they may never achieve what they could have. In groups of people where kids are ostracized for doing well in school, the kid who might have been an extraordinarily productive scientist may never even go to college.</p>
<p>“Recently I have seen increasing number of Jewish comments at my school”…key word RECENTLY…</p>
<p>caveat: I am Jewish, so I am not accusing anyone of anything, but even here in the Jewish community, the issue RECENTLY seems to be…</p>
<p>Bernie Madoff scandal…</p>
<p>there have been a number of CC threads over the years which go into detail about the history of antisemitism…I actually teach that topic in my Genocide and Holocaust class…</p>
<p>but the recently aspect is Madoff driven IMO</p>