I’m trying to expand some thoughts I expressed in the comments of this old entry. I watch a fair amount of romantic comedies (I wouldn’t be surprised if I watch more than any of my co-utilitarians), especially the male-aimed kind (of the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow schools) but also the female-aimed kind. A trend that has proliferated in the last several years is what some have termed “the slacker-striver romance,” where the slacker is always the man and the striver is the woman (I don’t know any LGBT instances of this trend, but I’d be fascinated to hear about them). It ranges from ridiculous male-wish-fulfillment (Knocked Up) to preposterous female-wish-fulfillment (in Failure to Launch, the guy lives with his parents, yes, but also just happens to be a wealthy yacht salesman played by Matthew McConaughey). You could even see WALL-E as a version of this (they both have important jobs that they are good at, but which has to learn to loosen up and have fun? Which is more human?).
I guess part of this comes from a real-life North American phenomenon of extended adolescence, but I think the trend’s biggest cultural precursor are nebbish-vindication stories, which many people trace back to Woody Allen. The geeky introvert, with embarrassingly big ethnic features, usually smarter than everyone around him but appreciated by no one, lusts after the perfect, successful, well-adjusted beautiful WASP. He gets her in the end, even though they have nothing in common, usually because he is a “nice guy,” unlike her brutish handsome WASP boyfriend (how exactly he is “nice” can be little more than notional… sometimes being nebbishy is enough to establish him as the one who should win, and he doesn’t ever have to do anything altruistic). In stories where he doesn’t get the girl, she is a symbol of everything that is bad and shallow about the world which constantly dumps on the poor nebbish.
This can be dismissed as obvious wish-fulfillment/power fantasy stuff, but it’s so pervasive that I can’t help but feel it influences real-world human relations in a significant way. I was exposed to probably more than my fair share of it, growing up consuming especially geeky culture (comic books, science fiction), and thinking that if I grew up pretty, I would be some downtrodden nerd’s salvation. Never, of course, that some otherworldly hunk was gonna reward my introversion and self-pity. I got started small, on Charlie Brown and Opus the penguin, and all the cruel, cruel hot girls who apparently had other interests beside them. I knew that if I only went for guys I found attractive, I was shallow and blind (whereas, if a guy only goes for hot chicks, well, that’s just evolution, don’t you know).
The counter-parable that’s been most in my head, as I think about this, is, ironically (and as also noted by Jon Hastings) another Judd Apatow joint. Freaks and Geeks was a one-season mid-nineties (I think. I just watched the season all at once this summer) show about a sister and brother and their respective circles of friends. Their high school experiences (she’s in grade eleven, I think, he’s in grade nine or maybe even eight) are parallel storylines in most episodes. At different times over the course of the season, they each enact nebbish-vindication narratives, but the show stays with each story long enough to see it fall apart. The sister gives in to peer pressure and dates the sweet loser in her circle of friends even though she’s not attracted to him. She ends up dumping him painfully a couple of episodes after, because she’s still not attracted to him, she’s a lot more intelligent than he is, and you know, he’s kind of a loser. He’s hurt badly, she feels guilty, and they unsuccessfully try to stay friends for the rest of the show.
The little brother is an ideal sympathetic nebbish: he is smart, studious, a big sci-fi geek, and actually sensitive and courteous to others. He of course lusts after the head cheerleader, she of course dates brutish jocks and thinks of him as just a friend, and we presumably are supposed to be rooting for her to notice the great guy right in front of her eyes. The unrequited bit carries on for most of the season, until she sees the light about three episodes before the end. Then it quickly goes south because, duh, they have nothing in common. It’s great.
You can see a couple of the seeds of the squickier Judd Apatow tropes in the show, like about how dating girls is totally less fun than hanging out with your buds. But like a lot of other people who half-like Apatow stuff, I’m still waiting for the best parts of Freaks and Geeks to show up in his movies.
I keep trying to think of a sequence where it’s done in reverse — i.e., nerdy girl gets gorgeous guy. What about 16 candles? Molly Ringwald was cute, but a little dorky, and the guy she got was definitely supposed to be hotter and older. Of course, there was also a nerdy-guy-gets-the-girl thing, but at least the guy in that situation was funny and thoughtful and even fairly cute (I mean, certainly compared to Jim Carrey.)
i can’t think of any, although in john hughes’ some kind of wonderful the butchy girl gets the probably-was-supposed-to-be-gorgeous guy (i can’t picture him. i was much more interested in the butchy girl throughout the movie).
the only homely-girl-gets-the-guy movie i can think of is circle of friends, which is at least ten years old & maybe not mainstream. & the "homely" girl was minnie driver with an extra fifty pounds, meaning she barely tipped overweight on the bmi scale.
I haven’t seen this one, but based on what I know of the premise, it might fit: The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Jeneane Garofalo is the nebbishy girl who falls in love with the guy, but she passes herself off as her prettier friend Uma Thurman, yada yada yada. It might work out differently in the actual movie though.
But all these homely girls are so fine. This is a problem with casting.
There are those Planter's peanuts commercials, but I'm sure even she has a great headshot.
Differently, I was trying to think back to other sources of the nebbish vindication story. Without getting ridiculous, I can't think of anything pre-60s. But Crumb keeps coming to mind– the resentment of/obsession with women, even the self-caricature (strange, considering some of the racist caricatures Crumb indulges)– as a parallel to Allen. Are there others?
(Back to movies, there's Jerry Lewis. Excellent filmmaker now hard to watch, but all film's manchildren are Lewis', Sandler & Carrey especially. The Disorderly Orderly makes me cringe, but for how TV's King of the Hill makes me cringe: it's too true.)
Happy New Year to all!
Nerdy and/or homely girl gets handsome guy. Yes, the pickings are slim:
The Truth About Cats and Dogs: Male ingenue has to pass over Uma Thurman for Janeane Garafalo.
She’s All That: Girl who wears glasses and ties her hair back gets prom king. Notion that the girl qualified as unattractive was mocked in Not Another Teen Movie.
Some Kind of Wonderful: Mary Stuart Masterson (the butch girl Miriam mentions) gets Eric Stoltz, one of the prettiest and best actors we have.
Nothing to compare with the Woody Allen/Seth Rogen dynamic. I would point out, though, that Woody Allen was not presented as a nice guy, that Seth Rogen does have charisma and panache (you may disagree, but the guy sold a lot of tickets), and that in real life I have seen a lot of couples where the guy was distinctly better looking than the girl, plus a few where the girl was hot or cute and the guy was fat but with a lot of personality, either Seth-Rogen style or in ways that were more palatable.
In other words, the love-for-a-nebbish theme may be doing fine in entertainment but hasn’t had much effect on hot girls’ behavior.
yeah, i haven’t seen the truth about cats & dogs either, but i remember it was supposed to be a retelling of cyrano.
tom, you're right about woody allen never being that nice. philip roth's protagonist in "portnoy's complaint" (another formative text in nebbish-gets-beautiful (but dumb)-wasp mythology) wasn't very nice either. i have a hard time remembering what *was* supposed to be in it for the women in those relationships.
i would argue that when you see schlubs with hot girls in real life, it *can* partially be explained by nebbish vindication mythology influencing people's (hot girls') thinking.
& if there's mutual attraction, it's all to the good. but maybe we need cultural myths to tell more guys to notice the homely girls.
Yes, Cats and Dogs was a Cyrano retelling. Not especially bad either, but a case of special pleading and therefore not attractive except to the group that’s being pleaded for.
The nebbish/hot girl films I’ve seen don’t argue that hot girls owe nebbishes their favors. The films just assume that hot girls, once they realize this individual nebbish’s good qualities, will want to couple up with him.
Or the question of why never comes up. For example, in the Woody Allen films. With Alexander Portnoy, his appeal is more obvious. In fact he’s not a nebbish, just a Jew who wishes he could be more of a daring goy. Portnoy is smart, good looking, charming, energetic and successful. He’s also an asshole, but lots of assholes of both sexes do fine when it comes to mating.
Cats and Dogs took the line that men should not care about conventional good looks, even though the boy ingenue landed by Janeanne Garafalo was quite a beauty. I guess what can be assumed by the male-oriented films has to be made explicit and argued for in a female-oriented counterpart.
Now about the fat guy/cute girl pairings I’ve seen in real life, I’d guess the girls weren’t doing it out of obligation. The guys in question weren’t nebbishes, just fat. They had personality, either in an overbearing Seth Rogen way or in more impressive ways. But of course I cannot read minds. I’m just discussing surface impressions.
i think "obligation" is too strong of a word. our pop culture tells women "once you realize this individual nebbish's good qualities, you will want to couple up with him," while telling men "you are a visual creature genetically programmed to go for the hottest girl in the room, & there's no use fighting it" (or worse, "the objective [sic] hotness of the woman you are with denotes your success as a man"). we absorb these messages subconsciously & they impact our decisions.
that is my belief, although i likewise cannot know other people's hearts or know the inner workings of anyone's relationships.
Have you seen that influence directly though? I mean, I do believe it could have some influence, but I think most men are going to go for the most attractive woman in the room without ever having gone to the movies.
I know in my personal life I’ve actually turned down *very attractive* women because I couldn’t see any real personal connection developing.
I’ve watched about 3 movies a week for about 20 years now. And I watch total crap too.
-I think Knocked Up is a pretty good example of a kind of wish-fulfillment , but I’m not sure I’d peg it along with “nebbish” dynamic you describe; Rogen is a moron in that movie. I think that’s really what men are relating to there; it’s not that they’re the unsung hero who *deserves* any woman, it’s that they fear they don’t deserve them at all cause they’re complete morons who cannot be relied upon to wipe their own asses. It’s a sort of caricature of that feeling, I think, and when a woman so very out of his league is forced to involve herself with him beyond a drunken night, that whole feeling about it all is put to the test.
I think, yes, it was a form of wish fulfillment that she “fell for him” ( he was sort of funny, right?). But I don’t think they overdid that. I left that movie thinking they probably wouldn’t stay together.
-And there is no way she would’ve slept with him in the first place, for sure.
The Rogen character would probably end up with someone like his roomates’ girlfriend, the nerdy Asian girl. You know, a peer.
Another thing- I think women are really hard on womens’ appearance in entertainment too.
Has anyone mentioned Muriels’ Wedding?
Is anybody ready to talk about race here? Why aren’t Jewish women the lust-objects in these movies? Are Jewish men more ready to objectify non-Jewish women? If so , why? Why are they depicted as naive/shallow so often? Cause Jews are the “smart” ones?
Is this only a common theme because Jews are so over-represented in Hollywood?
I think “jewish” just often equals “nerd” because of stuff having to do with how Jews assimilated and Jewish intellectual traditions colliding with American anti-intellectual ones. Basically, for Jewish males in a lot of these movies, ethnic identity gets translated as “nerd”. In that sense, I think they probably are partially assimilationist fantasies (as Superman is) — though assimilationist fantasies also map more or less directly onto masculine fantasies about being the uberman.
I was wondering what the hell was up with Daniel Craig playing a Polish Jew in that new movie, though. What’s up with that? No semites applied?
“-And there is no way she would’ve slept with him in the first place, for sure.”
Odd. My personal probability estimate is that she might have had a one-off with the Rogen guy — because I do think Rogen and his character are funny, and the movie carefully established that she was very, very drunk — but she wouldn’t have his kid and wouldn’t be in a couple with him. A whole lifetime of fucking no one but a guy who looks like Seth Rogen — that takes a lot of explaining, which the movie didn’t provide.
“Why aren’t Jewish women the lust-objects in these movies? Are Jewish men more ready to objectify non-Jewish women?”
Personally, I doubt it. Jewish men in movies/books/etc. are certainly more ready to yearn after gentile women, but that’s not the same thing. Cultural cachet-wise, gentiles are up here, Jews are down there, so Jews spend a lot of emotional energy on those unattainable gentiles. Or they did. I kind of think of that as a Portnoy-era phenomenon. Knocked Up is a recent example, but are there lots of others?
“Why are they depicted as naive/shallow so often?”
Are they? I mean recently. They certainly were during the Portnoy era, but the Heigl character didn’t strike me as naive or shallow. Remarkably quick to settle when it came to men, sure, but that’s not necessarily the same thing.
No, I don’t think the Hiegl character was naive/shallow. Annie Hall on the other hand..
But , correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t “Shiksa” a Yiddish term to describe non-Jewish ( I refuse to call anyone a “gentile”.) woman? The fact that that term is bandied about in the context of Jewish men going after non-Jewish women ( White, European women specifically) seems to indicate a history of a culturally specific mode of understanding such a thing.
Not too flattering either:
“The word shiksa is derived from the Hebrew term sheketz, which means “abomination,” “impure,” or “object of loathing”, depending on the translator.”
(( Oh, but wait, that’s a funny word now, just like “Goy”, cause we’ve heard so many comedians throw it around. ))
-Is it ridiculous to think that Jewish men might’ve lusted after the women in question, in part, because they fall outside of the cultural demands they associate with Jewish women? Demands that are related to being a part of a “chosen” people ( thereby devaluing all other peoples)?
Basically, they can objectify them without having to bring it home.
-Maybe that is a generational thing though. Might not be so prevalent nowadays.
I have to say that the scenes in Knocked Up where Rogen and co. had that little roundtable making clear that everyone knew they were Jews sort of irked me. What was that supposed to mean? It’s not like the jokes in that segment were funny..
But no- No way Heigl, a successful Hollywood media type would sleep with schlubby Rogen. I think she’d have made a bee-line away from him, in reality.
Jews have long been an oppressed group. In such groups, solidarity is extremely important as a survival tactic. A big part of cultural solidarity is endogamy; a refusal to assimilate and abandon your cultural values.
Jews aren’t really oppressed any more in any meaningful way in the U.S. As a result, a lot of stuff having to do with cultural solidarity is now basically just ethnic color. “Shiksa” probably had real venom in it at some point, but now it’s just a joke. I mean, as an atheist and extremely non-observant, non-ethnically identified Jew, it would never have even occurred to me to spend even half a moment classifying potential dating partners on the basis of whether they were Jewish or not. I doubt I’m especially unusual in that regard for people of my generation.
The dynamic around endogamy and cultural solidarity has somewhat more resonance in the black community still, I think — though there too interracial dating is a lot more common than it once was, obviously.
I also think that you have somewhat the wrong end of the stick when you say that Jewish dating preferences are about being chosen and devaluing others. I think (except in a few cases like the Amish) subcultures are solidified because the majority culture devalues *them*. Jews, at least, have long shown themselves eager to assimilate when given the chance.
i think there is an undercurrent (& sometimes an over-current) of contempt for the beautiful wasp object of desire in both the works of woody allen & philip roth (it would be harder to argue this disdain in judd apatow or, say, adam sandler).
but i think it is of a piece with the current of misogyny in both creators' work. i mean, can you find an example where they valourize jewish women?
Oh, yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. They hate gentile women because they’re women, not because they’re gentiles.
Yeah, she would have. Maybe. There’s a guy at the Second Cup where I go and he’s just as ugly as Seth Rogen but he’s still a regular thing with this girl who is not a huge, tremendous distance off from Katherine Heigl. She’s not in Heigl’s league for looks, but he’s not in Rogen’s league for presence and performance skills. The two of them are just everyday approximations of Heigl and Rogen.
What’s the matter with “gentile”?
"i think there is an undercurrent (& sometimes an over-current) of contempt for the beautiful wasp object of desire"
When you feel inferior, you try to take the other person down a few notches. So Alexander Portnoy and Alvy Singer go running after shiksas but also believe that the shiksas are kind of dumb and childlike. Annie Hall and the Monkey have the looks and the non-Jewishness, but Portnoy and Singer get to be the smart ones and to boss them around.
In Portnoy's case, I think misogyny and resentment of gentiles are about equally important. Portnoy’s Complaint boils over with dislike for gentiles. Roth may or may not have outgrown this trait, but it’s a key part of Portnoy’s personality.
On the other hand, I don’t think Woody Allen dislikes women. I say this having wasted a lot of my youth on reading about him and watching his movies. He’s a baby and anybody who comes in contact with him has to be ready for full-time diaper duty. But I don’t recall any hostility directed at his woman characters. He just assumes that he, or his fictional stand-in, is there to be the sun around which some babe orbits. That’s narcissism, not misogyny.
tom, i will defer to you on matters of woody allen. i've only seen two or three of his movies & read one of his early comedy books.
noah, on roth: i loved goodbye columbus & i really liked portnoy’s complaint, even though i hated the protagonist as a person. besides those, i’ve read the facts, reading myself & others & a bunch of scholarship on him, for a drawn essay. i enjoy his writing whenever i'm not overwhelmed with the desire to punch him in the face.
Where can I get ahold of your Roth essay?
All-time favorite Roth: “Goodbye, Columbus” (the novella).
All-time most despised Roth: The Ghost Writer. Kind of a nebbish/hottie fantasy, in that there’s a beautiful young thing pining after some magisterial, potbellied old doof who’s a literary genius. But that is only one strand in the bullshit.
I don’t know that a depiction of a woman that involves her being sort of dumb is necessarily misogynistic though. I mean, where do you draw the line? I know dumb women. I’ve dated dumb women. They exist. They’re not you.
As far as “gentile” goes, it just seems sort of icky to me. It’s almost like when people use the word “foreigner”; There’s us, and there’s the foreigners. It gives primacy to the in group, I think.
“Goy” and “Shiksa” bother me a lot. It always has the tinge of an in-joke or something.
As far as these terms being a matter of an oppressed group seeking to maintain itself, I don’t know if it’s that simple. I don’t think you can discount the “choseness” aspect of Judaism in questions about assimilation and I don’t think – if you can count Jews as an historically oppressed minority- they’re like any other we know about; more than any other minority group in the West, they’ve managed to gather a great deal of wealth in business; mercantilism/trade and banking, etc.. Sure there were many poor Jews, but I’m not sure you could say they were poor because they were Jews.
So I don’t know that it’s a straight-up feeling of inferiority that might have a Philip Roth indulge in some Shiksa hatred. I think it’s a little more involved than that.
I think “anti-semitism” ( yet the vast majority of Jews are not Semitic) as it’s identified by Jewish groups is often far more complex than some kind of basic, irrational mental disease, which the very term seems to imply. It’s “virulent”. A virus.
I read half of a Philip Roth book. I think it was Portnoy’s Complaint (?). It was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get much out of it. I was like 18 or something. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
I have heard criticisms from some Anti-Zionist lefties over THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. Paleo Conservatives too. I like a lot of things Lindbergh had to say, so the whole thing is shot right there for me..
tom, how convenient you should ask! it’s in this book, & i'm also gonna put just the essay out as a minicomic when con season starts… so it'll be on my website if my website ever gets revamped.
Uland, Jews have historically been mistreated because they were Jews. There’s that whole Holocaust thing, sort of capping generations of mistreatment and unpleasantness in Europe and elsewhere.
Jews tend not to be mistreated these days in America, not because they’re Jews, but because they’re effectively white. Over time, America is kind to white ethnics.
You’re discomfort with “gentile” and “goy” and “shiksa” — it’s not clear to me why you should be bothered or, indeed, threatened, by the fact that an almost completely assimilated ethnic group retains vestigial markers of in-group cultural identity. It’s like the Irish with St. Patrick’s Day (and the Irish have done quite well for themselves in the U.S. too, you’ll note.) There are things about it that are mildly creepy (which have to do with leveraging victim status while holding onto privilege.) But it’s not about threatening mainstream U.S. society, or keeping that society at arm’s length. Quite the opposite.
Miriam, you should put that link in a post. Not sure people are going to see it buried at the bottom of comments like that….
“Uland, Jews have historically been mistreated because they were Jews. There’s that whole Holocaust thing, sort of capping generations of mistreatment and unpleasantness in Europe and elsewhere.”
Well, what makes a Jew a Jew? To think that it’s a simple matter- that there is not historical, cultural, religious and economic interplay in the whole dynamic is just silly. What is the motive? If in fact such a small group of people were loathed for simply existing, how were they not simply wiped out?
“Jews tend not to be mistreated these days in America, not because they’re Jews, but because they’re effectively white. Over time, America is kind to white ethnics.”
I think you’re downplaying the position of power that American Jews came to and effectively changed America from. If you look at the Madoff scandal, for instance, it’s pretty clear that big Jewish money sticks together still, for instance. You could argue that Jewish power in entertainment/media has radically altered the character of America.
The distinction is still there for lots of Jews, and , clearly in religious terms, remaining distinct is all but the M.O of Judaism.
“You’re discomfort with “gentile” and “goy” and “shiksa” — it’s not clear to me why you should be bothered or, indeed, threatened, by the fact that an almost completely assimilated ethnic group retains vestigial markers of in-group cultural identity. It’s like the Irish with St. Patrick’s Day (and the Irish have done quite well for themselves in the U.S. too, you’ll note.) There are things about it that are mildly creepy (which have to do with leveraging victim status while holding onto privilege.) But it’s not about threatening mainstream U.S. society, or keeping that society at arm’s length. Quite the opposite. “
I’m not really concerned with any “threat” that those words might indicate, I just find it distasteful. I don’t think of “Mainstream America” as anything distinct enough to be threatened. Anyone can say it all they want to, and I can think they’re smug assholes for using those terms.
I can’t help but think it’s an insider slight against the great unwashed peasantry.
There’s no way you’d be down with analogous terms being used by any other racial group.
Man what a fucking loser I am. This is how I’m spending this night? Oh well..You can’t run from FATE..
Happy Jew Year!
Uland, I really do think that anti-Semitism is irrational and that you’re reading way too much into “goy” and “shiksa” and being chosen. It’s like saying the big problem with blacks is that they look down on whites, what with “ofay” and “grayboy” and talking about soul. Whereas really the big problem is that whites, by and large, have looked down on blacks and spent a lot of time kicking them around.
I’m starting to sound like Harry Kemelman here, but there’s a long list of national groups who think that God or some other supreme force has singled them out. You should have heard Winston Churchill on the “English-speaking peoples.” Or Ronald Reagan talking about “the shining city on the hill.” And it’s not just Churchill and Reagan. A lot of Brits and a lot of Americans think that their respective countries were destined by God or history or natural superiority to lead the world.
Retreating onto narrower ground,I’ll say that Alex Portnoy’s problem is not an ingrained sense of Jewish superiority, it’s an inflamed sense of resentment toward just about everyone, with gentiles high on the list. He envies gentiles, and you don’t envy people if you’re sure you’re better than they are.
“I was wondering what the hell was up with Daniel Craig playing a Polish Jew in that new movie, though. What’s up with that? No semites applied?”
Craig specializes in that role: he played the most blood thirsty member of the Israeli revenge squad in Munich. (Part of the “Blond Guys Are Evil” tradition?)
I’m with you on Judd Apatow and I think you’re right to pin the origins of this on Woody Allen, but I think you’re oversimplifying the actual content of Allen’s films — the better ones, anyway. There’s a lot of actual pain in them, and Allen, or his stand-in, usually doesn’t end up with the object of his desire. I’m thinking of Annie Hall, or Manhattan, or the Sidney Pollack plot in the underrated Husbands and Wives.
Hey, I never said Allen couldn’t feel self-pity.
Tom- I think “anti-semitism” is irrational, but I think that lots of legitimate criticism of organized Jewry is often- if not as a rule- painted as “anti-semitism” – Like just now in Miriams’ most recent post, my talk of Jews and banking has been reconfigured into “Jews controlling the worlds money” .It’s an irrational conflation, clearly, but it is given legitimacy via the use and abuse of the concept “anti-semitism”.
I don’t often hear criticisms of the Anglo establishment being turned by Anglos into a kind of mental sickness.
I don’t think you can honestly compare blacks with Jews on the historical victimology scale, honestly. Jews, as a distinct group, have much more power than black people in general terms.
And really, I’m not “worried” about those terms. Again, I just find them distasteful. If there were a Slavic word that originally meant “filthy Jewess”, I’m not sure in what alternate reality it would ever be made acceptable in polite company. We don’t have to agree though. I’m fine with that.
I do recognize the ubiquity of “chosen” peoples throughout history. Thing is, we mostly view that as essentially wrong.If it’s not thought of as outright fallacious ( and an obvious method for manipulation), the ends that that mode of thought has produced is pretty obviously recognized as a great source of injustice.
The massacres in Gaza speak to this, in my opinion. Israel seems to view itself as a Nation that should not or cannot abide by standards it often demands of other nations. I don’t believe that you can discount the conception of Israel as a “holy land” among many Jews and Christians alike in setting the stage for this irrational mode of thought. I mean, when it comes down to it, race-based nationalism in defense of the “motherland” is a pretty scary concept, except when Jews do it, I guess.
As far as the inferiority/superiority complex goes, I don’t think it’s so simple. Especially when you consider Roths’ eventual ultra-Zionist stance, it’s pretty clear that if there was a feeling of inferiority, it didn’t last, or is recognized by Roth as having no real validity. If anything- based on my limited knowledge of Roths’ work- it seems like the Non-Jewish world is blamed for making him feel inferior and his rage toward them isn’t simply a matter of them being wrong pursuant to eventual assimilation or an egalitarian vision, it’s that they won’t embrace his Jewishness. And again, I don’t think you can talk about Jewishness without mentioning “choseness”.
Whether you’re worried or threatened or miffed, at this point I don’t see how the opposing points we’re making really touch each other. If you agree that anti-Semitism is irrational, then I’ll settle for that. Just to reassure you: I’ve spent a lot of time around Jews and the use of “goy” and “shiksa” is close to nil. Slighting remarks about gentiles, also nil. Belief in Jewish specialness, nil except with my grandmother and some of the kids I knew in school, meaning that I heard a lot about how Einstein was Jewish and the Marx Brothers were Jewish,and so on. In other words, the same as any ethnic group with something to brag about, which means all ethnic groups.
Take my testimony for what it’s worth. But as family, friends and coworkers Jews have been part of my life for just about forever.
Well, I interact with Jewish people everyday, and I don’t hear those words and I don’t see indications of “specialness” either. I’m not generalizing about Jews as individuals here, it’s more about the concept of Jewishness and how that’s played out on a larger scale.
32 posts and we haven't even talked about Freaks & Geeks. We did get to Charles Lindbergh though.
I think about the “nerdy guys are inherently lovable and deserve to be saved by beautiful girls” theme all the time, because I think it had a bad influence on me. I haven’t seen Knocked Up, but Punch Drunk Love and Sideways are two fairly recent examples from the highbrow end of that genre. By the way, there are a few movies in which nerdy guys and nerdy girls fall in love–I saw a pretty good one called Marty recently.
It’s kind of weird how a Roth/Allen discussion just up on TCJ in a totally different context. Luke, I don’t think Roth is an “ultra-Zionist.” He dealt a lot with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Operation Shylock (one of his better books), and I couldn’t figure out who, if anyone, had his sympathies. And while The Plot Against America is one of Roth’s worst books, I don’t think it said anything about Zionism.