Writes David Mamet, in "How the Democrats betrayed the Jews/The sick thrill of antisemitism has a price" (UnHerd).
October 24, 2023
"We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats.... Why do Jews vote Democratic?..."
"But there is no more cosy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party; Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.... The Jews had no protection whatever: from Cossacks, peasants, pogroms, the Crusades, Hitler, Stalin, and so on. And, so, we were convenient victims as we were powerless, in effect the battered wife of the West.... The position of the Jews changed in 1948 with the foundation of the Jewish State. But the habits of 2,000 years, now of Liberal Jews (in the diaspora and in Israel) have not changed. These appeal, in the name of humanity, to powers which may believe in humanity, but, unfortunately, do not consider Jews human...."
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57 comments:
None of this is new. I really don't get it. Were these Jewish Democrats in comas during the Bush years? You were supporting the same party back then.
Oh please, spare us. Everyone with a brain knows how NYC Jews will vote in the next election. Sometimes, the greatest enemy is oneself. Again. Still.
Mamet's little piece is less political contemplation and more warning...as in he's warning people he and other NYC Jews contribute to politically to remember which side their bread is buttered on.
Come ballot season they'll PilPul themselves right back to voting lock step for more abortion, less guns, more immigrants, more everyone else first and Americans second so fast your head will spin.
Hamas could parachute into their living rooms pointing guns at their family's head and they'd still count the angels on the head of pin trying to 'talk the madman' down.
How many NYC Jews voted for NYC be a sanctuary city?
How many NYC Jews voted to defund police?
How many NYC Jews voted against Trump on immigration issues?
How many NYC Jews voted for DeBlasio and his jew-hating hag of a wife?
How many NYC Jews voted for Hochul?
How many NYC Jews voted for the NYC assault weapons ban?
You could fill fucking pages with variations on this question. Maybe the real question people should be asking is why so many NYC Jews hate themselves and love shooting themselves in the foot. Maybe people should stop giving a shit what NYC Jews think about the world. They're obviously quite conflicted.
He has learned the truth and has no hesitation about telling it. As used to be said, "Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." Even Puerto Ricans are learning but that is not true of Episcopalians.
The D's captured the Jewish vote in the late 19th C because the D's ran the big urban machines in the North where the Jews tended to settle, and because the R's had their origins and strongholds in the Midwest and Plains, which didn't attract a lot of Jews.
In every large city in the Solid South Jews made up an important fraction of the commercial and professional classes, but in the South too the machines were of a D persuasion and there was little reason to buck the trend and tradition (not to mention that a lot of Southern Jews were also of Confederate descent anyway).
My old colleague, the Viennese Jew whose grandparents were killed by the Nazis, used to say that during WWII American Jews believed in three worlds (welts)--diese Welt (this world), der naechste Welt (the next world), and RooseWelt.
Those things change at a glacial pace, and not always in a predictable direction.
"do not consider Jews human"
Only we do, deplorables, some Republicans, evangelicals, Althouse I would think and some nice women.
What's more disturbing to a lefty Jew, that her allies despise her or that the people she despises are her allies?
I thought the Jews were supposed to be the smartest race.
...FYI a major letter to Harvard from Boston donor/big deals went out on public channels this morning expressing serious concern. I give even money Harvard tells them so shove it, and they do....but as I say they are big deals at Harvard. It would be an historic break up...
How many NYC Jews support BLM?
How many NYC Jews support antifa?
How many NYC Jews ARE antifa?
How many NYC Jews supported Occupy Wall Street?
How many NYC Jews who supported Occupy Wall Street were also the 1%?
I really realy dislike NYC Jews if you can't tell. And if you can't tell, not because they're Jewish either...
Why aren't our alleged "journalists" not asking every single Democrat politician to denounce and distance themselves from the AOC's and the Ilhan Omars, just as every single Republican politician was asked to distance themselves and the Republican Party from lifelong Democrat and sudden "Republican" David Duke?
Yes, it's a rhetorical question.
Ride--I don't think Mamet votes, or contributes, D anymore. Not for a while, anyway.
I agree with other here. The voting patterns will not change much, if any. Likely, any increase in Jewish R vote is offset by white woman voting D over abortion. We are fucked.
Every Jew in NYC needs to read the parable of the scorpion and the frog.
@ Michael K.
To be honest Episcopalians are going extinct as a denomination along with the rest of the woke Christians.
@Ride Space mountain
They are yet again destroying their protectors. By 2030 when the currently White western countries have black & brown majorities,the new people won't GAF what happens to Jews & Israel at all assuming they don't outright hate them. And what will they do then? Hollywood Holocaust movies don't affect them whatsoever. And So It goes.
Everybody is a Jew. It's even part of the religion, and is what makes it a religion for adults.
Commentary on Sanhedrin 98b-99a
"We have just seen that the Messiah is the just man who suffers, who has taken on the suffering of others. Who finally takes on the suffering of others, if not the being who says Me?
"The fact of not evading the burden imposed by the suffering of others defines ipseity itself. All persons are the Messiah."
Levinas, _Difficult Freedom: Essays of Judaism_, Messianic Texts, p.89
It's why sick Palestinians are treated in Israeli hospitals probably even today.
Large democracies have a problem. People feel that their vote, as an engine of public policy, is an infinitesimal nothingburger. But their vote, as an expression of their value as a human being, has enormous communicative impact, with large hedonic effect.
The lawn signs, slogans, and bumper stickers of the left, along with the associated membership in the elite knowledge classes, confer a sort of social wealth that is frighteningly real.
Elite opinions have become our version of the sumptuary goods (hats, gloves, and strings of pearls, etc.) that in another era propelled the bourgeois into the illusion that their extravagant generosity had earned them a spot in the new aristocracy.
Our 1.7 trillion dollar deficit should sound the alarm that nobody other than people willing to be called a stingy racist is paying attention to limits, constraints, tradeoffs, and long term effects. Jews are a part of this, but only a part. This flaw is ecumenical.
Now do urban blacks.
Bari Weiss writes:
”As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right, I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.”
“So much of the work that happened in that [Trump] administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.”
“When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?”
“If it’s clear that the last two weeks have been a wake-up call, the next question is: Why?”
“Part of the answer is the sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism. That depravity has made the justification and celebration of their acts by those who police pronouns that much starker. The contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.”
“To put it another way: when Black Lives Matter organizations are lionizing Islamist terrorists by posting a paraglider logo, you’d be a fool not to reassess things.”
“The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power.
“And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.”
Dave Chappelle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1716486495102468367
I’m glad Ann blogged this piece by Mamet.
He’s written two great books about his political conversion.
Ipseity?
OK, that may be the first word at Althouse that I can't define.
"They are yet again destroying their protectors. By 2030 when the currently White western countries have black & brown majorities,the new people won't GAF what happens to Jews & Israel at all assuming they don't outright hate them. And what will they do then? Hollywood Holocaust movies don't affect them whatsoever. And So It goes."
I have said it here and elsewhere, and have been criticized and called an anti-semite for it, but there is a real and documented self-destructive aspect to Judaism that is different in flavor from the self-destructive tendencies of other ethnicities. All anyone needs to do is read the deep history of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet Union to see how intelligently blind and wisely idiotic lots of Jews, mostly secular ones, can be about who their friends and enemies are.
I am not an anti-semite, but that also doesn't mean I'm pro-semite either. I generally dislike 'sand' people, of any flavor, and I have MASSIVE problems with the amount of financial support or otherwise we keep pumping into that region for very very little to show for it except more entanglement and more blood. This shit has got to stop. America is not a bottomless piggybank for endless levantine blood feuds.
If NYC Jews were smart they'd stop stinging the back of their friend and instead cross the river safely instead of making this country safe for everyone EXCEPT the descendants of those who founded it.
Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary
huh? wha?
rcocean SWORE to us, that OVER nine hundred thousand people were killed in the hospital!!
now it turns out; that it DIDN'T happen?
I'm Confused! if we Can't Trust rcocean... Who CAN we trust?
Obama declared himself an anti-semite today.
Elite opinions have become our version of the sumptuary goods (hats, gloves, and strings of pearls, etc.) that in another era propelled the bourgeois into the illusion that their extravagant generosity had earned them a spot in the new aristocracy.
This is such an interesting observation. I would change it just a bit: the public display of elite opinions has become our version of the sumptuary goods (and, I'd add, even sumptuary laws controlling public appearance - and the poor dumb college kids are discovering that the "hat" they just put on supporting Hamas and the general Jew-killing that goes with Hamas doesn't connote the elite opinion they think it connotes, and instead there's a negative consequence for wearing that "hat").
And also - just like the sumptuary laws, the modern elite (I usually just call them "elitists") start to think in circular terms: I am elite because I deserve to be because I have the trappings of the elite because I deserve to have them.
To tag Crack in on this idea - Western elites never question the rectitude of their being elite; they take their status for granted, and as deserved - if they were religious, they might say "as ordained." It is useful for me, at least, to think about it in these terms, to keep me honest about what things I think just come naturally to me by right.
The Crusades? Yes, some Jews were killed when some of the Crusaders as they marched along the Rhine during the 1st Crusade, but that doesn't mean "The Crusades" which lasted hundreds of years, were about killing Jews. Actually, they weren't about Jews at all.
Am I the only one who thinks this pro-Israeli rhetoric is out-of-control and over-the-top? Basicall Mamet wants us to ignore reality and imagine its 1930 and the "poor powerless Jews" are beset by monsters who want to destroy them. Why even their old pals The democrats are antisemitic monsters.
Hello? Joe Biden has a Jewish Secretary of State, a Jewish Chief of Staff, and Jewish Grandkids. His VP is married to a Jew. Schumer, the Majority leader in the Senate is a Jew. The ADL lays down the law, and even the richest man in the world, Musk, dances to their tune.Almost all of congress gives the visiting israeli President, standing O afer Standing O. Others cry when they talk about their devotion to Israel, and asks how much we can give Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel, gets two A/C task forces to help it out, while we send massive amounts of Ammo by the fastest route possible. Any UN resolution to denounce the bombing of Gaza as a war crime is vetoed. THe UK, which before couldn't find its way to stop any muslim from entering the country, is now stating anyone supporting Hamas will be jailed. France says protests in support of Hamas are illegal. Other countries have stated expression of support for Gaza are illegal, or if the person making them is a foreigner will result in deportation.
DeSantis just stated that any college organization expressing support for Gaza, will be considered "antisemitic" and shut down.
Yet, Mamet acts like the "powerless jews" have no friends. They've been betrayed by antisemites in the Democrat party! Is this Mamet Bizzaro world where up is down and black is white? Its certainly not reality.
I have been asking this question for FOREVER!
Why would a very smart segment of the population (maybe the smartest) think that government banning guns is a good idea?
Or suppressing speech? Or glorifying abortion?
Maybe the pendulum has finally swung...
"Now do urban blacks."
That's easy.
$$$
“Why do Jews vote Democratic?”
Why does anyone?
Trump 2024
As I read history the European Jews, particularly the Ashkenazim including eastern Jews, were more secular and were left wing as they arrived in the US from 1900 on. This is “Barbara Streisand” Judaism, which was a large percentage of the US communist adjacent , communist friendly movement highly represented in academia, like Oppenheimer, Chomsky, Hollywood, and major branches of the legal profession. Jews are very much capitalists and have wealth at high proportions, but contradictorily seemed to want socialism, which eliminates family wealth.
The red diaper Jewish citizens publicly are extremely leftist, even revolutionary, while, like Streisand, are also wealthy. Streisand even notoriously hired guards to keep Californians off the public beach in front of her oceanfront house, yay to the proles! There may be American Jews living in deep poverty somewhere, but I have never noticed. So it’s a contradiction, they want the revolt of the proletariat but also want family generational wealth, so it is cognitive dissonance. Is it a way of covering guilt at being rich by openly supporting the poor?
Socialist beliefs while acting as capitalists seems to be an affectation, expressing a cultural heritage that in personal life the individual is agnostic to. Hard to understand, but I doubt it will ever change. They will always be leftist.
As a note I am not anti Jewish at all, this is just a quirky thing.
Helsinki Syndrome is the only explanation I have for why Jews vote en masse for Democrats. Same applies to urban blacks. Loving your oppressors is a real thing for some people.
I was a Jewish New York Liberal until 9/11. I have no idea why that event did not convert everybody with my background to the right side, but it did not. Once I saw the light, it was easy to realize that BLM, Greta Thunberg and her fans, most Ivy League students and professors, and many followers of the Religion of Peace are not fans of my people. That should have been clear before, but it wasn't. I think the recent events in Israel and the reaction among the Left will similarly open the eyes of a lot of Jews.
"I have said it here and elsewhere, and have been criticized and called an anti-semite for it, but there is a real and documented self-destructive aspect to Judaism that is different in flavor from the self-destructive tendencies of other ethnicities."
Yes, Jews are so self-destructive that they've been around for over 3,000 years, despite numerous mass murders, wars, and other attempts to wipe them out.
As for New York Jews, it's worth mentioning that religious Jews tend to vote Republican. If there is any self-destructive faction of Jews it's the ones who have cast off their religion, while observant ones are ensuring Jewish survival with high birth rates and adherence to tradition.
"Calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews."
That formulation is getting very, very tired. It demands that no one ever say they're wrong. Sorry, but that's not the way this works.
"Why do people who join the Republican party immediately leave and become independents?" is a better question.
Y'all will figure out, you're a bunch of problematic racists, one day. You still probably won't accept it, or the fact no one wants to really be around it, but you'll figure it out.
Lyle said...
"Obama declared himself an anti-semite today."
People who talk like this are idiots.
Basic reality of the US political scene is that practically every ethnic minority block is captured by Democratic Party machine. Jews have no choice but identify as distinct ethic minority group and thus are natural target for Democratic Party predation. Jews are not alone in this; every minority group is targeted and coerced into voting Democratic Party ticket. Blacks and Latinos vote overwhelmingly for Democrats as well. Present day Democratic Party seems to be a bundle of different groups, ethnic, cultural and ideological, that have nothing in common and often explicitly opposing each other, except all voting Democrat for some reason.
Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas.
Like finding gambling in a casino, I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you!
Shorter Mamet: The call is coming from inside the house!
Antisemites on this thread:
1. Ride Space Mountain (by your words, and their rather obsessive quality, shall we know thee)
2. rcocean (your Jew hate seems to be of the garden variety "progressive" brand)
3. The Crack Emcee (special distinction, since you've been showing your ass on "the Jewish question" for many days, on thread after thread)
Thanks @MalaiseLongue. By your lack of substantive response shall I know thee.
MalaiseLongue. Not a serious person.
RideSpaceMountain said...
"I am not an anti-semite, but that also doesn't mean I'm pro-semite either."
-----------
No, RideSpaceMountain, you are clearly anti-semitic and a Jew hater based on your own words. You call Jews "blind" and "idiotic." You say "maybe people should stop giving a shit what NYC Jews think about the world." You write: "I really realy dislike NYC Jews if you can't tell."
You must think that brown shirts look good on you.
Good blogging, Professor A.
@lonejustice
I appreciate your cherry-picking quotes from my above comments, while ignoring everything else I said. Tends to happen regarding this subject a lot. Sorry about your reading comprehension.
You do you.
lonejustice said...
"You must think that brown shirts look good on you."
You guys are pathetic. If someone is antisemitic, they hate Jews. Not "New York Jews," but Jews. (Louis CK said the horrible part about the Holocaust is that Jewish kids couldn't grow up to hate blacks in Brooklyn. Hateful Jews: now there's an under-researched topic worth exploring,...)
A good reason for Democrats to vote the way they do is because you guys throw "antisemitic" around too recklessly - you even called me anti-semitic - but when somebody calls you a "racist," you don't care - even when you're being racist.
White people.
Go watch "Killers of the Flower Moon" and ponder your legacy. Don't come back talking shit to me: Ponder.
"- but when somebody calls you a "racist," you don't care - even when you're being racist."
Probably because it's always been y'alls fall back position when you're losing. It's lost it's impact after umteen million iterations.
logic and reason can be harsh, but they are not racist.
Rusty said...
"- but when somebody calls you a "racist," you don't care - even when you're being racist."
Probably because it's always been y'alls fall back position when you're losing. It's lost it's impact after umteen million iterations.
logic and reason can be harsh, but they are not racist.
No, Rusty, it's because - historically - white people can walk away from anything they want.
All whites are racist in exactly the same way that all blacks are stupid and lazy, just as all Gentiles are antisemitic in exactly the same way that all Jews are greedy and duplicitous.
Everyone happy now?
When I was in college in the 1980s, Mamet was considered a playwrighting god. Everyone loved him and loved doing his plays. I'd be willing to bet that he is actively disliked by most theater majors today.
What in the heck is humanistic about leftist ideologies??? When have they ever been? Leftist has two components, Fascist killers and fellow traveling profiteers.
Jewish in name only.
Sometimes being a Jew has advantages of a private club. Other times it's just a label. Actual religion or kinship with Israelis are, at most, given lip service. Kind of like good Catholics like Biden or Pelosi being all in on abortion.
For the sake of moments of advantage a little thing like Palestinian neighbors who have declared planned genocide against other Jews fades into the mist.
"No, Rusty, it's because - historically - white people can walk away from anything they want."
No yersef Crack.
When people declare with a straight face that calling an outdoor gathering with food a "picnic" is racist... When calling a take from home lunch "brown bagging" is racist... When some poor, Hispanic, working guy touches his thumb to his forefinger, a Karen calls his boss about him flashing white power signs and he gets canned...
For years we reacted with horror, and tried to repent when the word racist was hurled. But like the boy who cried wolf (on steroids) that sting has lost its punch.
You toss it out pretty cavalierly too.
“Basic reality of the US political scene is that practically every ethnic minority block is captured by Democratic Party machine. Jews have no choice but identify as distinct ethic minority group and thus are natural target for Democratic Party predation. Jews are not alone in this; every minority group is targeted and coerced into voting Democratic Party ticket. Blacks and Latinos vote overwhelmingly for Democrats as well. Present day Democratic Party seems to be a bundle of different groups, ethnic, cultural and ideological, that have nothing in common and often explicitly opposing each other, except all voting Democrat for some reason.”
I would agree to the extent that when a group comes here, their power is very often limited to the votes that they can deliver - inevitably to the Dem party. That party has long been a collection of competing, often adverse, interest groups. That’s probably why the Jews joined the coalition, when they first came here in decent numbers. the position of Jews in the coalition is different than any other groups. What they provide are money and brains. They essentially try to protect themselves with protection money - they have long been the bankers for the Dem party. And really it’s brains. That latter is why they form the nucleus of every Dem Administration, and have been at the core of the anti-Trump movement. LawFare is their creation. It’s getting harder and harder though, because tech billionaires are taking over their role as the primary founders of the Dems, and the long running antisemitism is quickly becoming more evident in the Black and esp Muslim factions of that party. It is in the process of going kinetic, esp on college campuses, and the Jews are (again) finding that bribery only provides temporary safety (throughout the 2nd Millennium, they seem to have repeatedly faced this, across Europe, starting as highly valued citizens, and ultimately evicted in brutal pogroms).
But as ethnic groups assimilate, they very often move to aligning their interests with the Republicans. For example, the Irish. My father’s junior law partner had a photo of him and JFK taken of them, sitting in rockers, on his front porch, several blocks from our house. The partner was the county Dem chair during the 1960 election. Just two Irish boys shooting the breeze. He later admitted to my father, later in life, that he hadn’t voted for a Dem in years, but kept his Dem party registration until he died. His son, an MD, started out registering as a Republican. As did so many fully assimilated Irish. I think hat we are seeing this happening with Hispanics now. So many of them are staunch conservative Catholic Christians, and find a much more hospitable home in the Republican Party and it’s many conservative Christians.
The two big exceptions to this, so far are Blacks and Jews. For Jews, I think that the peer/group pressure is keeping them in the Dem fold, despite rapidly increasing, now becoming violent, antisemitism there. For Blacks, there is also a lot of peer pressure. But that solidarity seems to be breaking. So many esp female Blacks are strongly religious. Around here, at the Trump hotel where we are living, my partner is on hugging terms with most of them, after bonding over religion. When she was in the hospital last week, they would inquire about her health, and always end that they were praying for her - a staunchly conservative Trump supporter. Living there, I have a lot of Trump hats, and so many of the visiting Blacks tell me that they like my hat - something I have never heard swearing other hats. I think that the Dems’ control over Blacks is weakening too.
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