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On the one hand, on the other hand

By Michael J. Smith on Monday September 19, 2011 04:31 PM

The indispensable IOZ commented recently on a post here, about the upset in Anthony Weiner's old bun -- er, district, to wit, New York's Ninth :

On one of those NPR call-in shows this weekend, they were really laying it on thick. Obama is going to lose the Jews for a generation if he doesn't out-Avigdor Lieberman Avigdor Lieberman soon. I doubt it, of course; Republican-party optics are too Christian... Rick Perry's rootin-tootin routine just doesn't appeal to The People.
It's not even clear how much of a role Zionomania played in the Ninth District result; there was plenty of other stuff going on. But arguendo, let's accept the Zion-centric view of the result. What are the implications?

As Kissinger said to Nixon, Vell, Mr President, zere are Jews, und zen zere are Jews. The Ninth is full of Ultra-Ultras; very few of the other places in the country where Jews live in any numbers are quite so nutty on the subject (apart from Hollywood, of course).

Then there's the generational thing. The American Jewish Committee, which keeps a very nervous finger on the pulse of American Jewry and conducts polls about every five seconds, has found a very consistent downward trend among younger Jews in their attitude toward the Zionist project. Increasingly, they don't give a fuck, which certainly tends to underscrore the universally-acknowledged fact that the Jews are an intelligent people.

IOZ is certainly right about the general distrust within the tribe for people like Rick Perry, who looks like just the sort of guy who might have lynched your grandfather, or wanted to. But IOZ may perhaps be slightly underestimating the Shvartzer Effect. I remember the way the alter-kakers talked about the harmless David Dinkins here in New York; and the thuggish young guys from Brooklyn -- the guys with the knit kipot on their short-cropped scalps -- weren't far behind. But again, this is partly generational and partly local.

Still, though, wouldn't it be just grand if the Dems got bunged out of office for not being Zionist enough? The kind of injustice that's deeply just on a higher plane; the justice of the verdict thrown into sharper relief by the injustice of the indictment.

Comments (12)

Peter Ward:

Apparently the conservative end are willing to look past potential antisemitism.... I happen to work with many fairly orthodox gentleman--orthodox enough to use a negel vasser for netilat yadayim after restroom trips--and they, with the exception of members of the Kiryas Joel community*, vote Republican without fail.

*Quid pro quo after Hillary's intervention.

Op:

Yikes the zionics again
This site might rename itself
Stop me before I add a settlement again
Or stop me before i starve and bomb gaza again

And the number of pictures of the former congressman there
Has a problematic aspect too


And isir ioz invariably receiving the Homeric
The shat is it ....
Indigestable or whatever

What possibly motivates that ?

"ioz the indefuseable today
Took aim at former buffalo bill receiver
Elbert golden wheels dubenion...."

MJS:

Hey, Owen, I live in New York. And IOZ always brightens my dull day, which is more than I can say for Paul Krugman. Living where you do, maybe you should take a prosecutorial brief for the Catholic Church.

Op:

Attack the pope !!!
In this papist nest

Yes that really is a mission worth doing
for an old man of mixed heritage from Boston

The Vatican is my Israel

And I see your point
All politics is of not in object local
Is most often and with greatest piquancy
Locally provoked

In nueva York fur hatted Zion is everywhere
Here the self pity of the elder sox fan
stinks of papal paranoiac sadism
nambla in the sacristy and sacrificial sodomy after mass

-------------

Ioz is prolly far less problematic then louis CK

And Louie makes me laff


Op:

Attack the pope !!!
In this papist nest

Yes that really is a mission worth doing
for an old man of mixed heritage from Boston

The Vatican is my Israel

And I see your point
All politics is of not in object local
most often and with greatest piquancy
Locally provoked

In nueva York fur hatted Zion is everywhere

Here the self pity of the elder sox fan
stinks of papal paranoiac sadism
nambla in the sacristy and sacrificial sodomy after mass

-------------

Ioz is prolly far less problematic then louis CK

And Louie makes me laff


Op:

I once considered a brisk outline of THE CHURCH
and the cold war in Boston

And on a later tide
The role of Catholicism in the making of Reagan democrats

but the papists are prolly best seen
In the kennedy "thing"

That secularized cult of broadcast temptations and martyrdom

A kind of serial anti petticoat junction urban swank soap opera

Marian To its knock knees and thick ankles
and yet always sexed up and full of putrid steam
Rocks off macho and weeping booze soaked sluts

Alas
Now abjectly in decline if not Flat out disintegration

Op:

Boston to camelot

A retro show of the pre Dallas 60's

Madmen stuff of course but politics not advertising

Maybe the lead is a Kennedy fix it guy from the four clover streets of Dorchester

No
A half Mick from blue hill ave
The leavings of Scape grace Celtic papa
And with a big breasted Jewish mother always in the back of his mind
or on the phone

Dennis Quaid ?.

Lots of church because well it's his job to keep the bug gars off the backs
Of the brothers Trimchaser
so to speak

Trimchaser ?

A nice Boston slinger that eh?

Inside that drifting haze of Marlborough man smoke
Is our hero bi ?

He sure hits the cocktails early and often
Something deep in there ticks away

MJS:

Now you're cookin'! Think of the Pat O'Brien character in Angels With Dirty Faces.

Op:

Ya

We need a regular on the turned collar side
Some XO of the Cahhhdnill's "

Cleft chin hair dark well combed and glistening

Pat O' in AWDF hits all the right notes


Perhaps the most devious manipulative
mock sanctimonious
pietistically ruthless man of god
In all of hollywoods Romishly infested
30's song book



sk:

The Ninth is full of Ultra-Ultras...wouldn't it be just grand if the Dems got bunged out of office for not being Zionist enough?

The real Ultra-Ultras camp out in "Judea and Samaria" as shown in this account of a Columbia grad's defense of a Brooklyn doctor:


...grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and attended the traditional Orthodox Yeshiva Mercaz Harav when it was run by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, one of the inspirations behind the religious settler movement. At some point the bourgeois trappings of the old yeshivas and right-wing religion must have seemed inauthentic or too removed for Rav Gadi. He found his way to one of the most mystical and extreme yeshivas in the West Bank: Od Yosef Chai High School at Joseph's Tomb, then located outside Nablus, and led by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, native Missourian, mathematical genius, philosopher, Kabbalist, and Talmudic scholar whose political leanings could be described as Jewish-monarchist.

While Ginsburgh has written more than a dozen books--with titles like Awakening the Spark Within: Finding Your Soulmate; Kabbalah and Meditation, and Interpretation of Dreams and Paranormal Experiences--he is best-known for his notorious essay "Baruch Hagever" praising Baruch Goldstein's 1994 murder of 29 Arabs in the Cave of the Patriarch. Goldstein, he wrote, was following the five halakhic principles: sanctifying God's name, saving life, revenge, eradication of the seed of Amalek, and war.

"The only way we can live together is if they are put on trucks and taken away," said Corinne, carrying the dishes to the sink..."Even though Amalek knew that we are the chosen people, they fought against us, that is why we need to destroy them."

MJS:

Yeah, Judea and Samaria. Crazy places. Bad as Texas, almost. Somehow we manage to create this stuff and export it. Hell, we even produce batshit-crazy Jews in this country, and to some extent in foreign subsidiaries like Israel. But really nothing can compare with the home office.

sk:

Long-distance nationalism is a well-known phenomenon and the production of such kooks—no pun intended—is an area where American efforts—as in so many other areas of human endeavor—are nothing worth writing home about. Orwell's notes from a lifetime ago are still worthwhile:


The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook...It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic—more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest—that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realizes that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion—that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware—will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are skeptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack—all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshiped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

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