Creepy, etc.

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 24 22:39:35 PST 2002



>
>I can't understand why anyone can fail to see that "the Jews" is offensive.

I don't find it so, any more than "the Americans"; "the Left," etc. My grandmother usedto get upset when she say Heifitz referredto in the paper as "the great Jewisj violinist." She thought that was antisemitic. I though she was being silly. We Jews will be happy to take Heifitz and Einstein and Freud and Marx.


>Using this phrase for any but the most trivial purposes is either an
>empirical error, a failure to be informed about the multiplicity of views,
>experiences, thoughts, characteristics, etc. among those called Jews,

All groups are like this. This is pomo run amok.

or
>else it is an imputation of some mystical significance to Jewishness.

Why not? There is a people called the Jews, it exists as a social fact, nothing mystical about it.


>Christianity had a view of their mystical significance. So, apparently,
>does
>Islame, though it seems less integral than in Christianity's case. (I'm
>fairly poorly informed about the details of this). Various fascist and nazi
>groups had notions of "the Jews'" mystical significance, and used them as
>the prelude to attacks on specific persons and populations.

Yes, but the problem was not that they had a conception that the Jews exist as a group, which is true, but that their conceptiionof the group was wrong and wicked.


>Is it not obvious that "the Jews" is always suspect from the standpoint of
>democratic values? Not necessarily socialist values, but those rooted in
>the
>most elementary bourgeois democracy?
>

No more than any other group.

jks

_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list