Liberal agony - how to have my cake and eat it too. Re: [lbo-talk] Is There Still a Jewish Question? by Ellen Willis

[Steve Palmer]

Hot on the heels of an election where my local Jewish newspaper is celebrating
increasing Jewish representation from 26 to 30 in the House (7% of seats) and
from 11 to 13 in the Senate (13%). It is anticipated that they will chair a
number of major committees. This is not bad going for a minority which is 2% of
the population. Anyone who inspects the list of personnel in the White House
would be hard put to demonstrate that Jews are underrepresented. In society at
large the only group which has more privilege in relation to its representation
in the population is white folks. So Ms Willis fears are not of a political
nature, but psychological and the only sensible response to this kind of
paranoia is to urge her to seek professional psychiatric assistance instead of
laying her trip on the Left.

This, it is worth noting, is just a variant of the typical white liberal
response to anything which advances a truly oppressed minority. How to pay
genuflections to equality while hanging onto my privileges. Support public
school integration, but send the children to private schools - nothing to do
with racism you understand, its quality, my child's special needs, Montessori
blah blah ... etc. This is the paranoid Jewish version: how to preserve a
racist settler state and somehow get the oppressed to accept it with
equanimity. There's nothing quite so stomach-churning as watching a liberal
wrestle with her conscience - and lose.

--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> wrote:


>
http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/files/Willis-Is%20There%20Still%20A%20Jewish%20Question.pdf
> 
> -- 
> Michael Pugliese
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

"To the socialist it is not the horrors of war that are the hardest to endure ... but the horrors of the treachery shown by the leaders of present-day socialism" - Lenin

"When the train of history goes round a bend, all the intellectuals fall off" - Marx

 
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