k****a
发帖数: 7077 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Hubei 讨论区 】
发信人: kayaka (jimm), 信区: Hubei
标 题: Nice piece of article about the jews
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue May 24 04:28:26 2011, 美东)
说中国人很反犹，真他妈搞笑。中国有很多人崇犹就提都不提了。
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/whats-up-with-t
It’s been an interesting week or two for Jews. Mel Gibson’s new film, “
The Beaver,” opens nationwide in theaters and Jews must decide whether to
pay good money to see a movie starring someone whose father is a Holocaust
denier, and who has himself vilified Jews in public. In Cannes, the Danish
movie director Lars von Trier rambles on at a press conference about
sympathizing with Hitler, being annoyed with Israel and admiring Hitler’s
architect, Albert Speer. Next day he recants, but it’s too late; he’s
declared persona non grata at the film festival.
Then there is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French economist and politician who
was poised to become France’s first Jewish president, imprisoned at Rikers
Island after being accused of forcing sex on a chambermaid at a New York
hotel. (Strauss-Kahn has now moved to a very constrained “house arrest”
while awaiting arraignment, if he can find a house.) Meanwhile, on May 11
this newspaper publishes the results of a Pew Forum study that shows 67
percent of Reform Jewish households in the United States making more than $
75,000 a year; only 31 percent of all households hit the same mark.
Then there are a few older stories that linger on and add to the mix.
Designer John Galliano is facing trial in France and has been fired by Dior
because, in the course of a drunken rant in a bar, he said to someone (who
was not in fact Jewish) “I love Hitler and people like you would be dead.”
Bad-boy Charlie Sheen abused various substances, cavorted with assorted
women and trashed hotel-rooms for years and nothing much was done about it
until he spewed anti-Semitic remarks in the direction of the Jewish producer
of his hit TV show “Two and a Half Men.” In a short time he was fired and
his role has been given to Ashton Kutcher, raised Catholic, but now heavily
into Judaism and Kabala.
And of course there is the story that will live forever, even after its
protagonist dies, the story of Bernie Madoff (a Strauss-Kahn lookalike, or
is it the other way around?) who perpetrated the biggest scam in history (
will he replace Meyer Lansky as the chief exhibit in the bad-guy Jewish Hall
of Fame?) and ruined thousands of people, many of them fellow Jews.
The thing about these stories is that they all point in (at least) two
directions. Sheen, Gibson, Galliano and Von Trier have paid dearly for their
transgression against Jews; but that fact has also had some muttering on
about Jewish power and influence in Hollywood and the arts. (“You can
insult any ethnic group and get away with it, except for the Jews.”) In the
U.S. press and on some of the blogs, Strauss-Kahn is vilified as an elitist
misogamist thug, but in France he is thought of as a victim of a political
conspiracy and portrayed by some as a modern Alfred Dreyfus brought down
just as he was on the brink of ascendancy to a position no Jew has ever
attained.
The statistics that show Jewish households doing really well financially
would seem to be good news for the Jewish community, but the Times story
about the survey ended up featured on the Web site of Stormfront.org, where
it was placed just below an advertisement for the latest David Duke video.
The moral Stormfront draws is that “most honest people do not want to live
off other people,” the latest installment of the very old accusation that
Jews are parasitic blood suckers who infest and infect a society. The same
thing has been said many times on many white supremacists Web sites about
Madoff: “If one studies the history of the Jew, one will see how this race
of vagabond parasites takes over a host and bleeds it dry as we are now
being bled dry” (Vanguard News Network Forum).
So which is it? Jews are a success story, or Jews are a plague? Don’t mess
with Jews, or blame Jews for everything in sight the moment you get drunk?
Jews are victims (expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust), or Jews are
victimizers (rapacious bankers, shyster lawyers, land-grabbers and ethnic
cleansers)? Jews are devils and sub-human vermin (a Nazi trope), or Jews are
God’s chosen people?
The answer is all of the above and much more, for, as many before me have
observed, the Jew as a cultural/ historical figure is oversaturated, which
means that the meanings that accrue to him (or her, but mostly him) are in
excess of any empirical record and accumulate like barnacles without any
regard for the law of contradiction. Attitudes, especially negative ones,
toward Jews flourish whether there are Jews around or not. Anti-Semitism
survives in Poland even though most of its Jews have either fled or been
killed. There is anti-Semitism in China, but few actual Jews.
An important part of the protean and shape-shifting history of anti-Semitism
is illuminated by Matthew Biberman’s brilliant book “Masculinity, Anti-
Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature.” Biberman traces the
intertwined careers of two characterizations of the Jew — the Jew as devil,
an impossibly strong alien being who blocks and destroys everything that is
good, and the Jew as sissy, an effeminate, slight, pasty figure who stays
in the background and assimilates, but who, because of his having
disappeared into the woodwork, is able to rot it out from within. (This
quick summary does not do justice to the richness of Biberman’s analysis.)
So you can have the fierce barbaric Jew (Israel as the atom-bomb wielding
destroyer of Arab armies, at least in 1967) and the insidiously bland Jew,
the obsequious figure who, while no one’s looking, takes control of
everything. That means that whatever a Jew does there are a number of pre-
packaged, and often mutually exclusive, narratives in which to place him,
and, by and large, they are not positive ones.
And that goes double for the Jewish nation. There is, as everyone knows, an
ongoing debate about whether criticism of Israel can be separated from
criticism of Jews, that is, from anti-Semitism. (See, for example, the
comments on my two previous columns.) But it may be that the figure of the
Jew is so highly, and complexly, charged that attempts to detach the
political/military strategy of a nation from the ancient, entrenched and
multiple images of its inhabitants — this is, after all, the Jewish state
— are likely to fail from either direction. Israelis and their supporters
will hear in any criticism of policy echoes of the diaspora, the blood-libel
, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Third Reich’s final solution.
Those who offer the criticism can never quite be sure that their distaste
for Israel’s actions with respect to the Palestinians is entirely innocent
of the influence of centuries of vilification. And that seems to be where we
are. |
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