The White Jew
Hayman, Jane
1 This is the age of the White Jew. I have come to resent, if only because of their number, the hordes of outsiders who clamor fox admission to the clan. It is sad but true that this year...
...There is much to be said, however, for a grave and reasonable cynicism that leaves room for an honest attempt to shape the materials at hand...
...As the play starts he is a smug, stupid businessman, well-endowed with this world's goods and a far cry from the would-be lover I have chosen to call the White Jew...
...If unmarried he (or she) probably has an active and rather casual sex life...
...J. B. knows who made the bomb and if it was not he, it was his brothers in the Defense Department...
...To all of them Mr...
...It is fashionable now, with Jews and non-Jews alike, to cherish a Semitic stereotype that enables them to live without guilt while turning their backs on social and political realities...
...Having surrendered before the battle, he cannot be a hero in the tradition of the Western world and if he has a go at the Eastern religions, his vaguely guilty conscience rarely permits him the necessary quietness of soul...
...But love among the White Jews is not confined to love of freakishness...
...over these have been poured the real-type people and genuine home atmosphere of the Method school...
...love as the White Jew knows it is a last resort...
...In the plays of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and their imitators, a new image of the American man was created...
...White Jew, even in the sense meant here, is not an entirely new expression...
...Love will find a way...
...With great perception, Joyce made his twentieth-century Jew, Leopold Bloom, a masochist...
...TENDERNESS AND SENTIMENTALITY gush freely from the bosom of the White Jew and keep him from thoughts of suicide...
...He is better than the Irishmen who torture him, yet he enjoys his own degradation...
...This "true" Jew is often bitter, invariably sophisticated...
...Our friend likes books better than automobiles but he's damned if they'll get him that way...
...We respond to this in different ways...
...These are gifted writers, but their books pall...
...Occasionally love of animals or even love of plants is brought into play, as in the well-authenticated case of the Salinger fan who was late to a party one rainy night because she stopped to kiss a tree...
...Too often, though, a thin film of compassion tints everything pink...
...If his education and his reading and his anaalyst and his wife have helped him to overcome the influence of the parents who, he feels, robbed him of his manhood, it is the parent figure of the Enemy that paralyzes him now with fright and disgust...
...But I fathom your 'unselfishness...
...But Freud aside, if Bloom is Everyman, then, strictly speaking, every man is a cuckold and less than a man...
...Among the dark shapes that have threatened him since babyhood, biggest and blackest is the shape of the Enemy—the organized world in which he lives...
...When Mr...
...Examples of Chayefsky's misuse of love would make a long, dull list but I was particularly annoyed by a movie called The Bachelor Party...
...ACCORDING TO ONE TRADITION, the Jew, an outcast and a wanderer, is sometimes unattractive and ignoble but always shrewdly human...
...Again and again his faith is awakened and affirmed by cuteness...
...He is a guest at cocktail parties everywhere but can be seen most clearly through the windows of countless city bedrooms, his (often) young body bent in rigid attitudes of love...
...Handsome, primitive, smelly with sexuality, but at heart a lost little boy, he is the lover dreamed about by adolescent girls and homosexuals...
...If he is Saul Bellow, he draws his swaggering heroes with a touch of the picaresque to establish psychic distance between them and the real world of pain which they know so well is waiting hotly outside...
...True life, he says, is in pain and in pain is God...
...The cult of compassion is in fact a cult of failure...
...Henderson, the Rain King, big and fat, is, as a matter of fact, a kind of male Earth Mother, a gentleman farmer with a heart of gold who is never out of touch with suffering...
...MacLeish, in such a context, preaches love of God he is, in effect, turning the bomb into The Bomb and worshipping the defense dollar...
...Chayefsky has converted into a positive glut on the market an idea that has come down to him from above...
...he is lost in a labyrinth with no exit...
...But the fact is that individual man is always alone and that all of Western culture has been built on this hypothesis...
...It breeds, moreover, a subtler corruption of the soul in which the White Jew sneers at others even as he aligns himself with them...
...VOLUMES HAVE BEEN WRITTEN and will be written on the loneliness of American life...
...Afraid to act, he turns his back on action, but warmed with the soothing knowledge of his loving superiority he is able, like all martyrs, to patronize his tormentors...
...The life of the White Jew, like that of many real Jews, is suffused with fear...
...I am troubled by the vision of millions of bookkeepers all over the world, ten and fifteen and thirty years from now, warming themselves at the fires of love while overhead the lights of civilization flicker and go out...
...The "Jew" admired, however, is neither the actual religious Jew nor the specifically Jewish intellectual but the man, Gentile or Jew, who believes in himself as an inspired outsider: a sufferer who is at the same time a lover...
...Its idols are Salinger, Erich Fromm, and (acknowledged or not) the Beats...
...When man blames a God, in whom he does not believe, for the sordid mess made by other men, he has begun at last to replace Jehovah with Big Brother...
...Traces of the Leftist realism of the thirties and a dash of the Yiddish theater mingle with a faintly Saroyanesque attitude toward the human race in general...
...He knows who the enemy is...
...But we watch with mounting horror as modern Job blesses God and calls for more love...
...It is not by crying for love like children for a bottle but by coming to terms with events that we will justify ourselves...
...You cannot stand yourselves and you do not love yourselves sufficiently...
...Salinger, his particular passion is little boys and girls, if he is Bernard Malamud, little Jews...
...Love each other, huddle together, keep warm...
...His gifts include physical energy plus true love, and whenever he can find a decent motherly girl to rape, he and she settle down happy as clams...
...Such a plethora of feeling might almost be Franciscan except for the fact that the modern correlative of the saint's inner light is a rich, morbid self-hatred...
...He is now called Seymour Glass but, as his admirers imply, his real name is Hamlet and he is a prince...
...we who witnessed the rise of Hitler, we who have generations of a liberal tradition behind us, are not likely to fall immediate prey to that kind of glittering cynicism...
...The American Leopold Bloom pops up again and again these days, queer, compassionate, forgiving, and alone...
...When its only end is the mutual self-pity which today is called "compassion," it is worse than useless, it is decadent and destructive...
...This, then, is the ultimate triumph of weakness and myopia...
...The twentieth century has underscored our solitude and made us cynics...
...Love is all and the Jew is accounted the supreme lover...
...A stranger on the earth, Bloom suffers and understands, is persecuted and forgives, loves and cannot act...
...they express themselves frequently and with increasing monotony in books and plays, on television and in the movies, in national magazines and in the intellectually advanced reviews...
...1 This is the age of the White Jew...
...If he is J.D...
...The White Jew assumes the face of love to mask his own cowardice and defeat...
...Basic to it is a romantic belief in the fundamental holiness of the diseased and the deranged...
...When Kerouac and Ginsberg canonize themselves and their associates, they expound new qualifications for sainthood, important among them fatuousness and ignorance...
...Love, in fact, has become one of the fastest-moving commodities on the market...
...The essence of the White Jew reveals itself in his love...
...By logic, if love increases as suffering does, our friend should be ever closer to God as things get worse...
...In the role of conscious victim, however, he is hardly more rebellious than J. B. The White Jew accepts suffering as the norm, revels in it and calls his maudlin picnic love...
...It is sad but true that this year everyone chooses the chosen people...
...This love, often called compassion, is a loose amalgam of emotions invented by members of the in-group as an answer to the world situation...
...To honor meanness for its own sake is to feed the self on its own disgust...
...AN UNATTRACTIVE and telling parable of our times may be found in a bad verse play written by one of our major poets and presented on the New York stage two seasons ago...
...The cult of love is not confined to novelists...
...Conversely, in Tea and Sympathy an American dream comes true when the beautiful, wise and maternal but still sexy schoolmaster's wife gives her favors and her love to the schoolboy, Tom Lee, who has been accused of pederasty...
...he has found the meaning of life even if that meaning is merely that to live is to suffer...
...His use of the concept of love is irresponsible—but is he more irresponsible than those who could see disaster if they would and yet refuse to look...
...The White Jew may be an artist—he may write or paint—or he may not, but he is by definition an outsider, alone in a billboard world that can give him neither accepted tradition nor acceptable values...
...If Bloom is not the Everyman of all time, he is at least an Everyman of today, our self appointed Jew, not a pilgrim but a bum, walking down Nothing Street, heading for Nowhere...
...When such writers as Bernard Malamud, who peoples his eerie world with sad dwarfs from a long-lost ghetto, and Truman Capote, whose fancy is often taken by physical malformation, celebrate the grotesque, they only affirm a popular belief that the subhuman and the anti-human are the truly human...
...LovE SWEEPS the field consistently on today's stage but nowhere with such boring regularity and with such an accompaniment of chatter as in the little plays of Paddy Chayefsky...
...Even you, he says, who are so gross, so awful, even you I love...
...However, he is bewildered, he is depressed...
...He is apolitical—that is, while he votes for the Democrats and considers himself a liberal, he has no political ideas—and whether or not he is attached to a university his thinking is neither scholarly nor original...
...The White Jew has not yet come to the pretty pass of MacLeish's hero...
...Pain, we know, is not a virtue...
...Society offends him but he is awed by its well-oiled sophistry and subtle scientism...
...Yet out of pain and united in pain there has arisen a new generation, the bleeding-heart generation of the fifties...
...it has been used in certain circles to mean a Jew who lacks the offensive traits of his tribe, a Jew, in other words, who looks and behaves like a "hwatt mayun...
...When Zooey Glass tells his sister Franny that a fat lady from the Middle West is Jesus Christ, he speaks as a White Jew...
...If he is John Cheever or Philip Roth, the pictures he paints are distortions of the commonplace...
...When confidence men are plentiful it seems unwise to fancy oneself as a victim...
...Love in these cases is sometimes tempered with bitterness and the intelligent man's awareness that sickness and despair are the actual stuff of his art...
...Aha, we say to ourselves, he will curse man and die...
...he understands...
...The hero of this piece, the White Jew (pronounced white Jew), is cut from a different bolt of cloth altogether...
...Like Paddy Chayefsky's bookkeeper, j. B. goes back to his wife and, fortified by love, the two of them, I suppose, will try to make a life in the ruins...
...Pain is what enables us to recognize and so to love one another...
...Its typical member, the White Jew, is young or youngish, college-educated, sensitive, literary, and a self-proclaimed neurotic who may or may not be, but usually is, undergoing analysis...
...No one is asked to be optimistic today and few can be bravely radical...
...No longer silent, no longer waiting, this generation has begun to organize...
...Sexual love, love of the little guy, and mother love are equally important...
...Chayefsky shouts: Go home to your women and shut up...
...if he is Nathanael West, a precursor of the movement, genuine monstrosities excite him...
...This is something to look forward to...
...Let us ignore its mythic and poetic entanglements and glance only at J. B. himself as a representative modern man...
...The White Jew may be a Christian with a Jewish heart or even a Jewish Christian, but the important thing about him is that he is a victim...
...Far too little of the right sort of attention has been given to the hideous social and political implications of this work, J. B., Archibald MacLeish's story of the modern Job...
...Corporations snatch away his college friends, television seduces his children, and even art sells out publicly, producing a book club "for people who like books better than automobiles...
...Its more articulate members seem bound to engulf the sixties as well...
...I92 H If the outsider can identify himself with all of suffering humanity, he is no longer an outsider, he is in...
...When the organization world presses too hard on the outsider, he declares his contempt for conformity by clutching deformity to his breast...
...It is in the strength and the ideas of the individual that we have sometimes found greatness...
...Having been forced to recognize his own mortality, he can afford the compassion for other mortals that the jealous Gentile perceives and resents...
...As the play progresses, however, catastrophe follows misfortune as in the Biblical story and when we last view J. B., he is a mutilated victim of the hydrogen bomb...
...Meanwhile he creeps around in the darkness waiting for Santa Claus to come...
...Love holds the mixture together and without it the author's work would lose all of the slickness, smoothness and blandness that makes it popular...
...while at the same time it beckons, slyly, temptingly...
...Ye flee unto your neighbor from yourselves and would fain make a virtue thereof...
...After such a triumph it must be supposed that everything goes right for him...
...Cute midgets, cute dwarfs, cute cripples, cute homosexuals, cute whores, cute drug addicts, cute Negroes, and cute children, especially cute miserable children, remind him constantly of the hand of God in all our doings...
...The truth is that he is as afraid of them as the real Job was magnificently unafraid of the Lord...
...In recent years I have heard it used, in and around New York City, of the Gentile who, for one reason or another, has become infatuated with the Jews...
...The term "white Jew" (pronounced hwatt jeeoo) is not unknown in this country...
...If you don't have a woman, get one...
...If married he is domestic, though open to divorce...
...He may, in his own life, pursue it zestfully, yea, from bed to bed, but it will elude him forever...
...With apologies to Norman Mailer, I use the phrase because it seems to express conveniently a number of attributes of the would-be lover I shall presently describe...
...All hate the job, two of them are lonely, one is resigned, the other two need money...
...one man's togetherness is another man's compassion...
...In every case, love of weakness in generalcompassion— is the thing that counts...
...This usually happens among arty people and intellectuals but lately the fad has spread...
...It is the key to success for playwrights and prophets of the stage and the television screen...
...What we, the heirs of American lost causes, must fear instead is the frustration that will lead us first into a mire of hopelessness where, eyes averted, we clutch at one another, congratulating our own weakness in whining words of love...
...Erich Fromm quotes Nietzche in Man for Himself: "Your neighbor love is your bad love of yourselves...
...He blusters by day but at night he has bad dreams...
...Hitler's storm troopers grew out of a Weltschmerz akin to our own...
...In it the worries of a group of male bookkeepers come to light during a night on the town...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
