Reflections
Mayer, Milton
REFLECTIONS Milton Mayer Just Like the Gentiles To be a Jew is to be conscious of being a Jew and of being called one; conscious, too, of the world's disorder and degradation and the odds that...
...There's no point in a Jew's going along...
...But he is being killed all the time, in retaliation for having sent the Jew Jesus forth to torment the Gentiles by preaching the un-Gentile preachment of redemptive love...
...They want to be both assertive—they have to skate fast, the ice is so thin—and popular...
...It may not be alienated...
...Clout...
...Who really cared about the miserable Arabs as long as the Jews retrieved their 2,000-year-old Homeland (which was also the Arabs' 1,000-year-old Homeland...
...On June 3, 1982, a young Arab in London shot the Israeli ambassador to England, and the attempted assassination served the Israelis as the pretext for staging a two-month pogrom throughout Lebanon with the burning of shops and mosques and homes and schools—and hospitals—and the murder and maiming of thousands of Arabs...
...Besides Morris Raphael Cohen, there is Philip P. Cohen, who was waiting for a rush-hour bus in Madison, Wisconsin, which he adorns, and a bus with people hanging out all the doors and windows went by without stopping...
...Nobody wants them...
...The Gentiles don't know how to solve problems...
...It is to be a liquor dealer or a con man or a two-pants-suit salesman or a violinist, especially a two-pants-suit salesman or a violinist...
...Israel now manufactures its own cluster bombs"—and exports them, just like the Gentiles...
...Are the Israelis Jews...
...I was optimistic by thirty...
...The Jews were supposed to have been chosen, perhaps for suffering, perhaps for sacrifice, perhaps for teaching the Gentiles justice, mercy, and humility...
...It didn't work out...
...On November 7,1938, a young German Jewish refugee in Paris shot the third secretary of the German Embassy...
...It has to be bought in oratorial currency by every President and candidate for President, every Senator, every Representative, every metropolitan alderman...
...Are the Israelis Jews...
...I like," says a Jew who tries to stay out of trouble and maintain a low profile (and be approved), "to think of them as Israelis and not as Jews...
...Look at them in Israel now...
...In righteousness (their prophet told them) were they to be established...
...Jews are disproportionate...
...Or a lawyer...
...But the Sunday paper has a cartoon captioned, "Still Trying to Hatch," showing a dove sitting on an egg labeled "Arabs-Jews Peace...
...The American Jews are shameless when they cover themselves and say, "Nobody here but us Americans, boss," and just as shameless when they uncover themselves and hand the Israeli destroyers $27 million...
...They were supposed not to worship the work of their own hands and whore after false gods, as the Gentiles do, and abandon justice, mercy, and humility for the pursuit of money, fame, and power...
...they do not bleed like the Gentile Shylock...
...When Prime Minister Begin was here at the height of the Israeli massacre of the Lebanese and the Palestinians (in that order), here to tell President Reagan that he wanted more of his guns but none of his lip, there was a luncheon for Begin by the leading Jews, that is the rich Jews (just like the Gentiles), and the luncheon raised $27 million for Israeli "development...
...These Israelis now—just like the Gentiles—are thpv Tpw's...
...A clear case of anti-Semitism," said Philip P. Cohen...
...But the world needs another Balkan ethnocracy like it needed—and was bound to get—another hole in the head...
...The Jews smile and laugh and tell jokes, but they aren't sure that the other fellow (even the other Jew) likes them at all...
...Are the Israelis Jews...
...To do no worse than the Arabs did at the Munich Olympic Village or the Americans at My Lai is no good at all...
...They are disproportionately perfervid...
...In Chicago, some Jews put up a statue of a Jewish hero of the American Revolution, thinking that the Gentiles would admire it and be less anti-Semitic...
...He said he thought the money could be found—I always liked that 'found'—but how did I propose to bring the miracle to pass...
...Arabs are not our kind of people...
...The small Jewish vote is more important than the big black vote because the Jews have disproportionate clout...
...Where ever are they to go...
...The whole heartless world, including the United States, rejected them (as it subsequently rejected the Palestinians...
...conscious of having to fight...
...The only difficulty with the "Middle Eastern" problem is that it is insoluble (except on a bloody patchwork basis) short of great-power intervention moving the world closer to a third, and last, great war...
...The Israeli-Arab "crisis" began—and the statesmen all knew it began—sixty-three years ago when the British government decided it could bring worldwide Jewish influence to the side of war-torn England by saying coyly that "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," adding, equally coyly, that "it [is] clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine...
...in 1941 the intrepid ignoramus, racist, and innocent Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh made a speech in Des Moines attacking the disproportionate influence of the Jews in moving the country into war against Hitler, and he was run right out of American life, so disproportionately influential were the Jews...
...The most frightful of those weapons—unmentioned—was, of course, the cluster bomb...
...Let me tell you," said the late Robert M. Hutchins, "how I became anti-Semitic...
...Schutzjuden...
...To be a Jew, then, is to have a little money, and, if possible, a lot more, and to spend it selfishly and selflessly...
...General George (Blood and Guts) Patton was a Gentile, and so was Dickie Nixon, who got his Quaker mother to take him to the Pat-ton movie every time it came to town...
...But they were supposed (if they were Jews) to be different from the Americans, or the Britons, or the Huns...
...But are they Jews...
...The leader of the Jewish community said, 'Oh,' and then he said, 'Bob, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this country, and it's growing...
...Or a professor...
...Not all Jews fit the stereotype, but enough do to raise the question: Are the Israelis Jews...
...Not on your tintype...
...They are disproportionately radical and reactionary, disproportionately redolent of the Boy Scout virtues: thoughtful, imaginative, considerate, affectionate, loyal...
...I know," said the hunchback, "I used to be a hunchback...
...taste...
...What can be done for them to get them out of the mud and blood in which they wallow with the Americans, the Britons, and the Huns...
...Karl was a Jew, like Groucho...
...Begin is right—and the great Jewish community of the United States is a hissing and an abomination...
...They are disproportionately few...
...there's nobody to go along with...
...You can't tell a Jew by what he says or does or calls himself (or changes his name to...
...To be a Jew is to be a money-lender among Gentiles who don't know and don't care that the Gentiles forced the Jews to be money-lenders or lose their protection from pogrom a millennium ago...
...in Washington that "cluster bombs have not been sent to Israel in recent years...
...I told him that for $250,000 I could make the University of Chicago the greatest university in history in ninety days...
...They seem to be conditioned by ages of suffering and sacrifice imposed—the suffering and sacrifice they spurned like the tough mugs they were in the days of the prophets...
...Jews aren't soldiers, Masada or no Ma-sada, Maccabees or no Maccabees...
...Not in a pig's ear...
...You can change your noses," said the punster Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch during the plastic surgery boom, "but you can not change your Moses...
...That's how he won the war, recruiting the battered, tattered remnant who fled to Israel to perpetrate a racist holocaust no matter what the world says...
...Not so...
...The attempted assassination served the Nazis as the pretext for staging the Kristallnacht pogrom throughout Germany with the burning of shops and synagogues and homes and schools and the arrest and torment and deportation of thousands of Jews (and the murder of countless of them...
...These are Jews...
...To be a Gentile is to want to get along—not a bad thing—but to go along in any case...
...Or a doctor...
...The worst thing about the great Jewish community of the United States is that it is no worse than the great Gentile community...
...But a couple of weeks later there was an obscure little leak from some sneaky corner (anti-Semitic, eh...
...The Israelis—smart Jews, eh?—did it better in Lebanon...
...I was already anti-Gentile, but I didn't know I was anti-Semitic until the evening of December 31, 1932...
...The Jewish cliche has it that the Jewish problem is really a Gentile problem...
...I will tell you how different they are, in fact, from the Americans, the Britons, and the Huns...
...You know," said Otto Kahn to the hunchback, "I used to be a Jew...
...Some Jews are ridiculous enough to be Gentiles, and some Gentiles are wayward enough to be Jews...
...In his autobiographical sketch in "Who's Who in America," he writes: "Religion: Jewish (member Religious Society of Friends...
...Not all they that say, "Lord, Lord," shall enter the Kingdom...
...They could be prayed for, if only the Gentiles knew how to pray and the Jews themselves were not too busy wallowing to pray...
...they have clout galore...
...Not all Jews are Jews, and not all Gentiles are Gentiles...
...Just how this trick was ever to be turned, short of the armed establishment of multiple sovereignties, the Balfour Declaration just as coyly neglected to say...
...It is to maintain—that is, be stuck with—a non-low profile and to hanker after a low one plus approval...
...Whatever is to be done about the Jews...
...I just want to bash in a few Nazi heads before I die," said Louie Gottschalk to Morris Raphael Cohen, and Morris Raphael Cohen said, "Louie, bashing in heads is for the 96 per cent, not for the 4 per cent...
...Jews are touchy, and their best jokes, like Philip P. Cohen's, are about their touchiness...
...The Israelis right now are the triumph of the modern world, swinging America (by virtue of the American Jewish clout) by the tail and hitting people at random, hitting them with only one distinction: They are Arabs...
...But not an accountant...
...They stand alone, as they stood before Hitler, not in despair and mystification, but in jackbooted pride...
...Well along into the second month of the slaughter of the innocents in Beirut (and in sinless Sidon, and in sinless Tyre), Ronald Reagan, a Gentile Begin, deplored the Israeli use of "self-defensive" U.S...
...What ever are they to do...
...I told him that I was a great student of modern European history and that President von Hindenburg could not avoid appointing Hitler chancellor of Germany for more than another sixty days...
...Hitler transmitted it to the Jews of Israel, even though he was beaten and dead when he did it...
...All I would need, if I could get started right away, would be another thirty days after that to hire every Jewish scholar in Germany—and get them for coffee and buns...
...That was the Big Idea...
...conscious, too, of the world's disorder and degradation and the odds that are stacked against one in it...
...The ancient Zionist dream of Eretz Yisrael, which inspired the Declaration, was similarly coy...
...And disproportionately influential...
...To be a Jew is to be in trouble and/or make trouble and/or avoid trouble...
...Not if the protesters are...
...To be a Jew is to fight and fight interminably but not to be a soldier and fight with carnal weapons (at which Jews are bound to lose...
...Einstein was a Jew—like Bugsy Siegel, and Hart, Schaffner, and all three or four Marxes...
...Are these, too, these Americans, Britons, Huns—are these Jews...
...The Israelis9 Gentile conduct has isolated them from the only Gentile friends they had The Jews that Hitler left alive—the remnant—had to do something, go somewhere...
...They can not, it seems, help themselves very much whatever they do, wherever they go...
...Are the Israelis Jews...
...Jewish^ eagles, as they were of Biblical yore, they fly, high over their victims, hands hopelessly outstretched to them, dropping fire made in America...
...To be a Jew is to be a big giver and to be seen giving big, putting your mouth where your money is...
...They were supposed to be different and do differently from the Gentiles...
...Ten years after the statue was erected there was one millimeter-to-the-nth-degree more or less anti-Semitism in Chicago (and everywhere else...
...Never in the past," said Begin graciously, "was the great Jewish community of the United States so united around Israel...
...General George (Blood and Guts) Pat-ton was not a Jew...
...Are the Israelis Jews...
...But holocaust appears to be an acquired Milton Mayer is the Roving Editor of The Progressive...
...The Jews admired it, and the Gentiles went right by it...
...weapons for self-offense...
...Nobody wants anybody...
...A Gentile is something else altogether...
...They could be Americans, or Britons, or Huns, adjusting to the environment—the sovereign American, British, and Hun principle...
...In any case, an interesting (and interested) fellow, unless he's only a Gentile in drag...
...The fact of Isaiah and Jeremiah, of Amos and Hosea, is that the Gentile problem is really a Jewish problem...
...And of not wanting to...
...A Jew is likely to be killed in any saloon brawl or lynching, so he doesn't want to kill...
...These Israelis—a few thousand of them protested their country's atrociousness—are these Israelis Jews...
...The trouble is that there are too many Jews here now.'" There is no adjusting to the modern world, not for the Jews...
...just look at them and their Gentile world...
...To be no worse than the Arabs or the Americans is not to be much good...
...To be a Jew is to be a philanthropist, but not an anonymous philanthropist...
...They can't do it any cheaper—least of all by being like the Gentiles...
...In order to stay awake past my bedtime—it was New Year's Eve— I engaged one of our University of Chicago trustees in conversation...
...The Israelis' Gentile conduct has isolated them from the only Gentile friends (dubious friends, at that) they had in the world...
...The Jews have got to save the world's soul and begin by saving their own...
...Gentiles, with exceptions, some of them honorable, are not at all that interesting...
...The worst thing about the britches-busting little community of Israel is that it is no worse than the Arabs...
...Have it and use it...
...Only by what he is...
...A truly woebegone people with their Gentile bravura, a people who have, as their God told their prophet, "turned their back on me, and not their face"—what can be done for them...
...He had money, he was generous, and, what was more to the point, he was a leader of the Jewish community—a pushover for purposes of the conversation...
...The Jewish vote may not be ignored...
...Take your cold fish, now, a cheerful, incurious sort playing his cards close to the vest, and like as not you've got a Gentile on your hands...
...You'd be touchy, too, if you were a Jew...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
