Here’s to the Jews!
One of the great, tragic mysteries of history is how the Jews became perennial scapegoats. What is not in doubt is how much they have given to human culture, and how much they have enriched my life… and yours, too.
The Egyptians. The Assyrians. The Babylonians. The Philistines. The Romans. The Christians. The Muslims. The communists. The Nazis. American white supremacists. Blacks. Who hasn’t hated on the Jews? Maybe the Singaporeans? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Maybe it’s not so mysterious, actually. It’s likely plain old jealousy. The Jews, as a whole, are what anyone, everyone, should want to be. They are strong. They are courageous. They are resilient. They are persistent. They are loyal. Their mental acuity seems to have a narrow range, between smart and brilliant. They are creative and inventive. They have a great sense of humor. They have good food. They generally succeed at whatever they try to do.
It’s probably this last characteristic that so bugs those who, ignorantly, believe themselves to be “superior” in some form or fashion to these people. After all, nobody bothers to be jealous of losers. Despite their staggering losses the Jews, as a people, have suffered over the millennia, they are anything but losers. Nothing, not even genocidal tyrants, can repress them for long. They come back, even stronger.
We didn’t have many Jewish families in the West Texas town I grew up in. I don’t think I ever had a Jewish classmate through high school. If I did, they kept it quiet. We did have a synagogue in town, so they were around. The only Jew I knew was an affable shop owner. Stanley Levitt had a tiny store over on the south side across the tracks. The best collection of cowboy boots and shirts for a hundred miles could be found right there. Yep, a Jew selling cowboy wear. From that sample size, I figured all Jews were pretty cool. Subsequent experience through the decades has barely dented that initial supposition.
I have been fairly close friends, I would say, with five Jewish fellas and one gal. Each of them helped me along on my journey with affection, wit and humor and no shortage of good food. There was never a dull meet-up, and now that I think about it, also never a stupid or dangerous episode, although Jerry might argue about that white-knuckle helicopter plunge down into the Grand Canyon to dare the Colorado River rapids.
I consider each of them a treasure I somehow stumbled upon outside of my own “culture.” But that’s only the start of the gifts the Jewish family has bequeathed me, and the world. As a songwriter I am interested in, well, songwriters. Clueless me, I was probably in my thirties when I realized that, hey, a lot of my favorite songwriters are/were Jewish! Who knew? The list is nothing short of dazzling. Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Donald Fagen, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Billy Joel, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, Phil Ochs, Lou Reed, Mary and Richard Rodgers, Carole Bayer Sager, Neil Sedaka to name a few, and those are just the Americans. The two biggest for me are Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. Take away the Jewish songwriters and half of the good stuff in the American Songbook goes silent.
In the field of philosophy, again, the Jews sparkle like diamonds. It starts with the Old Testament, of course. A lot of what passes for “wisdom” in the Bible falls apart if there is no such tampering, taunting God, which is highly likely. Nevertheless, the ancient Hebrews were adept psychologists, could spin a great tale, and occasionally produced some good poetry, literature (particularly Job) and noble ideals such as being kind to the “other,” in between petitioning God to smite them in the most humiliating way possible. Yet modernity would allow the Jewish mind to more productively contemplate and explore. Among that throng are Jacques Derrida, Victor Frankl, Eric Fromm, Noam Chomsky, Edmund Husserl, Moses Maimonides, Karl Marx, Thomas Nagel, Karl Popper, Peter Singer, Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Wittgenstein and hundreds of others.
Jewish scientists and inventors include Robert Adler who came up with the remote control; Paul Baran, one of the architects of what became the internet; Emile Berliner who invented the microphone, gramophone and helicopter; Hans Bethe who discovered how stars work; Niels Bohr, a titan of quantum mechanics; Max Born, another founding father of quantum theory; Andre Citroen produced the first affordable cars in Europe; Ferdinand Cohn, one of the founding fathers of modern bacteriology; Arthur Eichengrun developed aspirin; Albert Einstein, the titan of modern physics; Paul Ehrlich, basically the founder of chemotherapy; another quantum genius Richard Feynman; Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology; Alexander Friedman, one of the founders of modern cosmology; Casimir Funk who systemized food nutrients and came up with the term “vitamin;” Herman Goldstine who helped create the world’s first computer; Boris Jacobi who effectively invented the electric motor; Amos Joel Jr., a pioneer of the cell phone; Vladimir Khavkin created vaccines against plague and cholera; Karl Landsteiner who discovered our blood groups; John von Neumann, a founder of modern computer architecture; Theodore Maiman who created the first laser; Siegfried Marcus, the actual inventor of the automobile; Otto Meyerhof confirmed the biochemical unity of life; laying the foundation of modern biochemistry; Gregory Pincus was one of the inventors of the contraceptive pill; Philipp Reis created the first telephone; Hyman Rickover helped create the first nuclear submarine; Ida Rosenthal invented the bra; Selman Waksman who discovered antibiotics; Tadeusz Reichstein synthesized the powerful antioxidant we call Vitamin C; Boris Rosing who invented television; Fernand Widal who developed a test for and prevention for typhoid fever. These are just a few of the crystals on the peak of an iceberg; the list goes on and on.
Jews represent approximately 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Yet Jiminy H. Cricket! Of the Nobel Foundations awards, Jews have won eight percent of the awards for Peace, 13 percent for Literature, 19 percent of the awards for Chemistry, 25 percent for Physics, 26 percent for Medicine and a whopping 41 percent for Economics!
Aside from being out in nature alone with your thoughts, is there anything that helps keep us sane more so than humor? Here again, the Jewish wit delivers. Bud Abbott, Don Adams, Jason Alexander, Marty Allen, Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Joey Bishop, Lewis Black, Fanny Brice, Matthew Broderick, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Eddie Cantor, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Buddy Hackett, Goldie Hawn, Jonah Hill, Andy Kaufman, Jack Klugman, Harvey Korman, Lisa Kudrow, Jerry Lewis, the Marx Brothers, Jackie Mason, Gilda Radner, Randy Rainbow, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Don Rickles, Mort Sahl, Amy Schumer, Jerry Seinfeld, Allan Sherman, Sarah Silverman, Phil Silvers, Red Skelton, Jon Stewart, Ben Stiller, the Three Stooges, Gene Wilder, Henry Winkler. And these are just some of the American comics that I have laughed with.
No discussion of great American Jews should fail to mention one of my personal favorites, Levi Strauss. I proudly wear his jeans just about every day. In any conversation about the best American invention ever, Levi’s must be included.
Can you imagine American culture, or world culture, without these colossal contributors? I can. And it’s unbelievably cruder, more ignorant, less perceptive, less comfortable, less colorful, less joyful, more dangerous and in every conceivable way worse… by far. We might as well enter a time tunnel and end up in the 12th Century.
And these are the folks that some psychopaths would eliminate? Do they know any of this about the Jews? Of course not; they are dumb as dirt. But can you think of anything more insanely evil? To rid the world, or at least “their” America, of Jews. For what? So these pathetic lowlifes can “replace” them? Let us see just one of these purportedly “supreme” punks accomplish anything remotely close to the achievements of any Jewish name on this list. Two things are for sure: in any actual calibration of the “supreme” human clans insofar as contribution to our species is concerned, the Jews would be right up there at the top and the Nazi-saluting dregs at the bottom.
A big question remains. What is it about the Jewish people that makes them so excellently productive in pretty much whatever endeavor they choose to pursue, even if it is selling cowboy boots and shirts?
Well, that inevitably brings us around to religion.
As you probably know, I’m an equal opportunity knocker of ALL religions. Judaism certainly gets no pass, particularly since it had the audacity to spawn two of the most damaging “faiths” to ever assault the planet. OK, the Jews didn’t plan it that way. Things just got out of control. Well, what do you expect when you invent a God as tempestuous as theirs? What a tool! Somebody’s going to steal it and run amok.
Notably, none of my Jewish friends are very religious. Many, perhaps most, maybe almost all, of the notables just mentioned are/were not very religious. Bob Dylan was religious for awhile, dabbling in Christianity! Paul Simon is not religious. Einstein wasn’t religious.
Are all of these outliers? It does not seem so. A recent Pew survey states that less than one percent of religious American Jews attend worship services regularly. That’s not one percent of all U.S. Jews, but a measly one percent of those who do claim to be religious and go to synagogue occasionally. Only the Buddhists score worse (not that Christians — except the Mormons — are leagues better… which only underscores my claim that most religious people do not really believe what they want to believe). American Jews seem to be among the least religious of all Jews in the world. Yet even in Israel, the largest chunk of “Jews,” nearly half, are the Hileni, or secular, Jews. The Masorti, or traditional Jews, are about a quarter of the nation, while the serious religionists, the Dati (12%) and Haredi (ultra-orthodox, 10%) combined, make up roughly another quarter of the Jewish population.
So maybe it’s not, actually, the religion at all that is the source of the Jewish aptitude for success. Then what? Many point to the broader culture, which with or without religion stresses family, community, education and diligence. Those are strong enough characteristics to account for a lot, but there’s another that may bind everything together for world Jewry. That’s their perilous condition as the world’s favorite target for punishment.
Including, especially, from God. I’m not sure why Jews haven’t petitioned Him and requested to be relieved from their “Chosen People” duty. Two or three thousand years is enough. Let somebody else be the “Chosen” for awhile. See how they like it. No doubt, it’s been a run of misery for their clan overall.
As the “little guy,” small in sheer number, and often in physical stature, but adept at business and other enterprises, they ever represent a tempting mark for bullies of any and all stripes. Their very perennial vulnerability has helped them maintain a cohesion that few other cultures can match. It’s been ongoing for two and a half thousand years, at least. So, isn’t it deliciously ironic that the very ire directed toward the Jews has backfired on their haters and served as perhaps the key ingredient in their dogged survival and continuance? It’s always somehow satisfying when the underdog ends up biting the bullydog!
Through most of that long history, it has rarely been the Jews starting trouble. They have kept their heads down and tried to be good neighbors. It has been the people who were wont to denigrate Jews who have caused the trouble. Big Trouble. The Jews were just living their lives, being successful, giving to the world, and Wham! Here comes yet another evil persecutor. Yes, in almost every case, the evil was, indeed, the persecutor, the oppressor, not the oppressed. That doesn’t just apply to Jews but to almost all the oppressed through the entirety of history. And it certainly applies to every single dolt who would do ill to Jews, or anyone, today, in America or anywhere. “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” Really? No Jew would want to, or could, “replace” the low-life, slacker-nincompoops carrying such signs and wiki torches.
These anti-Jewish villains, whether Roman or Russian or German or Muslim or American share a commonality beyond plain evil. They are all conservatives! They all mistakenly believe they are the heroes of their culture defending virtuous tradition, or some kind of “purity” (conservatives are big on “purity”), while, in fact, they are murderous bastards defiling their own culture, race, gender, religion and any pretense of intelligence or virtue. Conservatism is the Ideology of Selfishness. It is very enticing, yet very dangerous because there is no limit to how selfish it can get.
Alas, Judaism and the Jewish family have their own conservatives. And these, just like their non-Jewish adversaries, run a gamut from unhelpful to poisonous. As with conservatives in every land, this is nothing new. The Bible makes heroes out of them. The destruction of Canaan was one of history’s worst atrocities, and it is rapturously described and joyously celebrated in that tome. Elsewhere, in chapter after chapter, anger, rage, carnage, violence, massacre, not to mention lewdness, ensues, selfishness running wild. If there is any book that American conservatives should be clamoring to ban and burn, it’s the Old Testament! Which goes to show how confused they are. The only reason they can be so in love with the Bible is because they haven’t read it!
So the sudden turn of the far right-wing government of Israel into an instrument of Canaan-like destruction in Gaza is not without historical precedent. The Hebrew tribe has, itself, committed genocide. It’s just a shock to our modern moral senses, and expectations from the gentle, peaceful, intelligent Jewish people.
This is absolutely not to downplay the horrific start of the War in Gaza by other conservatives, Hamas. Horror and anger and impulse to strike back are to understandable. Then again, that’s what Hamas thinks they were doing! See, that’s a problem. But an “anything and everything goes” response, including a reckless modern military assault upon millions of innocent and essentially defenseless citizens is absolutely not. Yet, with conservatives in control, it was perfectly predictable. All conservatives are prone to overreaction and, potentially, knee-jerk violence. All conservatives consider life cheap. Such attacks, just like 9/11, are seized on by pugnacious conservatives with an agenda (they always have an agenda) as a veritable engraved invitation to unleash their armed fantasies upon the “other.”
Calling each other “vermin” is a sure sign of who and what level of conservatism is involved. Hatred of the “other,” and a complete and utter disregard for life are merit badges for radical conservatives. When they go at each other, terrible things are going to happen.
And they are. First the cruel terrorism of Hamas, and now the outrageous, over-the-top, disastrous response by Israel. It saddens the world greatly that Israel is doing this. You don’t have to be any real fan of Palestinian, or broader Arab, societies, only a fan of, you know, human life, to rightly recoil from scenes — day after day — of elders, women, children, men who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Hamas atrocity, schools, mosques, colleges, parks, hospitals, shops, entire neighborhoods, doctors, journalists, aid-workers being blown to bits by bombs (hello, many made by America!). Anyone not blinded by rage can see this is wrong, terribly wrong. Rage is never helpful; it is the out-of-control extremity of anger, negative and dangerous, effectively bereft of rationality, discernment and compassion, rushing to “solutions” that end up only begetting more rage. But that’s currently Israel’s official policy. As it was America’s, when the Bush-Cheney conservatives leveraged our rage to clumsily rush thousands of troops into Afghanistan to find bin Laden and punish the Taliban, got a bunch of our kids killed (and innocent Afghanis) and our military demoralized, only to give the country back to the Taliban over a decade later. Bin Laden was eventually found by simply asking around, and sending a single squad to take him out.
Defend yourself, certainly, plot a well planned, surgical response. But the Hamas attack was over nine months ago, the Iron Dome is working, nobody in Israel is shrinking in fear of being killed in the next moment. No Tel Aviv hospitals, schools or neighborhoods are being bombed. Yet Gaza is effectively being razed, its people trapped and starved, its culture smashed, its infrastructure ruined.
It’s Jericho all over again. The very same “Israelites” sacking much the same city, just 60 miles from the original. Except this time they were actually provoked, and the whole world is watching, and is horrified. How is it possible that the human family hasn’t gotten a little better at this peace thing in 3,400 years? Especially in the one spot upon the planet that is the most religious, the confluence of three kindred “faiths” of peace, all believing in the same god? It’s not a flashing advertisement for the real virtue of religion.
There’s a simple, one word, answer: conservatives! That spot has always been a nest of conservatives! Conserving the only thing they always conserve: their own advantage, privilege and power. Oh, and Part Two of the answer: our chronic failure to identify this singular problem.
“An eye for an eye?” Twelve hundred Israelis were killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. At least 40,000 Palestinians and others in Gaza have been killed so far. That’s nearly 33 eyes for an eye. Doesn’t seem quite proportional. And still the “war” rages on, with the Israeli Prime Minister vowing it won’t end this year. When will it end? How many eyes, and lives, will it take to assuage conservative vengeance? One hundred eyes for an eye, a thousand eyes for an eye, a million eyes for an eye? Is there any number that will suffice? The Israeli Army has admitted there “is no plan.” Which is, effectively, to say that there is a plan, but it cannot be publicly revealed, not even to military commanders. But “the plan” is actually crystal clear, what else, the conservative dream— removal of all Palestinians from historical Israel!
It doesn’t really help the cause of peace in the Unholy Land, nor the credibility of Israel’s current regime, when the far-right Zionists have long loudly insisted, and proved it with their bullying, that the land is theirs and they are going to take it, no matter how many people need to be killed along the way. Yep, reality is so simple for the Ideology of Selfishness. This is the recurring refrain from conservatism. It’s ours. We’re gonna take it. Get out or we will take you out. Recognizing this conservative penchant and calling it out is in no way anti-Semitic. Nor is pushing back on “Zionism” anti-Semitic if it means the forced removal of Arabs from Israel, which the ultra-orthodox, i.e. the true believers, plainly tell us it does.
Like most people in the world, I support Israel as a state. Like most people in the world, including Jews, I support a homeland, a state, for Palestinians. I’m always on the side of the oppressed, which has often included Jews. Yet, here the tables are turned. There can be no arguing whatsoever that the Palestinian people have been oppressed by the state of Israel. To be clear, by conservative Israel (though many Israelis have eagerly or blithely gone along with it). Only conservatives could manage to transform the Jewish people into the overweight bully. All of this has been perpetrated by a tiny percentage of the total Jewish population inside Israel, much less the rest of the world. Jews, overall, are actually among the most liberal people in the world (perhaps yet another of their collective strengths). Yet this small cabal of idiots is dragging the welfare of virtually every other Jew on the globe through the mud and blood of their miscreant ambitions and gleeful violence. Most of the world wants to support Israel, yet that inclination is now being deflected and degraded. Israel has become an international outlaw by exacting “collective punishment” on Gaza. That’s a war crime. Indiscriminately bombing. A war crime. Targeting civilians. A war crime. Purposefully preventing aid, food, water, medical supplies, electricity from a civilian population. A war crime. This “war” has Israelis heatedly arguing with each other, American Jews arguing with each other, Jews arguing with non-Jews, and many other Americans wondering just why we send so much money to Israel in the first place, and should we send them any more weapons at all if they are going to become rounds for a such irrational, over-the-top rage.
There is no way Israel “wins” this “war.” Actually, even calling it a war is utter subterfuge; it’s a slaughter. And even if they ever come close to “eradicating” Hamas, which, just like other terrorist ideologies, will be next to impossible, by “winning completely” the Israeli right-wingers will have sown millions of seeds of utter hatred that will soon enough blossom into full-bore terrorists with even more to resent than the current crop. Every father, every mother, every brother, every sister, every cousin killed in Gaza permanently imprints hate. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind!” some wise person once wrote. Some of that resentment, or at least distrust and disapproval, will be shared by disparate people around the world, having witnessed depravity trumped by far worse depravity, the Israelis being the more vile villain. The Israeli people are not being made more safe by this stupidity but less safe, by far, in the near future. Further, this irredeemable criminality will only stink more and more as the years pass and the smoking wreckage of Gaza decays back into swamps. The American-Israel rift will only widen, and U.S. largess toward Israel will almost assuredly decrease. Israel will be a pariah of its own making, of its own stupidity, of its own selfishness. All of Israel’s true enemies are just loving this, including the zealots Hamas.
And this is all supposing that the affair doesn’t end up igniting World War III.
The conservatives in Israel haven’t quite become the Nazis. But they are trying hard. They’ve already got the pens, the walls, the wire, the checkpoints, the watchtowers, the military weaponry, the rogues in charge, their brownshirts as “settlers” in Palestinian territory, and the laws that allow all manner of abuse, up to and including murder. Now they’ve added the blitzkrieg. When Gaza is extinguished, the panzers will roll into the West Bank, those “vermin” next for extermination. A Vichy “government” for the rubble of Gaza and the West Bank is surely in the planning. It’s a darkly ironic twist to an already ink-black episode in world history. How the right-wingers think they are going to turn this into a great victory remains a mystery. The era of social acceptance of celebrating killing every living thing — man, woman, child and animal — inside the city faded away centuries ago.
No one wins here. Not the Palestinian people, in the short-run; in the long run this victimization may actually improve their standing. Not Israel. Not America, with blood all over its hands, the current president weakly pushing back and Trump, possibly returning, saying, “Let them finish the job.” Those who don’t know what that means probably should get a clue.
Not by a long shot will the damage be limited to the Unholy Land, that cursed expanse of rock and scrub God obviously loves to torment. The widespread disgust and revulsion and resentment over this conservative Jewish debacle will affect Jews around the globe. Including our friends, our heroes, our geniuses, our creators, our inventors, our hard-working and diligent and so often magnificent fellow humans. They don’t deserve what they will reap, potentially for generations, from this “war.”
So this essay has become a tale of Jews and conservatives. When the two combine, they can be as bad as when conservatism and any race or religion or skin color conjoin to stir trouble. It’s the Ideology of Selfishness. What else is it going to do? Be magnanimous? Play well with others? Not a chance. It’s conservatives causing the trouble, folks! C’mon, figure it out.
Oh, how could I forget. There’s another Jew who had a nasty experience with conservatives of his own flock. Turned out they didn’t like his attitude. Something about peace and love and forgiveness and non-conformity and shunning materialism and helping the poor and not being so judgmental and trying to find the “kingdom of heaven” inside of yourself, and even “loving your enemy.” What kind of crap is that?, wondered the conservatives, being ardently opposed to all of it. They accused him of blasphemy and took him to the officials, also conservatives, and demanded he be killed. What did he do? the key official asked. He’s not sufficiently selfish. Oh, righty, then, he’s definitely got to go. Certainly can’t have those ideas circulating around!
Yeah, that guy. Yeshua. A Jew. You may know him better by his Romanized name, Jesus, which he would not have recognized.
Two millennia later, we still have our conservatives. And because we all stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what they really are, they are still wreaking havoc. After a near-miss coup attempt a few years ago, ours here in America are now planning to “repeal the 20th Century.” That should go well, for everyone.
When will we learn? That’s a question Jews often ask. The rest of us should join them.
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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.
Copyright 2024, Rusty Reid
