[BretLudwig]

((Where's old Marianne "Mars Bar" Faithfull when you need her?

http://www.lyricsondemand.com/m/mari...iltlyrics.html

Bret.))

White Guilt, Catholic Guilt, Jewish Guilt

Ron Rosenbaum writes in Slate:

In Praise of Liberal Guilt: It's not wrong to favor Obama because of
race.

As I've mentioned before, I don't believe in white liberal guilt, in the
sense that I haven't met any white liberals who personally feel guilty
about 19th Century treatment of blacks and Indians. What I do I see all
around me, however, is white liberal status-striving. As Rosenbaum
boasts:

"Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you
have€”in the case of America's history of racism€”historical
awareness."

He goes on to say that what we really need is more, lots more, "white
conservative guilt."

As C. Van Carter summarized white liberal guilt:

I feel terrible about what those other people did! About what I do,
not so much.

C.S. Lewis described this as indulging €œin the popular vice of
detraction without restraint€� while feeling €œall the time that you are
practicing contrition€�.

Ron Rosenbaum wants you to know that if he had any ancestors who were mean
to slaves or Indians, he'd feel just awful, and you should too.

One of the unmentionable ironies of this whole topic is that the most
fervent proponents of white Americans feeling guilty about their ancestors
owning slaves and fighting Indians tend to be white Americans whose
ancestors didn't own slaves or fight Indians.

More generally, it's interesting to compare "white guilt" to "Catholic
guilt" to "Jewish guilt."

White guilt is, nominally, about whites feeling bad about whites in the
past being racist.

Catholic guilt is more personal. Typically, Catholics and lapsed Catholics
complete about being made to feel guilty about about their sins, especially
their sexual urges and behavior.

Jewish guilt, on the other hand, is infinitely joked about, but its
essence is almost never spelled out in such a way that non-Jews can
understand what it means.

Clearly, there is a form of Jewish guilt much like Catholic guilt that
focuses on personal ethical lapses (for example, my father got a call on
Yom Kippur once from a former colleague asking forgiveness for wronging
him on the job), but that's not what Americans typically mean by "Jewish
guilt."

What is typically meant is something almost exactly the opposite of "white
guilt."

Joshua Halberstam wrote in The Forward in 2005 in "The Myth of Jewish
Guilt:"

There is no credible empirical evidence €” Ive looked hard and
carefully €” that Jews feel more unwarranted guilt than others. The
hypothesis is of course too amorphous to confirm or disconfirm with
reliability; interestingly, however, when it comes to testable mental
states such as psychosis, the data suggests that Jews suffer less than
average. To be sure, sensitive, reflective individuals are discomforted
when they disturb the traditions, the communities and the families to whom
they feel attachments. This is true of Jews€¦ and everyone else.

Judaism is, in fact, deadly serious about guilt. Every fall, Jews
stand for hours in synagogues, reciting their sins and asking forgiveness
(Note: always in a communal context, with liturgy always phrased in the
plural). Guilt is institutionalized, ritualized in daily prayer, part of
the fabric of religious practice and language, but it is never
personalized as an ineluctable trait of individuals. If I repeated an
€œIts my Jewish guilt€� line to my Hasidic mother, she wouldnt
have the vaguest idea of what I was talking about; her traditionally
religious grandchildren would be equally uncomprehending. Russian Jews
dont get the gag, nor do Argentine Jews or Syrian Jews. Nor do
Israelis. Nor, for that matter, would much older American Jews.

How, then, did this bromide about Jewish guilt attain its status as a
distinctive Jewish disposition? Unlike jokes about kishke, which Jews
actually ate (and eat), and such slurs such as the Jews association
with money €” originally propounded by non-Jews €” the Jewish guilt
syndrome is a Jewish creation, the invention of the previous generation of
assimilated American Jews (see Portnoy, Alexander).

I recently reread Philip Roth's very funny 1969 novel about an assimilated
young Jewish bachelor lawyer with a high profile job in the liberal Lindsay
administration in New York city. He's is constantly nagged by his parents
to stop chasing shiksas, find a nice Jewish girl, get married, and move
back to New Jersey and give them some grandkids. After he breaks up with
his latest shiksa girlfriend, a semi-literate West Virginia hillbilly
lingerie model because she demands he marry her (but she's not smart
enough to mix her genes with his), he flees to Israel. But he finds he
doesn't like Israel or Israeli women and returns to Manhattan At the end,
he's laying on Dr. Spielvogel's couch, in a state of extreme frustration
at his life, narrating his 309 page complaint.

In other words, in the classic example of Jewish guilt, Portnoy's
Complaint, Jewish guilt is the opposite of white guilt: Portnoy's guilt
stems from not being ethnocentric enough. His parents make him feel guilty
because he's individualistically ignoring his racial duty to settle down
and propagate the Jewish race.
Halberstam goes on:

When these Jews became untethered and estranged from Jewish tradition
and the established forms of expiation, they created a psychologized
specter of guilt as a €œJewish condition,€� a Judaism so lite, it fits
on an HBO laugh track and on your friends T-shirt.

A recently published book, €œThe Modern Jewish Girls Guide to
Guilt€� (Penguin Group USA), exemplifies the breadth of this presumption.
Unlike the sophomoric parade of Jewish-mother books that, incredibly, still
makes its way to the humor shelves of Barnes & Noble, this anthology
features well-written contributions by significant, contemporary Jewish
women writers. But while each entry describes some episode of guilt,
crucial differences among them should be emphasized. Some are heartfelt
accounts of their authors struggles, often ongoing, with the demands of
Jewish tradition and the pressures of their Jewish subcommunities. The
excerpt reprinted in this newspaper by the invariably brazen Daphne Merkin
is representative of these conflicts. These are worthy investigations, as
are the explorations of Jewish women experiencing guilt about their
Christmas trees, non-Jewish romances or trading their expected domestic
lives for careers. They are of particular interest to us because they are
our stories (though, undoubtedly, you could find the same strains among
women calibrating their lives as Methodists and Mormons, Shias and
Sikhs).

However, other contributions to this book gush with ludicrous and
often offensive extrapolations from the authors own experiences to a
national neurosis. What is striking €” and sociologically significant €”
is not what these authors say, but the ease with which they say it. The
tone is set by the editors introduction, in which she asserts that Jews
are only too delighted and eager to make others feel guilty. Then she
reduces her rabbi fathers discomfort with her dating a non-Jew as
typical guilt-tripping. And so it begins. ...

Katie Roiphe, writing about the €œinfinite voraciousness€� of Jewish
guilt that refuses to allow anyone to be happy, is upset because her mother
would like her to have children: €œCould it be that lurking inside all the
Jewish feminist mothers of the 70s is a 1950s housewife who values
china patterns and baby carriages above the passions of the mind?€�

In other words, "Jewish guilt" in modern America is, more than anything
else, about not being racialist enough.
Thus, it's not surprising that, while there is some demand among some
American Jews for works that will help them feel guilty about what Israel
does to to Palestinians (see The Nation magazine), there is zero market in
America for the Jewish equivalent of white guilt. Indeed, the
disproportionate role of Jews in inflicting Communism upon humanity has
largely been crammed down the Memory Hole.

For example, the world's most famous living author published almost a
decade ago a two volume history of the relationship between Russians and
Jews. He called for mutual remembrance, contrition, apology, and
forgiveness. Here's an excerpt from the only excerpt yet published in the
United States:

Alas, mutual grievances have accumulated in both our people's
memories, but if we repress the past, how can we heal them? Until the
collective psyche of a people finds its clear outlet in the written word,
it can rumble indistinctly or, worse, menacingly...

I have never conceded to anyone the right to conceal that which was.
Equally, I cannot call for an understanding based on an unjust portrayal
of the past. Instead, I call both sides -- the Russian and the Jewish --
to patient mutual comprehension, to the avowal of their own share of the
blame...

I conceived of my ultimate aim as discerning, to the best of my
ability, mutually agreeable and fruitful pathways for the future
development of Russian-Jewish relations. ...

Indeed, there are many explanations as to why Jews joined the
Bolsheviks (and the Civil War produced yet more weighty reasons [e.g., the
mass pogroms detailed in Volume II, Chapter 16]. Nevertheless, if Russian
Jews' memory of this period continues seeking primarily to justify this
involvement, then the level of Jewish self-awareness will be lowered, even
lost.

Using this line of reasoning, Germans could just as easily find
excuses for the Hitler period: "Those were not real Germans, but scum";
"they never asked us." Yet every people must answer morally for all of its
past -- including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By
attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where
in all this is our error? And could it happen again?

It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish
people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks
willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself,
to one's consciousness, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer --
for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed
revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors. ...

To answer, just as we would answer for members of our family.

For if we release ourselves from any responsibility for the actions of
our national kin, the very concept of a people loses any real meaning.


Not surprisingly, the world's most famous living author can't get these
two books published in New York City. Don't call us, Alexander, we'll call
you."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/w...lic-guilt.html

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[Clyde Slick]

On 27 Mai, 21:43, "BretLudwig" wrote:
..

Jewish guilt has nothing to do with politics, Communism, Arabs,
Israel, or racialism. To understand Jewish guilt,
one must understand Jewish mothers!

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On May 27, 8:43*pm, "BretLudwig" wrote:

White guilt is, nominally, about whites feeling bad about whites in the
past being racist.

I feel bad about whites being racist in the present, Bratzi.

I don't, however, expect that you or 2pid would understand why.