George Santos and What it Means to Be Jew-ish
The Svelte and Sardonic “Synagogue” of Bloomingdales, Bagels and Bette Midler
By David Gottfried
George Santos, the disgraced new Republican Congressman from New York, a man who has lied about every aspect of his life, told us that he did not lie when he said he was Jewish. (He is Roman Catholic.) He “explained" that he was Jew-ish, i.e., he sported Jewish attributes.
I contend that many people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, seem to pride themselves on being Jew-ish. If they are female or gay, their personalities may be liberally sprinkled with tart and trying mannerisms culled from studious reviews of old Barbara Streisand movies. They know not a whit about Judaism or its provocative and exacting conceptions of ethical behavior, but they sure do know all about Bloomingdales, Bagels and Bette Midler, and Judge Judy’s bitchy vim and bellicosity, and this makes them Jew-ish of a sort. They are like survey courses for college freshmen and headlines in the evening news: They are brimming with snappy, caustic one-liners and are devoid of depth.
If they are male and insecure and want to be tough like Don Rickles, they pride themselves on a Jewish vocabulary which consists of three words: Shvatza, Shlemeil and Oy vey. They love the guttural Yiddish syllables because they love angry, guttural German syllables (Yiddish is 85 percent German) because they have a very bad case of “identification with the aggressor.” (Identification with the aggressor is one of the most basic psychological defense mechanisms outlined by Freud and his progeny. It is the tendency to emulate people who persecute you. Footnote 1)
I have seen some of the worst forms of Jew-ishness in some Jews who emigrated from the old Soviet Union. These Jews know nothing about the Jewish faith. They have filled this void with Eastern European bigotry against Jews. In other words, they believe they will be true and fully realized Jews when they become greedy, lying entrepreneurs making a killing in business. For example, I knew a Jewish woman from Russia who knew so little about Judaism that she was apt to confuse the three patriarchs of Judaism with the 3 stooges. She came to America with a zealous, very aggressive desire to become a great and powerful Jew. What was her career ambition ? “I Vant to be a Financier,” she thundered, and the last syllable in financier was pronounced loudly and aggressively, suggesting that she wanted to SEAR your western, soft body in the hottest frying pan of her right wing, but thoroughly Stalinoid, imagination. Quite frankly, many Eastern Europeans who detested the Soviet Union have let their anger grow and curdle into an almost metastatic Hitlerite rage as in the case of one gentile Rumanian immigrant to America, who I knew at a law firm I once worked at, who argued that Republicans should kill all the Democrats in the USA.
Jew-ish identity is a form of schizophrenic ideation.
Dr. Silvano Arietti identified a form of logic which existed among schizophrenics, artistic geniuses and primitive peoples. He called this logic paleologic, or old logic. It was a form of logic which violates the logical rules set forth by Aristotle and common sense.
In paleologic, the thinker posits that A equals B because they have C in common. For example, a schizophrenic patient sees a cap on his nurse’s head. He also sees a tierra on Queen Elizabeth. Both the psychiatric nurse and the British Queen don headwear. The patient, employing paleologic, concludes that the nurse is Queen Elizabeth because like the queen she possesses headwear.
In the poetic metaphor, the writer might say that mountaintops are nipples on big breasts of land. Of course, mountaintops are no such thing, but if one were to consider only the shapes of things, i.e., if identification were predicated on the possession of one common attribute, then mountain tops could become nipples.
In any event, people like George Santos will reason that since some Jews are fabulously wealthy sheisters, they will become Jews if they become fabulously wealthy sheisters.
Jew-ish identity is a problem akin to our sloppy, error-ridden methods of adjudging political movements and candidates.
In this video-driven era of short attention spans and shallow thinking, we are loathe to analyze a candidate’s politics. Neither the New York press nor the plebians of Peoria want to delve into a politician’s economic platforms. Therefore, we have developed short cuts to help us review a politician. If a politician possesses certain attributes, we assume that politician is a liberal or a conservative, and then liberals and conservatives will know if that pol is their candidate.
For example, we have been told that if one likes Volvos, Starbucks and quiche Lorraine (I am probably showing my age. Quiche Lorraine was the signature dish of privileged prissy liberal prigs in 1979; I don’t know what they eat today), one is a liberal, and that if one likes meatball heroes, football and action movies, one is a conservative. In this way, we don’t have to evaluate a candidate’s stance on an issue. And so because Debbie Wasserman Shultz (A congresswoman who was a hot shot in Hillary’s 2016 presidential bid) sounds like a broad from Brooklyn and has a Jewish name (Until you get to the end of the name) people assume she is a liberal and are unmindful that her biggest contributors were payday lenders and check-cashing establishments, parasites who prey on the poor.
And it is this stupid streak in American politics which made George Bush the elder win in 1988 by professing an ardent appetite for fried pork rinds (a favorite in the vending machines of every bus station and gas station from Virginia to Florida), which made Dukakis lose to George Bush in 1988 by advising midwestern farmers to plant Belgian endive, and which made politics, an arena of the most deadly seriousness, something contested with all the profundity of a television game show.
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Footnote 1: I suppose someone will ball me out for having mentioned Freud. They will say that since he was patriarchal and sexist, he must be ignored. That’s almost akin to saying that because Hitler was a son of a bitch we must not mention him in any account of World War Two.
Freud was, perhaps, a bit of a sexist but that does not mean that every one of his ideas are invalid. To denounce an idea, simply because it was associated with someone who we have all been taught to hate is, per Aristotle, one of the informal logical fallacies, argumentum ad hominum. For example, Fidel Castro probably uses toilet paper. Does that mean that conservatives must refrain from using toilet paper as toilet paper is a wretched thing because Castro uses it.
ARE U IMPLYING IM SCHIZOPHRENIC JUST BECAUSE I IDENTIFY AS JEW-ISH AND MY GENDER NEUTRAL PRONOUNS ARE NOW THEY THEM?
OY VEY VAT AM I TO DO; U PROBABLY THINK IM SOME SCHLEMEIL WHO PRETENDS TO LIKE KNEIDLACH, BRISKET, ROASTED CHICKEN, KUGEL N LATKES JUST TO FIT IN WITH MY COMMUNITY...I WILL DRAW THE LINE AT CALLING MY BLACK FRIENDS SHVATZAS...LOL
THE MAN IN OUT OF HIS MIND BUT I BLAME THE PARTY LEADERS THAT ALLOWED HIM TO CONTINUE EVEN THOUGH MANY HAD SOUNDED THE ALARM. MORE SO THE MORONIC DEM PARTY FOR NOT WANTING TO SPEND THE $$ TO DO MORE VETTING. INSTEAD THEY LEAKED THE LITTLE INFO THEY HAD TO THE PAPERS PRAYED AND HOPED THEY WOULD DO THE WORK FOR THEM. GUESS THAT DIDNT PAN OUT. EVERYTHING IVE READ IS THAT HE IS PUSHED ASIDE IN CONGRESS MUST BE TERRIBLY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR HIM.
THIS WAS FUNNY TO READ VERY ENJOYABLE. THANKS 😊