Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on May 22, 2013

Joe Biden spoke last night in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month. Biden has long, deep ties to the Jewish community Obama actually picked him in 2008 in part to reassure skittish Jewish Democrats. Biden indeed offered fulsome, heartfelt praise in his remarks, before wandering into highly uncomfortable terrain and delivering a speech that is likely to be quoted by anti-Semites for years and decades to come. (Its already the subject of excited discussion among the white supremacist community.)

Bidens remarks were not anti-Semitic. They were very, very philo-Semitic. The thrust of his largely unscripted monologue is that Jews have contributed enormously to the United States. Thats obviously a standard spiel for praising any ethnic group, but Biden took care to emphasize that Jews have not just contributed their share to the United States, but far more:

The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you

You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates

I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact youve had on the development of this nation.

Its obviously true that Jews have flourished in the United States and, as Biden says, have achieved massively disproportionate representation in fields like science, culture, politics, academia, and so on.

Jews regard this fact with a mixture of pride and neurosis. The neurosis is a fear that our success will be seen as a kind of invidious control, that the broader society will at some point say, no, you have too much. Ivy League schools in the last century imposed first overt quotas, and then more subtle geographic and character-based admissions standards, precisely to suppress the disproportionate Jewish share of their student body. The first generation of Hollywood moguls lived in terror that they would be seen as using their control of film to impose a particular Jewish slant upon the culture and labored endlessly to dispel any such suspicions.

Its also true that, while Jewish opinions run the ideological gamut, they have clustered heavily on the left end of the political spectrum. When you combine that fact with the fact of disproportionate Jewish representation in politics and culture, you have a weirdly shared belief among philo-Semites and anti-Semites. As Biden proceeds to laud Jewish contributions to American politics, you can see the audience go from kvelling to shvitzing:

The embrace of immigration is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.

You cant talk about the civil rights movement in this country without talking about Jewish freedom riders and Jack Greenberg, he said, telling a story about seeing a group of Jewish activists at a segregated movie theater in Delaware. You cant talk about the womens movement without talking about Betty Friedan

Here is the original post:
Biden Praises Jews, Goes Too Far, Accidentally Thrills Anti-Semites

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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