| WEB EXCLUSIVE: THE WONDERING JEW |
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| Written by Claudia Lee | |||||
| Tuesday, 08 March 2005 | |||||
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Do Jews Get Shitfaced Enough?, How Peachy Was Nietzsche? Do Jews Get Shitfaced Enough? It seems every other immigrant group in America has some great ancient drinking culture. The Germans have Oktoberfest, the Russians have cold nights with a bottle of vodka, and the Britons have Guinness and the Irish Car Bomb. The crucial question is clear: Do Jews get drunk enough? Sure, I sip a little Manischewitz every now and then, but who doesn’t? Being the curious college student that I am, I probed deeper into the issue, using the superior investigative skills I developed that year I worked at my middle school TV station. I was put into contact with the great scholar Jonathan Sarna at Brandeis and he pointed me to some passages in his book American Judaism, especially those on Prohibition. The Volstead Act was passed on January 16, 1920. However, within the act there was the stipulation that those who require wine “for sacramental purposes or like religious rights” were exempt. The act itself hit into the deep anti-modernism in America. a yearning to return to the purity of America before the mass immigrations. However, the abuse which soon followed within the Jewish community did nothing to help the image of these immigrant Jews. The unscrupulous selling of wine on the side led to a tarnished reputation for the Jews, again reinforcing stereotypes held over from Europe about corrupt Jewish business practices. As the years progressed, the tenuous relationship between immigrant Jews and alcohol grew further apart, following the scandal. Today, it is known that Jews have the lowest rate of alcohol consumption and abuse in America of any immigrant community. In an interview with the doctoral candidate at Emory University, Marni Davis, she poses the astute question: “You would think the Jews would take on surrounding drinking culture.” Instead, Jews in America still seem to maintain a separate identity in regards to drinking. One theory is that since immigrant Jews mostly hail from Europe, they carry with them a European sensibility about drinking. Alcohol is neither sanctified nor glorified, but instead one is exposed to it with a casual attitude. “Wine is seen as part of a meal in the home, and it takes on a different meaning,” says Davis. She cautions, however, that “American Jews participate in American culture fully,” so this theory may have its faults. As this was not enough to satisfy me in my unquenchable thirst for the truth, I pushed ahead. Another theory as to the low level of alcohol consumption amongst Jews is that alcohol is so tied to religion and ritual that it exists outside the sphere of social drinking. Saying Kiddush every Friday night sorta takes away any exotic appeal of alcohol when you are a kid. For those Jews who are particularly more pious than others, less and less alcohol is drunk. Emily and Monica, two Jewish girls I interviewed observed that in their own families, the parent who was more religious also drank less. It seems that the closer the Jews were to the time of immigration, the more they partook of the juice. There are countless Yiddish Drinking songs, very raunchy, talking about trying to get as shitfaced as possible and to get the rabbi drunk off whisky as perhaps an added bonus. This, combined with the Prohibition scandal seems to point to more of a drinking culture in the Old Country, as opposed to the Land of Opportunity. But ultimately, is there a quantitative goal that Jews need to reach in their drinking? Despite scientific studies, I still know many Jewish prize winners here at Smith who can hold their liquor. I guess we should all just thank God Manischewitz is so cheap, or we’d all be teetotalers. How Peachy was Nietzsche? Was the greatest modern philosopher an anti-Semite? Ever since his now-infamous distinction between menschen and ubermenschen–men and physically and mentally ideal super-humans–was ID’d as an inspiration for that whole World War II brouhaha, Friedrich Nietzsche’s reputation as a philosopher has been on one heck of a rollercoaster ride. For every critic condemning him as an anti-Semite, there’s another working overtime to clear his name–it seems we just can’t make up our minds. At our wit’s end, New Voices set our crack team of researchers to the task–only to have them turn up some serious mixed signals: quotes that were seemingly anti-Semitic, side by side with quotes that were overweeningly flattering to the Jews. How did this iconic philosopher really feel about the Chosen? And why have his true feelings become so muddled over the years? “Nietzsche abominated anti-Semitism,” says Stanley Rosen, a prominent Nietzsche scholar at Boston University, putting the first question to rest. While Rosen acknowledged that some passages from the philosopher’s writings do paint desert-wanderers less than flatteringly, he points out that those quotes seem less anti-Semitic if you take a look at Nietzsche’s cultural context. “In the nineteenth century, that’s just the way people talked about Jews,” Professor Rosen said. “The way 75 years ago my parents’ generation thought about blacks, the people of the nineteenth century thought about Jews.” The second question–why Nietzsche’s strident anti-anti-Semitism has been obscured amidst speculation, denunciation, and myth–is trickier. Even folks unfamiliar with his work know of Nietzsche’s reputation as ideological father of the Nazi platform–a judgment that, again, takes Nietzsche out of context. Unfortunately for the truth, two large nails seal the philosopher into his anti-Semitic coffin: his choice of composer Richard Wagner as a mentor, and the intense admiration conferred on him posthumously by Adolf Hitler. But, just like Nietzsche’s supposedly anti-Semitic writings, popular assumptions about Nietzsche’s association with these men are based in distortion and fabrication. Nietzche was a fan of Wagner’s musical and scholarly works, and chose him as an intellectual guide in 1868. But as their relationship deepened, so did the composer’s intense anti-Semitism and proto-fascist political leanings. Disturbed by his mentor’s extremism, Nietzsche began to distance himself from Wagner’s views. In fact, he took a public stance against anti-Semitism, defending the oft-persecuted Jews in Human, All-Too-Human (1878), where he claimed that they were only cast as community scapegoat because the rest of Europe suffered from “mass envy” over Jews’ “energy and higher intelligence” and “accumulated capital of spirit and will.” In Beyond Good & Evil (1866), he wrote: “The Jews are, however, without any doubt, the strongest, most flexible, and purest race that is now living in Europe.” In short: yes, Nietzsche was at one point a friend of Wagner’s–and yes, he thought Wagner was a crackpot. Nietzsche’s association with Adolf Hitler is a tougher knot to untangle. The Führer quoted Nietzsche frequently in his speeches, and his devotion to the Aryan ideal was overwhelmingly influenced by Nietzsche’s take on social Darwinism, particularly his discussion of ubermenschen. But Hitler both oversimplified and misquoted Nietzsche at almost every turn. Taken in context, Nietzsche never intended the ubermensch to be the only kid on the block. While he did see his “super-man” as the natural result of social Darwinism, he recognized the ubermensch as just another category of person, existing in harmony with (okay, just a bit superior to) everyone else–including the Jews. The fact that Hitler was familiar with Nietzsche’s works at all, though, can be attributed to a lesser-known figure: the real culprit behind the philosopher’s bad rap, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. A proto-Nazi in high Wagnerian fashion, Elisabeth was a die-hard German nationalist who despised Jews. Returning to Germany after establishing Nueva Germania, an anti-Semitic Aryan colony in Paraguay, she took guardianship of her brother, who was in a vegetative state after a mental collapse. By carefully editing his published works, restricting access to his manuscripts, and interpreting his theories to fit her own proto-Fascism, Elisabeth was intentionally responsible for the widespread belief that her brother was the philosophical precursor to the Nazi dictate. Her acquaintance with Hitler and Mussolini sealed the fate of Nietzsche’s doctored philosophies, ensuring he would be misinterpreted for decades to come. Despite Nietzsche’s groundbreaking philosophical work, he wasn’t studied with much seriousness until the 1960’s–his often bleak and misanthropic philosophy appealed to the Existentialists, who brought him back into vogue and began to clear his name. But even though his bad reputation is a case of guilt by association (with a pinch of family backstabbing for good measure), the rumor that Nietzsche was a fascist, racist anti-Semite has persisted for nearly a century. Luckily, though, Nietzsche thought the Jews were pretty darn swell. What he thought about his sister–well, that’s a whole other story.
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