Charles Krauthammer has a good column today talking about the issue in terms relatively lighthearted and poignant. Here's the relatively lighthearted bit, focused on what the columnist calls Krauthammer's Law: Everyone you know is Jewish. He explains:
For all its tongue-in-cheek irony, Krauthammer's Law works because when I say "everyone," I don't mean everyone you know personally. Depending on the history and ethnicity of your neighborhood and social circles, there may be no one you know who is Jewish. But if "everyone" means anyone that you've heard of in public life, the law works for two reasons. Ever since the Jews were allowed out of the ghetto and into European society at the dawning of the Enlightenment, they have peopled the arts and sciences, politics, and history in astonishing disproportion to their numbers.
There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other "everyones" -- the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics.
For the poignant part, read to see what George Allen's tormented mother told him after she revealed his Jewish heritage. I have never understood anti-Semitism -- not because I'm especially enlightened or virtuous, but only because, at the risk of sounding weirdly patronizing, I've never understood why anybody (OK, anybody who's not a Palestinian) has a problem with the Jews. If the Jewish people had never existed, it is impossible to imagine how impoverished the world's art, literature, science and culture would be. Hell, we'd probably all be living in Branson, from sea to shining sea.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Astorian, that book will be next book I try to get my hands on. Love it!>
Thanks for the book tip, Astorian. It sounds like it breaks new ground. I have the impression that a number of the folks who produced MAD and other EC titles were Jewish, too.>
MM, do you not remember the FF of about 4 years ago where, when Ben(jamin) Grimm told a guy he was Jewish, and the guy said "You're Jewish?", Ben said to him "You got a problem with that?"? And the guy said, "No, it's just that you don't
look Jewish.">
Dovid - - Was your question to "MM" directed to me?
I didn't see that comic. To tell the truth, as regards Fantastic Four and the like, I'm stuck in Marvel's Silver Age. My first Marvel issue was Thor #140, which came out around Jan. 1967. I was a fan for a few years after that, but when Stan and Jack took to four panels per pagem, pointless full-page panels, and so on, I lost enthuasiasm. I got hold of many back issues, so I'd say the notable Ben Grimm stories were ones like "This Man, This Monster" in FF #51.
I'm getting older, but I still have to "Face Front!" every so often and take out some old issues.>
- - This may be plain silly, Dovid, so pardon me if so. But just now I was thinking about how those Marvel comics of the Sixties drew me, a young kid, in: it wasn't just the characters and the stories in any given issues, but that sense of this constantly elaborating super-story; because Stan Lee would so often have footnotes in the issues that would refer the reader to earlier issues of the same comic magazine or to other Marvel comics. Heroes guest-starred in others' magazines and villains crossed over, too. When you add to this the unusually lively and interactive letters pages, you get this burgeoning body of writing and commentary - - and I'm wondering if this is somehow "Jewish"?
I confess that, though my own experience, due to the places I happen to have lived and so on, has generally had little contact with Jews and Judaism, I once wrote (must be about 30 years ago) a little essay in which I wrote about my passion for Marvel comics, and how I would seek out back issues, and piece together and study that "super-story" of the "Marvel universe," with, as I believe I wrote with tongue in cheek, "the zeal of a rabbi poring over the Kabbalah."
Well, was I maybe picking up on something "Jewish"?
Poor DC comics didn't have something like that going for them then.>
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.