There tend to be two ways to react to such a statement: Thank him for the vote of confidence, or call the Anti-Defamation League.
Did I mention my coach wasn’t Jewish? He wasn’t a bigot either, just a product of an era when you could casually stereotype students by race and religion without losing your tenure. Besides, isn’t it a compliment to say Jews are brainy?
Nevertheless, I can never work out how I feel about stereotypes. Unlike my coach, I grew up in a “Free to Be You and Me” era when individuality was celebrated and talk of religious or ethnic “traits” frowned upon. Archie Bunker was supposed to be funny because he hadn’t yet learned that you don’t refer to “Jew lawyers” or “dumb Polacks.” In 1973 National Lampoon published a famous —– and famously hilarious — issue devoted to nothing but ethnic jokes. We junior high schoolers knew it was subversive because those very jokes had fallen so far out of official favor.
And that’s where my ambivalence sneaks in. Humor (the good kind, anyway) depends on certain gross generalizations — about women, men, dogs, those crazy airports. But it works the other way, too — good comedians remind you of the things various people or phenomena have in common. They make you see patterns. In fact, most men do hate asking for directions. Most women do want to talk about their feelings. Don’t blame the messenger.
And Jews? Let’s just say a lot of us would fall comfortably under the heading “neurotic.” I know more than a few who have, well, complicated relationships with their mothers. And very few of us hunt. Very few.
Jews also indulge in a kind of self-adulation that borders on — or at least invites — bigotry. Last year, Victor Navasky, the longtime editor of The Nation, wrote a piece for Tablet about the Jewish contribution to the magazine industry, making the debatable claim that Jews were largely responsible for the “golden age” of the American magazine.
Pretty good, right? Am I close?
The problem with this kind of casual ethnography is that weak arguments explaining an ethnic group’s good points implicitly condone weak arguments explaining their negative traits. There’s no difference between Navasky explaining why Jews are poised to revolutionize the magazine industry and an anti-Semite explaining why Jews are poised to destroy the banking system.
That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about the role of ethnicity in certain niche industries — Jews are indeed disproportionately represented in publishing and academia, just as Dominicans are disproportionately represented in the Major Leagues. But to discuss this without sounding like a bigot or your grandmother, you need to use a little be rigorous in your arguments. The example I always cite is Neil Gabler’s great book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Gabler carefully laid out the economic, sociological, and serendipitous reasons that the movies became a “Jewish” business.
Without that kind of careful research, you give license to the nudniks who chalk it all up to some sort of Zionist conspiracy.