Monday, October 28, 2013

Janice Fiamengo: Jews and the People Who Love Them-UPDATED With Music!

What an outstanding essay. 

Really lovely. I absolutely adore my philosemitic gentile peeps and you all know who you are!

"I suspect there is something even deeper than this at work, some fundamental recognition of goodness at the heart of philo-Semitism.  Here we get into regions not conducive to measurable proofs."

"From the time I was a child in a not-particularly Christian home, I was strongly drawn to Jews and mystified by anti-Semitism. I fell in love with Fiddler on the Roof when I was about 8 or 9 years old. Everything about it—the splendid music, the kvetching humour, the grumpy piety, the loving, agonistic family bonds—all spoke to me powerfully if somewhat inexplicably given my very different family background. I did not know any Jews and yet I somehow knew Jews. In junior high school I developed an interest in the Holocaust that gripped me for years. I did a major project in the tenth grade on the development of antisemitism in Germany and another in twelfth grade on the role of literature in purveying anti-Semitic stereotypes. I still did not know many Jews, but I admired and suffered with them. Although I never doubted anti-Semitism’s existence, it always seemed extraordinarily bizarre. Other forms of prejudice I could understand, if deplore—but hatred of Jews, that people of light and energy and genius … What was there not to love?"

"It may be that my initial love of Jews, based as it was on little more than a feeling, an impression, could be said to have been as irrational and inexplicable as the Jew-hatred that many feel who have themselves known no Jews (as Solway reports is the case in Japan and South Korea, for example). On the contrary, I believe it was quite explicable and defensible, and has been abundantly confirmed as I have come to know Jews: it was a simple recognition of a brilliant, resilient, life-affirming people whom it is abundantly good to have in the world. I cannot help but feel now that Jew hatred is a perverse recognition of that fact—that Jews are indeed a source of light, and that some people hate the light."

UPDATE: 

Non Jews singing Yiddish Jew song!