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Oct 26, 2023Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer

This was wonderful, and articulated something I’ve felt deeply but had a hard time putting into words.

I think as straight cis white dudes, we can draw a distinction between accepting our declining authority with grace (going into the West like Galadriel, I like to think) and feeling obligated to cheer on as others dance on our graves. (Freddie DeBoer describes this latter tendency well in his essay “Aging White Men, Like Everyone, Are Aware of the Discursive Reality in Which They Live”). The latter is false, corrosive to the soul and fundamentally condescending towards those who come after us.

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100%. I like that, going into the West like Galadriel. But also, y’know, talking endlessly about the nuances as we sail, like one of the off brand comic relief hobbits.

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Aug 8, 2023Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer

This speaks to me very deeply, Dan. I was born and raised from 1971-1988 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, went to summer camp at the 92nd St Y (well before the high stakes bribery), had an extremely intelligent mother. Being Jewish felt completely natural, though not as a majority (I feel part of my cultural upbringing was to always to “remember that you were slaves in Egypt”; it led to what I now regard as absurd militancy towards, say, Christmas). I never heard “Jew” as a verb until college (not an Ivy, but what’s now “Ivy plus”).

That college was in Chicago, and while there is a significant Jewish population here, it’s not the same as New York. Your post makes me wonder if New York’s Jewishness has diminished over time, anyway, so perhaps I didn’t miss much (yeah, right!)

I think I’m in a similar place as you are: Lamenting a change of valence in the culture away from my identity, but not decrying it as evil or “wrong” in any way; change is inevitable. I do hope that parts of American Jewishness (a cosmic sense of humor; argument as a form of respect; a belief in free expression in the old ACLU/People For The American Way manner) will live on; they may have started as “Jewish”, but they can be held by anyone, and in my opinion should!

I have a 5 year-old son, and it is a mixed marriage. My wife has agreed to raise him Jewish, but it’s a real challenge to be “the authority” on Jewishness, perhaps an effect of our diminishment in the culture (it’s harder to show him examples of cultural Jewishness in media)

I’m also now fascinated at the time when Jewish New York was such a cultural force (Eliot Gould was a sex symbol!). I’m just a couple of episodes away from finishing Mrs. Maisel, but I discovered that the creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, grew up in the Valley and only knows this time from her dad’s stories and records like The Two Thousand Year Old Man! It’s not as bad as a Seder performed by Evangelicals, but still, not good!

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I haven't lived in NYC for a while, but I would imagine it's somewhat less Jewish-feeling than when I was there, and certainly than when you were. Still pretty Jewish, though! I too am in a mixed marriage, but the kids are just being raised as nothing. I mean we try to pass on some vague heritage - celebrate Hannukah and Christmas, sometimes Easter and Passover, talk about our background -- but they will certainly have a much less distinct sense of Jewish identity than I do. We were not religious at all, growing up, though there was a strong sense of difference, less we were once slaves in Egypt than just we're very different from all the Catholics around us.

Sometimes I feel like the Jewish influence on culture is fading away, and then sometimes I look around at our culture -- with Maisel, Fleishman Is In Trouble, and half a dozen other shows on right now that have strong Jewish vibes -- and wonder if maybe the Jewish influence on culture will persist pretty strongly for a long time. Though doubtful we'll ever be quite as chic as we were when Elliot Gould was a sex symbol.

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Really like this piece, Dan. Among other things I'll go back to think about is this tidbit:

"Privilege is real, but privilege is wasted if it’s used as an excuse to do less thinking. Privilege should be the privilege to think harder, not less."

That plus the part at the end about identifying personally with certain cultural entities and achievements resonate strongly with some ideas I've been working on.

Also, I owe you lunch!

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Privilege has been such an interesting concept to me over the last few year, because analytically I think it's really valid and useful, but politically I think it's been operationalized in all sorts of really destructive ways. And yes to lunch, but I'm up north for the summer, so late August or September.

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👍 Enjoy your summer!

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