Ever since columnist Mark Caro published a rant against Gawker’s Jewish quips on the Chicago Tribune’s entertainment blog, we’ve been wondering what the Jewcy take should be. An e-mail debate took off as soon as The Forward published their thinkpiece, which some of us found…not so thoughtful. Because we’re all extremely fascinating, we’ve reprinted the discussion below. Highlights include adorable ignorance on the part of web developer/office naïf Craig, an impassioned speech about Elaine’s by our messianic leader, and, somehow, an earnest mini-dialog about the death of Jewish humor.

Michael started the conversation by saying what we were all thinking:

Oh God, that's like the eighth article The Forward has written about this subject. They used to include [Jessica] Coen and [Jesse] Oxfeld in their Big Jews of the Year roundup. In short: Old, old news.

Craig seconded the notion :

Yeah, even before reading Mike's, all I could think of was, "Why should we have done this first?"

This article sucks. Without really paying attention, I assumed I was on a news site's shitty "special report" section. Slow news day, I figured. I don't know why I would care about anything this article has to say. It appears to say "Gawker makes Jew jokes. Why is that?" and the obvious answer is that they're Jews in New York. There's no big picture. We did right to steer clear of this sort of cop-out article.

p.s. Tell Gabe I like his fried chicken with eleven different herbs and spices.

So Tahl did what he does every time someone inflames his Israeli temper: e-mailed everyone a rant about George Plimpton's apartment:

Who knew I included Norm Perlstein and David Remnick on my initial email?!?!??!

Such cynical, grizzled pros we have in our midst—glad everyone's journalistic/literary standards have evolved to the point where anything short of George Orwell is considered inane rubbish.

But I still maintain that, while the Forward's packaging, angle, and execution of the article are just short of dreadful, the central idea is a good one. The conflation of Jews, Media, New York, and snark is certainly not new, but it's one of those evergreen topics that, given a topical hook (Gawker, in this case), it can be manna from heaven for the right combination of writer and editor.

For instance, Gawker isn't the first to conflate this particular medley of geography, ethnicity, vocation, and a community of sex-addled, gossip-obsessed aspirants hungry to break in. Before the Internet, there was the Paris Review and George Plimpton's apartment. There was the upper east side restaurant, Elaine's, a virtual brick-and-mortar equivalent of Gawker in its heady days when it was the literati's stomping ground and its cantankerous owner, Elaine Kaufman, could single-handedly place a young writer on the map by an invitation to sit down on one of the coveted celeb tables (not unlike, say, a post by Gawker).

Ah, how fascinating! So there is a history! So Gawker is representative of something larger -- an ever-evolving institution serving to distinguish between the insiders and outsiders. What has remained the same about this institution, about who is chosen (Chosen! Our people are so obsessed with chosenness! No wonder we're so often at the helm of these things), and why? What is different?

In this light, Gawker is anything but a shitty special report. Like Elaine's, it has become a workaday digital saloon where the bright young things get hatched while alternatively ogling and tearing down the established things not so young anymore, and in the process, these institutions like Gawker and Elaine's help define an era of New York social and intellectual life (and particularly Jewish New York).

A smart and funny analysis of that, I maintain, would be a mighty fine read.

So as you see, my dear pals Norm and David, with a few more years of experience you'll approach an article and you'll be able to see it for what is, and perhaps more importantly, for what it could have been.

A fun thing about Craig is that he never knows anything about New York literary giants, because he's a web developer. NB: Shortly before this e-mail arrived in our inboxes, he asked us all "Who's that funny woman from the 1940s?"

Am I Norm Perlstein or David Remnick? And what of Izzy? Surely we could give her Dorothy Parker.

Anyway, you're quite simply talking about a different article here. One that doesn't suck.

And for the record, I have no clue who Norm Perlstein and David Remnick are.

"Goycy" Kurtzman weighed in:

I resisted reading the story because I don't find Gawker particularly entertaining or interesting and figured that the Forward-on-Gawker would be downright excruciating.

However, if there's a story to be written here, it still hasn't been written. There are probably a lot of angles to take on Gawker's Jewish fetish--I don't know since I don't read it--but sitting around fretting about whether it's okay to make make Jewish jokes for a general audience, as the Forward did, is a totally fresh and provocative angle circa 1897. American Jews have been nervously debating that question, and writing that story, every time there's an edgy new Jewish comic (Jackie Mason), or author (IB Singer, Philip Roth, ad infinitum), and so on. It's not a story, it's a constant.

What would be interesting is if Gawker departs from the pattern in some way, i.e. that their Jewish humor represents a significant shift in the way all this has played out before, a shift that's somehow typical of the whole New Jew zeitgeist that Jewcy's a part of. For example, maybe their carefree, bitchy response to the Forward's 19th century Lower East Side anxieties is something new: it used to be that you could shame Jewish envelope-pushers into quieting down, put them on the defensive by telling them that they were providing fodder for antisemites. For the first time, the trespassers, Gawkers, just laugh and call you a jackass, think you're still on the wrong side of Delancey Street.

That's one possible angle, anyway. But tired topics are not a problem. A lot of our most successful content has been novel takes on topics that have been hit endlessly by others, but never from the angles we take (just a recent example, "The ADL sucks!" is hardly a shocking point to make, but we got it from the right angle and in the right context.). And so far most of our most successful content have been on more intellectual/political topics. If we're going to replicate that success in pop culture areas, this is the kind of stuff we've got to learn how to hit.

So I said:

One surprising thing about the Gawker Jewish controversy is that the jokes they've been making are pretty hackneyed -- lots of Krusty-the-Clown-style material about big noses and domineering mothers and the international Jewish conspiracy. In fact, there's really been only one fresh line in their entire recent spate of Jewish posts: The one that started the controversy, in which Alex Balk made fun of Israel for being run by a bunch of religious zealots.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it certainly ties into Hal Niedzviecki's "Death of Edge" thesis. For some fifty years now, Jewish comics have been wringing laughs out of the same five ethnic stereotypes. It's gotten to the point where just referencing the Jews counts as humor, even if you haven't made an actual joke—almost like a Pavlovian response. Add this to a decade-long cultural turn towards anti-PC comedy and you wind up with a situation in which it's virtually impossible to make a new, funny joke about Ashkenazi culture, and yet every hackneyed Yiddish line is automatically rewarded with laughter.

Gawker has been making Jewish jokes for years, so it's interesting that the Chicago columnist didn't cry anti-semitism until now. Makes me wonder if everyone's so inured to boring, obvious Jewish jokes that it took a fresh take (and a line about Israel as opposed to, like, matza ball soup) to cause trouble. You could argue that the best humor makes people uncomfortable because it gets so close to the truth, so perhaps this is a sign of the success of Balk's line. And if THAT's true, then maybe the moral of all of this is that Jewcy needs to run an article declaring the death (and rebirth) of Jewish humor. Yiddishkeit schtick is dead; from now on, it's all about making fun of Israel and the Orthodox. Or something...

To which Joey replied with yet another Kurtzman manifesto:

"Makes me wonder if everyone's so inured to boring, obvious Jewish jokes that it took a fresh take (and a line about Israel as opposed to, like, matza ball soup) to cause trouble."

That's a great angle, and something we should address whether we do it with this story or another. Communal taboos have changed; much humor depends on poking at taboos; cover something that indicated how all this is changing our much-celebrated "Jewish humor."

But I just read the Tribune complaint, Gawker's original Potter post, and their response to the Forward, and the problem here is that Gawker didn't so much mock Israel as the old standbys of Jewish avarice and Judaic religious nuttiness. And that's what Caro and the Forward criticized. Still might work, but it'd be nice if there were more explicit jousting around Israel to grab onto.

And actually, after re-reading the Forward column I think there actually is something new in there, something hostile to our generation, to what Jewcy represents. They're not just asking--as they would have asked Mason/Roth et al--whether Gawker ought to be talking this way, whether it was necessary to cater to antisemites in order to make a name or a dollar. They're saying that Gawker "presents a special sort of enigma to the Jewish observer," because it is largely Jewish and yet "oblivious to the rhythms and texture of Jewish life. It is knowing and ignorant; clued in and without a clue." And so they're wondering whether the these strange sortof-Jews, products of the Jewish community yet so oblivious to the "rhythms and texture" of "Jewish life," are entitled to speak on "Jewish matters" at all. It's a question for the "Jewish observer"--presumably meaning an authentic Jew, rather than one of these other creatures.

That was the precisely the sort of criticism I expected for Wertheimer dialogue (who are you to talk! You don't even keep Shabbos! What do you know! Go home to your shiksas!). This is the same critique, different setting.

Gawker's response was actually funny, much funnier than the original post. He doesn't defend his Jewishness to these self-serious guardians of Jewish authenticity. He just does his best impersonation of the cracker antisemite out to getchya.

But ultimately the point is that the Forward is right, we don't get the "rhythms and texture" of their sort of Jewish life, because it's an institutional, paranoid, ethnically self-obsessed kind of life that we have no interest in. Our "ignorance" is a willful ignorance of things we've seen enough of to know they're not worth knowing. And we're certainly not waiting on their verdict about what we're Jewish enough to speak on. So go ahead and decide we're a bunch of ignorant quasi-Jew antisemites...meanwhile, we'll be banging out some new rhythms, weaving a new texture.

So ultimately, the angle is "Blow us, Forward. No one asked for your permission."

But it would have to be more playful, not as earnest or nasty as that.