political correctness was never much for semantic correctness.  or logic.  or righteousness. 

jews are a minority in the sense that we're... a minority.
but jews are not a minority in the sense that we can act like everybody else owes us something.  if we feel that an attack on us is bigoted, whether a jew or gentile is making the attack, it's perfectly acceptable for everyone else to roll their eyes and call us paranoid or overly sensitive.  "real" minorities don't have to worry about that. 

it's a simple, disgusting equation.  if you're not white, you can't be scrutinized by anyone who is.  this is played out in international relations, too.  non-western regimes get a free pass to commit worse atrocities than the united states or israel. 

When you want an adjective, use "every day," but when you are trying to tell us that you did something every day, you write "every day." Come on, "scholar."

it was obvious that Jews were not a much of a minority in academia, especially the humanities. Also, "minority" implies non-white. Jews used to be considered non-white, until they traded in ethnicity/nationhood for religious identification only. See here: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__How_Jews_Became_White_Folks_a...

Not that it matters, but there was a spleen-venting letter in the most recent Columbia alumni mag excoriating Columbia for elevating Spivak to University Professor. The writer basically ranted about how bullshit post-modernist jargon dominates the academy and is turning the school into a communist re-education camp. Or something like that. 

Portnoy--

That's actually true, I think -- that Jews are anything but a minority presence in academia, particularly the humanities as you say. But in terms of Jews not being non-whites anymore, I don't think the verdict is in on that. It's no different than the big debate these days on whether or not Jewish American literature counts as an ethnic American literature. People have argued that it's too mainstream, and too successful, to be considered ethnic literature anymore. This seems ridiculous to me -- it all goes back to the difference between the terms "ethnic" and "minority." In my mind, Jewish American literature is absolutely an ethnic literature, but not really a minority literature. Obviously people are defining these terms in different ways. I see this all the time in academia -- nobody really knows where to put Jewish American literature, or what to do with people who specialize in it.

 I am going to have to check out that letter about Spivak -- funny. He may be on to something.

Oops -- one more thing. What about Jews who do not identify with any of the religious incarnations of Jewishness? Aren't they still ethnically Jewish? Also, the Latina woman I referred to was upset that there was no ethnic representation, when in reality, I would argue that there absolutely was ethnic representation, though not a very diverse selection of ethnicities.

have i been out of ithaca that long?  two years ago last call in tompkins county (read: I-town and Gorges) was 1 am, and they threw you out at 1:30 am.  have more idiot kids been falling down the gorges again?

Ojoxsofeta -- yeah, seriously, 1am. They try to kick people out sooner, actually, and if you don't leave by 12:55 they start stacking up the chairs and asking you to leave, even if they just served you a new drink at 12:45. In one bar, two friends and I actually refused to leave until we finished our drinks, and until it was closing time, and they called the police. It was very exciting.

Well now that you are back in the Midwest you can make a trip up to Chicago where the bars seem to never ever (ever ever ever) close.

Yup, Adam, I am so on my way to Chicago. Very soon. We need to revisit that whole idea about a get-together for Midwest Jewcy people.

Non-whiteness is mostly a matter of perception. I think the vast majority of non-whites perceive Jews as white, or at least part of the dominant power structure. Whether most Jews feel confident as part of the dominant power structure is another matter. That said, I think the whole "white" category is a really dumb reductive construct. There is no such thing as "white" culture. But people can't help but to use this term. It should really be replaced with something more accurate. What that is, I don't know.

As it concerns Jews, it's hard to say. Like I said, most American Jews consider themselves Jewish by religion only. On the other hand, I think it can be proven, particularly in the field of literature, that there is a distinctly Jewish-American language and ethnicity being promoted. There's a tug-of-war going on though, between those who would like to see discrete ethnic Jewish Studies departments and those who want Jewish history and literature to simply be available as part of general lit or history departments. Another matter in the world of ethnic studies is funding: Jewish studies programs tend to be well-funded, whereas Latino, Black, Asian studies are not.

1) Yes, if you guys are back, let's do this get together in Chicago!

2) Absolutely love the pic of Spivak. The only one with a chair -literally. Represents so well the delights of petty power plays in the humanities. Anyway, wasn't she once proposing that suicide bombers were just expressing themselves or some such bunk?

Great point.  Even though numerically we are, others are terribly phobic about us.  They think we rule the world.

I'm upset by your post, so here's a lengthy bloggish response. Note: I just whipped this up, so bear with bad transitions, etc.:

I'm a little disconcerted by a young academic entering the field who uses stereotypical language to describe a particular ethnic group. Latinos and Latinas are regularly portrayed as being oversexed and horny in mainstream American media. While "lusty" has a secondary definition that means to "feel a strong desire for someone or something", the primary definition and it's stereotypical--and debasing--connotation is more apparent.

Academia is a profession. And within this professional field, people who are Jewish and of Jewish descent are well represented.  While they might have been, as you say, "kicking ass" at this particular presentation, it may have been useful to consider why and how they have so easily entered academia. Is it that Jews are smart? Crafty? Sheisty, conniving and greedy for knowledge? Perhaps Jews are too smart for their own good... maybe they should be removed altogether.

Of course I use these old, trite and stereotypical cliches not because I agree with them but because I wish to show that stereotyping is debasing and very bad for Jews like yourself and for all ethnic groups in general. Those words and sentiments have been used throughout history against your people. As such, I would expect an intellectual to not reciprocate racist sentiments towards other groups in this generation. 

As someone in academia and as a non-Jewish Latino myself, I must see and work with Jews on a regular basis. Through spending time with them, befriending them and even having a Shabbat dinner or two, I have learned that there is no super intellectual gene for Jews. Not all Jews are smart. So why are they so well represented in Academia?

 Like most things, it's complex. Many Jews in Academia have been assimilated into American culture for many generations and can easily pass for white. Many of them come from backgrounds where higher level professions are a part of their cultural background--i.e., their parents are doctors, lawyers, professors themselves, etc. As said before, their adeptness in Academia cannot be stereotyped or attributed for one or even a few reasons.  There are many. But, for whatever reason, they have found a home in the University. Other groups, however, have not.

Here's an example you might find iteresting: I have one very close friend who is a 1st generation Persian Jew. For him, both being  dark-skinned, relatively poor (certainly as compared to most people in academia) and a Jew leaves him with many conflicts he must face from admissions committees, police and ignorant people on the street. His struggles are very different from, let's say, a wealthy 3rd generation, pale skinned Jew whose forbears came from some northern European nation. Why?

 Because race and color still matter. It's more stringent than religion. And the stereotypes are worse for people of color than for people who are pale. According to TV, movies and the average ignorant American, we are dumb, lazy, violent, sexually aggressive people who are more likely to be on COPS than INTERVENTION. We belong in jail, not academia. And that we are since most inmates are Latino and black.

 For myself, a Latino who was a successful student and for someone who earned his way into graduate studies, I expected the stereotypes to end at the university. Instead, I deal with them everyday. I'm regularly pegged as the "token minority". People automatically assume I got in because of some charity not because I'm qualified. As such, I must face more complications since the eye is on me so to speak. 

 Therefore, I won't be surprised when I speak up at a presentation in order to address these concerns  and someone like you whispers to a friend that I'm being "lusty", "fiery", or "uppity". Please reconsider thsi. I don't whisper to my friends saying that you are "greedy", "elitist" or "deceitful". This is not because it's un-PC--it's because it's not true and because I don't wish to debase your individuality through stereotyping. Please return the favor.

The Prime Minister's Office recently earmarked a trifling NIS 200,000 to "deepen awareness of Theodor Herzl's legacy." But instead of forking anything out for hype and pageantry, Ehud Olmert need only focus on what got Herzl into hot water at 1903's Sixth Zionist Congress. There the harbinger of Jewish national revival felt impelled to vindicate himself and reaffirm his devotion to Zion, rendered suspect after he proposed Uganda as a nachtasyl (nighttime asylum) - a temporary haven for Jews fleeing czarist pogroms.

Yet these threatened Jews' own delegates, dubbing themselves "Zion's Zionists," denounced as heresy any notion of even short-haul substitutes for Zion. To convince them he was no heretic, Herzl rose and with visible emotion recited Psalm 137:5: "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning."

One hundred and five years on, as Olmertian Israel prepares to mark Jerusalem Day, Herzl wouldn't have to resort to such dramatic gestures. The Ugandan alternative would be hailed as progressive pragmatism. Any deviation from the inherent bond to Zion would be cheered as a desirable departure from messianic mesmerism. Where nothing's sacred, there's no heresy.

Until Olmert's ascendancy to the premiership of the state Herzl envisioned, the most outrageous promoter of the sham that nowadays parades as Zionism was another failed prime minister - Ehud Barak. Olmert's current defense minister earned everlasting infamy as the first Israeli premier who formally offered to fritter away 20 centuries of Jewish yearnings and over a century of Jewish blood, sweat and tears - all for his own political survival. Barak thereby unleashed demons which have since never ceased to haunt us.

Each of Barak's shady successors - too weak to resist the pressure of White House patrons and too vulnerable to defy left-wing blackmail - continues to compromise the Zionist endeavor for selfish interests. Regardless how Olmert's headlong rush to appease turns out, it constitutes corruption - unprecedented in cynicism, scale and severity.

BARAK'S THEN-avid accomplice, his foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, asserted in omniscient professorial tones that the "territorial phase of Zionism is over" - i.e. ties to the historical homeland no longer matter. Olmert's crass sidekick Haim Ramon put it more crudely: "Jews never prayed for Shuafat and A-Ram." Our link to this land is diminished by Arab occupancy. That's where Ben-Ami's soft-spoken sacrilege and Ramon's blusterous iconoclasm converge. For both, Zionism isn't anchored to specific locations. It's become nebulous. Pie in the sky.

Herzl leaving a Basel synagogue during the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress.
Photo: Archive

The fact that two millennia of Jewish experience tragically prove that there's no safety without territory won't matter if tomorrow Galilee or Negev Arabs rise in an irredentist demand to hack off another chunk of teeny-weeny Israel. If Jews don't insist on sovereignty over their Holiest of Holies, would they fight for Nazareth? Did our ancestors dream of it generations ago?
No wonder Mahmoud Abbas and his assorted cohorts cast doubt on the sacredness to Jews of Mount Moriah. It's an irresistible temptation to taunt dignity-deficient Jews by portraying their attachment to the mount as a provocative fabrication (even if denying the existence of the destroyed Temple inter alia also slices through the heart of the Christian Gospel). Barak-Ramon-Olmert brought this upon us.

IN THE Mideast, when someone is down, you kick him harder. If Olmert is desperate enough to sign articles of surrender - though his army was never vanquished in a catastrophic war - then Israel's enemies will rub Jewish noses in Jerusalem's dirt. They already claim the Western Wall as a Wakf holding. If granted power even nearby, Muslims will infringe on the right of Jews - maligned as usurping interlopers - to congregate at their Temple's remnant, as they infringed until 1967.
No Jews will be allowed beyond the seventh step (if at all) of Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. There'll be no prayers at Rachel's Tomb and no visits to the pantheon that is the Mount of Olives cemetery (whose ancient tombstones were ripped out between 1948-67 and used to pave the floors of Arab latrines).

Abbas's minions know Jews didn't appear from nowhere as rootless rabbles without pasts, bands of sinister globetrotting nomads who inconsiderately lusted after a barren, depopulated, malaria-infested land. The Arabs' own favorite friendly historian, Arnold Toynbee, asserted the precise opposite. He took Jews to task for impudently carrying on despite his contention that they have only a past and remain unsavory vestiges who should comply with his dictum and go extinct. For not having lived up to their duty to die, Toynbee defined Jews as "fossils."

And fossil evidence indeed inconsiderably impedes Arab efforts to erase Jewish history. Arabs even commemorate the Jewish Temple with their own name for Jerusalem. When Muslim conquistadors first invaded Jerusalem, they called it Bayt al-Maqdis, their adaptation of the Hebrew Beit Hamikdash - the Holy Temple. Al Quds - the contemporary Arabic contraction for this original appellation - daily betrays the very Jewish heritage which Arabs now take inordinate pains to expunge.

BUT SUCH quibbles are derisory for Olmert, Barak, Ramon et al. They tell us that sacrificing hallowed terrestrial relics is a paltry price for promises of peace, even if their interlocutors violently welched on all their undertakings hitherto. With pesky sanctum sanctorums out of the way, the conflict boils down to inundating Israel proper with so-called Arab refugees and undermining its very existence.

After Jerusalem is overrun by Arab migrants and Jews escape to their greater Tel Aviv enclave, "Palestine" will set its sights on reclaiming Sheikh Mounis (called Ramat Aviv by foreign colonizers), Soumeil (where streets known as Arlosoroff and Ibn Gvirol intersect in the Zionist urban adjunct to Jaffa) and Jamusin (off Derech Namir, a major traffic artery in the above settlement).

Anonymous--thanks for such an insightful response. I'm not sure how much difference this will make to you, but the term "lusty" does not necessarily have any kind of sexual connotation. The word suggests that someone is vigorous, spirited, or enthusiastic--all words that, in my estimation, are positive. I've been described that way myself before. I chose the word because I liked the alliteration (the two Ls in Lusty Latina), but I suppose you are right to say that we should also be aware of any alternate meanings of words that might reinforce negative stereotypes.

I confess when I read the phase I did not think of anything sexual, but assumed Monica Osborne was referring to how strongly the woman was expressing her views. 

One can express views "Modestly" ... like "I think but I'm not sure..." or "Powerfully" like, "I'm certain..." but if you can be powerful and quiet and detached and anylitical or powerful and loud and conveying heartfelt feeling... and the word "lusty" here brought the idea of  powerful and loud and conveying heartfelt feeling to mind.

I also assumed the word was chosen for alliteration.  "The powerfully expressive, loud and heartfelt Latina" doesn't have the same ring, even though it conveys the same idea.