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Jews Still “Acting Black” in 2007: From White Negro to Jewish Hipster
By Eric Goldstein / November 26, 2007
The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer has cast attention back on some of his early essays, including “The White Negro,” an influential piece that first appeared in Dissent magazine in 1957. Written during a period he described as "the years of conformity and depression," Mailer's essay focused on the hipster—"the urban adventurer. . .who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts"—as a hero capable of providing the antidote to America's stultifying postwar culture.
"The White Negro," and the hipster lifestyle it details, remind us that white Americans have looked to blacks not only as a group upon which they could project the negative aspects of their society, but also as an object of longing: Whites fantasize that the African American embodies the expressiveness and sensuality with which they as whites have lost touch in their self-styled "march toward progress." Bristling under the confines of postwar culture, Mailer admired the hipster as white man who, like his imagined black counterpart, could free himself from "the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization," divorce himself from society, and relinquish "the pleasures of the mind for…the pleasures of the body."
Although Mailer did not explicitly mention his Jewish background in "The White Negro," the essay was undoubtedly shaped by the symbolic importance African Americans and their culture have long held for American Jews. Mailer himself was a product of the urban streets where Jewish youth of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s often listened to "race records," formed their own jazz bands, and occasionally made evening excursions to Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. Not only were many of the leading white interpreters of African American music during the interwar period Jewish, but so was the original hipster, Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), a clarinetist who declared himself a "voluntary Negro" and devoted himself—in his own words—to "hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can."
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lady, you absolutely kick ass. Who ever you are, i adore you. I love smart girls…
but I have to admit, I didn't understand that he was a racist,
too. I don't see that the ability to get people angry and
string words together into nice sentences is admirable. Yet this
SOB is admired by many. WHY? Every time I think that
this guy is the ultimate scumbag, somebody comes up with something
about him showing him to be MORE scummy than I could have
imagined. Even dead, the man just keeps topping himself.
The idea that the rules don't apply to me is, sadly, very common in
various sectors of the Jewish community. Some liberal Jews want
to do everything that is opposed to Jewish tradition and call it
Jewish, lie about what Hebrew words means so that they can reject those
words, then scream and yell and call the rest of the Jews 'bigots' and
claim they hate non-Jews
when they don't revise everything to fit the results of their
defiance and redefinition. A small section of the Orthodox community
will pick out
rules made for situation in which Jews have lived in societies which
placed them outside the law as an excuse to break American law and
morals, ignoring the over vamping rule that 'the law of the land is the
law'.
I will leave the
African-Americans to speak to their own issues among themselves. It
seems to me that there are plenty of articulate and well educated
African-Americans to do that. I will mind my own business.
I figure Jews have enough problems, and Americans have enough problems,
without me poking my nose into other people's private affairs.
I can understand why people who are referred to as the white negro jew look to a people who have been labeled as black provoke a invitation to be studied and copied and not be frowned upon as slumming”. I would suggest that maybe if someone out there told the truth about a genuine set aside race that is set apart from every race on this earth and looked at as a social disgrace that maybe someone out there in the so call white jew community would stop trying to compare & put down a chosen people but to start trying to figure out how this confused place we call the land of the free can truly be saved and repaired and yes it would start by acknowledging a race that not only should be apologized to but a race who should be praised and placed in their rightful power and excepted as kings and queens not animals.
I can understand why people who are referred to as the white negro jew look to a people who have been labled as black provoke a invitation to be studied and copied and not be frowned upon as slumming”. I would suggest that maybe if someone out there told the truth about a genuine set aside race that is set apart from every race on this earth and looked at as a social disgrace that maybe someone out there in the so call white jew community would stop trying to compare & put down a chosen people but to start trying to figure out how this confused place we call the land of the free can truly be saved and repaired and yes it would start by acknowledging a race that not only should be apologized to but a race who should be praised and placed their in rightful power and excepted as kings and queens not animals.
For some pop culture commentary from two Jewish comedians struggling with the “sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,” how about this season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” which chronicles Larry David’s relationship with a black family called the Blacks?
Also check out Jewish hipster icon Sarah Silverman in blackface.
I’m not sure this is what Mailer meant by “The White Negro.”
In re: "…the Jewish hipster movement has marshaled black culture as a weapon in its fight to make Jewishness relevant for a generation so well accepted that it yearns to be different" (emphasis mine).
It would be nice to think that American secular culture really did accept the Crown Heights, or even Riverdale, version of Jewishness. Non-Jews and assimilated Jews are OK with Jews as long as the Jews aren't too religious, too Zionist, too Jewish. So often I feel embarrassed for self-styled hipster Jews who, generation after generation, are always running after other "freer" — read more sexually explicit — cultures. What, there isn't sexuality among a people that managed to survive for almost 6,000 years?
If you want to see an updated example of Norman Mailer's "embrace of the hip," watch Barry Levinson's "Liberty Heights." Ben begins to feel "authentic" — human — only after he attends a James Brown concert. Variants of this scenario show up so frequently in movies made by Jews you could think that Assimilation 101 is a requirement for Jewish filmmakers (see also "Dirty Dancing," "White Palace," "Monsieur Shlomo.")
So, how comfortable, really, are American Jews if virtually every movie a Jewish director makes has to lecture us that being Jewish is uncool — maybe even immoral?
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