To: David Samuels
From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

Thank you for your explanation. My impression is that this could become a long and detailed dialogue about the nature of journalism, literature and all things in between, but I'm really not sure Jewcy's the right venue for such discussion.

However, after reading your comments, I think we stand to benefit from summarizing the differences between our respective approaches to our journalistic work. While I think my job is to make the world more orderly and understandable for readers, to try and overcome the chaos, your work does the exact opposite: You meddle with your readers' minds and make them more confused.

The American Melting Pot: Where do Jews fit? Having said that, I'm a little confused now myself: Is what you say in your letter is what you really think or just one of your mind-games? You write a lot of things (that's one lengthy letter, why do they tell me to write up to 800 words, and let you go crazy with a 1300 words - I wonder), but do you really mean them? I'll take a chance here, and assume that you do. So let's make this our topic of discussion for today:

If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews.

This, you imply, is the reason that "the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance" for you "as an American Jewish writer." And these qualities are self-evidently vicious: Lying isn't be good, trying to have a cake and eat it too is what our mothers warned us not to do. But therein lies your irony. You go on to say that such characteristics "can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension." Which is a good thing, isn't it?

Basically, what you're up to is blaming American Jews for misleading their fellow-citizens, their communities, their friends: pretending to be aligned with American society while they really aren't. This is a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences --- a charge that shouldn't be made lightly just for the sake of toying with outrageous ideas. And I must say I am not yet convinced about your motives (if you haven't noticed, I'm the self-appointed responsible adult in this crowded neighborhood of rogue writers).

So the question arises: Is this accusatory description of American Jewry even accurate? Many American Jews whom I know --- who take the trouble to constantly marvel at the extent to which they are an integral part of the great American melting pot --- might dispute your narrative. And they might be even right. They see a tolerant society that can put up with the cultural and religious differences inherent in so many groups playing a part in it. They see an influential group overcoming the difficulties of being a true American minority while preserving its distinctiveness and uniqueness. This, they will say, is not "lying" or "posturing," but rather living a complicated and rich life in this shining city on the hill.

You want to ruin this for them, and one has to ask oneself why. What's bothering you?

"Life Is Full Of Important Choices" is the name of an article you published in the second book you've just released, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of articles you wrote for all sorts of magazines. Supposedly, the piece is about 9/11; it takes time for the reader to realize that as most of it is dedicated to, well, David Samuel's life. And too some degree, this old article of yours pulls the rug out from under the argument you made in your letter to me:

No one could dispute how beautiful Brooklyn was less than one year later, the summer after the towers fell. It was as if the ashes from the tower had fertilized our neighborhood. The local population of stoop-sitters, myself included, were the recipients of an unexpected bounty.

Can't this description of your Brooklyn count as proof that this joint venture of Americanness is no mirage, but rather the daily reality of "worshippers at the Mosque," and of your wife's mother who "called to tell us that Jesus Christ offered the only pathway to salvation," and of "Virginia and I" who "lit the Sabbath candles together, and said our blessings over the wine"?

"What is happening?", Virginia repeated as we stared at the picture on the television screen of the towers falling, one after the other. We went to the hardware store and bought white paper masks so we could safely breath, and then we went down to the Promenade, where my father used to take me to look at the cargo ships. We stood in the crowd of onlookers and watched the black cloud cross over the river.

Thus you, with your candles, and your decision to "not eat pork," were an integral part of an American tragedy. Not as a pretender, but as a participant. I'm no American, but it seems to me that your behavior that day, and the days following, is anything but part of an "ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea."

It is your American-Jewish weirdness, your American-Jewish scariness --- that is the American idea.

Best,
Rosner

There was a time when a Fat Old Jew (FOJ) like Harvey Weinstein marrying a Skinny Young Gentile (SYG) like Georgina Chapman would have caused a perfect storm of cultural anxieties around sex, power, and religion. Today, it's just another small gossip item.

The nuptials of the conniving, overeating, materialistic Hollywood mogul – the flesh-and-blood quintessence of the kind of crudely drawn stereotypical Jewish male who equates acceptance into the broader American culture with the acquisition of a hot shiksa – passed without so much of a media peep. More interestingly, the Jewish chattering class (a wild generalization referring to my friends) barely found it worthy of cocktail prattle.

Beatles Wrong: Money Buys Love: Beauty and the beast Such a high-profile FOJ triumph would once have tweaked all sorts of anxieties. Some Jews would have worried what it meant for the future of the people; others would have been scared at what gentiles thought about it. Jewish and non-Jewish feminists alike would have been horrified at the way a prominent man was so shamelessly using power and wealth to win such a “yummy mummy,” to use a phrase wielded by Maureen Dowd.

Chattering away about this curiosity with my friends, editors at Jewcy, and others, I realized that none of them interpreted the union as a suppressed lust for inclusion, but instead that less psycho-dramatic, nonsectarian lust…for a hot piece of ass.

What’s interesting is how that particular lust is no longer the sole province of the male beast. The enfranchisement of males at the expense of females (particularly Jewish males and Jewish females) is coming to an end. Firmly ensconced in the middle and upper classes, our generation of Jewish women find power, and its application (sexual, or otherwise), far less problematic than their predecessors.

Hot Piece of Ass: She loves this gentleman for his mind

Unlike the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who came of age in the late 1960s in male-dominated universities and workplaces, and has become known for bemoaning a perceived return to 1950s courtship rituals -- our generation of women are achieving unlike any other. They’re used to female-dominated universities, and, soon, workplaces too. And with that equality, they’re becoming a bit beastly themselves.

Edith Wharton's single woman's ambivalence toward marriage has given way to fearless casual sex (with only a smidgen of ambivalence about getting herpes). Women are marrying later. They’re marrying twice, sometimes three times. And like Harvey, their second and third marriages are occurring from a place of greater social stability and financial prosperity.

That particular place – successful women of an advanced age reveling in their single-dom – has been fertile fodder for pop culture, with TV and film glorifying its wonderful lusty freedoms. There’s Sex and the City, The L Word, Cashmere Mafia, The Real Housewives of Orange Country, and on and on.

Get the Get: If at first you don't succeed... Being a “pig” no longer has a gender, or for that matter an age. It’s hard to condemn Weinstein for being shallow after watching A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, in which 16 men and 16 women competing for the right to “love” Tequila, who is known mainly for having 2 million “friends” listed on MySpace.

Tila first entertains the men, interviewing some of them and making out with others. Then she does the same with the women. That’s the show. It might not have the novelistic complexity of The Wire, but it does prove you can be young, female, and utterly unaccomplished and still get a place at the trough.

Maybe I’m just a cynic. Maybe Harvey swoons over the way Georgina thinks. Maybe Georgina just loves portly men with prominent noses, liberal attitudes, and discerning taste in films. Maybe it’s not “love” Tila is looking for but love. Or maybe, when it comes to relationships and sex these days -- casual, matrimonial, queer, straight, and everything in between -- we’re all allowed to be pigs.

For the third week running the Shabbat lunch I attended ended up focusing on Noah Feldman’s Orthodox Paradox article from the Times magazine. Besides the fact that this is getting old, I’m pretty frustrated that no one really seems to be engaging with the issue at hand, i.e. that the Jewish community treats people who are intermarried like crap, no matter their interest in staying in the community.

Let’s just skip over the part where people actually get intermarried, okay? They’re going to do it, you’re going to be mad, blah blah blah, move on. I’m not saying it’s okay or good, I’m just saying, it’s going to happen. At that point, once those people have made the choice, ignoring, insulting or generally treating them poorly is a really bad idea. It merely propagates the assimilation problem. If we tell people that one choice is enough to excommunicate them, then can we blame them for not sending their kids to Hebrew school, having regular Shabbat dinners, or even joining a JCC?

Out Ya Go Little Christopher: no bar mitzvah for you!
I’m not a fan of intermarriage, but I don’t see it as the end of the world, perhaps because I know so many people who are the products of intermarriages, and who subsequently decided they were interested and invested in Judaism, and wanted to be involved in the community. Sadly, many of them faced conflict in their families because their parents didn’t want them going back to a community that had rejected the interfaith marriage. And can you blame the parents for being so angry? Would you want your kids embracing a community that had made it well known they wanted you to scram?

This is especially frustrating because I can’t leave the house these days without hearing someone else bemoaning the assimilation of the Jewish community, or whining about how young Jews aren’t affiliating and how can we reel them back in? I think the reason synagogues and federations aren’t seeing lots of young Jews who want to be involved is because children of interfaith couples feel out of place at lots of synagogues, and they’re more comfortable being irreverent and ironic. That sentiment is much better served by the places like Jewcy and Heeb, and I think it’s because we engage with everyone, not just the middle class families from solidly eastern European backgrounds.

I don’t know how to solve the intermarriage problem, and I would concede that it’s pretty problematic. But I just can’t sit around and say, “Well, intermarriage is a boundary our community has set, and we just can’t condone that kind of behavior so these people can’t be offended when we don’t include them.” You can’t tell people when they can’t be offended. It doesn’t work that way, and it never has. We can set boundaries all we want, but at some point we have to recognize that we’re pushing people away. And in these times of serious discussion about what the future of Judaism will look like, do we want to exclude thousands of couple who have shown by the nature of their decision to be together, that they’re willing to make compromises? I don’t, and I won’t.

I Heart Buying StuffHells yeah, it’s all coming together today. The front page of Thursday Styles brings it on home in the lead story about chain-boutique owner Stefani Greenfield, her business partner Uzi Ben-Abraham, and their ideal customer, Tarynne Goldenberg! (Love the double-“n” “e”, btw! Verrrry classy!)

What do all of these folks have in common (with Cindy Chupak, too)? Hint: it’s not just a fabulous wardrobe!

Jewish American Princess Syndrome is fairly understandable in its social, political, cultural context. Of course there would be a generation of American Jews who were unbelievably excited and overwhelmed by its own capability for material transcendence! Of course they would place enormous value in things and things and more things! Of course they would get their noses broken and scraped out, their hair dyed and straightened and thinned, their nails done and redone, their wardrobes obsessively flushed every season, their oh-so-Jewy body-hair waxed clear away!

Right, so a generation of spoiled little Brenda Patimkins resulted. The safety and prosperity and equal-opportunity-ness of America, replete with its near-religious reverence for the Almighty dollar, equals materialistic frenzy. But this giddy semitic shamelessness about assimilating, about owning and having and buying and having and having and having was supposed to time out about, oh, forty years ago.

Yet we now find ourselves one, two, even three generations removed from said JAP heydey, the organic Jewish American Princess zietgiest, and JAPiness remains ever present, blossoming, spreading its wings to encompass persistent generations of brainless mallrats of every vague cultural Jewish persuasion. (Just ask my sister-in-law!)

And you know what? There is absolutely no excuse for JAPiness in the 21st century. None.

Amazing irony points, however, to Ms. Greenfield, whose comments about her new flagship store inadvertently echo Herzl:

“We need a home to show the world who we really are.”

I’ve been called a self-hating Jew shockingly often this past year. But reading today’s Style section it hit me! Let it be said: I’m not a self-hater; I’m an other-hater. I like myself. It’s those horrid JAPs at Intermix I can’t stand.