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Michael Chabon: ‘To a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews’12:53 pm Monday, June 7, 2010by stacey palevsky
The essay is fascinating and maybe a little aggravating, but it is only the best writing that makes a reader squirm in his seat. Chabon essentially says that Jews are foolish in the same proportion as any other ethnic group or tribe, and that as we look back on Israel's history, we tend to put the foolishness of her Jews in the endnotes, thereby confusing us all the more when Israel does something foolish (as it did May 31). "Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime."
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Michael Chabon, Israel, flotilla, New York Times, Jewish
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Posted by Theodore Sternberg
How smart were those "peace activists"...
06/07/2010 at 11:54 PM ...who thought it would be a good idea to beat Israeli soldiers with steel rods? Login to reply to this comment or post your own
Posted by Jack Kessler
Stupid or.....?
06/10/2010 at 06:20 PM As smart as Michael Chabon is as a writer, here he is clueless. Everyone is smart AFTER the fact. Everyone. Being smart on incomplete information is not so damned easy as Chabon would have us believe. Being smart about predicting the behavior of inherently unpredictable things like human beings is not so damned easy as Chabon would have us believe. Being smart about dealing with every possible contingency is not so damned easy as Chabon would have us believe. Being smart when the lives of young men you are responsible for are in jeopardy is not so damned easy as Chabon would have us believe. If one will forgive the sports cliche, everyone is an omniscient quarterback on Monday. But it is not so damned easy to know what to do on Sunday. Login to reply to this comment or post your ownLeave a Comment
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In response to the flotilla raid, Berkeley author Michael Chabon writes in Saturday's New York Times that the idea that Jews are blessed with "seichel" — a Yiddish word connoting ingenuity, creativity, subtlety and nuance, imbuing a person with teh ability to foresee the consequences of his actions — is a complete myth.
06/07/2010 at 02:35 PM
To me, it was an odd editorial. I suppose that everyone, from Scandinavians to the Chinese, consider themselves a little sharper than the rest, but to publicly debate it on the front page of the nation’s premiere newspaper struck me as bizarre, inappropriate and a little pathetic. It’s very difficult to imagine anyone in this day and age penning a column legitimately renouncing, say, “German exceptionalism”—let’s not mince words and just plug in “superiority”—or “Dutch exceptionalism,” though there is every bit as much evidence, including the ridiculous IQ tests, to advance such a theory. I suppose Chabon’s heart was in the right place but it still strikes me as writing a column denouncing, say, hitting women in the face. Really? Yathink?
In any event, I’m happy he’s proud of being one of the “people of Einstein.” Personally I don’t think being one of the “people of” everyone from Heisenberg to Maxwell to Da Vinci to Fermi to Beethoven to Kepler, ad infinitum, is that bad, either, but, eh, I guess I just don’t get it.
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