One other consideration on this question of Jews who have "made it" and
forgotten their humble roots, as Max alluded to yesterday.
At the risk of sounding like an economic determinist, it is important to
take note of the fact that recent college graduates--including Jews--don't
have a red carpet into the job world like they did when Max and I were young.
I ran into a guy named David Strauss at the Knitting Factory event, who I
had sold a bunch of phonograph records to a year ago. He is a youngish
graduate of Bard College, my alma mater, who is trying to carve out a
career as a freelance writer. He is an occasional contributor to Salon and
the New York Observer. He, like many young aspiring artists and writers in
their twenties, have a tough time making ends meet. 25 years ago you could
work as a welfare worker or a teacher and write on the side. These kinds of
jobs have dried up and the corporate jobs simply don't exist for liberal
arts grads like him. In 1968, I went to work as a programmer trainee after
short stints with the welfare dept. and the board of ed.
The Jews of this generation of 20 somethings don't regard American society
as a cornocupia, nor do they regard the state of Israel as "socialist" as I
did when I first came around the radical movement in 1967. They tend to be
rather cynical about left politics, but just as cynical about bourgeois
society.
I ran into David again last night at a critic's screening of Ken Loach's
horrid movie on Nicaragua "Carla's Song" (more about that later). I got
into a conversation with him about the research I had been doing on the
American Indian and specifically tried to get him to understand the mascot
question from the point of view of a Jew living in Germany in 1952 who was
confronted by soccer teams called the Hamburg Jewboys. He shrugged his
shoulders, grinned and said, "I am too much of a postmodernist to let
things like that bother me. I'd just make a joke about the whole thing."
What a revelation. In that instant I understood the difference in
sensibility that divided me from this generation.
Louis Proyect
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
