Hypocrite Tikvah Fund Jews Against WOKE Identity Politics (2): Bari Austin Rufo David Project Weiss Attacks PC Culture, Forgets Her "Columbia Unbecoming" HASBARAH Cancel Militancy
David Shasha
The Origins of Woke
By: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
At a church book sale in my Toronto neighborhood, I found The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, a bestseller by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf first published 30 years ago. I always gravitate to books like this—first to see whether there is anything new in this world, and then to remind myself that the overly simplistic answer is no. (See also the 1995 compendium Debating Sexual Correctness. The #MeToo discourse existed prior to #MeToo.) It seems we’re living through a kind of 1990s revival—fueled, I suspect, by nostalgia for pre-Covid, pre-9/11, pre-internet times. Or maybe just by teenagers’ timeless desire to dress the way everyone did decades ago.
The front cover of the dictionary shows a man, a woman, and a dog, each affixed with labels such as “hair disadvantaged” (he’s balding), “woman of noncolor” (she’s white), and “nonhuman animal companion” (it’s a shaggy dog). None of them, though especially the woman and the dog, would be out of place in a 2022 farmers market. (Again: cyclical fashions.)
The back cover bears a warning: “Be sensitive or else!,” with the follow-up, “Welcome to the nineties. But you better watch what you say. If you’re not politically correct, not even your pet—oops, your animal companion—will love you anymore.” Beard’s author bio begins, “Although Henry Beard is a typical product of elitist educational institutions and a beneficiary of a number of negative action programs, he has struggled to overcome his many severe privileges.” And Cerf’s: “Christopher Cerf is a melanin-impoverished, temporarily abled, straight, half-Anglo-, half-Jewish-American male.” Privilege disclaimers in the early 1990s! I had to have it.
A compare-and-contrast of 1990s PC and contemporary so-called wokeness could fill volumes, so I’m mostly restricting myself to a too-close read of this one book. I’m asking only a few questions: What do the differences between the two phenomena indicate about the specificity of each moment? Did PC have the same place in the culture as wokeness later would?
And to the fact of the book itself: Could something like this exist today—that is, a light-hearted poke at left-wing pieties? The existence of The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness suggests yes, but humor does not exactly define the anti-wokeness crowd. Instead, the backlash is a mix of earnestly concerned liberals who think the left is shooting itself in the foot (Hi!) and conservatives delighted that the left is shooting itself in the foot.
Humorlessness dominates today—perhaps due to increased polarization or a sense that the stakes are too high to joke around. Those who have taken on wokeness with humor, from comedian Dave Chappelle to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, have faced protests, social media bans, and even physical attacks. Woke and anti-woke alike gravitate toward dead seriousness.
By contrast, the legacy of political correctness is the mockery it inspired. PC had its heyday as fodder for parodies in the 1990s, when I was in elementary school. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher launched in 1993. The following year saw the appearance of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, fairy tales updated satirically to reflect then-contemporary mores. There was also PCU, a campus comedy starring Jeremy Piven and David Spade that featured a scene in which meat was thrown at protesting vegans. South Park, which skewered both political correctness and conservative censoriousness, first appeared in 1997.
That, then, is the context for the PC Dictionary. It was very nineties to find it all hilarious and absurd. When I began reading the book, I had certain assumptions about what would seem different or dated. My initial hunch was that nineties PC was more about manners—how to speak politely of people of different races, sizes, and so forth—and as such, didn’t frighten anyone. But that’s not quite right. After all, in those years people talked about the PC police or the thought police. The book includes references to sexual harassment lawsuits and anxious jokes about being subjected to them. And the term “political correctness” is itself originally a reference to totalitarian speech restrictions.
While the specific term cancel culture wasn’t used, the concept existed and was indeed driving cultural concerns. The book opens with an account of an environmental studies professor having a “formal sexual-harassment charge” filed by some students, after he’d made a risqué joke in class. The dread, and the reality, that an encounter with PC could wreck your life was around in the nineties. But there was also a general sense that once the kids got into the real world, they would drop a lot of their PC nonsense. That couldn’t be more different from today, when corporations and other institutions tout their adherence to the orthodoxies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
As best I can tell, PC wasn’t a force dividing society, Dreyfus Affair-style, the way one’s stance on wokeness can be. The general reality conveyed by the book is that certain liberals, on college campuses or in progressive neighborhoods, believed that PC was a force for good and mockery was not welcome. Others, equally liberal, were comfortable laughing at PC excesses. It wasn’t impossible that someone could get in trouble for saying the non-PC thing. But people were not fearful, as many are today, that every utterance was being policed.
The PC Dictionary highlights the fact that while the exact terminology may differ, many of the concerns of that era overlap with ours. Apparently, “writing about communities of which one is not a member” was frowned upon—a transgression that would see one accused of “cultural appropriation” today. There were gender-neutral pronouns, but it’s “tey” and “tem” rather than “they/them.” “Sex worker” was preferred over “prostitute,” “houseless” over “homeless,” “enslaved person” over “slave.” “Swapping sex partners” was to be called “consensual non-monogamy.” “Person-first” language (a person with a condition, etc.) comes up quite a bit. (“Person of differing sobriety” in lieu of “a drunk,” or my favorite: “persons with difficult-to-meet needs”—serial killers, for example.)
Considering this was all before social media, the sheer Tumblr-ness of it all is striking.
As for differences? There’s a lot more about animals than one sees these days: veganism, but also speciesism and pet ownership. And though gender neutrality comes up frequently, and intersexuality occasionally, the entire concept of transgender or non-binary identities never appears.
There are parts of the book in which the authors mockingly point out PC terms that are simply part of today’s language: “chair” rather than “chairman,” or “personal assistant” replacing “secretary.” I wonder where the debate over “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women” will end up in 30 years.
While some things in The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook feel dated, much of it could be written in 2022. There are the defenses of free speech, for example, including a long glossary item: “freedom of speech and the First Amendment,” which recounts “an official ban on inappropriately directed laughter” at the University of Connecticut. Beard and Cerf take aim at the censorious policing of language, writing that PC’s fixation on this betrays the movement’s essence of style over substance. The authors deride the self-satisfaction of the proponents of PC in the following passage:
It’s easy to see why so many reformers have forsworn a unified assault on such distracting side issues as guaranteeing equal pay for equal work; eliminating unemployment, poverty, and homelessness; counteracting the inordinate influence of moneyed interests on the electoral system; and improving the dismal state of American education, all in order to devote their energies to correcting the fundamental inequities described in these pages.
My final verdict? PC is wokeness. Wokeness is PC. And per the cover models, normcore is forever.
A version of this essay originally appeared in Freddie deBoer’s Substack.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, September 4, 2022
People love blond Jews
By: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
At the recommendation of basically everyone I just read Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. And of course it’s good: learnèd but with good storytelling, and great insights. Some of which I had come up with in parallel (see: my ancient blog posts): about the Holocaust getting treated as a natural disaster, or about antisemitism not getting taken seriously because the bar for something counting is the Holocaust, and few incidents measure up. (Even Hitler: not as bad as Hitler.) She has four children and was awake enough to write this book; I have two and it’s a miracle I was able to read it. I defer, in awe.
But then there’s the opening anecdote. As a high school student, Horn stunned some girls from Mississippi, who did not know a Jew could have light hair and blue eyes. She showed them! By… having that coloring. The way the author presents it, it’s as if these kids had been stunned to learn Horn didn’t have, well, horns. Yes, the Mississippeans attribute their belief about Jews’ coloring to “Hitler,” which is disturbing, but you know what? If the problem with Hitler was a belief that Jews have brown hair and eyes then Jewdar is Hitlerian antisemitism, which, I believe, for all Jewdar’s flaws, it is not.
I suppose I’m interested less in Horn’s specific anecdote than in what it represents: If light coloring is a way of sticking it to casual antisemites, then simply having dark hair and dark eyes confirms a negative stereotype about Jews. No, not all Jews have dark coloring. (Nor is it exactly unusual among non-Jews. See: most of the planet. More on that in a moment.) But so what if we did?
What I’m talking about is separate from the question of Jews of color, that is, of people whose non-white features do not mark them as Jewish, and indeed whose Jewishness is at times doubted within the Jewish community for that reason. While Jews of color deal with both racism and antisemitism, they don’t quite deal with racial antisemitism, since their very situation—shared with Swedish-looking Jews—is that they get mistaken for non-Jews.
No, I mean the thing where Jews look identifiably Jewish. Where our presence doesn’t defy expectations about what a Jew might look like. I use “our” because I have for 38 years been going around giving Jews a bad name, what with my dark, frizz-prone hair, dark eyes, sickly-pale skin (white privilege, crossed with doctors never knowing if it’s a symptom or just how I look). This is not to say I’ve never gotten a, “But you don’t look Jewish!” because the world is full of people with varied notions of what Jews look like. However, for the most part, I confirm expectations. I am not Alicia Silverstone or Lauren Bacall, Marianne Faithful or ScarJo.
If some Mississippi teenagers met teenaged me, they’d have been like, yep, checks out. (I did once disappoint a similarly Jew-ignorant college classmate, who was stunned to learn that contrary to her expectations, Jews did not study all the time. In my defense it was the first week of freshman year of college.)
There is of course colorism in (and at) other groups. What there is not is a belief that, say, because Meghan Markle is Black, other Black people are doing a disservice to their community, confirming its worst stereotypes, by going around with darker skin than she has. Blackness is expected to be visible. But to refer to Jewishness as an even quasi-visible trait is understood as simultaneously racist against Jews of color and as somehow racist against Jews generally, as though it is somehow affirming to Hitler to go around being Jewish and not, if you’re white/white-presenting, be blond. As though it’s derogatory to suggest a group has a disproportionate number of brunettes, when meanwhile no one thinks this about any other ethnic group.
As for the supposed tragedy of Jewish brunetteishness, I don’t know. Like I said, most of the world has dark hair and eyes, so if this is true of most Jews as well, truly who cares. The brunette-versus-blonde definition of Jewishness comes out of specific contexts: Nazi Germany, WASPy country clubs. Dark-haired, dark-eyed non-Jewish white people are not exactly hard to come by (I’m married to one!), but maybe Jews look Jewish, as in look identifiable as such within day-to-day contexts. Is that so terrible? Not a problem for Fran Fine, nor for yours truly.
If I met the Mississippi girls I would simply tell them that the jerk store called.
From author Substack page, December 13, 2021
Forget a vaccine – I’m surviving the pandemic thanks to murder mysteries
By: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
Ever since a bat or a pangolin or was it governments' ineptitude turned the world upside down, my focus has not been optimal. I knew that staying home with a child who went from baby to toddler during the pandemic’s early months excused me from the expectation of showering, let alone composing symphonies. But the ability to sit and, say, read a novel, so newly reacquired, disappeared once more. This left one leisure pursuit: BritBox.
For the uninitiated: BritBox is a streaming service like Netflix, except that unlike Netflix, it does not keep you up to date on pop culture. It instead allows you to revisit the British TV shows of your North American public-television childhood and to see which, if any, hold up. If you want to stay aggressively out of the loop, or just to exit the loop in the hour or so before sleep, it’s the way to go. But there are only so many times you can watch Keeping Up Appearances before groaning every time Hyacinth Bucket snobbishly corrects someone’s pronunciation of her last name. And so I found my way to a neighbouring genre: silly mysteries. These are, I believe, the perfect escapism in this, the moment that cannot be escaped.
What is it about (some) murder mysteries that actually distracts from ubiquitous death? How do I find these shows relaxing enough that I can fall asleep more easily to them than to my own thoughts?
There are terms for the phenomenon I’m describing, things such as “cozy mysteries” or “gallows humour.” Where the pandemic itself is concerned, a different expression – “too soon” – comes to mind. But fictional deaths in fictional villages in circa 1990 England? Yes please!
Shows such as Midsomer Murders and Miss Marple defuse the scariness of death by removing its most frightening features. Virtually no one dies of natural causes. One is more likely to be toppled by an antique armoire than to receive an upsetting diagnosis. Hearts stop, but this will be about arsenic poisoning from a resentful cousin, not the aftereffects of a new virus about which still so little is known. There’s quite a bit of presumed suicide but even there, the truth inevitably emerges: yup, murder.
Death on these shows is met with either a shriek or a shrug, but never an emotion as complex as grief. On Midsomer, there’s the affectless response not just of Inspector Tom Barnaby, but also of his wife and daughter. Barnaby asks villagers if the deceased had any enemies, and the answer is always yes, everyone hated this person. Those questioned will explain that they’re happy this person is now dead, but that regrettably they weren’t the murderer. A suspect will ask Mr. Barnaby whether it’s absolutely necessary for an unexplained and gruesome murder to cancel a much-anticipated rowing competition. On Rosemary and Thyme, an episode will reach the part where the murder has happened and one of the women asks whether they should continue the garden project, what with, you know, and the answer is reliably that yes, the work must go on.
Now might not seem the moment for murder mysteries, what with the heightened, necessary focus on police brutality after the killing of George Floyd this past summer. Indeed, some have questioned the ethics of police procedurals, particularly the ones where real-life policing is used as entertainment. But British murder mysteries, or the ones I tend to click on, showcase police ineptitude. Midsomer stars detectives who solve every case, fail at crime prevention. If you take the big picture, it’s striking that these tiny villages can’t get their murder situation under control. If the police are glorified, it’s in the form of the rotating cast of handsome detective sergeants.
Then there are the Agatha Christie shows, where the formula doesn’t even allow an officer to find the answer. Hobbyist crime-solver Miss Marple is always steps ahead, as is private detective Hercule Poirot. Whatever your thoughts on policing in the abstract, there’s a soothing repetitiveness in how the police never catch on to this pattern. In episode after episode, it stuns often the very same officers that the little old lady or the mustachioed Belgian got there first. Who’d have thought they had it in them?
On Midsomer, the killer is peaceably apprehended, and makes a confession spelling out the convoluted grudge that led them to bludgeon friends and relatives. With Poirot, it’s calmer still, as the private investigator assembles all suspects into the drawing room of a manor house and explains, in his trademark Franglais, his deduction process.
It would be a stretch to say these shows are furthering a social justice cause – racial profiling is mentioned I think just once in Midsomer, in one of the recent episodes, and it’s only lately that show has had many characters of colour. But these programs, unlike some Britcoms that come to mind, are rarely distractingly offensive by contemporary standards. There is at most a kind of feminism built into the structure: For the plots to work, nothing can be presupposed about the murderer’s age or gender. (An attentive viewer will notice use of a singular “they.”) The murder weapon may have been the killer’s own brute force, but that clue in no way prevents the murderer from being a woman in her 80s.
Any show being watched partly as sleep aid needs to have good scenery. Poirot, set in 1930s London, serves as interior design inspiration, the art deco furnishings more absorbing than any Pinterest board. There are also crimes – a theft here, a poisoning there – but that’s secondary to the aesthetics. If you’re stuck at home, why not fantasize about installing chevron floors? But better still is Rosemary and Thyme, where two women with a landscaping business solve the murders that just happen to take place in or near the gardens they’re hired to refurbish. The clothes are early-2000s and notably terrible, but the gardens themselves? Swoon!
Midsomer is the ultimate, in quality and quantity (21 seasons and counting). There are the usual massive country estates and family rivalries, but it’s somehow sillier than its peers. It’s also the most creative with murder methods. A victim might be flattened by a block of cheese, strangled by automatic doors, or pelted with wine bottles. The red-herring side plots centre on what the show calls, in a non-judgmental way, “sexual deviancy,” a.k.a. the whips aren’t just being used in the posh family’s stable.
And with so many episodes, you and whoever you’re quarantined with can play the game of what was that actor in. The grandmother from Absolutely Fabulous marries one of the parish council members from The Vicar of Dibley. Samantha Bond, Lord Grantham’s sister from Downton Abbey, is in three different Midsomers, as well as Miss Marple and Poirot, which must have been exhausting. There’s the IMDB-assisted delight in spotting minor characters from much earlier British shows, looking different yet the same. See? During the time it took to confirm that yes that really was Prunella Scales, the actor who played Sybil Fawlty on Fawlty Towers, you didn’t think about the virus even once.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the author of The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage.
From The Toronto Globe and Mail, November 20, 2020