New Article: Back to the Shtetl: Jewish Week Editor Andrew Silow-Carroll and the White Jewish Supremacy in Action
David Shasha
Back to the Shtetl: Jewish Week Editor Andrew Silow-Carroll and the White Jewish Supremacy in Action
At the end of 2020 I wrote a critical taxonomic analysis of Tikvah Fund racism in my annotated review of Mosaic magazine’s extensive listing of the Best Books of the Year, drawn from their many Neo-Con writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ihDpdBeGvZY/m/Of4z7vsTBAAJ
A year later, I have been struck by yet another fascinating Best Books of the Year list from the new Jewish Week editor Andrew Silow-Carroll, that drove the point home even more forcefully:
Silow-Carroll has really not been on my Sephardic radar, as I have always had admiration for The Jewish Week under its previous editor Gary Rosenblatt.
Which I recently indicated in a post on the vile SY Modern Orthodox hero, the convicted pedophile Baruch Lanner:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/QJPHyJJygz4
As has been the case with The Forward since our racist friend Jane “Year of the Arab Jew” Eisner gave way to the even more deplorably racist Jodi Rudoren.
Ms. Rudoren, as I have noted, has moved the paper much further to the Neo-Con Straussian Jewish Right than her predecessor could have imagined, as Meirav Zonszein correctly argued in her Columbia Journalism Review article, which I included in SHU 944:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/the-forward.php
Given all that I have been dealing with when it comes to The Tikvah Fund, I have largely been ignoring both The Forward and The Jewish Week.
But that has now come to a crashing end.
Silow-Carroll, naturally, has an excellent White Jewish Supremacy CV, which, just as naturally, includes a stint as The Forward’s managing editor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Silow-Carroll
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/new-editor-named-for-jewish-week/
I was particularly struck by this highlighted quote from him in his new paper’s splashy announcement of the appointment:
“Most of all, I think we can continue to show how Jews in this great, diverse metropolis can talk with one another, and not at or beyond each other, about the things that matter most.”
When he claims that he wants Jews to “talk with one another,” what he really means is an Ashkenazi monolingual and monocultural exchange between the dysfunctional warring factions.
Sephardim, as we will see from the very heimiche books he reads, are emphatically not included in the discussion at the Adult Jewish Table.
As I was preparing to write this note, I turned up the following Silow-Carroll article defending the Jewish “West Side Story,” both iterations, that was recently published in his paper:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/a-white-jewish-guys-defense-of-west-side-story/
Indeed, this is not a very good sign, as it does not really take seriously the current New Racial Consciousness discussion of what is ultimately a brilliant piece of musical theater, but which sadly remains drenched in racial ignorance and stereotyping.
And that includes the fatal issue of miscasting Natalie Wood to play the Puerto Rican lead, and dubbing her singing voice with yet another White person:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-cant-west-side-story-just-cast-a-puerto-rican-maria
For his Ashkenazi double-down reboot, Steven Spielberg cast a young woman named Rachel Zegler as Maria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Zegler
Reading her family background, I thought of David Project Bernstein:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/4XXWvb997WM
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/G6vHpmQk9BA
Though Zegler is not Jewish, her father is Polish and her mother Columbian.
Even now, the iconic part could not be given to an actual Puerto Rican!
This at a time when the Jews are becoming deeply concerned about Jews being cast to play Jewish parts:
While there are always the obvious financial considerations involved in any production or reboot like this, it is unclear why one of the most powerful forces in Hollywood – and one of its most prominent Limousine Liberals, chose to take charge of the project and hire another prominent Ashkenazi Jew to work on the script, playwright Tony Kushner, rather than fully turn over the project to ethnic-appropriate professionals.
If the actual purpose of the reboot was to “straighten” out the original in PC terms, would it not have made more sense for Spielberg to bankroll the project and hand it over to a more ethnic appropriate set of filmmakers and writers?
Or was the ultimate aim, once again, to assert White Jewish Supremacy, albeit from the putatively PC Left?
Here is how Silow-Carroll defends the Ashkenazi “West Side Story” in the WOKE era:
There is also the question of who gets to tell a story – a question that is front and center as Steven Spielberg is about to release his own version of the musical, with a script by another Jewish-American, Tony Kushner. Spielberg is treading very carefully not to be seen as co-opting the Puerto Rican narrative, telling an interviewer that he “really wanted to tell that Puerto Rican, Nuyorican experience of basically the migration to this country and the struggle to make a living, and to have children, and to battle against the obstacles of xenophobia and racial prejudice.” He has consulted with Latino cast and crew and held a listening session at the University of Puerto Rico with students and faculty.
That session demonstrated the disconnect between how a white American Jew like me and a native Puerto Rican can perceive the same work of art. To me, the “America” dance and song have always been a triumph, a matchless melody wedded to brilliant lyrics and heart-stopping choreography. When Anita sings, “Puerto Rico, you ugly island, island of tropic diseases / Always the hurricanes blowing, Always the population growing / And the money owing, And the babies crying / And the bullets flying” – I hear it as an immigrant’s self-justification for a difficult move, and as a corrective to the rosy memories of her friends.
“West Side Story,” like the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess,” is at the same time a brilliant and complex work of Art, which is made difficult by cultural appropriation and racism from an era that is very much unlike the current one.
For those who may still have not read my article on “Porgy and Bess”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OB-cKs7X1PTs7bhil8AjwGh12XplRYB9z3P9vb-0RIA/edit
What should remain clear amidst all this mess, is that Silow-Carroll remains completely oblivious to his own internal Jewish racism as manifest in his Best Books list:
My 2021 in Books: Yiddish, Delis, Nazis and the Warburgs
I keep a log of all the books I read because a) otherwise I will have zero memory of having read them and b) because the list forms a sort of biography of my interior life. I don’t lead an especially adventurous life, and sometimes the most interesting part of the day is whatever is happening between the covers of whatever book I am reading.
(Okay, I am fudging here: I usually read on a Kindle.)
I toggle among Jewish and “non-Jewish” books, partly for professional reasons, and partly because — this may surprise you — there is a whole world out there that has nothing to do with being Jewish. For the purposes of this newsletter, however, here’s a list of the Jewish-themed books I read this year, some old, some new, some of which I wrote about.
“Yiddish: Biography of a Language”
Jeffrey Shandler shapes his history of Yiddish as a traditional biography: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity. He also debunks a few of the myths that non-Yiddish speakers, like me, continue to perpetuate, including the idea that Yiddish is somehow both vulgar and adorable, unlike the refined German from which it supposedly derives. My interview with Shandler also convinced me to take a beginner’s Yiddish class at The Workers Circle, which expanded my appreciation for the language and for my rapid loss of brain cells.
“Moshkele the Thief: A Rediscovered Novel”
“From the Jewish Provinces”
Two slim books — the first by Sholom Aleichem, the second by the early 20th-century writer Fradl Stock — demonstrate the overlooked possibilities of Yiddish. In “Moshkele,” appearing in a first-ever English translation by Curt Leviant, the cliches of the shtetl are turned upside down in the tale of a petty Jewish hoodlum and a Jewish women who runs off with a gentile man. An authentic shtetl peeks out from under the gloss of “Fiddler.”
“From the Jewish Provinces” is a collection stories, translated by Allison Schachter and Jordan D. Finkin, by a nearly forgotten poet and writer who moved to New York as a teenager, wrote for the Yiddish press, and largely slipped into obscurity, as so many women Yiddish writers were allowed to do. Stock’s stories — set in Europe and New York — often have a similar shape and theme: A young woman yearns for a bigger life beyond the narrow possibilities of her small Jewish village. The stories are charged with erotic longing, and gesture toward larger themes about the collision of tradition and modernity.
“Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice”
In her lively academic study of new kinds of Jewish belonging, Rachel B. Gross makes a bold claim: Jewish museums, genealogical societies and even delis create attachments to Jewishness as profound as anything that goes on in the synagogue. I challenged her in a fun, enlightening interview earlier this year, but I came away with a new appreciation for the ways material cultural and unconventional Jewish settings create and perpetuate meaning.
“The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive”
Human rights attorney Philippe Sands may be best known for his 2015 documentary “My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did,” which explores how the sons of two different Nazis deal with evidence of their fathers’ crimes.
Sands here tells the story of one of those Nazis — Otto Wächter, the Nazi governor of Galicia — and his attempts to escape justice after the war. “The Ratline” is an indictment of both the Catholic Church and the Allies — each active in shuttling unrepentant war criminals to new lives in the West — that reads like a novel by John LeCarre (who happens to show up in the book).
“Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection”
“The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family”
Sam Apple’s biography of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and indisputable odd duck Otto Warburg is two books in one: A history of German science before and after the rise of the Nazis, and a manifesto on how diet may be the overlooked factor in treating and curing cancer. Apple presents Warburg as a genius whose contributions to the science of cancer may have been overlooked because of his imperious personality and the compromises he made when he agreed to carry on his work in Hitler’s Germany.
Otto Warburg was a distant cousin of the “Famous Five” Warburg brothers at the center of Ron Chernow’s biography of the German banking clan. Chernow explores how German and Jewish history played out — triumphantly and tragically — on both sides of the Atlantic, and how the Warburgs tried desperately to hold onto traditions of business, philanthropy and noblesse oblige in the face of the upheavals of the 20th century. (Bonus: Read about Chaim Weizmann’s long-running affair with a Warburg daughter.)
“The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos”
Judy Batalion’s stirring book is about the young Jewish women who took amazing risks to help the resistance, passing as Aryans and acting as couriers under the noses of the Nazis and their collaborators. Batalion refuses to glamorize her subjects, and describes the physical suffering they endured and long-term effects — post-traumatic stress, survivor’s guilt — that haunted many of the women after the war. (I interviewed Batalion for a webinar in April.)
“A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg”
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper show how religion, real estate and politics came together to create the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg. Perhaps their most surprising insight is how the Satmar align themselves with New York City’s other minorities in the scramble for subsidized housing, while most non-Orthodox Jews have long been seen as part of the white majority in the ways they live and vote. (JTA’s Shira Hanau spoke to the authors in May.)
“Philip Roth: The Biography”
It was hard to untangle the late novelist from the scandal surrounding his biographer, after Blake Bailey was accused of sexual abuse and grooming by former students. Roth emerges from the biography both larger than life (a dedicated craftsman, a champion of other writers, a generous friend) and smaller (often aggrieved, callous and, even when it comes to lovers of whom he was obviously fond, caddish and worse). The best way to encounter Roth is in the pages of his own books, where he was invariably, brilliantly and sometimes tiresomely working out the themes of his long life.
“People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present”
Dara Horn’s book of essays explores the ways Jews and non-Jews try and fail to tell the Jewish story in the wake of the 20th century’s slaughter, displacement and ongoing antisemitism. She describes, for instance, how a Chinese city that was once home to a vibrant Jewish community wants to claim its Jewish history even as it obscures the ways its Jews were persecuted under Chinese rule, and tells the story of Varian Fry, the World War II rescuer of European intellectuals whose lionization similarly distorts all the ways the West failed to save average Jews.
“Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood”
Just three years after the massacre of 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue complex, Mark Oppenheimer offers a series of fresh and unexpected takes on an incident that I thought had been exhaustively covered — by us and others. As I wrote in October, “Squirrel Hill” is the story of a Jewish neighborhood, the American ritual of gun violence and its aftermath, and a deep dive into the ways tragedy can bind and divide a community.
I also read a number of excellent novels this year. Below are the ones with Jewish themes, in no particular order:
“Morningside Heights,” by Joshua Henkin
“The Vixen,” by Francine Prose
“Evening,” by Nessa Rapaport
“The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen
“Send for Me,” by Lauren Fox
Further Reading About Further Reading
My colleagues at Alma picked their “Favorite Books for Winter 2022.”
Note well how he characterizes his list in strictly religious terms:
I toggle among Jewish and “non-Jewish” books, partly for professional reasons, and partly because — this may surprise you — there is a whole world out there that has nothing to do with being Jewish. For the purposes of this newsletter, however, here’s a list of the Jewish-themed books I read this year, some old, some new, some of which I wrote about.
When he uses the term “being Jewish” that means “being Ashkenazi” exclusively. For him there is no other way of “being Jewish.”
Not only is his list completely Shtetl White Jewish Supremacist, he also does a bit of White Jewish Intersectionality by linking to the New Age Hipsters at Alma:
Last February, I presented how Alma sees the Ashkenazi/Sephardi binary:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/8_LPwv29Qcw/m/mCVNsj6yAgAJ
Indeed, it is much the same as that of Tikvah Tablet; the Ashkenazim get the “serious” culture, Sephardim are forced to stay in the kitchen.
We will also note some fortuitous Tikvah Intersectionality on his list, as he includes the Neo-Con Straussian tome on “Dead Jews” by Ruth Wisse favorite Dara Horn:
As an e-mail from the Jewish Women’s Archives puts it in their announcement of a Podcast with her, “Dara Horn is Done Being Polite”:
https://jwa.org/podcasts/canwetalk/episode-69-dara-horn-people-love-dead-jews
I would not be surprised if the deplorable book by Horn follows the deplorable book by her BFF Bari Weiss onto most, if not all, the Jewish year-end reviews.
As I continue to assert, not being polite is definitely a two-way street; though as a Sephardi it has definitely not worked to my professional-fiduciary benefit, as it has for the White Jewish Supremacists!
Silow-Carroll does not at all try to hide his Ashkenazi ethnocentrism, reveling in the Shtetl world that does not seem to know that Jews ever lived outside of Eastern Europe.
The Alma Best Books of 2021 list is even more intriguing, because it is not limited to Jewish authors. The fact that it is filled with non-Jews, many with non-White identities, makes the complete absence of Sephardim that much more racist, and thus that much more egregious from both a multicultural and a Jewish perspective.
This is what the young New Age Jews look like!
It certainly does not bode well for our “Jewish” future.
But to be completely fair, it is hard for the racist Ashkenazim to know Sephardim and Sephardic culture, given that nationally-recognized “Sephardic” organizations are currently being run by Ashkenazim.
Like Congregation Shearith Israel:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/5L0M39-6qMc
The Tikvah ASF, which continues to peddle its “Jazz Against Democracy” Straussian racism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/oUhqdKyoyew/m/0VrbDBWIAQAJ
And, last but not least, JIMENA, which has supported Ashkenazi HASBARAH racism as its primary aim:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Aik3N12jrfo/m/8KjLkv2cAgAJ
Each of these organizations, under the iron hand of well-connected White Jewish Supremacists, has expanded and gained substantial new sources of funding and support from a racist Ashkenazi world that is apparently totally comfortable, as we see in the new Ashkenazi “West Side Story,” with controlling the means of non-White representation.
In addition to the problem of the Ashkenazi-run “Sephardic” institutions, there is the world of academic Jewish Studies, which has transformed Sephardic History into a racist enterprise by very cleverly deploying Social Science scholarship to turn us into caged monkeys being analyzed in ways that strip us of our agency, but even more than that, showing us to be buffoons and cretins.
It is a world where intellectual, religious, and literary history, such as we saw in the brilliant studies of Andalusian Convivencia by the late Maria Rosa Menocal, now relegated to the Jewish dustbin demanded by HASBARAH Islamophobia, has given way to that Social Scientific racism and its debased Orientalism.
I have written a couple of articles on the matter, dealing with the racism of Laura Leibman and Devi Mays:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_k1I5KoFmIK0Qk7Zfd6HvTPo3iYaWL6YpuRp3VY3tgA/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l4GaqfTjcBkotDfzurNs8unp9sRA374FLKOmeEBcOkU/edit
And, lo and behold, both those women – “expert” in the Sephardic heritage, as much as Aryeh Tepper and Jason Guberman and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik are “expert” in the Sephardic heritage – have been richly rewarded by the Jewish Book Council with National Jewish Book awards in 2020:
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/2020-national-jewish-book-award-winners
In fact, Professor Leibman was awarded three separate awards for the same Sephardi-hating book!
Laura Arnold Leibman wins awards in three different categories with her impressive book The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center): the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, the American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award, and the Women Studies Barbara Dobkin Award.
It is not at all an easy thing to find a decent book by or about Sephardim these days. The recent history of institutional racism and White Jewish Supremacy has taken its collective toll on us.
In the end, Silow-Carroll is sadly just following the ethnocentric Neo-Con trend in the Jewish world, as forcefully spelled out in the new Pew Research Report:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
It is more Tyranny of the Majority oppression, rooted in a Might Makes Right ideology.
So, as we continue to consider the more overtly racist pronouncements coming out of The Tikvah Fund and its many allied groups, we are just as likely to find such racism from “soft targets” like The Jewish Week and its new editor.
David Shasha