Weinergate: Jewish Values on Display

It began with the usual judeo-liberal media attempts to ignore or at least downplay the scandal as it was first starting to swirl around one of their rising stars. When it was clear the controversy could not be snuffed out with silence Weiner himself went on the attack, calling an interviewer's implication that he had done anything inappropriate outrageous. As we know now Weiner was bluffing, but at the time he seemed to think customary jewish tactics of argument - playing the victim with bombastic bluster while he berates his interlocutor - could serve more broadly as a long-term strategy.

Of course the fact that Anthony Weiner is a jew, or as Debbie Wasserman Schultz might put it, a proud pro-Israel jewish member of Congress, has gone mostly unremarked upon in mainstream coverage. As with the DSK affair, a powerful political figure can be a proud jew, a representative of their very distinct community, right up until they do something embarassing or criminal, at which point, oh yeah, they just happen to be jewish, no different than anybody else, and anyway, so what?

A fleeting glimpse of the significance of Weiner's jewishness came to light in a Radar Online article titled Weiner Used Jewish Sexual Stereotype To Facebook Sexting Partner, by Dylan Howard, 6 June 2011. Oh my. Howard says Weiner's "reference to a stereotype of Jewish women’s aversion to the sex act is sure to create more heat under a scandal that is already red hot." Actually, it was the opposite of aversion:

“You give good head?” the embattled and married New York congressman asked the woman on March 16, this year.

She responded: “I’ve been told really good...and i love doing it.”

At that point, 46-year-old Weiner declared: “wow a jewish girl who sucks (bleep)! this thing is ready to do damage.”

So the problem, according to Howard, isn't Weiner's lying, or infidelity, or obsession with sex. The problem is that Weiner thinks negative thoughts about jewish women. In private.

This is an absurd excuse for a more direct and plausible understanding of the exchange, which is that Weiner is not only happy to have found an eager virtual sex partner, but that he is delighted that she is jewish - that he finds her jewishness especially exciting. Such an understanding is bound to create cognitive dissonance in the minds of deracinated Whites, lectured relentlessly for decades now, most especially by jews, that any preference for our own kind is peculiar and wrong. So better to invert reality and pretend that Weiner holds a dim view of jewish women.

There's more on this stereotyping excuse below, but first let's take a brief detour. The Radar Online article contained a link to a May/June 2011 Moment Magazine article which provides some background on Weiner and specifically his jewish bona fides. Live from New York, It's Anthony Weiner, by Daphna Berman:

A Master Of Political Theater, Congressman Anthony Weiner Has Leveraged His Strong Liberal Opinions, New York Attitude And Willingness To Go Head-To-Head With Republicans On Cable TV To Fill A Void In The Democratic Party.

Weiner, whose ninth district includes parts of Queens and Brooklyn, represents what is arguably the most Jewish congressional district in the U.S. Raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a middle-class Jewish family, he now lives in Forest Hills, Queens, and is—as he likes to remind people—a true New Yorker. His parents are divorced: His father, Morton, is a lawyer, and his mother, Frances, a retired public school teacher. He had two brothers, Jason and Seth (who was killed in a 2000 hit-and-run accident). Weiner and his mother are close, and she has accompanied him on campaigns—though he refused to have his mother answer questions directly. “She’s completely out of control,” he tells me. “You have no idea what she’s going to say.”

Weiner attended New York public schools, from Brooklyn Technical High School to SUNY Plattsburgh, where he graduated in 1985 with a degree in political science. He went to work for then-Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and became something of a protégé; he reportedly said to his boss, “I’m going to take your job some day.” He learned quite a bit from his mentor—also Jewish, and now the senior senator from New York—and, most notably, has absorbed much of the media acumen for which Schumer is known. “As a staff member to Schumer, he learned how to take advantage of the electronic media and how to get on television,” says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Former Republican Senator Bob Dole once said the most dangerous place in Washington was the space between Schumer and a camera, and critics could say the same of Weiner.

[Congressman Jason] Chaffetz [(R-Utah)], who has worked with Weiner on other bipartisan issues, concedes that Weiner can be “over-the-top,” adding that “his style offends a lot of people and he sometimes makes issues a little too personal. He’s aggressive, which works for some people. When we’re on the same side, it can be helpful.”

Jousting with conservatives can sometimes come across as a sport for Weiner, although he insists otherwise. “It’s a necessary thing to do,” he says. “I have a choice: I can shout at my television or shout at the host directly. I’m not afraid of having a debate about these issues. And some of these programs are so deep in lies and demagoguery that someone needs to be there to correct the record.” Then, with a smile, he adds: “It allows me to burn off bile.”

One of his colleagues is Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, who serves with him on the Judiciary Committee and is a personal friend. “Anthony is one of the most quick-witted legislators there is, and once he gets hold of an issue, there’s no letting go,” she says. “He’s very well-spoken and knows how to get a point across succinctly and effectively. He’s an excellent debater, and when a back and forth is necessary, he’s someone you can call on to be the standard-bearer.”

Weiner has always been assertive about his Jewishness. In his own words, he’s spent “more time at melaveh malkahs [post-Shabbat gatherings], a lot more time at shul, at sisterhood breakfasts, and at bond breakfasts than probably just about anybody else.” He doesn’t belong to a synagogue or consider himself close to a single rabbi—except to say, consummate politician that he is, “all the shuls in my district are my home shuls.” Says Warren Hecht, president of the Queens Jewish Community Council: “He’s a Jewish official who hasn’t forgotten” his roots or his district.

Weiner, whose middle name is David, had his bar mitzvah at Union Temple in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As part of a promise to his Twitter followers, he recently released a photo of himself on his big day as an awkward-looking 13-year-old boy, complete with a self-described 1970s Jewfro. “We weren’t a very religious household, but we had a very strong sense of our Judaism,” Weiner says of his upbringing.

He came by his solid Zionist inclinations early on. “Support for Israel was always a very big focus in my household growing up,” says Weiner, who has been to the Jewish state more than a half-dozen times. He remembers wearing a homemade pin to Sunday school that read, “I am a Zionist.”

As a congressman, he has consistently pushed pro-Israel legislation, and Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), counts him among the “top 10 congressmen” in terms of Israel issues.

From the outside, Weiner’s hawkish Israel views appear to have collided with his personal life. His wife, Huma Abedin, was born in Michigan to a Pakistani mother and an Indian father, and raised in Saudi Arabia. Her late father, an Islamic scholar, established an institute there that aimed to deepen religious tolerance, while her mother, who is a sociology professor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, helped create one of the first women’s colleges in the country.

The pair dated for two years before announcing their engagement, and Weiner was uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their courtship. In a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board in 2008, Weiner dodged a number of personal questions but was adamant when asked if his relationship posed a potential risk to his political ambitions. “I’m certain that the relationship was not the product of a political calculation,” he said. Later, he also refused to answer what his Jewish mom thought of his girlfriend. “It’s not something I want to talk about.”

The July 2010 wedding was covered widely. The reports were gushing, accompanied by photos of the couple with the beautiful bride in a white Oscar de la Renta gown. Response in the Jewish community was tepid: “Christian President Marries Jewish Congressman to Moslem Political Aide on Shabbos,” read the headline on The Yeshiva World News after the Saturday nuptials.

The ZOA’s Klein is more direct: “People I’ve spoken to in his district said they wouldn’t support him because he intermarried.” In fact, before Weiner came to the ZOA dinner in December, Klein warned him that his marriage to a Muslim might elicit jeers from the crowd.

Whoops. More cognitive dissonance, this time for jews. How to reconcile Weiner's assertive jewish identity with his choice of a non-jewish spouse? Hmmm. As Moment is written by jews, for jews, at least the readers who are unhappy about "intermarriage" (wink, wink, it's about "religion") aren't subjected to any insinuations that they're ignorant xenophobic bigots.

The article also discusses Weiner's aspirations to become mayor of New York City:

It’s unclear what Weiner’s chances may be. At the 2011 Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, noting the absence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Weiner, one of the event’s headliners, said: “Who knew that what it takes to be mayor of a big city is to be a hot-tempered, arrogant, loud Jew with nine and a half fingers. Who knew? And in other news, I’ve taken a job as a meat cutter at Arby’s.”

But changing demographics, as well as a shifting political reality, may present something of a challenge to what until now has been a meteoric rise. Political strategist Hank Sheinkopf says, “New York is less white than ever and less Jewish than ever, and traditional social class lines don’t hold.” Weiner’s only chance, he says, “is to position himself as a non-billionaire from the outer boroughs. He can do it, but it will be difficult.”

The article's conclusion contains a bit of unintended prophesy:

“He’s passionate—people respect that and respond to that,” says Queens Jewish Community Council President Hecht. “If he was a phony, people would see right through him.

Tablet Magazine (by jews, for jews) expanded on Radar Online's quick bit of damage control. Understanding Weinergate, by Marc Tracy, 7 June 2011:

How social media felled a rising star, and how his Jewishness was involved

That about sums it up. Half of Tracy's article is spent floating the implausible notion that Weiner doesn't understand the internet. He's an idiot savant. No mention of the more plausible notion that Weiner's incredible arrogance and lust had something to do with his assertive self-image as a "rising star", an unassailable zionist soldier for judeo-liberal interests.

Expanding on the Radar Online article quoted above, the second half of Tracy's excuse-making consists of a deeper examination of jewish identity, group-pity, and navel-gazing about stereotypes:

There is one more thing to discuss, though if my mom wanted to stop reading this post now, I wouldn’t mind. A Nevada woman Weiner flirted with on Facebook told him that she understood herself to be good at giving oral sex and added, “i love doing it.” To which the congressman from Queens responded: “Wow a jewish girl who sucks []! this thing is ready to do damage.”

I’ll pause for your laughter. But this is also, believe it or not, yet another manifestation of a generation gap! Weiner is old enough to be of the generation that, brought up on Portnoy’s Complaint and its spawn, generalizes Jewish women as sexually cold, and specifically unwilling to perform blow jobs and inept at them when they can be reluctantly coaxed. But a younger generation has almost the exact opposite conception of Jewish women: They (again generalizing) see Jewish women as more willing than the average woman to give blow jobs and as especially skilled at the task. Contributing editor Rachel Shukert has written the definitive article about this (she discusses it here); the new stereotype became especially pronounced in the public consciousness, she argues, thanks to Monica Lewinsky. When that scandal broke, Weiner was almost 30.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the single journalist most responsible for forcing this scandal into the open—who briefly hijacked Weiner’s press conference yesterday demanding an apology—is the conservative impresario Andrew Breitbart, who, yeah. Can you imagine if they had had Twitter in the shtetls?

When jewish stereotypes are discussed in scandal rags like Radar Online, intended for consumption by the hoi polloi, there is a pretense that jews are scandalized by such things. Amongst jews themselves such things inspire laughter. Listening in on their conversation what one actually finds is a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to argue about how they perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others, coupled with strong desires and active efforts to shape those perceptions.

If Weiner's private lewd flirtations make you queasy, you don't want to click the "here" link in the text above. It takes you to Interview with Rachel Shukert on Jewish girls and blowjobs at Best Sex Writing 2008. Here's the most relevant portion of this irrelevant sideshow:

Why do you think the stereotypes about Jewish women and sex are so pervasive? What do you make of the contrast between the older stereotype of the frigid Jewish woman vs. the newer one of the oversexed one?

Well, I think it’s important to stress that most of the factors in the culture that have made Jewish women seem unattractive–whether it’s being frigid, or physically unappealing, demanding, spoiled, etc.–have been created by Jewish men. Now, I love Jewish men. The men I love most in the world–my husband, my father, my grandfather–are Jewish men. But it’s not Gentiles who invented the “shikse goddess” or wrote all the JAP jokes. Who knows why? Frustration, mostly, I think. All that self-loathing and insecurity.

I’m going to speak in incredible generalizations here for a minute, so just bear with me. I think that Jewish men in the past 30 or 40 years have been extremely invested in making themselves sexy and attractive to the culture-at-large–and they are, they seem smart, sensitive, generous, etc. But with it comes this sense of fear, this kind of atavistic fear, I think, that at any moment they’ll be found out. And if anyone can call a Jewish man on his bullshit, it’s a Jewish woman. So they rationalize why they shouldn’t be involved with Jewish girls–all of these reasons. Jewish women are left open to constant criticism. And since Jews have been such an intrinsic part of popular culture, all this stuff disseminates and becomes conventional wisdom.

Now, I think this is changing, hugely. I think Jews have become more and more of an accepted part of mainstream culture, and this generation of Jewish men are more comfortable with themselves than ever before, and no longer feel like they’re straddling two worlds and trying to leave one of them behind. They can look on their Jewishness as something comforting instead of something constricting. But in the meantime, I think Jewish women have been like, “You know what? We’re sick of waiting for you,” and started on their own project of who they are, which is extremely interesting. And that’s what’s ascendant right now, I believe, which is very exciting for me. So that’s the split, I think, that the old Jewish stereotypes were disseminated by men, and the new ones by women. And the mainstream picking up on it.

Judeo-centric views like this were discussed in Jews Run Hollywood, Whites Get the Blame. I find it refreshing to read such criticisms of jewish media influence, cited approvingly by jews without the usual denials and personal attacks in response. It's refreshing because critiques from any point of view sympathetic to "shiksas" or their men is painted as "hate" and greeted with howls of real hate from jews.

The nonchalant "yeah" link in the Tablet article above tugs on another interesting jewish thread. You may have noticed how the judeo-liberal media makes judeo-conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart out to be the devil incarnate. Breitbart broke the Weiner story and wouldn't let it die. Maybe you wonder why. Tablet relates the jewish view in Being Andrew Breitbart, by Allison Hoffman, 21 May 2010:

But who is Breitbart? The New Yorker sent Rebecca Mead to find out, and it turns out that Breitbart, who was adopted, is a Jewish boy from L.A.’s Westside, specifically in Brentwood. There he attended the exclusive Brentwood School, which is the kind of place that turns out the people who run Hollywood’s machinery—the Ari Golds and the producers and the lawyers and the managers. But Breitbart tells Mead he was, even as a high-schooler, turned off by “the industry” and instead fascinated by the theatrics of Washington, D.C. His politics, he reports, emerged from his exasperation with the “deconstructive semiotic bullshit” first introduced to the American cultural scene by emigré members of the Frankfurt School—radicals, almost all of them Jews, exiled by the Nazis in the 1930s.

The article Hoffman links provides more insight into Breitbart's background and motives. Rage Machine - Andrew Breitbart’s empire of bluster, by Rebecca Mead, 24 May 2010:

Breitbart is the founder of Breitbart.com, which, since 2005, has aggregated news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services. He is also the proprietor of several newer Web sites—Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism—that provide right-leaning commentary and original reporting. Their content is largely supplied by unpaid bloggers, who are given a more prominent platform than they might otherwise attain. The Big sites are dedicated to countering what Breitbart believes is the leftist bias of American cultural and media institutions.

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism.

Breitbart is tall and burly, with eyes the color of Windex, silver hair that he sometimes forgets is no longer blond, and jowls that he wobbles for emphasis when he wishes to express outrage. He is fond of saying that he has two modes of discourse: righteous indignation and puerile jocularity. “I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he informed me. “ ‘You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.”

Breitbart considers himself an accidental cultural warrior. “I am not as partisan as people think I am,” he told me, calling himself eighty-five per cent conservative and fifteen per cent libertarian. His conservatism fails him on issues such as the legalization of prostitution, and he sometimes tilts toward favoring gay marriage. “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said.

He does not pretend to be an expert in policy, or to be particularly interested in it. “Just because I am paying attention to politics and culture doesn’t mean that I should be talking about the health-care bill, talking about the minutiae,” he told me. Instead, Breitbart is obsessed with wresting control of the political narrative from the established media organizations. If the wire services that Breitbart aggregates, and the bloggers he recruits, serve as his content providers, then Breitbart might be called a malcontent provider—giving seething, sneering voice to what he characterizes as a silenced majority.

Breitbart frequently decries racism, and likes to point out that he was adopted, as was his younger sister, who is of Mexican descent. “I hold in great disregard the idea that somehow her blood and my blood separate us,” he told me. “I grew up resenting people who would look at us at the table and would go, ‘Why are those people together?’ ” He likes to say that he is “pro-miscegenation.” As a result, Breitbart says, he is outraged when charges of racism are cynically made. Last year, he appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and sounded this theme: “There’s nothing in this country that is a worse accusation—in America, if you accuse somebody of racism, that person has to disprove that.”

"I just feel like I am one of these Idaho guys saying, ‘You’re not taking my land’—with a gun, on my porch,” Breitbart told me one evening. He was sitting in the bar of the Bowery Hotel, in Manhattan, drinking white wine from a glass that was being refilled by a slim waitress in a black wrap dress. His companions were similarly urbane.

Breitbart’s image of himself as a Western survivalist, he was explaining, referred to the sense of siege he felt in Los Angeles, which, he contends, has become egregiously radical since September 11, 2001. “There are people there that are aggressors,” he said. As the evening progressed, it emerged that the closest Breitbart had ever come to the real Idaho was on the Internet. He’d been looking online at properties in Coeur d’Alene, a resort town, while fantasizing about life elsewhere. “I saw the golf course there, and it had a really cool island,” Breitbart said.

Breitbart’s parents were quietly conservative. His father was a restaurateur and, later, a lobbyist for the food-service industry; his mother was a bank executive. But their son, who attended the prestigious Brentwood School, was reflexively liberal. “It was like the water I was in,” he told me. Gary Hewson, a classmate, who is now a real-estate developer, recalls Breitbart as “a bit of a class clown, a rabble-rouser.” Breitbart says, “That was my only discernible skill.”

For college, Breitbart went to Tulane University, in New Orleans, a period that he now regards with a mixture of shame and nostalgia. “It was four hideous years of debauchery of a level that was incomprehensible to me,” he told me. “I remember rationalizing my misbehavior. I remember giving my dad a book on the chemical structure of MDMA”—Ecstasy—“and I was, like, ‘Dad, what do you think of this?’ ”

“I was so excruciatingly bored after college—it was like going home to Pittsburgh to get into the steel industry, then realizing that you hate steel,” he says. “I hated Hollywood. I hated being at parties and hearing people say, ‘I work at “Mad About You,” I work in the clothing room.’ ”

Breitbart also began to reconsider the education that he had received in Tulane’s American Studies department, where, in his off-hours from partying, he had been exposed to critical theory. “I wanted to read Mark Twain and Emerson and Thoreau,” he says. “And I remember moments in class where I thought my head was going to explode, going, What the fuck are these people talking about? I don’t understand what this deconstructive semiotic bullshit is. Who the fuck is Michel Foucault?” He came across the work of Camille Paglia, and was captivated by her analysis of the takeover of academia by the left.

“A lot of these guys I was reading about in my American Studies class were German and Italian social scientists from the University of Frankfurt,” he says. “Once you see what their plan was, you realize that it was implemented. It was taking over the cultural institutions. The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems. So you look at the conservative movement—working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places—while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches. They did it through academia; they did it with K-12. You look back at the last forty years, and people didn’t put up a fight.”

But of course many people put up a fight, and still do. The inconvient truth for judeo-conservatives like Breitbart is that most of those people are demonized as "racists" and "anti-semites" - shoved down the memory hole as if they never existed, never resisted. Judeo-conservatives join judeo-liberals in doing this. They are two faces of a jewish hegemony over politics, media and culture. Breitbart may feel some small measure of compassion for the Whites who never resisted, especially because he knows just how much judeo-liberals detest us anyway, but it's only relative. Judeo-conservatives find White conservatives (which is to say most Whites) useful, for the moment at least. For them the judeo-liberal takeover doesn't represent a tragedy, much less a crime. But it does present a "huge business model" selling a white-washed view of the ongoing jewish aggression and hegemony. Judeo-conservatives are just as fond of vulgarity and deviance as their judeo-liberal comrades. Sure, they disagree about some things, vehemently some times. What they agree on is that Whites must defend or at least defer to jewish interests, while the idea of Whites defending White interests fills them all - from Weiner to Breitbart - with fear and loathing.