Chicago Tribune entertainment reporter Mark Caro describes himself as one whose sensibility generally veers toward the ironic, but after reading a July 18 post on the New York-based gossip site Gawker.com, he found himself playing an unfamiliar role: scold.
The story begins — as most news accounts from last week did — with the release of the final installment of the Harry Potter series. Gawker’s post was a response to word of how some Orthodox Knesset members were up in arms over the fact that the much-awaited tome, because of its simultaneous worldwide launch, would be going on sale in Israel at 2:01 a.m. Saturday and that some booksellers were going to flout both state and religious law and open for business anyhow.
Decrying the Potter series’s “defective messages,” Avraham Ravitz of the ultra Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party was quoted by The Associated Press as saying, “We don’t have to be dragged like monkeys after the world with this subculture, and certainly not while violating our holy Sabbath.”
Gawker writer Alex Balk, a self-professed equal-opportunity offender, ribbed both the secular booksellers (“these are Jews, let’s remember, and a buck’s a buck”) and their Orthodox critics, whose own “subculture” Balk described as no less “weird” than the one that Ravitz saw himself being dragged behind.
For the Tribune’s Caro, this proved too much.
“I know Gawker is ‘edgy’ and all,” he wrote on his blog, Pop Machine, but its Harry Potter post “either a) shows the perils of being too hip for the room, or b) is stupefying in its casual offensiveness.”
Gawker’s Balk was far from cowed. In the days that followed, he offered three more posts on the subject, each one cheekier than the last. The finale: a mock-scientific chart explicating “exactly what is so funny about the Jews” — Comical Hats and Beards (4/10), Domineering Mothers (5/10) and topping the list with nine points out of 10, Constant Bitching About Anti-Semitism.
For regular Gawker readers, Balk’s posts were nothing out of the ordinary — studiously irreverent, rich with Jewish-themed cracks and sheathed in a layer of irony so thick that any and all criticism comes off sounding daft, regardless of how maladroit the offending quip. The pose is one that the site — founded in 2002 and a guilty pleasure for media professionals ever since — has perfected. With its arch takes on everything from behind the scenes maneuverings at The New York Times to Lindsay Lohan’s rap sheet, it at once mires itself in the day’s muck and hovers loftily above it all. For the Jewish observer, the site presents a special sort of enigma, as it is thoroughly preoccupied with Jewish rites and personalities and yet largely oblivious to the rhythms and texture of Jewish life. It is knowing and ignorant; clued in and without a clue.
Just what is it about Gawker and Jews?
Asked to explain the Gawker ethos and its seeming obsession with things Jewish, the site’s managing editor, Choire Sicha, thought the explanation simple. “We live in New York,” he said. “Doesn’t that give us a right to talk about the Jews?”
But does living in New York — or, for that matter, being Jewish (as the bulk of the Gawker staff is) — necessarily qualify one to speak with any authority on Jewish matters?
“I tend to think of us as amateurs and know-nothings about everything,” Sicha said. “We prove that true every day.”
And if the end result isn’t funny?
“That’s fine,” he said. “Not everything is funny. I don’t think we should be funny for the sake of being funny.”
For Caro, however, funniness is a key issue. “A lot is forgiven if you’re actually funny,” he said. “But there’s a difference between genuine wit and easy, cynical ridicule.”
Jesse Oxfeld, who wrote for Gawker for a time and is now senior online editor for New York magazine, offered his own take on his onetime professional home.
“The Gawker voice is that of the average New York media professional,” he said, “which, in a lot of ways, tends to mean Jewish — or at least Jewish-ish. There’s probably a willingness to make ‘We’re all friends here’ kinds of jokes. Part of the whole shtick is to explode and undermine stereotypes by employing them.”
But are Gawker’s Jewish preoccupations emblematic of some larger truth — uneasiness, say, with the writers’ own Jewishness? Or could it be the opposite — unselfconscious Jewish assertiveness?
“It would be wrong to ascribe any kind of sociological, theoretical or philosophical significance to it,” Oxfeld said. “Gawker is largely about entertaining people and running with things that help to make a writer’s post counts for the day.”
Indeed, amassing posts is no small matter for writers under contract to produce 12 daily items.
“Getting into a feud is great,” Oxfeld said. “It delivers posts without having to think too hard about what they’re going to be.”
Clearly, they're self-hating anti-Semites.
"...Part of the whole shtick is to explode and undermine stereotypes by employing them.” Oxfeld's attitude is all too common among younger Americans. It makes me glad I'm 61 and won't be around all that much longer. I just don't find prejudice and bigotry funny.
Perhaps if Jews were not the 'average New York media professional', and some other ethnicities were allowed to amass in any real numbers in media professions; they would be ridiculed as well. But we'll never know, will we? I guess Jews will have to be satisfied with world domination, and work on mind control in their free time (if they wish).
All of the Gawker staff "Jews" are not really Jewish. Their mothers are shiksas and they did not grow up Jewish. They only identify as Jews now so that they can get away with anti-semitic remarks. Gawker is ignorant, iditoic and not funny which is also offensive.
“Gawker is largely about entertaining people and running with things that help to make a writer’s post counts for the day.” So casual anti-Semitism is entertaining? When I was growing up, my mother explained to me that people who used four-letter words did so because they didn't have the vocabulary to say anything more interesting. Same seems to apply to Gawker's writers.
Wonkette also slid into Judeophobia by uinnecessarily posting about the use of "Jew-liani" and then referring to the "Jew York Times". When confronted by me, first they threatened to employ their lawyers but backed down when I wouldn't. the full story
the full story here: http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2007/07/laffair-wonkette-round-up.html
It all sounds like whipping the weakest minority to show you can get away with it and entertain those whose self-hatred can be expressed by others....
Unfortunately, mocking Jews is inculcated into the left wing body politic in the US, and it is the pretend Jews or the Jews that anything identifying them as religiously Jewish that are the worst offenders. The National Council of Churches is nothing if it is not autthentically anti-Semitic. The MSM regularly rationalize Arabs killing Jews in Israel as a "cycle of violence" somehow making it all acceptable. Today Condi Rice forgot that she was a US official and not an Israeli official when she told the Jews that she has decided their fate and it does not include Judea and Samaria - 3700 years of Jewish residents not withstanding.
I'm sort of a reluctant Gawker consumer. I read it to keep abreast of the media (important in my job), and while I find some Judo-centric allusions kinda-sorta funny, it really exhibits the very worst side of Jewish culture. Lashon hara has got to be the most violated commandment out there in the Jewish community,and the one in which its culture and religion clash the hardest.
This piece fretting about some journalist's humor column is like a parody of Jewish self-obsession, Chosen-People vanity and the fetishising of words over deeds which comes from too much inbreeding for verbal-ability IQ. How do we see ourselves? How does the world see us? How will the world see us if one of us (is he REALLY one of us??!!!) makes fun of us? Should only we be allowed to make fun of ourselves? Should some of us be allowed to make fun of others for being too Jewish, or not Jewish enough? What is the true, deep, eternal, profound meaning of BEING JEWISH? You laughed too much, you're a pretend Jew, you schmuck! Aaagh, the goyim are laughing too, the crazy shmendrik's scribblngs will start another pogrom... Let's have a conference, an ADL ruling, a Department of Modern Jewish Humor Studies, a program to teach our kids what's semitically amusing and what isn't. Let's declare that too much unsavoury attention is being paid to us AS JEWS, and when the media go quiet we can complain that AS JEWS we are being "marginalised" and "written out of the script". Keep those guilty goyim on the hop... Enough, already. There is a world elsewhere, as a non-Torah scholar once remarked.
Your "E-mail this article" mode is not functioning !!! Very annoying for a major newspaper. Please check.
To some extent I might agree with some of the comments by David L Nilsson. Only I'm not quite sure if he is making or missing the point that there's a tradition of recursiveness in Yiddish humor.
"Part of the whole shtick is to explode and undermine stereotypes by employing them.”- Jesse Oxfeld That's the bottom line, in reference to jokes such as these. As a half Hispanic, half African american, I can guarantee you I've heard a ridiculous amount of racially offensive jokes. However, in this day in age, I find it very common and somewhat uniting that everyone makes fun of everyone. The purpose of creating jokes such as these, in whatever way they may (or may not be) offensive to certain people, is to help and hopefully force people to realize that hatred of others for reasons beyond their control is absolutely absurd. Anyone who is still ignorant in such a way deserves not to be taken seriously, and that's the purpose of this kind of humor. I also strongly uphold that anyone taking it to the point of so much as accusing such a satirist as a prejudiced scumbag sincerely needs to lighten up and see beyond the joke. Understand it's meaning; allow it's purpose to sink in. Once that occurs, I promise, you will laugh as well. -Chicago, IL
I DON'T WATCH THE SIMPSON'S ... DID YOU SEE THE MOVIE "YOUNG FRANKSTEIN" WITH MARTY FELDMAN??? MARTY FELDMAN HAD HAD TYHROID DISEADE. THAT'S WHY HE HAD THOSE URGLY BLOGING EYES. THAT'S WHAT TYHROID DISEASE DOES TO THE EYES.
We Jews ought to ask ourselves, "Is there any such thing as being too introspective?" The very existence of this article and David Nillson's comment point to the answer. I recommend my personal slogan: "The unexamined life IS worth living."
Why are Orthodox Jews reading Harry Potter in the first place...seriously, I'm Jewish and biracial and a New Yorker and read Gawker. Does that make me conflicted? Self-hating? I think it's supposed to be humorous and if non-Jews take it to heart and internalize the prejudice, they were going to do it anyway.
"exactly what is so funny about the Jews". I am offended by the expression THE Jews. Nobody refers to THE Catholics etc. So why are Jews singled out to be preferenced with a THE? To this day, Jewish Germans are referred to as THE JEWS. Considering that not so long ago, six million out of 9 million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, that almost EVERY country closed its borders to persecuted Jews who desperately tried to save their lives, considering further that Antisemitism in Europe is once again "thriving" and that Antisemitism in the Moslem world borders on murderous intent (explicitly expressed by the Iranian president with nary a word of worldwide outrage by non-Jews), I consider the expression that Jews are "Constant[ly] Bitching About Anti-Semitism" more than offensive, I consider it highly alarming. It's not like Antisemitism is something which was practiced in our very distant past like cannibalism and human sacrifice (always noted with a shudder!). As long as non-Jews don't care about the constant threat Jews are subjected to on a daily basis in the entire word (and have been for the past 2 thousand yrs), NOBODY, especially non-Jews , should accuse Jews of being overly concerned with Antisemitism. If anybody is interested in an [incomplete] listing of persecution of Jews I composed starting from the first thru the 19th century, pls write write to me. If anybody know of other persecutions/pogroms, pls let me know. ursula duba u.duba@comcast.net author of TALES FROM THE CHILD OF THE ENEMY (penguin 1997)
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