‘The Self-Infatuated Jew’
Today on Tablet
June 10, 2011
Liel Leibovitz’s weekly parasha column today in Tablet Magazine is typically insightful and typically provocative. He posits:
In the late 20th century, the dominant cultural paradigm haunting Jewish communal life was that of the self-hating Jew; now, in the dawn of the 21st, the figure to watch out for is the self-infatuated Jew, incapable of introspection, resistant to censure, aggressively rejecting any bit of opprobrium as inherently and intolerably evil. It’s the self-infatuated Jew who drowns any attempt at dialogue with the din of accusations—but the Palestinians started it all! But we’re still more democratic than Syria! But the Iranians are denying the Holocaust!—and who is quick to draw the boundaries of communal belonging as passing somewhere between right and extreme right.
As usual, I find myself wanting to nod along with Liel (“self-infatuated Jew” could stand to enter the lexicon) even as I want to argue with him (the self-hating Jew hasn’t exactly disappeared; Ahmadinejad really does deny the Holocaust). Luckily for me, he sits a few feet away; for the rest of you, to the comments!
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
