Seinfeld co-creator Larry David did something during his Saturday Night Live monologue that is almost unknown in 21st-century America, Steve Sailer reports. He engaged in Jewish self-criticism in front of gentiles:
It’s hardly surprising that David would be the one to stumble upon this prime directive of contemporary culture: Don’t recognize Jewish patterns.
Both Seinfeld and David’s subsequent HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm are shows about rules, about the descendants of shtetl dwellers awkwardly adrift in a world without an all-encompassing set of laws itemized in the Talmud. David’s characters are constantly either getting in trouble for violating rules that they didn’t know existed or are outraged that other people aren’t aware of rules that seem obvious to them.
As Larry’s blond wife on Curb explains to him in exasperation after his attempt to enforce his assumption that the cutoff for Halloween trick-or-treating ought to be age 13 ends in disaster:
You know what? Not everybody knows your rules, Larry. You’ve got your own set of rules and you think everyone’s going to adhere to them, but they’re not because nobody knows them.
On SNL, Larry, who is now 70, was appealing to an older Jewish-American rule that the most obvious way for Jews to avoid criticism for stereotypically Jewish failings, such as exploiting shiksas as if they were members of a different tribe, is to try to behave better.
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In other words, show some shame. And don’t try to shame everybody else.
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It’s worth observing that White Guilt and Jewish Guilt are diametrically opposite. White Guilt is the worry that your ancestors were too ethnocentric, but Jewish Guilt, as given its classic formulation in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, is the concern that you aren’t ethnocentric enough for your ancestors.
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One common explanation for why nobody, not even Larry David, is supposed to joke about Jewish tendencies is because Jews are so powerless.
An alternative and perhaps more plausible answer is because Jews are so powerful.
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Indeed, much of the Late Obama Age Collapse of the progressive coalition into squabbling factions seems to be focused on heavily Jewish institutions such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the universities. There isn’t all that much wealth left in red-state America for identity-politics groups to strip-mine, so their claws are now out for the wealthy institutions of blue-state America, whose leaderships are, of course, quite Jewish.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. An intelligent people should be able to sidestep these kinds of self-inflicted disasters. But when you make your highest priority keeping everybody else unaware, you wind up intellectually disarming yourselves as well.