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Aug. 18th, 2023 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI know lirazel is a big fan of Mark Oppenheimer, but I hadn't listened to any of his work until I stumbled on Dara Horn's promo for his podcast Gatecrashers, which sounded very up my alley. It's about the 'secret Jewish history of the Ivy League', which is to say, the secret history of the non-Jews running the Ivies trying desperately to keep their schools from being overrun by Jews. I did not personally attend an Ivy, but I spent Shabbos at the Hillel of every Ivy except Cornell in the early 2000s, and I formed definite opinions about the Jewish character of these schools.
I really liked Oppenheimer's presentation of the facts. There's a definite Jewish trauma around the Ivy quotas and the history, and it would be easy to present a simple story about the hateful goyim running the show (and this tends to be Dara Horn's presentation of these facts, fwiw), but the reality is a lot more complicated and Jews are a lot more culpable for our participation in the system than the simple story would suggest. Oppenheimer gets that. He gets how the Jews who got in felt differently than the Jews who didn't, he gets how the Jews were not always sympathetic to Asian-Americans and African-Americans faced with similar systems, or how many Jews regarded the inability of POCs to work around the system in the same way the Jews did as a failure of intellect or discipline. He gets how the social dynamics after the fall of the quota system were not always to the credit of Jewish students. I really appreciate the way he balanced these debilities against the constant way the Ivies reminded Jews that they didn't really belong.
I do wish he spent some more time acknowledging that while this trauma is real, it was nowhere near as high on the radar of most Jews as the actual violent traumas that have been experienced. And I am sure Oppenheimer could have found incidences of anti-Semitic violence or threats of violence on Ivy campuses, to the point where the show's emphasis on the effects of quotas and micro-aggressions and the occasional slur starts to seem trivializing.
lirazel is a big fan of Mark Oppenheimer, but I hadn't listened to any of his work until I stumbled on Dara Horn's promo for his podcast Gatecrashers, which sounded very up my alley. It's about the 'secret Jewish history of the Ivy League', which is to say, the secret history of the non-Jews running the Ivies trying desperately to keep their schools from being overrun by Jews. I did not personally attend an Ivy, but I spent Shabbos at the Hillel of every Ivy except Cornell in the early 2000s, and I formed definite opinions about the Jewish character of these schools.I really liked Oppenheimer's presentation of the facts. There's a definite Jewish trauma around the Ivy quotas and the history, and it would be easy to present a simple story about the hateful goyim running the show (and this tends to be Dara Horn's presentation of these facts, fwiw), but the reality is a lot more complicated and Jews are a lot more culpable for our participation in the system than the simple story would suggest. Oppenheimer gets that. He gets how the Jews who got in felt differently than the Jews who didn't, he gets how the Jews were not always sympathetic to Asian-Americans and African-Americans faced with similar systems, or how many Jews regarded the inability of POCs to work around the system in the same way the Jews did as a failure of intellect or discipline. He gets how the social dynamics after the fall of the quota system were not always to the credit of Jewish students. I really appreciate the way he balanced these debilities against the constant way the Ivies reminded Jews that they didn't really belong.
I do wish he spent some more time acknowledging that while this trauma is real, it was nowhere near as high on the radar of most Jews as the actual violent traumas that have been experienced. And I am sure Oppenheimer could have found incidences of anti-Semitic violence or threats of violence on Ivy campuses, to the point where the show's emphasis on the effects of quotas and micro-aggressions and the occasional slur starts to seem trivializing.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-21 12:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-21 06:33 pm (UTC)I do like Oppenheimer a lot, though I will be the first to admit that he has some real blind spots. I've picked up his book about the way the Squirrel Hill community dealt with the aftermath of the Tree of Life murders, but I haven't read it yet. I'm really looking forward to his biography of Judy Blume though!