13 Comments

I think the specific criticism in a case like this is that the guilty party adopted this identity because they saw it as an upgrade in status--therefore, it was self-serving, strike one--and that they thereby contribute to the fiction that victimized groups actually the privileged ones and privileged groups are victimized. Agree, in any case, that it's a shame there's no Roth around to write about this.

For what it's worth, I went through a similar experience when I was a kid. I went to one of those Jewish Borscht Belt bungalow colonies where you'd see seniors with numbers tattooed on their arms playing tennis and doing the backstroke. Since it was the Catskills, these Hasids would come around periodically to proselytize us; something no one really objected to, I think out of Jewish guilt for not being more observant. Most of the other kids would avoid them like the plague, but I was pretty into religious education, and I thought what we were learning was pure unadulterated Judaism (the Hebrew alphabet, etc.), and so I was obligated to learn it. Eventually, it came time to get tefillin, and one of the dudes asked me if my mother was Jewish. I told them she wasn't, and they booted me out of the whole program with a lot of tsk-tsking. Really confused me for a very long time.

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I was accused of being a pack of Jews while arguing with Holocaust deniers on Stormfront a little under 20 years ago. I liked the accusation and would've liked to be, considering the stakes, but I'll always be a nothing white dude, far as that goes. That led me into a history undergrad and eventually to follow your substack. It was nice to be a Jew for a time. Sadly it was short.

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Just as a thought experiment, take a hypothetical example of another person who very publicly and aggressively founds their persona on the performative enactment of every stereotype and behaviour associated with identity X. To become the become the truest of "True Scotsmen" (to borrow an idiom). Not just your average Scotsman, but the most Scottish of Scotsmen there's ever been. And if, after suspicion is raised, some investigative work is done into their background and it is revealed, anticlimactically, that actually they are factually Scottish (and male, I guess, in this idiom). Does it make their performative identitarianism "authentic" in any sense? Doesn't the fakeness inhere in the actual performance itself, in the substitution of caricatural mask for mundane unremarkable individuality?

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Interesting that each culture has its own version of this, based on its guilts and crimes - America has white people pretending to be black, Germany has fake Jews, and here in Canada we have our Pretendians. Freud would have a lot to say about this.

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The story of Wolff and his mother doesn't surprise me. Kriegsschuld and expiation for it was thoroughly and commendably baked into German boomers and Gen X. I could see his mother trying to avoid the burden of the horrors.

Kriegsschuld birthed tendencies in German politics not directly related to the Holocaust and WWII. The Greens and their mix of anti-nuclear power activism and Responsibility to Protect foreign and military policy for example.

As a US soldier in Germany in the mid-late 1970s I knew two soldiers who leveraged 'Jewishness' to attempt to score with German girls who otherwise would have had nothing to do with GIs. Think of a GI with a large Star of David pendant, a Qiana shirt, and bell-bottoms in a Frankfurt disco playing Abba and Silver Convention. One guy was most ostensibly a NY Rican, but of course he could have been Jewish too.

This was contemporaneous with the apogee of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhof Gang) and the anti-nuclear (weapons and power) movement.

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This reminds me, of course, of Elizabeth Warren's family story about having some Native American heritage - which turned out to be true, but not to the degree that confers bona fides. There was a similar, more vague story floating around in my family - it wasn't until decades into my adulthood that conversations with a step-uncle clarified that it was my mother's step-father's first wife who was part Cherokee. Having Altmans and Lehmans on my father's side, I was also hopeful for a little Ashkenazi blood (as if it would make me smarter and less whitebread than I actually am?) but my father's 23&me results revealed that these were ordinary German Altmans and Lehmans. Oh, to be a little more interesting then little old boring me.

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Glad to read that you’re finally visiting your family history. It just made me realize how terrible it was the Holocaust. I have 2 sisters that married German men. So in my family we have half germans. I hope you connect more with your origin.

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There’s a huge amount of self-loathing among Germans with left/liberal sympathies for obvious reasons. I mean, I’m an American of German-Irish descent and you can guess which tricolour I’d be seen with in public, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that he would embrace being Jewish on hearsay, though it is indeed ridiculous (like the “I’m gentile?!” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm). The Anti-Zionism is curious though since this usually comes with near-pathological philosemitism (the “antideutsche” antifa cells that will physicaly attack even Jews doing Palestine solidarity work being the most bizarre example)

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So what if he didn’t grow up in the Jewish community - or maybe he self identified with them & since his mother said he was one - he didn’t need to actually convert?

I haven’t read what he wrote or why anyone is upset about it.

Sounds similar to Repubs in the US saying only Repubs are “real Americans”

Doxxing is a big problem.

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so is he going to convert or what?

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Just imagine a Gentile mother saying to herself,

"I never liked that kid. How I can get him to cut off his own foreskin?"

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Roth "interprets" Feuchtwanger's Jud Süß from the grave.

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Let's hope the happy ending for Mr. Wolff isn't the reverse Hungary case, where he becomes a Querdenker activist against ze voke mind virus.

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