“ ‘Jew’ is a funny word,” the comedian Louis C. K. once said, “because ‘Jew’ is the only word that is the polite thing to call a group of people and the slur for the same group.”
.. As far as Trump speeches go, it was pretty decent, a short bit of hortatory boilerplate with Trumpian flourishes, like calling the Exodus the story of “an incredible people.
.. In his remarks, it was “Christians” who celebrated Holy Week and the resurrection of Christ — but it was “Jewish families” who celebrated Passover and “the Jewish people”
.. I had written that Americans had, in effect, “elected a Jew as vice president,” but the editor — a non-Jew — made me change the wording to “a Jewish vice president.” He knew that to write “a Jew,” even in a positive article by a Jewish reporter, would strike some as offensive.
We Jews, too, recoil from calling ourselves Jews.
.. In my experience as an editor at a publication focusing on Jewish news and culture, and hosting its podcast about Jewish life, I have noticed how many Jewish writers — me included — avoid calling anyone a “Jew.” I frequently edit articles that mention “Jewish politicians” or “Jewish artists” but not “Jews.”
.. we Jews have been conditioned to think of a “Jew” as something bad.
.. To be “a real Christian” is a compliment, but to be “a real Jew” is considered an insult
.. anti-Semites love to talk about “Jews” and “the Jews.”
.. Whether it’s the stain of having murdered Jesus or an inborn capacity for greed or deception, the vices perceived by the anti-Semite belong to “the Jew,” not someone who happens to be Jewish. Anti-Semites have made “Jew” a term of opprobrium, and the rest of us have acquiesced.
.. Many of us don’t think of Jew-ness as central to our identity.
.. “I’m German” sounds a bit milder than “I’m a German.” The former is purely descriptive, the latter a bit proud.
.. our preferred term for ourselves was “Israelite” or “Hebrew.”
Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War
“I don’t think it would be American Express,” one diner said. “I feel like that would be braggy, like I’m trying to prove I’m a big shot.”
.. “An Amex says you’re rich, but this says you’re interesting.”
.. Chase was succeeding by, essentially, copying the American Express playbook and chasing the same up-and-coming elites who had traditionally joined Amex’s ranks.
.. Could it be that American Express, the card that had defined ostentatious luxury and capitalist striving since the 1980s, was on the brink of becoming passé? What kinds of hoops would Amex need to jump through to attract these new hoodie-wearing moguls and young tycoons?
Was it possible .. millennials would never be convinced that income inequality was something they should aspire to?
.. For more than 30 years American Express has reaped enormous profits by telling its customers that they are successful, elite, the cream of the moneyed crop
.. people paid American Express up to $7,500 for the privilege of carrying cards that are very similar to the ones Visa and MasterCard give away free.
.. Last year, for instance, the number of American Express cards in use declined by almost 18 percent
the company’s relationships with Costco and JetBlue .. summarily ended when those firms found alternative credit card partners.
.. Chase and Citibank, have started beating Amex at its own game, often by hiring the same executives who built Amex.
.. “They can book travel for you, they have concierges to recommend the best restaurants. If you leave your reading glasses inside a hotel room in Budapest, Amex will get them mailed back to you. No one else does that.”
.. Millennials, however, don’t really need travel agents or concierges: They have Priceline and Yelp.
.. American Express, for decades, has essentially sold snob appeal
The Chase Sapphire Reserve .. is all about emphasizing what cardholders can do, rather than what they can buy.
.. This is a card for accumulating experiences.”
.. now gives cardholders an annual $200 credit with Uber.
.. more than a third of its new cardholders last year were millennials
.. many people who work at American Express aren’t all that millennially minded themselves. If you visit Amex’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, you’ll find squared-jawed men in bespoke suits and fashion model-glamorous women, but not a lot of young people in the uppermost ranks.
Why Americans Vote ‘Against Their Interest’: Partisanship
Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.
Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money in their pockets.
Why do people vote against their economic interests?
.. “Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,”
.. it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.
.. “It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,”
.. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.”
.. That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean toward one of the parties.
.. “Older voters who scored high on racial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,”
.. She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated white voters that he would represent their interests.
.. Economic status, it turns out, is not so important in partisanship.
.. Mr. Trump was able to win the G.O.P. nomination even though he broke with Republican ideology on economic matters like trade protectionism. His arguments played to white working-class voter identity
.. while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions .. today it’s more common to line up behind one party.
.. people now feel that they are fighting for many elements of who they are: their racial identity, professional identity, religious identity, even geographical identity.
.. he as a politician, kind of for the first time, said ‘we’re losers.’ ” Social psychology research has shown that the best way to get people to defend their identity is to threaten it. By saying “we don’t win anymore — we’re losers — and I’m going to make us win again,”
.. Mr. Trump’s pitch to voters both created the sense of threat and promised a defense: a winning political strategy for the age of identity politics.
.. people responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues.
.. He has been careful to recast every potential scandal and policy struggle as a battle against the Democrats and other outside groups.
.. Mr. Trump has insisted, for instance, that the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign staffers’ contacts with Russia is meaningless “fake news,” and that the real issue is whether President Obama wiretapped him before the election.
.. Abandoning him would mean betraying tribal allegiance, and all of the identities that underlie it.
Jonah Goldberg: Mutants and Identity Politics
Many of us, including those who are now shocked, said years ago that if Obamacare passed, it would radically, and perhaps permanently, change the relationship between the individual and the state. Now, many of the same people are gobsmacked that Paul Ryan says the fix has to happen over time and in three stages.
.. I could also bepop and scat about how if you nominate and elect a man of Nixonian domestic-policy instincts, you shouldn’t be stunned when he pursues Nixonian policies. Blaming Ryan for proposing a plan that could pass the requirements of the White House strikes me as more than a bit cowardly.
.. While I disagree with Trump ideologically, politically I find myself in the uncomfortable place of being more sympathetic to his predicament than some of his longtime boosters who have suddenly discovered the Rorschach test they’ve been staring at isn’t a window on the real world;
.. Again, I don’t much like the House health-care plan as proposed. But when you are in a crappy situation, you shouldn’t be too haughty about the fact that the solutions are pretty crappy too.
.. Trump came into office promising everything would be easy. A lot of people chose to believe him. That was foolish. It also wasn’t Paul Ryan’s fault.
.. The Danes, you see, have set out to make Down syndrome a memory in their society by weeding out the Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life).
.. One of the most brilliant aspects of the mutant storyline in Marvel comics (now ripped off everywhere) is its political and cultural adaptability. Mutants are Jews fleeing a Holocaust. Mutants are blacks facing bigotry and segregation. Mutants are immigrants with no rights or, again, Jews with no homeland.
.. Mutants are such malleable cultural props for several reasons. First, they tap into the modern cult of identity politics: that our political or cultural self-conception is a hardwired fact of nature
.. Mutants are also definitionally non-conformists, and non-conformity is the new conformity. (The mutants who choose to “pass” as human are considered to be living in a state of self-denial, the second greatest sin after bigotry itself).
.. Last, mutants are victims “just for being different,” which is a form of saintliness in our secular culture. Even the mutant supremacists claim the mantle of victimology and resentment
.. But if the old orthodoxy holds that most gay people are simply “born that way” (which I think is true), that means homosexuality is rooted in biology and/or genetics. And that means science can get to it. I am in no way condoning that. But it will be interesting to watch when being pro-life becomes a staple of the gay Left.
.. I’m a big subscriber to the view that science and technology drive culture and politics far more than we appreciate and, quite often, far more than ideas
.. A Slovakian Horatio Alger — who looks like a member of the Ukrainian politburo circa 1974, who swam the Danube to escape the Communists, and got a degree from Milton Friedman — is easy to talk about in an entertaining way, which is what I did.
.. Intellectually, I’ve always had at least a vague understanding of the Christian idea of “God is love.”
.. I often talk about the importance of family and marriage to civil society. The decline of volunteerism and social trust is, in my view, most attributable to the decline of the family in America. (As Charles Murray likes to note, single men rarely coach Little League — we do that kind of thing because our wives make us.) When I look at how much good work — better work than the state could ever do — was done by Donna, it reminds me how even the best government programs are a poor substitute for the organic work of communities.
.. Pedants like to say there’s no such thing as “very unique.” I don’t think that’s true. For instance, we say that each snowflake is unique. That’s true. No two snowflakes are alike. But that doesn’t mean that pretty much all snowflakes aren’t very similar. But, imagine if you found a snowflake that was ten feet in diameter and hot to the touch, I think it’d be fair to say it was very unique.