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WHAT I LEARNED FROM WHOOPI GOLDBERG

3/24/2020

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There’s Jewish and there’s too Jewish.

An Orthodox Jew in a black suit and wearing a shtreimel* is too Jewish. His ostentatious otherness challenges modernity, majority culture and religion. But Jewishness expressed with incongruities and ironic self-deprecations––a Jew wearing an ugly Hanukkah sweater that says “Oy to the World!” or one that riffs on the octopus-trope of malignant Jewish world-domination––is declawed Jewishness and therefore cute.

Whoopi Goldberg is just the right amount––the fun amount––of Jewish. Her Jewishness invites fans to celebrate their tolerance and worldliness and transforms being Jewish into something sort of un-Jewish––like Whoopi Goldberg’s “Jewish American Princess Fried Chicken,” recipe –a piquant mix of contempt for Jews, white blandness and cliched Blackness––that features wink-wink digs at rich, spoiled, JAPs too lazy to do the cooking themselves.

When the ADL complained about the recipe, Goldberg’s agent protested that because she’s Jewish, Whoopi Goldberg can’t be antisemitic. Goldberg claims Jewish ancestors despite Henry Louis Gates’s (“Finding Your Roots”) discovery that she had none. She adopted “Goldberg” when her mother suggested that having a Jewish surname was a requirement to become a “star."

Goldberg has said that that hers is a family surname: "Goldberg is my name—it's part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black…” Whoopi Goldberg also has stated that she is Jewish by Feeling––she “just [knows she is] Jewish" ––"Jewish" being is a generalized thing: “I practice nothing. I don't go to temple, but I do remember the holidays."

The Jewification of Goldberg’s professional name is ironic when so many Jews––including members my family––had to anglicize their too-Jewish and too-alien Hebrew names and surnames in order to find employment. Becoming Bob Gold instead of Shlomo Goldfarb demonstrated a willingness to conform, to tone down your otherness and served as a guarantee that you would not disturb the placid, mayonnaise flow of white Christian American life in which being a little Jewish is okay––even novel and entertaining schtick––but being too Jewish is subversive.

Hanukkah, because it can be understood to be Jewish Christmas, is fine, but observing the Sabbath or keeping kosher isn’t. Sandy Koufax was just Jewish enough; Larry David’s Jewishness is too Jewish––as is, I learned this week from Whoopi Goldberg––the Holocaust.

Besides teetering close to otherness, another weird aspect of Jewishness is, as Dara Horn describes in PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS, experiencing past as present: “The creation of the world recurred every week at our Sabbath table,” she remembers. On Passover, Jews don’t say that God freed the Jewish slaves in Egypt, they say, “God freed me.” The same time-collapsing Zelig contemporaneousness applies to the Holocaust. Those piled up, rag-like corpses and human skeletons in the concentration camp photos are family––not were family. Those first and last names on the Yad Vashem victim lists are radioactive with alive human presence.

Whatever Whoopi Goldberg’s Jewish feeling is, this feeling of extreme human nearness isn’t part of it. In her statements and clarifications, she does not identify with Holocaust victims or empathize with their agony. Instead, she reduces the catastrophe to “white people doing it to white people,” which conjures biker brawls, not the exterminist sadism of the Final Solution. Equating the genocided with their genociders does not gather the victims into a close and loving, familial embrace; it others and anonymizes.
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When Whoopi Goldberg insisted that “…the Jewish people around the world have always had [her] support,” I finally got it: There’s Jewish-feeling, JAP-mocking, extra-ugly Hannukah sweater-designing Whoopi Goldberg and then there are “the Jewish people of the world.” There’s family and there's the opposite of family because sometimes even a teeny bit Jewish is too Jewish and schtick only goes so far.
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 *"What Is A Shtreimel?" https://www.learnreligions.com/what-is-a-shtreimel-2076533
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 



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kill the dog

2/18/2020

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I was on a panel about animals in crime fiction at Bouchercon last year and I'm preparing to moderate (weird term) one on the same subject in a few weeks at the Tucson Festival of Books which reminded me once again of the the truth of writing universally acknowledged––offered always with a shrug to indicate its obviousness as a reality-tested fact:

Whatever the fuck you do as an author, 
#DontKillTheDog.

Informing this LAW OF FICTION  is the notion that killing said dog is the one thing readers will never forgive. A total turnoff.  Indecent. A form of reader-abuse. A thought-crime and a writing-crime, a betrayal, a total fuckover worthy of some sort of punishment a.s.a.p. 

For killing the dog is to void the tacit pact between writer and reader to not surprise too much, to tease but never actually go THERE. Sadism and violence against human beings is okay. Hyper-detailed descriptions of the sexual torture murders of young women pre and post mortem are "fascinating," but for God's sake, leave the dog alone. 

This line-that-cannot-be-crossed in crime fiction that divides the victimization of an innocent human victim and an INNOCENT canine victim is an interesting one. Is it that the dead, often violated female at the center of so many mysteries is not fully innocent in the way a dog is?  Is it that the reader and the writer can imagine hurting/killing another person under certain circumstances? But the capacity to hurt an animal is something no one, even animal abusers, ever admits to himself.  Even Michael-Torture-Electrocute-Dogs-For-His-Own-Pleasure Michael Vick. 

You tell me. 

I know zero. Clueless late bloomer that I was (not sure that one is still said to be blooming after a certain age) and am, my first novel and the series that grew from it begin with a murdered man (that's fine) and a dog who died of cruelty and neglect. 

Alas and without realizing it, I had fatally fucked up from the start. All was lost on page 3, book one. And having made the fatal error so early on, I was free.

At the Bouchercon panel all the panelists except yours truly spoke about why they would never "kill" the dog (also cat, etc), how absolutely wrong that would be, etc. and I found myself in the position of confessing that I had indeed killed the you-know-what to an audience of suddenly Keane-eyed stone faces. 

I still believe that that if someone or something in your fictional world calls out for you to kill it, do it. 

The victim in crime fiction is a stand-in for what matters and who matters--or it should be. In my series the dog matters. Not a dog sidekick inserted to "humanize" a character. To provide "warmth." "Cuteness."  But THE DOG.

Fiction has its own truth.  Nothing is deader than pages fogged over by words untethered to the real or to the deeply felt. Heed the insistent--animal or human--voice in your head. Listen to your thumping heart. Follow where your sorrow leads. 


Over a million animals abused each year in the USA during incidents of domestic violence--and this is a guess as abuse is an elastic term and reporting is sketchy and omits violence in other forms i.e. animal racing, hoarding, breeding, fighting, testing, etc.  https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/animal-cruelty-facts-and-stats 
https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-animal-cruelty


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