Friday miscellany

The crying conundrum, Halle Berry's Jewish nose gaffe and Bolivian prostitutes protest (Dollymix)

Turkey blames US Jews for genocide bill (Jerusalem Post)

Holocaust Denial and the French Ultra-Left (Infoshop News)

The Max Rayne school, where Arab and Jewish children study together (Independent)

Assimilation and the Jewish Radical, on Mark Rudd of the SDS (New Voices)


Acknowledgements: Jogo and Arieh

Comments

Bob, this is another rambling comment:

It's a strange phenomenon, Jewish noses. In Israel, where 80% of the population are Jews, what is known as a "Jewish nose" is a rarity. Either Diaspora Jews are more prone to this affliction, or maybe it's just an aesthetic prejudice whose time has come to be challenged?

When I was a student here in Canada, two of my profs turned out to be Jewish, after years that I'd studied with them. When I told them I was unaware of it, they both asked (respectively): How could you not see this nose?!!

On another occasion, I was participating in a seminar in which identities were discussed and Madeleine Albright's name came up. We wondered how she could get to be middle-aged, have Jewish cousins, and still not know that she was born Jewish. The prof animating the discussion then jumped in: All she needed to do was look in the mirror...

Actually, the two incidents I'm talking about reflect and bounce off each other. If you say I have green eyes, then I must have green eyes, even though the mirror tells me otherwise. Don't you think?

What I find quite remarkable is why in the more egregious Arab media Jews are caricatured as exaggeratedly hook-nosed. It could be that in harvesting Der Stürmer for Jew-baiting ideas the artists so identified with Aryan aesthetics that they obliterated their own identity, in the process. There must be a psychological term for that, somewhere :-)

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