Word: luftmenschen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grand punctilio of high-bosomed dreadnoughts like Emily Post had been unraveling for years, of course. But to many of the young in the '60s, the laid-back luftmenschen of the counterculture, manners were as superfluous as flatware at McDonald's (the late 20th century's reversion to its fingers) or linen napkins at the Donner Pass. To this last half-generation, manners were sexist, hypocritical...
...against the traditional image of the Diaspora Jew, the Ghetto Jew, born with a burden of guilt into a hostile world which he was unable to challenge and from which he therefore retreated, into the stagnant world of the Eastern European Jew, a world of peddlers, of scholars, of "luftmenschen" (literally, "men-of-the-air" that is, parasites, do-nothings) where he would scrounge a life until the next Good Friday when the mob of Christians would burst in for revenge upon the "Christ-killers", who would be cringing in their houses, under their beds, praying for salvation from...
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