Word: seinfeldisms
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...Jews marry Gentiles, and 50% do not belong to any synagogue. The Columbia University journalism professor offers only a terse aside. "It is hard to work up any optimism" that such people will continue as real Jews, he writes. Rather, he asks, once they have drifted off into a Seinfeld-and-bagels ethnicity, how will American Judaism be defined...
Secular Jews, for whom Jewishness is little more than a form of ethnicity, identity or perhaps just racial memory, have long been accepted in the American mainstream. Why, Jerry Seinfeld--the quintessential nominal Jew who quite cheerfully acknowledges his Jewishness but finds it so devoid of meaning that it plays no role whatsoever in his life--became the most popular figure in American popular culture. The embrace of Jews is so thorough that Irving Kristol once noted wryly regarding the alarming rates of Jewish assimilation, "The problem is that they don't want to persecute us, they want to marry...
...national media. Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion, but the most prominent Jews in American life usually embody the former quality more than the latter. Jewish senators like Barbara Boxer or Charles E. Schumer '71 rarely quote from Chronicles, or any part of the Bible. Seinfeld, Kramer and Elaine never set foot in a synagogue. There are few rabbis or religious Jews who enter public debates with the forcefulness of Jerry Falwell or Cardinal O'Connor. But Lieberman is different: His most memorable political moments, his campaign against Hollywood indecency and his condemnation of President Clinton during...
DeGeneres is by no means the only comedian with this problem. Fame isn't good for comedy. (Seen Robin Williams do anything funny recently?) Neither, alas, is happiness. (Why so quiet, Jerry Seinfeld?) DeGeneres is dealing with a triple-barreled assault on her humor resources. And perhaps it's better to be happy and a hero than to be funny. But it doesn't augur well for her new comedy-variety show, scheduled to air on CBS in November, which she, worryingly, describes as an old-fashioned comedy show. Please, Ellen, no hugs...
...lived by redlining ghettos and charging blacks more for their burial policies. It also precludes looking at how race is lived by those who seldom come into contact with peers of a different group, like affluent denizens of Manhattan's Upper East Side who wrap themselves in a Seinfeld show-like all--white cocoon or impoverished blacks in inner-city neighborhoods who know few whites besides cops, teachers and social workers. To some readers, leaving the story of those kinds of people out of the series seemed to teleport the problem to somewhere out there in the hinterlands, away from...