Jews From The United States

"The critical race theory scare is a reaction to the re-evaluation of history sparked during the Obama presidency and the Ferguson protests. They sparked an inquiry into how we have a Black president but still have glaring racial inequalities that have not been resolved. That process was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump because he was so overtly running on the politics of white identity, and then it culminated in the George Floyd protests. That recognition frightened conservatives because the knowledge that racial disparities were caused through public policy, that implies the state should step in and fix it. If you are conservative and you believe that these inequalities are actually the result of in-born natural ability then you don’t want the state to do that. So I think there’s a recognition on their part that this re-evaluation of history would cause people to understand the lingering effects of racism in American life, and to prevent that, they want to make it difficult to teach history that includes the extent that discriminatory policies shaped racial disparities in America."

"Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives (p 77)"

"You see, when only white men are hired, it's just a question of competence and merit. But when white men are not hired, it's prejudice. Don't ever let anyone tell you conservatives don't understand systemic racism! They just think it only exists for them."

"There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans.* Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace. (p28 "The Myth of Kindly General Lee")"

"Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles (p 210)"

"If editors made writers define what they mean by "woke" in pieces before using it derisively I suspect we wouldn't see it used very much."

""Woke capital" doesn't exist, only capital, and those obsesses with the former are not at all opposed to the power of the latter"

"Win or lose, the dust Trump was kicking up would linger in the lungs. I started poring over old texts about racism, immigration, and nativism, like John Higham's Strangers in the Land. I found disturbing echoes of Trump's rhetorical style in Hannah Arendt's description of Stalinist and Nazi apparatchiks in The Origins of Totalitarianism and had epiphanies about the fragility of American democracy reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. (p xiv "Introduction")"

"They would rather not have democracy than have to share it with people who are different from them"

"History is not a thing that operates on its own. It’s written by human hands and interpreted by human beings, and that interpretation is substantially mediated by power. For example, after Reconstruction, Democrats in the South saw Reconstruction as a mistake and saw Jim Crow as restoring the proper order of things. That interpretation was challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois and others but it did not begin to be overturned in American public memory until the around Civil Rights era. My book is an attempt to put down a historical record of the Trump administration to show it as I believe it really was; to prevent this kind of manipulation of history from taking place (although, I’m just one person). But the public memory of the Trump administration will be determined substantially by who holds power in the future."

"The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. (p 100)"

"Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another…Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump. (p 101)"

"When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Here's what she said to me Que sera, sera Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que sera, sera What will be, will be."

"City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style In the air there's a feeling of Christmas Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile And on every street corner you hear Silver bells, (silver bells), silver bells, (silver bells) It's Christmastime in the city Ring a ling, (ring a ling), hear them ring, (hear them ring) Soon it'll be Christmas Day"

"Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you You're so like the lady with the mystic smile."

"Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart? Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep They just lie there, and they die there Are you warm? Are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?"

"Zionism is as old as the Babylonian Exile, which began in 586BCE. Separation from the Land of Israel as they were being led into captivity by their conquerors rested crushingly upon the spirits of the Jewish exiles; a longing for the homeland consumed them. Turning in the direction of Judah, they then took an awesome vow: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy" (Psalms 137:5-6)."

"Folklore is a true and unguarded portrait, for where art may be selective, may conceal, may gloss over defects and even prettify, folk art is always revealing, always truthful in the sense that it is spontaneous expression."

"Jews have received their tempering from an unflinching realism learned for a high fee in the school of life; they have always felt the need of fortifying their spirits with the armor of laughter against the barbs of the world."

"One of the profoundest religious changes effected by the synagogue almost immediately upon its establishment twenty-five centuries ago was to bring communion with God directly and easily to the the individual worshiper."

"Of all the astonishing experiences of the widely dispersed Jewish people none was more extraordinary than that concerning the Khazars."

"First you laugh at a Jewish joke or quip. Then, against your will, you suddenly fall silent and thoughtful. And that is because Jews are so frequently jesting philosophers. A hard life has made them realists, realists without illusion."

"There is a new Monmouth University poll out this week that shows abortion nearly tied with the economy as voter top concern going into the midterm elections"

"There is nothing more important than hard work"

"As a person who believes in individual responsibility, I did not fear being alone; besides, I only argue with myself as head of the Republican Senate Minority!"

"A healthy economy or a healthy population are not mutually exclusive."

"What I said was that so many of the people -- and I'm paraphrasing, too -- it was something along the lines that so many of the people were so poor and so black. What I was trying to underscore was that most of the people suffering in New Orleans were African American. Some people have tried to distort that or whatever, but it's just a fundamental fact. They were poor and they were black. ... So the question being asked by some African-American leaders and others was, "Would there have been a different response if the victims had been predominantly white?" [According to a CNN Gallup poll] the black Americans said, yes, there would have been a difference, and the white Americans said absolutely not. So one of our commentators, Jack Cafferty, was talking about the elephant in the room: this whole issue of race and poverty in America. That is how that whole issue came up."

"Yeah, but she's cramming a lot of information..."

"It’s really an important part of our democracy to have an excellent world-class news organization — like CNN is, like other news organizations are. It’s very concerning, very worrisome that the president of the United States, you know, goes after us the way that he does."

"Wolf Blitzer, as I understand it, his parents weren’t vi his family comes out of that background — but you wouldn’t know it. Because the ideology o if you’re in media."

"A mathematical argument, once understood, is in its capacity to compel belief a miracle of enlightened life."

"In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that \sqrt{3} + \sqrt{12} = 3\sqrt{3}, an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)"

"I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances."

"“Any idiot,” he said calmly but with immense conviction, “can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience.”"

"It is here, at this very moment when the first utterly trivial differential equation is solved, that the secret form of words is revealed that makes modern science possible."

"Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say. “Remember me.”"

"The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life."

"Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after they have been completed, I am where I started, having done something but accomplished little, a useful metaphor for a great many activities in life."

""If we believe we can stop using coal today, we’re fooling ourselves … The answer is not to think that we can just run away from coal worldwide. … We could do all that we are potentially able to do, and even that will not be enough, because so many other parts of the world are just adding more and more carbon to our air … We need to be fair and just. We need to be open-minded."*"

"Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential."

"Being an optimist, especially in financial markets, have proven to be a good outcome. Being a pessimist out of any one periodic time, you may have good success, but over the long run, I believe in capitalism, that in the long run, it's the best economic model in the world."

"If you look over the course of my career, how the US has improved and other countries have improved, being an optimist, especially in financial markets, have proven to be a good outcome."

"Dear CEO, Each year I make it a priority to write to you on behalf of BlackRock’s clients, who are shareholders in your company. The majority of our clients are investing to finance retirement. Their time horizons can span decades."

"Television was dominated by one network — CBS in its early days. And Paley was a god. But he didn't like to hear what he didn't like to hear. And people soon learned that. So they told Paley only what he liked to hear. Therefore, he was soon living in a little cocoon of unreality and everything else was corrupt — although it was a great business. So the idiocy that crept into the system was carried along by this huge tide. It was a Mad Hatter's tea party the last ten years under Bill Paley."

"Paley, Mister Paley. "He is to American broadcasting as Carnegie was to steel, Ford to automobiles, Luce to publishing and Ruth to baseball," the New York Times had once written. The New York Daily News had called him an electronic Citizen Kane." His reign at CBS, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, could be summed up as more than five decades of "brilliant brinksmanship, salesmanship, statesmanship, and showmanship.""

"We the People (6/1/48) began on CBS Television as the first regularly scheduled network program series simulcast."

"CBS reaped a publicity bonanza from La Cadena de las Americas (Network of the Americas). Fortune magazine devoted six pages to Paley's triumphant blow-by-blow account of his negotiations, filled with lofty pronouncements ("We are far too prone to think of Latin Americans as a mass of black-haired, backward people who owe what security they have, in the midst of their well-costumed revolutions, to the Monroe Doctrine and North American cash")."

"I had an early passion for reading, especially for Horatio Alger stories. I went to the public library almost every day, and when I found a Horatio Alger book I had not read before, it was like finding a gold mine."

"Ed Sullivan proved his talent as a showman who could attract the best and most timely performers from all four corners of the world of entertainment."

"Most educators and students are familiar with Columbia's American School of the Air, which was established in 1930 and today has a weekly audience of millions throughout the school year. These broadcasts, prepared under the supervision of distinguished educators, typify in many ways Columbia's whole roster of educational and cultural programs. In themselves, however, they are a well-planned and cumultative course of education by radio, presented five days a week each autumn, winter, and spring."