Jews You Can Use
The following are fields in
which Jewish men are believed to excel: gastroenterology, the violin, political
consulting, the domination of world financial markets, and particle physics.
One field in which it is believed we do poorly, however, is beating people up.
We are, the stereotype has it, lousy fighters, and this rankles. Some of us
respond to this slander by embracing, in the words of the cultural critic
Daniel Boyarin, our "sissy heritage" and taking up, among other things, the
study of Yiddish (not for nothing is it known as "mama-loshen ," the
mother tongue). Others move in the opposite direction and join the Israeli
army, where Yiddish, the language of our sissy exile, is most definitely not
spoken. Still others take up ice hockey.
And there
are those who steel themselves with memories of our gangster past. Men with
names such as Kid Twist and Gyp the Blood and Pittsburgh Phil once roamed the
Jewish ghettos. These gangsters were as tough as the Irish and as powerful as
the Italian mob, and when I discovered this fact at age 12 or so, it thrilled
me. This reaction is easy to understand: I was, at the time, facing the
oppression of anti-Semitic schoolyard thugs, and in my revenge-fantasies, Bugsy
Siegel and Gurrah Shapiro were lining up on my side, blackjacks in hand.
Of course, all this was happening when I was 12. By the
time I hit 16, my understanding of Jewish gangsters had become substantially
more nuanced. Great nicknames and fists aside, I began to recognize these
Jewish gangsters as fools and thugs who preyed on their own communities, robbed
the Jewish poor, and murdered their own people.
Rich
Cohen, author of a new book titled Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster
Dreams , doesn't get this fact. For Cohen, a writer for Rolling Stone
magazine, the Jewish gangsters are the purest expression of the Jewish spirit
and the means through which he defines his own Jewishness.
There are two books here. One is a very bad
book of social history, defined by Cohen's tendency to make up facts--"imagine"
is his word--when he doesn't know something: "I do not know what [Yasha
Katzenberg] looked like," he writes, "but I have tried to imagine him. I see
his eyes as mirrors, reflecting not what he is looking at, but what he will
see: mountains, rivers, wars. I imagine him tall and slender, wearing a hood,
taking his time--something long prophesied, a nomad who has crossed wastes to
get here."
The
second book is his attempt to portray himself as a spiritual heir to the Jewish
gangsters. He does this by striking a tough guy pose throughout, a pose that
fails to hide his sense of physical inadequacy, which he blames on his
Jewishness:
When I
was growing up, any mention of Jews as Jews would make me cringe. Other than my
parents, I really knew of only one type of Jew: cerebral bourgeois
kids-to-college suburbanites. Do Jews get drunk? Do Jews trash hotel rooms? Do
Jews defend themselves? Questions I never thought to ask.
His father is different, he maintains, by dint of his
Brooklyn roots. Cohen writes affectionately and ad nauseam about his father and
his father's aging, Brooklyn-born schemer-friends, who sit in delis blowing
hard about the glories of tough Jews. One of his father's best friends is Larry
King, and these passages are charming only if you believe that being in a room
with four people just like King would be charming.
Cohen
believes his book is revolutionary, a violation of a taboo against speaking
about Jewish gangsters. Jews, he writes, "have pushed aside the image of the
gangster: Forget. Forget when you were bullies. When I tell old Jews about this
book, ... the blood drains from their faces." Cohen is infuriated by this
purported tendency to suppress the gangster past and is even more angered by
attempts to make light of it. "I once heard a comedian refer jokingly to the
Jewish Mafia," he writes. "The mere mention of a Jewish gang broke up the
audience. ... Sometimes, when I see this comedian's bit rerun on cable, I
imagine Pep Strauss"--a hit man in the hit-man organization called Murder
Inc.--"entering stage left and cutting him belly to chin."
I will put aside Cohen's bizarre dreams of
violence for a moment to address the idea that the memory of Jewish gangsters
has been suppressed, which, of course, is not the case. Just because Cohen
didn't know about Siegel and Dutch Schultz doesn't mean everyone else didn't.
The subject of Jewish gangsterism has been well mined in recent years by both
historians and Hollywood: Albert Fried's The Rise and Fall of the Jewish
Gangster in America and Jenna Weissman Joselit's Our Gang: Jewish Crime
and the New York Jewish Community--1900-1940 are two recent additions to
the nonfiction literature, and films such as Once Upon a Time in America
and Bugsy feature Jewish criminality. When Cohen is not "imagining"
history, he rewrites other people's research, sometimes mangling quotes during
his copying, as he did when he took a quote from a 1951 book, Murder, Inc.:
The Story of "the Syndicate ," by , also about Jewish gangsters. Even
the title of Cohen's book and its cover art--a brass-knuckled fist--are lifted
directly from a book published eight years ago, Paul Breines' Tough Jews:
Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry , which analyzes
the psychological underpinnings of the cult of Jewish toughness born after
Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War.
Cohen
hits bottom when he compares the gangster Louis Lepke's flight from justice to
the plight of Anne Frank, and when he compares his own grandfather to a drug
dealer. "When I think of someone like Tolly Greenberg, I think of my grandpa
Ben," he writes. "The same restless energy drove both men toward invention. Ben
worked in a diner and was tired of clunky sugar dispensers and so converted an
existing piece of machinery, a tea bagger, creating the first sugar packet.
Tolly worked in narcotics and knew there was a Southern market for drugs and so
converted an existing piece of machinery, creating the first morphine pill. ...
I would like to say Tolly was working for evil, my grandfather for good, but I
don't know if it's that simple."
This is stuff that defies analysis. Cohen has written a
book that he undoubtedly believes extols heroes and explains a suppressed bit
of Jewish history, but what he has done is expose the architecture of his own
pathology. He wants desperately to be a thug, because that is the only way he
knows to be Jewish. Instead of writing this book--and book-writing is surely a
job for sissies--he should have gone out and beat someone up or sold drugs.
Then his pathetic self-loathing might have been exorcised.
I am not opposed to Jewish
toughness. Breines, in the original Tough
Jews , argues that the
Holocaust disfigured the Jewish soul, turning the victims of fascist
persecution into the fascist persecutors of another people, the Palestinians.
But Breines is avowedly anti-Israel, and he sees any expression of Jewish
self-defense as a sign of nationalism gone awry. To my mind, though, Jewish
toughness of the sort that was in evidence in Entebbe, Uganda, 22 years ago,
when armed Jews flew thousands of miles to rescue Jewish innocents from death,
was one of the great moments in post-Holocaust Jewish history--a statement to
the world that Jews will no longer sit idly by and watch themselves being
oppressed. Jewish toughness was seen in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the
Nazis and in the sacrifices of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in
Mississippi in 1964. Also, Lou Reed is tough.
The
presence of Bugsy Siegel and Kid Twist in our recent history does not mean we
are a tough people. At most, it means we are simply a people like any
other.
If you
missed our link to a comparison of two versions of Jewish mob history--Cohen's
and Turkus and Feder's--click .
