“I Married a Jew” (The Atlantic, 1939)
But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…
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bell hooks on “faux feminism”
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Ebony thinks it’s time to acknowledge that educating white people about the offensiveness of blackface is officially pointless:
At this point in history, an adult who chooses to put on a blackface costume for a social occasion—who uses it in a fashion spread or to promote a makeup or for any other reason aside from some sort of recreation of historical minstrelsy that is done to examine the racism of the practice—knows it’s offensive and that people will be hurt and/or angered by it.
AND THEY DON’T CARE.
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Interesting article, offensive and incorrect title. Roxane Gay is writing a follow-up piece for us to add some grace and nuance (which will almost certainly not involve slavery metaphors.)
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From our own Sarah Jeong: Revenge porn: bad. Criminalizing revenge porn: bad.
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Why you shouldn’t buy a case for your smartphone (I’m not convinced.)
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The problem with Dave Ramsey and the gospel of personal responsibility.
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WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE IS A GENIUS WRITER. The world is not yet ready for my William Langewiesche fan fiction.
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If you’ve got a minute, maybe take a little survey about the choices you make getting dressed. Pinky swear, it’s not for advertising, it’s for a new book with contributions from a lot of cool female writers.
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WaxWing, a new brand-new literary magazine with a mission to represent cultural diversity.
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Here is a list of everyone who’s had their knighthood/dukedom, etc., revoked. It’s mostly worth it for the subcategories detailing why: Murder, Treason, Poverty (ouch), Battle, Disfavo(u)r, Title Forfeited Due to Jacobite Rebellion….
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
From that Atlantic article:
Ben’s mother and father attend an orthodox synagogue, observe the dietary rules and all the ritual holy days. Ben, however, like a large percentage of modern and intelligent young Jews, looks with affectionate tolerance on these parental habits but eschews them for himself. He goes to synagogue on Rosh Hashana to please his mother, and during the rest of the year wavers between agnosticism and downright atheism.
It kind of cracks me up that this is still basically the case – and I find it encouraging too, because it seems like every six months or so a Jewish diaspora establishment comes out screaming with a study about how American/European/fill in ______ Jewry is dying out and within a generation or two HITLER’S WORK WILL HAVE BEEN DONE FOR HIM. I’m really pleased that a very similar dynamic was going on with diaspora Judaism 70+ years ago.
Yeah, it’s fascinating how relevant this still is. My sister is a 100% Jew who seems pretty likely to marry a 100% goy, and Gertrude’s mom’s “think of the children!” argument sound a lot like my grandmother’s. It’s also disappointing how relevant a lot of this woman’s beliefs about Jews remain–I’ve encountered most of them from ignorant people, certain Evangelical Christians, and secular Jews who like to think they’re more evolved.
Are you guys officially doing this “Read more at the Toast” click through thing from RSS now? My corporation audits our internet usage and right out blocks any moderately racy content, so I’ll be missing a lot now 🙁
We are! It’s a fix to deal with our multipage articles cutting off in feeds with no explanation, and also because our publisher had no idea we weren’t already doing it.
That does suck for your reading habits, but hopefully you can catch up at home! I read and blogged 24/7 when I had a Job Job, it was a glorious time.
Sorry, Job Job!
I have no comment about my work habits at my last Job Job.
re: Ramsey – I tried listening to his podcast, once upon a time. Between his loud, bullying personality and his complete rejection of anyone that didn’t share his religious beliefs, I was completely repelled and never tried again. The best personal finance book I’ve ever found was All Your Worth by – get this – Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren is the best. You might also like Pound Foolish, which looks at the way personal finance has replaced, to some extent, the kind of collective organizing around poverty and working wages that lead to the labor rights movement. It’s a smart look at the limitations of personal finance–it might help someone with a reasonable income save for retirement, but if you’re working two minimum wage jobs part-time with no benefits, how are you supposed to save and budget your way out of poverty?
The author also investigated how the personal finance industry specifically markets towards the insecurities of women; they play on the tropes that women can’t handle all that complicated, math-y finance stuff, so they should leave it to the experts! I snapped a pencil in half during that section.
Oooh, that sounds awesome. I’ll check it out!
I feel like that also ties in with the bell hooks/Lean In piece – I feel like there’s a trend (although I can’t say how new it is, because I haven’t been paying attention that long) about shifting solutions to individuals. Gender discrimination in the workplace? Lean In! Mentor! Help individual women climb the ladder! Declining societal support for the elderly? Earn more! Save more! Not that these aren’t good things to do, but they make it entirely the responsibility of individuals to respond to social structures/issues.
I love All Your Worth! I especially liked that she talks about the housing bubble in it, despite the book being published in 2005, before anyone else had acknowledged that a bubble existed.
Comment from the iPhone case article: “Since the 4 series the iPhone has become a bit of a masterpiece art work piece of tech that you always want to hold. Even more than a baby.” Well, that’s creepy.
I liked the Atlantic piece a lot. Some things she said are seriously alarming to be reading in 2013 (though maybe it’s not quite fair to take the “she wrote in 1939, let’s give her a pass” view) but I was fascinated the whole way through. And this quote: I know that in many Christian-Jewish alliances it is thought wiser and more conducive to marital harmony to treat these differences as nonexistent, to shroud them in a veil of silence. Ben and I have always looked upon this as an unhealthy practice. To throttle a subject and make it forbidden, we think, leads to distortion and often to explosion. Still applicable, to more than Christians and Jews.
Additional creepy quote from the iPhone case article: ““Ultimately, breakage is a risk I’m willing to take,” Hsieh says. “That’s the cost of being able to hold the phone in my hand — it’s hard to say this without sounding sexual — and to run my hands over the aluminum backing and all over the phone. It’s a beautiful piece of industrial design.””
1. That sounds like a comment from someone who can afford to replace his phone at retail.
2. EW.
I had a student who was like this. So painfully pretentious, even at the tender age of 17.
No kidding. And the guy who was drooling over his Mercedes and comparing it to his iPhone just sounds like a massive tool.
I thought the Atlantic piece was a really interesting historical snapshot, but even if you set aside the creepy, retrograde aspects of it, I felt like the author was saying, “My husband is an overly-sensitive hypocrite! He’s totally imagining all this oppression! It’s exhausting being the sensible, correct one all the time! But I love him anyway.” Which seems like a less-than-ideal attitude towards one’s spouse under any circumstances.
Yeah, totally. She had some nice lines or a few good points but the takeaway message felt like, it’s ok, he’s not REALLY Jewish! Plus how they decided which religion to raise their kid in. And yet her attitude was probably a lot more benevolent than a lot of other people at the time. HISTORY! It’s fascinating! (Even though things like this still ring true in many ways today.)
“I’d marry him if he were a Hottentot!”
Oh dear.
Yeah, the parts where she’s like “eugh, I know Jews have been persecuted for more than a thousand years but they just won’t stop MOANING about it” are, well.
I mean, in my opinion there are some parts of the Jewish community that do kind of rely heavily on persecution to form their identity, which I don’t think is useful or healthy, and some Jewish people and institutions that are pretty quick to call things antisemitic. I do think antisemitism in society is under-acknowledged (particularly in and by progressive communities), but also I think there are parts of the Jewish community that jump to antisemitism when it isn’t necessarily what’s going on. SOOOO I can see somebody who was exposed to that for the first time going “Man, these people are really keen to find antisemitism in things and kind of get their identity from it, which is a little unhealthy maybe!”.
BUT I agree that the way it’s written about in the article is more like “YAP YAP YAP OPPRESSION JEEZ PEOPLE, GET OVER IT ALREADY”, and also the fact that it is 1939 makes it very different.
Basically I actually agree with her about some of the things she identifies, but overall the tone is really othering and patronising which is pretty gross.
Like this gem: “People have known Ben casually for two or three years without discovering he was Jewish. It pleases him that he looks and acts like other people.” (The writer’s mom ranting about Jews being the source of sex in theater/Hollywood was a new one to me.)
I’m just going to leave this here:
“I mean, in my opinion there are some parts of the Black community that do kind of rely heavily on persecution to form their identity, which I don’t think is useful or healthy, and some Black people and institutions that are pretty quick to call things racist. I do think racism in society is under-acknowledged (particularly in and by progressive communities), but also I think there are parts of the Black community that jump to racism when it isn’t necessarily what’s going on. SOOOO I can see somebody who was exposed to that for the first time going “Man, these people are really keen to find racism in things and kind of get their identity from it, which is a little unhealthy maybe!”. ”
While the rest of your comment is fine, this argument is an old tactic used by bigots to minimize the oppression and discrimination felt by minorities everywhere. I’m sure you’re not trying to be an anti-semite here, but you’ve aligned yourself with a Nazi sympathizer, and that fact alone should give you some pause.
(I’m Jewish, for the record, although I know this doesn’t mean I can’t have internalised antisemitism.)
Here’s an example of what I mean from earlier this year: I was walking to shul on Rosh Hashanah with my rabbi, and another congregant drove by and accidentally splashed my shoes. They rolled down the window to apologise, and my rabbi leaned over my shoulder and joked “Hate crime! Tell the JC!” The joke relies on how the Jewish Chronicle and some of its readership (are perceived by the Anglo-Jewish community to) assign “antisemitism” as a cause for anything bad that happens to (a) Jewish person(s), even if that isn’t necessarily what’s going on.
I agree with you that it’s a very common tactic to accuse groups of exaggerating oppression, but I also think it’s untrue to say that it doesn’t happen at all in any part of the Jewish community whatsoever.
It does give me pause to be talking about this outside of the Jewish community (we’re clannish! see?) because I agree that it’s very easy to misinterpret, but I do think it is a thing that happens and it’s inaccurate and misleading to pretend it doesn’t and that anybody who thinks it does must be being bigoted.
(The woman who wrote the article is still pretty terrible, though!)
To clarify: I liked READING it but did not like a lot of what she actually SAID. Sorry for wording poorly!
yes, that was more or less my reaction too. I would have liked to read another article from her in 1946 and see what she said then.
And Ben ended every post-1940 argument with, “Hey, remember how you thought Hitler was okay?”
All of them. Even arguments about calling a plumber.
It’s really interesting to me to see people discussing Hitler in a weirdly benign “politics, eh?” kind of a way considering what we know now about what transpired post-1939.
Even back in 1939 we were playing the “Well, both sides have a point!” game.
You should read Gaudy Night! The female academics are like “Fuck, seriously? Children, kitchen, church?” and everyone else is “But the economy!”
And there was Swastika Night, I think written in 1937, which is an incredibly bleak dystopia about what would happen if Hitler’s thousand year reich happened and it’s now 600 years into it (Jews have been completely killed off, so they then moved onto putting Christians in camps, women kept in breeding houses/considered subhuman, Japan controls the entire western hemisphere, Germany the eastern, etc).
Really hoping “WaxWing” is a Nabokov reference.
Smart phones are amazing for the ways they let us connect to each other and share information at almost any time or place. That is why they are amazing, not their design. It’s an okay design, but jeez, you are missing the point. It’s not the object itself, but what it lets us do. Since breaking the phone would inhibit or destroy the ability to use it, hell yes I put it in a case!
And actually, art works are generally protected by the walls of a museum, security staff, environmental controls, and curators so your metaphor is hella weak.
Hell yes I put it in a case too. Nothing that shatters as easily as an iPhone screen should be considered an amazing design, in my book!
After WWII my Jewish Grandparents moved to the suburbs and basically assimilated, as Gertrude suggested in the article. They raised my Dad without any knowledge of Judaism or really of Jewish culture, I mean, he celebrated Christmas and Easter, but no Jewish holidays at all. And they certainly weren’t Christian. As a result, I learned most of what I know about Jewish culture from books my Mom (Gentile) bought me. Soooo…I’m not too pleased with Gertrude’s advice. I kind of hate her.
Yeah, I was kind of on side with her at the beginning of the article, but then this part:
It is only when Ben is surrounded by his family that he lapses into Jewish ways, and then, no doubt, because of his early Jewish training. The family are extremely clannish.
And this:
The moment Ben is away from his family, his Jewishness drops away from him like a cloak. Not that his non-Jewishness then becomes another cloak. It is, I think, far more his real attitude than the other than the other, which is a relic of his childhood; for Ben is one of those who feel themselves first Americans, then Jews.
VOM.
UGH people who say “the family are” are probably more correct but I hate them.
I think that’s just a Britishism, and neither is more correct?
I don’t think they are correct! “Family” is singular…
Agreed – a collective singular!
Ben, however, like a large percentage of modern and intelligent young Jews, looks with affectionate tolerance on these parental habits but eschews them for himself.
I was not okay with this woman from pretty much the beginning.
I would have more of a problem with that sentence if it didn’t describe 90% of the under-40s at my synagogue. (Including self-identifying as “modern and intelligent” in a kidding-not-kidding way, most likely)
I really want Ben to be Ben Small of the Coney Island Smalls.
I feel a teensy bit bad criticizing this woman, because who’s an easier target than someone who admits to trying to excuse Nazis?
But right in the first paragraph she says not only that she finds “excuses” for the Nazis, suggesting that she goes beyond trying to consider all perspectives, and that she does so in the face of her husband’s “hurt confusion.” Frequently!
No matter what viewpoint she was advocating, she doesn’t particularly sound like someone I’d want to be married to.
The one that got me was “They, in their turn, think they are immensely superior to the Gentiles. If they did not think so, would they still remain Jews after generations of living among Gentiles?”
Yikes.
Oh no, it gets worse. What a fascinating, infuriating little time capsule.
Or this: “Unfortunately the Jewish publications and the church are not so private about it; they openly vaunt the superiority of their race and do not mince words when it comes to criticizing the Goy in whose land they live.”
GIRL. How can you be married to a Jew and not realize that that “we’re letting those cunning little Jews sit on our land for now” belief is basically how most of the diaspora/persecution has always worked?
Oh god I totally missed the date on the Atlantic article was was like WAIT WE ARE BLASÉ ABOUT HITLER NOW WHAT
An astounding number of the comments on the article itself also missed that, and started yelling at the woman and offering suggestions. Whoops.
Haha, oh internet, never change.
omigod off to read the comments
whyyyyyy am i doing this i never learn
Oh early 1939! Cleaning an attic, I found a May 1939 copy of Life magazine. There was a feature on the Bismarck and a photo essay of Spanish refuges fleeing over the Pyrenees into camps in France.
Also which Epstein is she thinking of?
She was predicting Brian Epstein, ultimately the world’s most important Jewish man who wasn’t Jesus.
When someone says just “Epstein” I usually think of Richard A. Epstein, but he wouldn’t have done anything notable as of 1939.
Brian Epstein makes more sense.
“that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…”
THERE IS A BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KICKING THEM OUT OF YOUR COUNTRY AND MASS GENOCIDE LADY.
Not that what Edward I did was great, but it was (probably) mostly nonviolent and only affected about 2000 people.
I was assuming that the genocide part hadn’t really kicked off/wasn’t known in America in January 1939 – the guy hadn’t even invaded Poland yet, I mean REALLY.
Yeah I mean, the Nazis were killing Jews in smaller numbers before the “Final Solution” started up on account of antisemitism making people with power generally not give a shit about how they treated Jews, but the mass genocide really didn’t get going ’til 1942 when they implemented the “Final Solution.” So this woman’s attitude about Hitler is weird to see, but she’s not brushing an atrocity under the rug. Unless she could see into the future, which would change a lot of things about this article.
Not to mention the scale of the Holocaust and what happened didn’t come to light until later, either — the Nazis made some crazy serious effort to keep it under wraps and veil it all with propaganda. There were films made inside Theresienstadt with the express purpose of making everyone think the Jews were being treated well, that kind of thing. Of course rumors rumbled all around and Jews knew what was going on, but when the American public finally started seeing pictures and learning the whole truth was pretty much when the camps were getting liberated at the end of the war.
Very true, but as it was 1939 I’m not sure if everyone had quite realized that it wasn’t going to be another Edward I again.
The mass genocide stuff didn’t happen ’til a little later, this woman may be a lot of things but she wasn’t excusing mass genocide. January 1939 was before the invasion of Poland. It’s still weird to see, though.
I don’t know, how worked up does your average American get about the various First Nations we genocided what 150? years ago.
Hell I suspect we barely give a shit about Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin… and I’m sure if I poke around wikipedia there’s a dozen other names that I (point provingly) don’t know.
I’m pretty sure the only reason Americans still care about Hitler is because the texts books can (by stretching the truth and ignoring Russia) claim that WE beat Hitler.
Totally. I mean, how much do we ever learn about the Taiping Rebellion?
I know Wikipedia isn’t the best resource, but I do not know about most of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
Sorry guys, I did not see the 1939 part. But like, it would not surprise me if someone published this today because people are the worst.
I mean, the comments on the Atlantic piece make it pretty clear that people are definitely the worst.
I’m still not sure why I ever bother to read comments on The Atlantic site at all. Masochism, most likely.
“I think—if I can express it—it is the fact that they make no concession to me as a Gentile. They pass that fact over as if it did not exist. They go about their Jewish ways, tales of their Jewish problems, and consider me aloof if I do not enter whole-heartedly into all this and become as one of them. Out of courtesy I try to do as they do when I am among them, but their not reaching out to meet me halfway becomes a strain after a while.”
I feel like I still hear a lot of people whining in a similar way. And they should all stop.
Also, re: the Trayvon costume – my bf last night had this brilliant gem: “I’m not in favor of capital punishment for retribution, but I am in favor of it for poetic justice.”
Yup. And it’s like the MRA/”why is there no white/straight history month” people..
(Is your photo the stuffed lemur given to the solitary National Zoo lemur??)
I don’t think so… it’s just the best lemur that comes up after googling “lemur.” But that sounds adorable.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/national… It’s a cute story. Although now that I’m looking, definitely not your lemur!
I feel weird about the Sheila Heti “Women in Clothes” survey. Like: you want me to write “creatively” and philosophically and at length about my habits and thoughts when I put clothes on in the morning, and then you’ll make your own book out of it? why don’t you write your book yourself?
but maybe that’s ungenerous of me?
I guess it depends on how she frames it all in the final product.
I took one look at that survey and was like, “oh man, this, much like dressing with any level of creativity, is way too much work,” so there’s a flaw in her survey design right there.
ha, yes. also, i thought: i don’t actually want to be that self-conscious about what i do in the mornings — that’s not going to a good place…
I bailed when it asked me to download an RTF file.
It brought up a bunch of weird stuff for me. Style and clothes are, to me, so closely associated with body image and self-worth that I usually just try to ignore it and dress in a mostly utilitarian way to avoid dealing with some of the issues that might bring up. Maybe this is a hint that I should deal with some of those feelings so that I potentially could answer a survey about style without spiraling into insecurities and crippling over-analysis but… that seems like a lot of work that I’m not really ready to do right now.
Also, I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a “transformative conversation” about the subject of fashion or style.
Me too. I’ve had the survey open on my desktop for months. I can’t bring myself to even start it.
I started it a few months ago, haven’t finished it yet & probably won’t. I just don’t think that much about my clothes and appearance in general!
Oh, is that what it was asking? See, I would never had known, because there is no way in hell I’m going to download a survey, fill it out and email it back. I have never in my life seen an online academic survey that couldn’t be filled out online. Not sensing a great deal of respect for their participants’ time here.
I am a no-case iPhone person. But it’s not a fetish! I promise! What is funny, is how many people notice and freak out about it. Like, OMIGOD YOU DON’T HAVE A CASE ON YOUR PHONE. No. No, I don’t. I don’t know! It’s fine!
Looking forward to reading Roxanne Gay’s piece on the free/not-free writing conversation.
I’m a no-case person because phones just keep getting bigger and I want to be able to keep it in my pocket even though the pockets on womens’ pants are not even remotely suited for that. But! I had my last smartphone (not iPhone) for three years and dropped it approximately one thousand times, and the only thing that ever stopped working was the wireless, so we’ll see if I can keep up the streak.
Yes. The pockets. I like being able to put it in my pocket. And I want it to be as small and thin as possible. I guess. But also? I’m just sorta lazy. Like, I’d have to go pick out a case that I didn’t hate and buy it and put it on and really, it’s too much for me.
I am in somewhat the same boat, except that to avoid bigger and bigger phones (and because I will not get an iPhone for reasons of spite and grudge-holding) I got a Galaxy S1 last year which everyone mocks for being old, but it fits in my pants or my clutch purse. It’s pretty hard to get cases for S1s now, so I never bothered. I have dropped it a few times, but other than some scratches in one corner it’s been fine so far.
But how do you keep from dropping it? I went for a week sans case when I first got my iPhone and I dropped it so many times. I finally had to get a case not to save it from breaking (because as far as I could tell, it was doing just fine on that front) but to keep it from spontaneously flinging itself from my hand.
Should I have just learned a better way to hold it?
I don’t know, honestly. I’ve dropped it a couple times, but it’s not a regular thing. It’s maybe from handling expensive camera equipment? Like, I’m way more worried about dropping my dslr than my phone. Luck, maybe. It must just be luck.
I also am a no case person, which my family hates (they keep buying me cases which I use for a while but they’re cumbersome and annoying so I take them out). I drop my phone all the time, and it’s fine! Well, okay, the back is all cracked up now, but it functions okay, and I look forward to my new phone arriving because they’re now made out of stuff that won’t crack. They generally only break when you drop them if you’re dropping them like, out of a window or into the toilet or something, and a case isn’t going to save you from that.
Me too! I just never seem to drop my phone. Like I’m on my third iPhone over almost 6 years, and I think I’ve seriously dropped one exactly twice. idk what my deal is, I think having large hands and dry skin helps somehow.
So, I kind of want “Title Forfeited Due to Jacobite Rebellion” on my theoretical tombstone.
But didn’t the Duke of Clarence die the night before he was executed in 1483? In a butt of malmsey? You know, old “butt of malmsey Clarence”? I can’t be the only Toastie to know that…
Clarence died in 1478 – Shakespeare really elides the events that lead up to Richard III’s accession in 1483 (which might be what you’re thinking of?) but Clarence was killed a few years earlier because he hilariously couldn’t stop trying to rebel against Edward IV. I don’t think anybody knows whether the butt of Malmsey thing is true, but it is an excellent story and means that wine companies today sell “Duke of Clarence madeira”, which in my opinion is GREAT.
I thought it was a few years earlier, but the Wikipedia list says his title was revoked in 1483. By Edward? By Richard? Not clear. The fact that there is Duke of Clarence madeira is *awesome*.
I’m confused, the list I’m looking at says 1478, although I could be misreading something!
Oops, no, you are right. I read the wrong line. I will blame it on looking at the list too quickly, rather than aging eyesight (gulp).
I was developing theories about how the first thing Richard III did when he ascended was to petulantly strip his dead brother of his titles, because he’d ALWAYS hated that guy.
Ha, I wouldn’t put it past a British monarch to pull something like that (look at Henry VII, trying to make a bunch of traitors by pre-dating his rule by a day) but I don’t think of Richard III that way. He always seemed pretty decent to me – but that’s probably because we were first introduced via The Daughter of Time instead of Shakespeare.
Totally butting in to say: Oh man, The Daughter of Time, what a great book that is.
DAUGHTER OF TIME.
My feelings on 15th-century English politics tends to be “basically everybody was stepping on everybody, don’t hate the player” – my secret favourites are the sneaky shits like Richmond (also I unambiguously love Margaret Beaufort forever).
Margaret Beaufort – was she the rabidly pro-Lancaster lady? I always get my Beauforts mixed up. I tend to be at least a little Yorkist in my leanings, partly because I’ve been to York and it’s lovely, partly because Cecily Neville is amazing, and partly because of my almost complete antipathy toward the Tudors.
Yeah, she’s Richmond’s mom and she’s basically badass. After he acceded to the throne she started signing her name “Margaret R” (supposedly for Richmond but really for Regina) which I think is just hilarious.
I like the York boys a lot but Margaret of Anjou is my absolute one million percent favourite of everybody.
Right now, some idiot is writing “I Married a Muslim” for their blog, and it’s exactly the same as “I Married a Jew,” just 70 years later.
I’ve been reading Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews books (started with 1939-1945, loved it, and then went back to read 1933-1939). One of the things that surprised me was how latent, casual anti-Semitism was literally everywhere in the 1930’s. Even before the Nazis invaded, Poland looked into deporting all its Jews to Madagascar (!!) and the Christian churches were only really concerned about the Jews who’d converted to their respective faiths.
I think in the US at least, we hear so many stories that follow the “brave ally” narrative– those few people who really stuck their neck out for their fellow human beings, like Miep Gies or Schindler with the List– that it’s easy to forget about the masses who just didn’t care. Or who cared a little bit, but only when it was right in front of them. That, I think, is the scariest part– it’s so easy to see that same attitude about injustice today. I know I’m guilty of it at times.
Oops, no, you are right. I read the wrong line. I will blame it on looking at the list too quickly, rather than aging eyesight (gulp).
Ha, I wouldn't put it past a British monarch to pull something like that (look at Henry VII, trying to make a bunch of traitors by pre-dating his rule by a day) but I don't think of Richard III that way. He always seemed pretty decent to me – but that's probably because we were first introduced via The Daughter of Time instead of Shakespeare.
Regarding the Vanity Fair article…
Retreating in confusion from the rising waters, Leader** could not understand what had gone wrong. Defenses had been mapped and erected, and somehow somewhere they had failed—but he knew that the greater problem now was that New York subway lines are interlinked by design, that water seeks its own level, and that underground flooding in one place will spread to others.
**Joseph Leader is a NYC native, subway manager, and an ENGINEER. An engineer. An engineer that couldn’t figure out that subways were connected and water seeks its own level. I mean.
Also, he is now the SVP of NYC Transit and chief of subway operations. FML.
Margaret Beaufort – was she the rabidly pro-Lancaster lady? I always get my Beauforts mixed up. I tend to be at least a little Yorkist in my leanings, partly because I've been to York and it's lovely, partly because Cecily Neville is amazing, and partly because of my almost complete antipathy toward the Tudors.