Every Jew in every generation faced the pariah, parvenu, or traitor choice
Evidence
It is the assertion of this study that the active or passive, direct or oblique involvement in the intense concerns of the modern era with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance was to remain the most distinctive and defining feature of the conceptual Jew. I propose that the conceptual Jew has been historically construed as the universal ‘viscosity’ of the Western world. He has been located astride virtually every barricade erected by the successive conflicts that tore apart the Western society at its various stages and in various dimensions. The very fact that the conceptual Jew straddled so many different barricades, built on so many, ostensibly unrelated, front lines, endowed his sliminess with the elsewhere unknown, exorbitant intensity. His was a multi-dimensional unclarity and the very multi-dimensionality was an extra cognitive incongruence unencountered in all other (simple, because confined, isolated and functionally specialized) ‘viscous’ categories spawned by boundary conflicts. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Antisemites conflate the parvenu with the pariah in every Jew; The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134
Related
- Antisemites conflate the parvenu with the pariah in every Jew (similarity 0.87)
- The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity (similarity 0.86)
- Every Jew had to choose between pariah, parvenu, or betraying conformity (similarity 0.84)
Broader Connections
- Antisemites conflate the parvenu with the pariah in every Jew
#expands(0.82) - The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity
#expands(0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134