FOR YEARS, Camille Paglia has been touted as a “maverick critic and scholar,” by conservatives and liberals.

Here, in this video, is a little background.

— Comments —

Terry Morris writes:

Miss Paglia has been heavily influenced by what she calls Jewish-American culture since the time she was a little girl attending classes at T. Aaron Levy Middle School in Syracuse N.Y.. I had personally never heard of this lunatic, Miss Paglia, until I watched the video you posted at your site. Out of curiosity I did a quick web search to learn more about the details of her personal life, and instantly ran across a March 2017 interview she gave to Adam Kirsch of Tablet Magazine, a Jewish periodical. Here is the final question of the interview, followed by Miss Paglia’s answer:

Kirsch:

You are always alert to the ethnic and class issues within white feminism; you credit your Italian background with giving you a different perspective on sex and gender from, say, Catharine MacKinnon. In this vein, why do you think so many of the prominent American feminists of the last 50 years have been Jewish women—including many of the people you argue with and about, from Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem to Naomi Wolf? Is there something about Jewishness that is conducive to feminism?

Paglia:

Second-wave feminism, to which Betty Friedan gave birth with her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, was strongly powered by a fiery social activism whose roots can be traced to the unionizing movement of the early 20th century. One of the classic protest songs in my “Art of Song Lyrics” course is “The Death of Harry Simms,” about the 1932 shooting of 20-year-old Jewish labor leader Harry Simms Hersh in the battle for unionization of the Kentucky coal mines. I have described my principal mentors, poet Milton Kessler in college and critic Harold Bloom in graduate school, as more like visionary rabbis than professors. I have repeatedly acknowledged my debt to Jewish-American culture. For example, in my long 1991 attack on post-structuralism, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” I wrote: “It was from Jews (beginning at T. Aaron Levy Junior High School) that I learned how to analyze politics, law, business, and medicine, how to decipher the power dynamics of family relationships, and how to plan pragmatic strategies of social activism.”

In response to your question, I don’t think it’s so much the conduciveness of Jewishness to feminism as it is the readiness and ability of Jewish-American women to aggressively speak out and confront, without fear of loss of “respectability,” as it was defined and enforced by the WASP establishment code that once governed U.S. business, politics, and education. The Jewish marriage contract is unusual in guaranteeing women’s rights, suggesting the power that Jewish women have always wielded in the home and family. When I was growing up in Syracuse in the stiflingly conformist late 1950s and early 1960s, I was highly impressed by the bold and even abrasive vocal style (then called “the Jewish seagull”) that was often employed by Jewish women, and there can be no doubt that I imitated and absorbed it. By the early 1990s, I was being called “the academic Joan Rivers”—Rivers hugely influenced me, including my onstage style.

Beyond that, Jewish-Americans, with their Torah-inspired zeal for legal studies, regularly challenged the status quo in ways that Italian-Americans rarely did. For nearly two millennia, Italians had been scattered in tight-knit tribal villages; even after Italy became a state again in the late 19th century, Italians regarded it as a distant sham. None of my immigrant family would dream of challenging the dictatorial authority or mysterious operations of the state, which occupied a nebulous, external realm, unreal in comparison to the intricate unit of the extended family. (Even the dead had infinitely more reality to an Italian family! Recreational cemetery visits were routine.) Nor would Italian-Americans of that era question a doctor’s diagnosis or indeed ask any questions at all in a medical office or hospital. What I got from Jewish-American culture was a revolutionary fervor for political and institutional reform, totally outside the otherwise wonderfully rich legacy of rural Italian tradition. When I was at Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) in the mid-1960s, all the outspoken student radical leaders were Jews from metropolitan New York. Indeed, one of the most iconic images from that period is the Life magazine photograph of Columbia student David Shapiro wearing hip dark glasses while insolently smoking a cigar at the president’s desk during the student uprising of 1968. Thus the prominent Jewish presence in second-wave feminism must simply be regarded as yet another form of modern Jewish progressivism.

Incidentally, if you click on the “About” box at the Tablet Mag. website, you will be informed that the website was designed by an outfit calling itself “Pentagram.” Your readers may of course make of that interesting bit of trivia what they will.

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