A Midge Decter Sampler

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”— from “Kennedyism,” Commentary, 1970:“The truly interesting question about the Kennedy administration, though, is not what did it accomplish but what, in the words of Oscar Gass, ‘did these people want.’ For besides elegance and gaiety, that which preeminently characterized the New Frontier was a kind of swashbuckling, and arrogant lack of principle. By ‘lack of principle’ I do not mean that anybody was an especially unprincipled individual. Anyway, only children or idlers level such charges at political leaders. What I do mean is that Kennedy and his ‘best and brightest people in the country’ swooped down on the White House and tackled its problems in the spirit of the belief that these problems continued to persist only because the ‘right’ people had never before been let loose on them. How much there was to be undone and cleared away: the work of Truman hacks and Eisenhower dullards, an inert State Department, not very bright generals, a bunch of small-time tacky Congressmen. And who could conceivably be better for the job? This spirit accounts in part, probably in great part, for the enormous new élan they brought to Washington.”— from “The Liberated Woman,” Commentary, 1970:“The freedom granted to her by society is, in so short a time as it has been demanded, remarkably equal to that enjoyed by men. It is the freedom to make certain choices and take the consequences. If she wishes to devote herself to marriage, she may do so. If she wishes instead to pursue a career, she may do so. If there are difficulties put in the way of the latter — of which her sex may or may not be one but is certainly not the only one and is often indeed not the one she complains of — she is free to attempt to overcome them. If she opts to have both marriage and a career, she will put herself in the way of certain inevitable practical difficulties, the managing of which will on the other hand also widen her options for gratification. “Perhaps most important, if she wishes not to be a sexual object, she may refrain from being one. What, after all, is to stop her from setting her own social and emotional price on her sexual complicity and then simply waiting for the man, if any, who is willing to pay it? If the price should be deemed too high, that would also be a freely chosen consequence. Or she might accept the implication of most of the pronouncements of Women’s Liberation and simply remain chaste, thereby restoring to herself that uniquely feminine power over men which many women so cavalierly made light of in their struggle for equality.”— from “A Look at Israel,” Commentary, 1971:“It is impossible, of course, to experience Israel as one might, or even might not, experience any other place on earth. For one thing, the country’s peculiar history, ancient as well as modern, seems to press upon the visitor some unspoken but inescapable demand that he arrive at a judgment which will in the end be either a simple affirmation or denial. The very surroundings contrive to suggest that what he sees does not necessarily exist outside the eye of the beholder: he finds himself like a member of the audience at ‘Peter Pan’ being requested to applaud in order that Tinker Bell need not disappear from the stage. This demand is certainly exacerbated by — though not, I suspect, initially created by — the fact that the country, and a large number of its inhabitants before they settled there, have for thirty-five years been thrown into a continuing series of contentions for their literal survival. One does not forget for a single day that this is a community which has been and continues to be in great danger, a state of mind tending to coat even trivial things with a certain fine dust of the ultimate.” …“These days in America it is not at all uncommon to hear from those who have abjured for themselves, and so would deny others, the struggle of standing one’s own ground certain expressions of fear that Israel has become a garrison state, a ‘militarist’ power. The truth is that friendless as they deeply, suspiciously, Jewishly — and, in my opinion, accurately — believe themselves to be, surrounded by people who would love to see them dead, and, in the concentric circle beyond these, people whose love may only be bestowed if they consent to die, Israelis as a society are at this moment probably the happiest men on earth. They are certainly the most cheerful, the most bustling about their daily lives, the most harmoniously tuned to the tending of their business, and the most tolerantly accepting of personal inconvenience. Israel may not be — as I at least found it not to be — a wonderful place to visit, but it is a place to live.”— from “The New Chastity, And Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation,” 1972:Marriage “is an institution maintained and protected by women, for the sake of and at the behest of women, and in accordance with their deepest wishes.”— from “Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” 1975:“So‐and‐so’s boy, he who once made his parents the envy of all the rest, handsome, healthy, gifted, well‐mannered, winner of a scholarship to Harvard, languishes now in a hospital where the therapists feel that in another few months he might attempt a few simple tasks and ultimately — for the prognosis is good — even hold down a job, provided it is not of the sort to make him feel too challenged or tense. Another of the sons of this group has lately sent a postcard to his sister announcing that he has taken up photography and that as soon as he gets some work he plans to buy himself a piece of land and build himself a house on it. Yet another — his parents should, they know, be grateful by comparison with some others, and are frequently troubled with the realization that they do not feel so — is in business: he has organized same friends into a firm of handymen and movers, and, rather to his astonishment and theirs, the firm is prospering. So‐and‐so’s elder daughter is living, unmarried, with a divorced man and looking after his two adolescent children, while the younger has just set off in pursuit of her third — or is it her fourth? — postgraduate degree.”— from “Looting and Liberal Racism,” Commentary, 1977:“Thus the young men who went rampaging on that hot July night were neither innocents nor savages; they were people in the grip of the pathology that arises from moral chaos. They were doing something they knew to be wrong but had been given a license for, and had not been able to overcome their temptation. A subsequent New York Times editorial (July 28) … reiterates the proposition that poverty and race were the salient factors in the looting. ‘Denounce them, jail them, hate them. Still the question lingers . . . They appeared only in the poorest sections of town and drew recruits only from the poorest population groups, albeit only a tiny fraction of them. The question is why these and only these? Why, bluntly, no white looters in white neighborhoods?’ The real answer to this question, I am afraid, is not to be found in the economy, nor even in the hot, nervous streets of summertime New York. It is to be found in a decade’s worth of the spread of this very liberal and very racist idea: that being black is a condition for a special moral allowance.”— from “On Affirmative Action and Lost Self-Respect,” New York Times, 1980:“At the heart of affirmative action, no matter how the policy is defined — whether as specific numerical quotas or only as desirable goals — lies the simple proposition that the individuals being hired or admitted or promoted would not in their own individual right be so. In other words, in at least one of the central areas of their lives, they are not looked at, or seen, or treated, as individuals at all. … Before long, the irony will have escaped no one: By means of a policy intended to shortcut past discriminatory practice, the American populace will have been encouraged to a kind of prejudice that, if more subtle, will also for that reason be infinitely more difficult to overcome.”— from “Liberating Women: Who Benefits?” Commentary, 1984:“Marriage, real marriage as distinct from the new ‘arrangement’ called coupledom, is not heaven and not even in the neighborhood of heaven. But those, especially those women, who think they have willed themselves or contracted themselves or argued themselves into a more reasoned and more just alternative to it have done themselves little good. And those men who have jumped at the chance to reap their own special benefits from the situation have done themselves even less.”— In response to President Reagan’s handling of the 1985 Lebanon hostage crisis, via the New York Times:“To say I’m extremely disappointed in the way the President is dealing with terrorism is wrong — I’m disgusted! It’s worse to make thundering speeches and do nothing, like Reagan, then to be quiet and do nothing. He is substituting words for deeds.”— from “The Rushdiad,” Commentary, 1989:“Salman Rushdie’s supporters more than anything else made it clear that they can no longer understand, no longer even imagine, what it means to blaspheme. They live in and in turn are producers of a culture that has lost the power to say no to them about anything. Nothing is blasphemy, nothing is obscenity, nothing is even bad manners. They would dearly love to think of themselves as brave — it is necessary to their sense of themselves as the inheritors of the modernist tradition — but there is nothing in their world (except for dissenting from the standard leftist pietites, which hardly a one of them would dream of doing) that requires bravery: not sex, not treason, not even the proper demands of thought and prose.”— from “Ronald Reagan & the Culture War,” Commentary, 1991:“Reagan was, in other words, sufficiently at ease with himself, and sufficiently distanced from those around him, to be willing to say simple things. And probably never before in the country’s history had simple things been more in need of repeated and authoritative saying. Primary among these were that Americans were on the whole a very decent people, that the productive and responsible among them must not be shoved aside for the sake of the wilfully unproductive and non-responsible, and that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. The liberals laughed at Reagan for simple-mindedness in 1980. By 1984 they were laughing no longer.”— from “An Old Wife’s Tale,” 2001:“My mother and father had three daughters. This was a circumstance, we children often heard it said, that my father did not mind in the least; on the contrary, my mother and he would smilingly insist, three daughters would one day bring him the happiness of having three sons-in-law. This was said so often, indeed, as to become suspect even to me, the youngest and hence by rights the most credulous member of the family. Will it surprise anyone to be told that when the time came, my father was in the end barely able to maintain civil relations with any of his sons-in-law?”

A Midge Decter Sampler

A Midge Decter Sampler

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