I was wondering why after the atrocities in Germany that there was still so much bigotry towards the Jews??? Was it just this closeted community or was nothing accomplished by the Holocaust?? anybody know??
shareI personally found the storyline to be kind of a stretch. The idea that these kids were dripping with anti-semitism despite the atrocities committed against the Jews ten years earlier is hard to believe. Some of the kids may have had older brothers who fought in WWII. It may have just been a function of the "elitist" bubble that the St. Matthews crowd was it, that was made up of the "old stock" WASP Americans, so it is feasible that they would be hostile to any outsiders. These days, the old WASP guard is pretty much gone. After WWII, we finally had Jews, Catholics and other minorities holding political office and important business positions. I went to a Catholic high school, and we had no limits on non-Catholic students, but other Catholic schools did.
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>I agree somewhat because I grew up in the South and never saw ill-will to Jewish people. There never was any tension and it was not forced upon us. Quite frankly we were maybe naive or ignorant, but we all had never heard or discussed anti-semitism.
I'm a Jew from the south and there's little ill will in the general population. Yeah there's a douche here or there but that's life. The average joe out there is honest hard working good person. However in the 50's in elite educational institutions, discrimination was ... well institutional. Until the late 50's there were Jew quotas in many private colleges (and African Americans and Asians were simply not allowed in period, outside of custodial staff that is). There's a great section in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where he relates a story about being a professor at a college and being approached by a professor association with an anti-jew agenda unknowing that he was jewish himself. Sadly not all that uncommon an occurance back then.
>I didn't even know that there were people who did not like Jews until I went to college.
You know, I've never had any issues in the south but have been harassed, sieg-heiled, and had more anti-semetic epithets shouted at me than I care to relate in supposedly liberal places like California. Just goes to show =/
You might change your mind if you take a look at a this documentary:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379158/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
It was quite interesting and it shows how the horrors of the holocaust were unknown to most people for quite some time after WW2. Hollywood attempted to break it to people slowly. They're underlying motive was not to offend and therefore make more money but it's interesting non the less.
Thanks for posting this. I read the OP and was thinking of a way to respond. The first question in my mind was "How many people actually knew about the Holocaust at that point in time?" And, honestly, I think it's still a relevant question.
Personally, I grew up Christian and my family history could be traced back countless generations to the same religion - Catholicism. I never met a Jewish person until I was in college (and honestly didn't even know other religions existed). I realize now that I lived in a bubble, but I don't find my experience of being around those like me varied for others I've met through the years. I elected to take a class on the Holocaust because I wanted to learn more about it, anti-semitism and bigotry/hatred. It probably sounds weird to someone reading this over the internet, but it was a world completely unknown to me until that time and I wanted to know more. There was one class offered at my University and the movies assigned were not easy to find. I can only imagine it was that much harder to research decades prior to when I was in school.
While it's a tough subject to broach, I'm glad the stories are being told. Sure some will dismiss it as propaganda and blame the victims, but like all prejudice, it can't be addressed until it's acknowledged.
it took time to promote the myth of the holocaust.
share99% of the jews see antisemitism infront of them except in israel.
jews in israel live in peace, the hate in the middle east mostly politic. actually the middle east was preety much anti semitism free >compared< to europe. hate is everywhere but europe most, even today.
jews are a very small minority- 13 million in the entire world. minority are tend to be hated.
thats why jews in israel are antisemitism free.
I went to a really rich prep school just like the one in School Ties, and I can say without a doubt that there were a lot of extremely bigoted rich elitists there.
It wasn't everyone, but with that clique...yeah, they were all pretty racist.
So I didn't think this movie was a stretch given the time period. It probably wasn't the whole school, but just the group David was around (the elite)
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when you see that people like walt disney and ronald regan are accused of belonging to antisemitic power group, you might see that it is very possible among the elite.
shareYes, and the 'Country Club' elite was viciously anti-Semitic in the 1950's.
I'm a civilian, I'm not a trout
I think anti-Semitism was ironically more prevalent in the US post-World War Two since Judaism and the influx of Jewish immigrants that entered the US following the end of the war were, erroneously, associated with Communists (the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have contributed to that perception). Since Communism was seen as the greatest threat to the US during the late 40s and 50s and this fear was tied to anti-Semitic prejudice, the one fed the other.
The contemporaneous film 'Gentleman's Agreement' is a good place to start if you want to get a glimpse of the general mindset at the time amongst gentile society.
Honestly, the anti-Semitism displayed by the characters in the film doesn't surprise me at all.
After it came out, Siskel and Ebert reviewed this film. Siskel was Jewish and attended such a school in the east coast in this period. Someone presented a swastika to him as well.
shareFrom: David Nirenberg (2013) "Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition"
Although I have focused on Germany in this chapter because it was in fact the German government and its people who planned and implemented the Holocaust, the habits of thought that I have been describing were, with local variants, widespread throughout Europe and the United States. When, for example, English publicists wanted to criticize financial markets and economic structures in the period between 1873 and 1939, they used a rhetoric of Judaism very similar to that of the German commentators we have touched on. An observer of western European politics around 1900, asked to predict where mass political violence against the Jews was most likely to erupt, might well have nominated France. And American citizens, asked to name the greatest threat to the United States in a series of polls taken by the Opinion Research Corporation between 1939 and 1946, consistently chose “the Jews” over the Japanese or the Germans, with fear peaking in June of 1944, just as the Jewish population of Europe was close to fully exterminated. 43
https://archive.is/U1NWV#selection-18643.748-18649.0
Multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Burton J. Hendrick publicly admitted in 1923 that the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was "chiefly intended—it is just as well to be frank about the matter—to restrict the entrance of Jews from eastern Europe."
https://t.ly/p7jJO
In 1939, following Kristallnacht, only 8% of Americans polled said they wanted to accept more Jewish refugees. That same year, the final attempt to increase the quota - the Wagner-Rogers bill, which called for refuge for Jewish children specifically - was soundly defeated. "One year later a similar bill to admit British children was introduced into the U.S. Congress. It was quickly approved."
https://t.ly/UX7j