Arts & Culture
Photo from Saul.Davis via Flickr
Yesterday, while in the process of defending U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) from criticism that he hadn’t brought enough new money into the state, Edwin Merwin Jr. and Jim Ulmer committed a … social faux pas that may cost them their respective roles as officials in the Orangeburg County Republican party. “There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,” wrote Merwin and Ulmer in the (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat. “By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.” Cue. The. Outrage.
And, before we do our Unfit thing, we’d like to make it clear that we agree with the sentiments of the Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, who reminded the New York Times that the picture of the Jewish miser “dates back to the centuries of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to own land or conduct any business other than money-lending, which was closed to Christians by Church law.” Still, what sticks in our craw isn’t so much the intent of Merwin and Ulmer’s slur — it’s clear that these doofuses actually felt like they were paying compliments to both the Jewish people and DeMint — but rather what it was that convinced the pair that such phrasing might be a good idea. For this, we are at a loss.
So, to better understand the motivations of Merwin, Ulmer, and other artists of the back-handed compliment, we here at Unfit have decided to, for the moment, play along — to argue that the banking Jew is, yes, a figure born of anti-Semitism and rigid social and political power structures but that, now, in the end-times of a post-holocaust glow, the thing has been reconstructed as a sort of badge of honor. In other words, if we believe the idea that Merwin and Ulmer were really aiming for a positive here, Shylock’s pound of flesh becomes a noble extraction carried out in the name of now-righteous self-interest. This jibes with the anti-federal actions that have found the Republican party — and U.S. conservatives — arguing against (to use an extreme example) government death panels and for limited government. To these folks, the common good needs to take a back seat to the individual goal, self-interest is self-preservation, and Shylock was well within his rights.
Is this how the (now-no-longer-hook-nosed) miser shows up as a model character in a political play? And, more to the point, should we M.O.T.s, perhaps freshly empowered by our money-counting acceptance, be reaching out to reclaim him? If Merwin, who told the Times that he has “always abhorred in the past, and shall continue to do so in the future, anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever” is to be believed (through all that bad grammar) and, as Brooks said, “[they] apparently believed that the image of the Jew as penny-pincher was a praise of Jewish frugality,” it would certainly seem like an affirmative answer to the first question.
But, if we are to believe that Merwin and Ulmer are sincere in their admiration of the Jewish people, and, by a logical political extension, that they think free-spending Democrats could, say, learn a lot through a closer reading of The Merchant of Venice, then we also must believe that Jews everywhere should embrace their inner financial wizard. Or something. The problem, of course, is that the image that Merwin and Ulmer seem to have is nothing more than a weird twist on a historically incomplete vision, and, as such, it makes any reclamation effort, by definition, kind of impossible.
What do we get from all of this? Well, we’re still kind of confused. But we’re pretty sure that you’ll forgive us if we don’t run out and buy ourselves a ledger, a pair of glasses, and a Brooklyn accent.
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