On Being a Bit of a Jew

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think I know what she means. 

And I think that, like Sylvia, I might also confess to being a bit of a Jew. 

How could it not be so when I have spent a lifetime under the influence of (amongst others) Malcolm McLaren, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Larry David and grew up believing Rhoda Morgenstern to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

As Susan Sontag notes, the Jews are (along with homosexuals) the greatest creative minority in contemporary urban culture; creative, that is, of a sensibility - an admittedly old-fashioned and problematic term, by which she means an emotionally and aesthetically informed way of looking at the world and thinking about the self. 

I suppose I would call this a style. And whereas Sontag identifies moral seriousness as being the crucial component, I think for me Jewishness is about an abrasive, provocative, sometimes vulgar often anarchic humour that is fundamentally anti-deutsch (with German also being understood as a style, characterized by a sluggish digestive system and an Aryan eye, bright blue).