It’s the weekend, so here’s a little quiz: what do the following items — the Barbie doll, the condom, the biro, the hydrogen bomb and psychoanalysis — have in common?
Jews.
They were all invented by Jews, as was the cure for polio and the treatment for syphilis, and if that doesn’t have you sitting back in gratitude, how about we give a little thanks for Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen?
Maybe not also to Karl Marx — what a seriously bad set of ideas he had — but what about Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall, Marcel Proust and Viktor Frankl? They are Jews and, according to a new and somewhat controversial documentary, so too are 22 per cent of Nobel prize winners, 40 per cent of chess grandmasters, and a staggering 53 per cent of the recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Statistically, it’s ridiculous: Jews comprise just 0.2 per cent of the population.
How do they do it?
To put it another way: Why the Jews?
That’s the name of the new documentary, produced not here of course, because who’d have the guts, but by a Canadian filmmaker, John Curtin, whose distributor is already worried about whether Australians will ever get to see it because, as everyone surely knows, debates about race, they’re tricky in this country.
They’re tricky everywhere. You can’t say this and you can’t say that, when really you should be allowed to say anything.
Read the article by Caroline Overington in The Australian.