--------------------------------
Rise of the Jewish Law Firm or is the Jewish Law Firm the Rule?
Elija Wald
University of Denver College of Law
Abstract:
The rise and growth of large Jewish law firms in New York City during the second half of the twentieth century is nothing short of an astounding success story. As late as 1950, there was not a single large Jewish law firm in town. By the mid 1960s, six of the largest twenty law firms were Jewish, and by 1980, four of the largest ten law firms were Jewish firms. Moreover, the accomplishment of the Jewish firms is especially striking because, while the traditional large White Anglo-Saxon Protestant law firms grew at a fast rate during this period, the Jewish firms grew twice as fast, as did Jewish presence in WASP firms. Even in New York State where there is a Jewish population center of 4% of the population or New York City where the population is almost 11% the success rate speaks to other factors.
What happened? I study the rise and growth of large New York City Jewish law firms. I do so on the basis of the public record, with respect to both the law firms themselves and trends in the legal profession generally, and through over twenty in-depth interviews with lawyers who either founded and practiced at these successful Jewish firms, attempted and failed to establish such firms, or were in a position to join these firms but decided instead to join WASP firms.
According to the informants interviewed in this article, while Jewish law firms benefited from general decline in exclusion that other minorities face and increased demand for corporate legal services, a unique combination of factors explains the incredible rise of the Jewish firms. First, white-shoe ethos caused large WASP firms to stay out of undignified practice areas, (representation of distasteful clients in civil law; targeting small businesses, professionals and the poor in civil law; predatory and vicious lawyering) and effectively created pockets of Jewish practice areas. These practice areas continued to give space for Jewish lawyers at smaller firms to learn law before moving on to large Jewish firms, whereas most WASP firms avoided hiring those same lawyers.
As Jewish firms became preeminent, many WASP (and white Catholic) firms hired Jewish lawyers who went on to become partners. Many top firms that were not originally Jewish, became functionally Jewish law firms, while Jewish law firms continued to attract Jewish lawyers. Firms long considered the province of WASPs such as Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett were to gain more Jewish partners than non-Jews.
Finally, the Jewish firms benefited from a flip side of bias phenomenon, that is, they benefited from the positive consequences of stereotyping, of being smarter, more aggressive and more competitive.
--------------------------------------------
Implosion of the WASPs--Er, White Protestants... ("Hate me. I do.")
Phillipe Weiss
I lately wrote a piece in which I extolled the late E. Digby Baltzell, and credited him with inventing the word WASP. Baltzell, a WASP himself, wished to hasten the day when the WASP caste no longer ruled society. He said it was a "caste" because it... had lost its focus, it did not reflect the real talents and energies of the society, in 1964. Those talents and energies were more broadly distributed, Baltzell said: among Jews, whom he specifically welcomed into the Establishment.
A scholarly reader named Paul Westman (who was raised Protestant) has told me I am wrong, that "WASP" was invented by the sociologist Andrew Hacker. I relay his comments below.
I take a couple points from Westman. First, he agrees with me that one of my great themes here, the rise of Jews into the Establishment and the loosening of the WASP grip on same, is largely unreported. He thinks this self-divestment of power is unprecedented; and he seems to lament it. Myself I celebrate it, though I think the new elite needs to be interrogated in the same way that Baltzell (and everyone else) interrogated the last one.
On a personal note, I'd add that when I was at Harvard in the '70s, I was fixated on WASPs because I thought they had- power. (They were the majority of Americans and in places like Harvard were their institutions originally in the same way that Notre Dame is Irish Catholic or Yeshiva is Jewish.) All that changed before my eyes. I remember a sociological Jewish friend saying, 10 years on, that the lucky WASPs were all living off land trusts or in dad's struggling law firm, they had lost the drive and gumption that had made them topdogs.
I remembered a party I went to in Harvard Yard, where a guy wore a paper pinned to the back of his jacket, "I'm a Preppie; Hate Me". Poor WASPs. As for my group, the Jews, one big theme of my blog is most of us don't want to accept our power in American society. We insist that we're outsiders (a vanity; we're not), or we self-segregate; we can't deal with the religious/historical consequences of being the ruling class. A real crisis of identity. Get over it! Perhaps it is the fear of the consequences of having such outsized wealth and influence in proportion to group size.
Anyway, here's Paul Westman (who has given me permission to use his writing this once):
"WASP"... the Establishment did widely publicize and popularize the term after Baltzell picked it up and utilized it to attack his own people. The reputation of an otherwise obscure and insignificant, but ambitious, academic was made.
Baltzell published The Protestant Establishment in 1964. However, the first known appearance of "the slur" in print occurs in an article by a Jew, Andrew Hacker, "Liberal Democracy and Social Control," American Political Science Review 51 (1957): 1009-26 at 1010-1011.
"These 'old' Americans possess, for the most part, some common characteristics. First of all, they are 'WASPs'--in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists." [Hacker provides no citation for this statement. -PW]
I asked Westman to elaborate. He did so in another email:
In Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America's Power Elite (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), former Newsweek and Time writer and editor Robert C. Christopher (b. 1924; since deceased, I believe) wrote at the beginning of Chapter Two, "The Myth of the WASP": "Though it was certainly in conversational use well before then, the acronym 'WASP' had never appeared in print so far as I can discover before 1962. I can still recall, in fact, how puzzled one of my mother's Yankee aunts was when sometime in the late 1950s I applied the term to her." (p. 23)
In a footnote at the bottom of the page Christopher adds: "Credit for coining the term 'WASP' is given to E. Digby Baltzell of the University of Pennsylvania, and it was indeed Baltzell's use of the acronym in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment that did most to launch it on the road to general acceptance. The first use of the term in print, however, actually appears to have been in an article that E. B. Palmore published in The American Journal of Sociology in 1962 in which he carefully explained that 'for the sake of brevity, we will use the nickname "WASP" for this group, from the initial letters of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.'"
Christopher, like Baltzell, celebrated the downfall of the WASP.
"Ethnophaulism (derived from Greek roots meaning to disparage an ethnic group)," Palmore writes in the article, is a neologism proposed by psychologist A. A. Roback, author of A Dictionary of International Slurs (1944), "to refer to group insults." (An enumeration elsewhere of Professor Roback's publications and organizational activities indicates that he was an ethnically-conscious Jew. -PW)
Palmore's thinly-disguised aim is Newspeak-style psychosocial engineering: "[L]abels used in a culture influence the perception and thinking of its members." Implicitly, Palmore suggests that selectively eradicating the subset of ethnophaulisms (ethnic slurs) utilized by "WASPs" against non-WASPs might lead to the diminution--indeed, eradication--of an important prop of WASP ethnic consciousness: "We may discover that ethnophaulisms are essential for the existence of such forms of ethnocentrism as chauvinism, pejorative stereotypes, scapegoats, segregation, and discrimination."
Palmore's agenda, widely shared, has proven itself a smashing success in the decades since.
In a society permeated with racial hypocrisy, it is fitting that Palmore slyly employed the term "WASP" in the very course of ostensibly preaching against slurs. One would expect nothing less. Hacker invoked the pejorative acronym once in his article, otherwise falling back on the phrase "old ruling class"; Palmore employed it six times in the span of three pages.
After I elsewhere cited Christopher as authority for the proposition that Palmore rather than Baltzell was the first to employ the term "WASP" in print, I received an e-mail from a reader stating that David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, in The Macmillan Book of Social Science Quotations (1991), p. 84, cited the Andrew Hacker article I quoted yesterday as the first known use of the term in print. It was that e-mail, five years ago, which prompted me to check the article in question. (I've looked at both Sills and Merton and Hacker's American Political Science Review article; the quotation I sent you yesterday is from the article itself.)
Robert Christopher deserves credit for one thing: despite enthusiastically cheering WASPs' destruction, he does acknowledge that Baltzell's thesis was fundamentally flawed, in that WASPs did not forcefully defend their elite status. On the contrary, they rather quickly and proactively surrendered their advantages to Jews... (Just to be clear, personally I regard this as a fact but not a virtue.) Years later, independently of Christopher, essayist Joseph Epstein arrived at the same conclusion. He termed the strange phenomenon "the Wasp self-divestment of power":
"The Wasp old guard put up the white flag without a shot being fired. Suddenly bars began to drop: in formerly restricted neighborhoods, in previously elite country and city clubs, in once white-shoe bank, law, and investment firms. Once-snobbish institutions loosened up, opened up, disappeared.
The closest thing to an aristocracy that America had known was now most prominently in evidence in the magazine ads of a small grey-haired Jewish designer named Ralph Lauren (ne Lifschitz). Perhaps the best analogy to the Wasp self-divestment of power is that of the British giving up their empire. Both may have felt that the need to do so was inevitable--and quite possibly it was--but each came away diminished, disliked, even a little despised for having done so. To this day in America, the Wasps are the one group about which-in a politically correct atmosphere--jokes can be made with impunity." --Joseph Epstein, (June 2002).
---------------------------------
"Rub It In Why Dont'cha?":
From the "We can't make this shit up" file and the "That's Right I said it" file, courtesy LA Times
Archive for Sunday, January 09, 2005
Why Hot, WASPy Chicks Love Jews
By Joel Stein
January 09, 2005 in print edition M-6
Note This article includes corrections to the original version.
This is embarrassing to admit, but we thought you didn’t like us. So while we Jews were controlling the media, we tried to avoid putting actual Jewish characters in front of you. Seinfield, sure. But we made George Costanza Italian. We gave Craig Kilborn a talk show.
But now that you’ve spent about $200 million to laugh at Ben Stiller’s mega-Jewish parents dealing with his WASPy soon-to-be-in-laws in “Meet the Fockers,” we feel comfortable showing you our big Jewish selves. Philosemetism, which is so new we had to invent a word for it, has led to a whole new genre: Jewsploitation.
In addition to “Fockers,” there’s the movie “The Hebrew Hammer,” Heeb magazine, Jewcy clothing, Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song” and his animated film “Eight Crazy Nights,” and an upcoming collection of bar mitzvah stories called “Bar Mitzvah Disco.”
The fact that young Jews in Hollywood feel comfortable creating Jewy characters isn’t surprising. That’s what happens when you forget to stop scaring us. You let us into your country clubs, gave us your women and encouraged our most annoyingly self-righteous member to run for president. So now that we’ve assimilated to the point where we’re completely the same as white people, we’re trying to re-create a community by shoving our culture down your throats. The bizarre part is that the same masses who saw “The Passion of the Christ” are into it.
With “Meet the Fockers,” otherwise sane people in red states were willing to fork over $6 – or however much they pay for movies in their Third World economy – to hang out with my parents for two hours. The success of “Meet the Fockers” shows that America is familiar and comfortable enough with Judaism to get the jokes. Al Jazeera may be right.
The stereotype in Jewsploitation isn’t the neurotic, nervous Jews of Woody Allen films, which you guys never seemed to like much. The Jews in “The Fockers” are loud, inappropriate, obsessed with sex and bodily functions, overly affectionate, liberal, earthy and smothering.
These traits seem to amuse people who don’t get two helpings of it a day from parents who can’t seem to understand that this is precisely why we moved 3,000 miles away to Los Angeles.
But they are also the traits that eventually teach the WASP parents in “Fockers” to loosen up and enjoy life. It’s the same function black people perform when they are forced to be in movies with Steve Martin. Blacks do voodoo; Jews do therapy. We both are portrayed (largely by Jews no less) as clownish people who eat too much, talk loudly, rebel against authority, use colorful slang, over-emote, are too in touch with our bodies and are clannish. We happen to be the only two groups of people in the world who don’t just pretend but actually enjoy jazz.
Josh Neuman, the editor of the Jewsploitation magazine Heeb, is concerned about this new role. Then again, like most Jews, he’s concerned about everything.
“It’s a kind of a fetishization of the Jew,” he said. “In the middle-American mind, Jews are beloved people. They’re a special kind of Christian. They’re like babies. They haven’t yet matured into full-fledged humans. I don’t think it’s ‘Meet the Fockers’ today, Kristallnacht tomorrow. But I don’t think kabbalah is a good thing.”
Neuman has a point about this fetishization thing. Like the assimilated Ben Stiller character who marries Teri Polo in “Meet the Fockers,” super-WASPy women seem to be into us. Suzanne Somers once told me that Jews make good husbands because we have good relationships with our mothers.
Good relationship, suffocation, what’s the difference? The point is Suzanne Somers likes us.
And I love Jewsploitation. It’s what we were doing already anyway. When you belong to a people who can often pass as white, you have the luxury of exploiting your difference when it’s to your advantage and hiding it when it’s not. It’s why we crafted this clever but adorably harmless image. We’ve infantilized ourselves. Because hot WASPy chicks love babies.
----------------------------------
"Because we are one big, racially and genetically superior family", David Mamet and Norman Podhoretz repeat often cited notion. Most Americans look on with confusion, resignation; Blacks with familiarity, disgust. They've read this book before.
No comments:
Post a Comment