Lynching voices
Chapter 47 million of Women Are Fair Game (as long as you can pin some other label on them like “white” or “cis” or “gender critical” or “Jewish” – the list is long):
Ohhhh they shed white women tears – well let’s wipe them all out then. First let’s nod vehemently in agreement, that they do indeed shed white women tears, and then let’s all jump on top of them until they stop breathing.
These Jewish women knowingly play the role of summoning white mobs to lynch black and brown women’s voices.
In other words Noah Strauss hates women.
Singal’s dry “mazel tov” refers to the fact that Herzog isn’t Jewish. I know, I know, how can that be when there’s a whole novel by Saul Bellow titled Herzog, but nevertheless, it is so. (I’ve always found Herzog unpleasantly misogynist, ironically enough.)
Because the Jews in what would shortly become the German Empire (along with large swathes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) were “emancipated” over the course of the 19th Century — i.e., Jewish people were recognised and integrated into German society as individual citizens in their own right, and not treated as a “condominium” represented by largely self-appointed “community leaders” and otherwise relegated to their own closed societies, as had been the case for centuries beforehand.
Especially during the Belle Epoque, Jewish Germans had a dream, and a large degree of success, in actually becoming Jewish *Germans*; the three generations between the founding of the German Empire and the Holocaust began to cast off Yiddish (itself derived from German and Polish over those preceding centuries) to adopt German language and many German customs, as well as bringing Yiddish and Hebrew language and cultural expressions into a broader German context.
This is why all of the stereotypical Jewish surnames familiar to Americans (think the wein-, rosen-, wiesen-, morgen-, etc. coupled with -berg, -stein/stien, -thal, -thau, -burg, etc., along with of course Herzog itself) are German in origin; either these names were adopted by Jews over the course of emancipation, they’d been adopted before emancipation, or they had been assimilated from Jewish culture into German culture. And, when Germany lost its mind and either drove out or murdered its Jews, they took their German names with them to America and Canada and Israel.
If you get a chance, I recommend visiting the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. It is an active synagogue as well as a museum, and it is quite moving to learn and feel and *smell* the history that the building contains.
By (religious) law, Jewishness is matrilineal, while in (most if not all of) the English-speakiing westerrn countries where Jews have settled, surnames are patrilineal. This means that it’s very easy for people with Jewish names to not technically be Jewish and vice versa.