Jews and "gender bending"

2014-10-20

I have avoided bringing up the role of Jews in
attacking traditional views of sexuality (ATVS)
until now,
because I know how much Jews dislike having anything said about them other than how wonderful they are,
but the relentless push of the New York Times (see a current example below)
to ATVS has pushed me to write about the matter.

What brings me to make the Jew/ATVS link is not just the NYT,
but also some prior observations.

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First, a personal one.
My undergraduate college (which I attended during the mid-1960s)
was a socially conservative one.
No one, to the best of my recollection,
was known as being a homosexual or indicated any support for that approach.
Perhaps there were homosexuals on campus (who knows?)
but if so their presence was not known to me.
And no one questioned traditional gender roles.

Then, in the late 1960s, I went to graduate school at Brandeis University,
founded in 1948 by American Jews "as a nonsectarian Jewish community-sponsored institution"
(the quote is from the Wikipedia article as of 2014-10-20).
I enjoyed my stay there.
The academics, so far as I could determine, were first-rate,
the students, both my fellow graduate students and some undergraduates
I had the opportunity to serve as an instructor for,
were serious, smart, hard-working, and generally likable.
I have nothing negative to say about my experience there.

But I did notice (one could hardly miss it!)
a quite different set of values than those of my previous university,
whose student body and faculty were so far as I could tell
overwhelmingly white, Christian, and socially conservative.
Some structural differences:
my previous university had:
two ROTC detachments,
a school of engineering with departments in mechanical, civil, electrical, and chemical engineering,
departments of geology and space science;
Brandeis had:
no ROTC, no engineering, but did have a "Heller School of Public Policy"
(and, of course, various departments examining various aspects of the Jewish experience
both in America and in the larger world).

On social issues, I remember being surprised by the support expressed at Brandeis,
through various campus cultural events (specifically theater)
for what they called "gender bending",
i.e., men and women reversing traditional sexual roles.
I had never heard of this before,
but it was popular in the campus cultural milieu of the time.

I assumed that interest in "gender bending" was perhaps popular at Brandeis,
but would be local to it,
and to culturally related parts of America.
So when I read the relentless pushing of ATVS at the New York Times,
I can hardly avoid the connection to the Brandeis experience.

---

Second, a less personal observation.
A few years ago, I believe during the debate over letting homosexuals serve openly in the military,
a homosexual activist was quoted in either the Washington Post or New York Times
as saying words to the effect that
the Jewish community was the part of America that had been most supportive of the homosexual agenda.
Sorry I do not recall the exact source for that observation.

---

Finally, here is the current item on the current New York Times web page
which,
following a long line of similar socially radical arguments from the Times,
has pushed me to write this post:

2014-10-19-NYT-is-checking-the-sex-box-necessary

Is Checking the ‘Sex’ Box Necessary?
New York Times, The Opinion Pages: Room for Debate
2014-10-19




And here are some more arguments for radicalism from the New York Times:

2015-05-04-NYT-Editorial-the-quest-for-transgender-equality

The Quest for Transgender Equality
New York Times Editorial, 2015-05-04