OK, let me begin by making some things very clear: I hate the fact that the word “anti-Semite” gets thrown around so much. I believe in free speech, and I believe in full and open discussion of any and all social topics without fear of being branded as a bigot. And I love Tom Wolfe’s writing. I think he is ingenious, in fact. He is one of my favorite writers. I have nothing but good things to say about him.
I’ve noticed that Wolfe always has extremely unflattering characterizations of Jews in his writing. I understand that Wolfe describes everyone in the most unflattering light possible, and that he’s brutally cynical and often derisive towards basically all of the people he writes about. But his Jewish characters always seem particularly unsavory.
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, the Jewish Professor Quat is described as being bald-headed, fat, jowly, whiny and obnoxious, and dressing like a slob. He also believes in abortion, as Wolfe writes, “not so much because [he] thought anyone [he] knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place.” He is unneccessarily mean to the basketball players in his class, and he is a loud aggressive blowhard towards his colleagues, but also a weasely, backpedaling suck-up at the same time.
This portrayal is not simply of a negative character who happens to be Jewish. His being Jewish is made an issue over and over again in the context of his hatred of the WASP establishment, his highly-exaggerated 60’s-style radicalism and desire to topple the system of White Christian America.
His other Jewish character, Adam Gellin, is a bitter, self-loathing, spineless dweeb and a simpering little devil who lacks confidence. He’s described again and again as being effeminate, emasculated, and weak, and like Quat, his Jewish upbringing is constantly made an issue. Gellin is also a sly and manipulative weasely character, and constantly scheming to get into bed with the heroine of the book, Charlotte Simmons, who (in my interpretation of the book, anyway) is actually a broad metaphor for the undefiled American heartland and its mainstays of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and Protestand Christianity.
The other characters in this book are all crooked and corrupt in their own ways, but nobody is described in such contempt-dripping terms as his Jewish characters. I’ve read many reviews which say the same thing I’ve just said, so it seems to be a widespread perception of this book.
In Ambush at Fort Bragg, a novella, the protagonist is a “fat little bald man” named Irv Durtscher, also explicitly Jewish (as if the name weren’t enough) who has a grand plan to expose a gay-bashing murder committed by three U.S. soldiers who also (surprise, surprise) are stand-ins for traditional American concepts of masculinity and military heroism. He cares passionately about the gay rights cause even though he is not himself homosexual, and is absolutely foaming at the mouth with contempt for the soldiers (who he describes as skinheads and brutes) and the culture of Fort Bragg. He also lusts after his co-worker, a news anchor named Mary Carey Brokenborough who is as WASPy and blonde as they come, and who is described as such with the subtlety of a mulekick. (Needless to say, Durtscher’s amorous advances towards here are shot down.) I wish I could go on and on describing the ways in which the portrayal of Irv Durtscher is dripping with contempt, but I want to get to the point.
In Hooking Up, many of Wolfe’s stories about science, psychology and technology (which are all excellent) involve WASP protagonists who are constantly demonized and hindered by other scientists with Jewish names. The theme of an epic battle between traditional American WASP values and rootless post-modern cosmopolitanism. Even when he lampoons the stuffed-shirt old-money WASPs, which he often does, he places the pure Midwestern and Southern ones on a pedestal. And the antagonists, the ones trying to defile or corrupt all that is good in America, always seem to be Jewish.
As I said before, I love Tom Wolfe and I have never been let down by any of his writing. I think he has a brilliant social critique of America, and he is also great as a nonfiction essayist. I’m not sure if I could genuinely call him an anti-Semite. I think he has a lot of contempt and distrust for certain intellectual elements that are overrepresented by Jews, but I don’t know if he considers the Jews as a people to be mal-intentioned or evil.
Maybe the only sure way to find out how he really feels about the Jews is to give him a bottle of tequila.