Head Grenade Productions

My own background is an English major, which, to be completely honest, I’m still working on. It’s a great way to find all sorts of material, though, since what I’m required to read and look through a whole diverse field of literature and other writigns for class. I recently began a Jewish-American Lit. course, and I must say it’s already starting off with a bang.

The truth of the matter is, we’re supposed to be good, kind, respectful people. If everyone was, this world would be a lot better . . . maybe. Maybe just more polite. Whatever. THe point is, though, everyone, once in a while, isn’t that good, kind, respectful people. Sure, when someone makes you angry, you could release that emotion in the easy way by shouting profanities, or making lewd gestures, or hitting them. While writing a letter to the editor may not be on the top of the list anymore, it is a good way to rip someone to itty-bitty bits in a highly public way. Plus, apparently, if you do it really well, you can get published as literature.

[Letter from "a Jew Broker"] is an untitled letter to the Independent Gazetteer in March of 1784, and is attributed to Haym Salomon, a Jewish banker who was pro-American in the American Revolutionary War. The person to whom it was directed at, Miers Fisher, was a Pennsylvanian Quaker who was pro-Tory and attempting to get the government to allow him to create a new bank, citing the reason that “Jewish” bankers were gouging interest rates and damaging the economy for their own greed. What Salomon supposedly wrote in response is one of the most visciously pointed and charged letter I’ve ever read without resorting to profanities. The first several paragraphs basically consist of the writer explaining that Fisher is scum so low in public opinion that even were he to save the world he would be despised; in addition, he is so vile that bodily excriment mixed with dirt and poison would be more palatable than him.

An Excerpt:

You shall yet repent, even in sackcloth and ashes, for the fowl language in which you have expressed yourself. And even the interposition of some well-meaning but mistaken Whigs who, I am sorry to think, have joined you,  “nor even the sacred shield of cowardice may protect you,” from your transgressions. Who knows but the beams of that very denomination whom you have traduced may, on one day, perhaps not very remote, warm you into the most abject servility, and make you penitentially solemnize what you have done?

(This quote is taken from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, copyright 2001. You can find it on Google Books here)

I don’t know about you, but I hope the next time someone gets pissed off at me, they spin a twenty sentence metaphor about how I am more useless for the good of society than an actual contraption designed to be utterly useless.