ABSTRACT
The central theme of The Ordeal of Civility is that diaspora Jews in Europe and America, from the giant generation of Marx and Sigmund Freud. Through the puny but successful American generation of Norman Podhoretz, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow, down to the outrageously impolite generation of Abbie Hoffman, have all been afflicted. With what the author sees as the particularly Jewish disease of bad manners, or lack of civility, brought on by their “sociocultural status-humiliation” at the hands of the goyim. Socio-cultural wounds lie behind the ideological creations of the giants of the Jewish Diaspora. In Freud and Marx, the “inferior” Jew loses his inferiority and the mighty goyim are brought low. But the author seems to have no ability or inclination to separate ideas from the Jewish men who hold them, for he sees their ideas really as plots to unmask the shams of goy gentility.
