Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jack Schwartz

Schwartz is staging a complaint about the boundaries of acceptable speech, but he does it by building a rhetorical trap: he frames criticism of European Jews as something so socially disallowed that only extremists or fools attempt it. The phrase "old Jews of Europe" is doing heavy, slippery work. It evokes an ancestral, pre-Holocaust image of European Jewry as cultural archetype and moral touchstone, not merely a demographic group. That mythic framing makes any negative statement feel not just prejudiced but sacrilegious, which is exactly the point of his line.

The sentence is also a status argument disguised as a free-speech argument. "Anyone who wishes to be taken seriously" shifts the focus from truth or harm to reputation management: the real penalty is not being wrong, but being socially exiled. "Reactionary troglodytes" is a deliberate sneer, a way of signaling that he knows the cultural script: criticism of Jews, especially in a European register, triggers instant association with fascist nostalgia and genocidal politics. He wants credit for recognizing that script while resenting its power.

Context matters: in postwar Europe and in much of Western intellectual life, "saying anything bad" about Jews carries a historical surcharge. It's not just about what you mean now; it's about what similar language enabled then. Schwartz's subtext reads like: there may be legitimate critiques, but the discourse is so morally booby-trapped that critique becomes impossible.

The risk is that this framing launders grievance into plausibility. By treating the taboo as the main story, he recenters the speaker's frustration rather than the target's vulnerability, and edges toward the very rhetorical neighborhood he claims to be distancing himself from.