"But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors"
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The line lands like an accidental confession: a messy, intimate thought that refuses to stay politely sorted into the usual villains and victims. Wolff, a writer attuned to how families narrate themselves, frames it through layers of remove (my brother, doing research, formed an opinion), as if the claim is too volatile to own directly. That indirection is the tell. It signals both the seduction of a provocative thesis and the speaker's awareness that it can sound like blame masquerading as insight.
The phrase "the most influential anti-semitism...was from Jews" points to a specific, historically common phenomenon: intra-communal policing, class and professional gatekeeping, and the pressure to assimilate by disavowing the "wrong kind" of Jewishness. The context cues are doing a lot of work: "German Jews" implies an older, often more assimilated bourgeois cohort in the American imagination; "doctors" hints at professional prestige, institutional power, and the chilly authority of respectability. It's not street-level hatred; it's social sorting delivered with credentials.
Wolff's intent seems less to litigate who counts as an oppressor than to show how prejudice can be administered from inside the house, where it cuts deeper and trains a child to internalize hierarchy as fate. The subtext is a family wrestling with origin stories: how much of a father's temperament, ambitions, or wounds came from external bigotry versus internal expectations. By attributing "influential" antisemitism to Jewish relatives and professionals, the line shifts the focus from overt persecution to the quieter coercions of belonging, the kind that reshapes identity while insisting it's merely advice.
The phrase "the most influential anti-semitism...was from Jews" points to a specific, historically common phenomenon: intra-communal policing, class and professional gatekeeping, and the pressure to assimilate by disavowing the "wrong kind" of Jewishness. The context cues are doing a lot of work: "German Jews" implies an older, often more assimilated bourgeois cohort in the American imagination; "doctors" hints at professional prestige, institutional power, and the chilly authority of respectability. It's not street-level hatred; it's social sorting delivered with credentials.
Wolff's intent seems less to litigate who counts as an oppressor than to show how prejudice can be administered from inside the house, where it cuts deeper and trains a child to internalize hierarchy as fate. The subtext is a family wrestling with origin stories: how much of a father's temperament, ambitions, or wounds came from external bigotry versus internal expectations. By attributing "influential" antisemitism to Jewish relatives and professionals, the line shifts the focus from overt persecution to the quieter coercions of belonging, the kind that reshapes identity while insisting it's merely advice.
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| Topic | Father |
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