Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but never received the word they need.
In the latter category, I hereby introduce—French horns and kettle drums, please—the neologism yidiosyncrasy to describe the odd behavior of my fellow Jews. “Idiosyncrasy,” of course, describes the peculiar behavior, often the distinguishing oddity, of an individual, but yidiosyncrasy is meant to describe the idiosyncrasies of an entire people. By yidiosyncrasy I certainly do not include the too-long established, vicious anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews, for as a Jew I side, naturally enough, with that philo-Semite Mark Twain, who wrote that the Jew, having survived all other ancient civilizations, is “what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind.” What I mean by yidiosyncrasies are those traits that give Jews their distinctive, often comic, quality.
Start with Chinese restaurants. Perhaps the most memorable thing that Justice Elena Kagan has said, or ever will say, was her reply when asked by Senator Lindsey Graham about her whereabouts on Christmas. “Like all Jews,” she replied, “I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” Walk into any Chinese restaurant in America and you are sure to find Jews. (The same cannot be said of finding Chinese in Jewish delicatessens.) Jewish civilization dates back 5,778 years and Chinese civilization roughly 4,000 years, which is why, as the Old Testament neglects to mention, the Jews went hungry for nearly 1,800 years.
Almost as strong as the penchant for Chinese food is the Jewish regard for education. Diplomas, I have heard it said, are the Jewish religion. The Jewish fetus, an old joke has it, does not become viable until it graduates medical school. My friend Edward Shils years ago told me he thought the Phi Beta Kappa Society was really formed to recognize the achievements of neurotic Jewish mothers for hounding their children to do well in school. I once sat at dinner with a Jewish woman who seemed unable to utter a sentence without the name of a prestige university in it. The greatest restraint was required for me not to remark, “Daddy, you know, went to Leavenworth.”
Another yidiosyncrasy is familial argumentativeness. Rare is the Jewish family in which there has not been a falling out somewhere, so that one sibling doesn’t speak to another, or a son chooses not to attend his father’s funeral, or a daughter to take her mother’s calls. My own parents’ families were riddled with such disputes: brothers-in-law who didn’t speak to each other, aunts who wore their resentments on their sleeves, cousins holding grudges that seemed to last slightly longer than the Roman republic. Sad though all this may seem, this particular yidiosyncrasy prevents Jewish family life from ever becoming dull, while adding a certain spice to holiday dinners.
The want of sitzfleisch, otherwise known as bottom patience, is another yidiosyncrasy, one that goes by the name of shpilkes, or needles in the pants. Jews do not wait well, whether in queues at restaurants or in airports or even at home. Jackie Mason does a bit about gentiles at an airport calmly awaiting the late arrival of a plane while “the Jew,” marching up and down, “is shvitzin’ and shvitzin’ ” (sweating and sweating). Extended periods of calm, let alone lengthy serenity, are apparently unavailable to my co-religionists.
The phrase is Henry James’s, whom no one ever accused of attempting to pass for Jewish, but Jews also have a keen “imagination for disaster.” In any enterprise they enter, they may hope for the best but are haunted by the possibility of the worst resulting. Cheerfulness is possible, but optimism is utterly alien to Jews. A man with whom I went to school, a Candide among Jews, sees all of his life as onward and upward, in the best of all possible worlds, and doesn’t mind saying so repeatedly. I suspect he isn’t really Jewish at all but was, though it was never revealed to him, adopted.
Other yidiosyncrasies could be cited. Nor in this brief scribble have I attempted to account for the origin of those I mentioned in Jewish lives lived in exile, under persecution, or for scores of other historical reasons. Yidiosyncrasies, though, they remain. Doubtless every people, the French, Germans, Swedes, has its own idiosyncrasies: Fridiosyncrasies, Gidiosyncrasies, Swidiosyncrasies, and more. Yet those of the Jews have an especially strong flavor, a pungency all their own. The reason I so enjoy them is that I happen to share every one.
