Aspies and Jewish Writers

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I appreciate literature from many lands, yes, but I always seem to have an almost Pavlovian response to Jewish writers. I am in emotional sync with them on some level. Why? I am not Jewish, I hardly know any Jews because of where I live, most of the Jews I know are jerks, and I happen to love bacon.

Saul Bellow, Isaac Singer, Philip Roth, Primo Levi and I have little in common as people. My connection to them, or so I theorize, is Asperger's.

Jews have always been outsiders, have always been alienated. This definitely shows in their writing. Because of Asperger's, I am an alienated outsider, too. This must be why I understand the dilemmas of Jewish writers so acutely, though I by logic should not.

Does Judacia resonate with people with Asperger's besides me?

Can you imagine how hard it is to be both Jewish and an aspie.

Oh, and you're a jerk too, thank you.

Greentea, who did you call a jerk? Or was it just a joke?


I also feel like part of the minority-group culture that keeps tabs on genocides and holocausts and that. I empathized with the people in concentration camps more than I empathized with normal everyday people with normal everyday lives.

My BF who is Jewish says that all his Jewish friend have AS traits but that neither he nor they are actually AS. I'm not sure, he seems more AS then I am and I'm DXed and he has several Jewish friends who have more AS traits then we do...something funny going on here. Maybe just birds of a feather, sort of thing.

As far as the authors...I tend to love Jewish writers and humor and I have a definite physical attraction to more Jewish looking(each, I know they all look different but there is a look that I'm attracted to and a lot of Jewish people have more of it then any other NonJewish people...though some other Mediterraneans are also very attractive to me.)

My BF saya that is because there are so many Jewish people in the media, but I'm not buying that. All my favorite actors are Jewish and most of my favorite comedians and writers.

Sigh. Many of us eat bacon, and it would be nice if people could refrain from suggesting that we have a higher level of jerk-itude than anyone else. BTW, you might want to distinguish between Jewish religion and culture--your original post does not make that clear.

I'm not entirely convinced that high levels of AS traits are necessarily common among Jews. I bet I've met more Jews than almost anyone here, and plenty of them aren't at all aspie-like.

And most people who seriously "empathize" with people in concentration camps need to think a bit harder about what the word "empathize" actually means. Geez.

I don't think that Jews have a higher level of "jerk-itude" than others; I have been unlucky enough to meet some unpleasant ones, but I am well aware that this is but chance, and the jerk:non-jerk ratio among Jews is probably the same as that of the general population. The bacon thing was a joke. It was supposed to be funny, see. Do I have to do some kind of Helen Keller thing where I spell out the words "I'm just trying for humor, please don't overanalyze me" out on your palm?



That was not the point of my post AT ALL. I didn't mean to imply that Jews were like aspies, only that aspies, through their alienation, may acquire that special brand of alienated minority loneliness that they have IN COMMON with Jews. Also, I was trying to say that I like Saul Below. Does THAT offend you, too?



I learned empathy starting at genocide and working up, just like Ana54 did. When the neurological condition that you have necessitates learning empathy by rote, you take what you can get. Just as kindergarteners learn the most obvious things first (like the alphabet), the struggling student of sympathy must begin in a world of moral clarity, like, say, a concentration camp.

Jewish people are not alienated. They are very tight with each other. They have a tremendous support system and stick together in a community of worship and other. They help each other out in amazing ways recommending the best doctors, dentists, schools etc like one big family. I have always envied this closeness they share amongst each other--so different from the religion I grew up with--roman catholic.

Maybe you're associating aspie with the geek stereotype. This is a stereotype and does many kids with aspergers or hfa a disservice--the ones that aren't necessarily geniuses, despite being bright, and perform at the mediocre level in school but still struggle with perseverating and other autistic traits that set them apart from the group. My son wouldn't be considered a geek, but he stands out and he turns heads due to his somewhat peculiar behaviors and insistence on talking about unusual topics with unbridled enthusiasum and urgency.

I don't see how being Jewish has anything at all to do with a neurological disorder besides the hereditary factor. Many traits associated with Aspergers are not worthy of noting unless the child can't function in school and requires assistance. It is a serious impairment interfering. sometimes, with the child's ability to go with the flow--then a dx might be in order to avail yourself to the proper services.

The aspies/hfa's I've come across are asian, black, jewish, irish, russian, german--quite a diverse group.

I think we need to be careful.

equinn

Sowwy Evwwwybody. I didn't mean to make generalizations. I just radiate alienation and tend to project it, that's all.

Sorry I took you too seriously. I just found the "most of them are jerks" comment rather gratuitous. When people make statements about a certain group they are not particularly familiar with, I don't assume anything.



And that is sympathy, not empathy. I don't want to go into an empathy tangent, but empathy signifies knowing how another person feels, and being able to relate to them in a personal way. I don't think that is applicable in that situation, and I'm sorry if I am being pedantic. To me, empathy means being able to imagine what other people feel at a very high level.

I pretty much agree with equinn's post about Jewish community, BTW. Even as an aspie, I have always felt a sense of belonging in my family's predominantly Jewish social circle, at least in terms of the adults older than myself. There is common ground there. In settings with lower Jewish populations, it's all that more significant because most of the people you meet aren't, and there's a shared connection over food, holidays, etc.

Good distinction. I should work harder at making small but crucial discriminations of terminology.

The jerks comment finds its source in my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. O'Reiner. She was Jewish, and she was obsessed with the idea that people who weren't were out to get her. She was so PC that we weren't allowed to put up St. Patrick's day decorations. She was almost cartoonish in her dislike of innocence, and she did everything she could to teach us how cruel the world was, from taking our backpacks away so as to show us how easily they could be stolen to making us read about the Nazis every freaking night (it is important to remember that we were all nine or ten years old). She was awful, but even then I sensed that she was also very tragic, that under her sadism lurked loneliness, that her hatred of innocence sprung from a longing for it. Sometimes, I want to go into her brain and have a look around just to see what sort of Dostoevskian s--- is going on in there. She's going to end up in my novel for sure.

This may also be why I see Jews as isolated. That, Woody Allen movies, and the old testament.

I'm glad you grew up in a tight-knit community. My envy pains me.

Personally, I tend to gravitate to women SF/F writers. I don't seem to be the slightest bit interested in Jewish writers. Actually, I'm not even sure if I've read any of them. For you they strike a chord. For me they don't. Who knows why?

The shared issue between Jews as a people and Aspies is persecution. The dynamics of persecution are exactly the same for Aspies and Jews.

Therefore, all those traits that we Aspies have from being persecuted are identical to the traits of Jews that are a result of suffering constant persecution.

This is where your feeling of identification comes from.

Due to my AS, people are negatively predisposed against me. So if there's a fight between me and an NT, people will always side with the NT. If the NT attacks me, I deserve it. If I attack the NT back, I'm aggressive. This kind of victimization of Aspies (called scapegoating) is what Jews experience as well, as a nation, nowadays especially in the media.

I think that the Jewish religion makes up a community of people that has an exclusivity within those who are either born into the religion or choose to convert to it, though there are also plently of less devout people who happily intermarry and arent too concerned either way. From what I have notied, people who are Jewish are often well-educated and quite a few can have an artistic bent, so they are well represented in the arts and have certainly made their mark there.

I dont think they are isolated, they can choose to have anyone as their friends and NT Jewish have NT social skills. I think any religion does set a person apart from a population of people who are not of the same belief system though, and I think a Christian in a Jewish community can feel a similar sense of being different, or a Buddhist family living in a predominantly Christian Community for instance.

It is more to do with the way people create divisions between themselves and others, based on race, religion, sexual preference, or even neurological characteristics.

I think the key point is alienation. The arts and education are open to the alienated who would rather read a book than go out and be beaten up by the other children.

The qualifacations for being a writer are being an antisocial recluse with a key board. It is just like those of old who talked to themselves while walking down the street, except they wrote it down and published. Writers are hermits who not only talk to themselves for months at a time, they argue!

Now everyone talks to themselves, but they have cell phones.

Alienation is an outsider view, where the alturnative to anger and hatred is humor. There is Black humor, Battlefield humor, Gallows humor, it is a way to cope with horror.

How many Aspies does it take to change a light bulb? It doesn't matter, they do not like change.

The same alienation carries over into the rest of life, hence Scientists who do find things, inventors seeking new ways, are driven because they have no attachment to the old, in fact they hate it. Proving that everybody is wrong, and has been, and their grandpa too, is fun.

Lets hear it for Alienation! It drives writing, painting, science, invention, humor.

If we were one big happy family, we would be picking fleas out of one anothers fur.

Has anyone here read "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison? It's a classic American novel which deals with just these themes. A lesser-known book that I really like as well is "Autobiography of a Face" by Lucy Grealy. Grealy was NT, but had jaw cancer as a young child and part of her jaw was removed. She was constantly teased, stared at, thought of as a freak, etc. I related well to it, though I wouldn't compare my own experiences to hers in terms of intensity. She died at a young age from drug overdose, BTW. "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides is also a favorite novel, about a man believed to be a girl for much of his childhood. "I'll Be Seeing You" by Joyce Carol Oates features a white female character who I think aspies can relate to very well, who falls in love with a black philosophy student, set in the '60s. The poetry of Matthew Arnold and Alan Ginsberg also touches on these themes. Alienation literature is an interesting topic, and I might think of more examples.