NY Observer > Virginia Woolf http://www.observer.com/taxonomy/term/29461/feed Articles from Observer.com en Commentary Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf (and Intermarriage) http://www.observer.com/node/33583 You're a smart Jew. You go to a prestige college and hang out with a bunch of cool gentile guys. One of them has a fancy sister. You marry her because you want to be in the cool gang. She turns out to be a vicious anti-Semite, but you can't face it. Your life is a horrible lie.

This vision of intermarriage is offered by Commentary in its December issue, in a piece about Leonard and Virginia Woolf (based on the new biography of Leonard by Victoria Glendinning).

John Gross writes that Leonard Woolf's marriage was a sham of Jewish self-hatred. Virginia, he states flatly, "did not like Jews." The article catalogs every anti-Semitic thing that Virginia Woolf said (most of them apparently in journals and letters). She was marrying "a penniless Jew." She didn't like her mother-in-law's "Jewish voice" or "Jewish laugh." His family were "nine Jews, all of whom with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned, without the world wagging one ounce the worst." Then there is "The Jew having a bath" in the shared bathroom of a lodging house, who leaves "a line of grease around the bath" (That from the novel The Years).

These statements are not "casual 'drawing-room' anti-Semitism." Gross can halfway excuse that. They reflect Virginia's hatred for her husband, Gross says; for she suffered from the racist view that "all Jews are interchangeable." And when Leonard married Virginia, he "was made to feel like a true outsider."  read more »

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