1 Comments

1. paul walter

   June 13, 2011

   Bugger, lost post. Just wanted to say, chess- the thinking person's game- seems the icon for the glorious Kaffeklatsch culture that has spread right across the world from Europe and remark on the devastating humour of kibbitzer, "NooYoik" hymie culture and bitingly funny yiddisher slang, with its subtleties. Ached with laughter one night doing a dictionary of yiddish slang online, and am just thinking on how this feeds into the curious phenomena of Hollywood humour. Here is the real Euro Jewish culture- the culture that gave us the Mendelssohns, Marx, Freud, Einstein,Mahler, Walter Benjamin, Chomsky and hundreds of other exceptional minds, the world's best musicians and most numerous per head of given population perhaps, academics. It was born of adversity.It originally accumulated feeds from the ancient cultures, through Hellenism and then so many others, across history. And yet, like the angloceltic Australian working class culture that developed in earlier times, the onlooker wonders if it's not lost some of its humanity and compassion, in prosperous but insecure times: "Civilisation and its Discontents"?