I distrusted Tucker Carlson before distrusting him was cool.  Still, I tolerated his subtle antisemitism as what could be called “patrician” antisemitism.  With his permanent adolescent boarding-school incredulity about what the grownups are doing, I thought Tucker’s aroma was the legacy antisemitism of the gentleman’s agreement variety, the  condescending, mildly indignant view of Jewish Americans that my childhood was steeped in.  When my parents married in 1947, my father’s bachelor brother and only sibling, Sherwood, did not attend the wedding because my father was marrying a lady he lightheartedly referred to as a “beautiful dark-eyed Jewess.”  (No wonder I’m a psychologist.)

My parents could not have come from more dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds.  My father and uncle were descendants of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Westchester County, New York.  The family’s pre-revolutionary homestead, Sherwood House, is a registered national historic monument.  And these dudes were pure-blooded Episcopalian WASPs.  With the pasty skin, high foreheads, and hooded eyelids, they looked like Alistair Cooke.  My mother was a Jewish-American archetype, growing up in poverty in a cramped tenement on the Lower East Side.  Her family had five children, four girls and a boy.  The boy died of diphtheria in infancy.

Prior to the turn of the century, my father’s class occupied the unquestioned pinnacle of American culture, wealth, and privilege, without a rival in sight.  Then catastrophe befell: Along came boatloads of Jews.  With the Jews equivalent in intelligence, and outstripping the WASPs in creative and entrepreneurial energy, the patricians were knocked off their perch forever, and as human nature will, they resented it deeply and chronically.  There is a striking difference between my mother’s and aunt’s practical acceptance and success in overcoming actual antisemitism and the left’s unending jonesing for a scrap — anything, a sombrero — to call........

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