Once a Jew, always a Jew? (An interview)

[Warpy]

6. Thanks, I thought the same thing

It wasn't as much an interview as it was two competing monologues.

What they were both talking past is deep culture, which covers things like how men talk to women and women talk to men and how they talk to each other, humor, eye contact, social distance, and a host of other things we really don't tend to think about because they're so ingrained.

Nothing much can change this, but people who realize what's going on can blunt it slightly when stepping out of their own culture and dealing with another in order to decrease the intercultural friction.

One of the funniest things I ever read was a book on intercultural psychotherapy wherein none of the authors actually got the point. The chapter on the Irish was written by an Italian who said (among other howlers) that psychosis was so common among the Irish it had to be taken as a cultural norm. The chapter on Native Americans was written by a WASP who thought all tribes were exactly alike in basic beliefs and customs. I learned a lot from that book but it wasn't anything the authors wanted me to.

Neither guy in this interview had gained that kind of insight, so they were both talking around it and talking past each other.