Chutzpah

About

Chutzpah is a word that describes positive quality in jewish culture. It has no clear translation and has no analogues in other languages, but closest words to describe the meaning would be "insolence", "greed" and "impudence", total denial of personal responsibility and conscience. But unlike of those words it has positive meaning in hebrew.

Among jews chutzpah means impudence beyond the line that less successful people think as acceptable, thus distinguishes a successful person from the unsuccessful and allow you to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, such as obvious wrongness.

Examples

Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish gives such anecdotal example of chutzpah: "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan".

In 1989, Alan Dershowitz filed a defamation suit against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw, on behalf of Rabbi Avi Weiss. Glemp had accused Weiss and six other New York Jews of attacking nuns at a much-disputed convent on the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Glemp's statement about Weiss, made in July 1989, was coupled with suggestions that Jews control the world's news media. Dershowitz's account of the lawsuit appears in his book "Chutzpah" (1991), where he says that jews should be thankful to chutzpah for their control of the world and shouldn't be ashamed.

In 2011, teacher of the general history of Bar-Ilan University of Israel, dr. Hilda Nesimi presented lecture named "Harry Potter and Disappeared jew", according to Israeli magazine Cursor. She says that with all multiculturalism and internationality of Harry Potter, books feature no jews as nation or historical phenomenon. Also dr. Hilda came to conclusion that Harry Potter proposes universalization of the Holocaust. (some trivia: Dumbledoor won battle with Gellert Grindelwald in 1945 and some think that Grindelwald solved jewish question in alternative reality) JK Rowling responded to this later in twitter and said that Hogwarts had number of jewish wizzard, for example Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.

Another example: citizen of israel was asked why in Palestinial-Israeli conflict Palestinian children die 22 times more than jewish ones? He replies "We hide our children, and Palestinians hide behind them".

So called "experts of the Holocaust", jews Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal and others spreaded lie that during Second World War Germans made soap from jews. When this lie was exposed by holocayst revisionists, Israeli "expert of the Holocaust" Shmul Krakowski in 1990 admitted that soap from the jews is fiction and said that story about soap from jewish fat was composed by Nazis themselves to deliever mental suffering to the jews.

When it was discovered in 2010 that one of "Holocaust victims" had gold Assyrian tablet with 3200-year history, stolen after the war from the Berlin's Forderasiatshes Museum amd court decided to return it to the museum, daughter of the "Holocaust victim" declared: "This golden Assyrian tablet represents the survival of my father during the gloomy period in the life of my parents and in the life of jewish people. It was the only thing he took from that bitter time, and he wanted to pass this thing on to his children and future generations, so it would serve as reminder of the cruelty and death of his family from the hands of the nazis." Her jewish lawyer gone outraged: "The Assyrian tablet is emotionally important to the family, it was one of the first things that Riven Flamenbaum [Holocaust victim] held in his hands, emigrating to the United States. He started a new life here, raised three children, and now they [the museum] are chasing his past."

Good or bad?

As always, this it's up to personal opinion.

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