SWANS OF DAVID
RECENTLY, at a dinner party, I listened to our hostess, who is Jewish, converse with my husband about the Fifth Avenue buildings in which they grew up. Our hostess noted that even though my husband’s parents were Social Register WASPS, they chose to live in a building that, like her family’s, was not “restricted.”
Does anyone recall the meaning of this once-commonplace euphemism? At least until the 1970s, and in some cases, beyond, certain apartment buildings and hotels in New York banned Jews. Our hostess still has a map seared into her brain of the Upper East Side co-ops that did not accept Jewish residents (or African Americans). So does another friend, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who remembers a realtor in 1976 navigating her mother away from 775 Park Ave. and 19 East 72nd St.
Do not believe the propaganda; New York City, in spite of the bagels, Yiddishisms, and urban myths about who runs the place, isn’t a Jewish town and never was. This buried truth is one of the several subtexts of FX’s popular series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” — which concluded this week — and recently has resurfaced amid today’s citywide antisemitic surge.
William S. Paley, the Jewish founder of the megalithic CBS network, tried, by marrying first the arts patron Dorothy Hart Hearst, and then by taking Capote’s queen “swan” Babe Cushing Mortimer as a trophy wife, to storm the barricades of the gentile ruling class. It didn’t work. If anything, Babe, a Boston Brahmin, dropped a notch, at least in the eyes of the old guard, who abided by codes harsher than those of Manhattan's Café Society. Paley installed Babe in his rental apartment at the St. Regis hotel, and later upgraded to a 20-room floorthrough in the otherwise “restricted” limestone fortress of 820 Fifth Ave.
But even while serving on the board of the Museum of Modern Art, alongside Rockefellers and Whitneys, Paley was denied membership to many of their clubs — in Manhattan, Washington, DC, and Bar Harbor, Maine. The interventions of his own brother-in-law, the dashing oil scion John “Jock” Whitney, could not remedy the situation. The attitude toward Paley at these bastions was clearly articulated by Jock’s sister Joan Payson, when she warned the chairman of the Mets, the team she owned, “Watch out for Bill Paley. He’ll take the gold right out of your teeth.”
Contemporaries did not label Paley and his landsmen “white” as Jews are so often today. The aristocrat Lady Diana Cooper, for instance, othered her media mogul friend as “Oriental” and “Tartar.” One under-acknowledged innovation of Capote’s famous Black and White Ball in 1966, the subject of the third episode of “Feud,” was the host’s transgressive dissolution of these social, racial and ethnic barriers.
Antisemitism in New York predates the city itself. In flagrant violation of 17th-century Dutch law, Peter Stuyvesant persecuted Jewish settlers in the colony of New Amsterdam. Edith Wharton, chronicler of 19th-century upper-crust New York mores, wrote in “The House of Mirth” (1905) about a Jewish character, the financier Simon Rosedale: “The man is mad to know the people who don’t want to know him. He is fat and shiny and has a sloppy manner.”
The Establishment’s revulsion toward Jews was not confined to arrivistes angling to infiltrate its ranks. Wharton’s friend Henry James, in “The American Scene” (1907), compared the struggling Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side to worms. Slice them into bits, he analogized, and each slimy fragment “wriggles away contentedly . . . still holding within it the whole hard glitter of Israel.” At least James, unlike the current “river-to-sea” eliminationists, recognized Israel as the Jewish homeland.
The dirtiest secret of Truman Capote’s social swirl in ‘Feud’ was its unspoken disdain for Jews
I have thickened my own skin from a lifetime of what in today’s parlance is called “microaggressions.” Although I was never denied housing, I was advised not to write my maiden name (Fine) when signing in as a guest, in my 20s, at a restricted club. (Yes, they still exist.) I’ve heard Jews stereotyped as venal, homely, uncoordinated, mendacious, conspiratorial, hell-bound, and worse.
Though they sting, these barbs are garden-variety examples of antisemitism. They follow the “polite” “Gentleman’s Agreement”-type playbook that existed in the “Capote vs. the Swans” era. But starting on Oct. 7, antisemitism in New York has metastasized into something physically threatening, vociferously enunciated, and institutionally celebrated. Right near me on the Upper East Side, where my hostess friend and my husband grew up, and where Bill and Babe Paley made their elegant home, our freedoms are jeopardized, and our lives are imperiled.
Outside Temple Emanu-El, on 65th and Fifth, at the Saturday-morning memorial service for Henry Kissinger in January, a pro-Hamas gang mocked Jewish congregants, spewed epithets at them, and blew smoke in their faces. Steps away from my apartment, another pro-Hamas mob surrounded a grocery-toting 43-year-old mom and her 17-year-old daughter, shouting “Nazi bitches” at them and hurling objects at their car.
Nearer still to me, the Neue Galerie, founded by Ronald Lauder, and filled with art treasures restituted from Nazis, was splattered with red paint spelling out the words “Ronald Slaughter.” If New York were really a Jewish town, these egregious hate crimes would not be proliferating, and they would not be committed with impunity. Or, to invoke another trendy term, after Hamas' attack on Israel, there are no “safe spaces” in New York for Jews anymore.