First published at I Read This Over Shabbos
In a January 1984 interview with Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman, the Rev. Jesse Jackson referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” home to so many “Hymies,” or Jews. Jackson assumed that Coleman wouldn’t print the remarks, but he did. The Hymie community was understandably in an uproar, but not all reactions were equally negative; In a sketch that year on SNL, Eddie Murphy parodied Jackson and tried to “explain it all in song,” in “Hymietown.” The song is timeless:
I want to form a new coalition of soul people and bagel people, from the chitlin district to the diamond district, from catfish to gefilte fish, we all need to live as one. I want to look out over the crowd and see both leather hats and yarmulkes side by side. So come on, you brothers and sisters, you hymies and hymettes!
In singing this, Murphy offers a New York response to Jackson. Yes, New York City is full of Jews, Murphy can be read as saying—but need that divide us? Can’t we laugh at the Jewishness of New York, and find points of contact, connection, and shared meaning-making?
Walter Benjamin, Hymie, writer, friend (of Scholem, Arendt, Adorno, etc), and the last holder of a mysterious briefcase, is one of the great thinkers of the city in modern life. Remembering his youth in “A Berlin Childhood around 1900,” he opens with these words:
Not to find one's way about in a city is of little interest. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires practice.
For this the street names must speak to one like the snapping of dry twigs, and the narrow streets of the city center must reflect the time of day as clearly as a mountain valley.
I learned this art late in life: it fulfilled the dreams whose first traces were the labyrinths on the blotters on my exercise-books.
I’ve lived in New York my whole life, but still get lost all the time. I walk out of a subway platform, my phone on three percent, and try for the life of me to figure out North from South. Just this week I found myself circling a six-block square in the Lower East Side for what felt like an eternity—walking from a chess spot to ice cream, back to the chess place, then to the subway—losing all sense of direction and a stable reality along the way. I’ve learned from Benjamin to see the city as less of a concrete jungle than a concrete labyrinth, one in which we are as well served losing our way as we are finding our way.
Best,
Yudl