#parvenu

Parvenu

Epigram: "Parvenu" (new word poem)

Word of the Day - Parvenu

Arendt follows Lazare in calling the Jew who is ever striving at all cost to succeed in the dominant Gentile world, the parvenu. She contrasts the parvenu with the conscious pariah, the Jew who understands their positionality and seeks to think outside the bounds of the antisemitic system. The parvenu is essentially a phony, attempting to assimilate by 'aping' dominant, elite, white behavior and culture. This imitation is an awkward and exaggerated version of the original, distorted by distance from the source and the desire to fit in. The parvenu is contemptible to Arendt not simply because of their spinelessness, but because their agency is a factor in the continuation of the antisemitic system. Elite treatment of Jews from 'the castle' involves negating collective Jewish claims to self-determination in favor of dealing with individual Jews. [...] The parvenu Arendt wrote of is the Jew imitating and striving for whiteness, yet unwittingly playing into the antisemitic system, but in fact there are two parvenu versions. Today, the other version is that of the left Jewish activist who denies the reality of antisemitism either striving to be the 'good ally' to the oppressed, a group to which this parvenu denies membership (as a Jew, though not necessarily on other bases) in a bid to gain acceptance.