The Triple Package (39 page)

“sea of moral decay”
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
p. 35.

“creepy” (as Mitt Romney’s sons were repeatedly described)
:
See, e.g., “Which Romney Son Is Creepiest?,” Gawker.com, http://gawker.com/5953005/which-romney-son-is-creepiest.

“do not regard the Mormon church”
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 23.

2006 South Carolina poll
:
Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling,
Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
(New York: HarperOne, 2007), p. xiv.

“peculiar people”
:
Ostling and Ostling,
Mormon America,
p. 185; see also Heaton, Goodman, and Holman, “In Search of a Peculiar People,” pp. 87–117.

“cognitive dissonance”
:
Armand L. Mauss, “Refuge and Retrenchment: The Mormon Quest for Identity,” in Cornwall, Heaton, and Young,
Contemporary Mormonism
, pp. 24, 36–7.

clean-cut, all-American
:
Mitt Romney’s five sons are sometimes perceived as “too strapping, too wholesome, and too perfect somehow,” particularly “in an age when complicated, messy families increasingly seem like the new normal.” Ashley Parker, “Romney Times Four,”
New York Times
, Jan. 6, 2012.

Joseph Smith ran for president
:
Ostling and Ostling,
Mormon America
, p. xiii.

Orrin Hatch
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 16.

vacillated between assimilation and retrenchment
:
Armand L. Mauss,
The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 5; Ostling and Ostling, pp. xviii, xx–xxvi.

Twilight
books
:
The wildly popular
Twilight
series was written by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer, and the Mormon symbolism, which the author says is overplayed, has been much discussed. See, e.g., Angela Aleiss, “Mormon Influence, Imagery Run Deep Through ‘Twilight,’” Huffington Post, June 24, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/24/mormon-influence-imagery_n_623487.html.

“As somebody who grew up in Utah”
:
Walter Kirn, “Mormons Rock!,”
Daily Beast
, June 5, 2011 (quoting Dave Checketts).

“A big part of my drive”
:
Benedict,
The Mormon Way of Doing Business
, p. 19 (quoting Dave Checketts).

“one of the most misunderstood organizations”
:
Ibid., p. xiii (quoting David Neeleman).

“It’s all about doing better than everyone”
:
Ibid., p. 24 (quoting David Neeleman).

divine favor
:
James Carroll, “The Mormon Arrival,”
Boston Globe
, Aug. 7, 2011.

“Puritan anachronism”
:
Harold Bloom,
The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 103.

Asceticism has never loomed large in Judaism
:
See, e.g., Louis Ginzberg, “Israel Salanter,” in Jacob Neusner, ed.,
Understanding Rabbinic Judaism, from Talmudic to Modern Times
(New York: KTAV Publishing, 1974), pp. 355, 378 (“there can be no doubt as to the correctness of the view that Judaism is not an ascetic religion”); George Robinson,
Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals
(New York: Pocket Books, 2000), p. 84 (“Judaism is most decidedly not an ascetic religion”); but for dissenting voices, see Eliezer Diamond,
Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6 (“Though I have heard over and over again that Judaism is not an ascetic faith, experience teaches me otherwise”); James A. Montgomery, “Ascetic Strains in Early Judaism,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
51, no. 3 (1932), pp. 183–213.

613 to be precise
:
See Ronald L. Eisenberg,
The 613 Mitzvot: A Contemporary Guide to the Commandments of Judaism
(Rockville, MD: Schreiber Publishing, 2005), p. xxi; Robinson,
Essential Judaism
, pp. 196–219.

law to bind the Jewish people
:
Jews traditionally consider the revelation of the law—the Torah—to Moses on Mt. Sinai as the “defining event in the history of Judaism.” Wayne D. Dosick,
Living Judaism: The Complete Guide to Jewish Belief, Tradition, and Practice
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 177. For one of the leading twentieth-century treatments of Jewish law, see Menachem Elon,
Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994).

“Who is strong?”
:
Erica Brown,
Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Judaism
(Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009), p. 84 (quoting
Pirkei Avot
, 4:1). Josephus, the Jewish scholar of ancient Rome, “stresse[d] that gentile religious practices lead to a lack of self-control,” as compared to the “great discipline the Jewish law requires.” Stanley K. Stowers,
A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews,
and Gentiles
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 64.

“and the organs below the belly”
:
Maren Niehoff,
Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), p. 94 (quoting Philo, 2 Spec. 195); Stowers,
A Rereading
of Romans
, p. 58 (nothing that Philo and other Jewish writers of that era viewed Judaism as a “philosophy for the passions, a school for self-control”); Hans Svebakken,
Philo of
Alexandria’s Exposition of the Tenth Commandment
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), p. 14; for the Stoic influences on Philo’s concept of
enkrateia
, see Carlos Lévy, “Philo’s Ethics,” in Adam Kamesar, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Philo
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 146, 150, 159.

the
Shulchan Aruch
:
Written by Rabbi Joseph Karo, the
Shulchan Aruch
was a mere “handy reference” work, to which Karo turned only after spending twenty years on a multivolume, encyclopedic compilation of Talmudic law. Sol Scharfstein,
The Five Books of Moses: Translation, Rabbinic and Contemporary Commentary
(Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2008), p. 547. For a translation of parts of the
Shulchan Aruch
, see Gersion Appel,
The Concise Code of Jewish Law: Compiled from the Kitzur Shulhan Aruch and Traditional Sources,
vols. 1–2 (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1977, 1989). For a list of other partial translations, see Phyllis Holman Weisbard and David Schonberg, eds.,
Jewish Law: Bibliography of Sources and Scholarship in English
(Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1989), p. 19.

“Jews
 . . . do not get drunk”:
Immanuel Kant,
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
, trans. and ed.
Robert B. Louden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) [1798], p. 63.

largely German
:
Ofer Shiff,
Survival Through Integration: American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 33; Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, “From Diaspora Jews to New Jews,” in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed.,
Postzionism: A Reader
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 350 (“German Jews made up the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century” and imported the “Reform movement”). On the German origins of Reform Judaism, whose leading figure declared that the “Talmud must go,” and “the Bible . . . as a divine work must also go,” see Michael A. Meyer,
Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 91.

Circumcision
 . . . a “remnant of savage African life”:
Richard Rosenthal, “Without Milah and Tevilah,” in Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer, eds.,
Conversion to Judaism in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa
(Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Press, 1994), p. 110.

the bar mitzvah an obsolete ritual
:
Nathan Glazer,
American Judaism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 55; Jerold S. Auerbach,
Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 79–80.

the menu included littleneck clams
:
John J. Appel, “The Trefa Banquet,”
Commentary
, Feb. 1966, pp. 75–78. Other sources list the offending items at Hebrew Union’s famous 1883 banquet as “oysters, shrimp and crabmeat.” Auerbach,
Rabbis and Lawyers
, p. 78.

brought with them an orthodox Judaism
:
See, e.g., Irving Howe,
World of Our Fathers
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 169–70, 193–94 (noting conflict between the orthodoxy of the new immigrants and the Reform Judaism of the “German Jews”).

1914 book about Jewish life
:
Israel Cohen,
Jewish Life in Modern Times
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914), p. 18.

“bound and shackled”
 . . . “tend even to forsake”:
Ba’al Makhshoves, “Mendele, Grandfather of Yiddish Literature,” quoted in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds.,
Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 32, 37. Makhshoves was the pen name of the Kovno-born Israel Isidor Elyashev (1873–1924), a pioneer in Yiddish literary criticism.

Jewish Sabbath
 . . . a highly disciplined regimen:
Appel,
The Concise Book of Jewish Law
, vol. 2, pp. 224, 239–81, 326; “The Shabbat Laws,” Chabad.org, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/95907/jewish/The-Shabbat-Laws.htm.

“I hadda chance to make a dollar”
:
Budd Schulberg,
What Makes Sammy Run?
(New York: Random House, 1941), p. 237.

“We push our children too much”
 . . . “[A] piano in the front room”:
Howe,
World of Our Fathers
, p. 261 (quoting
The Forward
, Jan. 20, 1911, and July 6, 1903).

probably strengthened their impulse control
:
See Charles E. Silberman,
A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today
(New York: Summit Books, 1985), p. 29 (describing the “fundamental rule” on which the author’s generation of American Jews was raised in the 1930s as “Be quiet!—Do not call attention to yourself. . . . In talking about a Jewish subject in public we lowered our voices automatically, and we were careful never to read a Hebrew book or magazine . . . when riding on a subway or bus”).

bar and bat mitzvahs
:
See Stefanie Cohen, “$1 Million Parties—Have NYC Bar Mitzvahs Gone Too Far?,”
New York Post
, Apr. 18, 2010; Ralph Gardner Jr., “Bash Mitzvahs!,”
New York Magazine
, Mar. 9, 1998, p. 20.

even the Cultural Revolution
:
See Li,
Cultural Foundations of Learning
, pp. 341–2. Professor Li writes that “[i]f the senseless Cultural Revolution did . . . manage[] to dent the family system, it did not destroy it permanently. It would be hard to imagine any force that would succeed in eradicating Confucian family relationships and child-rearing practices after they have survived for thousands of years.”

traditional strict parenting
 . . . softens:
Bryan Strong, Christine DeVault, and Theodore F. Cohen,
The Marriage and Family Experience: Intimate Relationships in a Changing Society
(11th ed.) (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2011), p. 97.

expectations drop
 . . . sharp fall-off:
Suet-ling Pong, Lingxin Hao, and Erica Gardner, “The Roles of Parenting Styles and Social Capital in the School Performance of Immigrant Asian and Hispanic Adolescents,”
Social Science Quarterly
86
(2005), pp. 928, 942, 944, 946; Yanwei Zhang, “Immigrant Generational Differences in Academic Achievement: The Case of Asian American High School Students,” in Park, Goodwin, and Lee,
Asian American Identities, Families, and Schooling
, pp. 204, 209; see also Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo, “Distinct Trajectories in the Transition to Adulthood: Are Children of Immigrants Advantaged?,”
Child Development
83, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1623, 1635.

junk-food corporations
:
Michael Moss,
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
(New York: Random House, 2013), p. 341.

The Wire
:
Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson, “Why We’re Teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard,”
Washington Post
, Sept. 12, 2010, p. B2.

Breaking Bad
:
Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Uncannily Accurate Description of the Meth Trade in ‘Breaking Bad,’”
The New Yorker
, July 13, 2012.

CHAPTER 6: THE UNDERSIDE OF THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

Wittgenstein’s paradoxical ladder
:
The ladder appears on the last page of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
ed. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922), p. 189; one must climb the ladder of philosophy, Wittgenstein suggests, in order to see that philosophy is “senseless.”

“The youth of America is their oldest tradition”
:
Oscar Wilde, “A Woman of No Importance” (1894), Act 1.

America is a youth culture
:
See, e.g., Jon Savage,
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture
(New York: Viking, 2007); Patricia Cohen,
In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age
(New York: Scribner, 2012), p. 166 (“Our digital world incessantly assails us with artificially maintained images of youth”; in a 2005 Harris survey “[h]alf of those polled agreed that a youthful appearance is necessary for professional success and for personal happiness”); Martha Irvine and Lindsey Tanner, “Youthfulness an American Obsession at What Cost?,” Associated Press, Dec. 7, 2008. Youth culture is of course not uniquely American. See Jed Rubenfeld,
Freedom and Time
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 34 (“Modernity adores youth because it imagines youth as exquisitely unburdened by temporal engagements . . .
To be young is to live in the present
”).