With two children of my own in an excellentand exorbitantly expensiveday school, and with shul membership and kosher butcher bills to pay each month, I empathize with the nameless
kvetcher. And I'm enraged, too!
It is to distinguish it from that of Hoffman, who, while he occasionally tilted toward the schlemiel type--a combination nerd,
kvetcher, wimp, and fool--this was not, as with Allen, an inherent aspect of his persona or modus operandi.
By now a Dark Ages Gresham's Law has kicked in, and every conservative
kvetcher at the mike is pushed out by another one more feverish.
While she works her way around to a defense of the Sabbath, particularly for the social cohesion and personal reflection it affords, she gets there by being a grump, a skeptic, a
kvetcher. Early on, she likens the Sabbath to "a suitcase full of stuff you don't need anymore but are unable to drop into a dumpster." It is "God's claim against our time." It is "a fossil," "the past hardened into rock."
In my view, this
kvetchers network can usefully be understood as another manifestation of what American sociology conceptualized in the 1970s more broadly as "the adversary culture of the intellectuals"--a product of comfortable bourgeois society's tendency to give rise to an influential segment of alienated pseudo-bohemians that rejects the culture in total and in principle (as opposed to the liberal voicing of more modest criticisms aimed at reform).
The headline read "Coughers,
Kvetchers and Other Stars in the Seats." Other dillies include "The Muse Who Sold Shmattes" (about Ron Rifkin), "Shaking Things Up in Broadway's Shtetl" and a dance review which read "A Mishmash of 2 Forms." Back in the 2005-6 season a review of an LA opera headlined "Shlemiel!
Marc's commands an almost fanatically loyal customer base, a fact that appears to irk a small number of
kvetchers in the blogosphere who complain about the quality of the plastic bags--which the chain often purchases from closeout dealers and other retailers that have gone out of business--used at Marc's checkouts and the in-and-out nature of the bargains to be found on its shelves.
Had they not been born Jewish, they would probably have become
kvetchers without craft; had they not been born in America, their humor would probably have been confined to the insular society of their ancestors.
Foundation has freed itself from the taint of sexism, I fully expect last year's
kvetchers to demand that the rest of society do likewise.