The rise of the Jewish nerds

In the nineteenth-century, you couldn’t forward YouTube videos, but you could purchase and mail a wide variety of postcards with exceedingly mean ethnic caricatures on them. The ones that took the Jew as their subject usually depicted him as clumsy and androgynous — falling off a bicycle, dropping a rifle when drafted into the army, wrestling incompetently with another Jew, being upended by frolicking children — wailing, smiling goofily, groping for his glasses. Read more