Joseph epstein net worth

Joseph epstein wife
Joseph epstein children
Dr joseph epstein

•

Author Joseph Epstein was born and educated in Chicago. He was a lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002 and editor of the Phi Beta Kappa society magazine American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. He has published numerous books of essays and short fiction including Envy, Snobbery: The American Version, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, Life Sentences, With My Trousers Rolled, Pertinent Players, The Goldin Boys, A Line Out for a Walk, Partial Payments, Once More Around the Block, Plausible Prejudices, The Middle of My Tether, Familiar Territory, Ambition and Divorced in America. He also edited The Norton Book of Personal Essays and is a regular contributor to Commentary, The New Yorker, Harper's, New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Joseph Epstein and his wife live in tree-lined Evanston, Illinois, where he is writing a few new books.

Joseph Epstein's latest book is Fabulous Small Jews. The eighteen stories in it are all set in Chicago, most in the Jewish enclaves of North Side, with middle and upper class Jews populating the narrat

•

Birth of a Snob

Snobbery: is it innate, or learned? Snobs: are they born, or made? Perhaps the best way to begin answering this question is by adducing a case I happen to know fairly well—my own.

My social origins are a bit complicated: culturally lower-middle-class but with middle- and, later, upper-middle-class financial backing. Neither of my parents went to college. My father, who grew up in Canada, never even finished high school, while my mother took what was then known as “the commercial course” at a public high school in Chicago. They were both Jews but, as against the usual stereotype, evinced almost no interest in cultural matters apart from taking in the occasional musical comedy or, in later years, televised broadcasts of the Boston Pops. Magazines—Life, Look, later Time—and local newspapers came into our apartment, but no books. I cannot recall our owning an English dictionary, though both my parents were well spoken, always grammatical and jargon-free.

Politics was not a great subject of family conversation. The behavior of our ex

•

SNOBBERY

Clever, prolific Epstein (Narcissus Leaves the Pool, 1999, etc.) turns his wit to the pernicious, universal failing previously addressed by such worthies as Edith Wharton, Tom Wolfe, Russell Lynes, and even Father Mencken, among countless others.

Dissecting snobbery in all its current manifestations, Epstein (English/Northwestern) examines the ways in which people who pursue lives of invidious comparison may judge you (and surely find you wanting) in matters of employment, education, income, affiliations, intellectual interests, spouse(s), ethnicity, favored comestibles, politics, celebrity, dogs, and, not least, progeny. Of course, a snob is Janus-faced. Note the contortions necessary to look up to paragons who are above contempt while simultaneously looking down on the dopes beneath consideration. A pretty slick slope, indeed. The classification of snobs as slobs or nobs is undertaken with fine spirit by our snobographer. Undeniably, perhaps unavoidably, it’s all a bit self-referential, with personal dislikes and dropped names. There’s wonderful dissing of the likes