On Sale: Jewish Memes by Tzvee Zahavy at Amazon

And so another one of my new books is on SALE! Jewish Memes – January, 2022 - a collection of my analytical essays - I frame it like this:

The term meme was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them as being in control of their own reproduction.

The genes in your body carries chemical instructions that make up the characteristics of who you are. Those instructions are in the DNA that makes your personality distinctive. And you transmit the DNA data down to your descendants. That is how the continuity of biological life works.

What Dawkins proposed was that there is a chemical unit of culture that contains the instructions for the characteristics of who you are as a member of a cultural family. That is what he called a “meme”. It is spread and transmitted across space and time to propagate and perpetuate a distinctive cultural group.

But this is not a tight scientific notion with rigorous rules. The DNA of the double helix is comprised of units of amino acids that pair up in ACTG units to define precise elements of the genetic code.

The cultural parallel that Dawkins and his successors identified – the meme – is a whole lot less rigorous and has a non-scientific chemistry that controls its composition and its transmission.

As an analogy or metaphor I find the idea of the meme attractive and I will use it in this book in many ways to make some points about what makes a particular cultural group distinctive and how the traits of that group have been passed on from parents to children.

There is a chemistry and a DNA to the basic ideas and concepts that make someone Jewish. They are distinctive to defining an identity of a person as Jewish and transmissible to the next generation.

There is also of course the fact that Jews claim affiliation to a biological heritage. We proudly say we are Members of the Tribe.

I spent my life formulating and transmitting Jewish memes in a long a rich career of teaching and writing.

This volume is a recapitulation of some of those most important things that I learned about some central Jewish memes.

Jewish Memes