A commenter notes about Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s obsession with recounting all the times he was victimized by anti-Semitism in the Hollywood Hills:

“His entire life is a self-created drama of brave endurance of microaggressions. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he possesses a strong predisposition to embellish non-events of his past.”

Right. But the strange thing is that the circumstances of Weiner’s past are extremely non-obscure. It’s not like he’s telling stories about all the raging anti-Semitism at some high school in Spokane, and we might believe him because who knows anything about Spokane? No, Weiner keeps talking about the early 1980s at the most famous high school in the center of Celebrityville, what’s now Harvard-Westlake in Coldwater Canyon, over Mulholland Drive from Beverly Hills.

I know a lot about Harvard-Westlake because it was my high school’s arch-rival in debate. One of my teachers in high school went to work at Harvard School when Weiner was there in 1981: Dr. K. was a brilliant man with a Harvard Ph.D. and a complicated life story. He’d been a Jesuit, he’d been married, now he lived in a big house overlooking the Hollywood Bowl and had 11,000 classical LPs on vinyl. Don’t tell Weiner, but Dr. K’s cousin was rumored to have been Führer of the Third Reich for a week in May 1945. But I always assumed that Dr. K. was part Jewish, which was presumably why his side of his rich German family was in America.

That’s kind of my point, which is that Diversity was already a real thing in this part of L.A. when I was growing up (and Weiner, from the richer side of the Hollywood Hills, is six years younger than me). Society was getting complicated in ways that the rest of the country only began to understand decades later. For example, Dr. K. told me at lunch in 1981 that Harvard School had a policy of discriminating against Oriental applicants because they didn’t contribute as much to classroom discussions as their test scores would indicate. Presumably, opinionated students like Weiner were preferred, even if they weren’t as smart. Today, we hear that Harvard University is being sued by Asian-Americans for discrimination in admissions, but I heard about discrimination against Asians at Harvard School 34 years ago.

It’s a little bit like how I can relate to Barack Obama (b. 1961) because Honolulu was like L.A., only much more so. But nobody is interested in how racially integrated little Barry’s kindergarten class was in 1965. Instead, when New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a quasi-biography of Obama, he called it The Bridge and made it, somehow, all about the 1965 civil rights struggle on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, even though Obama spent 1965 feeding the hamster in Miss Yomiguchi’s kindergarten class along with little Jimmy and Soon-mi. It was a bestseller.

In contrast, I wrote a book putting Obama into the context of his growing up at a prep school in Hawaii and going to college in Los Angeles in 1981. It was not a bestseller.

Similarly, Weiner loves to tell interviewers about how Jews were a down-trodden one-eighth or one-tenth of the student body at Harvard School, even though a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner article from 1981 mentions that two-fifths of the student body was then Jewish. It’s a bizarre thing to dissemble about since Harvard and Westlake (the boys school and the girls school merged in 1989) figure in the lives of so many prominent people. According to Harvard-Westlake’s Wikipedia page, it’s alumni include Shirley Temple, Jon Lovitz, H.R. Haldeman, gay basketball player Jason Collins, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tori Spelling, swimmer Dara Torres, Mark Harmon, astronaut Sally Ride, Governor Gray Davis, reluctant NFL player Jonathan Martin, Salon founder David Talbott, etc etc

Looking at this long list of famous alumni, I’m starting to wonder if what really bugged Weiner was that Harvard-Westlake seems to have been especially attractive to students who are half-Jewish, like Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Reitman, Jason Segel, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, and Mayor Eric Garcetti. Perhaps when Weiner claims his class was only 1/8th Jewish, he’s only deigning to count the Real Jews, and he remains agitated by all the part-Jewish kids at Harvard Westlake. How do they fit into his ethnocentric vision of the world?

Weiner is a half dozen years younger than me, and in our generation, Jews typically made it a point of ideological pride to attend public schools, unlike us weird Catholics and those snobby Protestants. I knew a lot of Jewish kids on the debate team at Beverly Hills HS, which was absurdly well-financed (it even had its own oil wells) relative to my private Catholic high school, but the point was that BHHS was still a public school. That Jewish attitude vanished after busing in LAUSD began in 1978 when Weiner was 13 — Jewish politicians in the Valley led the struggle against busing, but were vanquished. Now L.A. is full of private Jewish schools (e.g., Mike Milken build a lavish one on Mulholland Drive), but there were few Jewish private schools at the time.

Weiner grew up in Hancock Park a couple of miles outside the border of Beverly Hills, so he couldn’t go to BHHS where he probably would have been happy, and went to super-expensive Harvard-Westlake instead. Perhaps, being highly ethnocentric and already worried about betraying American Jewish tradition by going to a private school, he was then alienated and freaked out by all the half-Jewish kids at Harvard-Westlake.

That’s just speculation, but Jewish culture has a useful tendency to ret-con intra-ethnic resentments into prized examples of anti-Semitism.