Austin Bramwell makes a point that has been noted elsewhere:
Instead, perhaps a plurality of the rich private school kids in Manhattan–even at historically Protestant schools–are Jewish. The Jewish Daily Forward goes so far as to report that Trinity and Dalton, two of the top private schools in New York, are “largely Jewish.” An entire media industry follows the lavish bar mitzvahs of Manhattan private school kids. The closest real-world model for the high school in Gossip Girl, The Dalton School, has historically been the most recherché school for Jewish New Yorkers. (Most WASPs prefer to send their children to the old single-sex grammar schools.) Tellingly, the media now treat Dalton as the most posh school in Manhattan.
In Gossip Girl, however, Jewish kids don’t even exist, much less predominate. Everything about Gossip Girl is modern, from the drugs to the iphones, except for the sociological background, which the writers may as well have lifted out of the Gilded Age.
Austin Bramwell knows whereof he speaks; he is a New York City WASP whose marriage was noted in The New York Times. I do find it interesting that many contemporary works exhibit this bizarre sociological tick, the transposition of an older cultural hegemony into the present day. It reminds me somewhat of science fiction, though it is ostensibly a genre of the future it often tells us much more about the time in which it was written.
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