Posing As Jewish

I got to thinking, how Jewish am I, really? I’ve started to wonder. My main connection is respect for my father, who passed away in 1984. He had a heavy Jewish upbringing, to the point of being able to speak Yiddish (though never at home with us). His parents were immigrants; he was born in 1912, in a different world.

Otherwise there really isn’t much, except what’s in my head. I speak no Hebrew, and my only Yiddish is stray phrases and insults. A joke I made once, in response to an essay by someone about ‘leaving Judaism.’ “How Jewish,” I said.

I was raised secular. We went to Seders at my aunt’s, but never to synagogue. I was sent to Hebrew school, but it was not a good fit. I can’t forget that at the end of our term, everyone in the class got a little prize, everyone except me. I was told I had a bad attitude, I was a wise guy. I never went back. My brother, three years younger, never went at all as far as I can remember. Maybe I poisoned the ground for him. Neither of us were bar mitzvahed.

I went to summer camps filled with Jewish kids but run by Christians where there was no religion. None of the ‘commie camps.’ Since then I might have been inside synagogues just three or four times in sixty years. Once was for a cousin’s bar mitzvah. The other two times, my previous wife dragged me. She happened to have been raised Catholic, but she hoped that religion would turn me away from my political preoccupations, which annoyed her. It did not.

We stole our adopted daughter from a Jewish social services agency, promising to raise her Jewish. We didn’t. My wife took her to Catholic church every so often. Today she is a fundamentalist Christian who can preach your ears off.

There is food I still habitually eat. I’m always on the lookout for good deli. There are some cultural ties. Borscht belt comedy. The whole Sid Caesar/Mel Brooks axis. In literature, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer were important. (Mailer I came to regard as a buffoon and a bore.)

When it came to Israel, my views were conventional until my entry into the New Left. At that point I realized how little I knew and I began to bone up. I met a Palestinian on campus — there weren’t many around then — who told me we were all Semites.

An important book was an anthology by anti-Zionist Israeli leftists, long since lost. It had a light-blue cover, like the Israeli flag. I learned from Israeli Trotskyists and other lefts, such as Matzpen. There was an outfit calling itself “Black Panthers.” These were Israelis of Sephardic and Mizrahi* extraction who agitated against the racism of the politically dominant European Ashkenazi. By now the Ashkenazi are much diminished in Israeli politics, compared to the Mizrahi. All this eased the transition for me from liberal Zionist to non-Zionist. Now after Gaza, I’m as anti-Zionist as I can manage.

A memorable incident was at Speaker’s Corner in London. I visited during my big European tour in the summer of 1968. I loved that place. What a zoo. There were always dueling speakers from Israel and Palestine. At one point, some fat bastard in a skullcap was chasing around a skinny little Arab, who kept yelling out, “You are not a peaceful people!”

The horrific trend in Israeli politics and policy has brought me to the point where I really no longer care what happens to Israel, no more than to any other nation. It might as well be Moldova. Of course the population deserves security and self-determination as much as anyone, but the ideology of Zionism is first of all a failure as liberation, and second a toxic, fraudulent, ersatz parody of Judaism.

Israel’s only positive historical value was to have provided an escape valve for European Jews after the Holocaust. That was not personal for me; my ancestors came to the U.S. before 1900. We had no contact with any of those left behind; we assumed, without any special anguish, that they had all been exterminated. It was all distant in space and time.

Perhaps one Jewish thing about me is I have a bias against Germans and Poles. It’s hard to escape their historic roles in the Holocaust, even though such bias is irrational: many others could be judged guilty for the same reasons. We could also consider the sins of those who, from the safety of the U.S., colluded to deny escape to Jews from Europe. Or those in the U.S. “intelligence community” who offered a refuge to Nazi war criminals. This stuff gives rise in me more to Old Testament thoughts of revenge than to positive ideas of Jewishness.

I suppose I am more anti-antisemitic than Jewish. I don’t need Judaism for anti-fascism, humanism, or justice; I get all that I need of that from socialism and the labor movement (Dad again). I haven’t read any Jewish texts about any of those things. Even so, this kind of thing inspires me:

Jewish anti-Nazi resistance

Talk about the “greatest generation.”

I do think antisemitism in the U.S. is more of a problematic social indicator than racism. Racism or xenophobia are too ubiquitous to indicate much of anything. Antisemitism, however, takes some doing. If I was in charge of the FBI, I would give it extra emphasis. I am not talking about reputed antisemitism on college campuses, which I think is routinely exaggerated and misidentified, not to mention persecuted unfairly.

Maybe “The Jews” will disappear through assimilation and intermarriage. The thought doesn’t faze me. Israel as a Jewish entity has already disappeared. Think of all the native American nations in the Americas and the African ethnic groups that have vanished. What gives us more right to survive as a collectivity than any of them? I’m at a loss to answer.

_____________

*Sephardic refers to Jews with ancestral ties to Spain and the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. Mizrahi refers to Jews from predominantly Arab nations.