What I learned as a part Jew
by Sam Smith
Progressive Review, http://prorev.com/,
January 23, 2007
I grew up part Jewish. It was hard not
to if you lived in a New Deal family where your father was involved
in things like starting Americans for Democratic Action. My own
introduction to politics came as a pre-teen stuffing envelopes
for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he helped organize the
removal of Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican machine. Shull
was one of those who early convinced me that there were three
branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and your Liberal
Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful. I was certain
that Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions and win elections
for the good guys.
If you think I'm kidding, consider this:
for many years we lived across the street from a prominent activist
couple - she black, he Jewish. One day one of their sons came
over and slumped at our kitchen table. "What's the matter?"
asked my wife. "I had a terrible night," the boy explained.
"I dreamt I was Jacob Javits." He had already learned
to fear becoming a Jewish Republican.
Although I knew Jews went to synagogue,
I wasn't all that impressed. After all, as my friend Peter Temin
was going to Hebrew school on Saturdays, I got to go to the Henry
Glass music store and take drum lessons, clearly the better deal.
During the week we went to a Quaker school where perhaps a quarter
of the students were Jewish and nobody thought it odd. The tradition
continues. The joke about Washington's Sidwell Friends School
is that it is a place where Episcopalians teach Jews how to act
like Quakers.
Much later I would figure out what Quakerism
and Judaism had in common: a blend of individualism, pragmatism,
and responsibility, with a particular emphasis on the last. You
didn't come into the world pre-ordained and your primary goal
wasn't to leave it saved; what really mattered is what you did
in the meantime.
For much of my life, what I have done
and what I have thought have been deeply influenced by existential
Judaism and its practitioners. I can't even begin to count the
number of times I have come across Jews in the lonely corners
of hope trying to do what others, through lack of interest or
courage, would not.
But a number of things have happened since
I was first introduced to Judaism. The direct ties to the often
radical Jewish immigrant tradition began to fade. The offspring
of the immigrants became wealthier and less involved. America
of whatever ethnicity began paying less attention to others and
more to itself.
As I put it once, "The great 20th
century social movements [were] successful enough to create their
own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy
Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind.
The minority elites had joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat
and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most
prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history.
But as the best and brightest drove around town in their Range
Rovers, who would speak for those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's
phrase, fugitives from the law of averages? The work of witness
remained."
A whole history began to disappear. A
part of the story was told by journalist Paul S. Green in his
memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to the War in Europe. He
notes that by the dawn of the 20th century
"Jewish youth in Poland grew more
and more impatient with the narrow focus of their lives. They
were determined to take part in the opportunities opening up around
them - exciting new developments in science, the arts, in social
relationships. This brought them into conflict with their parents
and grandparents. In seeking a different way of life, they began
to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict age-old Orthodoxy
of their ancestors. "
Out of this grew several new movements,
one of which, Zionism, looked towards retrieving a Jewish nation.
Others were socialist, ranging from hard-core Bolshevik to the
Bund, which Green describes as
"An organization of free-thinking
Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish culture and
a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional religion.
The Bundists believed that only a socialist government - evolutionary
rather than revolutionary - could hope to bring together all peoples
of whatever origin and outlaw racial and religious conflict, with
all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an end to anti-Semitism
and pogroms."
And so we find, not too many years later,
the New York City Jewish cigar-makers each contributing a small
sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud
the classic works of Yiddish literature. And the leader of the
New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, became the first president
of the American Federation of Labor.
Green's own family joined the rebellion:
"In embracing the principles of free-thinking
non-religious belief, my parents had made a profound break with
the past. The generation gap with their own parents was unbelievably
deep. They had been born and brought up in a world that brooked
no deviation. . . They were turning their backs on the fearsome
God of their forefathers who had ruled Jewish lives for thousands
of years. . . They realized that maintaining their beliefs set
them apart from the mainstream of Jewish life, but the fact that
they were a small minority did not bother them. "
They became part of a Jewish tradition
that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural
course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations,
causes, and values that built this country's social democracy.
While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions
of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately
came from native populists and immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.
It is certainly impossible to imagine
liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests
without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable
of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority
than the influence of secular Jews on 20th century modern American
politics.
Sadly, however, social and economic progress
inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change
not just among Jews but within the entire post-liberal elite.
And, in many ways, Israel became the icon that replaced the cause
of social justice. This is not to say that the two are antithetical.
That certainly wasn't the case when I was younger. But as Jewish
rhetoric and politics became increasingly in the hands of powerful
conservative interests, an iconic, unexamined Israel began to
serve Jews much as an absurdly trivialized Jesus has been used
by the powerful conservative Christian interests to serve their
ends. And other things just got forgotten.
Just as it is important for Americans
not to define their country's past by the tragic distortions of
the past quarter century, it is important for Jews not to be misled
by a powerful right wing's reduction of Judaism to the goals of
a deeply misguided and militaristic nation.
The fact is both America and Israel have
badly damaged themselves through grandiosity, arrogance and narcissism.
Beyond that is a truth few want to admit: no culture, no ethnicity,
no value system can exist in a vacuum any more. This is not the
fault of terrorists or anti-Semites. It's the result of television
and multinational corporations that have usurped the role of culture,
values and ethnicities. Add to that Israel's demographic trends
and you've got a problem that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help
you with in the slightest.
The answer, to the extent there still
is one for the human species, is to be found in honest, personal
witness. You can't save Christianity with hypocrisy and you can't
save Judaism with missiles. What might work, however, is to reach
back into the past of one's own culture or ethnicity and find
examples of actions and behaviors that produced positive change.
Neither Christians nor Jews have always been as absurdly self-destructive
as they are today. And before they offer any more dangerous directions
for dealing with today's problems, they need to rediscover their
own good paths.
It is along such paths - and not on battlefields
- that faith is solidified, admiration is encouraged, and loyalty
is attracted. And along the way you may even pick up some unorthodox
stragglers like me.
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