Two nights ago, at my childhood vacation house in Cape Cod, I couldn’t get to sleep, tormented by thoughts about assimilation. This was after a dinner where I told friends and family I’m writing about being an assimilationist, and trying to celebrate my choices as American, rather than feeling guilty about them. Assimilation is too big a word when I’m talking to my nephews, so I say, "intermarriage." And my
wife is here, whom they all like, and a mile or so away is the smart skinny Jewish girl I
wanted to marry when I was a kid (and
who also married out, even after counseling my sister, then dating a gentile, that she would "miss that Jewish spark").
At dinner my sister said to me that she thought that Jewish kids
married out, out of an illusion that life would be simpler and less intense and neurotic in a
gentile home. They were deluded, she said, and driven by animus. The old selfhating thing. As she says it to me, I accept
that there is some truth in this, that I did want out of the seething food-oriented talking non-physical-culture familial home. Close knit, and everyone in everyone’s
stuff, boundary issues, it was a little too much for me, I wanted a little Protestant
crispness and formality, and I got it. And for my wife’s part, she loved Jewishness, liked Freud and Bellow and media and ye olde Jewishe magicke.
An old journalistic friend at the dinner asked me what I was writing about and I told her, and she offered various objections. She hadn’t thought the ideas through, the subject seemed to make her angry at some level. Or she didn’t see my assimilationism as a worthy writing subject. Oh, our
great success,which she has personally observed, is something to be talked about between
us, but when I say that we are witnessing an important
moment in Jewish history, a spiritual crisis, and the phenomenon of Jewish success ought to be covered in the New York Times, she shakes her head. What is the evidence of crisis? she asks. I say, Intermarriage is about acceptance.
Intermarriage is about the larger culture saying we want Jewishness, value it in the leadership of our society; and the
price America extracts for exalting Jews in prominent places is that they get to marry our children. I think that’s a fair bargain. But it is a spiritual crisis,
because who will remain Jewish?
And what does Jewishness mean, when Jews have
become so successful, such an integrated part of the Establishment? When the old antiworldly book values of Jewishness, so hallowed in the Eastern Europe of Y.L. Peretz , have given way to the incredibly-worldly book-values of the global meritocracy, which Peretz would hate. At dinner my nephews talk with admiration of Zuckerberg, founder of facebook, worth billions, they think. When I was a kid we worshiped Jewish Freedom Riders (like Patricia Kovner, cousin to neocon mogul Bruce Kovner).
What do you owe your people? And what do your people owe
you? Unable to sleep, I put it on a different level: What do I owe the white race, and what does it owe me? Nothing, I think. If it fades, do I care? Not really. Well then what about Jewish us-ness?
What does Jewish identity mean when it is based as it seems to be now on prestige-and-money-meritocratic Jewishness, or hollow ritualistic rabbinical Judaism, or
Still I am tormented. I love my wife, I see her
golden and polite and formal and self contained, with a million brilliant
thoughts going thru her head, and still I wonder whether I haven’t betrayed my
people. That’s my torment. The feeling that I
am helping to extinguish my people. The understanding that that is taking place. I am
part of it. I am doing it willfully. No doubt I am. Still I feel guilty.
Your guilt is well-founded. Just as Felix
Frankfurter should have felt guilt. And just as Stanley Levinson should have felt it. And Adorno, and Horkheimer, and Freud.
All the Jews who throughout recent history, after their rise to positions of influence and authority, have sought to weaken, destroy and eventually discard Western (white) culture and tradition. Without their pioneering, and likely guilt-free, labors we would have been spared Benetton ads, the Duke rape case farce, and quite possibly yet another navel-gazing Weiss column on the agonies of marrying his blond shiksa.
Yes, the lack of concern on the part of his wife's decision to marry outside the "tribe" is interesting (maybe a topic for another day?), but the fact is humanism seems to be winning over tribalism for now.
It is the neo-con hypocrites who propound humanism for the, but not for me, who are truly disgusting.
The problems of the citizens of Palm Beach County are a little more concrete than Phil's–
ISRAEL BONDS DON'T MEET COUNTY INVESTMENT STANDARDS
link to palmbeachpost.printthis.clickability.com
"At a special meeting July 18, the committee voted 4-1 to lower two requirements of existing investment policy in order to purchase substandard bonds. The substandard investment was not suggested or supported by staff. The investment was recommended and supported by committee chairman Burt Aaronson. … Chairman Aaronson directed most of the discussion to the necessity of helping the economy of Israel rather than to meet committee standards. We only can hope that when the issue is reviewed by the county commission, free from influence by Commissioner Aaronson, a wiser, more objective vote in the best interest of all the people of the county will prevail."
This is about as frank a discussion of dual loyalty as we are currently allowed here in America. Any more than this and you get reported to Michael Chertoff.
pardon me if i am intruding.
i long ago dated a chinese girl whose parents lived in Hong Kong, worked as executives for IBM in far east, and whose brother went to Harvard med. She was catholic, but not aggressively so.
my grandmother, thinking i might marry this person, came to me with objections that god does not approve of people like me mixing with people like her. she wasn't specific if it was my girlfriend's catholicism that bothered her, as she and she assumed i was protestant of some sort. Or, it might have been that my girlfriend was chinese, and she was not.
the fact that my grandmother, who up to then was a major influence on my life, would try to force me to give up this girl erected a major wall between us. I couldn't talk to her about it i was so upset and disappointed.
turned out, my mother was much more supportive to me in that she wanted me to make up my own mind on these matters.
turned out, i discovered a major difference between my mother and her mother because of this issue.
my grandmother was going through a very difficult time during that period of our lives. my grandfather was very ill with stomach cancer. he was at home periodically being confused and not able to eat.
during that same time her neighborhood was changing. her old friends who lived around her were dying, going to nursing homes, or otherwise moving away. they were being replaced by poor black families who didn't speak much with her or show any kind of familiarity towards her.
it was a difficult time for her and i guess she wanted to resist too much change.
point being, I can understand your situation with your wife by relating it to my situation with this grilfriend.
"What do I owe the white race, and what does it owe me? Nothing, I think. If it fades, do I care?"
What I find interesting is your sense of guilt concerning your own activities against your own sect of people.
I feel a loss for the old neighborhoods of my youth. Neighborhoods that are now ridden with crime, drugs, and murder. The Catholic ethnics of the industrial north have been pushed out to the 'burbs, exiled by integration and the inevitable crime that follows.
With this exile and along with the introduction of birth control, the Catholic ethnic has lost it's political power.
Will your ethnic group lose it's political power to assimilation? Possibly, but it won't happen anytime soon, at the least 75 to 100 years from now.
If not for Hitler assimilation would be no big deal. Because of the Holocaust people feel obliged to preserve Judaism. I'm sorry, but I don't think this tragedy is a proper basis for making a life.
If you are not a committed Zionist, Judaism is a religion. Those who want to preserve it should concentrate on making it more meaningful to its public. Maybe one such improvement would be to take the Israeli flag out of the synagouge.
This genetic material love story is making me feel like a vomiting fish.
The major current contribution of Jewish endogamy to the world appears to be the erection of boundaries against the intrusion of intelligence and humanity to counter the ongoing support for the criminal state of Israel.
Bring on assimilation.
Bring on universal assimilation. Endogamy in any tribe is a vehicle not for cultural enrichment but for cultural decay.
Phil – Tell your wife to give me a call. I'm Jewish, but I'm so good in the sack she will convert. When she is screaming "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" that will be the God of the Old Testament my friend. Personally I feel that every single Jew, male or female, should intermarry and just require their spouse to convert to a humanistic form of Judaism – Judintarianism. In several generations there will be as many of us in the USA as there are Mexicans. Well, maybe not that many, but that's a whole lot of Jews having bar and bat mitzvahs. That alone can revive entire economies in the inner cities and suburbs.
Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week starkly frames the issue of Harvard Professor Noah Feldman's erasure from the ranks of graduates of Brookline's Maimonides School.
"What Feldman’s essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. “We’ve sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we’ve told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American,” noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews.”"
Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and non-Americans become very uncomfortable.
Because American Jews exercise such strong influence over US society and ME policy, non-Jewish and assimilated Jewish Americans have to start paying serious attention to the fundamental disconnect between American principles and fundamental beliefs of Zionists and many if not most Jewish Americans.
[Noah Feldman's essay can be found at link to nytimes.com.
See link to thejewishweek.com for Rosenblatt's commentary thereon.
I put up a more complete version of this comment at link to eaazi.blogspot.com .]
Phil, if Atzmon is not too "strong" for you, he, too, talks about guilt but from a different perspective.
link to dissidentvoice.org
The situation has become such that, because you are a decent human being, you would not be able to escape feelings of guilt. The only choice you have, methinks, is that of the vantage point from which to feel guilt. I'm sorry that you find yourself in that predicament.
"That's my torment. The feeling that I am helping to extinguish my people."
I was raised on the premise that jews were like every one else in the sense of ADL exoteric orthodoxy. Comments like this from sympathetic folks like Phil Weiss suggest this view was mistaken. What other American ethnic group would have bad conscience about doing their duty and identifying with the American people? It doesn´t bother me too much, however, since I am sure that any American jews who identify "their people" in such stark contrast to other Americans would feel conscience-bound to avoid involving themselves in American politics and public life.
Second thoughts on my statement that 'If you are not a committed Zionist, Judaism is a religion'.
Of course Jewishness is an ethnicity as well, but for most people who are accepted in a society ethnic culture evaporates over the generations, causing regret perhaps but not guilt. Without an existential basis it loses force.
Zionism claims to solve the problem, but in largely discarding the tradional Jewish moral sense they may seem to have broken the thread of the religion as well as the culture.
For Jews like us, ironically, our moral concerns about Israels present and future keeps our ethnicity alive to an extent.
What Phil is expressing has nothing to do with Zionism or intermarriage. Would Phil be any more "Jewish" if he were unmarried? Would he be any more Jewish if Israel did not exist? Would he be any more Jewish even if he married another equally unobservant assimilated Jew?
No. He would still be an assimilated, ethnically Jewish, iconoclastic, Ivy League grad with very little Jewish identity — feeling slightly guilty about it. He's like millions of other Americans over the years who stray from their tribes.
And it's not like it has to be forever. Phil could find his way back into Judaism some day. Many others have. (But would all the Jew haters stick with the blog? Sorry, Phil, don't take it personally but I fear that they would not.)
Marrying a shiksa is only a problem if you want to STAY Jewish and you are worried about being accepted by narrow-minded Jews. If you want to assimilate, what is the big deal? It's not as if the fact that you fell in love with your wife has robbed the Jewish people of a new interpretation of the Talmud or something. At best you would have been a feckless, 1-seder a year man with a little Kol Nidrei thrown in out of pure inertia.
What is different from the Christians in the Middle East? They intermarry as there are small pools of Christians, but I think this comes from the past when there were few resources.
One keep the assets in the family or tribe as they were few and far between if you did not. Power through marriage, a pooling of assets is the story of history.
Guilt closes the door of thought and reason. Community keeps our bodies marching to the past.
Better link for Noah Feldman article: link to nytimes.com .
As for Jewishness as an ethnicity, Jews did not constitute an ethnicity in historic Poland where there was a significant minority of Jews, who were ethnically Tatar, while the majority of people, whose ancestors had practiced Judaism, were ethnic Ashkenazim.
I suspect that some of the trepidations of ethnic Ashkenazi Americans about assimilation in the USA comes from the lack of a genuine ethnic culture for those that have no interest in religious practice.
In Poland during the late 19th century, one could abandon Jewish religion and reject Zionist racism yet still take part in a complete Yiddish ethnic Ashkenazi culture.
Jewish Tatars, Jewish Persians, Jewish Arabs, Jewish Georgians and Jews of other ethnicities had no such option. In the Soviet Union non-Ashkenazi Jews often had a nationality not specifically associated with Jewish religion. Once such Jews ceased to practice Jewish religion they typically assimilated very quickly to local or to Russian culture.
The move Late Marriage (Hatunah Meuheret) shows how different Jewish Georgians are from ethnic Ashkenazim.
Extinguishing your people, already? Let me tell you: in two hundred years all earthlings will be gray silicone, floating around in flying saucers, scaring people on other planets. :-)
PS. Jews are children of Abraham — and his wife. How could they make such a big family without marrying out — if I may speak glibly?
"hollow ritualistic rabbinical Judaism"? Sounds like all too typical unselfconscius academic liberal bigotry towards classical religion (a.k.a. "wing-nuttery" or whatever).
Glad to see that racism is making a huge comeback, this time into the mainstream and openly!
I feel sorry for Phil's wife. Why would any woman have to go through all this bs? She is – according to Phil – beautiful, smart, adorable, she loves him, but hey, that's not enough, because you see, she is not a member of the tribe! She is a shiksa, G-d forbid! An unclean animal! The HORROR!
You gotta feel sorry for anyone who has to go through this, so for once, I'm totally against Phil and his really pathetic self-pity.
And come to think of it, what exactly has his marriage got to do with anything? Does Phil practice the religion of his tribe? Is it his wife's fault he doesn't?
And if this isn't about religion, is it about race? Great, let's hope we will soon have white male bloggers expressing similar pathetic self-pity for marrying an Asian-American or, G-d forbid, an Afro-American! Yeah, bring racism back to the mainstream, because, hey, some people suffer because of the racism of their parents, or sisters, or their tribe or whatever. And what's really at fault? Your partner's race, see?
Right! And if it's not race, is it ethnicity Phil? I mean how ridiculous would be to read about an Italian mama's boy tormenting himself to death because people in his family would not approve marrying someone other than an Italian-American girl?
Because, what exactly is that Judaism you talk about, and "your people" as you so often write Phil, is it a religion? A race? An ethnicity? And you take yourself so seriously that the survival of this "entity" – which has one definition now, one later according to the purpose needed to be served – depends on you?
I'm sorry for your wife man. This has got to be the most pathetic post I've read here, and I'm really surprised the readers here don't call you on the racism, the self-pity, the pathetic self-importance that you so vividly revealed.
It may not occur to you, but you are in the same league as any racist redneck who fell in love with a black girl and married her and then finds he can't deal with it because deep down he is still a racist and because his extended family is still racist. And guess what, the problem is the race, not the prejudice.
Congratulations.
Hey Alan: You really are a whiney jew aren't you? You are the pot calling the kettle black. Oops – is that me bringing racism back in vogue? Relax and lay off old Phil. He doesn't love his wife any less, because she is not Jewish. Heck, he might love her more because she isn't. He's just wrestling with the fact that while it is perfectly acceptable to be proud Scotsman and prance around in a skirt drinking scotch and hitting the links, if a Jew wants to celebrate his heritage and preserve it – since the true essence of being a jew is telling the real anti-semites to sod off and surviving to spite them — it is an act of bloody racism.
So what exactly is racism according to you Shiva?
And if you are a non-Jewish woman, do you like the fact that in some circles you would be rejected outright and called a shiksa, an unclean animal? Do you like the fact that in some circles, a Jewish man's love for you would be considered an indirect act of genocide?
Would you like your husband to be made to think that he contributes to the Jewish people's extinction simply because he fell in love with you and you with him?
P.S. I am a true Universalist. And I won't excuse racism by anyone. That's where we differ.
Shiva wrote: "if a Jew wants to celebrate his heritage and preserve it….."
If by "preserving" you mean discriminating on the basis of race, that is racism, I'm sorry. You are welcome to provide a rationale for racial discrimination, I'm waiting eagerly.
P.S. Maybe you should be advised that "preserving" the German Folk and protecting it from mixed marriages was the core of Nazi ideology. Watch your steps.
Great comments, thanks again to all for their generosity to this site, even the critics. THose who say this was selfindulgent are right, I acknowledge, and I apologize, I will try and sort out the selfindulgent from the instructive in a more rigorous manner! But I do feel a lot of the personal served a purpose…
the wife's not blonde…
Alan I applaud your response but I was actually truly recording my emotions that evening. Do they include racism, as you say? I guess so; I trust your geiger counter here. I grew up with that, and I'm interrogating that. It's in me. I'm not going to change overnight. I dont think that you can simply declare your commitment to universalism and alter your identity forever. It's a process. I truly felt those things. Admitting them is helpful to me, my blogging (which is writing in the sand to a large degree) and maybe some readers.
Great thanks to David for the Palm Beach news. Very helpful… I take his lesson from it too. thanks to patrick for the ray of light from catholic suburbs
I object to the claim that I have low JEwish identity. I think I have high Jewish identity. It used to be more latent, now it's patent and I'm struggling with it. Indeed: The universalist moral thread that runs thru this blog, not only my writings but the writings of a few others, is simply this: How can you be Jewish in the era of apartheid Israel? THis is obviously a question that is paralyzing a lot of Jews out there. As pedophilia paralyzed a lot of Catholics..
"How can you be Jewish in the era of apartheid Israel? THis is obviously a question that is paralyzing a lot of Jews out there."
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Marlene Dietrich faced a similar issue when Hitler became Kanzler.
As a German American Dr. Seuss took upon himself the role of the earliest prominent anti-Nazi political cartoonist in the USA.
For Marlene Dietrich as long as the German Nazis were defining the meaning of Germanness, she decided she was not German, and she emigrated to the USA.
Alan –
Right on the money, man. Your razor is sharp and poor Phil is naked. But he takes it honorably.
Pleasure to know you both.
Alex,
It's been a great pleasure to meet you here as well. You are a great scientist and a Humanist. I know everyone here appreciates your thoughts and fairness.
I acknowledge that I'm too harsh occasionally, but sometimes we have to be brutally honest and expose bs and call it what it is. Screw political correctness, people are dying and more will unless we dare take a hard look on our world and ourselves.
As far as Phil goes, he knows he has my outmost respect because he chose a difficult route in order to not betray his ideals and conscience. He took my harsh words and assault honorably, like a man, and he proved he is one of the few people who will keep on learning and bettering themselves by self-criticism, introspection and by being ready to listen to what others, those who really care, have to say to him when they think he goes too far. And that's what friends are for.
I tip my hat to him for his response and only wish I was as bighearted as he is.
Shiva wrote: " … the true essence of being a jew is telling the real anti-semites to sod off and surviving to spite them."
This should be engraved on a plaque and brought out every time Phil is tempted to call modern secular Jewishness a "religion".