I spent the weekend at my wife’s family’s community in the Pennsylvania mountains, an old Quaker retreat with a distinctly elite flavor. I made a faux pas when I whipped up a fruit salad for the dinner Saturday and used an old chipped enamel bowl with a blue rim. My mother-in-law was flustered. Turns out it was a chamber pot–"a bowl for urine," as my sister-in-law said amusedly. Back when the camps were non-electric and had outhouses. Not so long ago. My mother-in-law said nothing till the next day, when I was eating the soggy leftovers from it…
This sort of misunderstanding used to cause me great embarrassment and afterthought. No longer. I don’t really care. I’m completely out as a Jew, I talk foreign policy with my mother-in-law, who smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital when she visited Palestine, and I’m always on the lookout for other Jews, now and then get a glimpse of one. This time, a half-Jewish kid was around. There’s a little diversity, not much.
What seems most significant to me is the utter alignment of values I experience in that community. I’m a lefty. Most of the people I run into are liberal Democrats, appalled by Iraq. I’m in the media. My wife is too, so is my sister-in-law, in the film business. There was a psychotherapist next door this weekend; I bet he has worked with Jews. When I was a kid, I was sensitive to every cultural slight. Now it’s hard to be that sensitive, because the elites are merging, and Jews and WASPs are working together and getting past the Annie Hall moments of yesteryear. A niece of mine is transferring colleges to Washington, D.C., to have greater diversity than she gets in New England. What is diversity in her mind? Asians, blacks, Hispanics. Privileged Jews are a completely familiar quantity to her. I went with my mother-in-law to the Quaker Sunday service yesterday. No talk of Jesus, all about the trees and birds.
And a woman made a nice statement about the path down to the lake: that we all get a choice whether to be stepping stones or stumbling blocks in life…
I was tempted to stand up and give my own speech. It would have been political, about the Arab world. This weekend I reread one of the greatest books written in the last 25 years, Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. I’m going to be blogging about Pape later–basically giving the talk I would have liked to have offered at Quaker meeting–because his ideas are more important than ever in the wake of the British terrorist plots.
But one little social/psychological point the wideranging Pape makes is that national identifications are "social constructions." They are chiefly defined in relation to an other, as an "us-against-them" construct that can grow more important or less important. I had that construct growing up; I was a Jew to the core, in an antisemitic WASPy gentleman’s-agreement America. But that America ended; the sociology of Jewish privilege and acceptance was an overwhelming element of my America, and that is one reason my identification has paled. Of course there are real religious differences (and I had a lousy religious education…) but how significant are those differences going to be when the WASPs only talk about a historical Jesus?
