My wife and I were driving out to get Indian takeout for the
Christmas party we were hosting when we passed the hunble house of one of our
favorite friends, this very lowkey guy who does web design for a spiritual sort
of thinktank. I said to my wife, you could have married him, right? And she
said, that’s about the only kind of WASP I could marry. I asked her about it, and she said that she had always been somewhat anti-WASP. That she had
wanted to marry out of her tribe because no one had ever placed a high value in
her culture on the “Life that is not examined is not worth living,” which is
the sort of life she wanted to have. She said that Jews do that more. She
tended to find WASPs assumptive and smug. I said maybe it was a class thing,
and she said, No she felt it was part of the culture. I was somewhat surprised
but also freed by the comment. I feel a similar impatience with my native
culture. It has its own kind of arrogance, a sense that because we’re the
leaders of education and media and free inquiry, and we’re righteous outsiders, we don’t
have anything to answer for. There is no sense of our own American reality, no accountability
for our effect on foreign policy and world history due to the Jewish state, and
when two professors try to bring it up, they get screamed at, called
antisemites. I’m saying I couldn’t have married a Jew who was ethnocentric, not
unless they were openly challenging the Jewish state’s brutal treatment of
Palestinians.
I also wonder if this isn’t all rationalization; if my wife
and I aren’t temperamentally the kind of people who would want out of our native cultures
out of pure curiosity no matter where we were from. Sometimes I imagine being Irish Catholic,
or in the Latino immigrant culture. I think I’d want out in a hurry. The mixing
up’s more interesting to me.
