I went to a few parties around New Year’s and was struck afresh by the utter commingling of
Jews and gentiles in the privileged community in which I live, the Hudson Valley. Last night I went to an intimate New Year’s party in a friend’s big house, on a subdivided historic estate. About 20 people. Dancing, candlelight, good food and wine, and a couple of scions of sprawling wealthy families. I would have said fancy or WASPy when I was younger; today it feels very natural. When I was driving home, I reflected that 8 of the guests, more than half of the couples there, were intermarried couples. None of them schleppers. One of the Jews was a well-known writer, another a very sweet smart guy who flips classy houses. Our host, Joe (a pseudonym), was the third. He had put up a big menu for the night’s offerings, including the item: "Joe’s Jewish Ham." And at the bottom of the menu he wrote "Treyf," which is Yiddish for non-kosher food.
What I am driving at is that the politics of assimilation are very different in my generation from the last one. Jews function openly as Jews, and don’t fear any kind of discrimination or social contempt. They are not the furtive Jew at the party that we read about in Maugham. They are not the self-denying Jew who apes Christianity (ala the scholar Mortimer Adler, who used to read his translation of the Christian Nicene creed in churches). They are treated as peers. Yes it is true that their children are not highly likely to identify as Jews, certainly their grandchildren aren’t likely (per the anti-intermarriagers’ definition of being Jewish: "if your grandchildren are Jewish"); and yes, that would seem to be a price paid for my degree of inclusion in such circles: a sacrifice of the air of Jewish exceptionalism and difference. Though I would insist that the resulting culture is not gentile. It is a mix. (Again I would cite a gentile relative’s call for our family to have "a Jewish Christmas" this year.) And like it or not, as Jews gain a central role in wealth-production and the management of our society, it is this mix that would seem to characterize blue-state social privilege today.
Your posts would be interesting if you'd focus on what the Zionists are up to more, and on your endless Jewish identity crises less.
I don't agree at all with the previous comment. As a student of ethnicity I find posts on assimilation and hybridity extremely interesting. Thanks for the lucid analysis.
Phil — Your willingness to eat dinner and dance at historic estates demonstrates that no obstacle or discomfort, however harsh, can deter you from your research.
Does your wife enjoy your circumcised penis? Do you think that the penis of a gentile and your people are are part of the problem or part of the solution?
Does your gentile wife take it up the butt? Do you think that Jewish women enjoy this more? Do you think this is treyf (non-kosher)?
I guess the schleppers are over in Iraq.
Gee for a guy who things ethnicity is unimportant :)
Happy New Year Phil.
"… a very sweet smart guy who flips classy houses."
I know one of those guys too–I think he's Italian. Isn't the subprime debacle wonderful? Dot com to Subprime, and all above–isn't it wonderful the Fed supports this?
I heard a Jewish Conservative talk on the radio about how Hanukkah has become the Jewish Christmas because it's celebrated more in North America than other countries. The reason, he insisted, was the commercialization of Christmas in Canada and the U.S., beginning in the affluent 1950s. The Jewish kids were bombarded with Christmas reminders and their parents needed a Jewish Christmas so their kids would stop saying, "Judaism, what a swindle!" So Hanukkah got the nod because it just happened to be closest to Chistmas. I mean think about it–that giant Menorrah in Washington imitating the National Christmas Tree, lit by our national Head Hebe, Michael Chertoff, instead of the President? The old phrase "separate but equal" comes to mind–can't think why.