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.
