Last night I wrote about raw divisions inside Jewish families, including mine, over Israel. Well there are divisions over Obama too. The Times has an OK piece about Jewish voters in FL that (once again supports the notion that McCain/Hillary/Obama’s pandering is about votes not money, which is less than half the story, and) that quotes Joe Lieberman’s stepson, an Obama supporter: Rabbi Ethan Tucker, 32, co-founder of a Jewish learning organization in
New York. I bet that family has some division too. Ruth Wisse, Lieberman’s in-law, believes that young American Jews should metaphorically join the Israeli army, here, by putting out propaganda about Israel. Lieberman is of course Mr. We can solve the problems in Jerusalem by turning Iraq into a charnel house. Stepson makes a great statement about identity:
Younger Jews have grown up in diverse settings and are therefore less
likely to be troubled by Obama’s associations than their elders. “If
association was the litmus test of identity, everyone would be a
hopeless mishmash of confusion, or you’d have no friends,” he said.
Smart. Though I’d add this comment. Association is a component of identity. It is why parochial Jews separate their children from other children, and in part why Jews in Europe created Yiddish. It is why the AJC used to ask on questionnaires: How many of your friends are Jewish. It is why the Cohen/Kelman study on young American Jews valorized “ethnic cohesion.” It is why Jews and Arabs have nothing to do with one another in Jerusalem. It is why my leaving a very tightknit academic family to go to an Ivy League school during the great leap forward, of Jews into the Establishment, led in time to my marrying a gentile–I felt free as a bird in the new America, and prized diversity over the demands of tribe. Obama has spoken of his own identity as fluid. I can relate; so can others.
Obviously it is possible to have a diverse social life and a Jewish religious life. I’m not religious myself, but I see many such examples around me. The real challenge though is a political one in the age of Obama (who as I have said before is already president): How can you cherish diversity and your minority rights in the U.S. and support a state that provides second-class citizenship to Israeli Arabs and has an active policy of land-gobbling and ethnic cleansing (uprooting olive trees and a traditional Arab way of life, literally pouring raw sewage on Arab villages, the ones that weren’t erased). You can’t. Asking young free-as-a-bird American Jews to join a church that makes that demand is like asking young Catholics to enter a church that fosters and covers up for pedophilia.
