Before I went to bed last night I was reading Hannah Arendt's The Jew as Pariah, from 1944. It is an essay about an assimilationist impulse: creative Jews in Europe who "were great enough to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life." These Jews used their imagination to create the idea of the social outcast, or pariah. Heine and Kafka. The essay is marred by the fact that Arendt includes in her quartet of pariahs Charlie Chaplin. Oh sure, he's Irish/gypsy background, but he is drawing on a Jewish idea, she says in a footnote. I'm not sure that works. Though of course Hitler destroyed the gypsies too.
The essay does not endorse the idea of integration in western society. And that makes sense. Assimilation has failed: Jews "did not enjoy political freedom nor full admission to the life of nations… [they] have had practical experience of just how ambiguous is the freedom which emancipation has ensured, and how treacherous the promise of equality which assimilation has held out."
And who can argue with that? It's 1944.
This morning I had a dream about a rich gentile friend. He is from an old Hudson Valley family and in fact he is coming to the Christmas that my wife and I are having this Thursday for her family, along with a bunch of other friends. In the dream I was with him at a party and then driving away in his dead mother's Mercedes. His mother was a great old Hudson River doyenne, and she was driving way too fast, right along a beach. The ocean was on one side and the land on the other. It was very clever of her, but a little scary too. She was telling me how her son's first marriage had broken up. He had married an anorexic, a sick woman. The mother had found this out when the butler had called her from a bar mitzvah to say that her daughter-in-law and her grand-daughter had not eaten their food. The old lady was shocked by this. But she said bar mitzvah as naturally as you might say Christmas.
I read this as an assimilationist dream. The destruction of the Jews that Arendt would have been aware of in 1944 created enormous rage against the very idea of assimilation. It had failed, and in its place grew up a noble Jewish resistance to the liberal west, embodied by Zionism and the Israel lobby. I am sure I would have been down with that program in the 1940s, to one degree or another, as a recovery of Jewish power. But a lot has happened since then, two generations at least. Zionism has worked out as the revisionists' idea of an iron wall against the Arab world, and anti-assimilation here has tried to be an iron wall against the gentiles, even into foreign policy. Each program has worked out and not worked out. And the truth of the Jewish-American experience is that we are not outcasts, and we have actually transformed the Establishment, in joining it.
