I had a New York night. Don't have them often these days, now that I'm living in the woods and feel the economy like a great stony hand on my shoulder. But:
I went to a party in Brooklyn and had to wait a while for the local at the Union Station subway platform. There was a black brass band playing, a great 8 or 10 piece band, three or four trumpets, trombones, a French horn and a tuba, unbelievably good, and I recalled, This was my original sin as an assimilationist, when I was a kid in Baltimore I felt incredible romance about black culture. It was the great other, to the bookish circumscribed Jewish life I was raised in, and I went to black public schools and had black friends and reveled in blackness, inasmuch as I could get my feet wet. By the time I went to Harvard, I requested a black roommate. In retrospect this strikes me as affected, though I dug my roommate. I noticed other Jewish friends went further, I had one friend who sort of went over. He had darker skin. But that was my start, and last night I felt that considerable romance on the platform.
Then the party was just the mongrelized mix of New York, the great muttness of New York. Black gays, internationals, mixed couples out the wazoo, and a lot of Chinese adoptees. Sometimes I think this is just My crowd, then I understand, It's everyone's crowd in New York. It's just New York. I know Jews who hold themselves out of the great mixer, and that's fine. Everyone gets to do their thing. Some people are more conservative, but this is the way of the city, especially in this season. Slice the ham, dude.
Before I left for the city yesterday, I was watching CSpan and Alfonso Aguilar of the U.S. office of citizenship was on talking about assimilation. Urging it on immigrants. He was referring to Hispanics largely, but saying it was essential that they assimilate culturally and politically. They must "Americanize." There was an understanding of what it meant to be American, proselytized by the U.S. government. It is odd to hear assimilation urged by the government, and in my Jewish community, hear it denounced.
Assimilation is dangerous to the Jews. It affects Jewish numbers. Though I feel as if Jews should come up with some other marketing program to deal with numbers. Not so fervently anti-assimilationist, when we are the richest, by religious grouping. Doesn't feel right. Maybe Jews should try proselytizing on the basis of the rampant philosemitism. I know that's against Jewish law, but: Convert and do well!
Then there's the issue of political assimilation. It's hard to change hobbyhorses in midstream. But Aguilar urging political assimilation as gov't policy gets at the neoconservatives and their dual loyalty issues, and Elliott Abrams's assertion in his book of 11 years ago that Jews lives outside the society in every country they dwell in except Israel. This is an insupportable attitude, in the shadow of the charnel house Abrams et al made of Iraq. I urge political assimilation, a sense of American interests that transcends one side or another in the cycle of violence in the Middle East. The cultural stuff is gonna take care of itself.
My night concluded with meeting Jack Ross at Junior's on Flatbush Avenue. Most of the other people there were black. Jack and I talked about Jewishness, of the religious variety and the group-identity variety, and Jack, who seems to have read every Commentary ever published, spoke with his usual sardonic manner of some official of the Union for Reform Judaism talking about "the Jewish people." I felt very American.
