I love a lot of goyim. That might be the essence of my assimilationist problem. If you love some goyim—any goyim-- then the idea of Jewish difference and exceptionalism becomes very hard to maintain intellectually and in your life choices. It’s for this reason that the American Jewish committee used to offer a little test of Jewish identity that included the question, How many of your close friends are Jewish? The AJC understood. If you start associating with them too much, then the party’s over. Indeed, one of the strategies of the Jewish revival movement of the last 15 years or so was to separate Jewish youth from the goyim (which is Hebrew for "the nation"), through Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps. This wasn’t just about getting Jews to marry Jews, but getting Jews to associate with other Jews. And surely one of the causes of Jewish revival was fear of people like me, assimilationists, eroding the bonds of community.
I have a friend I’ll call Jim whose father was anti-Semitic. He’s told me about stuff his dad said, so I know that. We’re both outdoorsy and go camping together. When I started doing this stuff with him, a Jewish friend said to me, “Phil Jews don’t go camping.” It was a non-joke joke, but a warning about the tribal boundary. Of course it only made me want to go camping more.
A few years back my friend Jim and I went to Baxter state park in Maine to commemorate the anniversary of Thoreau’s visit to Mt. Katahdin. We were both reading The Maine Woods, a classic. When Thoreau got up most of the way on Katahdin he cried out “Contact, contact.” It’s an ecstatic religious pantheist moment in literature; and ultimately Jim and I went to the shoulder of the mountain where we thought that had happened, in the fields of great gray blocks that compose the magnificent mountain.
We had met up with about a dozen Thoreau enthusiasts in Massachusetts. The first night we stayed at their house, in a tent in the yard, then we drove up with them the six or eight hours to the park. Jim had only met them over the phone or on-line. So it was a little odd to meet them in actuality. They were more Thoreau enthusiasts than outdoorsmen.
That wasn’t a problem till the first night and we were in a hut they had engaged near the foot of Katahdin. The hut was crowded with paunchy enthusiasts, one of whom snored like a guy in the movies, on both the inhale and the exhale, and the exhale sounded like a whoopy cushion. It was comic except that we were trying to sleep. Jim finally took his sleeping bag outside and slept on the ground.
From an outdoors standpoint it was a marvelous weekend. We climbed a bunch of small hills and then Katahdin, via the famous knife edge ridge. We saw a family of moose from 100 yards.
On the last day at Baxter, Jim deconstructed my personality. He was sick of me, and we were sitting outside on the little porch in the sunlight. “You have two modes of being with other people, and they’re both weird,” he said. “The first mode is hail-fellow-well met. Like when you went into the outdoor place and when you left you said, ‘Have a good one.’ Like you were just one of the guys. You’re not just one of the guys. So that’s affected, and you might be fooling yourself, but no one else. Then the other mode you have is when you just grill someone with questions. You tell yourself it’s journalistic but it’s not. It just weirds people out, it’s so intense. You control the whole conversation and it’s not a natural conversation.”
It was quite a dressing down. I think Jim meant it in a military sort of way, that he was going to take apart my personality to the ground and then I could rebuild it. I didn’t get at all defensive, I just registered it. Jim had an SUV and on the way back he drank a lot of Maker’s Mark. I remember we were screaming down the Connecticut Turnpike late at night and he was slobbering Makers, which to me is extremely alien behavior.
It took me a while to take in Jim’s advice. My wife agreed with things he’d said. She’d been trying to tell me some of the same things. Was it effective? Yes. In years to come I began to change my personality, partly under his influence. I stopped asking so many questions, I tried not to mimic someone else’s class background, I stopped being so forcibly gregarious.
In the "Jew as Pariah," written in 1944, Hannah Arendt dismissed the idea of assimilation. She said that the assimilationist ideal was: “if only the Jews would not persist in banding together, assimilation would become a fairly simple process.” But it never worked out that way. Jews always stuck out, and were punished for that. Assimilation was a form of utopianism. “The Jew cannot be a human being either as a parvenu using his elbows or as a pariah voluntarily spurning its gifts.” All Jews were rowing madly in the same “angry sea.” They were excluded from “political realities.”
The most important points in that paragraph are that it was written in 1944, and in America I don't think we are excluded from “political realities” as parvenues. It seems to me that my entire adult life has been engaged in the Jewish question, American style, navigating the assimilationist line: Can I be a Jew and an American, can I be wholly integrated in American culture and neither fetishize my Jewishness nor let go of it but just be it and American and see where everything goes? I realize that my answer to that has been, Yes. And if the Jewishness goes out the window, I can’t really care, because actually Americanness is absorbing my Jewishness and being changed by it. And therefore to insist on my Jewishness at that point is tribal allegiance. It’s the reason that my mother’s best friend moved their family to Israel—to avoid intermarriage. In a sense, to avoid American history. Or to insist on the primacy of Jerusalem (Jewish identity) over Athens (the liberal western one).
The love of goyim has been around for a long time, and in the course of history many Jews have done, or tried to do, what I am doing. Seduced by Athens, they’ve basically crossed the line. Many have been punished for doing so. Arendt was influenced in her thinking by the death of her good friend Walter Benjamin who, fleeing the Holocaust, was stopped at a border in Spain because he was Jewish, and apparently committed suicide in 1940. Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem, the Zionist historian, had unsuccessfully urged Benjamin to immigrate to Palestine years before; and he was able to derive some satisfaction from the failure of Benjamin’s assimilation. “Benjamin [never] lived ‘directly’ immersed in Jewish concerns,” Scholem wrote. “On the contrary, had he followed his reflections on Judaism he would have painted himself into a very troublesome corner. I would say that by distancing himself from Judaism he distanced himself from his own nature as well, and hence from the unfolding of Jewishness within him.”
Of course, I and many other Jews are now in that "troublesome corner." The truth of assimilation is of course that the “unfolding of Jewishness within” those who assimilate, or within their children, will cease to take place. And anyone who stands up for even his own assimilation has to acknowledge that grief. I'd say my answer today is the reflection that some years ago I and a good friend traveled a great distance over three days with one another because of a book, an American book, of a religious character.
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I like these personal anecdotes, Phil. As a "Hebro" (black and Jewish), I've dealt with many of the same issues around assimilation and self-segregation from a variety of angles for my whole life. It's not an easy question: on the one hand, there's a big, beautiful, wondrous, amazing, diverse world out there beyond the parochial, ethnic experience that it's great to be a part of; on the other hand, group identity has a lot to do with community, and community is a valuable thing in today's world.
But the way you break all of this down even to Jewish personality traits and ways of interacting with people is just fascinating, because it rings true and may be pretty important in the whole picture, but it's not talked about that much. Kudos.
It’s for this reason that the American Jewish committee used to offer a little test of Jewish identity that included the question, How many of your close friends are Jewish? The AJC understood. If you start associating with them too much, then the party’s over.
Sure, and in Jim Crow times, any white person who hung out with black people was called "n-gg-r lover," "race traitor" and other charming names, for much the same reason. Your "white" identity (or Jewish, or whatever) is largely defined by exclusion: who do you not recognize as an equal, or as "your kind"?
That's beautiful, Phil. Thanks for writing it. I'm looking forward to your book.
"That might be the essence of my assimilationist problem. If you love some goyim—any goyim– then the idea of Jewish difference and exceptionalism becomes very hard to maintain intellectually and in your life choices."
A VERY false assumption.
It is clearly possible to remain assertively Jewish and assertively humane and great friends with non-Jews. Many non-Jews feel alienated by Jews having even some elements of shared experience that seems exclusive, and is stated as distinct. For example, most progressive non-Jews that I've met appreciate the metaphorical interpretation of Passover, the theme of humanity's transition from slavery to freedom.
But, when the content becomes more literal rather than figurative, they feel excluded (few desire to join, some do, most don't).
My memories and current practise of Jewish holidays (and my odd practise of Shabbat) are important to me. My closest friends though are not Jewish, and we speak of what we share and avoid what we differ on. Sometimes its not possible, or not desirable. Sometimes I get my head handed to me, and sometimes I confront prejudices.
I am still Jewish, and will NOT renounce that in imagined fantasy, reality, plan. Its NOT something that I could sever from myself.
Thanks, Phil.
You always give me very much to wonder about and this essay about psychic identity really does.
I've always thought that the differences among the individuals in any "group" of people–no matter how the group is defined–far outnumber the generic differences between "groups."
Hearing how you allow yourself gently to let friend's observations of you be, sit with their suggestions, then work on how you are in the world, is all inspiring.
Robert Bakker's Raptor Red got me thinking about the notion of what constitutes 'my kind'. I think that an expanding sense of inclusion of what constitutes 'my kind' is a marked pattern in human history. I don't mean in the sense that we are all becoming the same, but in the sense that, while retaining national or tribal identities, we are becoming on average more able to see kinship with larger groups of people. Of course such evaluations are continuous rather than discrete, while the edges may be sharper for some than for others, it is more a case of 'this individual is closer to my kind that that one', rather than a binary case of 'fully include/fully exclude'.
On a lighter note, a funny song: Hey Paul Krugman (A song, A plea)
What parallel universe are you living in, Phil? Did your parents teach you to stay away from Goyim, or something?
You seem to feel you've been taught this "thing" in your formative years that you've needed to shake off.
I'm not getting it.
The only true anti-assimilationists I know are fundamentalists. That includes some Orthodox, but mustly the Chasidim etc.
Why you bother to single out these fundamentalists from any other bugs me. As does your differentiating Jewish cliquishness from any other. I mean, good lord, have you been around any Irish, Italian, Armenian, Greek, INDIAN etc etc????
You sound very sheltered or something. It's not resonating with me.
What is this Planet Exclusionary Jew you live on?
"Can I be a Jew and an American, can I be wholly integrated in American culture and neither fetishize my Jewishness nor let go of it but just be it and American and see where everything goes?"
Yes you can,as you have found out.
While it is somewhat natural for people to herd together with other "likes" the identification with "any certain community" can change according to the time and space they inhabit with other people.
This essay is exactly why I formed "The Litvaks", the all-Jewish sport bike posse, to stretch tribal boundaries! We go camping, too, and sponsor a drag show where I do my version of "If I Can't Sell It (I Will Remain Seated Upon It").
Suzanne is right of course, all that Jewish exclusiness is nonsense. There's no problem these days mixing with the Gentiles. And I would even guess your relations with Gentiles are like your relations with Jews, in many ways. Either you are willing to work with basic dishonesties and minipulations, or you try to ameliorate them, and bring honesty to your relationships.
Zionism includes some terrible dishonesties you must maintain with both Jews and non-Jews, and many Zionist supporters feel comfortable with them. Bear in mind No. 4 (The Whole World Sucks) so what can you do, right?
I was never much of a camper–I guess I had enough of camping as a teen-age grunt in the USA military, combat branch, where I spent half of every enlisted year in the field. I never went to summer camp of any kind–we couldn't afford it, growing up. Like Phil, I've been accused of being too intense, asking too many questions–both by my Gentile friends and family and by my Jewish in-law extended family. I am aware of my ethnic and religious legacy (Irish, German, Austrian, Scot, Roman Catholic), and I have looked long and hard at those attributes of my accidental birth. Some pro, some con. I like to think I've moved beyond such a filter. I am aware of, and respect all humans. I like what Colin Murray says about progressive humanism. It alone keeps one unstuck, more individualistic and in his sense, more ultimately and more fully human. To me, this is God's work, for the human to expand constantly, become more knowing and more empathetic. I do not accept any notion of a supreme being who is discriminatory other than by virtue of deeds done on earth, by means and ends, as contrasted with born mere human being of whatever stripe. I am an agnostic by default.
"It was quite a dressing down."
I've never noticed that being young and maybe sort of self centered and obnoxious is a particularly Jewish trait (forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the point of the sequence) we just… Oh shit, Phil, I went through the same thing. It wasn't because I was Jewish, it was because I was unfortunately me. And it wasn't a personally rewarding way to be, so, I tried to change. (With little enough success, I readily admit) Turned out to be more about personal insecurity and fear than most anything else. I'm still scared of women, thank God. And pretty glad I always was.
Of course, now that I lead my own motorcycle gang I don't fear anybody, and I'm very popular.
I love a lot of goyim.
God, Phil I know the feeling. I love quite a lot of Jews (or, to be more exact, Jewesses).
because actually Americanness is absorbing my Jewishness
As America has absorbed the Jewishness of millions of Jews. America has absorbed so much Jewishness that America itself has become partly Jewish, and so gives Jewishness back to you in another form, as it absorbs it from you!
Of course you gotta participate in that process and make it your own.
And soon, will you acheive a measure of social religious and patriotic harmony and balance.
Which of course, is the cue to saying, "I shouldn't be this happy, I'm Jewish. Something is wrong!"
So the, 'hail-fellow-well-met' and, ‘Have a good one’ are forced pleasantries and affectation?
Well, shoot. When isn't the typical casual greeting a bit of a formality? You usually have to get to know someone a bit before you can determine if you really like them or not, but I like that the 'default position' is that they're probably a fairly decent person.
As to questions (interrogations?), what's wrong with wanting to know what someone else thinks about things? Most people on most subjects are willing to offer up their views and if it appears to become uncomfortable for someone, you usually sense that and can back off, and/or they can politely decline to be drawn in.
Stay just the way you are, Phil. Sure; be tuned-in to feedback, but consider the source too.
Witty: "I am still Jewish, and will NOT renounce that in imagined fantasy, reality, plan. Its NOT something that I could sever from myself."
This reminds me of what the Jesuits used to say: "Give me a boy until he is ten and I'll give you a Catholic for life."
Still, the fact that kids can be propagandized into lifelong attitudes at an early age doesn't make those attitudes psychologically helpful to someone growing up in a diverse democratic society. People who are taught that they are very different from everyone else are not taught that to make them think they are somehow inferior. It's to make them believe they have superior bloodlines and greater moral worth. What you may see as your great God-given birthright others may see as stubborn bigotry.
There is something about America that facilitates assimilation:
Arthur L. Goodhart, who came to Poland in the summer of 1920 as counsel to a mission sent by the president of the United Stares to investigate conditions in Poland, described typical Jewish schools in Warsaw connected with synagogues. These schools were working hard to safeguard Jewish culture and religious separateness:
"We then went to the senior class, where the children were thirteen or fourteen years old. These children had just been studying Jewish history, and one of them enthusiastically repeated to me the names of the different kings of Judah. As this was the oldest class, I thought I would ask them some questions. Of the thirty-five children … Nearly all of them knew that New York was in America. None of them knew who Kosciuszko [Kościuszko] was, and one particularly bright boy was the only one in the class who had ever heard of [King John] Sobieski. He thought that Sobieski was a Polish nobleman who had fought against the Russians. I then asked them some questions about languages. Only one boy could talk Polish, although four or five could understand it. … All the classes in this school were conducted in Yiddish, although the main emphasis was put on teaching the children Hebrew. …
We visited three or four other Talmud schools during the day. One of the best had some maps on the wall. When I examined them I found that they were detailed charts of Palestine. The children in this class were able to draw excellent plans of the country on the blackboard, filling in the names of all the cities and most of the villages. I asked one of the boys whether he could draw a similar map of Poland, and he said “No.”
Arthur L. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 170–72.
Contrast that with assimilationist forces that existed in America:
"Almost overnight, centuries-old traditions were abandoned by most Jews who emigrated from the shtetls of Poland to America. Citizens of Kolbuszowa, still we were in love with America. Nothing could change that; nothing ever did. To us American could do no wrong. …
What could happen to people there was common knowledge. The religion of their fathers, the faith of our ancestors, once in America it no longer was the same. Incident after incident reaffirmed this lamentable fact; so did many popular stories. Just look at those who had returned from America to visit us. Beards trimmed or shaved off, payes removed, long coats gone. What kind of Jews were these?
It was so. I remember when my brother came for a visit. Saturday arrived, the sacred Sabbath, but he continued to smoke his cigarettes. … Then he had someone go over to the local Polish store and buy pork sausages. What happened to kosher in America? Excuses—all you heard were excuses. It was too hard. It no longer made sense."
Norman Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, 1992.
As always our good Citizen comes with some very insightful personal viewpoint. Since I'm prone to inflict LeaNder-like boredom to others, I will only comment this particular viewpoint:
"I do not accept any notion of a supreme being who is discriminatory other than by virtue of deeds done on earth"
I do not think too much about the gods, but I sometimes think about what would I do if I were a god. I would create a gift cloacked as a piece of information, like a tale in some language, then I would part this gift between my human prototypes. For example, one would receive the verbs, one the articles, one the nouns and so on. No one would be able to reach the part of the gift possessed by the other, ever, but they would be given the desire to tinker with their own part and to be curious about the part of the others all the time (because they are human prototypes). Then I would create a single law, that if any part of the gift be lost, then all the rest should also be lost.
What would I accomplish? Well, because of their gift and the desire to know, my prototypes would create and live a singular, unexpected history and acquire a knowledge which would be like an expanded, marvelous variation of their (never to be fully understood) gift. If the gift was good, the history lived would be worthy no matter how hard the path.
I'm sorry if that was boring, but one of the things I most think about is the way partition procedures serve creation purposes. Such partitions are discriminatory but only as long as the full purpose of the creative process is still to be accomplished, but even then the "sharing of the gift" should be perceived, unless the creation was doomed.
[This seemingly theological tale is in fact a metaphor for some things I do, but if I told you how so, then you would experience a ten-MegaLeaNders killer pulse of tedium.]
Thank you Phil and everyone for your comments. This thread is extraordinary reading, and is one of the many reasons I keep trying to tell as many people as possible to visit this site – the best on the web, hands down.
While it is somewhat natural for people to herd together with other "likes" the identification with "any certain community" can change according to the time and space they inhabit with other people.
I agree. It's a learned behavior.
In this regard, Scholem's statement about Benjamin is misleading: "I would say that by distancing himself from Judaism he distanced himself from his own nature as well, and hence from the unfolding of Jewishness within him."
These are poetic words, but I don't think they're grounded in reality. We grow ("unfold from within") into ourselves as human beings in a physical sense. But I don't think there's any compelling evidence that we are given to a certain religious or cultural identity from birth. These are learned ("environmental factors," if you will).
If a baby is separated from its religious or cultural group immediately after birth, and grows up in an entirely different environment, that environment is what is going to mold the child. It's all the child is going to know (unless/until exposed to other environments).
Since I'm prone to inflict LeaNder-like boredom to others
I don't know about the American scene, the majority of people seem to be mentally quite healthy.
Concerning the German ground assimilation & the Jews has a peculiar ring. The basic idea was, if only they assimilated all would be fine, but deeper down there always lurked the demand that they give up their religion, their tradition. I have mainly bigoted 19th century sources in mind with its religious surfaces and its many double standards.
I once watched some neocon's celebrate the Prussian, thus Protestant, Otto von Bismarck (that was early, I wasn't familiar with their names. I had only followed net-hints and searched for some of the names to get an impression), who of course also had problem with the Catholic influence:
@ Suzanne
"The only true anti-assimilationists I know are fundamentalists. That includes some Orthodox, but mustly the Chasidim etc.
Why you bother to single out these fundamentalists from any other bugs me. As does your differentiating Jewish cliquishness from any other. I mean, good lord, have you been around any Irish, Italian, Armenian, Greek, INDIAN etc etc????
You sound very sheltered or something. It's not resonating with me."
I'm in a mixed marriage, with kids. My experience is contrary to Suzanne's. The group who hates
inter-marriage the most in my experience, are the Jewish Americans, including the secular ones–
they fight it every way they can, especially by fostering guilt-tripping–it's been working less and less since the kids are growing up in the USA, which has applicable values the parents have to pretend to subscribe too.
Dan, as I see, the only relevant environmental factor there is (considering no further health challenges) is sibling order, and that because we are born with a mind able to recognize and adapt to our position in the family. I could go on and show that amongst us there are patterns of behavior which are consistent with the ones required for ancient tribal survival and stability. Some of us are born made the same way some of us are born completely plastic, able to adapt to unimagined roles. This is nature. Even if your two last paragraphs could describe 99% of us (which it doesn't by far), I bet my head in a basket that the one percent left would be the spice of the world.
Regarding jews, except for the effects of early circumcision (which may, along cultural reinforcement, inflate the number of people in the group by means of calculated brain damage) I wouldn't doubt the existence of a "jewish" mind. More than that I would say there is a need for such jewish mind, in small, dispersed numbers, if we consider the historical record, or in a different social framework, if we dare go beyond, at the risk of losing everything. A risk, it seems, nature is more than willing to accept, the bitch!
Yes, LeaNder! Meaning that beside being good humoured you are also unforgetable, by virtue of your abilities to make us all speak in "italics" and to create some of the most effective anti-insomniac comments. :)
By force of history partially earned and partially not, the diaspora Jewish people are bred with a mind-set that questions the powers that be, the Other; to the extent this is what Anonymous means when he/she talks of "the Jewish mind" I agree it is a valuable piece of equipment, in reality the habit of skepticism. The more all humans cultivate it, the better–less and less sheeple. Since the Jews have so much power today, this makes Phil, for example, a valuable person to the whole society.
Caveat Emptor: incomprehensible blathering follows.
"to the extent this is what Anonymous means when he/she talks of the Jewish mind I agree it is a valuable piece of equipment, in reality the habit of skepticism."
According to my theological tale up there whatever it is the "jewish mind" it is also a part of the "gift" that is hidden by design and what we see as jewish behaviour is but the tinkering (with said part of the gift.) Furthermore, by virtue of the "uncertainty paradox" protecting the many partitions of the gift, the more one gets closer to understanding some of the parts, the lesser the ability to convey its meaning to others.
Ah, madness, how I like being near its edge! Still, my journey along the jews is almost over. I hear again the call of the tonal words. Inexorably I'm going back to were I was before, so many years ago. Though the days of Fat Pang's intrigue are gone, the pearls are still falling on gentle lute strings.
Betty–I grew up in a mixed marriage too. The Catholics objected more than the Jewish side did. The point being there is no sweeping generalization here.
People see what they want to see. And their truth is limited to their own experience…broad or narrow. I don't see Jews objecting to mixed marriage any more than Italians, Irish, Greek, Armenian, Indian, Japanese etc.
And SO WHAT if they do? Is it odd for Christians to want their kids to marry a Christian and raise Christian kids?
Why this sick obsession with Jews?
Some people take up golf, fishing, or cooking as a hobby.
Citizen? He spends his leisure time and 90% of his work day cyber-obsessing about a group of people who don't know he exists, nor do they care. lol!
Why so hard on Citizen, Suzanne? If there is something in his two comments above on this thread you object to, spell it out instead of personally insulting him and patting yourself on the back for attacking the messenger, not his message. You don't enhance the free exchange of ideas with your dull jokes directed at someone you don't know.