a few thoughts about Jewish community

A couple years ago I participated in a panel on Zionism at a synagogue on the Upper West Side. Dan Fleshler, who has a new book about the Israel lobby, helped arrange it. So did the progressive Zionist group, Meretz.

Before the panel began I talked to the moderator, J.J. Goldberg. I said, "J.J. you know I call myself an assimilationist Jew. I'm intermarried, and I write about that. It's your call, but maybe these Jewish identity questions are outside the scope of the panel." Because the panel was about Zionism. But J.J., who is famously reasonable, said, "No no. That's what I love about you. You're like so many Jews, you've intermarried, but you haven't turned your back on the community, you're fighting with it, you're engaged." It was a wise statement about community, one I've thought about a lot since.

Annie Roiphe, the liberal writer, was on the panel and she offered me another idea of community when she said in essence, If you're against the idea of a Jewish state, then all my differences with Cynthia Ozick disappear. For Israel is surrounded by hostile nations. That is to say, Roiphe said that if it was a question of being an anti-Zionist, then she wanted nothing to do with me, and would throw in with the neoconservatives. I mention this because the Roiphe-Ozick phenomenon has happened many times: liberals have signed up with neoconservatives because of the perceived threats to Israel. It was an emotional moment for Roiphe, who believes in the persistence of anti-Semitism. Also there was a hint in her words that Jews have to hang together because others are against us.

I think about that night a lot. Some of the lessons: I was then an outlier. My argument that I'm not a Zionist because it is in the DNA of Zionism to be militarist and exclusive–today that argument is not so shocking. Not after Gaza, not after Lieberman.

Goldberg's statement of community is also important. Despite his warmth for me, J.J. has never invited me to write for the Forward. So while he might admire me, he doesn't seem to consider me part of the Jewish community he serves. Ralph Seliger of Meretz was there that night, and he embodies the same contradiction. Seliger has said, "Phil, you're emblematic of the diversity within our community." But to me, that's pure lip service. If I'm emblematic of the diversity, then why don't Jewish organizations promote my ideas too? They don't; because non-Zionism or anti-Zionism are too antithetical to what Alan Dershowitz accurately describes as the "secular religion" of American Jews, supporting Israel.

But identity and community are fluid concepts. And these things are changing. Indeed, Dershowitz's secular religion seems to be crumbling at the edges because of the horrors of Gaza and Lieberman. When Chas Freeman describes the Israel lobby as the Likudnik lobby, he recognizes this change; he is saying, There is diversity in the Jewish community, like all the brave Jews who supported him. And I bet there are some non-Zionists in J Street's phalanx.

These days I relate everything to Kafka, and there is a passage in Kafka's letters to his Catholic lover Milena Jesenska that underscores my view of community. It was 1920 or so, and Kafka walked past a large group of Russian emigres who had collected in a Jewish center in Prague. The passage is beautiful, so I'm quoting it at length:

If I'd been given the choice last night (it was 8 p.m. when I looked from the street into the banqueting room of the Jewish Town Hall, where far more than 100 Russian Jewish emigres–they're waiting here for their American visas–are housed, the room is packed full as during a public meeting, and later at 12.30 I saw them all asleep there, one next the other, they were even sleeping stretched out on chair, here and there someone coughed or turned over or groped his way carefully through the lines, the electric light burns all night long)–if I'd been given the choice to be what I wanted, then I'd have chosen to be a small Eastern Jewish boy in the corner of the room, without a trace of worry, the father in the centre discussing with other men, the mother, heavily wrapped, is rummaging in the travel bundles, the sister chatters with the girls, scratching in her beautiful hair–and in a few weeks one will be in America. It isn't as simple as that, of course, there have been cases of dysentery, there are people standing in the street, shouting threats through the windows, there's even quarreling among the Jews themselves, two have already attacked one another with knives. But if one is small, if one takes in and judges everything quickly, what can happen to one? And there were enough boys like this running around, clambering over the mattresses, creeping under chairs and lying in wait for the bread which someone–they are one people–was spreading–with something… 

It's all there: the sense of one people, an encircled and encircling community that includes Jews to this day. Also the anti-Semites screaming things through the window; Kafka was hugely aware of anti-Semitism and felt terribly vulnerable to it; he was a Zionist who studied Hebrew, and his girlfriend was murdered in the Holocaust, along with Kafka's sisters.

There is also this in the story: the fact that Kafka, a privileged Jew, felt himself to be outside that safe tribal circle as he wrote to his Catholic girlfriend. He is an avatar of the sophisticated western Jewish community, integrated and open. 

Related posts:

1. Note to self: Zionism is central to the Jewish experience of the last century
2. a few thoughts ahead of my trip to the Middle East
3. ‘JVP’ takes on the ‘epic battle’ inside the Jewish community
4. A Few Thoughts About Obama’s Threat to Zionism
5. At doctor’s presentation, a Jewish woman says Gaza is slowly splitting the Jewish community and allowing others to speak out at last