I’m in a lousy mood, and determined to turn my lead into gold by writing about it. Yesterday I drove up the road with my wife to get a new dog tag for the dog. He’d lost his dog tag. I used to put dog pictures on this site, back when.
I was asking my wife about her recent sudden pride in being a WASP. She has begun extolling WASP virtues. "They don’t really care about money. They collect money, yes, but they don’t really care about it. They’re pretty straightforward verbally, that is when they open their mouths. Maybe it’s in my DNA, but the rules I grew up with, Don’t talk about yourself, don’t ask personal questions– I think those are good rules. Simplicity, sincerity, and service– I grew up with those as ideals, and they’re good ones.
"The whole stiff upper lip stuff is good for the depression. It suits the times we’re in. Ralph Lauren took all the old stuff and made it nouveau and expensive and flimsy, but LL Bean is sturdy and cheapskate. WASPs are cheapskates."
She used to feel lousy about being a WASP all through the 70s and 80s. The WASPs were responsible for everything that had gone wrong. In the car, we agreed that Robert McNamara dying had cleared the books somewhat–especially with the Iraq war being hatched by the neocons.
I think it’s cool that my wife likes being a WASP. I feel like I’ve become more Jewish than ever, reading Herzl’s complete diaries way into the night and mulling the ways I’m Jewish, my irony, my intelligence, my both-feet-off-the-groundism, and that’s great. I’ve learned how to be in this world from my wife in a lot of ways. If you’re as dependent on a woman as I am and most Jewish men I know are, well, you should sing praise to your wife all the time.
How did I get in the lousy mood then? Well before I went to bed I saw where I’d written yesterday that I was trying to find honor within my community for my choice to marry out. A weird statement, but true. Then when I woke up this morning I was still thinking about it and I went to the shelf and got down Elliott Abrams’s book, Faith or Fear. He wrote it a dozen years ago, during his lion in winter phase, when he probably thought he’d never get back into power. Its credo: Jewish "separatism," which Abrams openly praises. He suggests that Jews should sit shiva (mourn as dead) Jews who marry out.
"Scolding, rejection, and exclusion" worked, he says. Now’s the time to elevate "separatism and particularism, group identity and group survival, above social integration, individualism, and liberal ideals." Strong medicine? "Wrenching changes" are necessary in the Jewish community to avert the pollution of Jewish identity and community. The walls have to go back up.
It’s not just intermarriage, it’s Christian values, "in which personal faith is the key and community membership and solidarity are of much less importance." These individualistic Christian "traditions" leak into intermarried households. Whereas the Jewish "covenant with God… imposes special obligations upon [Jews]" to inculcate that aforesaid "community membership and solidarity." The Jewish community has been "wrecked" by intermarriage, and every Jew must "instruct his or her children in Judaism, not in the virtues of free thinking. Judaism imposes obligations binding on one and on one’s offspring."
I hate this kind of talk. I met my wife in New York journalism circles. I met her through a Jewish friend on the Upper West Side. The first time we met she was married and she and her first husband were giving a party for my Jewish friend before he headed out to another country on a journalism assignment. It was a good and generous thing. He got to invite all his friends. She was wearing a long gray sweatshirt at the party, which is part of her values, to which I’ve always been attracted, and we sat in a corner and she gave me advice about a relationship I was in, with a Jewish diva actually; she said, "She has no interest in you, don’t you get it?" and she was right. Everyone goes to my wife for advice. She’s smart. She happens to be a WASP. Big fucking deal. I met her doing what I was supposed to be doing, trying to make my way in journalism/intellectual life in New York. I liked her and she’s helped me a lot.
Elliott Abrams would have shunned her and me.
Look what Elliott Abrams did, out of his sense of primary obligation to the Jewish community. He helped launch a disastrous war against an Arab civilization. Tens of thousands of people were killed. There is no question in my mind that part of his motivation had to do with the security of Israel. He wanted to halt the peace process and offer a different route to stability in the Middle East: regime change at the hands of U.S. imperial power, giving the Arabs democracy at the point of a missile. He thought the peace process hurt Israel; I’m sure he’s talked about Judea and Samaria somewhere. Jews are "above all members of a religious community," he wrote in that book, his emphasis.
And, my emphasis: "Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except in Israel–from the rest of the population."
When Joe Klein wrote that the neocons had divided loyalties and were selling a "benign domino theory" to make the Middle East safe for Israel, he meant Abrams. When Tom Friedman told Haaretz that if you’d just kidnapped a bunch of intellectuals within a mile of his office a few years back, there would have been no Iraq war, he meant Abrams too. When Eric Alterman said that of course the neocons had dual loyalties, he meant Abrams. When John Judis said that the Jewish leadership was permeated by dual loyalty, he meant Abrams too.
That’s about as far as those liberal Jewish writers have gone, though, in diming out Abrams. They’ve funked their leadership responsibilty as liberal journalists by not being more explicit about the American tribal causes of the Iraq war. I think they’ve funked it out of some allegiance to the aforesaid Jewish community. Steve Walt, who like me is intermarried, and who is a courageous writer who loves the "liberal ideals" that Abrams is determined to fight, has gotten no support from Klein or Friedman, even though they know he’s right; and Walt has actually called for shunning the neocons because of their destructions. He’s got a point. Elliott Abrams, who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations still marketing regime change, should be shunned for the disastrous policy he recommended.
Walt said that apropos of McNamara, who led a good life to the end, Walt pointed out, notwithstanding Vietnam. McNamara should have suffered professionally. And I reflect that my wife’s former boyfriend tried to push McNamara off the ferry one night in Cape Cod. He was angry about the war.
There, I’m over my mood. I think I’ve been taking on Abrams’s guilt since I read that book ten years ago. Screw him. Young Jews aren’t buying tribal identities. They like "liberal ideals." J Street’s campaigns director, Isaac Luria, took intermarriage off the table in a recent post praising Obama as a model to young Jews and bashing the old leadership.
So: this is a battle over tribal identity–over mingled American values. And my side is going to win. Any time you doubt that, just look what Abrams’s highest values, "particularism" and "group survival," have done to the Middle East.
