I grew up in a liberal Jewish academic community. Everyone was smart, everyone did well. My parents' friends are in their late 70s/80s now and all have two houses and good lifestyles. Yet they regard themselves as Jewish outsiders-- an understanding cemented by their youthful experience of anti-Semitism.
The other day I went to see a childhood friend at his parents’ place in the city. His mom was there. They have a beautiful view of the Hudson, and a grand, sprawling pre-war apartment. For a while we chatted about the various movie productions that have rented out the place to film quintessential scenes of New York privilege.
There were hundreds of books in the apartment and when I pointed out some that I have, too, we switched to a more serious conversation, about the price of leftwing commitment. Being on the left, we know a number of political Jews who broke from the bourgeois path in the 1960s during the upheaval over Vietnam, and went on to lead more turbulent lives. We talked about people who had joined the SDS and the Weather underground, the ones who dropped out of Ivy League schools, who didn’t become professionals.
I told about my neighbor growing up in Baltimore. He got into the SDS at Harvard, and ended up dropping out and picking sugar cane for years in Cuba. Now he writes mysteries.
My friend’s mother sighed over the wreckage of the 60s. She said that it was a shame that these people had sacrificed their careers. She knew a boy who was the most promising medical student at a big school; but he was radicalized by Vietnam, and wanted to be a nurse. The dean implored him to stay, but he left. That was the last she heard of him. He could have had such a fine career.
As she said it, I thought, Yes, look what a fine career yields: this beautiful apartment with a view of the Hudson.
I argued with her; I said a lot of these people made choices that they don’t regret. They were young; they responded to real conditions with radical ideas and then commitment. Vietnam was a horrific chapter of history. I wonder what I'd have done. I met Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in Cairo. They seemed pretty happy. Ayers is a jokey guy who likes writing and storytelling.
At dinner I told my wife about the conversation. I found it hard to sort out. I was focused on the sociology of it, the Jewishness. I am always perplexed that Jews can think of themselves as outsiders when we have been so amply rewarded and are part of the Establishment.
My wife responded to the story more in the spirit of JD Salinger. She said that privileged people often blind themselves to varieties of experience and regard the loss of status as a kind of death. But a lot of those people who went off the path of success and profession have had engaged, i.e., happy, lives. A lot of them have had a lot more fun than my friend’s mom, with her stable existence. My wife doesn’t think that they necessarily regret their choices.
Last summer a friend snap-tested me and my wife, What are the four things that you enjoy most? My wife didn’t have to think about it, I took a little longer: Writing, marriage, the woods, travel. I've gotten those things. Status and money have very little to do with the capacity to take interest in life. They may even stand in the way.
In making contact with many of Jewish (and non-Jewish) friends from high school, I found that the vast majority had rejected conventional careers in strong preference for values-based ones. It wasn’t Vietnam, so much as the counter-culture positive idealism, the prospect of a better norm (as much of a confused work in process as it was).
My Jewish high school friends are teachers, holistic physicians, musicians, rabbis, social workers, definitely a bunch of lawyers and doctors. Very very few are bankers, corporate lawyers, corporate public relations.
I think your picture of Jewish exceptionalism is itself exceptional, born of your Harvard environ more than of your Jewish.
If you are a Jew by blood, you have no option but to stand on what every Zionist believe (thanks to global cultured biased and stereotyping against ‘Zionists’). Our Jew-hater world doest not sincerely accept an ‘non-Jewish’ Jew. Every person that carries a Jewish blood is a sure target of racial distinction. And this is a ‘real world’ fact. It is either you live as a Jew or perish as a Jew….
What is a ‘Jew by blood’?
you might be right as to the bellshaped curve of values/professions/choices, richard, but socioeconomically indisputably we are the richest group by religion. way ahead of any other. larry summers, david axelrod and rahm emanuel are not holistic. and they represent an important force in jewish life
So talk about them individually, and not generalize to “Jews are”.
Again, I hope you are open to considering that your comments are custom to your personal experience.
My statistical sampling of Jews that I know (and I know MANY from many settings and motivation), are of variety with a very strong representation in service and justice fields.
I actually agree more with Richard here. My Jewish friends from our lower middle class community on the South Side of Chicago are pretty much all upper middle class by now, but by no means elite, and, as Richard says, many are active in service and justice fields.
The friends Phil and I had in college are another story — although here again, we see the successful elitists on televsion all too often; the anti-death penalty and human rights lawyers don’t get as much publicity.
My grandmother, Sarah Bilsky, (who had followed a very typical immigrant Jewish trajectory – from telephone operator in Odessa in her youth to a huge house on a hill and lots of money) had pretty much the same worldview as Phil’s friend’s mom. Back in the 1970s, after I had let her and the rest of my family down by helping to bust up my Harvard graduation (where the honored guest was the Shah of Iran) and going on to a muddled career as printer/organizer/teacher/machinist, she would regularly shake her head over me and say “Ach, that dirty war [Vietnam]… you could have been vice-president of a big concern.”
I was pretty insulted by the “vice” part, but I gave her a lot of credit for understanding what happened to me.
I sort of get your point about what happened to you, Hnorr, but not enough to my satisfaction. Will you explain what happened to you–I am especially interested as to what happened to you as a human being, rather than as a human being who happened to be a Jew. Also, what’s the difference?
I have been ‘made’ to feel my identity as an Indian. I’m a human being too (I figure im Indian/American/human all at the same time lol), but I’ve been called some bad names before pertaining to my ‘group’.
Not anything serious when I put it in the big picture of my life. But it was in those moments where I felt Indian (not in a bad way, but where I felt, separated from others).
Other than that, I don’t think of myself as Indian primarily. I consider myself American. Upper-middle class. Pretty privileged. I feel identity-less actually… (not hurt by that or anything).
To me these identities are labels really. No deep meaning. I can imagine other ‘groups’, who may have a stronger sense of community and tradition than I (I always hung out w/ my cousin at the family gatherings and I hated going to Temple, and stopped after like 15) in having an identity apart from their ‘individual self’. I don’t think it has to be this complicated actually.
Sorry if I’m not making any sense. :P
Sorry, I don’t understand you, Cliff. I also consider myself American. Sorry, I don’t have any classical minority victimhood to my name, although I do know
the arguments that the Germans and the Irish are both considers as such in the good old USA by some wise and educated people. You’d just never read them in any K-12 classroom. Or Ivy college. OTH, I do identify with your evolution to a real individual apart from any tribe or religion at age approximately 15. I did the same thing. And I never stopped.
What happened to me, Citizen, was that I was part of the group Phil refers to: “political Jews who broke from the bourgeois path in the 1960s during the upheaval over Vietnam, and went on to lead more turbulent lives.” Of course many non-Jews made similar choices in the same era, and some people, both Jews and non-Jews, have done so in subsequent years. In that sense, there was nothing unique about my experience.
But every ethnic group and generation has its own history and its particular dynamics. For me and (I’d guess) the other Jews Phil and his friend’s mom were talking about, there was some special drama in the situation because our families had come so far so fast and there seemed to be so much wealth, power, and privilege in front of us. Like many Jewish immigrants, my grandparents started out in poverty but did very well for themselves, to the point that they could send their children on to prestigious colleges and professional careers. For the third generation (mine) there seemed to be no limits – I went to a fancy prep school, then Harvard. I was an ace student and a Big Man on Campus. I got all kinds of honors and fellowships and club memberships. I was clearly being trained to be part of, or at least to be an important lackey of, the ruling class (invitations to private dinners with McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and such). I managed to do all that and be somewhat involved in civil rights and farmworker support and such, and for a while, as an earnest liberal, I didn’t see an irreconcilable contradiction.
The war, however, really pushed me off the track. in 1965 or 1966 I was expelled from the Young Democrats for saying in public that I was rooting for the Viet Cong or something to that effect. Then I got involved in SDS and kept on moving to the left. Intellectually, I more or less abandoned my major (French history) and began to devote myself to the study of Marxism and other forms of radical critique.
The Harvard administration nevertheless chose me to be “Class Orator” at the “Class Day” ceremonies (day before graduation) in 1968, but I took advantage of that opportunity to point out to the assembled parents and alums and the guest speaker, Coretta Scott King, that the president of the university was a liar (which he plainly was), then turned the stage over for a “We Won’t Go” rally. The next day, when they gave an honorary degree to the Shah, I was among six graduates who tried to march on the stage holding a sheet reading “No Degree for a Dictator.” Frankly, I was scared sh*tless – the place was crawling with cops, Secret Service, Savak, etc. – so I was in the rear as we advanced. But that meant that when they started beating on us and we retreated, I was in the front of our little column, and the next day there was my picture on the front page of the Boston Globe “leading” the disruption.
Sorry to get off into reminiscing. The long and short of it is that in just a few years, in the hot-house conditions of the late 60s, I went from being on the fast track to elite status to being deeply alienated from establishment values and institutions. My subsequent career took some pretty bizarre twists and turns, and I certainly have some regrets, but one thing I don’t regret is getting off the ruling class track!
(BTW, Phil, you don’t *pick* sugar cane, you *cut* it.)
This was a darn good story – you should share more widely. maybe Phil can promote your post? (I wish he and Adam would do that now and then. There were some great comments around here – shame to have them buried).
Guess what was happening in Israel just as you went through your rebellion? major triumphalism, following the 6 days war, that’s what! adoration of all things military. No comprehension of why the ‘kids’ in America were up at arms all about. There can be no greater gap between what you went through and what your contemporaries in israel did at about the same time and the same age. Talking about divergence!
In any case, feel free to tell more. I, for one, am a sucker for good stories.
I second that. You’d make a great guest commentator. Would like to hear more from your personal experiences.^^
Interesting, hnorr. I was actually the Class Day Orator for the Class of ’74 at Harvard, (by then, partly thanks to people like you, a class committee and not the administration picked me). I used part of my speech to attack Elliot Richardson (although not directly by name), the adult speaker seated near me on the dais, for serving as Nixon’s Secretary of Defense during the ferocious bombing of Cambodia a year earlier. I made some political mistakes in my youth, but that wasn’t one of them, and I would do it again in a second.
Nor, like you, do I regret getting off the ruling class track. One — of many — reasons is that my mainstream friends, even the more liberal of them, have to dissemble about the Palestine/Israel, even though privately some of them would agree with much of what appears on Mondoweiss. Life does — and should — include compromises, sometimes for simple civility. But having to shut up about terrible ongoing human rights crimes in Gaza and elsewhere would make me cringe as I looked at myself in the mirror each morning.
I suspect you agree.
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A few decades ago there existed a subtle prejudice against Jews in my country. It has all but vanished. Now Jews are as well-off as they were before, but enjoying acceptance at all social levels. In my city, with 1 M inhabitants and 7,000 Jews, the mayor and half the local cabinet are Jewish. In the Buenos Aires mayoral race 2 years ago, 2 out of 3 candidates were Jewish, including the incumbent mayor.
Many Jews, however, continue to perceive themselves as a persecuted minority, and see Israel as the possible remedy to the soft discrimination they suffered in the 60s and 70s. They fail to notice that that was then, and this is now.
The American Left: RIP 1960-2010
link to counterpunch.org
How insane is US foreign policy? Here’s a short tickler sheet:
link to onlinejournal.com
“Vietnam was a horrific chapter of history. I wonder what I’d have done. ”
Phil, your brother is six months older than I. Ask him how he approached it.
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