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.
