Everyone’s talking about Elena Kagan’s remarks about Jewishness and Israel yesterday during the Senate hearing. My two cents.
First, the woman is charming. You don’t get so far in life without having interpersonal gifts, and she has ’em. I admired the way she took Lindsey Graham’s scary question about what she does on Christmas and spoke with sincerity about being Jewish. Speaking for myself, I would been deer-in-headlights.
That said, her construction of Jewish identity is predictable, unreflective and old school: her joke that "all Jews" go to Chinese restaurants on Christmas is really dated. More than half of young Jews marry out now, and I bet many are doing what I do: I go to a Christmas dinner, thanks to my marriage to a woman who was raised Christian but has less active connection to that tradition than I do to my Jewish one.
Also, the Israel romance in Kagan’s comments upset me. I asked if she’s a "sleeper Zionist" the other day, she is. Israel faced many "existential" threats, she says, and being Jewish she cares deeply about Israel. Israel has meant a lot to me and my family, she says.
Notice that she places herself in a familial social framework in that thinking in a way that I bet she doesn’t explicitly when it comes to gun rights or freedom of speech. Books have meant a lot to my family? No. But when it comes to Israel, clan nakedly asserts itself. My feeling is that unwed Kagan is wed to her parents’ values. Very traditional, unexamined. We’re progressives because we loved Thurgood Marshall (who died 17 years ago).
Can we break these rusty manacles? Can young Jews take Thurgood Marshall forward and form a more universal identification, which includes concern for the hundreds of thousands of people dispossessed, and now oppressed, by Israel?
Christopher Hayes had the best take on this, on twitter yesterday:
Gotta say, I think POTUS over-stepped by nominating an Israeli justice to the SCOTUS. Oh wait…
P.S. When will Chris Matthews address the Kagan nomination in Jewish terms? He keeps bringing up the Upper West Side cultural markers that the Republicans are talking about, and asks Schumer and Specter what it means. He’s afraid to say Jewish, wants a Jew to say the word first. Seems like only Kagan can open the door, and her colleague Noah Feldman in the NYT. So the discourse wants to talk about Kagan’s Jewishness, knows that it’s important, but all we get is affirmative complacency from Jews who think it’s cool that there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court anymore, but three Jews. Does Matthews share that feeling? Can the man who thinks in ethnic political terms even discuss this significant shift in the character of the elite?
