Goodbye to all that (my Jewish-WASP shtik)

Every holiday season, I used to write about how things were going between my wife’s Christian culture and my Jewish one. I would note all the amusing and provocative ways that two east-coast privileged groups were blending. Now that issue is dead to me, and it deserves an obituary.

The matter was born the year I got married, 1991, by the National Jewish Population Survey that said that more than half of Jews were marrying out. This was a giant crisis for the Jewish community in the 90s, and Jewish organizations in the battle against assimilation and to preserve “continuity” tried to build up social walls with Jewish schools and camps and began using Israel as a bonding agent, with birthright trips aimed at fostering Jewish marriages. I found much of this effort obnoxious as it was based on the idea that my wife was an alien. In the previous generation, my uncles had married non-Jews and been somewhat ostracized; I could not cherish a community based on such barriers. So this became a cause for me: to defend my own choices as a Jew. And when I started this blog in 2006, I got a lot of mileage out of the issue.

But that was years ago, and the crisis of the NJPS has now been resolved, in an establishment that is mixed Jewish and gentile. The evidence is simply too widespread that Jews and Christians are in the elites. The two leaders for their parties’ presidential nomination both have children married to Jews; and intermarriage is an establishment institution, from the UN ambassador to network anchors to Obama advisers to Haim Saban, on whom Hillary Clinton is dependent to fund her campaign, along with other wealthy Jews. The Republicans are having a primary around a similar question; and Netanyahu believes that dependence grants him impunity. The two presidents most independent of Israel and its American friends in the last generation lost their jobs after one term; and the lesson was not lost on Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The liberal Zionist group J Street heralded this cohesion by sending out a Christmas card on Christmas eve with the photo at the top of this post and the message, “However you celebrate… Whatever your tradition… We wish you the very best.” At Thanksiving this year I noticed the program of the Kimmel Center on my wife’s aunt’s refrigerator. Dennis Ross and Ayaan Hirsi Ali topped the bill, a Zionist and an Islam-basher. My wife’s relatives know members of the Roberts family, which is pro Israel and owns the biggest media company in the country, maybe the world.

I fought this battle for a long time, but now I’m sick of it. It’s just about cohesion in the elites. And it’s no longer that interesting.

More interesting sociological tensions have arisen. Islamophobia is reminiscent for many Jews of the anti-Semitism our grandparents experienced; and a reason to use our privilege outside our own community. The Black Lives Matter movement and the demonstrations at leading universities in the last year signify the demand that African Americans be at last included as decision-makers in the US establishment. I was starry-eyed over Obama’s election and thought it meant the end of racism; it has helped in the end to highlight racism’s persistence, to remind young black people of the barriers to their progress– from the incredible incarceration rates to the domination of media and prestige positions by white people. It seems to me we are witnessing an important black moment: from outside to inside. The changes at National Public Radio (the IV feed for the busy blue stater; even Obama is said to listen to it) in the last year have been dramatic. There are more and more people of color as hosts, and their concern with cultural and political issues of consequence to black people is pronounced in the programming in ways it never could be with 60-year-old Jewish hosts. A browner establishment is coming. I’m reminded of mine and my father’s generation’s Jewish battle. As I like to repeat, Alan Dershowitz was going to quit Harvard Law School in 1971 unless they named a Jewish dean. There have been several since then, including the one now on the Supreme Court (who is inspired by Israeli judges, as is the current dean). But there have been no black deans. No black Harvard president, either. The Ta-Nehisi Coates literary meteor (and his establishment host, from David Remnick to the Atlantic to AO Scott) is reminiscent of Jewish writers’ declarations of 40 years ago, including bumptious Roth and Podhoretz first-person books– and of John Updike channeling a Jew because he saw that was where the action was.

But that’s my old-fogy sociology. Today it’s not very interesting.

There are lessons for Jews in these changes. The American bastions I fixated on when I was young turned out to be highly inclusive of Jews. Privileged Jews are now part of a conservative old guard, the Rockefeller Republicans of this era; and of course people want to marry us. The Christians who marry us don’t go to church and we don’t go to synagogue that much; we are all part of Pew’s rocketing number, people of no religion. The only way to preserve Jewish continuity is as a religiously-isolated community that largely forswears the establishment. My mother’s best friends didn’t want to see their kids marrying goyim and they did something radical to preempt that likelihood, they moved to Israel in 1968. They got their wish. But Zionism isn’t going to preserve Jewish continuity either. The young are turning against the older generation’s Zionism; and Israel will face the same pressures.

The images I carry away from this holiday season are of the people of color in my own family and community. They face hurdles bigger than the ones I faced. Their struggle will be as interesting to our society as the Jewish one once was; and I will cheer them on. My sociological struggle is over. Except for the Zionism.