When the movie "The Social Network" came out, Zuckerberg reportedly took great offense with the way in which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin implied that he created Facebook in order to meet girls, specifically non-Jewish girls...

I tend to believe that Zuckerberg - who met Chan at [a Harvard fraternity party like one in the film] didn’t, in fact, intentionally set out in search of a non-Jewish girlfriend or wife. Religion and ethnic identity was and is simply irrelevant to him, and, like it or not, to most of his generation of American Jews. Sorkin - a generation ahead of him - was imposing a narrative on Zuckerberg and his friends that didn’t fit.

In the new online social order Zuckerberg has helped create, we are all friends and we are all networked.

Sommer's observation that Sorkin was anachronistic is well taken. I went to Harvard in the '70s; and the social stratification described in The Social Network could have been mine; but the Social Network is set in 2003-2004. A friend who went to Harvard in the '90s tells me that the era of Jewish outsiderdom at the school was well over even at that point.

Why is this important? Because there is a tendency in American Jewish life to hold on to the injustices of the past and fail to see the new reality. When we "impose a narrative," it tends to be a narrative of victimization. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the wealthiest men on earth, and his company, god bless it, played a significant role in the liberation of Egypt. He's a powerful guy, and I don't think he's as culturally bound as Aaron Sorkin. So get to work on Palestine, Mark.

Last week I went to a forestry lecture at Columbia University's Earth Institute where I learned a fascinating fact. Lecturer Matt Palmer put up a power-point graphic showing how much of the earth's forests are old growth, never cut down. Around the world old growth constitutes about a third of world forests. In Asia, it's about 15 percent. In Europe, it's 25 percent. In Africa it's about 10 percent (the sub-Saharan rain forest area). In North and Central America it's about 40 percent (think of those untouched Canadian and Rocky Mountain firs). And in South America it's 75 percent.

So 2/3 of the forests in the world were either planted by humans or regrown after being harveste; and environmentalists spend a lot of energy these days trying to stop that figure from getting larger because of the environmental consequences.

The focus is South America, because their reservoir is so large. Rapacious western colonial culture got there relatively late, and the continent is relatively unpopulated.

South Americans can argue, hey, you did it to your forests, why can't we do it to ours? And they'd have a point. They are being held to a higher standard. But history changes, ideas change, notions of justice evolve. It's essential that we behave differently from our ancestors because this issue poses a global crisis. People have now woken up, and carrying on the same activity today will have dire consequences. I believe this argument extends to ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The settlers of my property got away with racism. The global political consequences of such actions today are potentially explosive.

What a wrenching memorial. Writes a friend visiting Hamburg, "The house immediately next door to my hotel--now a kindergarten--had these brass 4" by 4" plaques embedded in the sidewalk--as a number of houses do in Hamburg." This couple was in their sixties. I see there are many such memorials in Germany.

For days I’ve been working through a convulsive cultural experience: seeing Death of a Salesman the other night (in a second-row seat a friend gave me). The play is so dark it's almost unwatchable. The character of Willy Loman doesn’t develop. You get it in the first scene, and the title tells you how things are gonna turn out. It may be a coronation for Philip Seymour Hoffman (or Dustin Hoffman, or Lee J. Cobb) to finally play Willy Loman, but it's torture for the audience to watch a guy falling down eight flights of stairs.

There is only one character with arc in the play, Willy’s son Biff, who comes to majestic self-awareness over the 3 hours. In this production Biff is played by Andrew Garfield, who played Mark Zuckerberg’s Brazilian Jewish associate/friend in the Social Network. I’m told he’s now the It boy. Well, he should be: he gives an astonishing soulful performance. The reason I stood up at the end was for what Garfield calls on in all of us, aspiration, honesty, failure, rage, creativity.

Andrew Garfield

The play had three levels of meaning for me. One was the father-son relationship. It’s devastating; the next time I see my father, I want to talk some things over. Another is the critique of capitalism. I loved it. It seems to me the whole play can be boiled down to two lines. One is Willy’s plea to his boss when he’s getting fired: "You can't eat an orange and then throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit." What could be a more meaningful description of hedge funds transforming our communities than that one line?

The second line is from Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, from opening night in 1949:

It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end to it. I was standing at the back and saw a distinguished-loking elderly man being led up the aisle; he was talking excitedly into the ear of what seemed to be his male secretary or assistant. This, I learned, was Bernard Gimbel, head of the department store chain, who that night gave an order that no one in his stores was to be fired for being overage.

Imagine a social drama today converting a hedge fund manager.

The third meaning for me was the Jewish layer. Walking out of the theater, I sensed that Death of a Salesman was wrested from Miller’s Jewish experience, and the next day I got his autobiography to learn more. Miller wrote that the play was based in some measure on a charismatic bullshitting Brooklyn salesman uncle of his named Manny Newman who had athletic sons who made their house “dank with sexuality.”

The Jewish meaning for me goes beyond Manny Newman. Willy's two generational counterparts in the play read to me as archetypal Jews: his brother Ben the luftmensch entrepreneur and his businessman neighbor Charlie whose son ends up arguing before the Supreme Court. But let's be clear. Ben and Charlie aren't Jewish; no one is presented as Jewish in the play, and even if the models came out of Miller’s NY Jewish world, he wasn’t smuggling Jewish characters into American public consciousness. He wasn’t doing what Seinfeld did. Or The Social Network. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

No, Miller was using his Jewish materials to reach a broad society he wanted to redeem. He writes in his autobiography of his first wife, Mary Grace Slattery:

Mary had stopped considering herself a Catholic as a high school student in Ohio, just as I was struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than just one small tribal fraction of it. Both of us thought we were leaving behind parochial narrowness of mind, prejudices, racism, and the irrational, which were having their ultimate triumph, it seemed to us, in the fascist and Nazi movements that were everywhere growing in strength. Judaism for me and Catholicism for Mary were dead history, cultural mystifications that had been devised mainly to empower their priesthoods by setting people against one another. Socialism was reason…

Cultural mystifications: when Miller told his family he was marrying Slattery, his grandfather threw a clock at his mother, blaming her I guess.

There was a deep shadow then over intermarriages between Jews and gentiles, and still deeper if the gentile was Catholic.

The prejudice went both ways. Miller sensed that Mary's Ohio family listened to anti-semitic radio. And that gave him a mission:

By whatever means, I had somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America, and among Americans themselves as well. No doubt as a defense against the immensity of the domestic and European fascistic threat, which in my depths I interpreted as the threat of my own extinction, I had the wish, if not yet the conviction, that art could express the universality of human beings, their common emotions and ideas.

Their common emotions and ideas! When I hear Miller's summons to universality, I think of how much official Jewish life today valorizes tribal identity. Surely this has to do with the "continuity" crisis brought on by the 1990 survey showing that more than half of Jews were marrying out. Surely it has to do with the '67 and '73 wars that married American Jews to Israeli nationalism. But today it is not very common to hear a Jewish writer standing up for intermarriage. At the Tablet-sponsored debate about Israel last Wednesday, Daniel Gordis stated that tribalism is the core of Judaism and congratulated Peter Beinart for his concession in the Jerusalem Post, "I am a Zionist, a tribalist, a partisan of the Jewish people and the Jewish state." And Beinart's book about Zionism calls on Jews to separate their children in day schools so they won't marry non-Jews. In doing so, Beinart notes that there are today 6000 non-Orthodox Jewish children in Jewish high schools.

As if that's a big number. It's not a big number. By and large, Jews are doing what so many other American tribes have done. They think of themselves as Americans, they are trying to help their country.

It's not surprising that many people associated with the new production of Death of a Salesman are Jewish. Wikipedia says Andrew Garfield is Jewish. Director Mike Nichols likes to talk about his immigrant Jewish background. Some of the producers are Jewish, including Scott Rudin (himself the son of a traveling salesman; so-- Biff ended up in Hollywood). 

All these Jews are cultural mediators, not just of Jewishness to America, but as Miller said, between Americans themselves. That is a great social responsibility; and for Miller that role was related to his intermarriage.

I must stress (Wondering Jew has hit me on this point): It's fine and great when Jews marry other Jews. Marriage is hard enough without anyone else issuing guidelines.

But I am talking about the role Miller sought in American life: of artistically/spiritually mediating between Americans, seeking to resolve cultural problems. I don't think you can aspire to such a role and meanwhile be telling your children to marry inside the tribe.

I got to a dark stone townhouse in downtown New Haven at about 7:30. There was a stained glass over the front door of a religious character but no other sign that I was in the right spot. I knocked on the big front door and it promptly opened; Ben brought me in.

Ben is tall and slender and from a mixed racial background, and his work is decidedly multiculturalist: he studies W.E.B. DuBois, he’s a pragmatic two-stater. He led me upstairs to the scene of the Sabbath dinner. I was surprised to see a redbearded Chabad rabbi standing there in his black coat, with his tie open on his neck. The man asked me my Hebrew name—Pinchas—and then embraced me and began talking about Pinchas great grandson of Abraham.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht

I say surprised because I had last seen Shmully Hecht two years before when Richard Goldstone spoke at Yale. A redhaired, redbearded man with very alive blue eyes, Hecht stood at the back of the hall holding up a big sign that said, “The Dreyfus Affair, 1890, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1903… Goldstone, 2009."
After Goldstone spoke, Hecht had approached him at the broccoli and red pepper spears reception and engaged in vigorous discussion. Goldstone had nodded quietly and then directed Hecht to look at the supplement to his report, containing a photograph of a Jewish star cut into a field in Gaza by Israeli tanks. Goldstone said that it had been one of the most upsetting things he had discovered in Gaza.

Shmully Hecht was also a founder of Eliezer. He and Ben and I went back downstairs to see who else had arrived, then we sat chatting. I could see my bedroom, a big bed with piled pillows waiting for me at the end of the night. Shmully said he was raised in a Chabad household but has had experience with many different forms of Jewish devotion. In fact he has more in common with an imam than he did with most Christian clergy-- the religions were more similar—and for more than 1000 years Jews and Muslims had gotten along fine with one another across the Middle East.

Of course I have heard this same idea often from anti-Zionists. Why did that change? I said. Why should 2000 years of harmony suddenly end?

Shmully said that when Esau sold his birthright to Jacob there had been a quarrel. That quarrel was reasserting itself now thousands of years later.

Shmully’s wife came in. Shmully had told me ahead of time that orthodox women do not shake hands. She was pretty and darkhaired with an animated face and a big smile-- in a word, vivacious. Toby. 

We talked about my Jewishness. Shmully said that Jewishness was in someone’s soul and it would always reassert itself in a Jew’s life. It would call to him at a certain time in life. I said I think that is what has happened to me, though it has not been religiously.

We went upstairs to the long and lavishly appointed Sabbath table. By the time laggards arrived, there were about 18 people at the table, most of them graduate students. We drank wine and I spoke. I believe there were some J Street folks at one end of the table who agreed with me, but hardly any one else did. Still the atmosphere was attentive and respectful. Yale is a serious place, though Shmully is nothing if not charismatic, a storyteller who makes Jewish religion come alive in that immediate, ecstatic Chabad manner. He said that he had also befriended Richard Goldstone since the incident at Yale's McMillan Center and he thought Goldstone was a fine man. Shmully loves to joke around about anything but the Jewish nation. Over the course of the night as we drank red wine and Japanese whiskey I kept joking that we were going to end up in bed together downstairs. Shmully had no problem with the joke.

Ben introduced me with a spiritual lesson. He said that there was a deep divide in the Jewish community and it shouldn’t be there. There were people like myself who felt righteous about being outcast. It reminded him of the urban renewal project in New Haven. It had cut a deep divide in the community.

When I spoke, I copped to the righteousness of the excommunicated. I said there was a pleasure in it. I spoke for about 15 minutes and told a story I always tell to Jewish audiences, how I as a feature journalist and Christmas tree Jew have a very similar background to the guy who gave Jews the Zionist religion, Theodore Herzl, and like him I have awakened to Jewish experience in midlife. But where the anti-Semites had made Herzl Jewish again, the neoconservatives did that to me, when they pushed for a war to take everyone’s attention off the occupation. I spoke a lot about Palestinian conditions in occupation, and how they had shaken me, made me want to have nothing to do with the Zionist project. 

After I spoke the questions began respectfully but critically and grew more heated. At the end it almost became a heated argument. But even then people were polite.  It was remarkably civil considering that most people at the table had an active relationship with Israel, had family there even.

Ben began the questions by asking me Did I ever have misgivings about my work given that it has been attractive to anti-Semites, and what did I aim to do about that. I said the short answer was Yes. That pained me. There is no doubt that anti-Semites have been drawn to some of what I’ve said, and there have been anti-Semites on the comment board. I tried to explain how hard it is to police a comments board and also how tribal internet communities are. Also, I said that the conflict was polarizing. Communities are deeply divided. It was like Ben’s image of urban renewal, a great wound. I’m in one camp and they’re in another.

A young scholar next to me who is studying proto-Zionism in Europe in the 1800s out of a commitment to Israel said how could I be so sure that anti-Semitism was not going to return in a virulent form. It had been recurring throughout our history. Every 50 or 100 years there were major episodes. Of course it could happen again. And why did I not think that Israel could be struck by a nuclear warhead from Iran soon and it would be gone in the blink of an eye, she said.

The rebbitzin was also tough on me. She leaned across the table to speak directly and familiarly. She used the word my mother has used with me to describe my website: “vile.” She had gone on it that day and been shocked by things she read. People there wanted to dismantle Israel. And then to see me talk about my Jewishness and Jewish history in a thoughtful way--she couldn’t believe this was the same person yukking it up with haters of Israel. Toby seemed to suggest I was masquerading. But she had gotten a taste of the site and said she was hurt by it. She told me about her grandmothers escaping the Holocaust. But their parents died, and many of their relatives died. This was not that long ago. You are not sensitive to this. This is an emotional issue. It’s not something that you can be rational about. These things really happened to our community. I felt bad. I nodded listening to her and said that I was sorry for her family and that I respected the emotion.

Shmully said that I was wrong about the occupation. That land was bought by Jews. It belonged to us. Abraham had bought Hebron to bury Sarah. It’s in the Bible. All of Eretz Israel is the Jews’. He said that some people were afraid of the idea that Jews have guns now. We didn’t use to have guns. Now we do. Nothing would change if Jews left the West Bank. We had left Gaza and nothing had changed. There were just rockets.

When I spoke of the dispossesson of Palestinians, several members of the group contested me. They said that Palestinians had sold the land. They said that no one was getting pushed off their land. When I said that Nabi Saleh had been denied access to its wells, and had to have water trucked in, Toby said Well who trucks that water in—Israel.

There were other comments: Palestinians were desperate to be on the west side of the Green Line because they were treated better than anywhere else in the Middle East. My time line comparing Israeli discrimination to American discrimination in the deep south circa 1964 was skewed. There were Arab members of the Knesset after Israel was founded and an Arab member of the Supreme Court.

I said we should measure a society by people’s consent to their government, and Palestinians didn’t consent to their government, or they did not like it. I felt there was broad acknowledgement at the long table of that truth, though it was stated that Islam doesn’t tolerate being under Jewish rule. The Jews are dhimmi. Second class citizens. Muslims couldn’t accept citizenship in a Jewish state. I said that human history is fluid. I said that American Jews would never accept minority status without equal rights in the U.S. and that is all we should be for in Israel and Palestine.

A big handsome young undergraduate with a shock of dark hair said that I was being narcissistic. I was taking my standards and expecting other people in the world to accept them. I was being completely self-referential. It was kind of psychological and I wasn’t sure what to say. I did a lot of listening. Later he came up to me and said I should read Peter Singer’s book about his grandfather in Vienna, who was killed in the Holocaust (when I got home I ordered it). Now and then I looked down at the J Street Jews at the table but they were mostly quiet and listening. They did not get drawn into the conversation.

The most heated conversation took place with a small businessman with a green knit skullcap. What I said made him angry. He spoke in a withering dismissive tone, a little snappish. As if I were the enemy. How much time had I spent there? Five visits, six or seven weeks, I said. Well that’s no time at all to be reaching such judgments. I said I never went to Vietnam or South Africa.

He said it was worrying when people like me expressed such ignorance. I said that he should be worried, because Israel had always depended on the American Jewish community and we’d had enough. He said I had no idea what I was talking about. Israel was a free place for Palestinians by and large and what was the point of what I was saying, you want to destroy Israel, you think it was a mistake, you want to undo the mistake. That is what you are trying to do.

I said I waffled on partition for just this reason. I wasn’t against a Jewish state per se but it wasn’t up to me, it was up to the people there to accept it or not, and Palestinians citizens didn't want it.

He said, What do you want Israel to do. What do you want it to do? Right now? I am asking you, tell me!

I said, stop discriminating against Arabs and allowing Nabi Saleh to have access to its water. The man in the green skullcap said that such discrimination was by individual landlords, and he denied that the occupation was hateful. I said that the Palestinians did not like it. He said I was calling for the destruction of Israel and I was dangerously naïve. I said that many American Jews were coming to the same conclusion I was because they didn’t want to continue to support these practices.

Shmully said that if you went around New Haven there were just as stark economic differences between one community and another as there was in Israel and Palestine. Why didn’t I begin my reform efforts in New Haven?

There was a soup course and then a main course of chicken at 11 o’clock. The food was excellent. The wine was excellent. I know because I drank a lot of it. Shmully kept refilling my glass. Then he led the end of the Shabbat service. I stayed up joking with him and Ben. Then I went to bed, that kingsized bed on the first floor with the big white comforter. There was a computer and a desk in the room and also a Chinese cabinet with liquor inside, all for the taking of guests. Ben said that I should lock the guestroom door as members of the Eliezer group might be coming and going all night. The Eliezer group now owns the next door building and will soon expand into it. Eliezer felt like a fancy club, not that different from the men’s clubs at Harvard when I was there. It’s odd for me to see Jews having a fancy club at Yale. But this is our modern condition. Wassail!

I had had too much to drink and did not sleep well. I had a dream about a football game. A Jets player was scoring a touchdown by stretching out over the goal-line. I was watching the player and noting that he was white. He used a clever device to hold on to the ball as he stretched over the goal-line, almost like phylacteries. I decided the dream was about racism. I notice race on the football field-- so who am I to be upset when the members of the Eliezer society speak of Jews in exceptional terms and as a nation. So many people are guilty of racism, nationalism.

I woke up at 4 and then at 5 from having drunk too much red wine, feeling terribly guilty. I was in an entirely Jewish setting and had betrayed the Jewish people. I was not helping, I was not helping. I was alienating myself from highly intelligent and kind people. They were kind to me anyway. Now I understood why Goldstone had reconsidered his report, if he had spent any time with Shmully!

The tiled bathroom was beautifully appointed, with a glass bowl sink set on the countertop. I used the toothbrush provided and went upstairs to the Sabbath room of the night before. It was miraculously cleaned up, there was no sign of the tumult and food of the night before. The chairs were back upside down on the table top. The silver Judaica wine pouring device to pour 20 silver cups at once was cleaned and set upside down in its different parts on a drying rack.

I took some of the cookies I had not been able to eat from the night before and closed the heavy front door after me. It was 6 a.m. and still dark on Shabbos. I drove back home wondering how I was going to mend my ways.

Karl Shapiro

The upset among fiction publishers over the Pulitzer Prizes this week reminded me of a post I prepared some time ago and have never published, till now:

In 1945, the Pulitzer Prize committee judged British poet W.H. Auden to have published "by far" the best book of poetry, but the prize went to a book by Karl Shapiro for political reasons. Shapiro was said to be “one of us”-- he was in uniform, while Auden was said to have communist antiwar leanings.

Auden, an Englishman living in the U.S., went into military service in 1945, and won the prize in 1948. 

The frankly-political judgments were recorded in papers from the 1945 Pulitzer Prize deliberations held at Columbia University toward the end of World War II. Columbia released the documents to me for research on a book I’m doing about the places Shapiro served in the war, Australia and New Guinea.

Everyone in this story is dead. Auden died in 1973. Shapiro died in 2000. 

The Pulitzer poetry jury of three men met in late February 1945. Then on March 6, 1945, the head of the jury, Yale English professor Wilbur Cross (who was also a former governor of Connecticut) sent two letters to Columbia Provost Frank Fackenthal. One "Dear Mr. Fackenthal" letter was the official jury report. The other "Dear Mr. Fackenthal" was a personal cover letter containing political judgments.

Auden’s book “For the Time Being” was “by far the most distinguished of the group,” the official report said, then it went on to say that the next best book was “V-Letter and Other Poems,” by Karl Shapiro, who was serving in the army in the Pacific.

Shapiro has not the technical skill of Auden in versification. But he writes well in a straight-forward natural manner. Auden addresses the intellect, Shapiro addresses the emotions.

The other Dear Mr. Fackenthal letter from Cross undermined the judgment in the report. Cross wrote:

Auden has been classed by some critics as a communist on the score of his earlier poems. He has indeed been very severe on contemporary English society. He has fought for the underdog. In the beginning he posed as a revolutionist like Shelley.

Members of the Jury indulged in a long discussion on Auden...

Among the factors the jury weighed, Cross said, was the fact that Auden had won a prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters “… and perhaps it would be better to settle on Shapiro who is ‘one of us’’”

A few days later, Cross sent Fackenthal a third letter (responding to a letter from the provost that is not in the file). This letter described Auden as a British poet and Shapiro as an American "through and through" but harped on political themes:

You are right, I think, in your inference from my personal letter to you that the Pulitzer Poety Jury ‘would be just as well content to make the award to Shapiro and leave Auden for a later award.’ This is decidedly my own view...

Shapiro is in active service in this war. Auden is keeping aloof from it for reasons I do not know. Incidently [sic] he several times touches upon the war in a volume of poems entitled Another Time, published in 1941. There he writes:

"Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return."

Most sincerely yours, Wilbur Cross

Auden was never a communist. He never joined the Communist Party, declaring himself a “bourgeois,” but he flirted openly with communism in the 1930s, according to W.H. Auden, A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter. “Communism is the only political theory that really holds the Christian position of absolute equality in value of every individual," Auden said then. In 1932 he wrote a poem called “A Communist to Others." At that time, his friend Christopher Isherwood wrote, “He now outwardly supported Marxism," and the writer Harold Nicolson recorded in his diary that Auden did a poetry reading for English friends that was “not so much a defence of communism as an attack upon all the ideas of comfort and complacency which will make communism difficult to achieve in this country.”

In March 1945, a month after the jury's deliberations, Auden applied to join the American armed forces, as part of a “United States Strategic Bombing Survey” in Germany, according to Carpenter's biography. Auden became a major in the U.S. army as a “Bombing Research Analyst in the Morale Division." He then spent several months in Europe interviewing civilians.

Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

I know that sounds conspiratorial. But it should be pointed out that at least one member of the Pulitzer jury leaked. Louis Untermeyer called Shapiro's promoter and girlfriend (and later wife), Evalyn Katz, to give her the news that Shapiro had won, though he swore her to secrecy (Shapiro tells the story in his autobiography). Possibly a juror told Auden about the judgment against him?

Two postscripts:

I. I told this story to David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English literature at Yale,  who has written extensively on modern poetry. He said that by whatever means, the Pulitzer Committee may have reached the right literary judgment:

As a matter of purely literary judgment, the Columbia archive letters you paraphrase might be said to have arrived at the right judgment for the wrong reason. But they are misinformed about Auden in every possible way. 

(1) He supported the war against Hitler--though without pomp or righteous accusation. The lines,

"Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return"

are about the Versailles arrangements and their consequences; his sense of the deeper-lying causes of the war comes through in some other lines of "September 1, 1939":

Accurate scholarship can 

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god.

 

(2) Auden was never a Communist, and by 1945 he hardly considered himself a man of the Left (though he published in The Nation and The New Republic). He had become a high Anglican in religion. 

 

In giving the award to Shapiro, the judges were, oddly, recognizing Auden in some way. Shapiro had earned a reputation as a proficient follower of Auden--the sort of gifted disciple who brings out the hidden resources of a fresh poetic style.

I'm not sure which of the two I would have voted for; there's a case to be made that V-Letter and Other Poems is a better book than For the Time Being. The latter is a virtuoso piece of writing, a Christmas Oratorio in the modernist idiom, sustained for several hundred lines, cast in prose as well as verse. (One precedent: Murder in the Cathedral.) 

But I think Shapiro was a pretty wonderful, energetic poet in his first two volumes: Person, Place and Thing and V-Letter and Other Poems. Shapiro's war poems--including "Troop Train," "Full Moon: New Guinea," and "Elegy for a Dead Soldier"-- are the only poems of the Second World War that anyone remembers now, except a few by Randall Jarrell (who didn't see combat) and three by Louis Simpson: "Carentan O Carentan," "The Battle," and "The Runner." F.O. Matthiessen's Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), the best anthology ever made of American poetry, includes several poems from  V-Letter.

II. The prize established young Shapiro’s career. Though he later called it a “Golden Albatross” and derided the prize as a middlebrow honor, it assured him employment. Writing about himself in the third person, 45 years later (in Reports of My Death), he said, “He would always be able to get lectures, even jobs, even good jobs, doing what he wanted in and around poetry, and he wouldn’t have to sit behind a librarian’s desk answering silly questions about how to address a duchess or which zoos keep unicorns.”

At dinner last night my wife and I were talking about memoirs and she said the reason they're popular is we get to judge the people who wrote them.

“I just read that book by JFK’s former mistress, and I thought, what a dope. I found her to be an Episcopalian twit who was completely divorced from all of her feelings."

My wife reads tons of books but I hadn’t seen Once Upon a Secret lying around the house. It turned out she’d read it on a tablet, weeks before.

“She not only had a creepy affair with JFK who used her and abused her, but her husband turns out to be the same way. And she ultimately gets divorced from him but she never puts it all together. So I realized that’s why we read these memoirs, so we can sit in judgment of these people.”

I asked, “How did JFK come off in the book?"

“A sicko." My wife reeled off an indictment, right at the dinner table. "The fact that he had her give a blowjob to Dave Powers in front of him. The fact that he wanted her to give a blowjob to his brother Teddy in front of him.

“The fact that he had sex with her umpteen times and she never called him anything other than Mr President and he never kissed her.

“The fact he deflowered her on Jackie’s bed. You just get this picture of a guy who had some really weird sex stuff going on.

“So I think that’s what you do as a reader of memoirs, that’s the pleasure. You sit there and say I wouldn’t have done that, that’s a stupid way to handle that situation. And somehow our own squalid little lives seem a little better…"

“Do you have sympathy for her?”

“In some ways I do. Because I think, you are really an idiot. Because she has a creepy relationship and he does all this weird sexual stuff and after he gets killed, she gets engaged to a young preppie her own age, and she confesses her affair with the President, and he says, I will marry you on one condition, you will never speak of this to anyone.”

“Not even to him?”

“Not him or anyone else. So she’s going from one sexual shrouded relationship with a WASP man to another. Where she’s always kind of kept in the closet, and she accepts it. You’d think she’d have a little bit of self awareness later and not have done the same thing again.”

“Do you ever feel generous to a memoirist?”

“No. That’s not the game. I’m a little embarrassed about it, but I'm a mean reader.”

“How would you have handled the situation?”

“Oh-- I would have slept with him too. But I would have gotten a little angry. And I would have started to call him Jack.”

One of the worst things about the Israel lobby is the demands it makes on an American Jew’s spirituality. As Jewish identity has been merged with support for Israel, all the mythic horse feathers of the Israeli project get dumped on an American Jew. Israel is your "birthright," say the rightwingers. At J Street, Peter Beinart says that the lands of the West Bank have "deep meaning to us," and the collapse of the Jewish state would leave tremendous spiritual rubble, also for "us." In Raritan Todd Gitlin says American liberal Jews have lost touch with the spirit of chosenness and messianism that gave "the project of founding a Jewish state... a transcendent dimension."

These are alien spiritual claims to me. I’m an American Jew, emphasis on America. I didn’t ever get to Israel till I was 50, and only then after I woke up politically and realized it was hurting my country. I refuse to fake devotions: My spiritual life has never had anything to do with Judea and Samaria any more than the father and the son and the holy ghost or the white salamander. It's cool when Gitlin speaks of “Israel’s wild and foundational God, its God of both mystery and justice,” but I can find that god right here with a little g. I do not want anyone to tell me what my beliefs are because I call myself a Jew; it is a hard enough process for me to figure out my beliefs on my own, let alone with some pious minder.

American visions and myths resonated for me from when I was 9 years old. In 1965 Norman Morrison burned himself to death outside the Pentagon. He was from my city, Baltimore, and my mother went across town to the Quaker meeting to honor him. Norman Morrison's noble act of resistance touched millions of souls. A year or so later, my 6th grade class took a field trip to Harpers Ferry, WV. It was where John Brown the American moralist and terrorist tried to destroy slavery, the raid for which he was hanged. And in middle age now I am reading a biography of Brown that says that raid helped destroy slavery and spark the Civil War and lead to the civil rights movement.

Religious ideas ran all through abolitionism: Brown was fueled by fundamentalist Calvinism, while the proper New England radicals who paid for Brown's guns, "the Secret Six," were “disestablished Protestants."

This disestablished Jew grew up with these glorious myths more prominently in his spiritual life than anything in Israel. The Six-Day war was not important to me. Julius Krevans ran up to tell me about it in elementary school, that the Israeli planes had destroyed the Egyptian planes on the runways, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I tuned out the '73 war too. Why should I care about a Jewish state? I was resonating already to an American mythology of equality. I chose to go to a high school that was almost entirely black because I believed in American diversity and Jewish integration; I did not think other people wanted to kill Jews.

The authors I loved came out of the Jewish world and the American transcendentalist world. Today I feel companionship in the fact that Emily Dickinson was nurtured by T.W. Higginson, one of the Secret Six who funded John Brown. "Lad of Athens faithful be, to thyself and mystery, all the rest is perjury," said Dickinson. Let no one tell you what your beliefs are.

Looking back on it, I see that it was because of my explorations and those of hundreds of thousands of other young Jews that the Jewish community panicked in the 90s. They worried about assimilation, the 52 percent intermarriage rate announced in 1990, the year before I went over Shiksa Falls. They had to fire up the troops with religious nationalism, and so at the very time I was being disestablished, American Judaism became more conservative and Orthodox. So today, even in the Nation, it matters to liberal Jews that Beinart is a religious person:

Beinart attends an Orthodox synagogue and sends his children to Jewish day school.

I thought liberal means enlightened-- that you don’t care about that fundamentalist hokum and Marcus Garvey separationism. But now all the synagogues have all-weather banners outside them, "We stand with Israel in her quest for peace." And birthright offers the hope that American Jews will have sex or even lose their virginities over there and thank the Israelis for that, which is what Democratic activist Ilyse Hogue bragged about at J Street last week: getting laid in the Galilee, which seems to have made her loyal forever, and to want her nieces to have the same transcontinental experience.

This was never my way. Nor the way of countless other Jews. But our way has been repudiated by the establishment. They staked out a new trail, they wanted the grass to grow over mine. Well…. f that.

I think it was when I was watching this video of Peter Beinart talking below about his South African childhood and his grandmother’s insecurity there and the importance of Israel to take in vulnerable Jews that I snapped about all this stuff-- the Ethiopian Jews, "separated from our people since the days of the Second Temple." This is not my mythology or ethos… I have always felt secure here. I am not an immigrant, like Beinart's parents, who when they had a choice didn’t even go there, no, they came here, for a reason. His generation missed the antiwar movement that formed my generation. He missed Berrigan spilling blood on the draft records and Bob Feldman and the Jewish SDS boys exposing the military industrial complex at Columbia. "We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living," Hillary Clinton said at her commencement in 1969, and I believe her. 

I need to reclaim my American spiritual roots. This website has been about Jewishness for me because the neoconservative project for the Middle East made me Jewish (as I have said many times) but I will have a Jewishness that is authentic to my experience. I love the Passover deliverance story only if it is shared. I hate the Purim story, I don’t even know what my Torah portion was about. The story of the binding of Isaac has helped me understand my relationship with my father, and all authority, but honestly I was more thrilled by getting to the place it took place in Minnesota when I was 21 -- Dylan’s Highway 61-- than by Mount Moriah in occupied East Jerusalem.

I don’t need Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount to believe in the binding. Any more than my wife needed Christian sovereignty in Jerusalem to bring me along when a group of English nuns she’d met took her on the Stations of the Cross last year, a powerful story about heresy and excommunication. 

I find as much power in Jim's beating his deaf daughter in Huck Finn as I do in the binding of Isaac, and I want an identity politics that respects my spirit and the American winds that move it, from Mark Twain to Melville to Carson McCullers to Isaac Singer to Schocken’s translations of Kafka to my lapsed Protestant wife’s yoga and ayurvedhic medicine and Tarot. I don’t want chosenness. Not when I've learned so much from lapsed Catholics with values of humility and egalitarianism. And J Street has credibility in part because its leader’s father was in the Irgun? What does the Irgun have to teach me?

Do I sound like a nativist? I don't care; Israel never called to me. I believe Zionism’s greatest achievement is the idea of Jewish physical labor. I don’t want my foreign policy guided by Jeffrey Goldberg who felt unsafe here and emigrated to Israel. I would rather a nativist foreign policy that is thoughtful of the Americans who are likely to have to go off and do the fighting (not us).

I can’t understand Hebrew because I was busy doing other things. I was listening to the Wailers and role-modeling Joseph Pulitzer who said that his job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and Harrison Salisbury who put out the Pentagon Papers and Sy Hersh who exposed My Lai and Melville who said that all men wear muzzles on their souls and he wanted to undo the muzzles, anticipating gay liberation by 100 years.

I am sick of our media valorizing a democracy that has not had our hard lessons in liberation.

That has not integrated the armed forces—we did that in 1948.

That excludes minorities from the governing coalition – we fixed that in 1964.

That redlines Palestinian home sales—we got rid of the gentleman’s agreement in the 60s.

That has segregated schools-- we attacked that in 1954.

That breaks historic compromises and extends rightlessness into the territories—we did that between 1854-1861, till that regime was washed away by “verry much bloodshed,” as John Brown prophesied.

I’m proud of a country that gave a home to Ali Abunimah when Israel wouldn’t let him or his family go to the place his parents were born. And if Israel ceases to be a Jewish state it will be no spiritual rubble for me, no, it will be because it honors a principle that my forefathers put down in the Declaration of Independence and our leaders are still struggling to make real.

Religion is the thing that gives your life meaning. It’s the codes and ideas and koans and dreams and stories that sustain you and give you purpose and explain your responsibilities to yourself and others and the land. It’s not a book in a church. Emerson said the dead books scatter your force, lose your time and blur the impression of your character. My codes are American ones, shot through with Jewish diaspora yearnings and my wife’s mystical explorations, and my story is American and my guides are American pantheists from Thoreau to Joan Osborne.

I honor Rabbi Hillel who understood that life is right under your feet when he said, If not now, when. I honor my Eastern European integrationist ancestors who spoke of “doykeit”-- hereness. I am going to be here and now, honor the place I stand and stop helping anyone locate meaning in fantasies about somebody else’s olive trees thousands of miles away.

Update: The original version of this piece stated that Peter Beinart is an immigrant. He was born in the U.S. I apologize for the error.

1.

In November a close friend who's a builder broke his neck working on a roof, and a couple weeks later a few friends of his went to finish the job for him. I worked with two other guys in the sun on a big house, an estate in a forested ravine. I know the homeowner too. He’s odd-- thin and crooked and goggly-eyed, always on the lookout. I walk a lot through the woods around here and I end up trespassing now and then. Once when I came down that ravine, he drove up to me when I was out on the road and sort of confronted me. 

We were on the roof when one of the carpenters brought up the Palestinians. He knows about this website. He said, it’s wrong the way those people are treated. It’s disgraceful. Then he asked me to tell him about the occupation.

I told him about kids not getting out of Gaza to get their scholarships, and he said, And it’s all because of the United States.

The taller carpenter was further up the roof putting on sheathing and he objected. You can’t judge the Israelis. We’d do exactly the same if we had gone through what they went through. The smaller carpenter got into it with him. What would we do if someone came over here and took our land, he said. I was tucked under the eaves holding soffit strips for the taller guy to screw down, and grinning devilishly.

He said, You want to get rid of Israel? There’s a good reason it’s there, that would be like the Holocaust all over again. I’m not saying that, the smaller one said.

The smaller guy went off to get another sheet of plywood and I could see him talking with the homeowner. The homeowner had been raking the yard as we talked. The smaller carpenter came back and said something under his breath to the other carpenter. The taller one passed it on to me: He wants us to stop talking about Israel. It upsets him. He is Jewish.

The conversation shut down. Later I felt a wave of sympathy for the homeowner. He is strange, he has a European name. I think he must be the child of Holocaust survivors. It is not hard to assign him a tortuous back story, barely escaping Poland via North Africa, wealth from German reparations. I can’t help identify with his helpless, rootless feeling. Still it didn’t excuse him shutting down the conversation.

2.

A friend of my wife came to visit around the holiday and on a whim he decided to drop in on a finance mogul who lives near us and had been sending him emails to try and get him to consult on a job. We drove up to the man’s town in my wife’s friend’s car and took a while to find the address.

It was a forbidding estate. Towering stone pillars and a steel gate. But by chance as we stopped outside the gate, it slid open. Shazaam. We passed huge sculptures on the driveway going down to a lake.

Of course, we weren’t expected. But my wife and her friend are both streetsmart drop-in artists. I find it excruciating. I hunched in the back of the car as they sauntered brashly up to the huge oaken front door. I could hear them jabbering with the man and his wife over the intercom.

How did you get in? How did you get through the gate? Who did you say you are? Translation: you have some nerve.

But my wife and her friend are charming, and soon she came back out and summoned me to come in too. Everyone had a drink. The man showed us around the vast house…. pornographic art and polished stone shower slabs from Uzbekistan and Timbuktu, walls that move on electric hidden cables, televisions that glide out of walls, an amphiteater above the water seating hundreds of close friends, a theater with gas fires along the wall. We were lucky to catch him home, in one of his four houses. You get the picture.

My wife and her friend were marveling, but I was embarrassed, because I'm Jewish and so was the mogul. This was shameless. And I saw it all coming when we drove down past the hulking sculptures. Is this what my great people have come to? It was like Gatsby throwing down shirts on the bed to impress Nick Carraway, but in this case it was exotic building materials, and none of the wit. But I guess WASPs lived like this once, when they were driving the economy.

My wife and her friend wore delighted smiles but I felt a need to excuse him inwardly. I said to him, You must have grown up poor. “My father was an immigrant laborer in South Africa,” he said with bite, as though he had said it many times before. “I grew up in [an American city] with bare plywood floors. I decided I was never going to live that way again.”

An American story. Though I wish it weren’t my people.

3.

My property touches another guy’s land at the back, a businessman and devout Christian. His wife sends out cards that warn people against being B.U.S.Y. Bustling under Satan’s Yoke.

He's a big hunter, and the only times I’ve seen him were in the woods. Twice I’ve disturbed his hunt, trespassing on his land to walk to a friend’s house over the ridge. One year I passed his camouflaged treestand with my dog and looked up and there he stood twenty feet above me with a black mask on. He nodded once like a fell superhero, gazing angrily. It froze my blood.

A year later I came over the rise with the dog and he was walking the ridge with a gun. This time he yelled at me for scaring off the deer he had been tracking for the last two hours. My dog had ruined the hunt. He said he had excused me the year before because he understood people trespassed. Still. I was silent, nodding shamefully.

I sent him a note later apologizing, and promised not to do it again.

But I did it again. Last month. I didn’t realize it was still bow season. There was a camouflage box tent on the ridge, and he must have been inside it. He called my neighbor to chew her out. What did he say to you? I asked her. She said, he’s waiting for Jew season to open. We laughed. It was her joke, not the hunter’s. She is married to a Jew, a mixed couple, like me.

Though later I reflected, I never felt scared of him, never, not even when he was stalking the ridge with his gun. Don’t go old-school on me now. No one is thinking that way.

4.

My neighbor Terry called me because he was going to cut down some telephone poles in the state park. I rushed off to help him. Terry is an official trail maintainer for New York-New Jersey trail conference and he keeps up a loop through a state park not far from my house. Sometimes I help him when he’s out there with his chain saw.

I was wild to do the telephone poles because, come on, who wouldn't want to chop down telephone poles? Also, they clutter this trail, and I like the woods. But the other reason is because Terry is Jewish. Not Jewish in any of the conventional ways. He is a teacher, he’s outdoorsy as hell, he’s built like a brick shithouse, he worked for 25 years as a telephone lineman. He is Hannah Arendt’s kind of Jew—Hannah Arendt who said that the kibbutz was the greatest Jewish achievement of the 20th century and who disdained wealth and “moneygrubbing.”

I like being with another Jew who understands my love of physical labor. As Terry cut the poles, I pulled on the wires to make them come down the right way. It was cold, and I came up with a joke. Terry used to work at Goldman, Sachs, and that’s how he learned to use a chain saw. "They taught you that on the trading floor at Goldman, Sachs, you don’t fool me," I said. Terry grinned and felled another telephone pole.

We carried four and five foot lengths of pole to fill a culvert on a creek that was washed out by Irene.

The next day Terry emailed me to say the Parks people have been all over him. We were out of line. There’s creosote in the poles. He’s got to move them all out.

I wrote back, No good deed goes unpunished, didn’t they teach you that lesson at Goldman?

Terry wrote back to say, he's named after his grandfather, Edwin Posner, who was Chairman of the American Stock Exchange twice, because the government asked him the second time to clean up corruption.

Well Terry, you've moved up in my book.

5.

I needed to borrow my friend’s hammer drill, the guy who broke his neck. He lives two-and-a-half miles from me, and I’ve tried to look in on him every day or so. For a while my wife arranged a schedule for friends to bring him meals. But he's healed well, and now he’s able enough not to need anyone to cook for him.

I called him on new year's day and said, I’ll take away your garbage if I can borrow that hammer drill. Sure, he said.

I stayed to watch some of the football game then went in the back for two big bags of garbage. Can I take them through the house? I asked. Sure, he said.

I hit the Christmas tree going past it and an ornament shattered. A big one.

He said, Oh hell, my favorite, my great-grandmother gave it to us.

I got on my knees to clean it up and my fingers trembled as I tore open the garbage bag to stick the shards in. I felt like hell. I felt so bad I didn’t ask for the hammer drill after all. When I got home I told my wife and she consoled me. It was the first day of the new year and I’d already crapped it up. I’d resolved to be orderly, I'd crapped it up. She said, You’ve been a good friend to him, don’t worry.

In the morning she was on-line looking for antique Christmas ornaments. I went to my desk and set up the paypal to buy one from Estonia for $40. Me, buying Christmas ornaments on January 2.

Then my wife called out to me in a sharp voice. A something-wrong voice. I went into her office. She had called my friend to tell him how shitty I felt, and he told her, Didn’t he get that I was joking? That was a nothing ornament. 

Later I heard my wife telling the story on me. This is how dramatic Phil is, she said. Or, this is how gullible. I’ve never been streetsmart either-- another of my resolutions.

I still needed that hammer drill. I called my friend and offered to move his logpile into the house for him. I drove down. I was going to grab that drill.

h/t The Awl's 15 Most Delightful Internet Films of 2011 post for the videos. Here are some more: