This Thanksgiving my wife and I went to her cousin’s place in suburban
Philadelphia
, not all that far from my parents’ house, and since my wife’s sister and her family from Connecticut were also coming, we made a plan for the four of them to spend the night at my parents’ house. This was emotionally loaded for me. My family and my inlaws have basically not set eyes on one another since my wedding 16 years ago. We’re from two tribes. My wife is a Philadelphia WASP, and my family is very Jewish. My wife and I go in and out of each group, but unlike the marriages in which inlaws commingle, we never try to mix them.
My wife and I drove down to
Philadelphia
in the big traffic on Wednesday night, and on Thanksgiving morning we sat around the breakfast table talking with my parents. My activism on Israel/Palestine has brought me closer to my parents. It’s now the only problem in my relationship with my parents, the only disagreement. So though we avoid the subject, we also always seem to find a way to bring it up, kick the can down the street. For instance, my mother was talking about a friend’s memorial service back in
Baltimore
, where I grew up, and I said Well they were assimilating Jews. My mother agreed, then I said the history of Jewish assimilation was a long and great one. My mother said, “It’s a long one, but it’s not a great one.” My mother’s funny, I had to laugh. It would have been mean to add that 4/6 of her children married nonJews (one of whom converted, so I guess that means half married “out”), because my mother thinks about that a lot already, and it concerns her. But I did throw in that this was one reason I was so critical of Zionism. Zionism is based on the idea that Jews are insecure in western societies. That’s why you need a Jewish state, after all, to harbor the Jews. While assimilationism is based on the idea that Jews can do fine in western societies. And this was my experience, we’re doing fine.
Then my father gave me his wise little smile and nodded and mumbled a few ironical words about just how fine we were doing. My father remembers anti-Semitism in his own life. He doesn’t have a lot of faith in liberal promises to Jews, and has an understanding of Jewish achievement in central Europe before the Holocaust. I think he’s a closet Zionist. He’s never been there, and he’s very anti-religious, but his sense of Jewish identity is profound, as a scientist, an intellectual, and someone who has never felt very comfortable in American society. My experience is completely opposite, and it’s for this reason as much as anything that I resist the demands that Zionists make on American Jews, for endless support. When will they be their own goddamn state, and learn to live with their neighbors, rather than expect us to back up their contempt and resistance forever and shape our foreign policy to fit their view of the Middle East? I didn’t say any of this.
But as my mother and wife continued to talk about family and psychology, I sat there reading the Jewish Exponent, the Jewish newspaper in
Philadelphia
. It is filled with the sort of tribal self-obsession that drives me nuts. The editor wrote about Soviet Jewry, our greatest triumph, freeing the Jews of Russia. (always: Jews for Jews.) Then a big article by two congresswomen about how
Israel
shouldn’t have to make “painful sacrifices” to achieve peace. Painful sacrifices referring to the settlements. Is that sacrifices? Or is that justice? What is wrong with my country that we frame the issues in such a way? Then there was an article all about rage on the part of hardline
Israel
supporters against a letter being sent out by AIPAC to Congress that called for aid to the Palestinian Authority. The main guy who is upset about this is Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul who has given $55 million to birthright
Israel
, the program that sends young Jews to
Israel
for free. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Adelson is thought to be the main backer of Freedoms’ Watch, the pro-war group that has formed in the last few months, which The American Conservative and JTA have pointed out is mostly Jewish. Lately Mother Jones has reported that Freedoms Watch seems to be working closely with a group called the Israel Project, which is doing focus groups on Americans’ reactions to a war with
Iran
. This is the simple reason that I do this blog: that "the religious left," as I call it, American Jews who are devoted to the Jewish state, are distorting American foreign policy and American Jewish identity, and Americans have to start talking about it.
My parents were having Thanksgiving at my sister’s house in the
Main Line
, and when my wife and I took off in early afternoon to visit one of her cousins, my mother asked me about my wife’s sister’s family. She was getting her house ready to put them up. She wasn’t nervous; she’s just aflutter whenever there’s a lot of planning. I went through the personalities and then said, They’re kind of WASPy but very warm. I love my wife’s family but I can also be anthropological about it, coming from such a different tribe. I understand that a lot of my wife’s culture reads as pure gentile, no matter how sophisticated she is, or how many times she’s been to
Africa
.
The house we had Thanksgiving at that night was a humble suburban one, very unpretentious, very determined to put on no airs at all. We said grace. We all held hands and when Betsy, who I’m just about closest to of all the cousins (she lived in Syria for a while and when I visited her in Damascus, used the code word “Disneyland” for Israel when we were walking the streets, lest it could cause anger, Americans chattering about Israel), Betsy told us to all hold hands and send a squeeze around the room, then her mother said, “Let’s give thanks that we’re all here and the table is so laden.” Short and pithy—the way my wife’s family are. We said Amen and then ate.
The alienation I used to feel in my wife’s family over its different mode of being is over. A lot of my feelings seem as dated as a Woody Allen movie. I don’t think many kids in the next generation go around like I did with a giant Jew/WASP radar gun. Jews and WASPs are involved in the power structure in an intimate way now, I feel that the next generation accepts this and goes forward. The evening had a Norman Rockwell quality. There was a real sense of ampleness. Halfway through the night our host told a story about a feud with her neighbor, involving a dog bite and a lawsuit many years ago, and then finally about five years ago, she got drunk and called the neighbor up and said, I don’t like you and you don’t like me, and that’s alright, but we should be civil to one another. Our kids don’t even talk to one another. That’s not right. At least be civil. It was a moving moment, a statement of real generosity and largeness of spirit.
Also, a neighbor who is undergoing chemo had been invited, and when he left the family pressed a bag of turkey on him. Then a couple minutes after he went out he came back in to say that another neighbor who had been on her deathbed all that week had just died. My wife’s cousins had actually visited the deathbed earlier that day to say goodbye to the woman. You could look out their front door and see the grieving family gathered, through their living room window, and one guy holding a baby and talking to it. Very Hallmark.
Anyway, it was nearly 10 when my brother-in-law sidled over to me and said that his family were going to drive back to
Connecticut
, not stay the night. I felt a burden lift from my shoulders. I dont think I’m quite ready to meld families. It would be loaded for me and my wife. I would be afraid of silent judgment on one side or the other, which I’d feel. My inlaws are all sophisticated and philosemitic, but I just don’t know. My sister in law always buttonholes me, When do I get invited to a seder? This time when she did, her daughter said, I got invited to one last week. It happens every Friday right, right? No, that’s Shabbat, I said. Anyway, I don’t know that everyone’s ready for a great mingling. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for my wife’s sister to come to a seder first, or my smart sharp niece. There are always a couple other gentiles there for one reason or another, like my wife, or my sisters’ husbands, they could slide in that way, form relationships with my sisters. A step at a time.
Two other things happened on Thanksgiving that affected my mood about all this. One is that I had a phone conversation with a guy who knows the financial community and he said that Bruce Kovner, the secretive chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, had just bought a parcel of land in
California
near Carpentiria, adjoining land owned by Kevin Costner, for $70 million. A whole bluff on the Pacific. The
New York
hedge fund guy, turning west to Santa Barbara. I kept thinking about how much Bruce Kovner is making that he can spend $70 million on real estate in a state far from his own. And Sheldon Adelson spending $60 million on birthright and how many million to enable an
Iran
war. How much Jewish wealth is there in our politics, on the religious left? When I got up the next morning in my former bedroom, I picked up Philip Roth’s wonderful sociological novel Goodbye Columbus, which came out 50 years ago, about Jewish aspiration from
Newark
to Short Hills in the 50s. That’s over baby. We done aspired and transpired. How many Jews still live in
Newark
? Yet Jews still seem to be locked into this self-image that we’re middle class/upper middle class, to protect ourselves from the truth, that we’re a powerful elite.
Then I thought about the deep wound in our republic now, between people of wealth whose children have never thought of serving in Iraq and people who are hanging on through the economic transformation and whose kids might actually have to go to Iran if that disaster happens, and I thought about Jewishness being on one side of that class divide, and what that’s doing, unconsciously, to the Jewish experience and mind. Our society’s splitting down the middle. I want a Jewish intellectual presence in the populist American movement. That
Baltimore
family my mother had talked about–the assimilating one with the memorial service–I remember one of their Thanksgivings was ruined in 1972 by one of their radical sons starting an argument over
Vietnam
. I want Jews to call out the Adelsons and the Kovners of
Iraq, and ruin a Thanksgiving meal now….
One other thing happened at Thanksgiving I want to end this post with. I always talk to my wife’s aunt about politics, so I asked her about the new Philadelphia mayor, and she went on and on about how great he is, how smart and forceful and talented. Michael Nutter. He wears glasses, and is very smart, she said. The next morning I asked my father about Nutter and he also went on and on about him, saying virtually the same things my wife’s aunt had. How smart and forceful. My father and my wife’s aunt may be from different tribes, but classwise they’re identical, both privileged people in the upper crust of American life; and their opinions about Nutter were identical. Anyway, then I opened the New York Times at the breakfast table, and saw that they had a big article about Nutter, and his picture was there, and he was black. I was stunned. Neither my wife’s aunt nor my father had mentioned that, neither thought it very important. I love
America.
Tribal stuff doesn’t have to matter here.
