I had a day filled with love of my own people, the Jews, yesterday. First, a fairly powerful media guy called me to apologize for having chewed me out 2 weeks back over a story I wrote for New York Magazine. I can’t name names because it would only hurt people. But the guy’s call came out of the blue and was a pretty pure act of grace. I was humbled, and stammered my thanks. Then I was painting cabinets in my new house with NPR on when I heard Daniel Zwerdling‘s piece on Iraq veterans with PTSD whose lives are in turmoil. Quiet, precise, horrifying, it was as good as journalism gets. No ego in it, just endless compassion for the vets. Then I went down to have dinner at a restaurant with a friend and the first person I saw there was an old leftwing lawyer I know who walks with a cane. He stops and shakes everyone’s hand and in a soft voice wishes them the best of the season. He’s bent by age but generous. I’m always moved to see him.
This morning I got an email from a friend speaking fearfully of the possible Weimarization of America in which the Jews will be singled out as an elite. I can see all his historical analogies. Germany was humiliated in WW1 and a fascist arose. Jews were successful then, even as the German economy faltered. Today the yawning gap between rich and poor here is staggering and wrong. My friend’s chilling email is the best answer to the great question that Tony Judt framed a year back in his talk at NYU:
Why is the American Jewish community so determined to convince itself
that we are living in 1938? Why does the most successful, the most well
integrated, the most culturally and politically influential, the most
socially and economically well situated Jewish community since the late
years of the Roman republic, why is it so worried about the demon of
anti-Semitism—more worried than the Jewish community in any other
country I know and certainly more worried than Israel itself? It’s an
American issue.
The answer to Judt is that Jews have a long historical memory and that the incredible privilege my people are now experiencing causes anxiety. All the Jews I found so moving yesterday are privileged people. Two are media powers. Two are rich. My lawyer friend has a beautiful modern house overlooking the river. Even Zwerdling, I imagine he’s doing well. I don’t have any answer to this. Compassion for the suffering of others isn’t the same as experiencing that suffering; the elite’s children aren’t going into uniform. One thing historians say is that history doesn’t repeat in the same way, that historical analogy is always insufficient. As an optimist I like to think that privileged Americans, including empowered Jews, will figure out a new, just, democratic answer to the terrible inequities in Zwerdling’s report.
