Yesterday Mike Desch, author of the new book, Power and Military Effectiveness, the Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism, knowing of my fascination with issues of dual loyalty, passed along this exchange from Haaretz. In it the writer David Samuels speaks of the claims of Jewish identity in the age of Israel. It's a high-minded conversation. I felt I had stepped into it halfway, and asked Desch to interpret. He said, "I think that Samuels is arguing that Jews and other minorities face a 'creative tension' living in America because the Jewish and American master narratives are out of sync in important respects. Here are the money grafs from Samuels:"
“As a writer, I believe that people live through stories that are
handed down through the ages by parents and grandparents and that we pass
on in turn to our children.
Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of
abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each
individual has the capacity for finding God’s grace within him or herself,
and can only find it by being born again — independent of family
history and ties. While you don’t have to be a Christian to accept
historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the
future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in
their history and, I would argue, in their essence.
The stories Jews tell ourselves are different. We tell ourselves
stories about our unbroken connection to a common set of tribal ancestors to
whom all Jews are connected by blood. We tell ourselves about the
unbroken chain of interpretation that connects today’s Torah sages to the
medieval commentators to the sages of the Gemarra and Mishna to the
revelation given to Moses on Har Sinai. We tell ourselves stories about our
survival as a people through thousands of years of exile and
persecution in which we still claim to be able to see the hand of God.
I don’t believe that American Jews are likely to spy for Israel, or
that being Shomer Shabbat is un-American. I don’t believe that the way
Jews understand ourselves and our relation to society is a superficial
question of customs and manners (although manners too can be important).
I am talking about something deeper. The ways that Jews see the
individual and his or her place in the world contradicts core American
beliefs about abolishing the past, living in the future, and making yourself
up from scratch. Sometimes we acknowledge this contradiction to
ourselves, and sometimes we pretend that we think and see the world the same
way as everyone else. Sometimes we acknowledge our difference to
ourselves and to our friends but not to our Christian neighbors. We are double
agents. That’s what it means to be a Jew in America.
As an American Jew, you can chose to make sense of the inherent
contradictions of our existence in a creative way, which is what I try to do
in my own life. Or you can simply live your live as a Jew who randomly
happens to reside in America as opposed to Israel or France, like the
ultra-orthodox do. Or you can embrace mainstream American notions of
personal identity and cease being Jewish in any meaningful way. Finally,
one can gratefully acknowledge the contributions of one’s long-ago
Jewish ancestors (see: John Kerry, William Cohen, Madeleine Albright,
etc.).”
To which Desch adds, “I think that this is the most profound discussion of the issue of
‘dual loyalty’ I’ve ever seen. Of course the big lacuna in the last
paragraph was the pre-Holocaust reform Judaism project, which is part and
parcel of America’s Liberal approach to religion based on a separation
of church and state. Still and all, very thought provoking.”
My own response to this is to free associate: I feel guilty because I’m assimilating, I feel that when people invoke a definition of Jewish identity that is so ethnocentric, I get scared. I ran away from that stuff as a kid, it was claustrophobic. Still find it claustrophobic. I think people tell themselves stories all the time, not just historical biblical mythologies, and American Jews can tell American Jewish stories too. Intermarriage is a very American story. Jews and WASPs being at the same powerful Washington/NY law firms and having the grace and common sense to let their children socialize and even go to bed together is such a story. Clinton’s philosemitic administration is such a story. German-Jewish antizionism is such a story. If those stories make me assimilating I say Well dammit I will go to hell then. Like Huck who broke the law to save Jim, I broke the law to marry my wife. No I am not telling everyone to do that. Still it will continue to seem attractive to Jewish kids, especially when the alternative seems to be dual loyalty to a militarized state that has completely erased the humanity of Palestinians. Samuels is a real smart guy. I note that his entry about this dialogue on Jewcy is titled: American Jews Are Double Agents: Deal With It. No thank you.
