I've been on Cape Cod for the last few days and had a few more observations about elite east coast culture.
The impression I had earlier this summer of cohesion of Jews and gentiles in the ruling class is just confirmed. I don't think it's a completely easy mix culturally– yet– but there's real cohesion. The tribes are getting along, at least the rich members of same; they have the serious business of running the country to do, and they share the table, the kids are working together. We were driving across Martha's Vineyard the other night and one of my relatives said, Well, Edgartown is considered the old WASP part of the Vineyard and now we're in Chilmark and that's the Jewish intellectual side, Alan Dershowitz has a house near here. (Dershowitz! I cried; my heart goes pitterpat when I just hear his name.). But the stereotype didn't completely hold. I saw a lot of mixing. Of couples, of parties. I see Jews and non-Jews of my generation beyond the intermarried who enjoy one another's company, who mix club tennis and conservation easements and Yiddish without raising an eyebrow, who don't really think about this stuff, or not apparently, and not nearly to the degree that I do. Seems like real progress.
It's funny to go from the richer parts of M.V. to the more democratic precincts. My wife and I got a boat out of Oak Bluffs yesterday, where lots of black people live, "and Methodists," as another relative put it. Though they too are obviously pretty well off. On the boat I was tickled to see how much blacks and whites were interacting in the age of Obama. You could feel the mutual respect, there are the beginnings of colorblindness. When a black mother told her daughter to stop making the peace sign everytime she took a picture–well, I've been there, you go girl. I know this is a blue-state elite bubble, but it's a good feeling, and I don't think it's ever going away, it's the American dream unfolding for all the world to see.
I still think of driving that night through Mr. Dershowitz's neighborhood, so far from his humble Brooklyn origins, stopping for cocktails on the great lawn of a friend with a buttload from the schmatte trade, running into another fancy New York friend on the dock at Menemsha, etc. I'm not going to get more specific because there are privacy issues, but today I have this very powerful feeling about Jewishness and its gifts. We are a minority and we are doing so so fucking well in America–do you think that for maybe one second we could lift our foot off the Palestinians' necks?
