The Forward's Marissa Brostoff has a good piece on the Lehman family, celebrated in Stephen Birmingham's book Our Crowd, which is frittering away for all the usual Tolstoyan reasons. But obviously assimilation is playing its part:
“We had everybody at this reunion from Wendy Vanderbilt to Matthew
and Adam Bronfman, both of whom have become very religious,” Loeb said,
suggesting the religious spectrum that the Lehman clan now spans. Once
strictly Reform Jewish, family members are now related by marriage to
WASP-ish families such as the Vanderbilts and strongly affiliated
Jewish families like the Bronfmans.
…The
society Birmingham depicted was solemn, cloistered and perfectly
groomed, walled off from both the WASP upper crust that rejected Jews
and the Jewish hoi polloi.
It's my hunch that the Bronfman position is the exception. It seems to me that the physics of success in the U.S. is the more dough you have, the more pressure there is on you to let pretty girls and boys of other persuasions into the fancy bedrooms. E.g., the class mixing in Goodbye, Columbus.
To restate the position of this blog: I'm not urging anyone to assimilate. You are perfectly free to wall yourself off from anyone. It's a free country. I dig Utah. I dig the Amish and their cute buggies. This blog is opposed to Amish setting policy re the highway system. That's my exception. If you're going to wield public power, particularly over Middle East policy, then you cannot issue edicts of ethnic discrimination to your children. Especially if those children aren't in the armed forces. I'm looking for the lines here… A friend cooed on the phone yesterday that I'm tortured. Okeydoke, I guess I am.
