I love a lot of goyim. That might be the essence of my assimilationist problem. If you love some goyim—any goyim– then the idea of Jewish difference and exceptionalism becomes very hard to maintain intellectually and in your life choices. It’s for this reason that the American Jewish committee used to offer a little test of Jewish identity that included the question, How many of your close friends are Jewish? The AJC understood. If you start associating with them too much, then the party’s over. Indeed, one of the strategies of the Jewish revival movement of the last 15 years or so was to separate Jewish youth from the goyim (which is Hebrew for “the nation”), through Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps. This wasn’t just about getting Jews to marry Jews, but getting Jews to associate with other Jews. And surely one of the causes of Jewish revival was fear of people like me, assimilationists, eroding the bonds of community.
I have a friend I’ll call Jim whose father was anti-Semitic. He’s told me about stuff his dad said, so I know that. We’re both outdoorsy and go camping together. When I started doing this stuff with him, a Jewish friend said to me, “Phil Jews don’t go camping.” It was a non-joke joke, but a warning about the tribal boundary. Of course it only made me want to go camping more.
A few years back my friend Jim and I went to Baxter state park in Maine to commemorate the anniversary of Thoreau’s visit to Mt. Katahdin. We were both reading The Maine Woods, a classic. When Thoreau got up most of the way on Katahdin he cried out “Contact, contact.” It’s an ecstatic religious pantheist moment in literature; and ultimately Jim and I went to the shoulder of the mountain where we thought that had happened, in the fields of great gray blocks that compose the magnificent mountain.
We had met up with about a dozen Thoreau enthusiasts in Massachusetts. The first night we stayed at their house, in a tent in the yard, then we drove up with them the six or eight hours to the park. Jim had only met them over the phone or on-line. So it was a little odd to meet them in actuality. They were more Thoreau enthusiasts than outdoorsmen.
That wasn’t a problem till the first night and we were in a hut they had engaged near the foot of Katahdin. The hut was crowded with paunchy enthusiasts, one of whom snored like a guy in the movies, on both the inhale and the exhale, and the exhale sounded like a whoopy cushion. It was comic except that we were trying to sleep. Jim finally took his sleeping bag outside and slept on the ground.
From an outdoors standpoint it was a marvelous weekend. We climbed a bunch of small hills and then Katahdin, via the famous knife edge ridge. We saw a family of moose from 100 yards.
On the last day at Baxter, Jim deconstructed my personality. He was sick of me, and we were sitting outside on the little porch in the sunlight. “You have two modes of being with other people, and they’re both weird,” he said. “The first mode is hail-fellow-well met. Like when you went into the outdoor place and when you left you said, ‘Have a good one.’ Like you were just one of the guys. You’re not just one of the guys. So that’s affected, and you might be fooling yourself, but no one else. Then the other mode you have is when you just grill someone with questions. You tell yourself it’s journalistic but it’s not. It just weirds people out, it’s so intense. You control the whole conversation and it’s not a natural conversation.”
It was quite a dressing down. I think Jim meant it in a military sort of way, that he was going to take apart my personality to the ground and then I could rebuild it. I didn’t get at all defensive, I just registered it. Jim had an SUV and on the way back he drank a lot of Maker’s Mark. I remember we were screaming down the Connecticut Turnpike late at night and he was slobbering Makers, which to me is extremely alien behavior.
It took me a while to take in Jim’s advice. My wife agreed with things he’d said. She’d been trying to tell me some of the same things. Was it effective? Yes. In years to come I began to change my personality, partly under his influence. I stopped asking so many questions, I tried not to mimic someone else’s class background, I stopped being so forcibly gregarious.
In the “Jew as Pariah,” written in 1944, Hannah Arendt dismissed the idea of assimilation. She said that the assimilationist ideal was: “if only the Jews would not persist in banding together, assimilation would become a fairly simple process.” But it never worked out that way. Jews always stuck out, and were punished for that. Assimilation was a form of utopianism. “The Jew cannot be a human being either as a parvenu using his elbows or as a pariah voluntarily spurning its gifts.” All Jews were rowing madly in the same “angry sea.” They were excluded from “political realities.”
The most important points in that paragraph are that it was written in 1944, and in America I don’t think we are excluded from “political realities” as parvenues. It seems to me that my entire adult life has been engaged in the Jewish question, American style, navigating the assimilationist line: Can I be a Jew and an American, can I be wholly integrated in American culture and neither fetishize my Jewishness nor let go of it but just be it and American and see where everything goes? I realize that my answer to that has been, Yes. And if the Jewishness goes out the window, I can’t really care, because actually Americanness is absorbing my Jewishness and being changed by it. And therefore to insist on my Jewishness at that point is tribal allegiance. It’s the reason that my mother’s best friend moved their family to Israel—to avoid intermarriage. In a sense, to avoid American history. Or to insist on the primacy of Jerusalem (Jewish identity) over Athens (the liberal western one).
The love of goyim has been around for a long time, and in the course of history many Jews have done, or tried to do, what I am doing. Seduced by Athens, they’ve basically crossed the line. Many have been punished for doing so. Arendt was influenced in her thinking by the death of her good friend Walter Benjamin who, fleeing the Holocaust, was stopped at a border in Spain because he was Jewish, and apparently committed suicide in 1940. Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem, the Zionist historian, had unsuccessfully urged Benjamin to immigrate to Palestine years before; and he was able to derive some satisfaction from the failure of Benjamin’s assimilation. “Benjamin [never] lived ‘directly’ immersed in Jewish concerns,” Scholem wrote. “On the contrary, had he followed his reflections on Judaism he would have painted himself into a very troublesome corner. I would say that by distancing himself from Judaism he distanced himself from his own nature as well, and hence from the unfolding of Jewishness within him.”
Of course, I and many other Jews are now in that “troublesome corner.” The truth of assimilation is of course that the “unfolding of Jewishness within” those who assimilate, or within their children, will cease to take place. And anyone who stands up for even his own assimilation has to acknowledge that grief. I’d say my answer today is the reflection that some years ago I and a good friend traveled a great distance over three days with one another because of a book, an American book, of a religious character.
