The Arizona horror reveals a philo-Semitic nation. The emotional center of last night’s memorial service was the stricken, trembling figure of astronaut Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords’s husband. An entire country identifies with his love for a Jewish woman.
Giffords’s aide for community outreach who was slain at her side is reported to be Jewish–Gabriel Zimmerman– and even Palin’s stupid blood libel comment is evidence of philo-Semitism, inasmuch as I heard many Jews on television last night piously lecturing their fellow citizens about why it was offensive to say this. (And maybe Palin learned it from hanging around Bill Kristol.) Indeed, every time I turn on the TV or radio these days, I hear my landsmen telling the country how to respond to the tragedy. David Remnick and David Brooks on Charlie Rose, Joe Klein and David Corn and Howard Fineman and Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Robert Siegel on NPR talks reverently of the mourning prayer in Giffords’s Reform synagogue, and pronounces the Hebrew right, and the late Debbie Friedman is then heard singing it. Mark Potok was on NPR bashing the right.
Yesterday on Terry Gross’s NPR show “Fresh Air,” she was asking Joel and Ethan Coen all about their religious education, and why they didn’t stay observant. No, the Coens weren’t talking about the Giffords case, but what I’m saying is that Jewish culture is now the wainscoting of the establishment. Americans admire success, and who wouldn’t want to be Jewish?
Over the Christmas holidays my wife’s niece told me she wanted to go on birthright, and how could she get in, could she lie that Granny is Jewish? Then my wife said for the second time in a few months that she wants to convert. Why? I want to be in the club, she said; I want to be able to register an opinion on these big questions only Jews get to answer. It’s not easy to get in, I told her, they make you do a million jumping jacks.
There is a giant fear inside the Jewish community– borne of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that showed that more than half of young Jews are marrying non-Jews– that Jews are going the way of the Dodo. This is called the continuity crisis. Or, The Vanishing American Jew, as Dershowitz put it. I used to feel guilty about marrying out for this reason. I was helping to end the tribe. The line was that America was doing what Hitler was incapable of doing, or that you could only call yourself Jewish if your grandchildren are Jewish.
I realize now that this is a load of horsefeathers. If you study history, you know you’d have to be a fool to make predictions about tribal survival. Groups rise, others fall. As Shlomo Sand shows, conversion to Judaism made Jewish #s soar in north Africa. As Jerry Muller shows, prosperity and hygiene made Jewish #s soar in the 1700s. In 1920 Isaac Babel went with the Russian army command through the tormented Jewish villages of Poland and saw the extermination of the Jews before his eyes. Little did he know. Jews are today among the most successful people in America. If you think that means the end of ’em, you’re nuts.
