The Hyphenated Life

My family came to the U.S. from Jewish Russia, in several waves, roughly a century ago. Soon enough, the phrase Jewish-American begged a question: Should the emphasis be on the first or second word?

As a young man, I had no doubt. I would have said (homage to Bellow) “I am an American, Cincinnati born.”

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Now, while I certainly live in the hyphen, I reverse the emphasis. I am a Jew, American born.

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As an American Jew in relation to war in Israel, I’m estranged, yet attached. Perhaps the “yet” is unnecessary.  Perhaps estrangement assumes attachment.

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Though in one sense it feels radical, in another sense it seems the height of obvious that we must separate Jewish interests from the state of Israel, and certainly from the state as presently governed.

It feels radical because a sense of entwinement with Israel has been so fundamental in my Jewish milieu. As a child, I remember how my grandfather’s orthodox congregation would stir to life, during sleepy services, when Israeli bonds were sold. My father regularly went on “missions,” i.e., visits to Israel arranged for contributors to Jewish causes.

My father was also a frequent critic of Israeli policy. For free societies, such contradictions are a feature not a bug. I would not call myself anti-Israeli, no more than I would call myself anti-American. My dissent is American.

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Still, the fundamental question must be asked. Is Israel good for the Jews?

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I want to take enormous care around this subject, because of its importance, because of its complexity, and because feelings run so high on all sides. When I say “take care” I don’t mean avoid clarity or resort to platitudes. I mean “take care” in the sense of recognizing the enormous pools of human pain and the primal fear, in all quarters, that our basic needs for dignity, for safety, and for vital freedoms won’t be met—or, worse, will be violently abrogated.

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I have this fear.

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However distant a Jew may be from historical persecution, it doesn’t feel far. For one thing there is “inter-generational trauma,” i.e., pain lastingly embodied. The pogroms of Jewish Russia are as faint as steam-ships to my imagination. Yet they are also in my shin, liver, and thumb.

Also, history tells us that a wheel turns, consistently, predictably, a kind of primal Jewish story arc. (I recommend the first chapter of Peter Hayes’s book, Why?) The Jew flees trouble; finds respite as a stranger in a strange land—perhaps an uneasy solace, perhaps a meaningful home, perhaps riches and acclaim. Yet, his strangeness remains. This position may excite varied reactions—a lure toward it, a distaste or animus. There’s an ambient sense of Jew as other, though it may be subtle, like a room tone.

Then, though, the wheel turns; times turn unusually difficult for the native people of that land; old stories resurface of the Jew as the problematic other—not just trouble, but the trouble. Charismatic sociopaths take to that story, like ants to honey.

Where are we in the story now? In thousands of years of Jewish history, I suppose, no place has been as hospitable as the United States in 2023. Yet, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center poll, nearly seven in ten Republicans believe in some version of the Great Replacement Theory, which posits that Jews machinate to dilute the power of native-born Americans as part of an insidious and nefarious plot. NPR reports, “The speed with which this false narrative has tipped into American discourse since a French ethnonationalist first coined the term roughly a decade ago has stunned even extremism experts who have tracked the spread of hate-filled ideologies.”

GRT = Trumpism = “Jewish Space Laser”/Marjorie Taylor Greenism. It represents the most explicitly anti-Jewish platform¹ in modern politics. Trump’s core argument is that he stands with native whites against “globalists” (i.e., the Jews, their accomplices and puppets) who have “bled this country dry.”

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Many of my fellow Jews still feel more American than Jewish. This, to quarrel with orthodoxy of any kind, is very Jewish.

Do you know the joke of the Jewish father who asks his boy what Jews believe in? “I know,” the boy says, “it’s it the father, the son and the Holy Ghost?”

“No,” the father cries, “that’s Christians.”

“I know,” the boy says. “It’s that all of existence is maya and we must take refuge in dharma.”

“No,” the father shouts. “That’s the Buddhists. Okay, son, for the last time: There’s only one God and we don't believe in him.”

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Very often, Jews identify with their current home more than any ethereal history. A Madrid Jew in the 14th century felt … Spanish. A Berlin Jew in the 19th century felt … German. I feel American.

Yet I am a stranger here. That’s my nature.

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Many American Jews have cousins, sisters, colleagues in Israel. Yet many others are connected primarily by an abstract sense of future historical need. My grandfather and father were ardent Zionists, at bottom, because they wanted to know, if another Lindberg arose and did better than the first, that they’d have a place to scurry off to. Their second-worst fear—the worst being actually rounded up by the Nazis—was sitting on a boat like those tragic Jews in the St. Louis, the 900-plus humans on the “Voyage of the Damned” to whom the Cubans and Americans refused entry. Many were later killed in Europe by Hitler’s armies.

My point is that a common condition of world Jewry is an estrangement from its persecution yet an attachment to its contingency, a furious effort to recognize something that they scan scarcely imagine. 

Let me get at this estrangement another way.

On June 12, 1929, a Jewish girl was born in Frankfurt to parents who had been in Germany for generations, in one of those respites I’ve referred to. Europe’s Jews were “emancipated,” i.e., freed from many of the most restrictive laws governing them, in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, they found many of their brethren established in mercantile, banking, entertainment, and the arts. Jewish Vienna in this period was a golden age, as was Jewish Prague and Jewish Berlin, and so this Jewish girl in Frankfurt was, many still thought in 1929, a lucky Jew indeed.

Five years later, on  September 21, 1934, a Jewish boy was born in Montreal. His mother had emigrated from Jewish Russia; his father’s parents had come by the same route. These Jews, then, had a much more precarious perch in the affairs of Canada than their cousins in Germany.

Yet, then, suddenly, the Canadian Jews were in the blessed realm—while their old world brethren were licked by a hot tongue from the jaws of hell.

The girl and boy were both evidently artistic; both would become known for their writing. But the girl, Anne Frank, we mostly think of as a diarist of genocide.

What interests me here is—what does the boy, Leonard Cohen, do with this information? By what strange divinity had he ended up in Montreal, and the girl in Frankfurt fled to Amsterdam murdered at Bergen-Belsen? Would his luck last? Though in a bounty of food, art, and with a Jewish charm irresistible to shiksa beauties, was this just a dream from which he would wake into the reality of Anne Frank’s murder?

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What is a Jew? Any effort to clarify meets obstacles. You could say Judaism is a religion, yet many Jews are atheists or subscribe to other ethical or religious traditions. You could say it’s an ethnicity but many Jewish people are not born into Jewish blood, or have varieties of ethnic influences physiologically. You could say it’s a sensibility—and this is where I come down; I’m a Leonard Cohen Jew. I’m a Lenny Bruce “Jewish or Goyish” Jew. But I’ll concede before anyone has to point this out that this is a position born out of privilege. If someone tries to kill, humiliate, or dispossess me as a Jew, it won’t be because of my fucking sensibility.

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I’m scared of being killed, humiliated, or dispossessed. My Jewish brethren like Ram Sass tell me this is a function of an identity attachment with my body, which, alas, is true. I’ll keep working on that (i.e., listening to Ram Dass podcasts in my bathtub). Nevertheless, I prefer to not be murdered or plundered, and I especially prefer that this fate not await my son, so I have an ear and eye out for the Jew haters, a broad group which, not incidentally—it’s the opposite of incidental—include the major, currently essential, supporters of the state of Israel as it is currently run.

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Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu who told Christians United for Israel that they constituted the best friends his government had in the United States. He is correct. A majority of American Jews oppose Netanyahu’s core policies but he is 100% aligned, on policy grounds, with the Christian Zionists.

Christian Zionists have played an essential role in creating and defending the Jewish state in historical Palestine from the beginning. Lord Balfour was a self-declared Christian Zionist. So was President Truman. Christian Zionists in the U.S. today create a bedrock of financial and political support for Netanyahu’s government.

Why? Because they believe, in a theology called dispensational premillenialism,the Jewish people must rule their historical homeland in order that Armageddon will come, the Anti-Christ will manifest, and Jesus will return to earth, to sit on King David’s throne in Jerusalem, where he will rule for a clean thousand years. In this return, called the rapture, everyone who is not born again to Christ will be killed.

Including the Jews.

Well, some Jews will convert on the spot and be saved. Evangelicals have speculated on the numbers; it ranges from 144,000 to roughly a third of the world Jewish population. In other words, they imagine a Rapture Holocaust in which somewhere between 10 and 16 million Jews will die.

This, of course, would far outdo Hitler who, not incidentally, is not a bad guy in this Christian story. By hunting the Jews, he hastened survivors to flee to Israel, which started the clock of End Times.

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“Support Israel right now as she fights the barbarians at her gates,” Christians United for Israel declares. They are emphasizing the first piece of their story, where Jews must subdue the Arabs. But they are not coy about the second part, where Christ himself subdues the Jews.

At its core, this is an Anti-Jewish Zionism, as Trump’s certainly is. On Rosh Hashanah, he posted this: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!”

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I am out of time. I am in a fog. I come back to time and see a horror unfolding that stretches my capacity to fathom it. I keep looking around my house and imagining it after a bombing. I grieve for the people afflicted. I keep asking, but no one is answering, “What does it mean to ‘eliminate’ Hamas?” I pray for the capacity to stay aware and hold hope. I look for spaces to gather in affinity. I take momentary refuge in this thought:

Our fears are of the other. Yet just — these — fears bind us to the other. The Arab who fears the Jew will abrogate his humanity and the Jew who fears the Arab will abrogate his humanity have just this in common—their fear.

Forgive me this fantasy, that we may share our fears while tears pour over our faces, then splash our faces with cold holy water, and sit together over plates of fresh falafel.

Love,

Josh

p.s. Etgar Keret, “‘I Feel a Human Deterioration”;

p.s. This is the most incomplete I’ve ever felt while hitting send on a post. Yet I am due to repair to the kitchen of my intact house to prepare dinner for my Jewish-Danish son. I will make him burgers, fries, and green beans in the air fryer.

May God bless you all.

1. I forswear the term “anti-semitic” though because, as a stickler for etymology, I have a problem with a phrase purporting to describe Jew hatred that was in fact fashioned and popularized by Jew haters. I am also a stickler for clarity, and the phrase “anti-semitism” is incoherent at its core.