This article first appeared on Splice Today.
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I was trying to get my son and his car pool friends into my car to go home when I was accosted in the middle of the street by a guy in a beard and antiquated black hat. “Hello!” he said. “You look Jewish! Are you Jewish?”
My flagrant nose had betrayed me; there was no point in denying it. I admitted that I was indeed Jewish. Nominally.
He took that “nominally” with good cheer. “Once a Jew, always a Jew!” he said, and handed me a card promoting some sort of Jewish goings-on, which I promptly threw away.
Chucking the card was a natural rejection of marketing such as we all perform daily (hourly?) under capitalism. But it was also, in its way, an exercise of empowerment. America lets Jews — even Jews with noses like mine — hold our identities very lightly.
But it wasn’t always that way. Even in the first part of the 1900s, not being a Jew was a lot harder than chucking a piece of advertising. My dad’s father, Manny, was heavily involved in the Jewish Community Center and an ardent Zionist; cultural Judaism shaped his life. My mom’s father, Milton, on the other hand, changed his name from Weinberger to Winters to avoid prejudice, and even converted to Christian Science for a while. Judaism was something he worked to escape.
Anti-semitism hasn’t vanished, of course. In middle school I had bullies push pennies at me in the lunch room — because Jews are greedy, get it? On my blog, I had one particularly unpleasant troll who would make occasional Jew-baiting remarks. And I suspect that the cultural association of Jewish appearance with nerdiness had something to do with my conviction through most of my school years that I was fairly unattractive (my wife — who likes skinny guys and big noses — insists I was wrong, bless her).
But a couple of incidents and a mildly negative self-image is pretty small beer compared to the history of anti-Semitism. I haven’t had to work to assimilate, like Milton did. For the most part, and without any effort on my part, people see me as white, not Jewish. I married a shiksa, and, while her Appalachian extended family was initially a little confused (“Jewish? Does that mean he’s black?”), her parents certainly couldn’t have cared less. Perhaps in part because acceptance has come so easy, I haven’t felt a need to join Jewish organizations or even be a part of a Jewish community the way Manny did. My half-goyim son went to the JCC camp in Hyde Park — but so do lots of other non-Jews, black and white. The one etiolated remnant of my cultural heritage that remains is that I call my son (and sometimes my wife) “bubaleh”— Yiddish for baby. That’s what my dad always called my mom.
Again, anti-semitism was still a major force in the lives of my grandparents. Yes, things have changed radically for African-Americans and women over the same time period — but racism and sexism are still a big deal in our culture. Anti-Semitism? Despite what the concern trolls at TNR may tell you, not so much. How’d that happen?
I think it mostly happened because of World War II. The United States’ modern image of its own virtue, and of its prominent place in the world, was forged in large part by its fight against Hitler The Nazis were defined (and not without reason) as the epitome of evil. And that evil was largely confirmed by the Holocaust. America’s self-image, in other words, is indelibly linked to its courageous opposition to murdering Jews. You can flirt with other prejudices — against women, against blacks, against Hispanics, against Muslims, against gays. But anti-Semitism is universally reviled on both left and right. That’s not to say that it doesn’t pop up on occasion — whether in Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party. But it’s virtually always a political liability — something disavowed as quickly as possible.
Six million dead is, of course, a high price to pay for the marginalization of anti-Semitism in America. Moreover, I find it unnerving that my country’s decent treatment of me is supposed to guarantee its virtue. This is especially nauseating in regard to Israel. There are various reasons for US Middle East policy, from weird evangelical millenarianism to Jewish lobbying groups to the post 9/11 anti-Muslim consensus. But I think a central reason for our support of whatever stupid thing the Israelis want to do is that America’s vision of itself as world savior is tied so closely to its vision of itself as my savior. America loves Jews like me — and since it loves Jews like me, it has the right and the responsibility to go bomb all other people everywhere forever, in the name of justice and anti-anti-Semitism, hallelujah.
America really did pick the right side in World War II. To look at the Holocaust and say, “this is really wrong” didn’t require a ton of moral insight, but is still better than the alternative. Moreover, I very much appreciate the fact that I’m allowed to be just as Jewish as I’d like and no more. My country’s done right by me. I just wish it wasn’t quite so smug about it — and that it didn’t end up being an excuse to do less right by so many others.
Is the increasing assimilation and power of American Jews (especially after WW2) not a bigger deal in terms of Israel policy than some idea about Holocaust triumphalism (if perhaps not NOT a bigger deal than the evangelical end times thing)?
Jews also did a lot to encourage race integration, which may have been a pretty unselfish form of self-help.
Noah — One day, on my way to Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles, I was briskly walking up LaBrea avenue in a predominantly Jewish section of the city. I was blissfully ignorant of my surroundings, listening to music via my ear buds, when I was suddenly stopped from behind by a young man in a traditional black outfit and hat and asked the same thing, “Are you Jewish?”
In my case, however, I told him no and he walked away.
It was pretty abrupt — almost bizarre — and in a town where muggings are common and homeless people are known to be aggressive (sometimes dangerously so), he’s lucky I didn’t deck him for sneaking up on me like that.
Bert…the thing is, without a drop in prejudice, you don’t get greater Jewish power. If you’re still considered and alien and an outsider and if people won’t give you jobs, it’s difficult to amass a very secure cultural position.
I think what people do has a huge effect on what prejudices they hold — and undertaking a massive, lengthy, in many ways nation-defining war against anti-Semitism seems to me like it was a really, really big deal. American Jewish lobbying groups matter too…but I think the Evangelical enthusiasm for Israel is continuous with, rather than some sort of aberrant exception to, the general American attitude towards Israel.
Oh, I agree that evangelicals are echoing the imperial ambitions of neoconservative/Zionist types.
I guess I think that Jewish assimilation was aided by racism as much as acceptance of any white group. But I definitely think you probably have excellent reasons for your WW2 insight.
I’d agree that America is into suffering white people.
Noah — America entered the war because of Pearl Harbor, but Churchill was pleading and cajoling anyone in the US who would listen long before Dec. 7, 1941 that the Third Reich would not stop with a conquest of Europe, but would soon turn its sights on the US. For most Americans at the time, Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe was pretty low on the radar screen — if it even registered at all.
The plight of Jews in Europe was little known to most Americans — even many Jewish Americans — in those pre-war days. Certainly, few people here knew a Holocaust was brewing — despite the tales of widespread persecution told by Jewish refugees who had relocated to the US from Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The real killing started within a year or so of Poland’s conquest in 1939, and kicked into high gear in 1942 — AFTER America had entered the war.
The true scope and utter heinousness of the Holocaust wasn’t widely understood in the US, and throughout the world, until AFTER the war was over.
So while the Holocaust did not influence America’s entry into WW II, it certainly influenced the US and other countries when it came to the question of backing the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Why did we support Israel?
First, it’s a democracy. Following the end of WW II, there was a huge boom in independent countries, and an equally huge competition between democratic and communist countries both trying to spread the adoption of their brands of political ideology. Israel established a parlimentary democracy, which countries like the US and the UK smiled upon.
Second, the US had a large and influential Jewish population who lobbied long and hard for such a state.
Third, then, as now, folks in the US simply loved an underdog — especially an underdog that Americans could relate to culturally, politically and religiously.
Finally, Israel was a “pro-Western” outpost in a primarily anti-Western region of the world — an area that is also obviously rich in the strategic resource everyone loves to hate: oil.
All of these reasons still apply today, although many of them have weakened in the intervening 65 years.
I really don’t think it’s because the average schmoe in America loves you in particular, Noah.
;)
Hey Russ. I’m aware that the Holocaust was only visible to America after the War. That’s (one of) the points of the piece — that is, that the War (and things like the liberation of the camps) profoundly changed US attitudes towards Jews.
The change in that attitude is why I’m white now, unlike my grandparents, who weren’t quite. So it’s not that America loves Israel because America loves me. It’s that America loves Israel for the same reason it loves me.
Well, growing up in multicultural but segregated Chicago, I saw quite a few instances where I felt like the crew of the Enterprise as they observed Lokai and Bele go after each other in the episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”
Italians and Poles bad-mouthing and fighting each other. Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Cubans bad-mouthing and fighting each other. Blacks and whites bad-mouthing and fighting each other. Greeks and Irish bad-mouthing and fighting each other.
It wasn’t just about skin color, it was also about social, cultural, political, and, as you mention, religious differences.
The whole Protestant/Catholic blood feud, mirrored by the Shiite/Suni blood feud, is a great example of the odd logic people use to fight and kill each other over differences in religion.
But, as I seem to have to always point out to my (ahem) forgetful aetheist friends, aetheists like Stalin in the 20th Century made Hitler look like a lightweight when it came to eradicating perceived riff-raff.
I’m convinced if computers had sprung up 1,000 years ago, Apple users would have waged scorched-earth battles against Microsoft users.
So maybe some of us are becoming more civilized after all.
A major chunk of my friends (perhaps an ethnic plurality) are/have been Jewish, my wife is half but identifies Jewish, possibly an ethnic plurality of white people I admire are Jewish, and yet I still don’t feel like I have a Jew fetish– it’s just that there are a lot of great Jews. I have heard the idea put forth that there is a Jewish mystique, however. Is that what you’re suggesting Noah? Americans have the fever for the flavor of the gefilte?
No; it’s national and political identity I’m talking about, not really personal.
The US identifies itself as a good nation these days in large part because of its actions in WWII. Those actions were good, basically, because they were anti-anti-Semitic. As a result, America’s self-image of goodness became tied to anti-anti-Semitism — in a way it’s still not tied, for example, to anti-racism, or anti-misogyny (not that it’s totally divorced from those in all cases). That has domestic and international policy repercussions.
Okay. So… what’s some evidence for that? I mean, I realize ideology doesn’t always have evidence.
Oh, have you seen Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman, about Holocause survivors going off to set up Israel? Katie and I watched about an hour, and got bored as they were all hunger-striking themselves to death in a boat and so didn’t watch all three and a half hours.
I think there’s a fair bit of evidence that the US uses WW II as a touchstone for its goodness (the Greatest Generation, etc. etc.) Something like Schindler’s List maps onto this argument fairly easily, too. And…of course arguments against Islamofascism work by recreating World War II, in no small part through reinscribing the Jews in the place of the Jews.
I presume you’d want to look at changes in rhetoric around Jews, reactions to the camps, that sort of thing. This is more my impression of things than a scholarly paper, obviously.
I mean, maybe I’m just completely wrong. I haven’t really seen anyone say this, which presumably means I just haven’t looked in the right place or that there’s some reason it’s obviously wrong. It still seems right to me, though.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
[America’s}…undertaking a massive, lengthy, in many ways nation-defining war against anti-Semitism seems to me like it was a really, really big deal.
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Uh… “Class, what’s wrong with this statement?”
Reading on, I see Russ comprehensively explained the actual reasons we went to war with Nazi Germany.
And, what about the fact that we could have bombed the railroad tracks ferrying Jews to the gas chambers, and refused to do so? That FDR’s administration was concerned that it not be seen as overly concerned with the plight of the Jews? That even after the war, we were so unwilling — along with every other nation on Earth — to admit more than a modest amount of Jewish refugees?
Though I’d agree that having been opposed to a regime capable of such monstrous evil serves as an image-enhancing deed…
I think the railroad track thing is way overstated, from what I’ve read; it was a lot more logistically difficult than it sounds like.
Anyway, the point isn’t why we really did x or y or whatever, but how it’s framed in retrospect. The Holocaust is presented as a war against evil, and that evil is defined particularly as the Holocaust.
I think the Holocaust carries its appropriate weight among all Jews internationally and among lots of Europeans. I think the Greatest Generation thing was about Baby Boomer insecurities. Americans don’t like Nazis and they do like winning world wars, but I feel like the Holocaust is too much of a downer for most Americans.
It’s a downer if you’re thinking about the suffering. It’s not a downer if you think about Americans liberating the camps. I contend that it’s not that hard to do the second without doing the first.
I don’t know. I’ve lived a fairly unremarkable American WASP life– or, at any rate, not unduly sheltered or cloistered– and I have never seen those infamous newsreels of Americans opening the camps up and seeing the bodies and almost-bodies. I have heard about them, but not so often that I even think of them when the Holocaust is mentioned– and I’m exposed to Holocaust discussion owing largely to my exposure to Jews in person and books by Europeans.
Actually, I bet if we thought about the Holocaust more, at least some American would cut Israel less slack. As it is, it’s sort of their own little Manifest Destiny story and we can get behind that.
Total bummer…the Holocaust is such a “downer”! We need to cut someone or other some slack, dudes, or if they are raping, murdering or torturing, maybe sort of less slack as the case may be—-or WTFever, I could be just wrong. Hey, pass that over here.
Noah, Bert: You are talking/writing as if anti-Semitism (understood as the desire and will to have all the Jews killed) was a thing of the past. It may not be that virulent and palpable in the USA currently, but it sure is elsewhere in the world. Do you acknowledge this at all?
Well, the piece is about the US; I’m arguing that the particular history of the US has decreased anti-Semitism here. Other countries are different, sure.
Noah, your piece is not only about the US, since you write about the US’ foreign policy. You write: “There are various reasons for US Middle East policy, from weird evangelical millenarianism to Jewish lobbying groups to the post 9/11 anti-Muslim consensus.” But US Middle East policy may also be motivated by realities that do not come solely from inside the US – and this is where the rest of the world comes in. Have you thought about the will to annihilate Israel, which is endemic in the Islamic world? May that also be a factor that must be taken into account?
The US doesn’t really care about a lot of horrible things that go on in the world. We didn’t intervene in Sri Lanka, for example; we didn’t do much about East Pakistan. Etc. etc. Of course the Arab world is hostile to Israel — but why should that be such a major driver of US policy? There are ethnic and sectarian tensions in other parts of the world, and we don’t necessarily care all that much. Simply pointing to the fact that Israel is in distress isn’t really either here nor there as far as US policy decisions go, as far as I can tell. (You could certainly argue that it *should be* here or there, and that the US should systematically fight for the little guy, or what have you — but I just don’t think that’s how things work in practice at the moment.)
Researching the subject, indeed there was a plethora of reasons why the rails were not bombed; see “Why bombing was not considered” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate …
Not to defend that vile and moronic prejudice, but it hardly need extend to the range of genocide…
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Definition of ANTI-SEMITISM:
hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group
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http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-semitism
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anti-Semitism
an attitude or policy of hatred and hostility toward Jewish people.
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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/anti-Semitism
…unless one would want to pump up the meaning of any enmity against Jews to a murderous level for some ideological reason. For instance, not only does any criticism of any policy of Israel’s get slammed as “anti-Semitic,” that re-defining of the term would then mean that anyone opposing any Israeli policy would then supposedly want to kill all the Jews.
But sure, there certainly is a “will to annihilate Israel…endemic in the Islamic world”; which is why I can understand that embattled country’s harsh policies towards the Palestinians. It’s amazing they’ve actually been so relatively* restrained.
*Note the qualifier; I’ve read Joe Sacco’s “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza” as well as countless other news stories on the subject.
There’s certainly a lot of nasty anti-Semitism in the mix when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but Israel isn’t exactly the little guy in that one (and of course some of that strength derives from unconditional US backing). Its governmental policies have been quite resolutely colonial.
A serious oversight in this article is that America still constitutes a predominantly Christian community, which is a more central issue than Noah’s aside about “weird evangelical millennarianism” suggests. The effect of the Holocaust on that community has been to create an aversion to pursuing ancient differences with Jews and to encourage a focus on religious commonality, from Old Testament blockbusters to fundamentalist Christian Zionism. It’s also fairly absurd to ignore the influence of the Biblical narrative on American attitudes toward the creation of modern Israel. Hitler has indeed become a devil of 20th century iconography, but in challenging the perhaps too easy moral self-assurance America may have inherited from WWII, Noah shouldn’t neglect the reliance of Christian polemicists on the Holocaust as the supposed ultimate outcome of atheism, and all the self-assurance and ahistorical rejection of contingency and complicity entailed by that posture. I can agree with Bert Stalber’s “if we thought about the Holocaust more, at least some Americans would cut Israel less slack” to the extent that thinking seriously about any historical event should serve to guard against its use as a blunt instrument by religious extremists.
I really think it doesn’t deserve much more than an aside. America’s more religious than Europe, but big swaths of it are still quite secular, and even among the Christian bits the millenarian ideology around Israel is pretty marginal. Nationalism is a much more powerful force in the US than Christianity.
But Judaism is more powerful than Christianity? US nationalism is meaningfully influenced by Judaism, in self-image and Middle East policy as you state in your article, more so than by Christianity?
I think WWII and the Holocaust’s place within it is more important to US actions than marginal evangelical millenarianism, yes. We can agree to disagree, though.
Regarding the evangelical aside, I remember listening to a sermon wherein the argued the point that whenever you have evil at its worst, Jew-killing will be one of its activities. He cited the various conquests and enslavements of the Old Testament, as well as Stalin’s pogroms and Nazi genocide. There’s the obvious exception of “except when you have no Jews around,” as in Cambodia under Pol Pot. I tout the point was interesting, but unsupportable as an absolute, since in the Old Testament, pagans who practiced child sacrifice were killed by Jews, not the other way around.
The word “preacher” is missing from the second clause of the first sentence. Sorry.
Three other points more focused on your main one follow. One, I think I anti-anti-Semitism should really be called anti-anti-Jewishism, or any more elegant alternative, as Arabs are also Semites, and much more popular targets. Second, I think it has at least as much to do with our narrative about how bad the Nazis were as it does with our narrative about how cool we are. I’m really okay with both of those, until the latter extends into smug self-righteousness. Being able to teach my children some of the positive moral acts associated with the American identity encourages them to support such actions in the future, I think. Finally, the fact that America had been more accepting than Europe even before the war enabled things like the anti-Holocaust narrative and the support for Zionism. We had Jews in influential positions despite some active prejudice, and I think Americans were generally happy with their work. I’m thinking of businessmen and movie producers, not Meyer Lansky.