Tag Archives: Jews

Jews and America

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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.
 

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My People

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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All through my childhood, my family told me I mumbled. And, as kids will, I believed them — and went on believing them well after I had left home. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized how I had been deceived until well into adulthood. I must have been 28, I think; my parents had come into Chicago to visit and we were having dinner in a restaurant with my cousin and my wife-to-be. My cousin showed up late, bearing a relatively spectacular bit of news —my grandmother had caught her eye on a car door and was in the hospital. My mom sat up straighter in her chair, lifted her chin, and, with that east-coast Jewish nasal edge that sounds like a jackhammer pulled across a blackboard, bellowed out, “Holy Fuck!”

As the restaurant plunged into shocked silence and my eardrums reverberated, I experienced a kind of epiphany. It wasn’t that I mumbled, I suddenly realized. It was that my parents were, officially, the Loudest People on Earth.

They’re not really, of course. Or, rather, it’s not just them, but rather the Ashkenazi in general. I had ample opportunity to realize this in the run-up to a recent concert at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music . While eating dinner, my wife and I learned, oh, just heaps, thanks, about the two lovely couples at the next table: married for forty years and with relatives in Florida and at odds over whether it was really fair to say that Maury had had nothing to do with his kids, or whether that statement just couldn’t be allowed to stand. And all the while I knew as sure as my boy’s my bubeleh that they were going to the same damn concert we were.

And what was that concert, you ask? Klezmer, perhaps? In John Zorn’s wet dreams, maybe. I’m talking about performers like Odetta, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie — collectors of songs, purveyors of social justice, and bearers of banjo-fulls of mitzvahs all around.

So, yeah, we were going to the Old Town School of Folk Music for an evening of folk revival nostalgia — and, at least for me, the nostalgia was almost crippling. The nervous, semi-professional opening announcement; the raffle; the jovial, inevitably bewhiskered volunteers with nametags; it was like I had wandered through a hole in my head into some sort of archetypal JCC. Or back to my Jewish summer camp, where the cantors (that’s “song leaders” for you gentiles) played the songs of Joni Mitchell and all knew Harry Chapin personally.

At the Old Town School, opening act Caroline Herring explained that she hailed from Mississippi; nor did she appear to have a particularly large nose. But I bet she knew Harry Chapin too, and that he recognized her as a Semite-sister of the soul. My wife — whose family is from Appalachia and whose patience for precious, breathy folk tunes is, shall we say, spotty — watched Ms. Herring with a mounting horror that exploded quietly but magnificently during an earnestly pedantic desecration of “Long Black Veil.” And, yes, I do know where my wife’s coming from. But how — I ask you, how? — could I turn up the nose of my forefathers at a woman who name-dropped the Kingston Trio and (with a proud little giggle) Nirvana, before launching into a slow, heartfelt version of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors”. Or who talked at length about a book titled Black Culture and Black Consciousness by a Jew from Brooklyn named Larry Levine? Or who declaimed “I’m a white girl from a segregated town/and I’m looking for some answers” to a crowd entirely hushed except for that one person walking by behind us talking about their grandson’s Bar Mitzvah? Yes, yes, yes, and also oy, it was amateurish and self-involved and yes, again, it is in truly, truly poor taste to mention your yearning desire to be black for the fifth time in the set. But…it’s my amateurishness, isn’t it? It’s my self-involvement and, God help me, my desire to be black. Is it really so wrong?

My wife assures me that it is.

In any case, Herring finally left and the main act came on — Chris Smither. Smither is not Jewish either, I don’t think, but his dad is a university professor, which is pretty much the next best thing. Also, he sang a cutesy, blasphemous rag about evolution — red meat for this crowd, obviously.

The thing about Chris Smither, though, is that, while he is a 100% bona fide, folk revival fossil down to his witty self-deprecating patter (“I love this place. I feel like I’m such an artist”) and the easy liberal jeremiads (“the trickle down will float you up…surprise, surprise, it ain’t so”) he’s also, actually — well, good. His blues-derived guitar playing is a wonder, whether swinging through a dirty Lightning Hopkins rave-up like “Surprise, Surprise” or using a lighter, Mississippi John Hurt-style flow as on “Time Stood Still.” His voice is hoarse, and his mumbled phrasing is remarkably evocative, like Tom Waits with half the booze and twice the brains. Everything, down to the incidental aspects of his set — the way he uses both feet to create barely audible (though mic’ed) percussive rhythms, or the effortless speed with which he downtunes between songs —is done so professionally, and with such unpretentious nonchalance, that it attains soulfulness almost by default. His performance of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which closed the night, was near definitive — a slow, almost-dirge where every drawn-out, supposedly carefree line dripped with bittersweet longing. Even my wife liked him. In fact, she bristled a bit when I informed her that he was, indisputably, and despite his many good qualities, clearly of the folk revival. (“I guess I did hear about him on NPR,” she finally admitted reluctantly.)

None of which is to say that Smither escapes the problems endemic to his brethren, necessarily. His humor is witty, but doesn’t have much real bite, and — despite the occasional “Sittin’ On Top of the World” — he rarely tries for emotions much more complicated than self-mockery or diffuse melancholy. When he sings a come on, he sounds amused rather than dangerous; when he ruefully declares that many “perfectly good songwriters become parents and then spend the rest of their lives churning out maudlin crap about their children,” it’s as a prelude to a maudlin and fairly crappy song about his daughter.

But, you know, not all art has to be about being edgy and shocking the bourgeoisie. Sometimes, as Carl Wilson has noted, it can be about community, even if that community is kind of, well, bourgeois. My parents would love Chris Smither : his easy liberalism, his easy humor, his deft mastery of someone else’s quintessentially American folk idiom. And they’d be right to love him, because he’s great. The concert was easy and welcoming and gentle. Great children’s music, in other words, much like the first tapes of Arlo and Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio I ever listened to on an old cassette deck in the back seat of our station wagon, the songs sometimes drowned out by my mom and dad bickering loudly in front.

Not a Gentleman

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Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Dispatches From the Front, argues that Trollope’s work offers a challenge to the moral peril of modernity.

It is not hard to document the central place of constancy and forgiveness throughout Trollope’s work. That he saw these themes as central no doubt has much to do with his sense that the England he loved and cherished, the England of the genry and the honest workman, was in danger of being lost under the onslaught of the new commercial culture. Thus, in his Autobiography he says: “A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” The threat of such people, vividly portrayed in Lopez (The Prime Minister) and in Melmorre (The Way We Live Now), was not that they were unambiguously evil, but that they could so easily be mistaken for gentlemen. Even though Trollope was no doubt concerned with the passing of a certain social class, he was yet more deeply concerned with the accompanying threat to moral order. It is that concern which shapes his entire literary enterprise.

As this makes clear, Hauerwas shares Trollope’s concern about the threat of capitalism and liberalism to the moral order. For Hauerwas, the Enlightenment has abstracted moral principles from community and tradition. Thus, liberalism (in its broad sense, including Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, and more) organizes politics as the pragmatic magaerial effort to balance interest groups. “Freedom” and “equality” are seen as the most important virtues, and truth, honor, and everything else is abandoned in their name. Thus, Hauerwas argues:

I have found it hard to enter the debate about abortion since I do not believe the issue for Christians can be framed in “pro-life” or “pro-choice” terms. Such descriptions are attempts to win the political battle on the most minimum set of agreements — that is, that abortion is primarily about the sanctity of life or freedom of women. As a result, abortion is abstracted from those practices through which our lives are ordered that we might as a community be in a position to welcome children. It is a political necessity to make our moral discourse, and our lives, as thin as possible in the hopes of securing political agreement. As a result, the debate is but a shouting match between two interest groups.

Again, Hauerwas sees Trollope as offering a different vision of society — one based on honor, constancy, and forgiveness rather than lowest common denominator interest group squabbles. Trollope presents a vision of a community in which people strive, not for freedom and equality, but rather to be gentleman and Christians.

I have a fair bit of sympathy for this view. Capitalism is an acid; it dissolves social relations and community. It believes in nothing but desire — the freedom to desire, the equality of all desire, and the need for infinite space in which desire can expand. We’re all autonomous wanting machines, scrabbling for oil and sex and the money to buy both as our hydrocarbons and progeny scuttle across the globe, leaving nothing but extinction and advertising slogans in their wake.

So, if Trollope is the cure, then, hey, I’ll read Trollope.

I picked up The Prime Minister; coincidentally one of the books that Hauerwas discusses. Here’s the passage where the gentlemanly, virtuous Mr. Wharton, scion of the old class and old morality, confronts Ferdinand Lopez, the reckless capitalist adventurer, who wishes to marry Mr. Wharton’s daughter. Wharton is turning over, in his own mind, why he cannot allow his daughter to do so.

this man [that is, Lopez] who was now in [Mr. Wharton’s] presence and whom he continued to scan with the closest observation, was not what he called a gentleman. The foreign blood was proved, and that would suffice. As he looked at Lopez he thought that he detected Jewish signs…

As the book goes along, we learn that Lopez is, in fact, not a gentleman. His whole life is devoted to reckless speculation and the pursuit of money. Like capitalism itself, he has no sense of good and bad — and no sense of social fitness. In his egalitarian amorality, he envies those above him (rather than respecting them) and ruthlessly exploits those below (rather than protecting them.)

Lopez is, in other words, modernity incarnate. And modernity incarnate, for Trollope, is a Jew.

I’m a Jew myself, as it happens. There are Jews who see anti-Semitism everywhere in the media. I have to say, I’m not one of them. Jews are, as far as most Americans are concerned, white. Anti-semitism is pretty thoroughly despised…in part because Jews have so thoroughly assimilated, and in part because the U.S. fought a massive, successful war against anti-Semitism, and, partialy as a result (thanks Hitler!), anti-Semitism continues to be equated with absolute evil.

All of which is to say that Trollope’s anti-Semitism in itself doesn’t bother me so much. I don’t feel like I’m being oppressed. Lopez is an invidious stereotype, but it’s a stereotype that lost. I, for example, married a shiksa, and nobody in the shiksa’s family cared. Lopez hasn’t hurt me and can’t hurt me. In the book, all his plans may have failed and he may have offed himself in the interest of conveniencing the uptight Brits. But, in real life he got to keep the girl and have little baby Lopezes who no one could tell, or even wanted to tell, from the uptight baby Brits. Admittedly, Lopez had to go through the gas chambers first, which sucked…but all’s well that ends well.

What does bother me, though, is that I think there’s a real sense in which Trollope isn’t wrong about Lopez. I mean, clearly, he’s wrong that Jews are evil sneaking submen who don’t deserve to marry shiksas, because, in fact, Jews are awesome, and should marry whoever they want. But I think he’s right that the old moral order which Hauerwas defends, the anti-capitalist, cohesive morality he challenges, is, by its nature, anti-Semitic.

Hauerwas is aware that this is a problem…but he tries to get around it by suggesting in passing that Trollope has us identify with Lopez’s frustrations and by emphasizing that it is Lopez’s conduct that makes him not a gentleman, rather than the happenstance of circumcision.

None of which is very convincing. Mr. Warren identifies Lopez as not being a gentleman because Lopez is a foreigner and a Jew before he knows anything else about him. Indeed, he dislikes Lopez, as he says, precisely because “no one knows anything about him” — and no one knows anything about him because he’s a Jew without lineage or proper family.

And lo and behold, the rest of the novel goes about remorselessly demonstrating that Mr. Warren’s prejudices were correct. It’s true that Lopez does not act like a gentleman…but that conduct is not separable from his ancestry. On the contrary, the ancestry comes first, diagetically and I believe thematically.

Trollope does, as Hauerwas says, show the virtues of constancy, forgiveness, and gentlemanliness…virtues that Lopez and capitalism repudiate. But Trollope also shows that virtues of keeping to one’s own set and keeping away from the greasy foreigners. I can sneer at the Enlightenment and liberalism all I want, but the fact remains that it’s because of Enlightenment liberalism that I was able to marry my wife without a great deal of unpleasantness. Capitalism eats through moral truths and communities — but one of the communal moral truths it eats through is anti-Semitism.

Hauerwas seems to believe that we can get Trollope’s honorable cohesive, pre-capitalist community without that anti-Semitism, and, presumably, without the sexism or the homophobia. It’s an appealing vision…but if he wants to make me believe in it, he needs to do better than just pointing to Trollope. Because, lovely as Trollope is in many ways, I don’t think too many Lopezes are going to want to live in his world.


Nazi caricature of a Jewish banker

What’s “Clark Kent” in Yiddish?

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This essay first ran on Splice Today.
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One of the smartest books I’ve ever read about ethnicity is James Loewen’s Mississippi Chinese. Like the title says, it’s an academic study of Chinese immigrants in Mississippi during the first half of the twentieth century. Specifically, it tries to explain why virtually all of them ended up working as shopkeepers in black neighborhoods. The answer turns out to have next to nothing to do with racial or ethnic predilections or talents, and everything to do with specific social factors. In other words, the Chinese didn’t run stores because they had some sort of gene which made them good salesmen. They ran stores in black neighborhoods because (a) the only way such stores could be economically feasible is if the shopkeeper lived above the shop, and because of racism white people wouldn’t live in black neighborhoods, and (b) African-Americans had difficulty being storekeepers themselves because they had strong community taboos against dunning their neighbors for debts. Thus, because of racism on the one hand and community solidarity created by oppression on the other, there was a particular space available for non-black, non-white immigrants — and the Chinese stepped into it.

I’ve long hoped to find a similar study which would explain why Jews were so dominant in the comic industry. I’d hoped Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypto would provide some answers — and it didn’t completely disappoint. Kaplan points out that because of prejudice, Jews were effectively barred from advertising illustration, newspaper cartooning — from every commercial artistic outlet, that is, except for comic books, which were considered to be such dreck that nobody cared who worked on them. In this, Kaplan suggests, comics were like Hollywood movies, or comedy, or music: entertainment occupations so low caste that the usual barriers to entry did not apply.

Bringing up music, though, points to a lacuna in the thesis. After all, there were other low caste folks in New York in the thirties, forties, and fifties when Jews were moving into the comics business. I’m pretty sure African-Americans weren’t welcomed with open arms into the world of commercial illustration; why then weren’t they, too, being funneled into the low-class funnybooks?

I can think of a couple of answers to this, but the most likely ones aren’t especially flattering to comic-bookdom.. Perhaps that’s why Kaplan avoids them; certainly, he seems determined to discuss race only when it’s possible to do so while patting the industry loudly on the back (Matt Baker and the Black Panther both make — shall we say, token appearances?) Similarly, though Kaplan’s book does touch on the exploitation comics creators faced, it doesn’t do much to put this in a specifically Jewish context. Did publishers take advantage of shared ethnicity to build trust and more effectively screw their underlings? How important were Jewish social networks to staffing these companies? How did that affect the way the companies were run?

Of course, just because the issues which interest me don’t interest Kaplan isn’t to say that the book is worthless. On the contrary, From Krakow to Krypton covers the history of Jews in American comics — which is more or less the entire history of American comics — with bright efficiency. In only 200 pages or so, Kaplan hits Golden Age superheroes, EC, the Silver Age at Marvel and DC, the undergrounds, and more — and even finds time to mention Michael Chabon way, way more often than necessary. No doubt experts in the field will find the tour cursory, but I learned lots of fun facts, whether big (I’d always thought Gardner Fox was responsible for updating the Flash…duh) or small (Clark Kent was based on Cary Grant! Buffy was based on Kitty Pryde! Neil Gaiman is Jewish!) In addition, the tome is lavishly and carefully illustrated. My favorite image is the adorable Jack Kirby drawing of the Thing in prayer shawl and yarmulke, but the Al Jaffee self-portrait with upside-down head is a close second. Certainly, with all the information and all the art, the book seems very reasonably priced at $25.00.

The main weakness is, inevitably, the boosterism. The constant reiteration of how great Jews and comics are and how far they’ve come had grown wearisome long, long before I reached the last page — and, indeed, long before I opened the volume. I do understand the impulse to cheer on the tribe, but the success of comics isn’t ultimately about culturally validating the Jews, or vice versa. If we want to understand Jews, or comics, or how the two relate to each other, at some point we’re going to need a history that is a little, or a lot, more ruthless.

Spiritual Enlightenment from Peanuts

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I was reading the 1963 Fantagraphics Peanuts collection to my son (now on sale!) he’s gotten really into them recently. Anyway, there’s one fantastic series of strips where Linus paints a Biblical mural on the ceiling of Snoopy’s doghouse. In perhaps the best, Linus comments that he isn’t sure what Antiochus Epiphanes of the Maccabee story looks like— a lack of knowledge which, Snoopy comments, is forgivable in a six year old.

My son is very curious about how old the Peanuts characters are exactly, so I pointed to the end of the strip and said, “Look, Snoopy says Linus is six, just like you.”

“Linus is six?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “But he doesn’t act like he’s six really does he?”

“No,” he said. “Because he carries a blanket around and sucks his thumb.”

“Um, right.” I said. “But he also does things that seem older. Like painting a mural on the roof of a doghouse. Could you paint a mural on the ceiling of a doghouse?”

“I could if the doghouse was big enough.”

“I don’t…”

“I could. I can paint. And I could paint a mural about the Hanukkah story.”

As is the way of my Semitic people, I have, of course, done absolutely nothing to further my child’s religious education, prompting my wife, who was sitting nearby, to ask the obvious question.

“How do you know that the Maccabees have anything to do with Hanukkah?”

He looked at us like we were crazy. “Because,” he said, “I saw it on Krypto the Super Dog.”