WHAT I'VE LEARNED AS A PART JEW

Sam Smith

I grew up part Jewish. It was hard not to if you lived in a New Deal
family where your father was involved in things like starting Americans
for Democratic Action. My own introduction to politics came as a
pre-teen stuffing envelopes for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he
helped organize the removal of the Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican
machine. Shull was one of those who early convinced me that there were
three branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and your Liberal
Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful. I was certain that
Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions and win elections for
the good guys.

If you think I'm kidding, consider this: for many years we lived across
the street from a prominent activist couple - she black, he Jewish. One
day one of their sons came over and slumped at our kitchen table.
"What's the matter?" asked my wife. "I had a terrible night," the boy
explained. "I dreamt I was Jacob Javits." He had already learned to
fear becoming a Jewish Republican.

Although I knew Jews went to synagogue, I wasn't all that impressed.
After all, as my friend Peter Temin was going to Hebrew school on
Saturdays, I got to go to the Henry Glass music store and take drum
lessons, clearly the better deal. During the week we went to a Quaker
school where perhaps a quarter of the students were Jewish and nobody
thought it odd. The tradition continues. The joke about Washington's
Sidwell Friends School is that it is a place where Episcopalians teach
Jews how to act like Quakers.

Much later I would figure out what Quakerism and Judaism had in common:
a blend of individualism, pragmatism, and responsibility, with a
particular emphasis on the last. You didn't come into the world
pre-ordained and your primary goal wasn't to leave it saved; what really
mattered is what you did in the meantime.

For much of my life, what I have done and what I have thought have been
deeply influenced by existential Judaism and its practitioners. I can't
even begin to count the number of times I have come across Jews in the
lonely corners of hope trying to do what others, through lack of
interest or courage, would not.

But a number of things have happened since I was first introduced to
Judaism. The direct ties to the often radical Jewish immigrant tradition
began to fade. The offspring of the immigrants became wealthier and less
involved. America of whatever ethnicity began paying less attention to
others and more to itself.

As I put it once, "The great 20th century social movements [were]
successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks,
powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to
ignore those left behind. The minority elites had joined the Yankee and
the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the
largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our
history. But as the best and brightest drove around town in their Range
Rovers, who would speak for those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's
phrase, fugitives from the law of averages? The work of witness
remained."

A whole history began to disappear. A part of the story was told by
journalist Paul S. Green in his memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to
the War in Europe. He notes that by the dawn of the 20th century

"Jewish youth in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow
focus of their lives. They were determined to take part in the
opportunities opening up around them - exciting new developments in
science, the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into
conflict with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way
of life, they began to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict age-old
Orthodoxy of their ancestors. "

Out of this grew several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked
towards retrieving a Jewish nation. Others were socialist, ranging from
hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as

"An organization of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly
embraced Yiddish culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected
traditional religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist
government - evolutionary rather than revolutionary - could hope to
bring together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and
religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an
end to anti-Semitism and pogroms."

And so we find, not too many years later, the New York City Jewish
cigar-makers each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with
them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish
literature. And the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers,
became the first president of the American Federation of Labor.

Green's own family joined the rebellion:

"In embracing the principles of free-thinking non-religious belief, my
parents had made a profound break with the past. The generation gap with
their own parents was unbelievably deep. They had been born and brought
up in a world that brooked no deviation. . . They were turning their
backs on the fearsome God of their forefathers who had ruled Jewish
lives for thousands of years. . . They realized that maintaining their
beliefs set them apart from the mainstream of Jewish life, but the fact
that they were a small minority did not bother them. "

They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the
politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century
America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that
built this country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish
Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern
social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and
immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.

It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights
movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in
fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious,
conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on 20th
century modern American politics.

Sadly, however, social and economic progress inevitably produced a
dilution of passion for justice and change not just among Jews but
within the entire post-liberal elite. And, in many ways, Israel became
the icon that replaced the cause of social justice. This is not to say
that the two are antithetical. That certainly wasn't the case when I was
younger. But as Jewish rhetoric and politics became increasingly in the
hands of powerful conservative interests, an iconic, unexamined Israel
began to serve Jews much as an absurdly trivialized Jesus has been used
by the powerful conservative Christian interests to serve their ends.
And other things just got forgotten.

Just as it is important for Americans not to define their country's past
by the tragic distortions of the past quarter century, it is important
for Jews not to be misled by a powerful right wing's reduction of
Judaism to the goals of a deep misguided and militaristic nation.

The fact is both America and Israel have badly damaged themselves
through grandiosity, arrogance and narcissism. Beyond that is a truth
few want to admit: no culture, no ethnicity, no value system can exist
in a vacuum any more. This is not the fault of terrorists or
anti-Semites. It's the result of television and multinational
corporations that have usurped the role of culture, values and
ethnicities. Add to that Israel's demographic trends and you've got a
problem that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help you with in the slightest.

The answer, to the extent there still is one for the human species, is
to be found in honest, personal witness. You can't save Christianity
with hypocrisy and you can't save Judaism with missiles. What might
work, however, is to reach back into the past of one's own culture or
ethnicity and find examples of actions and behaviors that produced
positive change. Neither Christians nor Jews have always been as
absurdly self-destructive as they are today. And before they offer any
more dangerous directions for dealing with today's problems, they need
to rediscover their own good paths.

It is along such paths - and not on battlefields - that faith is
solidified, admiration is encouraged, and loyalty is attracted. And
along the way you may even pick up some unorthodox stragglers like me.

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