Rabbi Richard N. Levy
דוקא/DAVKA (the journal) Nov. — Dec. 1970 — Vol. I No. 1 — The Ills of American Jewry (pages 4–11)
Some years ago I attended a speech clinic in New York City in an attempt to overcome a stutter which at the time had rendered my speech almost totally incomprehensible. Most of my fellow students had similarly noticeable defects, except for one young man whose speech sounded absolutely normal, and none of us could figure out what he was doing there. He had, he informed us, an “internal stutter”, and inside he apparently went through all the same gyrations and agonies as the rest of us every time he wanted to speak–except for him the result of the agonies was normal speech, while for us it was confused and ugly noise. In a sense he envied us, because he knew that he could not begin to rid himself of his “internal stutter” until he began to stutter on the outside too, and one day he announced to us in a tone of great triumph that his inner gyrations had at last produced what everyone around him recognized as an honest-to-goodness stutter.
The Jew in the United States is a lot like my friend the internal stutterer. While all around us black people, brown people, and Orientals are able to demonstrate quite visibly the results of their inner agonies of being an oppressed minority group in America, most Jews in the United States cannot: we look white, we are for the most part very well off, and while we have very little political power, we do play a major role in the intellectual life of this country. For black, brown and yellow people, Jews are white and therefore members of the oppressing Establishment; in the speech clinic that is the struggle of American minorities for self determination the Jew is looked at with incredulity when he enrolls for admission. “You want self-determination? “black people are likely to ask us; “You’ve been determining us!”
And so, before we can understand what must be done for Jewishness in America, we shall have to confront this fact of the internal stutter of the American Jew — the destruction of our history, our culture, and our personality by the dominant White Christian culture in the United States-though, to be fair, not only in the United States, but in every country to which Enlightenment brought some measure of physical security with a concomitant loss of cultural virginity.
Caught up totally in the middle-class culture of America, the comfortable, neatly-pressed white Jew has found himself marching in the continual Purim masquerade which has camouflaged his true, authentic, integrated self throughout the centennia of our exile in this Enlightened land.
When we do discuss our Jewishness in public, we emphasize its insignificance by laughing at it-we talk about chicken soup and lox and bagels and we cleverly reveal our hangup with our Jewish mothers. *You don’t have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s rye”, runs the New York subway ad, How cruel that poster is! However little we prayed or studied, for a long time we tried to fool ourselves into believing that eating pastrami on rye was a very Jewish act. In degrading our noble culture to a heaping pastrami sandwich, we are making fun of ourselves and denigrating our past. How many of us have been with Gentiles who offer a patronizing smile when we emphasized one or another difference between our religions or our cultures? Too often we smile back, apologizing. Our self-denigrating ethnic jokes are really little more than the Semitic version of singing and dancing Sambo, making public fun of his blackness to hide his private shame.
All these self-effacing tactics should indicate to us that even in America we have tried to hide ourselves, and a people which does that la a people which has come to accept the reigning culture’s judgement that its culture, its worth, is inferior—that it is, in short, an oppressed people. We have all grown up in a country which believed that the American was to be a new sort of man, who had to be stripped of the conspicuous baggage of European culture. It was necessary to turn Poles, Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians into Americans, all with one common culture, stripped of those loyalties to the past which might only divide them, removed from any ties to other cultures. The only trouble was that the Founding Fathers were all from British culture, and cast their image of the new American man in their own white Anglo-Saxon light.
The instrument devised to effect this cultural lobotomy was the public school. Those immigrant groups which could afford to provide their own ethnic or religious schooling might do so—but of course not on school time. One’s own heritage was thus relegated to the weekends, in Into afternoons, when the older Americans were out playing ball. “wiry shunted so obviously to the side, one’s own culture appeared clearly inferior to the American culture being taught in the schools, and the frustration of trying to cram the beauties of an ancient faith into the pittance of hours handed down by the school system turned teachers, rabbis, and principals into frustrated, angry tyrants trying to make Jews of their children while the school system was trying—and succeeding—to make Americans of them. How else should these children respond but with anger—and flee this marginal, education whenever they got the chance? Responsibility for the abysmal. ignorance of American Jews of their own heritage lies not with the rabbis and Hebrew school teachers(self-serving as that may sound!) but
in a national culture that sought to destroy the separate cultures of its constituent peoples and channel them into the culture of those who first rose to authority in the school system: the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who imperiously believed that their past was the only American past.
As a result of this cultural imperialism, we Jews in the United States may justifiably consider ourselves a culturally oppressed minority—as, of course, may every ethnic or religious group in America except the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I speak of cultural oppression rather than religious oppression because the public school does not prevent us, as individual Jews, from practicing our religion—outside the school of course. But the public schools do prevent us, as a group, from inculcating in our children the idea that one of the ways to be an American is to be a Jew. They have more frequently been taught that the only way to be an American is to drop one’s special pre-American culture with the result that the pre-Americana remaining in them has often become a hateful, crippling residue, to be excised as thoroughly as possible. The only problem is that for the Jew to excise his Jewishness, as we have seen, he must destroy a part of himself.
What has been the effect of this oppression of the Jewish heritage in America? It has allied American Jews to two great, but, I would suggest, ultimately self-destructive myths. One is the myth of ourselves as under constant siege, always checking our armor, always looking for possible enemies. As a result, two things happen: everyone else becomes not a person but a potential enemy for whom one must always be on guard, and one runs the risk of turning into the armor he is always checking, so defensive that eventually he forgets the values he was once
defending.
In what way is this sense of being under siege a myth? It originates as a response to 2000 years of pogroms and destructions which were surely not a myth, beginning with the attack by King Amalek on the straggling slaves leaving Egypt. It is a mitzvah to remember Amalek until eternity, earnestly working to wipe out every trace of him. Severe oppressors of the Jews—Haman, Antiochus, Hadrian, Hitler—have all been recognized, upon unmasking, as the Amalek of the commandment, and once recognized, have been the object of all the zeal inherent both in obeying the will of God and preventing one’s own destruction. Sometimes, unfortunately, by the time the mask was taken off, the oppressor had done his work.
After Hitler, Jews have become determined no longer to be deceived by masks. But as Jews have had their own identity problems in the Diaspora, so has Amalek—sometimes Amalek lurked behind the mask; sometimes what seemed a mask was not. But since it is safer to assume that a man who may be speaking against Jews is, we have sometimes tended to see Amalek behind every blowhard, and raise our spears when the proper response would be to shake our graggers. Too often, attacks on individual Jews have been interpreted as attacks on the whole Jewish community—at which times the Amalek myth can become distortive and destructive. While we hesitate to recognize ourselves as a culturally oppressed minority, at least in part for the reasons stated above, we heartily embrace the Amalek myth because it is, perversely, very satisfying. By isolating one man, or one group of people, we can grasp the vague uneasiness we feel, shape it into recognizable form, and shout “Amalek” at it until it is forced to retreat. In a sense this is the other side of the coin of anti-Semitism: it is making one of those who hate us (or who hate some of us) into the scapegoat for the real source of our oppression, which can become just as diversionary and obfuscating as anti-Semitism itself.
There is another myth that hounds us, and not us alone, but many groups in America who have found some kind of economic and personal security. The United States was founded by men who believed that the only social and political entity was the individual—and that as an American he was a new kind of person, torn from his past, with rights pertaining to him for no other reason than that he was a human being, created (however abstractly) by God. The Bill of Rights protects the individual, and it has led to a certain notion in American life that the individual is supreme, that the only real rights in this country are individual ones. With the enforcement by the Supreme Court of the principle of one man, one vote, the last vestiges of group rights (whether class or economic groups) present in the Constitution are disappearing just at the time that the whole notion of the absolute rights of the individual are being thrown into question. For the privatism that afflicts so many Americans has led them to say: my job, my admission to college, my personal freedom to run my business as I choose, to enter the business I choose, is an absolute right. Everyone rIse has the same freedom—all men are created equal, aren’t they? But al course some men, having shared certain experiences, by choice or force, are more or less able to take advantage of that freedom, because while God creates all men equal, man has forced other men into environments with unequal advantages or disabilities. We are only gradually coming to realize that a man is not merely a man, but also a member of a group, and to treat him only as a man and not as a member of a group as well may be to give him unequal treatment. One man, one vote may deny equal rights to men in disadvantaged groups.
How can we explode these myths, and defuse the dangerous confrontation of individual rights with group rights which now threatens to tear America apart? Let me suggest two false solutions—for American Jews, at any rate—and two which I think are sound. The false ones first: one is, that the American myth of absolute rights for the individual is true; my right to live my life as I please is an absolute one. By supporting the causes of job security, admission to college solely on the basis of academic merit, and the innocence (or at best irrelevance) of Jewish merchants who exploit in the ghetto, some people in the Jewish community are equating the absoluteness of individual rights with Jewish survival. Of course other solutions are suggested—to build larger colleges, to regulate the conduct of all business in the ghetto-but these are long-range solutions; in the short run, to see the issue in terms of individual survival versus group survival may well be terribly self-destructive.
Along with this idea that individual rights are absolute comes the second false solution to the problem of oppression in America, one particularly favored by American Jews on the left–to get out of the way. Since Jews are much less oppressed than other groups in this society, such people say, blacks and other “visible minorities” should be allowed to do whatever they want, and Jews who are accused of standing in their way should, like some of the young civil rights workers of the early 60’s, fight for the rights of blacks and ignore what many Jewish activists consider their own irrelevant and superannuated culture. Jewish radicals who deny the rights of their own people betray the same psychological disorders as those closer to the middle who change their names and shorten their noses. Albert Memmi, in The Liberation of the Jew, has some telling words for this self-denial on the part of Jewish leftists:
I was interested in a lot more than just the Jews, but I did not see why I should be disinterested in them. When the proletariat fights, it fights quite naturally for itself; who would have dreamed of reproaching them for it? Why would I have been of the Left if I myself did not suffer from serious injuries? The Jewish revolutionary has no clear conception of whether he is struggling for a world in which alleged particularisms must disappear or for the salvation of all particularisms, each one entirely respected, each one contributing its own voice to the general concert.
Albert Memmi, in The Liberation of the Jew
It is in this direction, then, that the proper solution must lie, for the Jew and for all whose heritage and culture have been raped by white (and often Christian) imperialism. In the nineteenth century, two differing solutions arose–one, the Zionist, which held that oppression of the Jews was endemic to the Diaspora, and not until the Jews established their own political hegemony in their own land would anti-Semitism cease and the full, creative development of the Jewish people begin. Earlier in the century, the Reform movement had posited another way; for Jews to work for a better life for all men as full citizens of countries in the Diaspora, carrying out the mission of a prophet people striving to bring all men to the messianic age of which the prophets dreamed.
Of these two classic approaches to the problem of Jewish existence, Zionism and Reform, is either applicable in our own time?
Obviously Zionism has proved its claim for most of the countries on this globe where Jews have lived and been expelled, exterminated, or oppressed. But by their unwillingness physically to share that destiny, American Jews have not granted the Zionist thesis its final proof. Though surely not in command of our own destiny in the United States, we have lived here for over three hundred years with greater security and liberty than in any other country. Nonetheless, one would think that Jews whose sole concern was the survival of the Jewish people would go where that people needs them most, namely, to Israel, while only those of us would remain in America who wish the Jewish people to help liberate other peoples even as we are liberating ourselves. Only the American Jew who can break through the stupor of his subjugation to “the American way” will be able to see that these are his only alternatives—and that they are two sides of the same coin. Most of us live primarily for our own pleasures, trying to do an honest day’s work, but lacking much real concern to work for the creation of our community beyond what is frequently generous support to Israel and the local Welfare Fund. Israel needs financial support—but she needs human support even more. For our bodies to reside in the United States and our souls in Israel makes us parasites of both countries: of the United States because we are less involved than we should be in creating a just, responsive government which will reflect the needs of its constituent communities; and of Israel, because despite all the money we give her, we are still using her for our own spiritual “nachas”, and denying her what she wants most from us, which is our settlement. If we are concerned only for Jewish survival, we should settle in Israel; if we decide to remain in the United States, we have a responsibility to work for the welfare of all her constituent communities, and not merely for a status quo which interprets the preservation of American creature comforts and individual liberties as “Jewish survival.”
So long as we insist on seeing ourselves as individuals only we shall be blind to the fact of our peoplehood—blind to the need to work toward the creation of a vital, self-determined, integrated Jewish community whether in Israel, where that work is well under way, or in the United States, where it has hardly begun.
The Israeli would say that it cannot be begun in the United States, that in any country in the Diaspora Jews are doomed to live as isolated individuals, unable to affect their own (or anyone else’s) cultural, political, or economic liberation, because all significant decisions in those spheres will always be made for them by the majority. But we have never, in America, really put that belief to the test. Because the United States was settled by many different ethnic groups, Jews have never been a minority here in the sense that we have been elsewhere: indeed if we could view America as a land of many different groups, we would realize that the whole notion of a “minority” does not really apply. What Memmi calls “the salvation of all particularisms” might well succeed in the United States, though it has never really been tried—but we have entered upon a time when it is possible to attempt it. The cry for black power to black people, brown power to brown people, white power to white people is a slogan possible of fulfillment in a country beginning to realize that groups have rights as well as individuals.
This is not a country of blacks and whites—it is a country of blacks and browns and yellows and reds and olives and blonds and all sorts of hues and nationalities and ethnoi blacks who for generations have passed as white or “high-yellow” are now realizing that they are black:
we internal stutterers, we Jews who have passed for white too long, are starting too to recall our multiracial heritage. Moses’ wife was black, and the heroine of the Song of Songs announces that she is black and beautiful; they are our ancestors. Some anthropologists have
determined that Jews around the world derive from a common Palestinian stock, and that despite the many peoples with whom we have intermingled, Jews can still trace their origins to two basic non-white strains, the Semitic-Oriental and the Western Asiatic. The Diaspora that produced Caucasian Jews in Europe also produced Jews in North Africa who are brown, in Ethiopia black, and in China yellow. It is America which has told us we are white, and that our lot was with the white man, but it is white American culture which has castrated our own.
And so the gauntlet has been thrown down for Jews in America: either make aliyah to Israel, and participate in the upbuilding of the Jewish community on our own soil, or join the grand experiment for a truly pluralistic, self-determining, multi-faceted culture in the United States, working to build a Jewish community that will wrest its destiny from a non-existent white “majority” and take control of its own cultural, economic and political life. We cannot mask the needs of individual Jews as a struggle for Jewish survival: we must come to know the needs of Jews so that together we can develop a significant Jewish culture in the United States, a culture not only built upon the past, but acting out in the present the social concern implicit in Jewish law, exploring in our literature, art, and music, the meaning of being a Jew in this country in this world at this time. If we choose the latter it means that we must weigh our needs vis-a-vis the needs of other groups in the United States, and work out together the ways in which we may each, in the same country, fulfill our separate particularity.
One last chance remains, for Jews who decide to remain in America, to fulfill the Reformers’ mission of bringing on the world we all desire. To undertake it means to explore the depths to which our ancient heritage has been ground up by American culture into the bland pap which sickens our children and amuses our middle-aged. To undertake it means to overcome the conviction of so many of our people that Jewishness is not to be taken seriously, either because it is inferior to American culture, or because it is too narrow for a man of human concerns. To undertake it means to introduce our people to their heritage in ways we have not tried before, or in ways that have lain forgotten for millennia. To undertake it means to help each other build new structures through which our differing conceptions of Jewishness can be expressed. Thus revitalized, we may join with other peoples to overthrow the tyranny of what we have too long been taught is the true “American” culture, and together establish a society in which the cultures of all its peoples, Jews and WASPS, blacks and yellows, may live whole, profound, concerned lives beneath the sun which nourished all of them, exploiting none, hating none, with reverence for all.
