So at a socially distanced get-together with an extremely gentile friend today, I confessed to something: in spite of barely knowing a single non-Jew until I was sixteen, the vast majority of my good friends are not Jews. I can barely get through a twenty minutes of a conversation without bringing up Judaism in some facet, now as twenty years ago, but perhaps in part consequence, I really just don't get along with a lot of other Jews....
I haven't read or listened to Seth Rogen's opinions on Israel, and the amount of a shit I don't give about this can stretch to the Middle East and back six hundred thirteen times. Of all the things to be concerned about.... the fact that anybody at all cares about what a stoner celebrity thinks about Israel while the world is on the verge of burning - and particularly every country with a sizable Jewish population, is a perfect explicator of the trivial distractions that allows the world to exist in its current state.
As I've said many times here, I grew up in Pikesville, Maryland, arguably the most Jewish place on earth, a Jewish United States of America in which a hundred thousand every hue of Jew was thrown together in a claustrophobic nine mile space. We were so Jewish, we didn't experience 'The Jewish Question' as Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer asked it, we experienced 'The Jewish Perspective on Every Question.' There was no such thing as a separation of synagogue and state, because there wasn't even a state. There was just the ongoing debate: 'is this good for the Jews?' And contrary to popular belief, nobody knew, and therefore nobody could truly act in Jewish interests. The more they asked the question, the lessJews could act in their own self-interest, because no two Jews in any given room ever agree on the answer. The whole town of Pikesville Maryland was a ridiculous place, possible only for a single generation when secular and orthodox Jews were distinct enough to be completely different and similar enough to trust each other to live together in relatively solid harmony. As Baltimore continues its decline, most of my generation of non-orthodox have long since left, and Pikesville is gradually becoming another frum/orthodox stronghold - little different from Munsie or Lakewood.
Was there wall to wall Israel propaganda every day when we were growing up? You better fucking believe it. We were fed it with the latkes, we drank it with the Manischewitz. BUT, anybody who tells you that Israel education in school was a Zionist North Korea is either selectively remembering or lying. There were leftist parents screaming at every Day School PTA meeting about how terrible it was and making sure when other kids came over that they knew the 'other perspective' so that they could have a 'serious conversation about the Middle East,' there were teachers who believed that too and made sure the kids knew it, and most importantly, at that point, every mainstream Jew in a mainstream Jewish Day School believed that by being Zionist, we were also being liberals who showed how to make a more functional democracy in 45 years than it took America to be for at least a hundred-fifty (and that remains true...), that we were being progressives who supported Israeli attempts at Kibbutzim and better organized labor than we ever had here (which by the 90s was already a notion outdated by a generation...), and that we in no way had dual loyalties but in fact, quite the opposite: we were being American patriots because in multicultural America we're supposed to celebrate our hyphenated identities, and Americans so celebrated difference that they seemed even proud to welcome a peoplehood who defended themselves. There were two types of people who objected to all that: one was the leftist parents who in the eyes of people like my parents, seemed arrested in sixties adolescence. Even after seventy years of dealing with the Soviet Union and its factory of death (and NEVER forget, the Soviet Union on its most benevolent day was a meat grinder compared to the United States on its most malicious), they still believed in all those old-fashioned notions of revolution, socialism, and solidarity with the oppressed. And on the other side of that divide, the only people who agreed with the leftists that the peace process was a disgusting ruse and the only solution was a one-state solution, were the right-wing meshugoyim, the meshuggeh-frum, the Likudniks, the neocons, the people who simultaneously wanted to bury the Soviet Union in the ground and also not-so-secretly admired Soviet culture's deference to authority and their lack of concern for human rights' niceties. If these were the basic options, we need to forgive people a generation ago who decided that full support for that particular Israel, striving for peace, seemingly so close to being a permanently liberal democracy, was the only good option, and the only option that didn't put them in cahoots with people who seemed both crazy and a little bit evil.
But now it's almost 30 years later. Reality, of course, is much, much more complicated. There was never a time when the tensions in all those contradictions weren't incredibly taut, they always were, they always will be. Israel is as good a proof as anywhere in the world that there is no life where you don't have to make compromises and alliances with people who often hate you and you often hate hate them right back. For a golden generation between 1967 and 1993, it seemed as though there was no tension between aspirations of nationalist self-determination and liberal or progressive ones. There always was, and the challenge of Israel has always been that the survival of the Jewish people depends on threading a needle that seems impossible. If Israel becomes sufficiently illiberal, it will eventually lose the United States. No ally is powerful enough yet to give Israel everything the United States did, and no emerging state will ever be energy independent enough in our lifetimes to not require far deeper friendship with oil-rich Middle East states than even the United States has with Saudi Arabia.
Seth Rogen is exactly my age. Every Jewish Day School student who's our age can probably remember a night-and-day difference between being Jewish when we were kids and being Jewish now: 1993 was not 2020. In 1993, peace seemed like a very legitimate future, the brightest possible future seemed part of being American generally. Neither of those states of being are true anymore. For the first seventy years of Israel, the vast majority of American Jews have been liberals, and a relatively small minority were conservatives. That is changing. Secular Jews are in the process of irreversible assimilation, and orthodox Jews are becoming ever more distinct, and ever more mistrustful of liberalism. Like everyone else in America, the left and right divide between Jews is hardening ever more, and as the wall thickens, a kindling is placed in the wall's foundation that practically begs troublemakers to light an explosion event whose consequences are irreversible.
Neither of these are my Judaism, in fact, I believe outright that both of these are misrepresentative abominations of the religion they claim to practice. Judaism is the religion of ambiguity, of pragmatic discourse to weigh the nuances of every problem with the greatest care so that the most livable and durable solutions can be found. These are, writ small, the descendants of all the same Jews who once believed that there could be accommodation between Jews and hard-right nationalists on the one side, and Jews with hard-left socialists on the other. All that is for another post, but I don't know how many times Jews need to repeat the same episodes of their history, but equivalents have happened so many times already that at this point one can only assume that it's long since embedded into the fabric of the Jewish condition.
Hard right and hard left Jews share one particular and very surprising trait: almost all of them are so much nicer people than their peers in the center, and I so often prefer their company. They are untroubled by the doubts which rive so many who can't lean on walls for their basic assumptions that other people have built for them. And consequently, when they like you, they really like you and there is so much less chance for drama and aggression. But once you're written out from their respective books of life, you're really and truly out, and there is no getting back in their good graces. People can only be that nice to you if there are enemies upon who they can direct all of their aggression. You are either friend or enemy, and it seems virtually impossible to be anything in between.
But this state of affairs was created by my parents' generation, and our generation is absolutely right to complain that we got sold a false bill of goods, but we're still looking at the wrong bill. It's Twain who said 'Jews are just like other human beings, only more so.' And if in the late-20th century, the entire country bought into that American Beauty rat race to be the most successful, rise the highest, have the best possessions, and present the best possible image of yourself to society, then Jews bought into it twice as hard. American Jews are now, unquestionably, the most successful minority in the history of the world. And a person can only project high status by making other people feel lower. Meritocracy is a complete myth, but it's not a myth because of systemic injustice, and it's not a myth because people abdicate personal responsibility. It's a myth because success is itself a myth, and the Jewish story is the ultimate example of it. Success, money, property, status, even friendships, can all evaporate in the span of a minute. What is real is survival, and the ability to help others survive. Every Jew who became a banker instead of a scientist, a lawyer instead of a teacher, an entrepreneur instead of a public servant, a PR consultant instead of an artist, put self in front of society. So who can be surprised then that millions who were not able to advance themselves at the expense of societal decay then embrace totalizing mass movements left and right that explain that America will be cured of its ills when its ruling class is overthrown? And what did all of that success matter when the dumbest men in America cut in front of all those meritocrats to the front of the line and took the Presidency, possibly in perpetuity?
The center has not held, and it didn't hold because the center was wrong to be the center. It didn't hold because the center had a choice to help everybody, or help themselves, and we chose ourselves. And now, 25 years after the assassination of the Jewish leader who could have lit the way for us all had we not ignored him after we killed him, we are all beginning to pay the price he foresaw.
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