When I first heard what Haley did (again... Eagles will understand what I mean...), my first reaction was not about Haley, it was not about the country, it was not about the election, it was not even about the state of Jews or Muslims: my thought was very simple:
"For the rest of my mother's life I'm going to hear what a hero my friend Haley is."
The underlying message, as it is with all Jewish mothers, is 'why can't you be more like Haley?'
And it's always 'Haley.' Even when it's not Haley it's 'Haley.' For those who grew up among American Jews, it should be no secret why Haley Stevens found common cause with us. I grew up with three dozen Haley Stevenses, so did the rest of you, some of you WERE Haley Stevens and I worry still are. They go by all kinds of names: Tracy Flick, Leslie Knope, Paris Geller, Alex Dunphy, Annie Edison, Hillary Clinton, Carlton Banks, Alexander Portnoy, Max Fischer, Pete Buttigieg, Ben Shapiro, even Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't know what Haley's going to do next, but I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Haley will clean up on the extremely lucrative Jewish speakers circuit: synagogues, Hillel houses, charitable organizations, she will make hundreds of thousands on it, probably millions, be treated like a hero, and no matter what her motivation for her vote, she can invent a story of the greatest heroism and 90% of the Jews I know will eat up her every word. She will be speaking in my town of origin every year for the next twenty, and should I stay there, the awkward question every year will be 'Should we get lunch?' I'd imagine after what follows, the answer will only be 'yes' after the first ten years.
In Yiddish there is a word called 'Nakhes.' Nakhes is the warm, deep pride you have from another person's achievements: particularly the achievements of your kids. Many immigrants raise their children to be 'nakhes machines,' and the drive to churn out of achievement always lasts for some family members a hundred years or more after we get off the boat. The genetic vestige is always there: the world as we know it can disappear tomorrow, we need to achieve while we can, and maybe, just maybe, our achievements will buy us a very little bit of security when things get hairy. It never buys that security, but it gives some people piece of mind to think it does.
Haley seems to come from the opposite of that. For all I know she came from Old Money, but that desire to achieve never slaked, and like so many people I knew growing up in the extraordinarily strange environs of Pikesville, MD, I get the sense she learned values that are not as rock solid as we'd like to pretend they are. Like Haley, many of us were taught that achievement matters more than community, more than loyalty, more than friendship, occasionally even more than family. When it came time for my generation of Baltimore Jews to choose between achievement and loyalty, barely any of them even hesitated. Everybody I knew growing up migrated to DC, to New York, to much farther afield to be lawyers, doctors, policy analysts. Very few took the unglamorous work of high school teacher or nurse or HVAC technician. They left behind a city that could not need them more direly: their connections, their practicality, their will to achieve, their desire to fill whatever community they grace with 'nakhes.'
It's not like I'm immune to this. I'm a 44 year old underachiever, but my ambitions are still massive and megalomaniacal. Others want to be the most powerful lawyer or best doctor in their cities, but even in a midlife of mediocre health, I can't let go of the idea that I can be Judaism's Dostoevsky, Milton, Dante: maybe if I'm a giant of literature, my father will finally approve of me.
Such jobs were frankly a little looked down on: it was rarely ever said aloud, but we knew. Our teachers were generally not the smartest of us, at least in Jewish Day Schools they were generally the wives of doctors who needed something to do during the day and showed up to work in 500 dollar pantsuits, and then some of our parents wondered how we got so little education in the humanities and how our Jewish knowledge was so lacking. We had some great teachers, one or two I'm still friends with, but they were shining exceptions. Yet somehow, most of us went from that to jobs that were only three degrees removed from really impressive. It's as though everybody I knew growing up got magnificent educations while showing little evidence of it.
The reason for all this is that we were taught snobbery from a very early age, not least from those teachers, and the smart kids were told by their parents to feel destined for better things. It rubbed off on a lot of us. Jews are often thought of as supercilious, and there's a little bit of truth to it: no moreso than other ethnicities known for their bourgeois ethics, but we definitely have our snobbish side as a people: believing not only that we're smarter, but that our character is higher. It's an unfortunate belief: and even were it true, it's the sort of pride that sets us up for a terrible fall.
For many of us, this morning is manna for the starving. I don't want to pour cold water on everybody, but we're not out of the woods until Trump is gone. We think Trump is done: he's not. He becomes especially dangerous now: we don't know what he will do, but an evil man like that will fight only the harder when his pride is injured: January 6th proved it, and the probable hell which comes now is entirely fresh.
And in some ways, a probable nightmare is still only beginning. Not a nightmare for everybody, but a nightmare for 'us,' for Jews. A nightmare that in many ways, we brought upon ourselves.
It may have happened anyway: antisemitism is madness, but irrationality is only compounded by further irrationality. Nothing is more irrational than a persecuted minority that becomes conspicuously successful. To be Jewish is to keep your head down, achieve what you can, and settle for second best.
We may be about to have a Jewish President. Jon Ossoff is currently agreeable to every side of the Democratic party, and a capable politician enough to ingratiate himself to moderates, leftists and Republicans. He is not, however, capable enough to ingratiate himself to the forces of history. It is not a good idea to have a Jewish President in the world's most powerful country any more than it's a good idea to have a Jewish foreign policy czar like Henry Kissinger or a Jewish Prime Minister like Benjamin Disraeli. In the long run, it can only increase antisemitism, it can only increase conspiracy theories of Jewish power, the ramifications can be felt for 100 years.
Back in the 19th century, English Prime Ministers were supposed to be intellectuals, and Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel, Conningsby, which contained a Jewish character who secretly controlled a network that moved the levers of the world. This was a good, benevolent character, and for a hundred years was taken as evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy.
For some reason, on the day of our election, we find out that the United States and Israel are ending their funding agreement.
Be realistic, what do people really think is going to happen from this?
Israel no longer needs the money. It has a GDP of 500 billion dollars a year, against the US's 4 billion dollar a year loan. Even ten years ago, the loan would have some effect. But Israel has developed economically at light speed: more startups per capita than any country on earth. The idea that the loan has much effect at this point is a bit laughable. What's the point of the loan?
The point is a declaration of mutual alliance. It's a blue ribbon certification: telling US investors that Israel is a rock solid certification, and in exchange, the US gets use of Mossad's intelligence, which according to one general is worth 'Five CIA's.
Israel no longer needs America's blue ribbon certification, but if the US and Israel move in separate directions while America moves left, divisions of the near-future will dwarf what Jews experience now.
The US loan guarantees is not what enables Israel's behavior but what prevents Israel from further misbehavior. An Israel without American restraints has no reason to not lay waste to the entire Middle East, thereby risking war on a scale few Jews have yet imagined.
Now let's say Ossoff is President when all this happens? Ossoff will be compelled to oppose Israel to the fullest extent of international relations, particularly because of his Jewish background. And no matter how much he does, he will still be seen as being in the pocket of Jewish interests.
What Haley did was a mixture of comedy, spite and somebody's sinister intentions, but the amount of conspiracy theories which instantly proliferated was uncanny. Barely within an hour, Haley was alleged to take instructions from the Democratic National Committee after the Democratic party had poured unprecedented resources into electing al-Sayed. Haley was equated not only with John Fetterman but with Tulsi Gabbard: an anti-queer elected and appointed official who crossed over to Trump after being considered far-left, and is basically proven to be an agent of both Russia and Syria.
People who believe these things are, quite literally, insane. Crazier even than Haley. They're capable of believing any conspiracy theory at all and it's only a matter of time before some RFK Jr. sways them (a figure against whom Haley led the charge by the way...).
Haley is as complicated a person as I've ever met. But what was clear to me from the moment we met was that she had no peace of mind.
I will never forget the moment I met her: we were freshmen, I was severely drunk yet I immediately realized this was no neurotypical student: her mind was chaos. She came right up to me and said 'Let's have a conversation, we've obviously been gearing to have one for a long time.' My first thought was 'oh my god I've got a shot here...' But I tried to have that conversation, and over the course of ten or twenty minutes, Haley must have changed the subject at least fifteen times. That was her way, it still seems to be her way. I'm still frankly amazed she had the focus for a political career.
The only explanation I had for it is that this chaos was a put on, that the real Haley was a singularly focused career animal and the constant mental darting was just a performance, a put-on to hide a lethally focused mind.
Yet here is evidence that it is no put-on at all. Haley really was chaos from the moment I met her until now. When she said "Israel appears to me in my dreams," I remember how seriously she seemed to take astrology in college, and I honestly wonder if that's the reason she supports Israel and there is no reason more substantial than that.
It's not that Haley is without substance, she's the opposite of that. Anyone who's talked philosophy and history with her knows that this is no 'woo-woo.' But in my experience she was always incapable of connecting the various thoughts in her head into something coherent, and thus was a bit open to the same bullshit as the conspiracy theorists who probably made her life a living hell for the past year. Even in her incoherence, she was utterly brilliant, the spontaneous combustion bringing her an eloquence and charisma that was mesmeric. There is literally no one like Haley Stevens in the entire world: the moment you meet her, you remember her forever.
But I've resolved that beneath all that is a person forced by someone to be the exact opposite sort of person: I don't know if it was her mother, some childhood friends, some teachers, or some deep inner compulsion to prove herself that she did not even understand herself. But I wonder, did she look at Jewish friends like the ones I grew up with, and felt the same mixture of jealousy, intimidation, awe and searing resentment I felt? As though she had to compete with them, rise higher than them, be 'better' than them.
In that sense, the only difference between her and me is that she succeeded. American Jews of my generation are populated by a hundred thousand Haley Stevenses, and it makes a certain sense that she found her motivation in these sort of circles of Jewish meritocrats.
And the values of the Jewish meritocracy screwed her just as it screwed so many people I know. She seems to be going down with our ship, and the fate of Haley Stevens is the fate we all may share fairly soon.
May she and we find better fortune.
Amen
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