My Dear Haley

For the last week and a half, I have not been American.

Without really thinking it through, I bought a ticket to leave America on October 20th, the birthday of my Bubbie who spent our inheritance travelling to 59 countries, and unlike her, I didn't buy a return ticket. I had the further good luck of tearing my Achilles tendon and potentially tearing the other, so now I have an excuse to stay in Austria, a constitutionally mandated 'neutral country' while the world teeters on something... well we just don't know, do we?

I told myself it was a 'work trip' for a book i'm writing, and I suppose it still is, but it's also a mid-life crisis trip, a trip taken under a bad health diagnosis and a trip made in forbodding that even if I survive, America as we know it may not.

I have never felt American, but I have spent whatever fraction thus allotted by my life trying to defend America from people who would say that it's a country deserving of nothing but shame. I have defended it against leftists who say that America is a country powered by nothing but genocide and exploitation, and I've defended it against rightists who claim that America is a country ruined by sponges and inner threats. America took my family in when we were thought the sponges and inner threats: America took us in when genocide pursued us all through the world for two-thousand years.

A large part of why I feel compelled to leave is my sense that they have now won: not either side, but both of them. For the voice of the center, there is no space. But far more important than the voice of the center is the voice of the individual, the iconoclast, the person with the courage to depart from norms. I feel now as though there is no space for me, and I'm sure you feel the same way.

But you're a Stevens: a Michigan WASP like Robin Williams, the daughter of a powerful auto executive. By even the standards of JD Vance, you ARE America. I don't know how long your ancestors were here: but I'd imagine it's more than 200 years. Your life is defined by it, your lineage, your privileges, your history, and even if you become one of us, you will always be American in a way 99% of Jews can never quite understand.

My mother's mother was a fetus on the very last train out of the Soviet Union. Even when my mother's family arrived in America, their lives were defined by the Soviet Union: first radicals who spent their lives embracing it, then anticommunists who devoted their lives to opposing it. My grandfather's father was beaten to death by a Nazi soldier in our ancestral shtetl: Bransk. His funeral was the final goodbye event for the entire Jewish community. My late father was the first Jewish child born in Bialystok, the nearest Polish city, and when he was born, his bris was a celebration for every survivor in the city. In between then, my grandmother's mother was shot by the Germans in a mass shooting after Jews were made to dig their own graves: according to Polish eyewitnesses she died while shouting the Shema: in Judaism, that was the tradition of the martyr's death going all the way from the Romans to the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition. My grandparents were practically the only married couple in Poland who survived together: living in barns and fields on a steady diet of raw potatoes with my father's Tanteh (Aunt) Rochel. After the war, Rochel, a socialist, was shot by the far right Endex Party as a suspected communist collaborator: there are conflicting stories--one was that she was simply caught in a crossfire of the Polish Civil War, another is that she was rounded up and murdered in cold blood: given other statistics in Poland at the time, I worry the truth is still worse. And then there was my father's sister: seven years older and all of six years old at the the Shoah's end, dropped off when she was two or three at a convent where she learned the Ave Maria and Pater Noster, then standing next to my grandfather as he lead Rosh Hashana services for the shtetl survivors in 1945. By Yom Kippur, Tzipporah (Faygaleh) was dead from typhus. The only picture my grandparents had of her was at her funeral, lying in peace in her coffin. We only found it in a drawer as my grandparents suffered simultaneously from dementia.

We read that you want to become Jewish, and we don't particularly believe in cultural appropriation. If you become one of us, then everything about our people is available to you: the customs, the history, the laws, the mysticism, the language, the wisdom: but we're not just another American people like Episcopalians and Mormons: within Judaism is the concept of 'yichus:' the lineage of distinction that stretches back past living memory. A large part of the reason the orthodox insist on conversion taking years and years is because Yichus is just something you're born with: it's the inner experience that exists in the kishkes of every Jew with a family born into it: today we usually call that the 'limbic system.' And to acquire some of that inner experience is a process that takes years and years. A gentile does acquire the inner experience of Judaism overnight any more than a white male can acquire the experience of a queer black woman, and many Jews never acquire that wisdom.

Long before you seemed to define yourself by your relationship to us, I did not feel American. I felt a citizen of every country where Jews ever lived. I came to Vienna a week and a half ago, and when I got here, all I could think of was my late father, about whom you wrote to me movingly quickly the day he passed. All I could think is how I wished he could have seen this country he spent a good ten years of his life studying in school but refused to set foot in it. He spent a large part of his life wondering about this alleged Jewish paradise: what failed in this country's politics that this paradise for Jews so failed the citizens it once so valued?

In some ways, it's an unanswerable question. Politics, as I'm sure you know, is all chaos and luck. No matter how much you prepare, chance dictates it all, and the irrationalities of the day dictate the winners and losers; and those irrationalities form the basis of what we call history.

In other ways, it's all too answerable, and it's answerable by the breakdowns of the very norms and institutions that defended stability from decision to decision, year to year, generation to generation. Whether or not you were Jewish, you've had nearly 45 years of opportunity to read the Bible: and if you really read it, you'll understand what so many Jews don't these days: Jews right and Jews left.

History is not made by conspicuous heroes who take a stand against the day's prevailing trends. It's made by those quiet heroes who simply put one foot in front of the other and keep things going. Some of them are famous, some of them are eminent to those people who really know about Judaism, and the vast majority of them: we never know about.

Decisions like you made to endorse your would-have-been opponent are the kind of iconoclastic, individualistic decisions I feel Americans are suffocated from making in our generation, and after this, I imagine you feel very much the same way.

Perhaps I'm still too much a partisan in this extraordinarily partisan era, perhaps I'm too out of touch with what's necessary to keep a country going, but why does your decision fill my kishkes with such foreboding? Why does it feel so craven, so selfish, so 'goyish'?

Your fiance strikes me as a very Jewish type: the type whose hubris exceeds his Judaism, whose mind is filled with alleged concepts of Jewish peoplehood and self-defense, yet hasn't really read the Tanakh, and if he has, he hasn't read it with its lessons in mind.

Think of Netanyahu, think of Likud, think of the Republican party, then think of Shakesperean characters in the Bible like King Shaoul (Saul), think of Shimshon (Samson). Both put too much trust in their own judgement, both fancied themselves heroes, and the message is ultimately that they were idolators: they put their ultimate trust in something other than God: Sha'oul in himself, Shimshon in his love. Then think of the kings Hoshea and Yoshiahu (Josiah). Yoshiahu put too much trust in his own religiosity and did not consider the needs of those non-native Israelites he ruled, Hoshea put too much trust in the non-native Israelites. The end result of both was the same. Hoshea resulted in the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, but Yoshiahu resulted in catastrophic defeats too. Yoshiahu's fanaticism can be said to have set up the calamity of Hoshea. Think of the Chronicles of Kings, the would have been lost book of the Bible. Think for a moment about why it may have been lost... The history of Jews, the history of Israelites and Judeans, is not an unbroken history of triumphs and massacres, yet someone in our history clearly wanted to frame it so.

The history of Jews is always being rewritten to be a story of victimhood and triumph. It is neither, it is a story of a people always struggling to do the right thing in complex situations, and the right thing, particularly in crisis, is to thread the needle: do the lesser evil that so obviously needs to be done, and live to fight another day.

On matters of love, trust your fiance. On matters of Judaism, trust neither him nor any of his neocon minions/minyans: they are selling a vision of Judaism that is flagrantly partial and flattering. We have been dealing with their type for three-thousand years: everyone from Bar-Kochba to Moses of Crete to Shabbetai Zevi to Jacob Frank. To be Jewish is not to bring attention to one's own heroism, and it is surely not self-defense. It is the simple, Talmud-like work of pragmatism: putting one foot in front of the other, making the practical accomodations to norms and customs and routine that carry one day to the next, agonizingly deliberating over the consequences of every practical question. Everything slightly antisemitic gentiles you heard about Jews being like pedantic Pharisees is right, only practices like phariseeism are what make the world stand afloat: not revolutionary progressives like Jesus, not PR men like Paul, not would-be warriors like Bar-Kochba and Akiva whose zealotry was delusional 2000 years ago, and is still delusional today.

The world is made go not because of them or their descendents: the world is made go by men like Moses: who negotiated between two irreconcilable poles: an angry, jealous God who often hated his people, and an angry, jealous people who often hated their God. It's made by men like Joseph, who suffers immeasurably on the path to power and waits for decades to take revenge on the close people who betrayed him, then dishes it out over a series of years only to compel their forgiveness in the end. It's made by Abigail, who abases herself before King David to save her family in disobedience of her husband. It's made by Nehamiah who secures a building permit rather than pray.

There are many who are going to call you a hero, others will tell you that what you did is a Chilul Hashem. It was neither, but it was a deeply goyish decision: made not in pragmatism but in ego dressed in heroism. Christians can afford such absolute values: a people threatened with annihilation never can, and we have survived by pragmatic compromises time and again.

Make no mistake, Abdul el-Sayed is an enemy of the Jews, not pro-Israel Jews, Jews. But he was caused by our supposed friends. Over and over again in Jewish history, we are the dhimmi, the schutzjuden, the protected minority, the model minority brandished as a weapon to the public to say 'you too could succeed like this if only your values were better.' We're given cover by absolute rulers who want merely to protect the upper class: raised to be the interface between ruler and ruled--the tax collectors, accountants, lawyers, doctors: the educated people who make a society go. But when the underclass rises up, and they inevitably do when times are lean, the upper class uses us as the perfect bait: we're thrown to the wolves, and the upper class survives.

The proper, Jewish decision, the decision of the true individual, was to endorse el-Sayed and work to undermine him from the inside. Even if it doesn't work, it has a better chance than if you step out in front and endorse a Republican that will only help brandish us as American schutzjuden. If both the American left and right prove one thing: there are no absolute moral values, and such short cuts lead society to ruin. There is only practical accommodation, and with enough of those, society lives on another generation.

All best wishes from your Jewish friend who is deeply worried about the Jewish company you keep.

They are not your friends.

Evan