Personal ad for a Jewish dating website, for purposes supposed and sundry

I am looking for there things, in different persons: (1) a (female) romantic partner to share my life with, with or without children; (2) to expand my network of suitable friends (of both genders), including those who might be occasional companions for my very frequent outings to film and arts events; (3) at the moment, a roommate (for my lovely, ample, book-lined, rent-stabilized Bronx apartment with guest accommodations and easy access to Manhattan venues).   

In the following statement I list the key points of my own identity, character, and ethical-political intellectual and religious ‘orientation’ organized around the theme of my relationship to Judaism and being Jewish.  

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I am a man of the left, European- and American-educated, French- and English-speaking, a writer, aficionado of the arts, film critic, and essayist.  I am also Irish and American and in both cases it starts with refusing all forms of oppression. I am by disposition an intellectual more than an activist type, and I am on the left essentially in a European and not very American fashion.  I study philosophy mostly in the ‘Continental’ (German, French, and Italian) tradition, and am a film critic and aficionado of international and especially European (East and West) cinema.  I have a strong interest in Jewish studies that intersects with my interest in European studies.   (Jews have never needed, nor has the religion asked them, to decide between commitment to the people with its particular concerns and traditions and those things we find vital in the broader world culture.) Even more left-Heideggerian than Marxist, I prefer to pursuing thinking in an open-ended way more than as instrumental militancy or a moralism that has already answered the questions it discusses.    

I am a Jewish (and as such reasonably well-educated and getting more so) non-Jew (this last at least officially and for now). (Briefly, while Trotsky was a non-Jewish Jew, Giorgio Agamben is a Jewish non-Jew; ‘Jewish Jews’ I admire do not include people like Jared Kushner, and do include people like Susan Sontag, who I think usually have happier lives (she managed while writing to see so many great films, and had so many friends) than people like, say, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a non-Jewish German who is perhaps the filmmaker I most admire (as a person). As for religious ‘Jewish Jews’ I might greatly admire, I cannot easily think of many living recently or now, but if you know of one, I’m interested to know. Alas, when people create great works or theories, I don’t ask about their identity papers or credentials, and I suppose how they spend their Friday nights matters to themselves and their wives or kids but rightly makes little difference to us readers and viewers. I must say I have admired Moses since his rash beginning in a powerful opening scene confronting the violent overseer. Needless to say, the religious/secular opposition is really meaningless, especially in Judaism; thus, the question whether Kafka’s writings are ‘religious’ or only ‘political’ would be undecidable if it mattered. Maybe that was the point of ‘deconstruction’, about whose founder the same thing can be said: the distinctions people fret about are mostly false problems as such.).

I find most American Jews to be too American for my tastes, and the liberals among them to be attached to anodyne solutions to social problems (like feminism and gay liberation) that should rather be considered fait accompli (I agree, but so what).  I do indeed despise our police state and loathe its mass incarceration.  I have little appreciation for American identity politics.  I don’t think I have a ‘privilege’ that is excessive or makes me an ‘oppressor’, but only want to use my opportunities in the best way.  Though I may seem like a neo-conservative to American left-liberals with their peculiar obsessions, in the French and European world it is obvious I am on the left. 

I am ill at ease with the suburban country-club mentality that emphasizes a morality of good manners and is essentially anti-political.  I dislike the New Age with its superficial Orientalism and therapeutic ‘spirituality’.  I am a rationalist, not a mystic, do not seek any generalized salvation, and would rather read poetry or listen to music than ‘meditate’.  

I am unapologetically a European-American deeply drawn to European culture, with some real involvement in French intellectual culture (more than being some touristic ‘Francophile’), partly as translator.  I have deep affinities to the older European Jewish culture, including in the German language.  As one who studies philosophy, I must say that religious Jewish philosophy in the last 100 years has mostly produced book-length sermons, in contrast to their properly philosophical sources and to the remarkable developments in recent times of secular ‘Jewish’ philosophy qua social theory, politics, and art.  I suppose it is no wonder then that Jews who are on the left in America in my generation have almost always identified themselves not as Jewish but simply as on the left or in some other secular terms.  There is in our troubling times a primacy of the political, and the major division in the Jewish world is what it is everywhere — not between religious and secular, theism and atheism, traditionalists and moderns, legalist rationalists and mystically-inclined ‘spiritualists’; nor along racial or national grounds, or even matters of sexuality and gender norms — but between right and left.

As a critic and essayist, I have a polemical disposition that has made living in the United States difficult and probably impossible outside New York.  Experience has confirmed this, as I have lived in a dozen other places with various social climates.   (I am originally from Los Angeles, America’s other major cultural center, with the main difference being in respective styles of social distance and proximity in cities of houses and cars versus urban density, subways, and walking). I have offended people even when trying to say how much I agree with them.  I could never understand the American protestant culture’s distaste for the pleasures of vigorous argument.  But we critics are supposed to be opinionated. 

There are three principal forms of Jewish culture in the world today: Israeli, American, and European.  I respect the others, but my own ties are essentially to the European one.  I can value the idea of living in a Jewish society, though only if that is also a way of living in the world itself and in its essential entirety.  The society with Jewish values that I would like to see is not Israel today, sadly.  Parts of New York are better to my thinking as are indeed much of Paris, Berlin, and other great cities.   As a man of the left, I am critical of Israel, but regard the Palestinian question as both cause and consequence yet not quite the essence of the right-wing orientation of the official Jewish world, due also to some other fateful decisions, that include the corruption of the Jewish state by its choice to ally itself with some of the world’s most reactionary and repressive tendencies.  Not only is being Jewish and European no contradiction, as I see it, the modern world knows differences but not true separations; it was only Hitler who could make the Jews a race and a people separate from the Europeans, separations always turning salutary difference into violence-inducing corruption and mendacity, even in relation to the so-called ‘Arabs’ who are not a race but a language, that of the grandparents of most Israelis today, and certainly no more ‘improper’ qua foreign to us than German, French, or English.  The Jews have no pure culture but are an exilic people, different from all others but truly separate from none of their various neighboring peoples, and who since antiquity have been the world’s most creative ‘parasites’ in an essentially productive and salutary way.  I understand Jewish identity as based ontologically as well as historically on the estrangement that is the very condition of having or being a neighbor who can be welcomed and loved.  Nothing therefore in Judaism authorizes me to refuse being also what Nietzsche called a ‘good European’.    

I am influenced by notions of Jewish identity in recent European philosophy that regard it as essentially both exilic, existentially as much as socially, and perhaps even internally divided somehow, if only because some degree or manner of self-estrangement is necessary both for maturity, and because the divine is not just self-expression and power but also the encounter with an other that makes the ‘here I am’ of responsibility an act of courage and love and not just individual or collective affirmation of the self and its strength and enjoyment of a divine or tradition-enjoying glory. 

I have lately become deeply interested in the remarkable work in Holocaust studies done by a number of European scholars, particularly in my field, philosophy.  European artists and intellectuals since the war have tended to consider, as Americans and Israelis do not, that understanding the Shoah is an immanent concern because ‘it happened here’ and in and to a modern capitalist society that we are all engaged in too deeply for mere inclusion vs. exclusion to be the question, all the more so seeing where that thinking led.  American and Israeli societies share in this situation  but are mistakenly committed to seeing themselves as at a safe distance outside and beyond it.  Thus, this enormously fruitful standpoint alone enables us to struggle with, and not just denounce in self-serving rhetorical postures, some of the greatest forms of barbarism that our advanced global civilization very much still includes.  A Judaism that does not oppose and struggle ‘immanently’ with this barbarism, as our ancestors including prophets and patriarchs have so often done, is not one I can call my own, as we must oppose the generalized cruelty and catastrophe of the modern world not just in postures of moralizing indignation and proud basking in our having freed ourselves from, but in rigorous thoughtful inquiries of the kind that are why the arts and philosophy or ‘theory’ so greatly matter.  

My political sensibility is above all anti-authoritarian and tends to affirm or desire a post- if not anti-capitalism, recognizing that we have no blueprint yet for it, and that a class hatred from below has never been a genuine possibility of the Jewish mind, for which worldly success on given terms is normally a good thing, just not enough. Though the given as such lacks ethical authority outside reflective and critical rational thinking, and a politics worthy of the name is more a set of open inquiries and struggles with real stakes but uncertain outcomes, and so eschews every Manichaean or Gnostic dualism with its moralisms and hatreds.  (I believe we give form to our experience in world-making whose generative condition is indeed the underlying chaos and vulnerability of our way of living in the world that every idolatrous investment or fixation is a vain effort to flee from. This fact and the resulting character of experience in time, concretized in the generative notions of ‘creation, revelation, and redemption’ instead of, as Harold Bloom puts it, ‘foundation, preservation, and augmentation’, the poietic rather than ‘architectural’, is also why the divine is distorted by preponderantly paternal figurations and why its moral authority is not rooted in domination (power and control) and so quite different from that of states and empires, or even markets and contracts; both temporally and logically, it never rests with the given, which is also why, facing an open future, it offers no guarantees but depends on us; if it did, the real question would only be the nature of his game.)

My positions on Judaism proper are in practical terms fairly traditional, though my mode of observance is not obsessively nor superstitiously absolute.  There are moral obligations recognizable as commanded, what is just is therefore also what is happy, and ‘oral Torah’ survives in a broad sense as study of this domain through the use of reason aided by the work of imaginative interpretation conjoining texts and artworks with present situations.  

The Jews are both a people of exemplary moral rigor driven by commitment to thoroughgoing ‘holiness’, and bearers of an idea that may be best called avant-garde, a broad project today that is best embodied in a broad left-wing and in the world of the arts and ‘theory’.   Yet in Judaism the dominant idea seems to have once again relegated, as in the Middle Ages, when this was inevitable, Judaism to the conservative posture of exemplary separatism alone, and that I cannot follow.

Usually the people I meet in religious Jewish contexts do not much interest me, a fact that is no more necessary than the equally true fact that most Americans do not appeal much to me, at least outside the world of the arts.  Though I am more or less ‘in’ in terms of Shabbat, holidays, Torah study, daily prayer, and the ethical principle of the Jewish faith as I understand them.   Certainly, as this is a minor detail, I am quite open to different degrees of observance or even active Jewish identification in those close to me.   And I associate eagerly with lots of people who are not Jewish with whom I seem to share generally a set of interests and values.

I find Reform services in particular satisfying in themselves, but the social environment and ideological orientation of the attendant rabbinate and congregations to be unattractive in their conservative liberalism.  Most of the people I enjoy meeting and being around are part of the art world or the university-based intellectual world, usually in the humanities.  

I also am a bit disconnected naturally, having been raised with some attributes of a dysfunctional divorced family that bordered on being orphaned.  My parents were professionals, in classical music and the scientific professoriate, but I was not raised in a deeply intellectual environment nor with a very interesting education, a fact I chose to make up for later in life, and surely for the time that remains.  

I am a New Yorker who will not live elsewhere unless I resettle, perhaps in part, presumably in Paris or elsewhere in Europe.   

I am an essayist who writes on Jewish issues and other contemporary problems, including as developed in the art form I mostly write critically about, in which each new aesthetic encounter is a revelation.  (My writings are available for reading on my blog: www.questionsducinema.com.) My free time tends to be spent reading and seeing films and art exhibits.  Art to me is a way of thinking about the world and how to live in, deal with, and think about it.  My aesthetic tastes are thus as much sublime as beautiful. Sartre said rightly that life begins on the far side of despair, and I do not flee traumatic subjects but find delight in working to understand them.

I am looking for people who broadly share my intellectual and artistic orientation, subjects and objects of the usual personal supportiveness.  I would not necessarily rule out a late in life project of raising a child, but it has to fit with the things I do for self and world more abstractly.  Though the idea of self-arranged marriages based on checklists of desired traits but lacking the passion that links love to desire is of course a non-starter. A good date for me has the same conditions as a good rendez-vous with more modest aims: attending a film or other event and then talking about it while getting to know each other over food or drinks.