To make good our nation's shared Jewish heritage? Fragments of a dialogue

"But what right have you to criticize Israel, when you are not Jewish? And worse, you do so partly referencing Jewish traditions?"

"And why shouldn't I reference them? I honor the Jewish part of my cultural heritage, and so should you."

"But I'm not Jewish."

"You live in a society, and more importantly a world, which has a Jewish heritage."

"I live in a country where there are many minorities, and Jews are among them. The minorities have rights, and must be treated fairly, especially as some are historically oppressed and marginalized. But you cannot speak for any group you don't belong to."

"Do we live in a country that only has many minority groups, a kind of set of subsets, or collection of particularities, our universality reduced to recognition of these multiple and different identities, just as we must honor the Other as not-me, the stranger and the strange? Or do we live in a country that has many minorities as part of its composition? Can we not say that the whole that we identify with is a and b and c and.... and not only that it includes these things, all discrete, well-bounded, essentially separate, like monads each reflecting the whole in its own way but without windows, or with them, but each excluding the others from its own protected interiority? Is it not also the case that, just as the Mexicans think their nation itself is a mix of European and Native American roots, our nation, and the world, is a multiplicity not of particularities that are each closed on itself, but of histories and cultures that in some sense are part of all of us? Is American culture one that has a white and black culture, containing a bunch of Europeans in one place and a bunch of Africans in another, or does it not also have a culture that has European, African, and other influences?"

"But the heritage of a people belongs to them and no one else!"

"That is where we disagree. And I deny that the meaning of Jewish history somehow dictates the necessity of a particular state founded on ethnicity and a particular religion. There are other legacies, other forms of Jewishness, and at any rate the culture I grew up in, and live in today, is partly Jewish. The Talmud is as open to anyone who wants to read it as any text or document from anywhere. A post-imperialist global culture already recognizes this. My question about the cultural particularities that some of these documents are involved with historically is what they mean, what they can say to us today, and by us I mean any interested reader, from a standpoint of universality, rather than how they can be owned and used."