My punk Jewish dating ad

I am a writer who writes on film, philosophy/theory, and politics, as well as personal poems and stories.  What I am looking for in a relationship is someone whose company I enjoy, who understands me, and who has compatible interests.  My interests and my approach to Jewish identity are the subject of the following paragraphs. 

I am an observant religious Jew who is on the left politically and whose thinking mostly derives from European traditions of modern and contemporary philosophy.  These traditions were German Jewish before the war and are now mostly French, sometimes Italian, and increasingly American but with roots in those countries, where it is still pursued as philosophy while here it is called “theory” and studied in connection with the arts and by their scholars and critics.  This tradition is, of course, largely left-wing, and in a particular way that in Europe at least has to do with anti-capitalism and some kind of critical approach to modernity, and not with our identity politics, in which I have no interest. 

These interests of mine (European philosophy/theory and radical left politics) place me on the outside of every religious Jewish institution or group I have ever visited, though that is wrong, as they certainly should not.  For this reason, I do not feel very comfortable socially in most synagogues (never found one I like, don’t believe it exists anywhere today) and other officially “Jewish” places.  I would add that this manner of belonging to two or three overlapping worlds is wrongly considered by some people to be non- or less Jewish; I can show that it is more so.  In fact, Jews have never had a self-enclosed, fully autonomous culture; even the holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the rejection only of the Greek religion (which was then dying anyway), not its philosophical tradition, which in fact was massively absorbed, and that is why today there are Jewish scientists and Jews contributing broadly in the arts, not just painting flags of their new Spartan national ghetto fortress state, or designing camouflages for soldiers whose only university is the army, policing the non- or secondary citizen poor who are included as excluded, while dreaming that they are finally defeating Hitler or Amalek, and that their people will endure merely because they are strong.    

I cannot believe in a Jewish nationalism (there can be nations without nationalisms, like states without ideologies) or ethnic racism (for example, the lie that there is Jewish DNA, a truly Nazi idea, in fact, for only the Nazis made the Jews the race they never were and cannot be, just as being chosen by God did not mean that he practices a medical eugenics, as if holiness were confused with or exchanged for strength, the better only to defeat our enemies), and I affirm that “it was only at Auschwitz that they separated the Europeans and the Jews,” as my Jewishness is European, and I note that difference is not separation (else, we would have to settle for an Apartheid), and that is why we can love our neighbors and learn from them, instead of wanting to live behind a castle wall in a fortress state designed to guard and protect rich people in their villas against the poor people outside them, which is really what Israel is becoming, and why it is now ally of some of the world’s most reactionary forces and regimes. 

I also dissent from the standard thinking about the Shoah, which Jews do not own, just as destruction and humiliation do not in themselves make anyone holy (the name “Holocaust” means sacrifice through annihilation), nor do they legitimate any privilege.  The Holocaust was not a pogrom, and while anti-semitism is certainly part of what made it possible, it was larger than that (fully half the victims were not Jews), and its more important causes, in part because they still exist and are cause of other evils, even if lesser in horror (as if that were a recommendation!), include colonialism, the modern prison (though more than that, the camps are impossible to imagine except as the prisons they also were, and prisons and camps are how the modern capitalist world deals with unwanted populations), biopolitics (rooting social traits in genetics, thus yielding the novel lie of racial anti-semitism, along with the closely related biologization of deviant sexualities and “mental illness”), and immunological programs of health, strength, and purity, including the segregation and elimination from “society” of the “mad” or intractably ill, who along with Gypsies and others, crucially shared the fate of the Jews, and even lent some of their imagined qualities to them (all these groups were not “normal.”) Thus, a politics driven partly by opposition to the Holocaust has consequences today that just being observantly Jewish (contra Fackenheim and his “614th commandment”) and defending Israel will do nothing to limit or prevent (more likely, they will help legitimate it, which will work for Jews as long as they are among the wealthy or the victors).

Moreover, understanding antisemitism particularly in the forms it took in modern Europe, is also a key to understanding Jewish identity, because the antisemites did correctly identify (as historical processes revealed) some of the things they hated but should have admired, including the exilic (whose constitutive character no one can deny) if not the divided or ambivalent character of modern Jewish identity (which most Zionist Jews today reject, but for reasons whose truth is less than an established fact).  (This is one reason why a Jewish redemptive nationalism with its Gemeinschaftgefühl is so false.)  It is consistent with this that I am not ashamed but if anything proud of being both Jewish and German.  That is not a contradiction but only a duality, among many.  The best identities are hybrid, in a globalized world that soon will have nothing else, and purity of individual or collective self is in the modern world the most vicious and murderous kind of mythology.  

My way of being religiously observant is fairly thorough but not obsessive; I am not interested in making a fetish of it and do not appreciate any obscurantist theological notions.  I often like modern Orthodox Jews as well as the Reform or Conservative, but I am not willing to live obsessionally or reduce my library to its narrowly “Jewish” contents.  I refuse adamantly any redemptive nationalist project (Israel should exist today because of anti-semitism, not because it should be the object of anyone’s inner longing, as if ethnic states with their exclusions and wars were like romantic partners, like the Song of Songs as martial anthem), and of course am very critical of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians which have done so much to corrupt the nation and the Jewish world, being much of the reason (the greedy nastiness of American foreign policy and the suburban embourgeoisement (and white flight) of the descendants of immigrants are the other two causes) for its conservatism and insular dullness. 

Consider that Reform Judaism adapted none of the more interesting developments in German and European philosophy and artistic culture after Kant, and its rabbis mostly know very little about them; thus there is no real connection made within Judaism to modern cultural life and the forms of creative thinking about the social world that it embodies and furthers.  When I say I am on the left, I mean in terms of roughly Marxist and Heideggerian (e.g., Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Agamben) anti-capitalist and modernist traditions, not some milquetoast “left of the center(-right).”

(I observe the holidays mostly and am fairly rigorous about Shabbat, but I attend synagogue only rarely and will not be very motivated to go until and unless I find one that I feel at home in intellectually and politically, and I am doubtful that is even possible today. I am obviously very dissatisfied with the profoundly conservative character of Judaism and Jewish life in America today.) 

I studied at major universities in America and France, and in many ways feel much more at home in the French intellectual world, which also is more integral to cultural and social life in France, whereas here it is isolated in academic and artistic bohemian ghettoes.  My ghetto is the world of the arts in New York.  Not the nonprofit world where many “progressive” and left-liberal people are employed; activists usually annoy and bore me, as htey seem like business people who simply have an ideological corporate mission.  So for me it is the art world, and often also I get along with academics, the university world, which I partly grew up in, being very familiar to me.  More than rituals, I take my interest and involvement in the Jewish world, from the world of ideas in and touching upon Judaism and Jewishness (including Holocaust studies), with which it is for me indistinguishable. 

I was not brought up by Jews, in case that is an excluding factor for you.  What I got from my Irish, French, and German -American ancestors was a sense of, and concern for, oppression, which I hate (and am sensitive to in ways that some more conservative Jews, happy to sit in judgment on others and see them punished for whatever transgression, while they themselves may seem uncannily and obliviously mirthful), and a taste for, risking even snobbery, the arts and sciences, including philosophy, historical gemstone of the modern German nation both Jewish and not. 

I side with the followers of Kant and not those of Jacobi, the latter rejecting reason in favor of a faith that needs no justification beyond affirming a tradition or identity.  Appalling it is that even the Jewish world is so predominantly full of the latter!  My left-wing politics may seem peculiar to some Americans in style, because for me it is not about feminism, anti-racism, or any of the popular left-liberal things.  So some people might think I am a conservative, or even on the right.  That is probably mostly because of my Eurocentrism, since Americans who want to get away from their past often are distancing themselves from that while thinking it is about something else, like patriarchy or some other bugbear.  My heroes include Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Samuel Beckett, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Patti Smith, Picasso, Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Bacon (the painter), Hannah Arendt, Milan Kundera, and Susan Sontag.  Those who think this sounds somehow conservative (because Eurocentric?) are probably looking at the book jackets and not reading anything. 

If your Judaism is the country club variety of people whose morals are not politics but manners, like Eugene Borowitz or Joseph Telushkin, then we aren’t meant to be best of friends; the problem is not that I reject good manners (I consider manners of value and Telushkin an expert worth consulting), but that these people do not live in the world I live in, where people are regularly tortured, killed, or worse, sometimes disposed of in places whose best alibi is that it is less horrible than Auschwitz, and they are living in suburban enclaves where no poor person could ever be object of an insulting attitude, because they have never met any.  My film tastes range from stories of violent men to weepy women’s melodramas; when a girl is being threatened or hurt in a horror film, I cringe in my seat, because I feel as if it’s happening to me.  I like arguments and don’t lose too much sleep about saying something someone might be offended by.  Long past are the days when campus functionaries with false feminisms and other policing ideologies would dictate what one could say or visibly think. Though I have a sign above my desk that says something similar to Spinoza’s motto, “Caution”: “Comrade, shut up and write!”  This will not save my joyfully unsaveable mortal soul adrift among the infinite possibilities of a world of words and languages, but it might keep me from being locked up by some punishing cop with a phony medical practice, and thus giving me what I don’t need, one more object of hate. 

Yes, I do have both loves and hatreds; that is, I am a man with flesh who bleeds if pricked and weeps when others are; I care about the world and agree with Heschel that the just person is not at peace with but troubled by it.  My political life began in adolescence with a refusal of oppression experienced very personally.  I must say that if you come from one of those remarkably loving and tight-knit Jewish families, I envy you that, and think you are very lucky, because that is marvelous. 

While the old classics of the religion remain of interest, the Jewish world has a whole has become a pale shadow of what it might have been and should be.  Now you know why I am careful now before setting foot in a synagogue.  I think of Reform Judaism what Gandhi (not one of my heroes) said of Western civilization: what a great idea it surely would have been. 

Voilà, that’s me.  Tell me, who are you, and what are you into?