Without identity, or, How I became a Jewish non-Jew

This war liberated me in a very important way. Like many, I grew up in an American environment of educated urban professionals that was partly Jewish, and very secular, liberal, and arts-influenced. I appreciated these things. I have prayed in synagogues and observed many Jewish holidays. While remaining a secular, liberal, modern person.

I would sometimes be asked if I had the expected identity. In some social contexts, that seemed like a taunting invitation to a performance of authorized inauthenticity, like daring me to prove I'm a fool, perhaps in a charming and colorful way. I finally decided that I think I understand their identity thing, and I not only don't want, but assert that I don't need it and am better without it, and you might be, too. The people claiming it became less attractive the more they talked about their roots.

An ancient Jewish writer asserted that identities don't matter, but his innovations were ignored after his texts became the basis of a new religion, identified with an empire and thus with ideological fidelity, and with a curious and variously if sharply consequential ambivalence to political and legal authority as such. Most fatefully, they identified states and fathers, a despotic derivation from imperial Rome. Sometimes I wonder about ideas that lead to clubhouse opinions that could be enforced by local bosses, and if other directions might have been taken or be rediscovered, by creative, pariah readers who could only be heretics in any establishment. Couldn't we listen to the music without having to march in the parade? Or worse, declare that we march in some other one?

Americans in my generation sometimes turned to declarations that they would become rooted. So much hysteria; what is well-rooted is a plant. Animals move, and the animals with language that we are do so in inventive, creative ways, thinkingly. And I decided to move on.

I was already very offended by the way that some people treated me in these places, including (some) rabbis and lay leaders. I was offended by the ways they were excluding (of opinions that I knew very well are valid in their world), and also by the ideas afoot in this religious world of inclusion. One of them told me “It is what you do in Community that counts,” invoking the provinicialism that has become so common by using that keyword as a name of God. It took me scarce a minute to ponder the riddle of what Jewish writer would only write only for other Jews (how about, a rabbi?). Indeed, I don't see anything interesting about the ideas most Jews I have met who are religious, or who for whatever reason, think that there is something important about their particular identity that actually is uniquely available to those with it. It's very clear from my experience that if there is any such thing, it's only comical at best, or some comforting but meaninglessly marketable culinary taste. Indeed, that must be why so many admit of it with a blush of embarrassment, like some sexual indiscretion.

The most offensive thing to me is the idea that this religion is the property and expression of a race. That the Jews are a race. What facilitated this impression was their typically intense familialism, and the way in the long middle ages particular ethnic and religious groups were all isolated and kept separate, a condition that is absent in America, except where neo-traditionalists have consciously recreated it in ghettos that, as in feudal times, are enforced from within even when not from without. The Nazis declared they were a race, and this was an innovation in recent European thought. They are not a race in fact, and most Jews today are descended largely or entirely from converts. Biology and thought or meaning are not easily equated. The idea that the Jews are a race is the most extreme form of the nationalist idea, and it is popular (Israel officially takes this stance, and it is now normal in official religious and secular Jewish circles, including in journals promoted in and by them). It is a perfectly fascist idea. The Germans are not a race either, the French refuse that idea politically, and of course America is not at all, except for extremists, though most Americans seem to think we are not a mix of peoples, as the Mexicans think they are, but a kind of place where a plurality of entirely distinct ones are, all with separately contained and well-bounded identities. A national socialist idea of Judaism cannot appeal to me. I also don't think Shakespeare belongs to the English people by a birth right. When the American writer Saul Bellow said he didn't like multiculturalism because he did not believe there is a Bantu Tolstoy, an African writer responded, "The Bantu Tolstoy, Mr. Bellow, is Tolstoy." His novels belong to whoever has the will to read them. That, by the way, is why America is not a "white" country. Things that seemed to have identities have a tendency to wander and migrate, and that is good, and so is appropriation of things originally seeming to belong to others. I too have stood at Sinai. Your ancestors did? Maybe so, but a DNA blood test will not reveal that; blood doesn't think. The Spanish imperial state believed in purity of blood, but I don't like torturing inquisitors no matter what language they speak, holy or not.

In America, people can be pretty nasty to you if they do not like something you have said, and it doesn't even have to be very extreme or pronounced; America is like that, and in fact our culture not only rightly prides itself on its openness and tolerance, but is manifestly intolerant in certain ways that, as a writer and social observer, I find interesting. I am one of those people who invariably winds up seeming a pariah wherever I am, and that usually means being treated to some kind of shit. It's truly comical to see people in a group that nominally and historically were social pariahs in some rather marked and consequential ways, treat me as the pariah among them. Maybe I would have cared more if they had also said anything very interesting. They usually don't, I think because the interesting things people might say are manifest in some inverse proportion to the particularity and clarity of the house opinion.

Comically, I even found one interesting synagogue that prides itself on the freedom of speech of, guess which group of people, the set of persons with one member that is their head rabbi. Now imagine discussions in which there is no debate and none possible or allowed. How interesting would that be. True, this may sound like a personal gripe, but this place was only one exemplar, the others being pretty similar. I think partly because religious groups are voluntary associations that are also nonprofit organizations, and like interest groups they basically have one opinion, and people go there to soak it up and reiterate it, enjoying the enthusiasm that Europeans of a certain generation might associate with memories of Party rallies.

But I was more than outraged by the behavior of some people that I especially noticed during this war. I did not and do appreciate one bit the assumption that almost any statement that someone finds disagreeable is automatically "anti-semitism." I think this is a function actually of a broad tendency in American culture because of our identity politics. How many black people will accuse you of racism if you are critical of them individually somehow? And this goes for almost all identities; many people are sensitive in that way.

The canard that all criticism of Israel is hatred of the Jews (and the Christian idea that people are obligated to have only the affirmative and flattering attitudes of love to everyone, and that political anger, called "hatred," is some kind of implicit violent crime, something I long ago found in many radical feminists who would assume this of any disagreeing man), this becomes more than just ugly when it is wielded in defensive of what is functionally something like or approaching genocide, whatever the justification intended. We know: a place where some 2 million live has a government organization that, like Israel, has a military arm, that Israel can claim credible reasons for wanting to attack and defeat at all and any cost, including the displacement or killing of at least tens of thousands of those people. Sure, this resembles Vietnam or Hiroshima more than it does Auschwitz. But it is not justified. You can hate injustice, you can hate people who commit it. No one with much of a brain believes that Israel is committing these war crimes because it is acting as the representative of "the Jews," and thus to criticize the one is to hate the other. It is Israel, alone, that claims that. It claims to be the state of the Jews. It and its supporters claim that Judaism and the Jewish people both imply and entail necessarily, inevitably, and so undeniably, Israel as the national Jewish state. And they claim other things as well, that people with liberal values rightly find intolerable. What I have conclude is this, radical as this is:

I am a person influenced by aspects of Judaism among other things (Shakespeare, French philosophy, modern film, lots of things, of course). Why not? It is part of my culture. As it is part of American and European culture. It's available to me. I don't have to ask anyone's permission. I have prayed in synagogues, observed Jewish holidays, and often start my day with prayers from a Jewish prayerbook. I will continue to do so. Whether anyone else in these places likes it or not. I do not expect any more to feel very welcome in any of these places. I now wear a kaffiyeh daily and plan to continue to do so, so I expect I will encounter either some hostility or will have to keep to myself. That's sad, because I like meeting people and being a bit social. I refuse an identity. The next time someone asks me if I am Jewish, I am going to tell them I do not consider that as a question that I ought to either answer or even have a position on. It doesn't matter. I don't need to be. If, years from now, I find myself observing some variant of the traditional "commandments," then I will do so, but I will maintain this same position on identity. Basically, I am refusing it. And I am doing so because that is the most ethically sound position in this political context, and the most consistent one with my own thinking. I remain interested in Jewish thought (along with French philosophy and other things). And I am not interested in being part of a people. Why do I need a nation? Yes, I am culturally an American, and have other predicates, that are usually accidental. I am not interested in being committed to anything that doesn't make sense to me ethically. I will take the text, and leave the community. I don't want to be associated with it anymore. That could change if it changes, but I am not holding my breath. I think nationalism today is a dead end. I live in a place, and I live in that place because I want to and can, but not because I was born with or clothed in an identity proper to that place. There simply is no such thing.

Origin is not destiny, and destinies are not justified by origins, even when explained by them. Once, I was living in a community dwelling (a student cooperative). I had said something pointed to someone else, and, this being California (where the supreme ethical principle apparently was to always be mellow), she averred that I must have a disposition to “violence.” (I do not at all). I asked what she thought that would mean. A man standing nearby said, “I would think someone was violent if he stayed in his room and I didn’t know what he was doing.” I replied, “That’s not violence, it’s an alibi for police state suspicion and war.” Maybe a war that would wipe out people who are not properly registered and documented with systems of knowledge identifying the particular traits that some Americans are so eager to aver and demand special protection and respect for, or whom we find opaque and mysterious because they don’t share our idioms or gestures. So what is, he asked. We know there is something about you; what is it? (Pasolini’s sphinx in Oedipe Re: “There is an enigma in you, what is it?”). I said, “I will give you names of violence: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam.” Today, I would add a fourth name, problematizing his reply in a different way. He turned to me in surprise: “Are you Jewish?” “Excuse me?” I said. He repeated the question. “No, I mean: excuse me? To be against political injustice, I would have to be Jewish?” He had no answer to that. My answer to him is I am one of the people who is against political injustice. Hell, maybe I’m an Athenian (reincarnated!). And there is something else, that, many years later, I must add today, unfortunately:

Jewish fascists: fuck off.