national identities

This post by Ralph Seliger contains an important argument:

With regard to #5, I've already discoursed somewhat on this in an earlier posting: "The Zionist movement successfully remade the Jewish people as a nation in the land of Israel. It took a series of scattered religious and ethnic communities and – with the ‘help’ of pervasive and (eventually) genocidal antisemitism – gathered them up and transformed them. ...”

Prof. Sand admits that there is such a thing as "Jewish identity," apart from the religion. But he doesn't seem to understand that all national identities are "invented." I blogged on this as well: "This is one of the lessons I drew from an insightful book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997). He makes the point that 'National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given....' Khalidi proceeds to relate how Palestinians didn't see themselves as a distinct people until well into the 20th century. Just as anti-Zionist writers and activists would never think of denying Palestinians their understanding of themselves as a people, they should not be denying the Jews their sense of peoplehood – a consciousness born of centuries of persecution, discrimination and worse, not to mention strong religious and cultural continuities."

Early Reform Judaism, born in 19th century Germany and the US, attempted to recast Jewish self-definition into only a religious frame; classical Reform Jews were Americans or Germans of the "Mosaic" faith. The traditional or Orthodox view of Jews is of "Ahm Yisrael" -- the people or nation of Israel (even among anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews). The left has generally granted people the right to define themselves, to "national self-determination"; only with regard to the Jews does this seem not to be the case.

For me, personally, it's meaningful that we Jews have always understood ourselves as a people, well before the advent of nationalism. I've seen that denied too many times. The attempt among some Reform Jews to recast Jewishness as just Judaism, should be understood as assimilation in a colonial context. But it's particularly galling that those who deny Jewish national identities insist on a Palestinian national identity that is somehow "authentic." Jews, it seems, are just inauthentic.

Btw, the ideas that Ashkenazi Jews are descendents of the Khazars and that Jews are more converts than descendents of the original Jews both strike me as not only politically irrelevant but also as likely false. Of course, as Seliger writes, such a discussion in a genuinely scholarly environment wouldn't be open to the same kinds of criticism whether right or wrong. However, some classically antisemitic motifs can be understood as inauthenticity -See Occidentalism for numerous examples- and I wonder if these notions of Jewish ancestry stem from a general view of Jews as inauthentic.

On the instability of Jewish identities

You probably read Tablet. Make sure you read this. For many Jews, and I'm one, a Jewish identity isn't stable. It's a story that goes, roughly, "Yes. No. Well, yes, dependinig, but not really. Well, yes. And no. And, emphatically, yes."

I'm sure many minorities have that conversation with themselves, asking in what way their identity depends on that one fact and in what way their behavior depends on that identity. As a certain type of Jew, there's more hanging on this, because there's nothing else to hang my Jewishness on. It folds over itself, so asking the question becomes a major way I enact Jewishness.

Kafka once claimed he had nothing in common with himself. But the fact that he's someone who would say that is more than enough to have in common. One interpretation of The Metamorphosis is that Gregor Samsa's awaking to find himself a bug is a metaphor for being Jewish. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed.

And, truly, everything has changed. Too much history rides on it to pretend it's an illusion.

Yoo Hoo!

I saw the documentary, Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, by Aviva Kempner, last nigh. Here's the film website, a NYT article, and here's Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is rated 92% fresh. Unfortunately, it's in limited release, and Molly Goldberg/Gertrude Berg will probably remain for most people the most famous woman you've never heard of.

That so few know who she is shouldn't be understood to qualify her fame. She was incredibly popular, ranked by a popular magazine (I forget which, unfortunately, but a major, widely read mag) as the second most influential woman in America behind Eleanor Roosevelt (and the richest woman ahead of ER). Her television show was the highest rated on television for almost a decade. The radio show that preceded tv was as popular for twice as long, so her rain as a pop icon ("The Oprah of her day") ran from the early 30s into the mid 50s. And if not for McCarthyism, Lucille Ball might never have had a shot to replace here.

The audience was lively. Judging by their accents (it was too dark for racial profiling) and their vocal or otherwise palpable reactions to much of the film, most in the theater were Jewish. My wife might have been the only one who wasn't. And the two of us might have been the only ones this side of 60. People were there to revel in nostalgia. Like my mother, they grew up watching The Goldbergs, and that was very much their story. Of course, as the film makes clear, it was the story of anyone who grew up in a family. But if you were other than WASPy, it was even easier to identify with it as your story. And if you were a New York Jew, then you might have felt like you owned the story. (And if your name happened to be Goldberg, well..) Before the show, one woman asked the assembled, "Anyone here from the Bronx?"

A few things in particular caught my attention. One, the early success of the radio show was around the same time as the rise of fascism world-wide. Given her success, it might have been easy to argue the US was incredibly tolerant to Jews in a way that ignored that it was also a time when the German-American Bund, Charles Coughlin, and the America First Party were popular and influential. Unlike Hollywood, she even had an episode (only one) with a brick thrown through her window. This really drove home to me something that's been true of antisemitism at least since Augustine, that elements of tolerance and success for Jews are not dispositive of Jewish oppression. In fact, they coexist rather well.

Two, Ed Asner's interview was quite different from the rest of the film. Though Gertrude Berg herself was born in the US, the character Molly Goldberg had some vaguely Eastern European accent. Through most of the film, I was amazed at this brazen willingness to express difference, something I wish was more pronounced today. But for Asner, who grew up wanting to fit in and hide his difference, that foreign accent made him incredibly uncomfortable.

Three, and for this you see the film (in part because I don't want to render it superfluous for you and because I really couldn't convey this) was the role of antisemitism in McCarthyism. When her costar Philip Loeb was targeted as a supposed Communist (he was a prominent trade union activist), Berg fought for him and stood up to General Mills - and it ruined her. There was a certain Catholic cardinal who could have made it all go away - but he insisted she convert. It was a proud, but unsurprising moment when then off-Broadway play that played a huge role in breaking McCarthyism was The Life of Sholem Aleichem.

At present, it's only showing in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema or the Quad Cinema. Tomorrow it opens in DC and one theater on Long Island. Next week, it goes into somewhat wider release. Check at the film's website to see if it'll be near you.