"Jew? Well, Jewish..."

Utt Da Zay...!

Forty years ago, in the course of a mildly heated conversation with my second wife, the only woman to whom I’ve been married who was actually born into the tribe, she referred to Jews as “they.”

I replied that when the knock on the door came in the middle of the night for the roundup, she’d be unlikely to be exempted by identifying her fellow Jews as “they,” no matter how insistent or how convincing her argument might have sounded to her.

She dismissed me with a tut-tut, and we went on to other things about which to argue.  She was, I might add, a brilliant woman, sharp tongued and sharp witted, in the Dorothy Parker/Dawn Powell manner, who felt I was being over the top and melodramatic.

Of course, I was being melodramatic—as much so as a decade later, in a similarly heated conversation with my third wife on a different but now completely forgotten subject. 

This woman was the product of deep south snake handlers a few generations back, with a healthy slather of the Upper West Side of Manhattan to complicate the mix, making her what must be considered Jew adjacent.  In this exchange, I dismissed her side of the argument with, “Remember—when your ancestors were running around naked with their asses painted blue, mine were devising monotheism.”

It's worth noting that even then, over 30 years ago, despite the now acknowledged perfectly unjustified pride in my ancestors’ cultural shutdown of paganism, I was well along in a lifelong program of atheism and rejection of the supernatural…and yet, I knew full well, despite that overweening reality, I was and would forever remain a member of a club from which I could never resign, and could play the MOT card with impunity.

I’m now married to, and will die with, a woman who converted to Judaism to marry her second husband—I’m her third, she’s my fourth wife.  Don’t judge.  Like so many conversos, she’d taken the big bite of Yiddishkeit in her embrace of the faith.  Her children were yeshiva educated, for fuck’s sake.

It took her a number of years of our relationship to realize she was never going to get me into a shul.  As I pointed out to her frequent annoyance, “I’m so good at being Jewish, I don’t have to practice.”

Maybe apropos of nothing, but I’d like to note that my unintended influence has secularized her to an extraordinary degree—which, entre nous, delights the living fuck out of me.

All this is to convey, in some way, my complex relationship with Judaism in general and my own personal and idiosyncratic Jewishness in particular.

I was born in 1950, when the memory of the death camps and near elimination of European Jewry by Nazi Classic was all too fresh, and a genuine presence for American Jews. 

Among my toys was a Wehrmacht Luger, the perfect match to a GI helmet for playing war, with other kids who had the same brought back from the two theaters of war souvenirs only a few years before.

By the time I entered first grade in the autumn of 1956, I had taught myself to read on what was tested as a fifth grade level from comic books, granting me a nascent and increasing awareness of the world around me, in league with a curiosity and nosiness that persists to this day.  This combination fed my increasing interest in just about everything, of good and evil, for good and evil.

Around that time, my maternal grandmother, a loving yet terrifying coffee table sized kitchen witch, who’d emigrated from the Pale just before the turn of the century, used what I now recognize as an enhanced interrogation technique to instill in me her deep seated conviction that, once out in the world, the only thing to fear more than a German was a German Jew.

Really.

Crazy, right?  But the absolute, honest to god (metaphorically speaking, because, hey, atheist here) truth.

I was raised in poverty, first with the man I presumed incorrectly was my father, a gambler and low rent criminal, and then by a single mother, rearing me and my two brothers on welfare, in a tenement that was echoed to fine detail, for those looking for visual reference, by the set on the HONEYMOONERS.

I first witnessed what my grandmother meant by her loathing for German Jews in the person of our landlord, a fussy little greenhorn shit who seemed nonplussed by and contemptuous of a Jewish woman, even a product of Eastern European Jews for fuck’s sake, raising three children without a husband in a shithole, cheek by jowl with Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Italians, all of whom this Berlin born bastard held in complete contempt.

Despite my mother’s secularism, tinged as it was with the same sort of hypocrisy that in my experience informs and supports most if not all universal religious thought in one self-justifying way or another, I was schooled in the required training to be a Bar Mitzvah boy.  Even then, I had a suspicion that I was going through this solely because my grandmother was still alive, and that had I skipped it, it would have killed her.

This was confirmed when, after her death, neither of my two brothers were required to step up to the pulpit in this regard.  Bastards.

But, as ever, I digress.

Suffice to say I have spent much of my life in what must be described as a complex, not to say ambiguous, relationship with my own state of Judaica.  This relation has, to say the least, grown more complex in our madcap modern world, in regard to what must be acknowledged as the comeback of Jew hatred, in its classic as well as newly minted iteration.

To be clear, despite the snarky conversation with wife number two, I never really expected a knock at the door in the middle of the night for a Jew roundup.  Of course, back then I was a Manhattanite, living in a liberal democratic and Democratic bubble, where even the gentiles knew enough of their way around Yiddishkeit to enjoy its pleasures enthusiastically.

I mean, Tom Wopat lives on the Upper West Side, for fuck’s sake, so just close your eyes for a moment and visualize him at Zabar’s on any given Sunday with strict instructions on slicing the Nova, if you catch my drift.  

Enjoy the gift of that image, and then we can push on.

Thirty-five years later, having spent half my life in Southern California, the world has turned. To be sure, I’ve always been aware that right wing Jew hate has never gone away, and it didn’t and doesn’t take as extreme a figure as, say, David Dukes, to remind me of this on a frequent basis.

Casual antisemitism, often cloaked in the same kind of “just kidding” rationale that delivers casual misogyny, casual homophobia, and casual racism, has been and will always be just waiting to be experienced.

Living in this small and yes, provincial coastal town, and traveling as much as I do, has done a real job on bursting that bubble. Visiting the smaller cities of the South and the Midwest over the last several decades has been a wake-up call in regard to the simmering systemic hostility to Jews which runs deep and parallel with the systemic racism that informs a vein of this country’s narrative, often cloaked in the guise of good-natured comedy. 

For the record, I’ll be the judge of the good in your nature, thanks very much.

I grew up with those great antisemitic and contradictory tropes of Nazism Classic, which simultaneously condemned Jews as barbaric Bolsheviks and rapacious capitalists, not to mention subhuman vermin and/or the spawn of Satan, depending on where you stood on the flow chart vector of fascism and its tangentially modern American Christian adherents. 

I can’t speak for you, whatever faith you may or may not profess or follow, but that shit just never made any sense to me.  Choose one bete noire and stick with it.  But then again, we are talking about a creed whose modern proponents and propagandists deny the existence of that mass murder of European Jews, while simultaneously wistfully ruing this genocide as no more than a success d’estime. 

Again, pick a lane, already, right?

To their credit, those modern American Nazis have added a new and admittedly cockeyed creative trope to their portfolio, with their “Jews will not replace us!” shouts and cries, charging the Tribe with force feeding immigrants into the culture in order to, I would assume, piss in the gene pool and thus diminish the old White order—an order, to be sure, that none of those White supremacists in any way acknowledge Jews as a part of.

And of course, in that ‘are they or aren’t they?’ White discussion, the only sector of Jew loathing in the US which actually regards Jews as White is that of Black antisemitism, personified by but hardly reserved entirely for Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam…

…Which is a perfect segue to acknowledge my despair, not to mention blind rage, at the now increasingly common and apparently acceptable Jew hate from the left.

Now, to be honest, left wing hostility to Jews isn’t really all that new a thing, despite Marx and his own origins as a Jew, secular though he may have been. And a German Jew at that—see above for my point, perhaps made.

Any student of history knows that Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s, and many of the subsequent purges that followed, were simply pogroms with a different name.  And again, only his sudden and timely death saved the thousands of Jews condemned to die in the Kremlin ordered Doctor’s purge—and to be clear, all those victims were deeply committed comrades of the world revolution.

At least Stalin didn’t go through a lot of handwringing mishigas to justify his murder.  Jews, for Uncle Joe, were cosmopolitan, and thus, from his farm raised hillbillski point of view, all too likely potential counterrevolutionaries. Just cleaning up any possible threat to his hegemony over the Soviet Union was motivation enough.  To quote Billy Wilder, “…Fewer but better Russians.”

Modern leftist Jew hate—I use the words anti-Semitism sparingly, with caution, since much of that modern Jew hate derives from other Semites and the leftists who frequently and to be sure, counterintuitively, love them—comes, like that of the right, in two varieties, variations on a theme of Nazism’s loathing, of course, but with enough of a slather of modern woke intersectionality to put a fresh spin on a timeless and never vanished hatred that everyone can enjoy.

In this regard, I wonder whether anyone has ever pointed out to Louis Farrakhan that he’s real life cosplaying Robert Stanley Wilson, Kurt Vonnegut’s Black Fuhrer of Harlem from his novel MOTHER NIGHT, a fictional version of Sufi Abdul Hamid, who called himself by that selfsame honorific.

That sociopolitical horseshoe metaphor about ideology is perfectly personified in this perfect shitstorm of agreement between Louis Farrakhan and David Duke, with both keeping Nazi Classic “Jew as vermin” stuff alive, for their respective cohorts of credulous shitheads. 

Which, inevitably, leads to the elephant in the room, namely Israel.

I’ve never been to Israel. To be clear, I’ve never had any particular desire to visit Israel, despite my boyhood spent at seders which always included a traditional, albeit drunken, “Next year in Jerusalem!”  For my family, and I would guess for many others, this was a metaphor, much like most religious thought of the 1950s before Billy Graham showed up to lead us down the garden path back to the dark ages.

I’m an American, and an atheist as noted above, but still, and I know this seems contradictory for those of the gentile persuasion out there, a Jew.  Belief in god, faith in god, the very acknowledgment of the existence of god, in my case to be sure, has nothing to do with it.  I am stuck, and frankly, perfectly happy to be so stuck in this motley Tribe.

That said, and to confirm, I have no particular link with a Jewish state…but then there’s all that anti Zionism out there, with its attendant fragrance of performative morality in the name of Critical Theory, intersectionality, and power bottom victim culture.

Consider if you will the abuse of human rights, of misogyny, of homophobia, to mention only a few of the crimes committed internationally by nation states, many of which are among those very victim culture power bottom societies mentioned above.

Now further consider that those abuses are routinely ignored by the anti-Zionist Left in its repeated attacks on Israel.

None of this is to whitewash the state of Israel.  There is, to be sure, no such thing as a nation state utterly blameless of some antisocial behavior, and Israel is no exception.  The conservative Likud party, and the Hassidim who seem to make everyone miserable where they go, are reason enough for me to stay the fuck away from this society.

But when one considers the left’s double standard of attacking Israel for policies that are ignored when practiced by others, I am afraid that a discomfiting percentage of the left’s anti-Zionist fervor is just a beard for the classic default of good old-fashioned Jew hate.

Tom Lehrer made it clear—“Everybody hates the Jews.”

And to repeat, perhaps ad nauseum for the sensitive among you, I have no particular identification with Israel, and the chances of my finding myself as a visitor there grow slimmer by the minute.

But in a vein that runs tangentially with the racist assumption on the part of this administration that Israel is “…My country…” the blowback of that anti-Zionist fervor is a toxic additive to the growth industry of All-American Jew hate from the woke left.

From Jewish Lesbians being denied the right to participate in a Pride parade, to Ilhan Omar’s “…All about the Benjamin’s, baby,” to the microaggression(That’s right, I said microaggression—what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.) of a progressive columnist assiduously explaining the Ku Klux Klan, going to enormous lengths to never include Jews in his list of targets of that masked posse of white supremacist identitarians, a huge swathe of progressive political thought is as infected with the international pastime of Jew hate as the right, albeit more effectively bearded, to be sure.

I am fully aware that this is going to aggravate and piss off some, many or even most of you.  Gentiles might very well think I’m exaggerating, but most of those who believe this will keep it to yourselves, perhaps even privately indulging in remarks and sensibilities that boil down to, “Those crazy over emotional and argumentative Jews, am I right?”

As for my fellow Members of the Tribe, many of whom are shining exemplars of coastal elitism at its most cosmopolitan, I anticipate dismissal at best, outrage at worst. As a former member of that coastal elite, I can dig it.  There are plenty of those who share my second wife’s perspective on her own identification, whatever it may be, with Judaism.

But just as the right has Stephen Miller, and Sheldon Adelson, and Ike Perlmutter, to mention only a few, who have allied themselves with an avowedly anti-Semitic cohort in the name of their own unenlightened self-interests, the left has its own well publicized share of apologists for Jew hate in the name of woke progressiveness and performative morality.

And maybe I am being melodramatic.  Maybe I have nothing in common with those Soviet Jews, those perfectly doctrinaire Communists stunned to be purged and executed by Stalin, or with those German and Austrian Jews who figured all this comic Wagnerian opera Nazi stuff would soon blow over or normalize so their lives as loyal Germans could go on, as opposed to ending up a decade later as corpses stacked like cordwood.

Maybe it was that ‘live and let live’ stuff of those doomed German Jews, or that ‘who gives a fuck about the Kikes in the Pale as long as we’ve got our home in the Fatherland,’ that informed my grandmother’s warning.  Seems possible, perhaps even likely.

And just to be clear, I don’t believe in false equivalency, at least not for the time being.  Modern American Nazism is the clear and present danger, certainly as long as so large and committed a voting block defined by White supremacist terror with a lagniappe of toxic masculinity is out there.  Which is to say the foreseeable future.

And in that regard, let’s revisit that “Jews will not replace us!” slogan of those apparently all-American millennials noted above.  When parsed, this single sentence does extraordinary work.

First, it manages to hold Jews responsible for an imaginary swarm of immigrants who are going to take the place of this crowd—comically enough, an imaginary immigrant swarm whose majority is societally primed and nationalistically ready to loathe the Jews being held accountable for their immigration.

Comedy gold!

And second, it identifies life in this modern America as a zero-sum game.  In sum, these selfish shitstains earnestly and honestly believe that what is given to others is denied to them.

In reality, of course, it’s a tiny minority of low-profile billionaires and oligarchs who’ve been robbing the system blind, pitting the serfs who believe this nonsense against any racial or ethnic group that can be demonized and othered.  

And yes.  As deeply flawed and overreaching as I regard the New York Times’ 1619 PROJECT, and as skeptical as I am of the suddenly woke nature of corporate America, endowed as it is with a longstanding gift for the commodification of dissent, culture and counterculture in the name of the holy bottom line, only a willfully ignorant fool, or a disingenuous liar, would deny the existence of systemic racism in the United States.

On the other hand, Jew hate is as old as the indictment for those creators of monotheism for complicity in the murder of what is likely as mythical a figure as a unicorn, an indictment that has complicated western civilization, not to mention eastern civilization, too, and its relationship with the so-called Chosen People for two millennia and counting since.

And informing that indictment is the endless and insipid identification of Jews as crafty, as clever, as conniving…how else to explain so much success of so tiny a minority that has managed to survive expulsion, inquisition, mass murder and general loathing for those two millennia and still keeps chugging along? 

Jews, right?

And it’s just that idiotic and ultimately murderous calumny being hurled at Jews, by the politically intersectional Critical Theorizing crowd of all ethnic and racial stripes, that would be stunned into first silence then into an uproar if, as an example, any of the timeworn cliched bullshit universally applied to Black Americans were trotted out. 

A list is available on request of all those misbegotten racist and ethnic stereotypes, but I’m sure you know all of them, or at least enough to catch my drift.  That said, it would seem that double standards apparently apply in this regard. 

Not to be too indelicate, but fuck that.

So yes, my Judaism, and my relationship with Judaism at large, is complex and complicated, contradictory and confounding.  And despite the progressive left’s unfortunately and frankly intermittently successful attempt to paint me as a right-wing nutcase, I remain a pragmatic Democratic Socialist, albeit with an iconoclastic streak that confuses and enrages those lockstep Stalinist adjacent intersectionalists, while my own singular brand of Yiddishkeit confounds a healthy number of my fellow Tribesmen of all political stripes.

So maybe, as my second wife charged, I’m being a tad melodramatic.  Maybe this is just the same old racist Jew baiting horseshit from the White Supremacist right, and just growing pains on the part of the Intersectional Woke left.

And just as I don’t believe in god, I certainly don’t believe in ghosts, either, beyond such things as useful metaphor.

And then I think of those victims of the blood libel, of the inquisition, of the purges, of the holocaust, and I have to admit, I can allow myself to be haunted by metaphor, too.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin, a Prince--but far from the J.A.P. variety.