ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANS...

...And unlearned Elders.

I am an American, Newark born (a tip of the Chaykin chapeau to Saul Bellow), the child of the children of immigrants.

Apropos of nothing, out of wedlock born, by the way. Hence the Newark birthplace, as opposed to New York City, the home of my mother, who concealed my existence until my adoptive father came along three years later. 

A bastard, literally, and in the minds of many, figuratively, too.

I am a Jew.  I am an Atheist.  

And despite that immediate, “Hey, wait a minute,” from both gentiles and observant Jews alike, it must be noted that separate and distinct from being born into a family with what has to be described as a very casual and cherry-picking practice of Judaism, the monotheistic faith of my distant middle eastern forefathers, Jews are an ethnic minority, separate and distinct from any supernatural beliefs or religious behaviors. Thus, identifying as a Jew and as an Atheist is in no way outrageous—or all that unusual.

Just ask all those non practicing Jews, completely assimilated into German society and German culture, who ended up as cinders in the chimneys of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald.  The Nazis knew an ethnic minority when they despised it, and did what they could to deal with nearly two millennium long Christian issues in regard to the Chosen People. 

The only mystery here is that allegedly enlightened Germany beat medievalist Catholic France to this mass murder, when one considers the conditions that made the Dreyfus case so easy for so many of the captain’s fellow Frenchmen to relish.  And let’s not forget Stalin’s purges, which were, for the most part, pogroms by another name…not to mention the narrow escape of millions of Jews as a result of his long overdue death.

And speaking of Europe, and its many hundreds of years long commitment to Jew loathing, without doing even the slightest whiff of research, I can absolutely guarantee that while the first American Civil War was underway, a war waged entirely over the issue of slavery as an issue of economy as opposed to an actual moral understanding of the horror attendant to human ownership, or any of that state’s rights bullshit for that matter, my great great great grandparents were doing everything they possibly could to avoid pillage, rape and murder, and more pillage, rape and murder, of themselves and my great great grandparents, too, at the hands of the Tsar’s Cossacks, who would have laughed themselves into a Chekhovian coma at the very idea of regarding these hapless Jews as human, let alone white.

And, just to remake a point as specifically as possible, this dynamic goes back a lot farther than the generations indicated above.  It is, rest assured, the life of the Jew since the mythical murder of the mythical son of a mythical God, this mythical martyr allegedly a rabbi, whose origin story was crafted by those Jews who didn’t have any clue of the groundwork of the two millennia of lethal genocidal bullshit they were laying, and became the inspiration for what must be acknowledged as unquestionably the most commercially and critically successful bait and switch metaphoric Theydunnit in human history.

When my maternal grandparents—I have no specific information about the paternal, as per note in re: bastardy above—arrived in this country, they were regarded as just another couple of scabrous invaders of what was already genocidally cleared real estate, a blood soaked but now purportedly golden land apparently intended by a haphazardly benign yet sternly judgmental White Anglo Saxon Protestant god, who it must be noted, was a second draft of the god of those distant middle eastern forefathers of mine, to be a nation of White, Anglo Saxon Protestant stock. 

White Anglo Saxon Protestantism was perceived as the apex, the default, the baseline and pinnacle of the human pyramid—this despite the current trend in entertainment product of depicting ethnic minorities as having agency over their own lives and the lives of others, including White Anglo Saxon Protestants among those others, in fiction depicting what was in reality a White supremacist, unquestionably and undeniably systemically racist and antisemitic western hemisphere. 

Of course, this fantasy has been preceded for millennia by all those pale skinned, blue eyed and overtly Northern European depictions of that mythical middle Eastern Jewish Rabbi, and consider how ridiculous and flattering of the credulous that lie has been for all those years as a comparison. 

So be entertained, be flattered, but do all this with wariness in regard to pandering and patronization by corporations with agency and agendas of their own.  Despite what you’d love to believe, no corporation does this out of the good of any corporate heart.

Just a suggestion. 

And yes, I digress.  But only a little.

In reaction to this invasion and feared inversion of this Aryan default, an invasion which also included Italians, before they were (un)officially deemed white, and of course the already transported and, by many of those Aryans, regretfully emancipated Black population, the American eugenicists, WASPS to a man,  whose diligent work inspired so much of what became the Third Reich’s final solution, were well underway in their program of sterilizing immigrant boys, mostly Jews, to curtail their breeding like the human shaped rats they were perceived to be. 

Morris and Celia Pave, along with their fellow Jews from the east, were considered vermin, and, just to be clear, not solely by those white Protestant grandees.  Their co-religionists from western Europe dismissed them as Oriental Untermenschen, too.  Like their relatives and descendants in Germany and Austria only a few decades later, these westernized Jews made the mistaken assumption that the white power structure welcomed them, if not as equals, heaven forfend, but as junior partners in the forward momentum of western civilization.

To digress just a tad (I know, I know…), when I was four or five years old, my grandmother Celia took it upon herself to lecture me, in all seriousness, that when I went out into the world, the only thing to fear and hate more than a German was a German Jew.  Really.  That little old lady actually did this.

Life was complex, even in those utterly misunderstood and mischaracterized 1950s.

I grew up, and spent the first thirty-five years of my life living in New York City, or “Hymietown,” as Jesse Jackson famously called it, to no particular lasting effect on neither his character in life nor his reputation in death.  Just to be clear, I’m not waiting for that posthumous cancellation—I know better than to waste my time on anything like that. 

And not because, as so many on the left side of the trough insist, that cancel culture is no more than the usual hypocritical right-wing bullshit, or doesn’t exist, or is just about some plastic and every evolving metric of accountability. Or even, when one considers the speed with which culture adjusts itself to accommodate the tectonic shift of feelings mistaken for facts, potentially something else entirely by the time you read this. 

Who can say?

No.  Rather, it’s because such actions, such sanctions, are rarely if ever applied to representatives of those ethnic minorities deemed worthy of the demands for diversity, inclusivity and intersectionality—with the unspoken caveat of the specificity applied to that diversity and inclusivity—from which, of course, Jews have been systemically excluded. This despite, of course, the systemic nature of antisemitism.

In this regard, just imagine if a Jewish politician with a public presence, persona and platform comparable to Reverend Jackson had made such a remark about, say, Atlanta. 

The condemnation, the calumny, you should pardon the expression the canceling of that Jewish politician would have been front and center, and he would be an unperson, about whom no one can ever speak again.

You know, like Louis Farrakhan.  Oh, that’s right.  He’s still the GOAT, right?

And, as noted above, don’t get me started on progressive dismissal of cancel culture as no more than accountability, as if this last were another inviolable absolute, an enlightened cultural awareness of right thinking, endowed on men, women, and the nonbinary, whatever that right thinking might be at that moment, as deemed by some mystical Star Chamber of do no wrong progressive thought.

And then, of course, there’s intersectionality*.  Asterisked because it is an expression of unity, of acceptance, of inclusion, of diversity across ethnic, racial and gender-based lines—an inclusivity that specifically excludes Jews. 

This was brought home to me a few years back in an almost jaw droppingly comical way in a piece by Jamelle Bouie, now an Op-Ed contributor to the New York Times, then a freelancer, in an explanation, as if such a thing were needed, of the Ku Klux Klan in the Huffington Post.

I paraphrase, but he described the Klan as a racist organization that despised and terrorized Blacks, Catholics and some immigrant groups.  Bouie clearly couldn’t seem to bring himself to identify Jews, so he linguistically twisted himself into a knot, backing into the concept in as bullshit based a manner as I can imagine. 

Let me make myself perfectly clear.  Antisemitism by omission is still antisemitism.

So, as noted, I lived half my life in New York City, a bubble, an echo chamber and cocoon of generally liberal thought, in which much of the hatred of Jews is often no more than reflexive, pathetic and tragicomical self-loathing on the part of Jews themselves.  I was lucky, if such is the correct word, to learn at an early age, and to my shock and dismay, just how Jews were perceived in the United States west of Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover, well before I moved out of New York City to live the rest of my life among Americans.

I’ve related the story elsewhere of how, at sixteen, on a trip to Vermont for a college interview, I found myself sharing a cab with locals, all of whom spoke at great length of their profound discomfort with and distaste for Jews.  Clearly, they must have assumed that they could identify Jews by appearance—horns, I would reckon.  Apparently bereft as I was of those telltale physical traits, I was safely in the Christian fold—passing for white(supremacist), one might say.

Of course, this also provides a “gotcha” moment for the progressive anti-Semite of color, who can point at my ostensible secret Jewish superpower of passing for white—as opposed to all those bullshit depictions of cartooned huge nosed, sensuously lipped greed and lust exuding Jews so popular among OG Nazis and now at home in Black Jew baiting and loathing—see Ice Cube, for a perfect recent example, of the application of the techniques of Third Reich level minstrelsy and caricature to antisemitism.

Thus, the having it both ways—identifying/vilifying Jews by their characteristic physical traits, while at the same time being utterly and enragedly bamboozled by their ability to pass undetected as white—continues to bemuse and dismay the fuck out of me. 

This is, of course, part and parcel of the right’s depiction of Jews as both rapacious capitalists and malevolent communists. Pick a god damned lane and defend it, for fuck’s sake.  Please.

That shared car ride was, to be sure, a real eye opener, for that teenager who’d been safely nestled in the bubble of New York City.   Not that I really should have been surprised, despite a steady repeat diet of the Frank Sinatra short subject, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN.  This plea against prejudice was aspirational at best, and fatuous at worst.

And then, a few years after that Vermont ride, there was another, the lift a pal of mine and I got hitchhiking west, thanks to a couple of happy go lucky Ku Klux Klan rodeo clowns, from Akron Ohio to Gary Indiana. Another spiritual experience of the educational variety, this one scaring the living shit out of me and my equally Jewish compadre.

All this is to say that I long ago became untethered from the kind of expectations of the world and its perspective about people like me, that safety in miscalculated numbers, ivory tower beliefs held by all too many Jews in the enclave of the Big (Hymie)town. 

Living in the United States, among Americans, has been an ongoing and evolving educational experience.  When I hear the encoded phrase, “New York sense of humor,” I’m all too hip that they’re not talking about the New Yorker, believe you me.

I didn’t need this experience of living in the United States, a separate and distinct place from New York City, to confirm that racism is systemic.  Nor, as noted above, was it really necessary to confirm the systemic nature of antisemitism…the latter of which, despite and because of intersectionality*, remains a perfectly acceptable distaste across any and all ideological divides. 

While the American Nazis continue to eat their hearts out about the Great Replacement—a fucked up fantasia in which the hidden hands of those Learned Elders are driving blood and soil based White Anglo Saxon culture off the map by enabling mass immigration of brown people from across the globe—American Progressives beard their Jew anathema behind pious anti Zionism, taking sides in a conflict that provides the morally performative a delightful platform for intersectional* bullshit.

And now, in regard to that conflict, to alienate a number of you, potentially on a permanent basis…

…As noted, I am an American.  I am a Jew.  I am not an Israeli.  I am not a Zionist. 

I have as much informed judgment, which is to say very little, in regard to the endless war in the middle east as I do, say, in the ongoing war between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, another contretemps on which swarms of those with apparently too much spare time on their hands have brought confirmation bias to bear on an issue that seems to demand a profoundly reductive hero and villain narrative in the name of digestion, comprehension and yes, social opportunism. 

We are, after all, a culture that quantifies opinion, despite so much of the willful ignorance underpinning those opinions, as universally valid.  In my case, “Your guess is as good as mine” is perfectly fine if we’re talking about something of which I’m ignorant, such as sports, or combustion engines, or mathematics, or the lives of most other people, for examples. 

Otherwise, fuck that.  And it’s worth noting that I never guess, by the way.

So, my only real thoughts in regard to the seemingly endless war of attrition in the Sinai is how it affects me and my landsmen and their lives in the United States and Europe, alongside many, Black and White, who have found in that aforementioned side-taking a perfect opportunity to convey their systemic distaste for Jews free of opprobrium through the perfectly safe and self-serving deflection of anti-Zionism.

And furthermore, in a culture wherein The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion continues to find new audiences, delighting and misinforming the Volk and Woke in equal measure—I’m guessing with the general collapse of literacy the audible version is a hot commodity--I find no humor in comically monetizing this Nazi fuckhead Greene’s Jewish Space Laser bullshit into allegedly clever merchandise. 

My experience has always taught me that satire is as effective on fanatics as sarcasm is on cats.  But wait, you say.  What harm does it do? And it mocks these shmucks, right?

Whatever you say.

To me, this shrugging it off with mockery smacks too much of the modern-day equivalent of the waltzes whistled in the dark by all those murdered Viennese and Berliners, who, to their shock and dismay, found themselves sharing cattle cars, barracks and ovens with their distaff cousins from the Pale.

And so, we succumb to what seems to be an inevitable slide into a new international barbarism, with the distinct likelihood of authoritarian All American fascism joining the increasing number of totalitarian regimes, with nothing but a hapless, unfocused and splintered identitarian left incapable of engaging in actual ideological combat with anyone but itself.

Needless to say, I and those like me with any level of self-respect and self-awareness are all too hip to being unwelcome in either camp.

According to many t-shirts worn at the January 6th insurrection, 6 million wasn’t enough.  This is a sentiment that it would seem carries weight across the political spectrum.

Lester Young, that midcentury cultural giant, responsible and uncredited for much of hep, hip and hipster slang, described the presence of racism as “Feeling a draft.”  If I can borrow that phrase, in regard to my growing discomfort as a Jew in America, I’m feeling a draft, too. 

It’s a wind that blows from left and right in equal and yes, contradictory measure.  But it is a mighty wind, and to pile cliché on cliché, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.

And I have a deep suspicion that Jews are once again in serious danger of being utterly fucked.