Читать книгу If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee - Страница 11

The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was thirty-nine, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age fourteen, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a foot soldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.

As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice, and at college he was drawn to the Communist Party, which is how John Marqusee ended up with Janet Morand, Ed and Olga’s daughter, the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-Communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean War at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who had stood stubbornly by his side when his life seemed most precarious.

They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, reached a deal and agreed to name names. “To this day we regret the mutual decision we made,” my mother wrote. “It has been a source of incredible pain and shame.” When my father, forty-five years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. “I fucked it up,” he moaned. The note of helplessness went right through me. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he’d made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.

In the early 1960s, somehow having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home, a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother both threw themselves into the struggle in the American South, raising money, organizing meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964 my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed up by his participation in the Selma march a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, who for me in those days included everyone from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael.

All of which partly—but only partly—explains why, when he lowered the boom on me in the autumn of 1967 by suggesting I was a self-hating Jew, it came as an uncushioned blow, an attack out of nowhere, or out of a place of which I was previously unaware. For my parents, as for others of their generation, the post-World War II realization of the scale and nature of the holocaust had prompted a return to organized Judaism. They felt a duty to respect and preserve this entity that had come so close to extinction, a need to embrace Judaism more explicitly, more positively, coupled with shame at the very idea of trying to escape one’s Jewishness—when the Nazis had shown that it was inescapable. It was decided that I would be sent to Sunday school and receive the kind of Jewish education of which my parents themselves had no experience. Like others of my generation, I was expected to pay the price for their renewed sense of Jewishness. As a result of this, I quickly came to know more about Judaism than they did.

The first step for a young couple newly resident in the suburbs (we lived in Westchester County, twenty miles north of New York City) was joining a temple. Interestingly, my parents’ first choice was a Reconstructionist congregation. This fourth major branch of organized American Jewry, the only one born and bred entirely in the USA, defined Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, left ultimate beliefs about the deity up to the individual, and stressed Jewish “peoplehood” and the centrality of building Israel. Crucially for my parents, it also embraced an ethic of social responsibility.

Reconstructionism was then in its infancy, and the congregation we joined was a small one, housed in an old mansion in a neglected neighborhood. I remember it as dark and cavernous, with creaking wooden floors and classes held in rooms without blackboards. The guiding spirit here was the rabbi, portly and smiling but nonetheless in deadly and perpetual earnest. I knew my parents respected him as a man of ideals and integrity. I was enrolled not only in Sunday school, where we learned Torah stories, but also in Hebrew classes. These were taught by an Israeli woman with a heavy accent and a heavier hand. I suspect we were even more incomprehensible to her than she was to us. When one of my classmates just couldn’t fathom the difference between ch as in church and ch as in chutzpah, she berated him and he broke down in tears. I remember feeling profoundly relieved that I had been able to master this alien sound and had escaped, for the moment, the verbal lash.

In contrast to my own weekly routine, the only synagogue activities my parents took part in were the High Holidays, Passover (Reconstructionism favored a communal seder) and occasional meetings with our Sunday school teachers. It must have been in the course of one of these that complaints about the Israeli teacher’s methods were voiced, and subsequently we had a visit from the jolly rabbi, who tried to explain to us that different cultures had different expectations of behavior. The teacher had been spoken to, but the students also had to do their part.

Sometime after this, my parents decided to leave the Reconstructionists and join the local Reform temple, the most popular in the area and the one whose approach to religion was least likely to disturb our family priorities. (“It was also all tied to being a giver to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and the United Jewish Appeal,” my mother wrote.) The Reconstructionist rabbi asked for a chance to talk my parents out of the switch, and they must have felt they owed him at least a meeting. He came to our house with his usual smile, shook my hand, and joked with dad. Then I was sent upstairs to my room while the adults met downstairs in private. I was aware that for my parents this was an unpleasant task. And I felt complicit: in some way this was being done for my sake, to give me an easier life, because I’d chafed under the Israeli Hebrew teacher. But years later, I learned that I had nothing to do with it. “The rabbi decided that John should be bar mitzvahed,” my mother recalled. “He was then in his mid-thirties and the idea intrigued him, mostly because he would enjoy being a novelty, but you couldn’t get away with this unless you actually studied, and John was not ready for that kind of discipline.”

Initially, I was anxious about going to a new synagogue, partly because it was new, and partly because it was a synagogue and my only experience of one had been weirdly disturbing. But as soon as our car turned into the blacktop driveway, I sensed this would be an entirely different proposition. The building was purpose-built and sleekly modern. The parking lot was crammed with station wagons. Dad escorted me to my classroom, where at once I felt relief. The room was filled with kids I knew from school. There was the one who played quarterback, the one who made funny noises, the one who had all the Batman comic books. So they were Jewish too. I hadn’t known that. There was a map of Israel alongside a map of the USA, but apart from that it looked like the classrooms I knew from school, with colorful posters and a big blackboard.

I felt at home. We all did. We were the most comfortable Jews that had ever walked the planet. Not for us the longing of exile, the pain of dispersal. We were Americans in America. And we were, in particular, suburban American Jewish kids in the early 1960s, blithely self-confident about our privileges and our position in the world. Sublimely safe. That was the beginning of my eight years of Reform Jewish education, which sputtered to an end when I was fifteen and declared, in my confirmation speech, that God was dead and man was condemned to be free.

For the most part, I enjoyed Sunday school. It combined history, literature, philosophy, and politics, the subjects that excited me even before I knew their names, a world of abstract ideas and compelling narratives in which I revelled. I rarely studied but excelled at the exams. Once I was accused of cheating, or rather helping a friend to cheat. He sat next to me, and, without thinking much about it, I had allowed him to copy the answers from my test sheet. The two of us were hauled before the rabbi, who pointed out that we had given identical answers to all the questions. I insisted, and actually believed, that I hadn’t cheated, since I hadn’t benefited, and was astonished when the rabbi refused to swallow this and held me equally guilty of the crime.

Ritual, even in its diluted Reform version, always left me cold. It was something to be squirmed through. (The boy who made funny noises imitated the cantor’s nasal tenor.) But the stories intrigued me, those weird Old Testament tales of sons cheating fathers, brothers selling brothers, spurned wives and martyred daughters, heroic figures who were also incongruous and flawed. Moses was forever irritated with both his people and his God. David and Jacob were deceitful men. Abraham was near murderer of his own son, Isaac. The lessons embedded in these tales were often hard to unravel, but I liked the sweep of them: the history of a whole people and its vexed but special relationship with God. We Jews kept getting it wrong and had to be corrected, and the voices of correction came either as destruction from without or dissent from within. Usually, it was the refusal to heed the latter that led to the former. The prophets warned and were ignored, but in the end they turned out to be right. Somehow all this perversity—on both sides—was for a purpose, testing and shaping us. From Ur to Canaan to Egypt to Canaan to Babylon to Canaan. From Europe to the USA. And back to Canaan. Dispersal and return. Suffering and redemption. We were taught to see this cycle of persecution and survival as more than a tale out of the Bible. The drama of Exodus had been re-enacted in modern times, with the holocaust and the state of Israel, and an end of Jewish history in the twin Zions of America and Israel.

We should have distrusted it from the beginning. It was too rounded.

We learned about the holocaust, the monstrous climax of a centuries-long saga of intolerance. We read The Diary of Anne Frank. We were shown a documentary: trenches in the death camps filled with naked emaciated bodies, piles of gold teeth, skull-faced survivors. “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Even the kids who never paid attention, the kids who couldn’t resist a wisecrack or a giggle, were rapt, solemn. When the film ended there was silence. The teacher then explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that “never again” should such a thing be allowed to happen. When I heard this, I assented with my whole being. It seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard, or maybe it was just the first one I had really grasped. Back then I thought it meant “never again” to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews.

Only twenty years separated us from the events in the film, yet they seemed to have taken place in a remote past. The victims, we were told, were people like us, but we could not imagine ourselves in their place. How could we? We were the most comfortable Jews the world had ever known. We knew Jews as powerful, as achievers in every imaginable field, as world leaders, as inventors and reformers, as leaders in business and champions of democracy and tolerance and the higher civic virtues. The notion that we were or could ever be taken for anything other than bona fide Americans never occurred to us. It never occurred to us that there might be any reason to deny you were a Jew. We were senators and governors and Nobel Prize winning scientists and novelists and movie stars and even baseball players. (Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on the Sabbath.) It was, self-evidently, a good thing to be a Jew—a blessing, an advantage, especially as it seemed you could be a Jew without actually having to follow many prescriptions or proscriptions. The Catholic kids had a much tougher regime.

The goods of the world were accessible to us as to none of our forebears. The dominant culture was our culture. The synagogue molded itself to this world, blending with the suburban landscape, streamlined with its sloping roof and giant windows. Poor Jews were a memory, a postcard image from a Hollywood past. We were taken on a Sunday school outing to the Lower East Side, the land of our forefathers. The Jews in the street didn’t look like us. We were taken to Katz’s delicatessen. We ate and ate. Jewishness, as much as anything, was food—tastes of pastrami, pickles, rye bread, gefilte fish, chopped liver, smoked fish. Our view of the shtetl was Chagall-tinted. The modernist Jewish folklorist with a passion for Jesus was a strange transmission belt for the only certified Jewish imagery we knew. (It was not until many years later, when I saw Chagall’s earlier, hard-edged fantasies, that I came to savor his mordant poetry.)

Then there was Fiddler. A number of the kids had already seen it, it had been plugged in Sunday school, and I was charged up with anticipation as I arrived with my dad at the theater, only to discover that the star of the hit show, Zero Mostel, was indisposed for the evening. That meant more to my dad than to me: he was fully aware that the role of Tevye had completed Mostel’s public rehabilitation after he had languished on the McCarthyite blacklist for more than a decade.* Even without Mostel, I was entranced. The book and the presentation had a clarity and gentle humor that made the plot and its social implications easy to follow, even for an eleven-year-old. The sets themselves were apparently evocative to older members of the audience, who sighed in recognition at the customs depicted on stage. “Tea in a glass!” a woman sitting near me intoned, an observation that returned to me many years later, when I traveled in Morocco, Turkey, and Afghanistan.

Fiddler on the Roof was an origin story for American Jews, a recollection of the world left behind in eastern Europe, an account of the upheavals that had brought us to where we were and made us who we were. Anti-semitism (depicted in a highly sanitized pogrom) was the context, but the real drama derived from the incursions of modernity and secularism into shtetl provincialism. As Tevye’s pragmatic-fatalistic faith is tested by his daughter’s marriages—to a poor tailor, a socialist agitator and finally, unthinkably, a gentile—his adaptability reaches its limits. Fiddler was easily digestible yiddishkeit for the 1960s, but I suspect if it were written today, its approach would be different. The threats of Bolshevism and rationalism, of intermarriage and women’s freedom, might not be depicted with such equanimity, and the near-complete absence of any references to Palestine or Israel would surely be remedied.

From an early age I conceived of myself as a rationalist and though I made spasmodic efforts at belief, I never felt a divine presence. During “prayer,” I was acutely aware of the gap between what I was supposed to be thinking and what was actually going through my head. But in the end what alienated me from the synagogue was not the make-believe of the after-life or the all-seeing omnipotence of an invisible God. Not in this synagogue. Here the absolutes were kept in the background. God was there, mentioned in the prayers, but he had been discreetly updated and denatured. No one seemed over-concerned about his judgement.

So what was the creed we were taught in Sunday school? It was not about God. It was about the Jews. A singular people who had given wonderful gifts to the world and whom the world had treated cruelly. A people who were persecuted. A people who survived. A people who triumphed. Despite the holocaust, we were not a nation of losers, of victims. There was a redemptive denouement. There was Israel, a modern Jewish homeland, a beacon to the world. A shiny new state with a squeaky clean people. Up-to-date, Coke-drinking people like us. Liberals, like us. Bearers of democracy and civilization, making the desert bloom. A little America in the Middle East.

Our Jewish history was full of heroes who stood up for the truth, who defied the powerful. The civil rights movement in the South was our cause, not only because the Negroes were the latter-day Jews, slaves in Egypt land, but also because so many Jews were involved in the movement. The synagogue raised funds for voter registration projects in Mississippi. The rabbi excoriated the Southern bigots. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” he quoted from Deuteronomy. On the wall of the temple’s multipurpose room the words of Isaiah were inscribed: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” This was a Jewish teaching but we knew it had now become a world teaching, a watchword for the United Nations. This was further confirmation that we were a people of enlightened progress.

For the over-subscribed High Holidays our temple rented the multi-seated White Plains County Center arena (later I saw the Harlem Globetrotters and the Lovin’ Spoonful play there). In 1964, with the presidential election weeks away, the rabbi used his Rosh Hashanah sermon to attack the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, and inveigh against the threat from the right wing—the eternal seedbed of anti-semitism. What was remarkable was that only one out of the many thousands in attendance walked out. In the election, the Texas Baptist Lyndon Johnson received some 90 percent of the Jewish vote (though Goldwater’s paternal grandfather was a Jew from Poland). Two years later, LBJ became the first US president to sell warplanes to the Israelis.*

Israel was both our own cause, a Jewish cause, and a moral cause, a universal cause. Like America. A land without people for a people without land. Like America. That was the gift we received in Sunday school—an extra country. For us there were two nations and best of all we didn’t have to choose between them. As Jews and Americans we enjoyed a double birthright and a double privilege.

“And I will make of thee a great nation,” the Lord promised Abraham, “And I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee.” The coming home of the Jews to the land of our forefathers completed the epic saga stretching back to Genesis and ensured it ended with a huge upswing in mood: from near-annihilation in the holocaust to the pride of statehood in a few short years. We took this outcome less as a sign of the divine inspiration of the ancient prophets than as another manifestation of the order and justice that generally prevailed in our world. It was a testament to progress and the Jewish mastery of progress. Thanks to America and Israel, the Jews were safe at last. Thanks to America and Israel, we all had two homelands. We could visit Israel and work on a kibbutz, which was like a grown-up summer camp. We were taught to revere Ben Gurion and his heir, the Jewish-American farm girl Golda Meir. In our Sunday school textbooks the Israelis looked like us: white, youthful, healthy—American teenagers with Hebrew names. And the country they were building looked familiar, with modern buildings and girls in jeans. These were Jews who read books but also drove tractors and tanks.

As always, the Jews had enemies. Israel was menaced by “Arabs” (not “Palestinians,” a word never uttered in our synagogue). They were exotically attired bedouin—people who did not have or want a home. In our Sunday school texts, they appeared swarthy, coarse, ignorant, duplicitous. These descendants of Pharaoh and the Philistines seemed curiously ungrateful and irrational. For no reason at all they hated us. We watched the movie Exodus, with Paul Newman as Palmach commando Ari Ben Canaan. It was the story of Chanukkah all over again: the Maccabees defying the ruthless might of the Syrians.

I was intrigued by the holidays. Simchas Torah, a year marked out in chapters of a book. Succoth, the Jewish Thanksgiving, was a harvest festival, a deeply exotic idea to kids who knew food only from supermarkets. Purim commemorated the revenge of integrity. Yom Kippur disturbed me (I knew I should atone for something but wasn’t sure what), but Pesach was special: the food (Olga visited with matzoh balls and latkes), the slouching at the table, the search for the afikomen, Elijah’s cup. Most of all, it was the story that pulled me in: that epic of liberation, with the oppressed triumphing over their oppressors, right over might. It was an intoxicating narrative, as exciting and satisfying as the food. People should be careful when they teach this stuff to kids. It sinks in deeper than they realize. It can even turn someone against the land promised them in the Pesach story.

One day Dad took me for an outing in Manhattan. As I had become a keen camper, we made a pilgrimage to Abercrombie and Fitch to buy a hunting knife which I had seen in a catalogue and on which I had set my heart. Afterwards, we went for a meal at Ratners, the legendary Jewish restaurant in the Lower East Side. The hunting knife in its leather sheath sat on the table, much to the dismay of the elderly Jewish waiter. “For cutting the leaves of a book a Jewish boy uses a knife . . .” he said. My dad was delighted by the episode, but I felt tongue-tied and ashamed.

In the summer of 1965, I persuaded my parents to send me, along with two others from our neighborhood, to a Boy Scout camp. We slept in saggy, gray-green tents pitched in a small clearing in a forest in the Catskills. The tents provided minimal protection from the wind and rain and even less from the mosquitoes, which feasted on our tender twelve-year-old flesh. We were soon covered in bites, which we scratched, and which turned to scabs. After a while, we gave up battling the mosquitoes and took to watching them land on our bare arms or legs, insert their needles into our skin, then fill their tiny bulbous bodies with our red blood.

The food was terrible and there wasn’t much of it. When we were taken on a hike to a mountaintop with a long-range view, we failed to carry enough water with us, and at the summit we found ourselves utterly parched. Desperate for moisture, we scoured the brush for blueberries, stuffing any we could find in our dry mouths. It became a kind of delirium, with all of us giggling and showing each other our blue-stained teeth.

Like nearly all the members of our local Scout troop, the three of us were Jews. However, it didn’t even dawn on me for several days that we were the only ones in the camp, until a kid named Jimmy, a lanky kid with stooped shoulders and a loud voice, walked up to me, looked into my face with a broad grin, and said: “Hey, you’re a kike, aren’t you?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Yeah, you know how I could tell?”

I stared back at him blankly, my mind frozen.

“’Cause your shoe’s untied!”

Without thinking, I looked down. It was true. My shoe was untied. Again, without thinking, I bent down to tie it. The laughter erupted and I felt something deeply unpleasant rush through me, which later I came to understand as the blood of shame and embarrassment and impotence. The other kids at the camp were mostly Catholic, Irish and Italian, and though they read the same comic books as us, they all seemed tougher, more streetwise, more adept at sarcasm and insult. I had been intimidated by them even before they began the Jew-baiting.

When one of us stumbled or dropped something or made any kind of clumsy error we were met by howls of “Being Jewish again?” or “That’s a Jew thing to do” or “What a Jew!” or “Now I know you’re a real Jew.” Then there were the jokes. “Hey, Mike, you know why Jews have big noses?” (‘cause the air is free) or “What’s the difference between a pizza and a Jew?” (a pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven).

We already knew that anti-semitism existed, but that knowledge had come from lessons, from books, from stories told of a distant world. We knew anti-semitism as something that had been triumphed over. But now, like EVM in the army, we discovered that there was a world out there where Jews were not the norm, where some people hated us for no reason at all. I was confident that the repartee of my fellow Scouts was ignorant and idiotic, that I was superior to them for not thinking or talking the way they did. Yet I also felt inferior for not being able to stop the abuse, for not being able to stand up for myself in terms they would understand. There was no doubt in my mind that people who judged others by their race or religion were plain wrong, and especially wrong about the Jews. My fear was that they might be right about me: that I was a klutz, that I was impractical, that I was clumsy, weak, and hesitant. Though I never for a moment accepted that Jews were worthy objects of derision, I certainly felt that I was.

It was worse for the one black kid in the camp. Mornings often began with the cry, “What’s for breakfast? Fried nigger on toast!” met with hilarity on the part of some and uneasy silence among others. I desperately wanted to be accepted by these kids but I also wanted to leave, to walk away from the whole dismaying experience. There was a stream near the camp. I caught a tiny fish and cooked it for myself, feeling pleased with the whole process until Jimmy spotted me and said, “Hey, that’s not kosher, you’re not supposed to eat that.” For a moment I feared that he might be right, but I wolfed down the fish defiantly.

Looking back, I wonder how much of the Jew-baiting was just Jimmy, who had probably picked up the habit from his family and wanted to show off with it. I wonder how much the others just followed his lead, how much they had already been exposed to, how much they really embraced. I think most joined in for the obvious reason: Jews were being picked on and it was a relief to them that they weren’t Jews.

Mostly we suffered in what we hoped was a dignified and superior silence. Sometimes we answered haughtily, “You sound just like Hitler,” or “That’s what Hitler said,” certain that the Nazi reference would trump them. Sometimes we tried another tack. “Jonas Salk was a Jew, he cured polio.” “Yeah, and Einstein. . . Jerry Lewis . . . Tony Curtis . . .” We threw the names back at them, maintaining a tone of reason, while grizzling under their utter and seemingly undentable unreasonableness.

In any case we were outnumbered. And they also enjoyed the significant advantage of being familiar with a greater variety of obscenities and sexual references than we were. Our resort to rational argument only made them more scornful of us. Nonetheless, we still joined with them in the daily activities, worked on projects and played games together, and for a time we really would be just a bunch of boys interacting without distinction. Until the Jew-baiting started again, leaving the three of us sulky and isolated.

I don’t know at what point I resolved to appeal to a superior authority. The name-calling seemed to have been going on for an eternity (it couldn’t have been more than two weeks). The scoutmaster was himself no more than twenty. He supervised us with good humor and with a light touch goaded us into doing things we didn’t want to do. He often asked me about the books I was reading, and it was during one of these chats that I told him some of the other boys were criticizing us for being Jews and it wasn’t fair.

I remember the sudden change in his expression. His neck went rigid and there was a grave look in his eyes. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered. We watched as he took Jimmy and some of the others aside and gave them a stern lecture. Somehow, I knew he was telling them about the Jews, about the holocaust. The boys looked somber, discomfited. After that, the teasing stopped. But the mosquitoes didn’t. My parents were appalled at the state they found me in when they came to visit, and with my ready assent, they took me home, though the camp season had several more weeks to run.

For several years I took twice-weekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for my bar mitzvah. Then came a year of lavish celebrations, services, dinners, dances in marquees on suburban lawns and ballrooms in midtown hotels. Mountains of gifts. Checks or bonds or little stakes in IBM or ITT. Compared to some, my own bar mitzvah was a low-key affair; my mother disapproved of the conspicuous display made by some of our neighbors. I got the checks, I got a set of left-handed golf clubs, but better yet I got elegant illustrated editions of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Thoreau’s Walden from a couple who were close friends of my parents from their left-wing student days. There seemed nothing in the least incongruous about offering such secular testaments as bar mitzvah gifts. I still read today the inscription the couple added to the astutely chosen texts: “These two books provide the always exhilarating blend of the search for individual freedom and oneness with nature, with the struggle for political freedom and social responsibility.” Thus my reaching out to non-Jewish sources began within my Jewish milieu. Thoreau and Paine were not Jews but they were very much part of my liberal democratic American-Jewish legacy.

Within weeks of my bar mitzvah, every word of Hebrew vanished from my head. The language had been learned solely in order to complete a public performance, a rite, that had little meaning for me. I certainly did not feel that I had become a man, an adult, a member of a congregation, that I was enfranchised. Instead, I began to look for and find some of that sense of growth, of emergence as an autonomous human being, in politics, in the world of the left, in battles against racism and for civil liberties. Soon I just could not stop talking about the Vietnam War and how it was wrong on every count. This, in 1966, did not make me popular. So why was I so determined to pursue the course? Did I like being different? Was I showing off, calling attention to myself? Yes, I was. But there were other ways to do that and I did not choose them.

Like EVM, I enjoyed the idea of being part of a vanguard of truth-seekers and rebels. I was sustained in opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the Black Panthers and the Yippies by the proud tradition of dissent I’d imbibed as a package that combined Americanism, Jewishness, Thoreau, Galileo, and a gallery of figures of conscience. My Jewish role models shifted: Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner, Dylan, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

For years it was a family tradition to buy sandwiches once a week from our neighborhood deli. Here I acquired a lifelong taste for pastrami, corn beef with the works, fresh rye and new pickles. One morning in mid-1967, aged fourteen, I went off on the familiar errand with my dad. The old man who owned the deli—his thick glasses held together by Scotch tape—seemed genuinely distressed by the long, unkempt hair I’d grown since he’d last seen me. “Mike, you used to be the all-American boy.”

“He still is,” my dad chirped in my defense. But in fact I knew I was mutating into something other than that all-American boy.

In Sunday school, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was a great moment of Jewish pride. I don’t remember much thanking of God, and no mourning for the victims on either side, just a sustained note of elated triumph. To cap all our other Jewish achievements, to confirm our eminence, we had now proved ourselves masters in war. It had taken us just six days to defeat Arab armies attacking from all sides, to sweep across the Sinai, unite Jerusalem, drive the enemy back across the Jordan. No one spoke then, not in my hearing, of the beginning of an occupation. We had redrawn the lines on the map. That was our prerogative. That was justice. We were unbeatable and we were righteous. Israel married moral virtue and military strength—another sign that we lived in an age of order and progress, that all we wished for would be ours. When a friend who liked to tease me about my anti-Vietnam War views suggested I might not support Israel against the Arabs, I was outraged and offended.

I’m not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the June war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early twenties, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents’ accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war, and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher’s desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. “You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street.”

Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white Southerners I’d been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I’d been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist.

I felt the eyes of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to my spouting radical opinions, but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn’t have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.

I can’t remember how long it was after that that I decided to share this experience and my thoughts on it with my family. This was something I was usually encouraged to do and for which I usually received approbation. We were sitting around the dinner table—all seven of us—so it must have been a weekend, because during the week my father rarely made it home from the city in time to eat with us. I launched into my story about the Israeli in Sunday school and how what he said was racist. I had been thinking about the matter and now added, for my family’s benefit, a further opinion. It was wrong for one country to take over another, or part of another, by military force. If the US was wrong in Vietnam—and that was a given around our dinner table—then Israel was wrong in taking over all that Arab land. I was reasoning by analogy, and nobody had yet told me that some analogies were off-limits.

For some time I remained unaware that my father was listening to me not with approval but with rising fury. When he barked, “Enough already!” the shift was disturbingly abrupt. Like my Sunday school teacher, he made me feel that I’d said something obscene. Then he drew a breath, turned to me and seemed to soften. “I think you need to look at why you’re saying what you’re saying,” he said, and then the softness vanished. “There’s some Jewish self-hatred there.”

I felt then, and still feel now, when I look back on it, deeply and frustratingly misunderstood. My motives had nothing to do with self-hatred or any feeling about being Jewish. Nor did they have anything to do with compassion for a people—the Palestinians—about whom I knew nothing. I was merely following, as best I could, and in typical fourteen-year-old fashion, what seemed to be the dictates of logic. If in following them, the results appeared to defy assumptions, then that just made them more curious and compelling. Judging people by their color or religion was wrong. Racism, making a generalization about a whole people, stereotyping a whole people, was wrong. Taking over other countries was wrong, even if they attacked you (it was years before I learned that it was Israel that had launched this war, justified at the time by Abba Eban, American liberal Jewry’s favorite Israeli, as a “pre-emptive” strike). Among the shibboleths I was brought up on was the belief that “my country right or wrong” was wrong. No one liked to insist more than my dad that if you really loved your country you criticized its flaws. Surely that also applied to religion, and “my religion right or wrong” must also be wrong. I was only trying to apply general principles to a particular case. It was an exercise in logic, an exercise in teenage stubbornness. I was unprepared for the response, with its implication that I did not know myself, coming from my father’s lips. An attack on my selfhood.

I was startled and bewildered by the phrase “Jewish self-hatred.” I didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t imagined that Jews would hate themselves, or that anyone would think that I hated myself. The charge seemed so farfetched, yet so personal. And so bitterly unfair. Burning from head to toe, I threw down knife and fork and left the table in a huff, pounding up the stairs to my room, where I hurled myself on my bed and wrestled with my frustration.

Some might by now have concluded that the roots of my anti-Zionism lie in Oedipal trauma. For sure, this was a deeply distressing incident. Later, I looked back on it as my first political disagreement with my father, later still as one of a number of raw episodes in our relationship, most of which had nothing to do with politics. Now, looking again at the history behind the incident, I see more clearly why the opinions I was expressing would have infuriated nearly everyone in my father’s milieu in those days. To me, they were a logical development from the agreed shared ground of democratic liberalism, but to liberals of my father’s generation they were an insolent abrogation of that shared ground. Israel was a just cause and a Jewish cause, those who opposed Israel were anti-semites, and the only Jew who could fail to recognize these truths was a self-hating Jew. Without in the least intending to, I had breached a taboo.

* The leftist Mostel had been named as a Communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and appeared before the committee in 1955. He refused to name names or to answer questions about his political activities.

* But it was under his successor, Richard Nixon, that US military support for Israel really expanded, from $76.8 million in 1968 to more than $600 million in 1971. As the Watergate tapes revealed, Nixon regarded Jews with paranoid hostility, and a substantial majority of Jewish voters backed his opponents in both 1968 and 1972. Nixon acted as he did not because of pressure from the Israel lobby but because of his vision of US strategic interests.