Thinking about Jews
This one has a surprising amount of sports and more footnotes than ever.
The word for words like cleave is contronym. Contronym is not a contronym: its meaning is the simple sum of its roots: opposite + word = a word that has opposite meanings. There are many contronyms, but the one I always come back to is cleave. When we cleave, we come together. When we cleave something, we break it apart.
That there are all sorts of Jews is foundational to my understanding of what it is to be Jewish, starting in my own family.
My mother’s mother had three sisters. From oldest to youngest, the four Rosenberg girls married, respectively, a plumber who became the owner of a plumbing supply company and moved to Long Island, a plumber who was deeply involved in his union and stayed in Brooklyn, a lawyer who belonged to the National Lawyer’s Guild and stayed in Brooklyn, an accountant who was deeply involved in his synagogue and moved to Rockaway. They were the story of East Coast American Judaism writ small.
My father’s family embodies Jewish divides of nation, religious practice, and politics. His older sister left Germany for Palestine in 1935, when she was 15. A couple of years later, she cofounded an Orthodox kibbutz. She was modern Orthodox: her hair was short and uncovered unless it was raining, she wore trousers every day but shabbat, when she was abroad she ate all the cheese from everywhere without looking at the ingredients.1 Today her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren run the Israeli gamut: from yoga and protesting in the streets to religious Zionism and all in for Bibi.
Meanwhile, my father’s older brother came to New York in 1937, and my four-year-old father and his parents arrived in September 1941 on the infamous Navemar.2 On shabbat, my father and his brother went with their father to the Orthodox shul on the corner of their block in Washington Heights, though every month or so they went with their mother (who loved ham but not at home) and aunt to the Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side. My father went to summer camp at five, returned speaking English, and was on his way: Yankees fan, Bronx Science, Regents Scholarship, Boston academia…yet another iteration of East Coast American Judaism.3
Despite the Jewish diversity that constitutes me, the notion of bad for the Jews is equally foundational to my understanding of what it is to be Jewish. I’m not sure where I got that notion. I don’t associate it with either of my parents. Perhaps my grandmothers? But it is baked into my constitution and I baked it into my children.
When a Jew does something bad - think Bernie Madoff - my instinctive reaction is bad for the Jews. My Black friends understand, but I had to explain what I meant after I texted Chaim Bloom is bad for the Jews4 to a non-Jewish white friend. In that case, it was a heartfelt joke based on deep reality: when one member of a minority community does something bad, the fault instantly translates to all members of that community.5 We Jews may have our differences, but we are also a monolith.
Since October 7, I’ve been insisting on the essential multiplicity of the Jews. Every page of the Talmud is a set of competing interpretations of the Mishnah passage at its center. There have been anti-Zionist Jews since the beginnings of Zionism in late 19th-century Europe. We don’t even agree on what happens when we die.
Today, I know Jews who unconditionally support Israel. I know Jews who feel that Israel is doing what they have to do in Gaza but rue6 the death and destruction they have had to wreak. I know passionately anti-Zionist Jews who have been protesting the occupation for decades and the war since it began.
Meanwhile, dominant discourses compress Jews to the singularity of Israel. There is the American Jewish establishment, which takes Jewish support of Israel as axiomatic. There is the International Holocaust Remembrance Association's definition of antisemitism, which has been used to demarcate all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, with the absurd result of people like the president accusing Jews of antisemitism.7 There are the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza where people shout “death to the Jews,” and there are the pro-Palestine attacks on Jews in Washington DC and Boulder.
Jean Paul Sartre, Talia Lavin, Lisa Silverman, and others argue variously that antisemitism is foundational to western notions of difference. That is, the Jew - killer of Jesus, object of blood libel - is the ur-Other who grounds social and cultural difference. When you dig down through the angry layers of white supremacy, says Lavin, you end up at its root antagonist: the Jew.
Last month, I watched Reformed (HBO Max), a French sitcom about a young woman rabbi who returns home to Strasbourg to become the first rabbi of a new Reform synagogue. Reformed is built upon the multiplicity of Jews and our incessant conflicts. There is Rabbi Lea and her psychoanalyst father who scorns religion. There is Lea’s one-room start-up synagogue and the established Orthodox synagogue where the rabbi was Lea’s first Talmud teacher but one of his acolytes insists on raising the mechitza8 so men can’t see the tops of women’s heads. There is the materialistic Jewish father trying to plan a bar mitzvah for his climate despairing son who wants no part of it.
Fortunately, the sitcom format insists on resolution. In each episode, Lea’s wisdom or a thoughtful act sutures the break, unifies the multiplicity, and makes everything OK. Did I say that I loved Reformed?
Unfortunately, life is not a sitcom, and we must live with the permanent dilemma of the Jews. We are many and we are one. We eternally cleave from each other and we are eternally cleaved together. We are the contronym that this moment of ideological absurdity and material horror is not capable of holding. But here we are.
Book(s) of the Week
If you are paying attention to Cooper Flagg and you like novels, Tabitha King’s Maine basketball books are great (and, alas, mostly out of print so I can’t even provide informative links, but try the library). I loved One on One so much I read it again (both readings were over 30 years ago, but I bet it holds up). The Book of Reuben is good too. Wow, maybe there needs to be a Cooper Flagg-Tabitha King tie-in edition. It’s not like there’s nobody wealthy enough to make it happen...9
Because we still deserve nice things…
Today’s nice thing is courtesy of my daughter, and it is Eddie Huang arguing that The Long Island Iced Tea Can Save Us. I love an Aperol Spritz10 (even though now I DON’T DRINK11), but Huang is absolutely right on every single front. Great writing, laughed out loud, highly recommended, very nice.
If you’re wondering why this matters, think rennet.
One version of this post circled around the Holocaust, which has hardly figured in my life, aside from my obsession with Anne Frank. On my mother’s side, my two-year-old grandfather came to the US in 1902 and my in-utero grandmother arrived in 1907. On my father’s side, the family story was escape and regeneration. I know of only one family member who died in the Holocaust, my father’s mother’s mother, at Theresienstadt, but she and my grandmother had a difficult relationship and nobody talked about her. When I was trying to write the Holocaust version of this post, which was inspired by Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write,” I did a deep dive on the evolving definition of Holocaust survivor. By current norms, we are all Holocaust survivors: my grandparents, father, aunt, and uncle because they were “Jews who lived for any amount of time under Nazi domination, direct or indirect, and survived”; the rest of us according to Brodesser-Akner, because we are “what’s known as 2G, the generation born to Holocaust survivors, or 3G, their grandchildren,” terms I had never encountered. When I recently asked my father if he identified as a Holocaust survivor, he paused, thought for a moment, and said he had recently started identifying himself as a refugee when he speaks in public. These days, he speaks about climate change, whose refugees will be all kinds of people from all kinds of places. (If all writing is symptomatic, this paragraph is undoubtedly my symptom.)
Fortunately he came to his baseball senses once he moved to Boston.
Chaim Bloom tanked the Red Sox when he was their Chief Baseball Officer, dashing our pride and hopes.
Whenever Black feminist sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes about whiteness, which she does better than anyone, white people collectively rise up in her comments to insist upon the individual validity of their preferences and politics.
There is no adequate word here but rue feels closest. I know some people find this position untenable, but it is a position and I get it.
For critiques of this usage, see this op-ed by Kenneth Stern, who wrote the definition, and Masha Gessen on Zohran Mamdani and antisemitism (gift link) earlier this week.
The partition between the men’s and women’s sections in an Orthodox synagogue
I hope someone, anyone, totally got this paragraph, but if you’re baffled, Cooper Flagg is a teenage basketball phenomenon from Maine who was first pick in last night’s NBA draft, and Tabitha King is a Maine novelist married to a more famous Maine novelist who has been known to say that he is not the most talented novelist in the family (and he is not talking about his novelist son).
Like Huang, I had an Aperol Spritz before 2021, in fact many, on both sides of the Atlantic. Hit me up some day for my umbrella theory of the rise of the Aperol Spritz in the US (like, actual umbrellas) and tales of the Pennsylvania Aperol shortage of 2022. I ride hard for Aperol Spritz and I don’t even much like Long Island Iced Tea - I was a pitcher of margaritas kind of girl - but he is still absolutely right on every single front.
Be glad if you don’t hang out with me in person, because I say this all the time now, in all caps, and I believe it is quite annoying, albeit true. At least for the moment. (If you missed it, I have been diagnosed with an alcohol sensitivity that has shot my stomach to hell over the last year, and then it was further shot by an unlikely reaction to Benefiber of all things, so I currently DO NOT DRINK, though we are hoping that once my stomach calms the fuck down, I will be able to very occasionally drink a little bit. But if it remains true that I CANNOT DRINK, I will be OK with that, if sometimes a little sad, because a stomach shot to hell is a miserable thing and well worth NOT DRINKING to overcome.)
I would be honored and delighted to not-drink with you any time and place we are in the same place at the same time.
This was fantastic. I'm glad you sat on it until it felt right. And the footnotes were winning (they always are).