Bad Jew/Good Jew
Antisemitism, Pepperoni Pizza & J Street
Until recently, I listed my religious affiliation on Facebook as “Bad Jew.”
Yes, my father and two of my uncles ran a kosher butcher shop in Cleveland, and my Uncle Max in St. Louis was a prominent Jewish historian. Every day after regular school I went to Hebrew school, where Gveret Packard had a concentration camp tattoo on her forearm. I even met my first girlfriends through United Synagogue Youth.
On the other hand, my father confided in me that he lost his own faith in god as a young man, when his father died, and the rabbi forbade him to mourn at the shul because it required a streetcar ride.
We kept a kosher house, but we could bring home leftover pepperoni pizza as long as we ate it from paper plates. In fact, on special occasions my parents took us to a local rib joint (though sufficiently distant that this crime against kashrut was unlikely to be observed by any of his similarly cheating customers).
Most significantly, we never went to synagogue but twice a year, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The main sanctuary was packed with more affluent congregants; we were consigned to the auxiliary service with the second-string rabbi and cantor, a few blocks away at a borrowed Catholic church where they hung white sheets over the crucifix for the duration.
Such was my Jewish upbringing.
I got out of Cleveland, went to college and have since devoted 40 years of my life to progressive media and political work. Also I self-secularized. No capital G god. Never went to Israel. Forgot about kosher. No synagogue. No high holidays. Two sons, zero bar mitzvahs.
Yet I still felt enough of a connection to see myself as a bad Jew and to have profoundly ambivalent feelings about Israel and the Middle East. Especially of late, I’ve also experienced a rekindling of my Jewishness in response to an ugly surge in antisemitism emanating from the right, and increasingly, sadly, from the left.
Which brought me to J Street.
Walking into their recent national conference in Washington, DC (a friend gifted me a ticket) my lifetime of ambivalence toward Judaism came flooding back, along with a strange new emotion I’d never before experienced. Immersed in a sea of 4,000 Jewish progressives, it suddenly struck me that I was walking amongst my tribe.
A self-identified cosmopolitan, I never thought of myself as even having a tribe. Now I understood why Jews have been regarded as troublemakers by authoritarian regimes throughout history and across the world. Because we are!
Of course, Jews have been overrepresented in all the various social struggles I’ve participated in throughout my life, whether for peace, climate action, racial equity, gender identity, human rights or economic justice. Jews everywhere … but rarely as Jews.
This is a distinction with a difference. I find it a source of legitimate pride, just like the legitimate anger I feel when confronted with neo-antisemitism or the mindless demonization of Israel.
Sadly, sources of legitimate shame complicate the picture, including Jewish zealots, outlaw settlers and ultra-orthodox fundamentalists, as well as the increasingly indefensible actions of the State of Israel in denying and frustrating legitimate Palestinian aspirations for a decent life in a state of their own.
Ami Ayalon, who was formerly head of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, and also commander in chief of the Israeli Navy, oddly struck just this ambivalent note in his J Street conference address.
“Israel is involved in two separate wars,” he said. “We have won the first war. It was a just war to secure the existence of a Jewish state. But this second war is not a just war. It is being fought to expand our border to the east, to build ever more settlements, and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. This unjust war cannot be won. Unless we choose a different approach it will continue for generations to come.”
Ayalon’s notion of two struggles — one just, one not — resonates deeply within me. It’s at the core of J Street’s identity as “the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”
Keynote addresses by five Democratic presidential contenders inevitably drove media coverage of the J Street conference. But I was more impressed by those, like Ayalon, who travelled here from the Middle East bringing news of the front from all sides.
It was possible to discern a few scraps of potential progress amidst the current doom and gloom in the news. I learned, for example, that church-state tensions in Israel are profound. Some members of the secular right-wing party Yisrael Beitenu, for example, are starting to see their own ultra-orthodox Jewish brethren as more of a mortal danger than Israel’s Arabs.
Those Arab and Palestinian Israeli citizens — who constitute 20 percent of the country’s population and tilt 70 percent to the left — are edging toward a strategy of more active participation in Israeli politics, rather than an automatic rejection of anything that smacks of cooperation with the enemy.
Younger Jewish progressives, meanwhile, are themselves in a state of transition. They no longer identify so closely with their grandparents’ Labor Party and its reflexive anti-Arab racism. Ultimately, a rapprochement of progressives across the religious divide, if it could surmount powerful taboos on both sides, would essentially double the size of the electoral left. That could eventually realign the Israeli political landscape.
It may just be a fantasy, but at J Street I heard an impassioned example of this optimism from Maisam Jaljuli, an Israeli-born Palestinian Arab, women’s rights activist, labor organizer, and chair of the Hadash Party of the Arab Joint List. She spoke of attending a mass protest against spousal abuse by 20,000 women in central Tel Aviv last year. “For the first time,” she said, “Jewish and Arab women, shoulder to shoulder, went to the streets … shouting together in Hebrew and in Arabic, ‘Stop Killing Women!’”
I wish I could say that I left the conference feeling more optimistic about the prospects for eventual peace in the Middle East, but I didn’t. For one thing, I just couldn’t help thinking about my Uncle Max (may he rest in peace).
Max Dimont, my mother’s brother, was an immigrant from Lithuania. With no formal education beyond high school, Max worked in the shoe business while he taught himself history. He then proceeded to research and write a series of books on Israel and Judaism. The first, “Jews, God and History,” quickly became a bestseller on publication in 1962. It has since sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Max was also, I should note, an ardent Zionist with a background in U.S. military intelligence during World War II.
Uncle Max was touring the West Coast in the late 1970s with his wife Ethel to promote his latest book, The Jews in America. I was living in San Francisco at the time. Despite considering me a communist, Max invited me and my then-girlfriend Randy (who, atypically for me, was herself Jewish) for a nice Sunday brunch at their hotel overlooking Union Square.
Things were proceeding smoothly until the subject inevitably turned to the Middle East. My suggestion that Israel ought to negotiate directly with the PLO brought conversation to an immediate halt. Uncle Max looked me straight in the eyes and, without raising his voice, said, “Arthur, you are my nephew and I love you. But I abhor everything you stand for, and if push came to shove, I would kill you without hesitation!” Several long seconds of stunned silence were finally broken by Aunt Ethel. “Maaaaaaaaax,” was all she said. Brunch resumed.
And so it goes. Too many on both sides of the conflict still think, as my Uncle Max did, in terms of traitors to the cause. Since the J Street Conference, however, I’ve revised my religious affiliation on Facebook. I have promoted myself to “Bad Jew/Good Jew.” While I may have rejected much of my religion in practice, it continues to have a hold on me in spirit.
