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The Wholeness of a Split Identity
Gershom Gorenberg

Outsiders see options where insiders see givens

Evening, early November, Jerusalem. My daughter is stretched out on the couch rereading one of J.K. Rowling�s essays against racism, which is to say a Harry Potter novel, in the original English. My son has nabbed my bed and the copy of Seamus Heaney�s �Beo-wulf� translation he convinced me I was buying for myself after I mentioned reading about it in The New York Times Book Review that arrives by erratic mail. An immigrant�s children, an �migr�s children. I�m sipping cocoa at the kitchen table and reading the Ha�aretz article (in Hebrew, someone in the family has to) on a recent seminar at the Shalom Hartman Institute marking the 25th anniversary of the religious think-tank and 70th birthday of founder David Hartman, distinguished dissident from unthinking Orthodoxy. And then I squawk, the way one does when out of the bland news text leaps one absurd, infuriating sentence.

�In contrast to the American-born Hartman, [Institute fellow Avi] Sagi is more plugged into local Orthodox society, being Israeli-born and a former coordinator of a Bnei Akiva chapter... � it says, indicating why Sagi�s pessimistic view of the institute�s impact on Israel should be preferred to Hartman�s claim to have made intellectual openness more kosher among the Orthodox. To be fully qualified to comment on Israeli society, that sentence asserts, you have to be born here; you have to have sat at the campfires of one of the establishment youth movements that substitutes for the proper prep schools. If you have an accent or memories of another landscape, what could you possibly understand?

That Daughters of the Israeli Revolution smugness is worthy of comment precisely because it is endemic in the country�s influential class. Ori Orr, formerly one of Labor�s most lackluster Knesset members, expressed it in an infamous interview in which he said he couldn�t speak to party colleagues born in Iraq or Morocco as easily as he could to those who were �more Israeli.� Some of Orr�s media defenders didn�t get why that caused irritation. Hartman is a good example of why the smugness is silly: When he came to Israel 30 years ago, the Ha�aretz writer was still a kid. Hartman�s institute, where men and women study together and works of historical criticism sit on the study hall shelves next to the Talmud, has influenced educators and academics, including many who sat at the movement campfires. On the other hand, he is a critic of religious Zionism�s closemindedness precisely because he�s not from here. �I didn�t learn pluralism from Israel,� he says. �I learned pluralism playing basketball in Lincoln Terrace Park in Brooklyn, and from going to Fordham and experiencing the Jesuits.�

Outsiders see options where insiders see givens. �When you have alternative culture, the present you live in is not inevitable,� Hartman says. If there is any substance to �Jewish genius,� this is its source: the jumpy, insecure, uncomfortable experience of belonging and not belonging, the knowing that there is another word for anything, an intonation that turns any statement into a question.

In the Diaspora, that outsider status has been our given, the reason for presuming the establishment is wrong, be it the Republican Party or the accepted academic theory, the reason for the fury of Jewish comedy or fiction. Even comic books are Jewish, one Jewish producer of the genre tells another in Michael Chabon�s novel, �The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay�: �They�re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don�t think he�s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that?�

And perhaps that novel is placed back in the 40s because today�s writer knows American Jews aren�t marginal enough any more; they belong to the club. To give the story the appropriate Jewish madness, you need to go back to when we all still had half-secret identities. Perhaps that�s why Philip Roth made the Jew in �The Human Stain� turn out to be a black man passing as a Jew: That way the Jew would be sufficiently marginal, even at the turn of the millennium, for a Roth hero. Meanwhile, American Jews whose parents believed passionately in public schools are sending their children to day schools. To stay Jewish after the grandparents no longer have Yiddish accents, you need to create a space for your children outside the mainstream.

Or you go to a place where Jews are the mainstream. Zionism asserted that the price for being on the edge was too high, physically or at least culturally, and that our own nation-state would solve the problem. Behold, I said, fresh off the plane 24 years ago, the shopkeepers tell you �Shanah tovah,� and no one makes a fuss when it�s Christmas.

I still want that. I still believe we need a place like this. I also see the cost: smug Jews, for heaven�s sake, who don�t want to be bothered by other ways of thinking. �Jews who don�t know that they are Jews,� to borrow a phrase from A.B.Yehoshua�s �Mr. Mani� � for my money, the novel where he reached greatness, the one in which he told the saga of a Sephardi family like his own and outted himself as outsider.

Ironically, all the groups that are marginal, that keep the ruling class worried about the threat to a unified Israeli identity, are what keeps a bubbling Jewishness alive. Yehouda Shenhav, Tel Aviv University sociologist and Sephardi dissident, reminded me of that when I called him to discuss that one sentence in the newspaper. Before I spoke to him, the woman who answered his phone switched into English when she heard my accent. I resent that. Yet my American-accented thinking is what keeps me Jewish here. Teaching my children to read in English, trying to teach them the pluralism I shlepped in my backpack from America, is how I hope to keep them Jewish. Go figure.