Last week, the opinion editor at The Forward sent me a quick, six-word email: “Do you have an Epstein take?” I thought about Jewish villains for about five seconds and then clacked out a stream-of-consciousness email with my gut reaction. First, accused child rapist (and Trump friend) Jeffrey Epstein is a sorry excuse for a human. Then, why, oh why, did he have to be Jewish? It will only feed the anti-Semite trolls.
Then I remembered what author Deborah Lipstadt taught me about the nature of anti-Semitism: It is a virus that has little to do with the way Jews behave. It makes no difference. Anti-Semitism not based on anything rational, so Jews don’t really have to “cringe” when they see Jewish villains.
Well, my editor liked the idea and wanted a commentary that day. The result was this op-ed, which was the fastest brain-to-publication process I had undergone in years.
When I heard that Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested on sex-trafficking charges, I cringed. I’m sure I was not the only Jewish person who did, or whose first thought was,Why does this sorry excuse for a human have to be Jewish? And I probably also wasn’t the only Jewish person whose second thought was, Given that he is Jewish, why does he have to have such a Jewish-sounding name? Read the full essay at the Forward.
Well, the commentary certainly did make the anti-Semites crawl out of the woodwork, jumping on me, and mocking me, for bringing up a Jewish villain that proves many of their stereotypes. I received a lot of the anti-Semitic garbage because the Forward credited me in their tweet.
It took me a few days to disinfect my Twitter timeline. It was an educational experience, though, to see how anti-Semites actually subscribe to the Forward’s social media feeds for the sole purpose of trolling them with anti-Semitic hate.
Now, you may ask, if you’ve gotten this far, why do I have a picture of Henry Kissinger at the top of a blog post about an accused child rapist? Well, it’s to make a point that I had made in an early draft of my piece, which the editor correctly cut out, since it would force the conversation to go down a rabbit hole about Kissinger. He came up in my initial stream-of-consciousness response to the question. So, here’s the “Kissinger” part.
Again. Don’t fall into the trap of doing what the anti-Semites do: See bad (or even good) people as representative of our community.
Take Henry Kissinger, for example. Not that I’m comparing to the former Holocaust refugee, national security adviser and secretary of state to an alleged child rapist like Epstein, but hear me out. There is special hatred against Kissinger among many on the left for his role in the Nixon Administration. How many other secretaries of state take on that much bile for the actions of his president?
Kissinger is widely hated because of his Jewishness. To be sure, there may be plenty of reasons to either hate or love Kissinger, depending on your political point of view, but many on the left (including many Jews) start sputtering incoherently in anger at the mention of his name. Many left-wing Jews are particularly angry with him because he’s a Jew and so he should have had a better understanding of the misery and human suffering caused by, say, Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.
Kissinger is admired by many Jews, he’s loathed by many Jews, and he’s especially loathed by anti-Semites. This is because he is seen by all of the above as an “example” to us all, or a warning to us all.
If you don’t like the Kissinger analogy. How about Son of Sam? Or … pick the villain of your choice who happens to be Jewish.
One thing that did make me cringe just a bit was the “As A Jew …” headline, which is a cliche phrase regularly mocked by Jews on social media. Usually, what comes next, is something offensive to most Jews. I recently mocked it on my Twitter feed:
As a Jew, I believe that ketchup should be spelled k-e-t-c-h-u-p and not c-a-t-s-u-p.
For my latest Publishers Weekly piece, my editor asked me if I could do a general roundup of Jewish books sales. That was a big, general assignment, so I chose representatives of different kinds of Jewish publishers, from big houses to university presses to a startup children’s book publisher, and learned a few new things.
While old standbys such as the Bible and associated commentary still keep Jewish publishing houses alive, the next crop of Jewish-themed books will address the rise in anti-Semitism. I expect Jewish book sales will reflect that.
But most ripped-from-the-headlines books on anti-Semitism haven’t yet been released. “What’s more indicative of trends, I think, is in the submissions I’ve been getting,” says Altie Karper, editorial director at Schocken Books. “A lot of them are indeed on the subject of the recent rise in anti-Semitism. And, interestingly enough, I’ve also seen an uptick in Holocaust memoirs and histories, with authors saying that the rise in contemporary anti-Semitism has been their motivating factor.”
This tells me, among other things, that I really need to find time to finish my own memoirs.
I also learned that Antisemitism: Here and Now, by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, has over 27,000 copies in print, according to the publisher. “We’re about to go back for a fourth printing,” says Karper. “We’d had high expectations for the book, but constantly unfolding current events have certainly given it a boost.” You can read, and listen to, my interview with Deborah Lipstadt here.
Me with my classmates at A. Brian Merry Elementary School, 1972. I’m in the middle row, two kids down from my teacher.
Thank you to the Jewish Daily Forward for running this memory of growing up Jewish in the South. Some aspects of being a Southern Jew was painful, some of it I’m proud of. The memory was triggered by the busing integration debate between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Oh, and that’s 6-year-old me in the middle, two kids down from my teacher, Mrs. Vanover. As usual, I’m staring off into space, dreaming of being far away. Mrs. Vanover was a horrible teacher. She would make kids who “told on” other kids stand in a corner wearing a cut-out donkey tail that said, “I am a tattletale.” Once, she threw out my jacket for not hanging it properly. My father had to come and get it.
Culture is slower to change than laws. Sometimes, it takes generations. I would be the only white kid who swapped desserts with an African American classmate at lunchtime. My white classmates refused to eat any food they touched.
I left Jewish journalism 18 years ago, but decided to return due to the rise in anti-Semitism. I felt like there’s more I needed to say after all these years. So, two Jewish publications accepted two separate essays. And they both ran July 3, 2019. The first one was picked up by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, where I used to be managing editor. You can read that one here:
Anyway, this tale of Southern Jews, white supremacists, and cat-torturing Nazis is part of a larger narrative in my memoir-in-progress. Chronologically, the two incidents come just before and after this excerpt, which ran in Longreads, detailing my memories of the Yom Kippur War as seen through the prism of OCD. It will all make sense, in context, I hope.
Young Jews, Birthright Israel participants, listen to a lecture atop Masada in this picture I snapped back in 2000. Today, they’re in their 40s. My next project, maybe, is to get back in touch with some of them and see whether Birthright strengthened their ties to Judaism.
Eighteen years ago, I left my job as managing editor at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a Jewish news service. A couple of days ago, I returned with this piece, contrasting efforts to attract young Jews, then and now. One advantage of being old is I can consult 18-year-old notes and track trends across time. I thought the JTA editors did a wonderful job of taming my rambling prose and getting to the point faster. But I also present this “writer’s cut” edition of the piece. It emphasizes slightly different things than the version that ran. This one is more reflective of my search for a way that “cultural Judaism” can find a home without being dismissed as unsustainable. I have heard from Jewish lay and religious leaders for 35-plus years that “cultural Judaism” is a dead-end. Yet still, it endures.
By Howard Lovy
At the beginning of the year 2000, then-Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg looked down upon more than 4,000 young “unaffiliated” Jewish faces at the Binyanei Ha’umah convention center in Jerusalem and told them they were “the first generation that can ask the question, ‘Can the Jewish people survive without an external enemy?’”
Burg nodded toward a smiling Michael Steinhardt, who was moved to tears at the rock-star greeting he was given by participants in one of the first Birthright Israel trips that he co-sponsored. Anti-Semitism was on the retreat, Steinhardt had warned the young Jews, but therein lies danger because it means a weakening of Jewish ties.
I was managing editor at JTA at the time. Today, going through my 20-year-old notes, I am struck at how often Jewish lay and religious leaders voiced a fear that an end to anti-Semitism would further erode the tenuous connection young people had to Judaism. It all seems quaintly naive today. Yet even though they were wrong about an end to anti-Semitism, they were right in turning the discussion to how to embrace more Jews who acknowledge only a tenuous connection to Judaism. That was the original thought behind Birthright Israel.
Birthright participant Riva Saker sits atop Masada in 2000.
Twenty years ago, I was on a personal quest for a Judaism of meaning, myself. I was an odd choice for managing editor at JTA, because at the time I knew very little about the organized Jewish world. I grew up primarily in small communities, with my family often one of only a handful of Jews in town. So, the way I practice Judaism is very personal and not at all communal. The publisher at the time hired me for my news judgment first, connection to Judaism second. I guess you could say that I was JTA’s own private Birthright experiment.
I wrote about the birth of Birthright, and attended a United Jewish Communities Young Leadership Conference to talk to younger Jews who were searching for connection. And the mantra I continuously heard was often the same. Richard Joel of Hillel said the whole idea of cultural Judaism was too vague to be sustainable. Elliott Abrams, who at the time was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, moaned that cultural Jews were “lost to Judaism.”
The issue almost came to blows when I covered a meeting of another initiative of Michael Steinhardt. He, along with Edgar Bronfman and Charles Schusterman, had launched STAR: Synagogue Transformation and Renewal. Again, the “problem” was a decline in anti-Semitism. “The Jewish world, certainly in America, is in crisis,” Bronfman told me in a 2000 interview at a STAR conference in Chicago. “The fact that we don’t think it’s in crisis is unfortunate—because we’re doing so well, there’s so little anti-Semitism, etcetera. But we’re disappearing.”
Steinhardt, the homespun, folksy philosopher of the trio, stopped the show with this bombshell. “I tend, in my dourest moments, to consider both the Reform and Conservative Jews as historic accidents in the 21st century and suspect before the end of this century they will have disappeared.” This, and similar statements by Bronfman, had irked Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who was president of the Union for Reform Judaism at the time. Undermining non-Orthodox synagogues was not the way to encourage experimentation.
“I’m not going to get into a pissing match with Rabbi Yoffie over whether the Reform movement is a good movement or not because that’s not the point,” Bronfman told me. “The point is, we have a crisis and I don’t care how we go about getting young people involved in their Jewishness.”
“The old way of Sunday school until Bar Mitzvah—that didn’t work. They left.”
Twenty years ago, they would have been counted as lost to Judaism. I’m afraid that, today, these “cultural Jews” are still not counted.
I agreed with Bronfman because, unlike Yoffie, he said let’s change Judaism to meet Jews where they already are, and not try to draw them into where we want them to be. In the end, my quest was interrupted. After the breakdown of talks between Barak and Arafat and the beginning of the second intifada, I left JTA, moved back to Michigan, and pivoted my career to cover science and technology. Sixteen years later, I began writing about Jewish issues again after I noticed more swastikas in my social media timeline after a decade and a half of being relatively swastika-free.
It is a sad contrast, the difference between the Jewish mood of 20 years ago and today. We did not know how to handle a drop in anti-Semitism, and there was what seemed to me to be deep depression and desperation among Jewish leaders to attract the young. Today, as I interview people whose connection to Judaism is strengthened through the rise in anti-Semitism, I also note that many are still unaffiliated with synagogues. Twenty years ago, they would have been counted as lost to Judaism. I’m afraid that, today, these “cultural Jews” are still not counted.
When faced, again, with existential crises, now is the time to talk about what being Jewish is and what it means. In fact, it’s the perfect time, because people who never thought about their Judaism before are now constantly reminded of it by anti-Semites.
I never wanted anti-Semitism to define the way I write about Judaism. But the rise in anti-Semitism can, perhaps, help us see clearer than we did 20 years ago. We can see who is with us and who is not. Jews are standing up to be counted. I would be more optimistic for the future if we found a way to embrace them.
And the edited version for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ..
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (JTA) – The year was 2000, and Michael Steinhardt had just dropped a bombshell that nearly brought an otherwise dignified conference to blows.
I took these pictures 20 years ago at one of the first Birthright Israel trips. Young Jews were encouraged to meet one another and see what happened next.
When I was managing editor at JTA (1999-2001) I covered the birth of Birthright Israel and other issues involving younger Jews searching for connection to Judaism. Strangely, at the time, there was a fear that an end to anti-Semitism would further erode the tenuous connection young people had to Judaism.
Folks like Birthright Israel founders Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman, leaders at Hillel, and others were actually bemoaning the fact that young Jews were not having to deal with anti-Semitism, as their parents did, so they’d have to bring young Jews together in other ways.
Much of the Birthright story I wrote was left on the cutting-room floor, so here are some more details from my notes. Today, I find them especially interesting. I’ve placed some text in bold now for emphasis.
Michael Steinhardt at Birthright Israel in 2000.
Tears welled up in Michael Steinhardt’s eyes as he was given a raucous rock-star greeting Saturday night by roughly 4,000 grateful young Jews who packed the Binyanei Ha’umah convention center in Jerusalem. He and fellow Jewish philanthropist Charles Bronfman were joined by Israeli Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg and other Israeli officials in welcoming participants of Birthright Israel, many of whom had already spent a week in the Jewish State as part of a program to provide Jews between 18 and 26 with free trips to Israel.
Steinhardt told the young Jews that the price of Jewish success and a retreat of anti-Semitism has been a weakening of Jewish ties. He called on the Birthright participants, most of whom are unafilliated, to rise to the task of “renewing Judaism.”
Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was in the United States talking peace with Syria, sent a videotaped message in which he promised full participation of young Israelis in the Birthright program to enhance the bonds between them and their Diaspora peers. Burg told the group that they are “the first generation that can ask the question, ‘Can the Jewish people survive without an external enemy?’ ” The Knesset speaker looked at the young faces and said that seeing Israeli and Diaspora Jews together makes the Jewish people “complete.”
In my coverage that Birthright Israel trip, that “cultural Judaism” mantra was treated as an epithet, including this quote from Richard Joel, who at the time was president and international director of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.
If you push the students who say they are culturally Jewish, and ask them to tell you what it is, ask them to tell you about their story, you don’t hear a lot of culture, you hear a lot of vagueness.
Maybe so, but later, when I covered a meeting of synagogue leaders at a conference in Chicago, Steinhardt stopped the show, and caused a lot of grumblings in the sidelines. He asserted that all non-Orthodox Jewish denominations will disappear. This quote did not make it into my story, but here’s what he said.
I tend, in my dourest moments, to consider both the Reform and Conservative Jews as historic accidents in the 21st century and suspect before the end of this century they will have disappeared.
The hotel ballroom was filled with men and women who have dedicated their lives to using their voices. Yet at that moment, not a sound was heard. The grumbling during the next 24 hours was quiet and largely “off the record,” and worrisome. “Ignorant,” is the word one rabbi used to describe the philanthropists.
As I talk to Jewish thinkers, they tell me that even Tikkun Olam is bad for the Jews, or that “cultural Judaism” still means death to Jews. Most of them say that this notion of Judaism without God or synagogue is not sustainable. I’ve been told this by rabbis of all denominations for thirty-five years. Yet cultural Judaism endures.
Today, as I interview people whose connection to Judaism is strengthened through the rise in anti-Semitism, I argue that, while we’re all together feeling united as Jews as anti-Semites from all political points of view close in on us, let’s also revive the discussion of what it means to be a Jew. When faced, again, with existential crises, now is the time to talk about what being Jewish is and what it means. In fact, it’s the perfect time, because people who never thought about their Judaism before are now constantly reminded of it by anti-Semites.
I quit Jewish journalism in 2001 after the failure of Oslo and the outbreak of the 2nd intifada. I rejoined in 2016 with the rise in anti-Semitism. But I don’t want anti-Semitism to define the way I write about Judaism. I want to get back to the Judaism of meaning I began to explore 20 years ago.
About fifteen years ago, I attempted to combined two of my obsessions: nanotechnology and Judaism, into one article for Salon. The result was a feature with this convoluted headline:
This special report of mine made precisely zero people happy. Scientists trashed me in the comments. Religious people scratched their heads in bafflement. But I still think there’s something there in that both science and religion, at their most fundamental level, could find common ground.
This was during my nanotech phase, which was my reaction against my previous journalism life covering Jewish news. After leading coverage of Mideast peace talks, I thought it’d be great to cover science insead, where there were fewer disputes, where things are either true or not true. Boy was I wrong about that.
From Judaism to Science
After the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks between Arafat and Barak, and the beginning of the second intifada, I began wondering what I was doing, since news out of the Middle East seemed to never change. And I was more interested in covering domestic Jewish life than Israel. So, I quit my job as managing editor at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2001 and went back home to Michigan, where I helped found a magazine and website covering nanotechnology. We called it Small Times. Get it? And it was great fun!
There was a mini nanotech boom going on at the time, with lots of venture capital and government money being thrown at it. The guy who launched Small Times was future Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who tossed a great deal of dough at our magazine.
Birth of NanoBot
But I became frustrated with the limits of a publication that existed to attract ad dollars as industry boosters, when there was a larger conversation happening outside our magazine about the ethical and environmental implications of the technology and the pace of its development. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so in the summer of 2003, much to the annoyance of my boss, I launched my own blog,Howard Lovy’s NanoBot, that covered the implications of nanotech that the magazine couldn’t cover.
Almost right away, my blog attracted far more web visitors per day than did my magazine. That got me into plenty of hot water with management and so they threw me overboard just before the magazine, itself, sunk into oblivion. But, as many of you know, I have OCD tendencies, so my obsession with nanotechnology remained. I continued my blog and I wrote some nanotech stories for different publications, including the Salon story above, and a few stories for Wired, like this one on nanotech and cancer cures.
But my favorite Wired nanotech story was one I wrote about a group of anti-nanotech protesters (see picture at the top of this page) who decided to strip off their clothes on Chicago’s Miracle Mile to protest Eddie Bauer’s stain-resistant pants that used a nanotech-enabled coating. Bless their hearts, they wrongly thought nanotech was another word for GMO, so they protested against the technology as if they were in some battle against genetically modified foods (which in itself is a cause based on wrong information, but I won’t argue that one here). Anyway, Wired called it …
ON A CHILLY Chicago afternoon in early May, environmental activists sauntered into the Eddie Bauer store on Michigan Avenue, headed to the broad storefront windows opening out on the Magnificent Mile and proceeded to take off their clothes. The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology. More here.
Well, nanotech was fun while it lasted, but the world moved on, and so did I. I began writing about publishing and then, when anti-Semitic garbage began appearing on my social media feed from Trump fans (or Russian bots), I decided it was time to come in from the cold and write about Jewish issues again. But I still miss writing about nanotechnology, and follow nano news for fun.
To study Judaism is almost like studying physics. Everything seems to follow straightforward rules, until you take a closer and closer look and you see those bizarre quantum effects. Jews have no pope, no central authority, so not only does practice of Judaism vary greatly, so does the Jewish concept of God.
Now, add in the Jewish philosophers (as opposed to theologians), and the Jewish concept of God can vary even more. So, what is the Jewish concept of God, exactly? That’s the heavy question for which I sought answers when I interviewed Andrew Pessin, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.
The result was a great collection of writings from Jewish thinkers throughout history.
In this article for Publishers Weekly, we discussed what Jews think about when they think about God. But, here is the “writer’s cut” version, with more questions and answers than PW can fit. Thank you to Andrew for a great interview.
Howard Lovy: Everything seems to follow rules when you look at Judaism, but the closer you look the more chaotic everything seems. What was your goal in putting this book together?
Andrew Pessin: One is the selfish goal of, I wanted to learn this material. I realized I was becoming an expert on medieval Catholic theology, but it started occurring to me I knew almost nothing about my own Jewish background and heritage. When you’re reading Western philosophy, the Jews are largely excluded from the canon. So I had this kind of awakening a few years back where I said, “What were the Jews saying during all these centuries that I’ve been studying?”
The second is over the past 10 years or so I’ve developed a general interest in spreading the wealth of philosophy to nonprofessional philosophers. I would write a scholarly article on Descartes, and 10 people would read it and, as I like to say, eight of them would ignore it and two would criticize it.
Howard Lovy: When Jews think about God, do they think about a different kind of entity than does a Christian or a Muslim?
Andrew Pessin: That’s a really deep question and it presupposes that there’s some single unified notion of God within each of those three religions. They have really extremely different conceptions of the divine being within each religion. And what I’m discovering — and this is kind of exhilarating for me — is that a lot of these Jewish thinkers end up not only disagreeing among themselves about the nature of the divine being, but end up saying exactly the same sorts of things the Christians and Muslims have said in their disagreements.
A lot of these Jewish thinkers end up not only disagreeing among themselves about the nature of the divine being, but end up saying exactly the same sorts of things the Christians and Muslims have said in their disagreements.
Howard Lovy: Do you approach this subject as a philosopher or a theologist? What is the difference?
Andrew Pessin: Great question. The distinction would be based on the idea that for the philosopher, there are no constraints on what he or she thinks other than sensory experience, historical experience, and reason. In theology, they start off with certain givens and those givens might be, for example, there’s a scripture and that scripture is accepted to be divine in nature. It’s sort of roughly the distinction between reason and revelation, where the philosopher is guided by reason and the theologist — not being irrational or anti-rational — has an additional constraint in his or her reasoning.
Howard Lovy: You put together a really ambitious set of questions through these different voices throughout history. What is God? Is there life after death? Is there a soul? Why are we here? After reading this, will I get a better idea of the answers?
Andrew Pessin: I wasn’t attempting to answer those questions. I was attempting to raise them because in the history of Jewish thinkers, these are among the major questions that they grapple with. You know the famous adage: you ask two Jews, get three opinions. As I like to say about this book, I asked 72 Jewish thinkers and got more opinions than I could actually count. I leave it to the reader to decide in the end.
Howard Lovy: Will this book answer questions about what Jews believe about X, Y, or Z?
Andrew Pessin: It may not give you the definitive answers. You’ll notice that even though Maimonides was certainly the towering figure of the Middle Ages, and arguably the towering figure in the whole history of Jewish philosophy, that doesn’t stop people from disagreeing with him on absolutely every single issue. Maimonides is not the pope and you can quote me on that.
Howard Lovy: Who was the best writer?
Andrew Pessin: Abraham Isaac Kook, the first official state rabbi in Palestine, is just a beautiful poetic mystical writer. It’s so very challenging to figure out exactly what he’s saying and to put it into comprehensible English. I did try to do that in one short chapter in the book, but reading him is really stimulating in a kind of mystical way. So that’s what comes to mind for me.
The first interview I did as Publishers Weekly’s Senior Jewish Correspondent (I just invented that title. I freelance for PW on Jewish issues.) was with conservative author Jonathan Neumann. He argues that Tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world,” is a dangerous hijacking of what was once a minor liturgical metaphor and turning it into a call for liberal politics.
The author is English and he critiques American Jews’ perspective of Jewish values, including Tikkun Olam, which he says has redirected the Jewish community toward liberalism. He thinks this is a bad thing.
My own opinions on this were immaterial to the story. But here’s what I think about Tikkun Olam (which has definitely reached peak saturation in cultural Judaism). Judaism has stayed alive and relevant for millennia because of its ability to adapt with the times. Tikkun Olam was a little-known Talmudic metaphor before progressive Jews took it as a central tenet.
Tikkun Olam: Just a Minor Metaphor?
One generation’s minor liturgical metaphor can be another’s most-visible trappings of religious fervor. The Haredim base some of their dress and behavior on single Torah passages that could arguably even be metaphors not meant to be taken literally. So it is with Tikkun Olam.
I realize that this is probably an inadequate, largely semantic, defense of Tikkun Olam. I’m still working it through. It comes down to how every single Jewish thinker of every denomination has told me in multiple interviews over 35 years that “cultural Judaism” is not sustainable. Yet, still, it survives.
One generation’s minor liturgical metaphor can be another’s most-visible trappings of religious fervor. The Haredim base some of their dress and behavior on single Torah passages that could arguably even be metaphors not meant to be taken literally. So it is with Tikkun Olam.
Is Social Justice Judaism Sustainable?
There have been generations of Jews sustaining their Jewishness on social justice — if not specifically by that name, then in how they live their lives and careers they choose. So, is rabbinic Judaism needed for Jewish values? When I was at JTA, I used to write stories about alleged lack of affiliation of US Jews. But what I found was a great amount of devotion to salad-bar Judaism. I never knew why this was always explained to me as a bad thing.
During my wilderness years, those 16 years between when I quit JTA and stopped writing about Judaism and when I picked it up again in 2016, I was still very grounded in Jewish thought even as I went through various crises. I’m not the only one. I’ll write more on this in future.
On a side note: For this story, I also interviewed Adam Bellow, editorial director St. Martin’s Press imprint All Points Books. Adam is the son of one of my literary heroes, Saul Bellow.
“I’m not trying to make a partisan argument. It’s more a question of [are] these politics, and particularly the more liberal, the more radical politics we see within the Tikkun Olam movement, justified by biblical and rabbinic texts in the way that is claimed? I would suggest that they’re not.”
Me, in 1985, age 19, with more hair than I needed and wearing the keffiyeh given to me by my Palestinian friend.
In this scene of my memoir-in-progress, I learn an important lesson in college about perception and reality when it comes to Muslim-Jewish relations. And I’m introduced to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. More on that in a bit. The year is 1985, and, as I say in this excerpt, I think I know everything, when in fact I know very little. This is typical for a person who is only nineteen years old and being exposed to many things for the first time in life.
This is the story of the beginning of many things in my life: An understanding of Arab perceptions, an intense friendship I had with a Palestinian woman, my own journey through the way others perceive Judaism, and the accidental beginning of my career in Jewish journalism. The passage at the end will make sense in context, I hope. A recurring theme in my book is also my struggles with OCD and how the comfort of Jewish ritual gave it a home.
From time to time on this blog, I’ll post various excerpts as I get closer to completing my book about my grandfather’s life in pre-Holocaust Hungary, and my own personal journey through Judaism.
I decided to narrate this short chapter to see if I had the stamina to, eventually, record my own audiobook. Turns out, I’m not sure. I decided to take this seven-minute snippet and add some music to the background to make my voice perhaps sound more appealing. But, then, everybody is critical of their own voices.
You can read more excerpts from my work-in-progress on my Memoir page.
My Private Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
For those who’d rather not hear my voice, here is the raw, unedited version of this chapter.
“You don’t know everything, Howard,” Lamya told me, her eyes rolling slightly, revealing just a hint of humor, letting me know that she was both kidding and not kidding. It was 1985 and we were both working at my college newspaper at Wayne State University in Detroit. I did not know much about her, except I heard that she was Palestinian and had escaped from an abusive marriage.
“You think you know a lot, but you don’t know everything,” she said. Well, a more accurate statement might have been that I didn’t know anything. She was thirty years old and I was only nineteen. There were a great many things I did not know, but Lamya was specifically referring to my lack of knowledge about Arab culture and the way they think about historical and current grievances. I saw this in the angry letters to the editor I was receiving over my coverage of controversy over a book, a kind of silly-looking book. Turned out, the book was not a book at all, but really a fun-house mirror through which one could view many layers of distortions.
A few days earlier, Rabbi Oppenheimer of the campus Hillel approached me at the Student Center. I don’t know how the rabbi found me, or even how he knew who I was. I had never dropped by Hillel’s area of the Student Center. Somebody must have pointed me out to him as the guy who was writing pro-Israel commentaries in the student newspaper. He didn’t look like much of a rabbi to me. He wore a Greek fisherman’s cap. Tall, scruffy-bearded, he walked with a slouch that made it appear as if he was folded in half at the waist, but the crease stayed.
We had never spoken before, yet Oppenheimer approached me as if we had known each other for years and were continuing an earlier conversation. He tossed a book near my lunch tray, shaking the gravy well in my mashed potatoes, and then hovered above me and asked, “Guess what I found the Muslim Students Association selling at Manoogian Hall?”
It wasn’t really a book. It was more like a pamphlet. On the cover were a strange combination of words that actually struck me as funny.The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was an undertone of what I took to be Jewish sarcasm right there in the title. It seemed like it could be the script for a new Mel Brooks movie. You know, like Jews in Space. I looked up at the rabbi with a half-grin on my face, waiting for the punch line. Instead, there was silence. It took a couple of beats for me to realize that Oppenheimer was waiting for a reaction from me. I had nothing. He let out a tiny sigh and sat down next to me.
“Surely you’ve heard of the Protocols,” Oppenheimer said.
My blank stare was his answer.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Up until then, my knowledge of anti-Semitism was narrow, despite some experience with it during my early life in Georgia, and later in a suburb of Chicago (“Hey, Howard, aren’t you going to pick up that penny?”). But the serious, deadly kind of anti-Semitism was confined primarily to the Holocaust, fed mostly by my grandfather’s stories of Hungary. What happened before the life of my grandfather, or how it fit in with the larger narrative of my people, I was clueless. That’s what it is to be truly obsessive in the clinical sense. The information you obtain, obsessively, is narrow, focused, and often incomplete because it ignores the periphery and all that comes before and after. It was akin to extreme contemplation of the chalk outline of a corpse with no knowledge of the events that led to the murder. My obsession with the Holocaust was devoid of context except my own family’s.
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” I grinned slightly. The name still sounded funny to me.
“I’ll leave this here with you,” said the rabbi, who was not smiling at all. “Read it, and then come see me at Hillel and I’ll give you a statement for your story.”
My story? I had never agreed to write a story on this. But, nevertheless, I flipped the book open and the more I read, the more curious I became. Mel Brooks indeed, It was filled with what I found to be laughable lines about One World Government under the control of International Jewry. It was obviously written by anti-Semites, but if you are a Jew who denies it was written by Jews, well, then that just proves that you are part of the plot. That’s the beauty of a conspiracy theory. The more you deny, the guiltier you seem. And, now, Arab students are using it as some kind of proof of Jewish intent in the Middle East.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Semite and Anti-Semite
“We are Semites ourselves,” said Mohammed, the association’s president, speaking to me in a cramped office at the Student Center. “How can we be anti-Semitic?” Mohammed seemed a bit old to be a student. He came to Detroit from Egypt, which led to the rumor that he was also with the Muslim Brotherhood. I had no idea if that was true, but he was to become my nemesis for the next three years.
“It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are fiction. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” said Mohammed, arms waving, gesturing, hovering over me as I remained seated. “But you cannot deny that many of the prophecies in this book have come true. Jews run the financial systems.”
“Prophecies,” I thought. “Prophecies.” It’s the language of religion used to describe an anti-Jewish invention from the czarist era. I cocked my head a bit like a dog. Mohammad picked up on it immediately. “Yes, prophecies.”
Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service. I hadn’t meant these things to happen.
But I was only in college, was learning as I went along, and had not yet had my full immersion into Arab culture with Lamya and her friends. That would come later, and through it an appreciation of how very alike Jews and Arabs were in many respects. At that moment, though, at the age of 19, I thought I knew what an anti-Semite was.
Accidental Jewish Journalism Career
I wrote the Protocols story, which led to my friendship with Lamya, who would change my life in many ways, aside from telling me that I did not know everything. Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service.
I hadn’t meant these things to happen. But I felt I was being dragged there by this state of Jewishness that I could not escape. It was a voice that was always there since as long as I had conscious thought. It was sometimes my grandfather’s voice, other times I interpreted it as God’s. It could not have been my own, since there were obviously forces outside myself at play. I was convinced of it.
This voice led to the illusion of conviction and confidence and how very convinced I was that I was right. It’s how I stoically endured, expressionless, when the entire Arab student body showed up to a public forum to denounce my application to be editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. It’s how I handled the humiliation when Abbie Hoffman, himself, denounced me at a campus rally as representative of all that was wrong with the youth of the 1980s.
The tics of my early childhood had morphed into rigid thought in college. Yet, the feelings of being out of sync with my peers, of having another being travel with me, forcing my muscles and my brain synapses into rigid rituals, were still there in more disturbing forms. The tics, the habits, even the waking sleep paralysis and night terrors I had mistaken for God much of my life. What else could they be? But by 1985 I knew that it was a flaw in me. The voice was more than an impulse. It was much more dark, persistent, life-swallowing than the narcissism of youth.
Arkady Polishchuk, a former Soviet Jewish Refusnik, reminds me of my grandfather, with his Old World sense of irony and humor, mixed with the slight pathos of age and long suffering.
I first came into contact with Arkady when I interviewed him for this Publishers Weekly feature I wrote about him when he released his previous book, Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter (Doppelhouse Press, July 2018). I was impressed not only by the depth and breadth of his experiences as a witness to history, but the compelling way in which he tells the stories of his life—with both wit and wisdom.
I was privileged to have received an early draft of a few chapters of his next book, As I Was Burying Comrade Stalin. Again, he not only made history come alive through excellent storytelling, he presents this history from a unique perspective. There are very few living people who can relate this story of life under communist rule—first being taught to worship Stalin, then slowly, as he came of age, realizing that he had been lied to all his life. We are there with him, experiencing these historic moments from Arkady’s point of view.
Arkady and I have corresponded a great deal since then. I hope to be his editor for when he finds a publisher for Comrade Stalin. He’s a great guy to talk to. Humble, but with a sharp wit.
Meanwhile, please enjoy this feature I wrote about Arkady for Publishers Weekly.
How did a Soviet Jewish Refusnik, raised an atheist communist, come to be a powerful voice on behalf of Russian evangelical Christians? No, this isn’t one of those “walked into a bar” jokes. It’s a true story of Cold War bravery and danger told in Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter(Doppelhouse Press, July) by Arkady Polishchuk.
