October 31, 2006
American Jews and the Question of Confidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 PM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for sharing some of his family history, and for responding to my daily feature on the Yiddish theater. Much of what I had to say about the acculturation of second- and third-generation Jewish Americans is culled from my forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, which will be published next spring by the University of North Carolina Press. Self-promotion aside, it’s a topic that holds great interest for me, as the book is an adaptation of my graduate dissertation. I’ve been living with the subject matter for a very long time. When I wrote of the “world before the Holocaust, when there was still a thriving transnational Yiddish culture, and when Diaspora Jewry possessed more cultural self-confidence and didn’t yet feel the need to fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists,” I didn’t mean to suggest that American Jews lived free of fear, or that they were impervious to the very real effects of anti-Semitism. I was referring specifically to their confidence in Diaspora culture. These were years when Jews took tremendous pride in Yiddish literature, theater, and song, which were rooted deeply in the diasporatic experiences of Ashkenazic Jewry, and when Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism, with their muscular ideal of the new Jewish man, were popular competitors—but only competitors—to the other models of the modern Jew: the scholar, the labor radical, the educated professional. In 1958 Leon Uris, the popular American Jewish author, earned fame and fortune with his novel Exodus, which Otto Preminger later adapted into a stirring film starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. Along with Theodore Bikel’s recordings of Hebrew folk songs and Golda Meir’s autobiography, Exodus quickly assumed its place as a mandatory accoutrement in virtually every middle-class American Jewish household. (I exaggerate, and yes, Bikel also recorded Yiddiah folk tunes; but this is all in good fun.) The novel celebrated the new Zionist man, the sabra, who spoke Hebrew, not Yiddish; lived in Israel, not America (or France, or Britain, or Germany); worked the earth with his own hands; and exuded physical strength in abundance. It was an idea very much in line with Theodor Herzl’s pioneering Zionist work, The Jewish State, which envisioned a radical moral and physical makeover for Diaspora Jews, whom it portrayed as weak, corrupted, and pliant. I’m not knocking Exodus. It’s one of my favorite movies, and as far as historical novels go, it’s a keeper. But its essentially uncritical praise of Zionism contrasts sharply with some of the great Yiddish Diaspora works, like Isaac Beshevis Singer’s The Family Moskat, and some of the great English-language Diaspora works, like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books (The Ghost Writer; Zuckerman Unbound; The Anatomy Lesson). Both writers exposed and mocked the foibles of Diaspora Jewry. And yet, while both would stand accused of self-hatred—particularly Roth, who earned scathing criticism from Irving Howe with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint—their novels pay respect to Diaspora culture and treat it with humor and candor. The very fact that Roth was popular, and that Singer earned a Nobel Prize and remains in print, cuts against my argument a bit. American Jews clearly retained a love of their own culture. But with self-confidence must come honesty, and it strikes me that in their uncritical appreciation of Israel, these same Jews were worshiping Zionism in a way that suggested doubts about their own Western acculturation.
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