in a remote past. The victims, we were told, were people like us, but we could not imagine ourselves in their place. How could we? We were the most comfortable Jews the world had ever known. We knew Jews as powerful, as achievers in every imaginable field, as world leaders, as inventors and reformers, as leaders in business and champions of democracy and tolerance and the higher civic virtues. The notion that we were or could ever be taken for anything other than bona fide Americans never occurred to us. It never occurred to us that there might be any reason to deny you were a Jew. We were senators and governors and Nobel Prize winning scientists and novelists and movie stars and even baseball players. (Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on the Sabbath.) It was, self-evidently, a good thing to be a Jew—a blessing, an advantage, especially as it seemed you could be a Jew without actually having to follow many prescriptions or proscriptions. The Catholic kids had a much tougher regime.
The goods of the world were accessible to us as to none of our forebears. The dominant culture was our culture. The synagogue molded itself to this world, blending with the suburban landscape, streamlined with its sloping roof and giant windows. Poor Jews were a memory, a postcard image from a Hollywood past. We were taken on a Sunday school outing to the Lower East Side, the land of our forefathers. The Jews in the street didn’t look like us. We were taken to Katz’s delicatessen. We ate and ate. Jewishness, as much as anything, was food—tastes of pastrami, pickles, rye bread, gefilte fish, chopped liver, smoked fish. Our view of the shtetl was Chagall-tinted. The modernist Jewish folklorist with a passion for Jesus was a strange transmission belt for the only certified Jewish imagery we knew. (It was not until many years later, when I saw Chagall’s earlier, hard-edged fantasies, that I came to savor his mordant poetry.)
Then there was Fiddler. A number of the kids had already seen it, it had been plugged in Sunday school, and I was charged up with anticipation as I arrived with my dad at the theater, only to discover that the star of the hit show, Zero Mostel, was indisposed for the evening. That meant more to my dad than to me: he was fully aware that the role of Tevye had completed Mostel’s public rehabilitation after he had languished on the McCarthyite blacklist for more than a decade.* Even without Mostel, I was entranced. The book and the presentation had a clarity and gentle humor that made the plot and its social implications easy to follow, even for an eleven-year-old. The sets themselves were apparently evocative to older members of the audience, who sighed in recognition at the customs depicted on stage. “Tea in a glass!” a woman sitting near me intoned, an observation that returned to me many years later, when I traveled in Morocco, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
Fiddler on the Roof was an origin story for American Jews, a recollection of the world left behind in eastern Europe, an account of the upheavals that had brought us to where we were and made us who we were. Anti-semitism (depicted in a highly sanitized pogrom) was the context, but the real drama derived from the incursions of modernity and secularism into shtetl provincialism. As Tevye’s pragmatic-fatalistic faith is tested by his daughter’s marriages—to a poor tailor, a socialist agitator and finally, unthinkably, a gentile—his adaptability reaches its limits. Fiddler was easily digestible yiddishkeit for the 1960s, but I suspect if it were written today, its approach would be different. The threats of Bolshevism and rationalism, of intermarriage and women’s freedom, might not be depicted with such equanimity, and the near-complete absence of any references to Palestine or Israel would surely be remedied.
From an early age I conceived of myself as a rationalist and though I made spasmodic efforts at belief, I never felt a divine presence. During “prayer,” I was acutely aware of the gap between what I was supposed to be thinking and what was actually going through my head. But in the end what alienated me from the synagogue was not the make-believe of the after-life or the all-seeing omnipotence of an invisible God. Not in this synagogue. Here the absolutes were kept in the background. God was there, mentioned in the prayers, but he had been discreetly updated and denatured. No one seemed over-concerned about his judgement.
So what was the creed we were taught in Sunday school? It was not about God. It was about the Jews. A singular people who had given wonderful gifts to the world and whom the world had treated cruelly. A people who were persecuted. A people who survived. A people who triumphed. Despite the holocaust, we were not a nation of losers, of victims. There was a redemptive denouement. There was Israel, a modern Jewish homeland, a beacon to the world. A shiny new state with a squeaky clean people. Up-to-date, Coke-drinking people like us. Liberals, like us. Bearers of democracy and civilization, making the desert bloom. A little America in the Middle East.
Our Jewish history was full of heroes who stood up for the truth, who defied the powerful. The civil rights movement in the South was our cause, not only because the Negroes were the latter-day Jews, slaves in Egypt land, but also because so many Jews were involved in the movement. The synagogue raised funds for voter registration projects in Mississippi. The rabbi excoriated the Southern bigots. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” he quoted from Deuteronomy. On the wall of the temple’s multipurpose room the words of Isaiah were inscribed: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” This was a Jewish teaching but we knew it had now become a world teaching, a watchword for the United Nations. This was further confirmation that we were a people of enlightened progress.
For the over-subscribed High Holidays our temple rented the multi-seated White Plains County Center arena (later I saw the Harlem Globetrotters and the Lovin’ Spoonful play there). In 1964, with the presidential election weeks away, the rabbi used his Rosh Hashanah sermon to attack the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, and inveigh against the threat from the right wing—the eternal seedbed of anti-semitism. What was remarkable was that only one out of the many thousands in attendance walked out. In the election, the Texas Baptist Lyndon Johnson received some 90 percent of the Jewish vote (though Goldwater’s paternal grandfather was a Jew from Poland). Two years later, LBJ became the first US president to sell warplanes to the Israelis.*
Israel was both our own cause, a Jewish cause, and a moral cause, a universal cause. Like America. A land without people for a people without land. Like America. That was the gift we received in Sunday school—an extra country. For us there were two nations and best of all we didn’t have to choose between them. As Jews and Americans we enjoyed a double birthright and a double privilege.
“And I will make of thee a great nation,” the Lord promised Abraham, “And I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee.” The coming home of the Jews to the land of our forefathers completed the epic saga stretching back to Genesis and ensured it ended with a huge upswing in mood: from near-annihilation in the holocaust to the pride of statehood in a few short years. We took this outcome less as a sign of the divine inspiration of the ancient prophets than as another manifestation of the order and justice that generally prevailed in our world. It was a testament to progress and the Jewish mastery of progress. Thanks to America and Israel, the Jews were safe at last. Thanks to America and Israel, we all had two homelands. We could visit Israel and work on a kibbutz, which was like a grown-up summer camp. We were taught to revere Ben Gurion and his heir, the Jewish-American farm girl Golda Meir. In our Sunday school textbooks the Israelis looked like us: white, youthful, healthy—American teenagers with Hebrew names. And the country they were building looked familiar, with modern buildings and girls in jeans. These were Jews who read books but also drove tractors and tanks.
As always, the Jews had enemies. Israel was menaced by “Arabs” (not “Palestinians,” a word never uttered in our synagogue). They were exotically attired bedouin—people who did not have or want a home. In our Sunday school texts, they appeared swarthy, coarse, ignorant, duplicitous. These descendants of Pharaoh and the Philistines seemed curiously ungrateful and irrational. For no reason at all they hated us. We watched the movie Exodus, with Paul Newman as Palmach commando Ari Ben Canaan. It was the story of Chanukkah all over again: the Maccabees defying the ruthless might of the Syrians.
