editions of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Thoreau’s Walden from a couple who were close friends of my parents from their left-wing student days. There seemed nothing in the least incongruous about offering such secular testaments as bar mitzvah gifts. I still read today the inscription the couple added to the astutely chosen texts: “These two books provide the always exhilarating blend of the search for individual freedom and oneness with nature, with the struggle for political freedom and social responsibility.” Thus my reaching out to non-Jewish sources began within my Jewish milieu. Thoreau and Paine were not Jews but they were very much part of my liberal democratic American-Jewish legacy.
Within weeks of my bar mitzvah, every word of Hebrew vanished from my head. The language had been learned solely in order to complete a public performance, a rite, that had little meaning for me. I certainly did not feel that I had become a man, an adult, a member of a congregation, that I was enfranchised. Instead, I began to look for and find some of that sense of growth, of emergence as an autonomous human being, in politics, in the world of the left, in battles against racism and for civil liberties. Soon I just could not stop talking about the Vietnam War and how it was wrong on every count. This, in 1966, did not make me popular. So why was I so determined to pursue the course? Did I like being different? Was I showing off, calling attention to myself? Yes, I was. But there were other ways to do that and I did not choose them.
Like EVM, I enjoyed the idea of being part of a vanguard of truth-seekers and rebels. I was sustained in opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the Black Panthers and the Yippies by the proud tradition of dissent I’d imbibed as a package that combined Americanism, Jewishness, Thoreau, Galileo, and a gallery of figures of conscience. My Jewish role models shifted: Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner, Dylan, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
For years it was a family tradition to buy sandwiches once a week from our neighborhood deli. Here I acquired a lifelong taste for pastrami, corn beef with the works, fresh rye and new pickles. One morning in mid-1967, aged fourteen, I went off on the familiar errand with my dad. The old man who owned the deli—his thick glasses held together by Scotch tape—seemed genuinely distressed by the long, unkempt hair I’d grown since he’d last seen me. “Mike, you used to be the all-American boy.”
“He still is,” my dad chirped in my defense. But in fact I knew I was mutating into something other than that all-American boy.
In Sunday school, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was a great moment of Jewish pride. I don’t remember much thanking of God, and no mourning for the victims on either side, just a sustained note of elated triumph. To cap all our other Jewish achievements, to confirm our eminence, we had now proved ourselves masters in war. It had taken us just six days to defeat Arab armies attacking from all sides, to sweep across the Sinai, unite Jerusalem, drive the enemy back across the Jordan. No one spoke then, not in my hearing, of the beginning of an occupation. We had redrawn the lines on the map. That was our prerogative. That was justice. We were unbeatable and we were righteous. Israel married moral virtue and military strength—another sign that we lived in an age of order and progress, that all we wished for would be ours. When a friend who liked to tease me about my anti-Vietnam War views suggested I might not support Israel against the Arabs, I was outraged and offended.
I’m not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the June war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early twenties, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents’ accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war, and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher’s desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. “You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street.”
Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white Southerners I’d been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I’d been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist.
I felt the eyes of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to my spouting radical opinions, but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn’t have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.
I can’t remember how long it was after that that I decided to share this experience and my thoughts on it with my family. This was something I was usually encouraged to do and for which I usually received approbation. We were sitting around the dinner table—all seven of us—so it must have been a weekend, because during the week my father rarely made it home from the city in time to eat with us. I launched into my story about the Israeli in Sunday school and how what he said was racist. I had been thinking about the matter and now added, for my family’s benefit, a further opinion. It was wrong for one country to take over another, or part of another, by military force. If the US was wrong in Vietnam—and that was a given around our dinner table—then Israel was wrong in taking over all that Arab land. I was reasoning by analogy, and nobody had yet told me that some analogies were off-limits.
For some time I remained unaware that my father was listening to me not with approval but with rising fury. When he barked, “Enough already!” the shift was disturbingly abrupt. Like my Sunday school teacher, he made me feel that I’d said something obscene. Then he drew a breath, turned to me and seemed to soften. “I think you need to look at why you’re saying what you’re saying,” he said, and then the softness vanished. “There’s some Jewish self-hatred there.”
I felt then, and still feel now, when I look back on it, deeply and frustratingly misunderstood. My motives had nothing to do with self-hatred or any feeling about being Jewish. Nor did they have anything to do with compassion for a people—the Palestinians—about whom I knew nothing. I was merely following, as best I could, and in typical fourteen-year-old fashion, what seemed to be the dictates of logic. If in following them, the results appeared to defy assumptions, then that just made them more curious and compelling. Judging people by their color or religion was wrong. Racism, making a generalization about a whole people, stereotyping a whole people, was wrong. Taking over other countries was wrong, even if they attacked you (it was years before I learned that it was Israel that had launched this war, justified at the time by Abba Eban, American liberal Jewry’s favorite Israeli, as a “pre-emptive” strike). Among the shibboleths I was brought up on was the belief that “my country right or wrong” was wrong. No one liked to insist more than my dad that if you really loved your country you criticized its flaws. Surely that also applied to religion, and “my religion right or wrong” must also be wrong. I was only trying to apply general principles to a particular case. It was an exercise in logic, an exercise in teenage stubbornness. I was unprepared for the response, with its implication that I did not know myself, coming from my father’s lips. An attack on my selfhood.
I was startled and bewildered by the phrase “Jewish self-hatred.” I didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t imagined that Jews would hate themselves, or that anyone would think that I hated myself. The charge seemed so farfetched, yet so personal. And so bitterly unfair. Burning from head to toe, I threw down knife and fork and left the table in a huff, pounding up the stairs to my room, where I hurled myself on my bed and wrestled with my frustration.
Some might by now have concluded that the roots of my anti-Zionism lie in Oedipal trauma. For sure, this was a deeply distressing
