At the New York Marathon last weekend, I joined a group of spectators supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation. I did so in spite of reservations not about the cause itself, but rather about the efficacy of such public demonstrations. On the whole, it was a positive experience, and I'm grateful to my conscientious wife for convincing me that the exigency of the situation in Gaza outweighed my doubts. I even waved a Palestinian flag, and was met with warmth not just by Arab and Muslim runners, but also, notably, Black, Latino, Irish, and Vietnamese ones. For what it's worth, I have to give credit to the Israeli runners that we saw for either ignoring us or, in one case, mocking us gently and humorously. (Believe me when I tell you that I bear no ill will for Israeli civilians or even really for non-ideological conscripts. The ones I've met and worked with have been lovely.) The one blot on the day was another spectator, who walked by us and loudly muttered "fucking antisemites." I yelled back at him, "I'm a Jew, you fucking retard," and I'm not sure if he heard it, but he proceeded to hover menacingly near us for another ten or fifteen minutes before fucking off.
Am I really a Jew, though? My go-to answer to this question is, "it depends who you ask." Being a secular, solely-patrilineal Jew, I am at the very fringes of what could be considered Jewishness, but I maintain that I'm in there! For one thing, I am the most Jew-y looking member of my extended family, and for another, I think more about that part of our heritage than the rest of us. I know the most about my great grandfather Max, who came to New York from the Russian Empire in 1912. Fleeing pogroms in what is now Belarus, he departed from the port of Libau (now Liepaja, Latvia), landed at Ellis Island, promptly assimilated, served in the US Army in World War 1, married a nice girl from the big city (Minsk), and started a family in Brooklyn. For the most part, he seems to have abandoned his faith. In his home town back in the old country, there still stands an abandoned 17th-century synagogue.
(I recently considered visiting Berlin and then popping over to the old country, but alas, what would be a twelve-hour drive across Poland takes more than thirty hours by air, as the new Iron Curtain necessitates a layover in Baku).
Any relatives who may have stayed behind would have been rounded up by the SS in the fall of 1941, lined up on the edge of an anti-tank ditch, and shot dead. Again, I know these specifics because I care deeply about this part of my heritage.
Let me confess to you a dirty secret: owing to all of this family history, I went through a phase of being quite enthusiastic about Israel. I was particularly taken with the "anti-colonial" fight against the British in Mandatory Palestine, and went so far in this direction that I felt some admiration for the terroristic Irgun paramilitary organization. I never could embrace their compatriots in Lehi (they sought a deal with the Nazis, after all), though I regarded Avraham Stern with mixed scorn and pity as a kind of doomed, inverted Mishima, who in spite of the basic success of his political ambitions, was a literary failure who died an ignominious death.
My reversion to an anti-Zionist position involved, among other things, remembering the admiration for Islam and Islamic civilization that I first learned from Malcolm X, learning about massacres like Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila, Qana, understanding the basic folly of the nation-state, imperialism, seeing the possibility of Jewish anti-Zionism, et cetera. My purpose here is not to browbeat you into agreeing with me, so whatever. (I would recommend reading Robert Fisk's chronicle of the Lebanese Civil War, Pity the Nation. It's a great read, and will introduce you to some complexities of Middle Eastern affairs, if you're not already familiar.) What's on my mind is still that question, am I a Jew?
It occurred to me tonight that "Jew" is a cross-categorically exclusive epithet. Being a Jew excludes one from other faiths: one can be a Jew for Jesus, but not a Jewish Christian. It also excludes from other ethnicities. A Jew can be ethnically categorized within Jewry as Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Bukharan, and so on, but a Yemenite Jew is somehow separate from Yemeni people, and Mizrahi Jews aren't Arabs like the Arab Christians and Muslims all around them. Unlike Lebanese Maronites, who are evidently Arabs, but insist that they are Phoenecians, recognition of the non-Arabness of Yemenite and Mizrahi Jews is recognized both within and outside the Tribe. Russian Jews like me are, regrettably, not quite Russian, and the same applies to us (if you'll allow me the "us") in the rest of Europe. Jewishness is not unique in being both an ethnic and religious identity, but it carries a particular ontological wound, a mysterious trait of non-union with the other, and an internal unity that is inexplicable. There may or may not be a Jewish state, but in the strict and rational terms laid out in J.V. Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question", there is no Jewish nation. While there is no Jewish nation, there is a recognizable Jewish spirit. What is this mark on me?
Before I lapse into incoherence, a lapse into psychologizing: In the midst of the extremely lethal bombardment of Gaza, my aunt admonished me that Palestinian civilians are "not as innocent as they look." The barely-concealed subtext, of course is that they are guilty of disliking us Jews, who have been bullied for millennia, and they are therefore legitimate targets for 'security measures'. This is a very common frame of mind. I've seen it described as "ethno-narcissism," which seems apt. I presumed to write this today because I've been blessed with a personality flaw more primitive, raw, and unguarded than narcissism, a flaw like the "wound" of Jewishness that disposes me to both a longing for closeness with other people and an almost insurmountable sense of separation from them. The longing and the sense of separation are never more acute than when an Arab man calls me brother. It's something to be reconciled. In the words of Ali Shariati, and in the spirit of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:
"My Lord, inspire me with the piety of rebellion so that I may not stumble in the grandeur of my responsibilities. And save me from the piety of avoidance so that I may not be wasted in the corner of solitude."