American Jews' Exceptional Diaspora
While the traditional Jewish narrative may be useful in calling attention to an excess of idealism in postcolonial discourse, postcolonial discourse may in turn be useful in calling attention to an excess of exceptionalism in American Jews' attitude toward diaspora. Here, therefore, we must attempt to engage three parties in dialogue at once.
Twentieth-century American Jewish intellectuals have generally resisted many of the elements of the traditional Jewish narrative. In particular, they have rejected the equation of the United States with galut (exile) and the state of Israel with Zion. These intellectuals, for the most part not traditionalists, have been unwilling to see their diaspora as a divine punishment for their transgressions. Moreover, while they have conceded that Israel is the Jewish cultural center in the second half of the twentieth century, they have resisted the notion that Israel is the spiritual center. They have not seen Israel as the "homeland" in the metaphysical sense, rejecting the notion that the Land is a sacred source of wholeness.
The conclusion Arnold Eisen reaches on completing his survey of twentieth-century American Jewish thought is that a rather Kaplanian consensus has been reached: "America is not home, yet neither is Israel. The latter is the Center and is certainly not exile, but neither can the former be compared to any previous diaspora. 'America is different.' Nor should its rich Jewish resources be underestimated. The two communities [are] interdependent."[30]
Eisen, Galut, 156-180.
I hope to show that this ideological consensus is, however, only partially accurate and has some quite negative consequences.As a result of their exceptionalism, American Jews are isolated from other cultural groups in the United States and alienated from all but a sentimentalized Jewish history. How has this model come into being? And how can it be overcome?
America's "difference" is usually justified by pointing to the relative absence of systematic persecution and concomitantly to the many freedoms American Jews enjoy. Since the colonial period, American Jewish intellectuals have maintained that this New Jerusalem (as the Puritans called it) was a place of promise—a Promised Land—unlike any other. The Jews' embrace of the basic benignity of the Bill of Rights has perhaps most recently been exemplified in Lynne Sharon Schwartz's short story "The Opiate of the People," in which David the Russian Jewish immigrant memorizes the Constitution in order to be more American than Americans themselves.[31]
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "The Opiate of the People," in Joyce Antler, ed., America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 233-251.
An attitude toward their condition that includes trust in the United States, trust that the United States is not galut but a hothouse nurturing self-expression and experimentation, pervades American Jewish theology and literature.In the United States experimental theologies have come into being ranging from reform to reconstructionism to Heschelian awe to renewal to feminism. These theologies have consistently deemphasized the role of the land of Israel as "center" and have interpreted terms such as land and aliyah (ascent to the land of Israel) in ways that divest them of any literal implication. Early advocates of reform called for the decentralization of Judaism: they called their prayer sites "temples," the lower-case t signifying that genuine Jewish spirituality could occur outside the land in which the Temple had been located. Mordecai Kaplan's reconstructionist vision of Judaism as a religious civilization emphasized the mutual interdependence of the state of Israel and the American diaspora. The state of Israel would "provide an essential source of inspiration" for Jews in the diaspora. For its part, the American diaspora, free of the moral hypocrisies engendered by the state's attempt to balance democracy and Jewish power, free of the state's stark polarization between secular and devout Jews, would be able to maintain a vital spirituality that would in turn be a crucial resource for Israelis.[32]
Jack J. Cohen, "Reflections on Kaplan's Zionism," in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer, eds., The American Judaism of Modccai Kaplan, 401-414 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). In the same volume, see also Mel Scult, "Kaplan's Reinterpretation of the Bible," 312-313. See also Eisen, Galut, 159.
While Abraham Joshua Heschel's Israel: An Echo of Eternity saw the formation of the state of Israel as a crucial moment in Jewish history, he tended to invoke "Israel" as a holy state of being to which one aspires rather than a territory to which one returns. Similarly, he tended to speak of aliyah as the ascent to the holiness of "Israel," wherever one may happen to be living.[33]Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). See also Eisen, Galut, 169-172.
Arthur Waskow's vision of Jewish renewal is focused on revivifying the holiday cycle and gainingan environmental appreciation for land—any land—rather than on geographical aliyah .[34]
Arthur Waskow, Seasons of Our Joy: A Celebration of Modern Jewish Renewal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982).
Judith Plaskow's feminist Judaism defines the term "Israel" not as a geographical place but metaphorically as "the nature of Jewish community and the Jewish people" and she calls on Judaism to realize an "Israel" that fully includes women.[35]Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 75. Eisen, Galut, 159, 172.
While Israeli Zionists have consistently negated the function of the diaspora in the aftermath of the formation of the state, American Jewish theologians have just as consistently maintained the importance of the continuing existence of Jewish communities outside Ha-aretz (the Land), communities understood not as cursed but as blessed with opportunities for spiritual creativity. There is no need to look abroad for Zion when Zion is right here—or more accurately, when Zion is right now , a time rather than a place, an experience rather than a territory, to be reached through the practice of a particular kind of attention, or kavanah .In contrast to this vision of America as heimisch —familiar, secure, and creative—the state of Israel has seemed to many American Jews what Freud would have called unheimliche , unfamiliar.[36]
Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur, ed. Hrsg. von Klaus Wagenbach (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1963).
While the traditional narrative of diaspora functioned to unite scattered Jews from diverse locations in a common dream of return, the realization of that dream by the ingathering of Israel's hundred diasporas has had the ironic effect of producing an awareness of Jews' heterogeneity. For many American Jews, for whom Jews appear fairly homogeneous—Ashkenazic, white—the hundred diasporas call attention to Israel's diversity and unfamiliarity. For many American Jews, then, this heterogeneity is another indication (alongside Israel's continuing national insecurity and economic deprivation) that Israel is not Zion, that Israeli nationhood is not the fulfillment of a sacred promise but the partial, haphazard, sometimes elating and sometimes distorting realization of generations of Jewish dreams and nightmares.Even the familiar Western aspects of the modern Israeli state, like its parliamentary structure and principle of majority rule, can produce an awareness of Israel's distance from the traditional vision of Zion, for if the state is comprised in part of political and cultural institutions transplanted to the Land from galut , then the center begins to seem less distinct from the periphery after all. These "impurities" attendant on Israel's realization must conflict with the prophetic promise of a return to wholeness and the rabbinic vision of spiritual purity. When Philip Roth's Portnoy makes his brief and catastrophic sojourn to the Land, the state appears exotic, dangerous, even emasculating.[37]
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969).
American Jews may still "sing the songs of Zion in a strange land," but they do so with the consciousness that the land in which they sing is not so strange and the land of which they sing is not so familiar.If American Jewish writers have longed to return to any Zion, it is not to Jerusalem but to Bialystok. For many the Old World is the American Jewish homeland. To be sure, it is an imaginary homeland, not remembered in its particularities, a homeland sentimentalized as a quaint and timeless place of Jewish wholeness, a seamless Yiddishkeit. The important differences between German and Russian Jewish immigrants—and between Jews from Galicia and Warsaw, for that matter—have been replaced by a pan-Ashkenazi "American" Jewish identity. American Jews are alienated from the reality of this homeland more even than from the Israeli nation-state, separated by a distance of anguish that cannot even be imagined, much less traversed. The desire to return to the Old World has gained a certain tragic pathos in the work of writers like I. B. Singer, Jacob Glatstein, Cynthia Ozick, and Art Spiegelman, whose writing tries to bridge the gap between a New World we inhabit and an Old World to which, because of the Holocaust, we cannot return.[38]
Cf. I. B. Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972); Jacob Glatstein, Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, trans. and ed. Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987); Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Art Spiegelman, Maus I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), and Maus II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
Short story writer Steve Stern has taken this desire to make contact with the Old World in a more nostalgic direction in his collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. He creates a shtetl in Memphis, Tennessee, a shtetl in which no pogroms ever occur and all the Jews are Americans. He brings the sentimentalized version of the Old World to us.[39]Steve Stern, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
Alienated from both "homelands," American Jews have felt they had no choice but to create an existence unlike any their forebears ever knew. Because of their ideology of exceptionalism, they have not, for the most part, looked to other eras of stability and promise in diaspora Jewish history for aid in understanding their situation. In consequence they suffer an emotional and intellectual distance from Israel, the Old World, and the rest of Jewish history. For this reason, American Jews' commitment to the promise of America simultaneously affirms the solidity and the fragility of their freedom. The triumphalism that since 1948 has seemed endemic to certain kinds of American Jewish thinking about the relation of the "periphery" to the "center" hides what might be called an anxiety of the lack of influence.[40]
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). See Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 203-205, for a counterexample.
In less defensive moments, what American Jews celebrate as their freedom from the dictates of tradition, they also lament as the loss of their continuity with the past.What makes American Jews since 1948 truly exceptional is not in any case the absence of anti-Semitism or the economic or cultural opportunity provided by the Golden Land. The "lachrymose" view of Jewish history to the contrary, there have been many such eras. Rather, American Jews' exceptionalism rests on two startlingly new facts of Jewish history: that they are among the first Jews in two thousand years to have had the option to literalize the notion of "return" and that for the most part they
have chosen not to be "gathered in." Along with other poststatehood diasporic Jews, American Jews are faced with two questions that their ancestors never had to confront: What sort of attitude is appropriate toward a "Zion" that has been realized as a nation-state? and What does it mean to desire to continue living outside of that "Zion"?
The range and limitations of recent American Jewish attempts to answer these questions can be seen in a comparison of an essay by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," with Philip Roth's "confession," Operation Shylock , both from 1993. The Boyarins' essay takes the triumphalism in certain versions of American Jewish thought and postcolonialism to an extreme. The Boyarins idealize the condition of diaspora and seem to oppose the formation and continuing existence of Israel as a nation-state. In a rather too certain fashion their essay elevates wilderness over Canaan, wandering over settlement, diaspora over statehood, and genealogy (that is, biologically determined "kinship" or "race") over geographical territory. The Boyarins want to "propose a privileging of Diaspora" and to argue that "Diaspora, not monotheism, may be the most important contribution that Judaism has to make to the world." They identify with what they describe (wrongly, in my view) as "a prophetic discourse of preference for 'exile' over rootedness in the Land."[41]
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 693-725. A preference for exile could be found later in rabbinic literature but rarely in the prophetic literature. Cf. Jer. 15:7, Ezek. 22:15-16 and Hos. 9:17, in each of which exile is seen as a punishment for Israel's transgression against God.
They seem to support a race-based—or, as they say, "ethnocentric"—definition of Jewish community, as long as that community does not "seek domination over others." And they describe this ethnocentricity as a proposal endorsed by "the Rabbis," that is, by ancient diasporic Jewish teachers.How to ensure that one's ethnocentricity does not devolve into dominance over others? Simply by acting like the members of the Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox sect that in its mission statement denies "any desire to exploit the local population in order to attain statehood." Like the Neturei Karta, other Jews need to divest themselves of any attachment to land and power. In the Boyarins' assessment, Jews who divest are in the position to be perpetual exiles, subversive of all state power formations because they always call attention to hybridity in power's midst. They are in the position to be morally pure.
But the Boyarins' call to divestment is curiously contradictory. On the one hand, their theory seems determined to idealize the diasporic condition and to minimize the tragic suffering the Rabbis (and all the other diasporic Jews) also experienced and recorded. On the other hand, while downplaying Jewish suffering, the Boyarins' theory places supreme importance on Palestinians' suffering, without recognizing any of the Zionists'
claims as legitimate. The Boyarins claim that only by living in the "wilderness"—in perpetual exile—can Jews maintain moral purity. But the Boyarins also position themselves as postcolonial theorists interested in impurity and hybridity. On the one hand, they want to "privilege Diaspora," but on the other they want to privilege a sect for whom Diaspora is nothing less than a punishment for sin. As their mission statement says, the members of Neturei Karta "repeat constantly in our prayers, 'since we sinned, we were therefore exiled from our land.'" How can diaspora be plausibly construed as both a positive position and a curse at the same time? (And is it really a greater "privilege" to be in a state of sin than in a Jewish state?) Finally, the Boyarins appear to position themselves as politically engaged critics, but they champion a form of political behavior that can only be seen as utopian in the most unconstructive sense. They apparently wish to restrict Jews to the role of Cain or Ahasuerus, the legendary wandering Jews. Their call to divestment is not a solution to the challenges of Jewish power—it is an evasion of the question.
A more satisfactory and more nuanced—although still incomplete—attempt to articulate an American Jewish relationship to the nation-state is Philip Roth's doppelgänger novel, Operation Shylock. Yet even Roth's more complex vision cannot dispense with the negative consequences of American Jews' exceptionalism. Roth conjures up a second Philip Roth, a fraud pretending to be him in order to gain support for a theory called "Diasporism." The theory is that Zionism is dead, that the state of Israel will either be the physical or moral death of the Jews, and that the Ashkenazim who once fled Europe for Israel need now to return to Europe and resettle there. In Israel, according to a Palestinian nationalist with whom the fraud sympathizes, Jews have merely built themselves "a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it."[42]
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Random House, 1993), 126.
It was only in diaspora that Jews could thrive morally. True, anti-Semitism was a distinct problem for European Jews, but much has changed in Europe since the Holocaust, and residual anti-Semitism may be dealt with through the creation of a twelve-step group with chapters in every European city to be called Anti-Semites Anonymous (A-S.A.).The "real" Philip Roth distances himself from this prankster's theory, sometimes calling it absurd and monomaniacal, other times merely pointing to its "exaggerations." In the fiction of this confession, he sets out to defeat the other Philip Roth—whom he renames Moishe Pipik ("Moses Bellybutton" in Yiddish) so as to satirize the trivializing impulse behind this imaginary reverse Exodus. (As Roth says, Pipikism is "the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes
everything, superficializes everything—our suffering as Jews not excluded.")[43]
Ibid., 389.
As part of his attempt to defeat Pipik, Roth goes to work for the Mossad, posing as an agent of Palestinian nationalism in order to identify "other" Jewish anti-Zionists. By working on behalf of Israel's national security, Roth gives evidence for the Mossad agent Smilesburger's contention that "Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service"—shades of Pollard! At one level, then, the "real" Philip Roth seems to suggest that Pipik's Diasporism is nonsense, that Jews' suffering in diaspora (especially during the Holocaust) and the continued existence of anti-Semitism in Europe justifies the necessity of the Jewish state, and that American Jews like himself should organize their life choices around the state's needs. Israel is the center.But this is only one of many levels of analysis in a novel that takes Paul Gilroy's notion of "double consciousness" to new extremes. Ironically, the most ruthlessly honest figure in the book is the character who is paid to distribute disinformation, the Mossad agent, Smilesburger. He admits that the occupation and in some sense even the foundation of the state itself have been the occasions for Jews' moral degeneration. As he says:
What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status.
Statehood has thus not only been a grievous violation of the "indigenous people" but a violation of Jews' own vision of themselves. The center cannot hold. Perhaps then the periphery may have more to recommend it after all. But lest we draw that conclusion, Smilesburger goes on to assure Roth that even diaspora Jews have been morally defiled by the existence of the state, for self-righteous and sanctimonious American Jews have impugned the memory of the Holocaust by invoking it to justify the "imperialist, colonialist theft that was the state of Israel." They have also supported Israel's oppression of Palestinians through their monetary donations and their exertion of political pressure on Israel's behalf. Between diaspora and the state, it seems there is no right. Smilesburger's honest justification for his own actions on behalf of the state is "I did what I did to you because I did what
I did to you"—in other words, European Jews could not have done anything else if they were to survive. Yet this necessity does not absolve them of responsibility for their oppression of Palestinians.[44]
Ibid., 349-350, 351.
While Roth undermines the attempt of his anti-Moses to lead a reverse Exodus to Europe and complicates any easy identification with the state of Israel, he never really questions the legitimacy of the American Jewish diaspora. Instead, toward the end of the novel it begins to appear that he has introduced such an absurd version of "Diasporism" in the plot about Moishe Pipik so that by comparison his own version of diasporism will seem more palatable. Not that he recommends a reverse Exodus to America, but he nevertheless does make a claim for the ongoing validity of American Jewish settlement and cultural expression. True, American Jews are still hypocrites for invoking the Holocaust to support an oppressive state. But they cannot be accused of living with the false consciousness imputed to all diaspora Jews by Israeli Zionism. America is different from Europe, and its relative lack of anti-Semitism lends diasporism a more solid credibility than Moishe Pipik's version. No need for an A-S.A. in the U.S.A. While Roth avoids suggesting a Pipikist moral triumphalism for American Jews, he also avoids advocating a mass transfer of American Jews to Israel.
For himself, having had his Israeli adventure (and having milked Demjanjuk's trial, Leon Klinghoffer's death, and the intifada for a novel), Philip Roth returns to New York. The final chapter of Operation Shylock takes place in a New York delicatessen that becomes a metonym for the American Jewish diaspora. In a novel whose parodic structure eschews realism, the detailed and nostalgic description of this restaurant and the memories and reflections it inspires are remarkable:
[The store] served breakfast and lunch on a dozen formica-topped tables in a room adjacent to the bagel and bialy counter and that looked as though, years back, when someone got the bright idea to "modernize," the attempt at redecoration had been sensibly curtailed halfway through. … In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy … silky slices of precious lox … at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did— … wafting up from behind the showcase … the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life.[45]
Ibid., 378-379.
Here Roth expresses a nostalgic secular vision of the American diaspora at
its creative best, insisting that this diaspora is "more than likely" the true descendant of the culture of the "common folk," whose "ancient" preservative arts hold the secret of Jewish self-preservation. He revels in the material reality—the lavishly imagined smells, flavors, and textures, almost, one could say, the heimisch quality—of this evidence of continuing links between the American Jewish culture and Jewish cultures past. After all, this "humble" store is only half modernized—the other half still belongs to the medieval Jewish world. Roth seems to suggest that American Jews are the ancestral standard-bearers of an expressive tradition that reaches back at least a thousand years. He seems to relate the American Jewish diaspora to eastern European Jewish history. Has he abandoned exceptionalism?
Surely not, for Roth represents Yiddish folk culture in the timeless, quaint, homogeneous, and sentimental vein. His delicatessen epiphany may appear to relate American Jews to history, but it is in fact antihistorical since it represents Jews in an unchanging (and inaccurate) still-life portrait. He replaces history with nostalgia. In this way, he enables American Jews to see themselves both as filial to their ancestors and as utterly unique. He satisfies their felt need for at least the illusion of historical continuity while maintaining their exceptionalism.
But this criticism needs to be tempered with one important qualification: while Roth insists that Yiddishkeit in America is heimisch , he is equally insistent that America itself is not home. Rather, Roth goes on to say that these stores with their "satisfying folk cuisine" bear "the stamp of provisional homeliness."[46]
Ibid., 379.
Roth may appear to suggest that gefilte fish is the only homeland, but even that great expression of Jewish continuity and culinary art can only ever aspire to a rough approximation of "homeliness." For, like the four-letter name of God, home itself is a food whose flavor Jews have definitively forgotten and for which they nevertheless are destined to continue to yearn forever—even in America. American Jews may not be "strangers" in their land in quite the same sense as their European forebears were strangers in theirs, but they are still singing the songs of longing for the wholeness and purity of Zion. And even if they rename the desired wholeness "hybridity" and the desired purity "impurity," their yearning will remain—only partially satisfied, forever deferred. America is not the Promised Land, Roth implies, because no land ever will be.But because the United States supports the material marks of Jews' "provisional homeliness," Roth believes it is a valid social location for Jewish dwelling and indwelling. The United States serves more easily as provisional homeland for Roth than Israel, precisely because it has enabled the expression of the preservative folkish values of the Old World. Just as Roth
is committed to his friend the Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, he is committed to the necessity of Jewish statehood—but he is not anxious about his own cultural or moral inferiority to Israelis, for he belongs to a venerable and proudly nonelite lineage.
Roth's claim for the ancient, secular, and folkish legitimacy of the American Jewish diaspora depends on his abandonment of the traditional categories through which Jews have understood the term diaspora —clearly the old narrative that interprets diaspora as a curse and Israel as sacred and whole will not suffice. But Roth cannot make any general claims for the validity of his alternative vision. Instead, he must construct his narrative as a "confession," a highly personal account of the shenanigans of an exceptional man. He is acutely aware that there is no Sanhedrin or Babylonian Academy or Beit Din that might validate his confession for all American Jews. This atomized individual, with his alienation from any but a sentimentalized antihistory and his isolation from contemporary non-Jewish communities, seems to exemplify the negative consequences of American Jewish exceptionalism, even at its best.