Our essentially elastic identity
THE JC and JW3’s Jewish identity project has prompted a rich variety of replies to the question: “What does being Jewish mean to you?” Among the wellkn known names, Julia Neuberger was sp spiritual, Ed Miliband historical, and Gi Giles Coren vulnerable. Lynne Franks’s ge generous embrace ranged from latkes to schmaltz herring, “strident voices” to “big hugs”, “smart minds” to “tribal lo loyalty”, and from Paul Simon to Joan Ri Rivers.
Which goes to show that “being Je Jewish” resists tidy definition, w whether religious or racial, sacred or pr profane. It can be all or any of these th things — even the latter. The American co comedian, Lenny Bruce, was one man in whom profanity and Jewishness were inextricably combined. He died of a drug overdose at the age of 40 in 1966, still awaiting the result of an a appeal against a 1964 conviction for o obscenity. Woody Allen, Bob Dylan a and Norman Mailer were among those who spoke in his defence.
Bruce espoused an amorphous kind of Jewishness. He had a routine in which he divided 1960s America into Jewish and “Goyish”. For Bruce, nonJewish black musicians Count Basie and Ray Charles were Jewish, in contrast to “goyish” Jewish entertainer Eddie Cantor. “B’nai Brith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish” he argued. “It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic — if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish… Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish… Italians are all Jews… Mouths are very Jewish. And bosoms. Baton-twirling is very goyish…”
Unsurprisingly, humour features frequently in people’s definitions of their own sense of Jewishness. It enables the marginalised outsider to seek acceptance on the one hand and, on the other, to challenge or subvert the status quo.
Not even the Bible is immune to humour. The natural response to many of its stories is: “You must be joking!” That is the tone in which Bob Dylan (yes, him again) reacts, in Highway 61 Revisited, to the Akedah: “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’.” (And let’s not forget that Abraham circumcised himself!)
Two other Jews, George and Ira Gershwin, gave perhaps the most memorable musical version of this jokey scepticism in It Ain’t Necessarily So, explaining how “ole Pharaoh’s daughter” discovered baby Moses: “She fished him, she says, from that stream” with its inevitable stress on the fourth and fifth words.
And there is comedian Alan King’s Pesach story (story-telling is also a strong part of many people’s Jewish identity), in which a young boy comes home from his first day at cheder and relates to his proud father what he learned about the escape from Egypt.
“The Hebrews got away in helicopters across the Red Sea,” says the boy. “And when the Egyptians tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft weapons, the Hebrews returned fire with machine guns.”
“They told you that?” the incredulous father exclaims. “Well, not exactly,” says his son, “but if I told you what they told us, you’d never believe me.”
More recently, and less gently, the writer Shalom Auslander, a scion of strict Orthodoxy, has carried this form of mockery to its most irreverent extremes in his books, Beware of God, Foreskin’s Lament, and Hope: a Tragedy.
Even this irreverence, as the JC survey will show, is intensely Jewish. In my view, perhaps the most resonant definition of Jewish identity — which I have mentioned in these pages before — is one of several reportedly made by Sigmund Freud.
Given that Freud did not believe in any religion, including Judaism, and abhorred all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, what, it could be asked, was left in him of Jewishness. “To which I would reply,” said Freud, “a great deal and probably its very essence.”
The JC survey will doubtless identify elements of that “very essence” — intellectual curiosity, passionate argument etc — while many will say that being Jewish involves a respect for tradition, family and the recognition of a “special warmth” derived, for example, from the lighting of Fridaynight candles.
It is thus hard for even the most atheistic Jew to deny that all aspects of Jewishness can probably be traced back to, if not actually located in, the religion.
On the other hand, who can deny that the scope of Jewishness today extends far beyond religious observance? Or that so many outstanding benefactors of humanity, including a hugely disproportionate number of Nobel laureates, are strictly unorthodox Jews.