… To belong to a society as an essential part without ever feeling or being accepted as a perfect fit within it, and to consequently experience history as a struggle between conflicting identities: That is the life-story of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, after haskalah…
Say what? “After haskalah?” Were Jews not strangers in a strange land earlier than the Enlightenment? Mordecai and Esther and their contemporaries in Persia? Maimonedes and his in Egypt and the Levant? Not strangers in a strange land? How often in the long history of the Jews were we not strangers in a strange land? So wherefore “after Haskala?”
Daniel Koffler’s core assumption is dead wrong. Identification with Jews was never an indicator of empathy with or sympathy for Jews. Indeed, the opposite is true. Special hostility toward Jews is absent among Buddhists and Hindus whose faith and culture owes nothing to Jews while anti-Semitism is entirely natural to Christians and Muslims whose supersessionist beliefs and rituals are overwhelmingly derivative and imitative of Judaism.
Daniel’s support of Obama raises a deeper question. Barack Obama doesn’t feel mainstream because Barack Obama isn’t mainstream. His past is checkered and some of it won’t stand up to scrutiny. He’s changed his name to something more Muslim and his religion to something more Christian.
But why does Daniel Koffler identify with Obama? Why does this young American Jew feel he’s less than a perfect fit? Not fully American? What are these “conflicting identities” he feels he has in common with Obama? Is his Jewish identity in conflict with his American identity?
And why does Daniel assume that all American Jews feel equally odd and estranged? I ask because I have three daughters about Daniel’s age receiving the same rarified education and they suffer no such angst.
My daughters are loyal Jews and loyal Americans and they’ve never felt anything but comfortably Jewish and comfortably American. They don’t feel morally superior to their fellow Jews and they don’t feel morally superior to their fellow Americans. And unlike young Daniel, they are all three far too modest ever to presume to speak for their coreligionists at large.
That a large majority of American Jews will vote Obama is yet another sad reminder that the intelligence of Jews is much overrated.
