Our Jewish history was full of heroes who stood up for the truth, who defied the powerful. The civil rights movement in the South was our cause, not only because the Negroes were the latter-day Jews, slaves in Egypt land, but also because so many Jews were involved in the movement. The synagogue raised funds for voter registration projects in Mississippi. The rabbi excoriated the Southern bigots. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” he quoted from Deuteronomy. On the wall of the temple’s multipurpose room the words of Isaiah were inscribed: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” This was a Jewish teaching but we knew it had now become a world teaching, a watchword for the United Nations. This was further confirmation that we were a people of enlightened progress.
For the over-subscribed High Holidays our temple rented the multi-seated White Plains County Center arena (later I saw the Harlem Globetrotters and the Lovin’ Spoonful play there). In 1964, with the presidential election weeks away, the rabbi used his Rosh Hashanah sermon to attack the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, and inveigh against the threat from the right wing—the eternal seedbed of anti-semitism. What was remarkable was that only one out of the many thousands in attendance walked out. In the election, the Texas Baptist Lyndon Johnson received some 90 percent of the Jewish vote (though Goldwater’s paternal grandfather was a Jew from Poland). Two years later, LBJ became the first US president to sell warplanes to the Israelis.*
Israel was both our own cause, a Jewish cause, and a moral cause, a universal cause. Like America. A land without people for a people without land. Like America. That was the gift we received in Sunday school—an extra country. For us there were two nations and best of all we didn’t have to choose between them. As Jews and Americans we enjoyed a double birthright and a double privilege.
“And I will make of thee a great nation,” the Lord promised Abraham, “And I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee.” The coming home of the Jews to the land of our forefathers completed the epic saga stretching back to Genesis and ensured it ended with a huge upswing in mood: from near-annihilation in the holocaust to the pride of statehood in a few short years. We took this outcome less as a sign of the divine inspiration of the ancient prophets than as another manifestation of the order and justice that generally prevailed in our world. It was a testament to progress and the Jewish mastery of progress. Thanks to America and Israel, the Jews were safe at last. Thanks to America and Israel, we all had two homelands. We could visit Israel and work on a kibbutz, which was like a grown-up summer camp. We were taught to revere Ben Gurion and his heir, the Jewish-American farm girl Golda Meir. In our Sunday school textbooks the Israelis looked like us: white, youthful, healthy—American teenagers with Hebrew names. And the country they were building looked familiar, with modern buildings and girls in jeans. These were Jews who read books but also drove tractors and tanks.
As always, the Jews had enemies. Israel was menaced by “Arabs” (not “Palestinians,” a word never uttered in our synagogue). They were exotically attired bedouin—people who did not have or want a home. In our Sunday school texts, they appeared swarthy, coarse, ignorant, duplicitous. These descendants of Pharaoh and the Philistines seemed curiously ungrateful and irrational. For no reason at all they hated us. We watched the movie Exodus, with Paul Newman as Palmach commando Ari Ben Canaan. It was the story of Chanukkah all over again: the Maccabees defying the ruthless might of the Syrians.
I was intrigued by the holidays. Simchas Torah, a year marked out in chapters of a book. Succoth, the Jewish Thanksgiving, was a harvest festival, a deeply exotic idea to kids who knew food only from supermarkets. Purim commemorated the revenge of integrity. Yom Kippur disturbed me (I knew I should atone for something but wasn’t sure what), but Pesach was special: the food (Olga visited with matzoh balls and latkes), the slouching at the table, the search for the afikomen, Elijah’s cup. Most of all, it was the story that pulled me in: that epic of liberation, with the oppressed triumphing over their oppressors, right over might. It was an intoxicating narrative, as exciting and satisfying as the food. People should be careful when they teach this stuff to kids. It sinks in deeper than they realize. It can even turn someone against the land promised them in the Pesach story.
One day Dad took me for an outing in Manhattan. As I had become a keen camper, we made a pilgrimage to Abercrombie and Fitch to buy a hunting knife which I had seen in a catalogue and on which I had set my heart. Afterwards, we went for a meal at Ratners, the legendary Jewish restaurant in the Lower East Side. The hunting knife in its leather sheath sat on the table, much to the dismay of the elderly Jewish waiter. “For cutting the leaves of a book a Jewish boy uses a knife . . .” he said. My dad was delighted by the episode, but I felt tongue-tied and ashamed.
In the summer of 1965, I persuaded my parents to send me, along with two others from our neighborhood, to a Boy Scout camp. We slept in saggy, gray-green tents pitched in a small clearing in a forest in the Catskills. The tents provided minimal protection from the wind and rain and even less from the mosquitoes, which feasted on our tender twelve-year-old flesh. We were soon covered in bites, which we scratched, and which turned to scabs. After a while, we gave up battling the mosquitoes and took to watching them land on our bare arms or legs, insert their needles into our skin, then fill their tiny bulbous bodies with our red blood.
The food was terrible and there wasn’t much of it. When we were taken on a hike to a mountaintop with a long-range view, we failed to carry enough water with us, and at the summit we found ourselves utterly parched. Desperate for moisture, we scoured the brush for blueberries, stuffing any we could find in our dry mouths. It became a kind of delirium, with all of us giggling and showing each other our blue-stained teeth.
Like nearly all the members of our local Scout troop, the three of us were Jews. However, it didn’t even dawn on me for several days that we were the only ones in the camp, until a kid named Jimmy, a lanky kid with stooped shoulders and a loud voice, walked up to me, looked into my face with a broad grin, and said: “Hey, you’re a kike, aren’t you?”
“I’m Jewish.”
“Yeah, you know how I could tell?”
I stared back at him blankly, my mind frozen.
“’Cause your shoe’s untied!”
Without thinking, I looked down. It was true. My shoe was untied. Again, without thinking, I bent down to tie it. The laughter erupted and I felt something deeply unpleasant rush through me, which later I came to understand as the blood of shame and embarrassment and impotence. The other kids at the camp were mostly Catholic, Irish and Italian, and though they read the same comic books as us, they all seemed tougher, more streetwise, more adept at sarcasm and insult. I had been intimidated by them even before they began the Jew-baiting.
When one of us stumbled or dropped something or made any kind of clumsy error we were met by howls of “Being Jewish again?” or “That’s a Jew thing to do” or “What a Jew!” or “Now I know you’re a real Jew.” Then there were the jokes. “Hey, Mike, you know why Jews have big noses?” (‘cause the air is free) or “What’s the difference between a pizza and a Jew?” (a pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven).
We already knew that anti-semitism existed, but that knowledge had come from lessons, from books, from stories told of a distant world. We knew anti-semitism as something that had been triumphed over. But now, like EVM in the army, we discovered that there was a world out there where Jews were not the norm, where some people hated us for no reason at all. I was confident that the repartee of my fellow