It was worse for the one black kid in the camp. Mornings often began with the cry, “What’s for breakfast? Fried nigger on toast!” met with hilarity on the part of some and uneasy silence among others. I desperately wanted to be accepted by these kids but I also wanted to leave, to walk away from the whole dismaying experience. There was a stream near the camp. I caught a tiny fish and cooked it for myself, feeling pleased with the whole process until Jimmy spotted me and said, “Hey, that’s not kosher, you’re not supposed to eat that.” For a moment I feared that he might be right, but I wolfed down the fish defiantly.
Looking back, I wonder how much of the Jew-baiting was just Jimmy, who had probably picked up the habit from his family and wanted to show off with it. I wonder how much the others just followed his lead, how much they had already been exposed to, how much they really embraced. I think most joined in for the obvious reason: Jews were being picked on and it was a relief to them that they weren’t Jews.
Mostly we suffered in what we hoped was a dignified and superior silence. Sometimes we answered haughtily, “You sound just like Hitler,” or “That’s what Hitler said,” certain that the Nazi reference would trump them. Sometimes we tried another tack. “Jonas Salk was a Jew, he cured polio.” “Yeah, and Einstein. . . Jerry Lewis . . . Tony Curtis . . .” We threw the names back at them, maintaining a tone of reason, while grizzling under their utter and seemingly undentable unreasonableness.
In any case we were outnumbered. And they also enjoyed the significant advantage of being familiar with a greater variety of obscenities and sexual references than we were. Our resort to rational argument only made them more scornful of us. Nonetheless, we still joined with them in the daily activities, worked on projects and played games together, and for a time we really would be just a bunch of boys interacting without distinction. Until the Jew-baiting started again, leaving the three of us sulky and isolated.
I don’t know at what point I resolved to appeal to a superior authority. The name-calling seemed to have been going on for an eternity (it couldn’t have been more than two weeks). The scoutmaster was himself no more than twenty. He supervised us with good humor and with a light touch goaded us into doing things we didn’t want to do. He often asked me about the books I was reading, and it was during one of these chats that I told him some of the other boys were criticizing us for being Jews and it wasn’t fair.
I remember the sudden change in his expression. His neck went rigid and there was a grave look in his eyes. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered. We watched as he took Jimmy and some of the others aside and gave them a stern lecture. Somehow, I knew he was telling them about the Jews, about the holocaust. The boys looked somber, discomfited. After that, the teasing stopped. But the mosquitoes didn’t. My parents were appalled at the state they found me in when they came to visit, and with my ready assent, they took me home, though the camp season had several more weeks to run.
For several years I took twice-weekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for my bar mitzvah. Then came a year of lavish celebrations, services, dinners, dances in marquees on suburban lawns and ballrooms in midtown hotels. Mountains of gifts. Checks or bonds or little stakes in IBM or ITT. Compared to some, my own bar mitzvah was a low-key affair; my mother disapproved of the conspicuous display made by some of our neighbors. I got the checks, I got a set of left-handed golf clubs, but better yet I got elegant illustrated editions of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Thoreau’s Walden from a couple who were close friends of my parents from their left-wing student days. There seemed nothing in the least incongruous about offering such secular testaments as bar mitzvah gifts. I still read today the inscription the couple added to the astutely chosen texts: “These two books provide the always exhilarating blend of the search for individual freedom and oneness with nature, with the struggle for political freedom and social responsibility.” Thus my reaching out to non-Jewish sources began within my Jewish milieu. Thoreau and Paine were not Jews but they were very much part of my liberal democratic American-Jewish legacy.
Within weeks of my bar mitzvah, every word of Hebrew vanished from my head. The language had been learned solely in order to complete a public performance, a rite, that had little meaning for me. I certainly did not feel that I had become a man, an adult, a member of a congregation, that I was enfranchised. Instead, I began to look for and find some of that sense of growth, of emergence as an autonomous human being, in politics, in the world of the left, in battles against racism and for civil liberties. Soon I just could not stop talking about the Vietnam War and how it was wrong on every count. This, in 1966, did not make me popular. So why was I so determined to pursue the course? Did I like being different? Was I showing off, calling attention to myself? Yes, I was. But there were other ways to do that and I did not choose them.
Like EVM, I enjoyed the idea of being part of a vanguard of truth-seekers and rebels. I was sustained in opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the Black Panthers and the Yippies by the proud tradition of dissent I’d imbibed as a package that combined Americanism, Jewishness, Thoreau, Galileo, and a gallery of figures of conscience. My Jewish role models shifted: Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner, Dylan, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
For years it was a family tradition to buy sandwiches once a week from our neighborhood deli. Here I acquired a lifelong taste for pastrami, corn beef with the works, fresh rye and new pickles. One morning in mid-1967, aged fourteen, I went off on the familiar errand with my dad. The old man who owned the deli—his thick glasses held together by Scotch tape—seemed genuinely distressed by the long, unkempt hair I’d grown since he’d last seen me. “Mike, you used to be the all-American boy.”
“He still is,” my dad chirped in my defense. But in fact I knew I was mutating into something other than that all-American boy.
In Sunday school, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was a great moment of Jewish pride. I don’t remember much thanking of God, and no mourning for the victims on either side, just a sustained note of elated triumph. To cap all our other Jewish achievements, to confirm our eminence, we had now proved ourselves masters in war. It had taken us just six days to defeat Arab armies attacking from all sides, to sweep across the Sinai, unite Jerusalem, drive the enemy back across the Jordan. No one spoke then, not in my hearing, of the beginning of an occupation. We had redrawn the lines on the map. That was our prerogative. That was justice. We were unbeatable and we were righteous. Israel married moral virtue and military strength—another sign that we lived in an age of order and progress, that all we wished for would be ours. When a friend who liked to tease me about my anti-Vietnam War views suggested I might not support Israel against the Arabs, I was outraged and offended.
I’m not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the June war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early twenties, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents’ accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war, and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher’s desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. “You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street.”
Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white Southerners I’d been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I’d been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our