Anti-Zionist Jews are not and do not claim to be any more authentic or representative than any other Jews, nor is their protest against Israel any more valid than a non-Jew’s. But “If I am not for myself,” then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness. Since each Israeli atrocity is justified by the exigencies of Jewish survival, each calls forth a particular witness from anti-Zionist Jews, whose very existence contradicts the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.
But what makes me a Jew? I’m an atheist. I am unmoved by religious ritual. I think there is wisdom to be found within religious traditions, including Judaism, but I can’t say I find more of it in Judaism than in other religions. Nonetheless, I’ve never had the slightest doubt that I am a Jew.
According to both anti-semites and Zionists, I am objectively a Jew and will be a Jew whatever I believe or practice. For this reason the Nazis would have marked me out for persecution and extermination, and Israel marks me out as a potential recipient of privileges, a rightful inheritor of others’ land and resources. But as should become clear from what follows in this book, my Jewishness is far more than the sum of others’ perceptions. It’s a locale where the self intersects with history, past and present.
Every attempt to narrow down Jewishness has backfired, broken down or produced manifest absurdities. Even reducing it to “religion” fails to clarify its nature. Religion is itself a multifaceted package, incorporating ritual, observance, faith, theology, custom, inwardness and outwardness. There is no religious consensus about the precise boundaries between Jew and non-Jew. So if the Jews are not, or not only, a religious body, then what are they? Tribe, people, culture, “race,” nation?
The words goy and goyim appear in the Hebrew Bible first in reference to the various peoples who descended from Noah and the flood survivors. The term is specifically applied to the Jews themselves in Genesis 12:2, when God promises Abraham that his descendants will form a goy gadol (“great nation”). In the world recalled in the Torah, a goy was an extended clan network claiming common ancestry and customs: the Hebrews were one among many. However, later biblical texts apply the term mainly to other peoples. Similarly, the word ethnikos, which the Greeks used to translate goyim, first denotes groups of people living together, and later becomes a synonym for “foreigner” or “barbarian.” The translators of the King James Bible chose the word “nation.” “Ethnic group” is probably the closest we’d come in today’s usage, but it is infinitely less resonant and wouldn’t really resolve any of the ambiguities.
Being a category blurred at the edges and internally inconsistent does not make Jewishness any less of a category, any less a human, historical reality. Nor is this indeterminateness unique to Jews. There’s always something arbitrary in the way we break up the multidimensional spectrum of human diversity. Groups overlap and mutate, expand and contract, and Jewishness is no exception. Its indeterminateness cannot be overcome, nor can I see why it should be overcome. It’s not a problem except in so far as it is denied—and, along with it, much of Jewish history. That indeterminateness is part of the story of Jewish survival through successive social orders and eras. Anti-semites and Zionists alike freeze the Jewish identity and fix it in relation to other identities. Both prize an unambiguous demarcation between the Jew and the non-Jew. In contrast, the very negativity of anti-Zionism—the constrictions it denies—opens one to the multiplicity of Jewish reality.
Hence this particular anti-Zionist Jew’s particular journey, through past and present, stretches across both sides of the Atlantic, and of necessity beyond, through the evolving relations between Jews and the left, and the shifting place of Palestine in that axis. It straddles my upbringing in New York (and early immersion in the US left) and my adulthood in Britain (and involvement in the anti-war and pro-Palestine movements). In tracing the role Jewishness has played in my own life and the world I’ve lived in, I’ve also traveled the backward path of family history, which in modern Jewish experience is always penetrated by—and serves to illuminate—larger histories. In particular, I’ve burrowed deep into an old leather case stuffed with yellowing newspaper clippings and brittle typescripts, the literary remains of a grandfather whose life on the American left, whose approach to Jewishness, to the enemies of the Jews and to his fellow Jews, posed unexpectedly pertinent questions and at times disturbing lessons. In trying to decipher his legacy, I’ve been compelled to investigate circumstances, movements, individuals. I’ve discovered affinities (not all of them reassuring) and unbridgeable gulfs.
My itinerary is unapologetically diasporic, but its compass is set in Palestine, in the realities of conquest, subjugation and suffering. In navigating this course, I have tried to follow the advice of the Andalusian Hebrew politician and poet-warrior Shmu’el HaNagid:
You who’d be wise
should inquire
into the nature of
justice and evil
from your teachers,
seekers like yourself,
and the students
who question your answers.1
* There is a strand of Orthodox Jewry which rejects Zionism on theological and scriptural grounds: they believe Zionism has pre-empted God’s prerogative. Their critique is at root anti-secular and anti-modern, and I feel little in common with it.
1
Names and Faces
Like many American Jews of his era, my grandfather Ed changed his name. Unlike most, he changed it to something that would sound more, not less, Jewish. His parents were both immigrants to New York, his mother a Jew from eastern Europe and his father a Catholic from Ireland. Since his father died before his first birthday, he was brought up entirely by his Jewish mother, in a Jewish milieu, but he was stuck with the Irish name Moran, and struggled with the consequences for many years. In 1932, at the age of thirty-two, he went to court to have it changed—from Moran to Morand. According to an FBI report compiled years later, he gave the following reasons for wanting to add that d: “He had always been associated with the Jewish people and the name Moran caused most of the people with whom he was associated to think him to be of Irish extract. In many instances he had been deprived of joining certain Jewish clubs, lodges, etc. and he desired always to be associated with the Jewish people.”
It’s strange that all he did was add the d. His daughter, my mother, was never convinced it really made a difference. “When I stayed home from school on a Jewish holiday,” she recalled in a memoir she wrote in 1999, two years before her death, “the teachers always questioned my right to stay at home with a name like Morand, and I would point out that it had a ‘d’ on it. How I wished it had been changed to Goldberg.”
Through most of my childhood, Ed was an absent figure. In 1950 he left my grandmother Olga after twenty-five years of marriage, and he was not invited to my parents’ wedding two years later or to subsequent family gatherings, including my bar mitzvah, though we all continued to live in the New York area. Once a year or so, he would pay us a visit with his second wife, Mabel. They quarreled incessantly. I remember him as gruff and distant, a pale, portly, stubby man who wore wide ties. He never spoke to just one person, but always addressed everyone in earshot, and truculent sarcasm was his habitual mode.
I knew Olga much better. She was part of our life, if not always a happy part. Yet Ed was