It’s the Sabbath and I’m wearing a mask, standing in line waiting to buy a challah at Goguette French Bakery which is owned and operated by Naz and Najine who look Middle Eastern and tell me they’re of Persian descent. “Bonjour monsieur Jonah,” Najine says. “Bonjour madame,” I say. Our weekly encounter is brief and French is the only language we use when the challah, which has been blessed by a rabbi, passes from her hands to my hands. With Naz I speak English, though we don’t talk about anything overtly political. It’s not necessary. He makes the challah. I buy it and eat it. The challah has been at the heart of our friendship, especially over the past three months when we’ve been quarantined and he and Najine have gone on making and selling bread and helping to create a sense of community that COVID-19 seems determined to choke to death.
The pandemic, along with “shelter-in-place,” has intensified nearly all my experiences and memories. How could it not? The life-threatening virus has made me more aware than ever before of my own mortality and my identity as an American Jew. With the name Jonah, with Russian Jewish ancestors slaughtered by Nazis and Communists—and with anti-Semitism on the rise—I haven’t been able to wear my identity lightly. I could go into denial about the whole megillah, but denying something makes it come back stronger. In the Old Testament, Jonah tries to run away from his mission to Nineveh, and we all know what happens to him.
The novelist Henry James observed more than 100 years ago that, “It’s a complex fate, being an American.” Much the same could be said for being an American Jew.
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In the early 1980s, as a part-time faculty member in a college English department, the department chair and the president of the university, David Benson, both told me that I could not be hired because the institution had to increase the number of women and people of color on the faculty. I understood the concept of providing a leg up for members of minority groups, but I also felt that I was as qualified as anyone else for a tenure-track position and should not be denied one because I was white and male.
After teaching for six years as a part-time faculty member and later as a visiting Fulbright professor in Europe, I applied once again for a full-time teaching position, and again wasn’t called for an interview. In anger and frustration I turned to a friend who was Jewish, wealthy and powerful, and with connections which he pulled with Stanley Sheinbaum who was a trustee for the California State University system and who had been one of the financial backers of Ramparts magazine.
Stanley pulled strings and the university created a tenure track position for me in the communication studies department, not the English department. Years after I became a professor and the chair of the department, I met Stanley at the home of an LA Jew, and a producer in the movie industry. I thanked him. He said, with a smile, “Jonah, you owe me big time.”
I had chosen the old boy network over the office of affirmative action. I didn’t want to be hired because I was Jewish but because I was qualified. I probably could have won a lawsuit charging the college with discrimination. At an English department party, a woman offered me a slice of cheesecake. When I said, “no thanks,” she said, “but all Jews love cheesecake.” It bothered me, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t point out that that was like saying to an African American, “all Blacks love watermelon.”
California prides itself as a meritocracy, but I have known no other place where connections mean more than in the so-called Golden State, where there has been only one Jewish governor, Washington Bartlett, and he served for only one year, 1887. Sonoma County, where I live, is largely white, with a sizable Latino population. There’s a Jewish Community Center and an annual Israeli Film Festival, this year virtual, but there isn’t a pronounced Jewish presence. Nas and Najine helped to found a French language school in town, not a shul.
. . .
I am sorry that I didn’t stand up to Black power advocate, H. Rap Brown, who said in a speech on the campus of Columbia University in 1968, “We’re not going to play Jew to your Nazis,” as though Jews simply rolled over and let themselves be rounded up, sent to concentration camps and exterminated.
Even as a boy I knew, from personal accounts I heard from relatives, and also from history books that some Jews collaborated with some Nazis and also that some Jews resisted fascism and died doing so. History is more complicated than demagogues and ideologues allow.
I have traveled to and lived in half-a-dozen places around the world where I have experienced anti-Semitism, including Morocco, where I was told by an Arab, who invited me for couscous at his home, that Jews like Henry Kissinger ran the United States. In Mexico City, a Latina from a wealthy family insisted that the U.S. media was owned and operated by Jews. When I explained that newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was born and raised a Protestant and became an anti-Semite and pro-Hitler, she accused me of slandering a great American. The Jews are taking over. That’s the litany I have heard for decades and on three continents.
There was anti-Semitism in Belgium where I lived and taught in the late 1980s. A neo-Nazi group passing as Flemish nationalists met openly in a café on Friday nights to drink beer and sing songs. My Belgian friend, Frank Albers, took me there so I could see the Nazi icons. Synagogues in Antwerp were bombed, and spray painted with anti-Jewish graffiti, though the real cultural divide in Antwerp, an international diamond center, was between the Dutch speakers and the French speakers, not between Jews and non-Jews.
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The place where I have experienced more anti-Semitism than any other is Sonoma County, California. Soon after I settled here, Solomon Sorgenstein, a Jew born in Poland, took me to the Jewish cemetery in Petaluma. Jews were buried separately from gentiles. That was the rule. The earliest Jews in the county came from France and had French names. Later they came from Poland and Russia with Eastern European names.
For a long time my closest Sonoma County friends were two Jews: Paul Cohen, a former U.S. Marine and a San Francisco taxi driver who became a school principal; and Bill Pinkus, a lawyer, a pilot, and a fifth-generation Californian who didn’t know a word of Hebrew or Yiddish, or any Jewish history or culture. If Cohen was an ethnic Jew, Pinkus was a non-Jewish Jew. One of the commonest complaints I hear from New York Jews who have moved to Northern California is that there are no real Jews here.
I mix with believers and nonbelievers from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and all sorts of religions, including Buddhism and Christianity in its many incarnations. At some Buddhist sanghas, the majority of the members are Jewish who described themselves as “Jewbus,” or “jubus.” Like my friend, Jimalee, I have attended churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and “pagan” ceremonies. A Protestant minister called her “a spiritual slut.” He probably would call me the same name, and I thought I was a spiritual seeker.
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Once on the subway in New York after attending a Lubavitcher event, I forgot to remove my yarmulke. It was 2 a.m. and I was on the way to Brooklyn to stay with two Jews. The Lubavitchers were recruiting me and I enjoyed their company. When I realized that the yarmulke sat on my head I laughed and left it there. No one did or said anything to me. That’s New York, among the most tolerant cities on the face of the earth in part because of the contributions of Emma Lazarus and Emma Goldman and also because of Walt Whitman and Fiorello La Guardia. After a while, there’s no point labeling anyone a Jew or a non-Jew.
These days I live on a farm in Northern California. I’m the only Jew in a kind of cooperative community. My Jewishness isn’t a big deal. And it is a big deal.
The Saturday after I bought the challah from my French-speaking Persian Jewish friends, my brother Daniel visited. We had lox and challah and wondered if and when we’d be able to go to a real Jewish deli again and feel safe.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
