MOMENT ASKS 35
AMERICAN JEWS TWO BIG QUESTIONS:
What does it mean
to be a Jew today?
What do Jews bring
to the world today?
FEATURING (IN ALPHABETICAL
ORDER):
THEODORE BIKEL • SHMULEY BOTEACH • GERALDINE
BROOKS • MEL BROOKS • MICHAEL BROYDE • ALAN
DERSHOWITZ • STEPHEN J. DUBNER • DIANNE FEINSTEIN • RUTH BADER GINSBURG • REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN • DAN GLICKMAN •ARTHUR
GREEN • BLU GREENBERG • JEROME GROOPMAN • ROYA
HAKAKIAN • MICHAEL HAMMER • SUSANNAH HESCHEL • MADELEINE MAY KUNIN • TONY KUSHNER • LIZ LERMAN
• DANIEL LIBESKIND • JOSEPH LIEBERMAN • YAVILAH
MCCOY • RUTH MESSINGER • LEONARD NIMOY • SHERWIN
NULAND • JUDEA PEARL • ITZHAK PERLMAN • JUDITH
SHULEVITZ • GARY SHTEYNGART • ILAN STAVANS • ELIE WIESEL
• LEON WIESELTIER • RUTH
WISSE
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here for 35 more responses, including Francine Prose, Walter Mosley,
Anita Diamant, Ari Fleischer, Daniel S. Abraham and many more!
Theodore Bikel
I consider myself to be a Jew in the vertical and
horizontal sense. Horizontal, because I feel myself to be kin, relative
and family of every Jew who lives today, wherever he or she may be.
Vertical, because I am son, grandson and descendant of all the Jews who
came before me; I am also father, grandfather and ancestor of all those
who will come after me. Am I special because I am a Jew? Too often,
people misunderstand the notion of Jewish specialness. Being the “chosen
people” meant chosen for a task, not for privilege. That task was to
bring the Word to a world that needed to hear it—still needs to hear it.
Call it the Word of God, call it an ethical orientation, call it the
knowledge of the difference between good and evil. We are not better
than our neighbors, not nobler; we just carry a knapsack that is heavier
with memory, with pain. We peddle the lessons of history. As for
survival in the face of mortal threats, we who have repeatedly stared
into the jaws of death are better able to deal with the threats than
those who face them for the first time. But when we tell the world about
survival, we are talking about creative survival, not mere physical
survival. Everybody who is threatened with extinction fights for
physical survival. Yet to survive as a moral people is as important,
maybe more important. Far too often people forget this. Theodore
Bikel is an actor and folk singer.
Shmuley
Boteach
American Jews are phenomenally proud of the
history and the modern contributions of our people. But the biggest
mistake the Jews have ever made—and we have yet to correct it—is
believing that Judaism is only for Jews. We are not a proselytizing
faith, nor should we be, yet we have much to offer. Christianity and
Islam focus on macro-cosmic issues: Where do I go when I’m going to die?
What’s heaven like? How can I be saved? Judaism is focused on
micro-cosmic issues: How do I learn not to gossip? How do I learn to be
spiritually fulfilled? How do I get an intimate relationship with God?
How do I create a viable family structure and avoid divorce? We have
mastered certain tenets of life that the modern world fails at. We know
how to create passionate marriages. We know so much about inspiring
children. We have focused on these things as a people for three
millennia. We ought to share what we have learned with the rest of the
world. Shmuley Boteach is a rabbi and the author of Kosher
Sex.
Geraldine
Brooks
When I announced my plans to marry a Jew and
convert to his religion, everyone assumed I was doing it for my fiancé.
When I told friends that he greeted my decision with bemused
indifference, they were baffled: “So if he doesn’t care, and you don’t
believe in God, why on earth would you do it?” God, I explained, had
nothing to do with it. It was about history. Since Judaism is passed
through the maternal line (a fact I admired for its hard-headed
pragmatism as well as its feminist implications), there was no way I was
going to become the end of a tradition that had made it through Roman
sackings, Babylonian exile, Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the
Shoah. And reciting the ancient Hebrew blessings encourages me to
notice the small gifts of daily life—the dew on the grass, the new moon,
the swift grace and subtle hues of sparrows. Slow down, take a minute,
bless the bread and be grateful. This, I tell myself, is what Jews do.
This is who I am. What can we offer the world? I think of the poem: “Try
to praise the mutilated world.” The world is a tangle of the beautiful
and the ugly, the cruel and the gentle, the funny and the tragic. We
know from the Torah that it has always been this way and from the sages
that it is our business to mend it.
Geraldine Brooks is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in
fiction for March.
Mel Brooks
I’m part of the generation that changed their
name so they’d get hired. I went from Kaminsky to Brooks. My mother’s
name was Brookman. But I couldn’t fit Brookman on the drums. I was a
drummer. So I got as far as Brook and then put on an “s.” There was a
lot of comedy when I was a little kid, street corner comics. We couldn’t
own railroads, so prize fighting and comedy were open to us. We’re
still comedians. Maybe because Jews cried for so long, it was time to
laugh. Who knows? I started in the Borscht Belt with terrible jokes. The
first joke I ever wrote, I think, was, “You can’t keep Jews in jail,
they eat lox.” I’ve seen Jews come through an awful lot in my life,
especially the Holocaust. In the Army, I suffered a lot of
anti-Semitism. Sometimes, I suffered a lot of curiosity from
southerners: “Mel, what’s a Jew? What do you people eat?” There’s much
less stigma attached to being Jewish today than there used to be. But
it’s still an excuse for gathering hate and anti-Semitism. What can we
offer the world? We can still offer what Maimonides and Moses laid down.
We can offer the law of human behavior. We astonishingly were one of
the first cultures to create this thing called law, what is right and
what is wrong, based on the tenets of the Old Testament. And, if they
want something tasty, we can certainly offer matzoh brei.
Mel Brooks is a comedian, writer, actor, director and
producer.
Michael Broyde
Jews have a particular model of thinking about
the relationship between law and ethics from which there is much to
learn. Secular law is a white line—you are either on the legal or the
illegal side of it. Jewish tradition is about shades of gray. In
Judaism, something can be legal but discouraged, frowned upon but not
prohibited. Medical bioethics is about shades of gray and is one area in
which Jewish tradition has had an enormous impact on secular American
law. For example, in sharp contrast to the stance taken by the Catholic
Church, all major Jewish denominations have stood in favor of stem cell
research, provided that it is carried out for medical or therapeutic
purposes. As Jews we can continue to offer the world reasonable answers
to complex biomedical and other ethical questions in the name of
religion.
Michael Broyde is a rabbi and law professor at Emory
University.
Alan Dershowitz
Being Jewish today includes both a positive and a
negative element. On the positive side, Jews have contributed
enormously to every aspect of life in the world—literary, scientific,
legal, medical. We tend to be overachievers, leaders and people who
exert considerable influence on our communities. But this success
continues to breed jealousy. To be a Jew today means always being put on
the defensive about something, whether it’s Israel’s imperfections or
the imperfections of individual Jews. Being a Jew means never being
bored, never being able to say that we are completely safe and secure
and never being able to forget the past. As Jews, we must offer the
world a vision of moral clarity. There is no clearer moral litmus test
in the world today than attitudes toward Israel. By defending Israel
while being critical of some of its actions, we force the world to
confront its bigotry, its imposition of a double standard on the Jewish
state and its refusal to confront the oldest of prejudices in the newest
of guises.
Alan Dershowitz is an author, trial lawyer and professor at
Harvard Law School.
Stephen J.
Dubner
Judaism provides a social, political, historical
and religious blueprint for the way civilization has unfolded. That’s
not because Judaism was necessarily the best or even the first, but
because it is a very robust religious tradition that taught the world
what civilization can and should look like. It has informed the way
people have thought for centuries about vengeance, guilt, punishment,
law and order and justice. Millions of Jews since then have done a
remarkable job of extending that religious tradition into political,
social and moral realms. Marx, Freud and Einstein, three of the
essential intellects who shaped the 20th century, were Jewish. Not only
is that not a coincidence, but it’s also not insignificant in informing
how we think about Judaism beyond the shul. Judaism has a great deal to
offer the world in terms of thinking about justice, government, science,
medicine, language and music, as do a great many other traditions that I
also love with all my heart.
Stephen J. Dubner is the co-author of Freakonomics and
SuperFreakonomics.
Dianne
Feinstein
For some, religious identity may be cut and
dried, but it isn’t for me or for many Jews who saw what happened as a
result of Hitler and who have been denied homes and land because of
their religion. All these things enter into who we are today. Since the
whole history of the Jewish people has been one of struggle, there’s
much strength to draw from Judaism. The motivation, drive, staying
power, all those traits we have needed, are not just inherent in the
scriptures or the Ten Commandments but in the whole of our history. The
strength of purpose and the care and compassion we give to others are
important. Whatever God has given us, we use to the fullest. I think
that defines who we are and what we bring.
Dianne Feinstein is a United States senator from California.
Ruth Bader
Ginsburg
I am a judge, born, raised and proud of being a
Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history
and Jewish tradition. I hope, in all the years I have the good fortune
to serve on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will
have the strength and courage to remain steadfast in the service of that
demand. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an associate justice on the
U.S. Supreme Court.
Rebecca
Newberger Goldstein
What I’ve always admired about Judaism is its
worldliness, its earthliness, its impatience with metaphysical questions
about God’s existence and the afterlife, which has always struck me as a
realistic assessment of the limits of human understanding. Judaism
focuses on the here and now with a zestiness that infuses all different
aspects of life, whether intellectual, cultural or spiritual. It’s a
life-celebrating attitude, and I love that. There’s also a certain
greediness, which I also love, a greediness for life itself. It seems
significant that Judaism never went in for monasticism. Moral growth has
to be strived for within the mess of human life itself, because the
mess itself is valuable; the mess is life, and life is good.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author of 36
Arguments for the Existence of God.
Dan Glickman
Being Jewish has always been a big part of my
life because I was one of the limited number of Jewish people in my
community. I got a good Jewish education growing up in Wichita, Kansas, a
small Midwestern town, where you were expected to conduct the entire
bar mitzvah service. As a result, I came away with a strong sense of
identity, which I’ve carried with me as I’ve worked in various fields,
including the movie industry, where there are many Jews, and
agriculture, where there are very few. Bill Clinton always used to think
it was somewhat humorous that he appointed me as the first Jewish
secretary of agriculture. Once, when a change of rules for meat and
poultry inspection was under consideration, a group of rabbis came to
see me, worried that I was going to make kosher slaughtering illegal. I
looked at them and said, “Do you think the first Jewish secretary of
agriculture would outlaw kosher slaughtering?” My Jewish upbringing has
been valuable for dealing with both Jews and non-Jews. The dignified
treatment of fellow human beings and other principles laid out in the
Torah and the Talmud have created a value system that teaches us how to
live our lives and is one we can impart to the rest of world.
Dan Glickman is president of Refugees International.
Arthur Green
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in a white
ethnic neighborhood where a couple of kids could still grab you on a
street corner and say, “What are you, kid?” Answering “Jewish” got you a
bloody nose, but Jewish was who we were. I still had a close
relationship to Yiddish-speaking Eastern European grandparents and to
that world of native Yiddishkeit. There was no question about whether
you should “keep being Jewish,” which meant both religion and ethnicity.
I am aware that now we have to ask the question, “Why be Jewish?”
People who are fifth-generation American Jews have no connection to
Eastern Europe, no memory of Yiddish accents. It’s a very different
time, a great change in my lifetime. What the Jews have to offer the
world today, however, is our ancient truth, to which we were covenanted
so long ago. All of existence is one and holy; every human being is the
image of God. As what happened in Rwanda, Bosnia and many other places
shows, it is a lesson that the world has not learned. We Jews, as
survivors of the Holocaust, should never again let that happen to other
human beings. As bearers of the memories of slavery, of liberation and
the covenant, we still need to bear witness and help make the world
hear.
Arthur Green is a rabbi and author of Radical Judaism:
Rethinking God and Tradition.
Blu Greenberg
To be a Jew is to live a joyous, vulnerable,
purposeful existence, mindful of the noble legacy we carry and the
incredible ethics Judaism contributed to the world. It is to take
enormous pride in the Jewish state and in Jewish contributions all
around the world. It is to feel responsible for all Jews, no matter
where they are and to care for the downtrodden, the outsider and the
stranger in our midst. It is exhilaration in the cup half full—the many
ways Judaism has integrated the new feminist values. It is to be
grateful for the core value of family that tradition contributes to my
life. It is sitting in shul, people-watching and loving my community
more than conversing with God, yet deeply sensing the two go hand in
hand. It is to believe in God at some moments but not others—accepting
this as all-of-a-piece in an ongoing faith. It is to be forever scarred
by the Holocaust, yet because of it more intensely bound up with our
partners in the covenant. It is to worry about and marvel at Israel in
its ethical, restrained use of power despite continuous war and threats
to its existence. I have faith in the promise of an eternal people, yet I
know it demands of us a continuous struggle to stay alive. What a great
gift to be chosen to walk through history as a Jew, a direct descendant
of those who stood at Sinai and accepted the mission that is not yet
finished! I know what it took my ancestors to get me here as a Jew, and I
intend to make the same effort for my line, improving the world, I
hope, in the process.
Blu Greenberg is the founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist
Alliance and author of On Women and Judaism: A View From
Tradition.
Jerome Groopman
Being Jewish is a dynamic struggle with identity.
It’s Jacob with the angel, or whoever it is who comes in the middle of
the night to wrestle with him. That’s what Jews do: We wrestle with God,
we wrestle with others, and, most fundamentally, we wrestle with
ourselves. One of the wonderful legacies of Jewish thought is
challenging authority and doubting. As a scientist, I believe that real
scientific progress comes from being an iconoclast, smashing idols in
the tradition of Abraham so that you challenge traditional wisdom. You
don’t accept things at face value, and you demand a great deal of
yourself with regard to the validity of your knowledge. The excitement
and the energy of science comes from disputes, and the Talmud is nothing
but great authorities arguing with themselves. As a physician who takes
care of patients, I look to the wonderful prayer (refuat hanefesh
u’refuat haguf) for the healing of spirit and body. Judaism long
ago appreciated these two dimensions in the experience of illness. As a
real-world, pragmatic people, we are determined to do everything
possible to improve the physical condition of the person but understand
that there is an emotional, psychological and spiritual dimension that
also needs to be addressed. What we call “healing” requires both. As a
writer, I remember that we are people of books who understand that words
have power. There are rabbinic injunctions against using words
incorrectly and false testimony. What I extrapolate from our tradition
is that the words I offer in public to describe science and medicine
have to be carefully chosen and, as best as possible, filled with truth.
Jerome Groopman is a professor of medicine at Harvard
Medical School.
Roya Hakakian
I was a lot less open to the idea of being a Jew
as a teenager in Iran because the context in which I could exercise my
Judaism was not a democratic one. When I emigrated to the United States
in 1985, however, I had options. Living in a democracy means that
Judaism is not a monochromatic exercise, it is a multi-colored fact, a
brilliant spectrum of many possibilities in which the range is so vast
that all of us can find a shade that becomes us and allows us to
continue to identify as Jewish. I love that our task for the Day of
Atonement is to collectively read a single book in a day. One community,
one book project. This is what we do as Jews: We read. Our connection
with the higher authority is through a very rigorous exercise of
reading. Human religious proxies are dangerous because it is easier to
manipulate people this way. If there is to be a proxy, let it be a book.
As Jews, we can help bring all other faith communities, including
Muslim ones, in contact with the texts that they worship. Enhancing
literacy among all populations is the way to engender the greatest
Jewish value there is.
Roya Hakakian is author of Journey from the Land of No:
A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran.
Michael Hammer
When I look at the Jews, I see continuity among
people of different communities—Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardi Jews, the
Bukharan Jews from Central Asia—who remained apart for thousands of
years. From a population geneticist’s point of view, to be Jewish today
is to be a beautiful example of the process of descent with modification
from a common ancestor. We not only share a common culture and
religion, our genes tell us we share a common origin. One example is the
special genetic marker of the Cohanim, the priestly class, which is
represented by a unique Y chromosome lineage carried by Cohanim in
different Jewish communities today that traces back to a common male
ancestor over 100 generations ago. I’m not a Cohen but knowing this has
an emotional impact on me. Our ancestors almost went extinct many times
in history, so it’s amazing that Jews still exist today as a people. Our
genetic heritage brings with it all the forces that shaped that
struggle for survival. Genetic variation is influenced not only by
chance but also by selective pressure. Whether you have what it takes to
survive changes in the environment depends on what you carry with you,
so in our genes and our culture, we carry the special talents we have as
Jews. There are many explanations for this. Perhaps Jews, as a result
of having evolved through the many near-extinctions and persecutions,
had to be clever and outthink others to survive. Perhaps because Jews
could not own land in many places in the past, they had to work with
numbers and mental constructs and abstractions more than others. And, of
course, our culture has always taught us the importance of education
and studying. So what do we offer the world? We offer our unique brand
of intelligence.
Michael Hammer is a population geneticist at the University
of Arizona.
Susannah
Heschel
My father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once asked
at a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, “What are you doing
here?” My father replied, “I’m here because I can’t pray. Whenever I
open the prayer book, I see images of children burning from napalm. How
can I pray?” For me, that captures it. On the one hand, we have a need
to pray. But if we’re able to pray easily when there’s so much suffering
around us, it’s not really prayer. My father believed that prayer had
to be subversive, that prayer should make you feel that you need to
strive for something more. To be a serious Jew means you can’t be
complacent. A life of kedusha means that we have to be
concerned about humanity, about others who were also created in God’s
image.
Susannah Heschel is a professor of Jewish studies at
Dartmouth College.
Madeleine May
Kunin
We came to the United States when I was a child
because my mother feared that Hitler would occupy Switzerland, as he had
all the countries around it. Being a Jew in America is very different
from being a Jew in any other country. Here, your religion is not your
identity, at least from the viewpoint of other people. You are Madeleine
Kunin, governor of Vermont, not the Jewish governor of Vermont. But
when I returned to Switzerland as an ambassador, I was considered the
Jewish American ambassador. There’s a difference. Jews offer the world
diversity, intellect and ambition. We also offer a sense of history,
particularly the lesson that silence in the face of injustice is never
acceptable.
Madeleine May Kunin, a former governor of Vermont, is a
professor at the University of Vermont.
Tony Kushner
What Jews have to offer the world right now is
what we always have offered it, although the world has not always been
willing to pay attention. We have a vast experience of oppression, of
displacement, of a refusal to accept nonexistence. Jewish history,
culture, theology and ethics have immense amounts to teach the world in
terms of how majorities relate to minorities. They teach us how
minorities come to understand themselves as being a model for the rest
of the world, of being more exemplary as a result of lessons that either
history or God has chosen to teach. The question is: Does our
survival, which has always been a difficult proposition, mean that we’re
exempt from our own moral codes when nobody else is following them?
Tony Kushner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.
Liz Lerman
The Jews are known as “the people of the book,”
but we could have been “the people of the body,” too. It’s the body that
carries the books. It’s the body that remembers the stories. It’s the
bodies that touch each other when we stand in a circle. It’s the body
that stood up to the pogroms. Our bodies are sources of knowledge,
memory and deep connections that are inexpressible through language. But
we decided to define ourselves as the people of the book and that has
been both fantastic and difficult for us. The difficult part is being
addressed today with a renaissance of artistic activity in the Jewish
community. We can offer the world our notion of survival. We’ve absorbed
massive amounts of beautiful things from the cultures in which we
lived, visited, even were oppressed by. I am interested in the
compromise that emerges from these influences. I don’t see compromise as
a bad thing but as the border where we negotiate what we’re going to
keep and what we’re going to let go of. Being Jewish is a daily act of
creation. We can’t keep out our creative impulses because they’re
so-called “not rational.” You cannot survive unless you keep and let go,
keep and let go. And that is painful and sad—and very inspiring.
Liz Lerman is the founder of the Liz
Lerman Dance Exchange.
Daniel
Libeskind
What it means to be Jewish today is what it has
always meant to be Jewish, which is to bring together memory, the past
and the quest that is part of the Jewish sense of life. Being Jewish is
not just a one liner. It’s a complex tradition with many different
strands, both religious and secular. The challenge and meaning of being
Jewish today is to bring together the various, often even contradictory,
threads of the Jewish tradition into the future. It’s to assert the
very deep Jewish values that are always under threat in any contemporary
society. What Jews offer the world today is to question the world. The
fantastic thing about being Jewish is that Jewishness offers freedom of
discourse and imagination in all directions. There’s no limit to it;
that’s the eternal. That’s the Jewish mind. It’s very important for us
to bring something positive to the world in which there is so much
negativity. Ultimately, despite all that has befallen the Jewish people,
the Jewish tradition is a tradition of joyfulness, of celebration.
Above all else, that is a key to what Jews can offer to the world: to be
the leaders against dark shadows.
Daniel Libeskind is an architect and artist.
Joseph
Lieberman
To me, being Jewish today means what it has
always meant—a covenantal responsibility to honor and enjoy God’s
creations (natural and human), and to do whatever we can to protect and
improve their existence. But being Jewish today also means something
unique—being blessed to be alive at an extraordinary time in Jewish
history, when so many of us have the privilege of being citizens of the
United States, which has provided Jews with more freedom, opportunity
and respect than any other country in history, and when the State of
Israel has been re-established after centuries of praying and working
for that result. As Jews, we can try, each in our own way, to advance
and implement the great principles of ethics, justice and humaneness
that were given at Sinai.
Joseph Lieberman is a United States senator from
Connecticut.
Yavilah McCoy
What it means to be Jewish today is to be an
African-American-Jewish woman. People need to understand that the choice
to be Jewish cuts across different racial identities. We are not
looking to be integrated and absorbed. We are a manifestation of what
Judaism has become. We are the Jewish community. If I lined all of us up
as a Jewish people in terms of color, we would look more like the
United Nations than the United Nations itself. Yet what binds us
together is deeper than skin color. Our morals, ethics and values have
impacted the world. The Exodus was the model the Founding Fathers used
to found our country. The United States of America was supposed to be
the next Zion. The idea of freedom that permeates the Bible is what
helped to create the Constitution of the United States. Care for the
stranger is the model that Jews can give to the world in a graceful way.
We must understand that it’s not those who have and those who don’t, it
is who we all are when we stand before God. Yavilah McCoy
founded Ayecha, a Jewish diversity resource organization.
Ruth Messinger
Being Jewish is being part of a
thousands-year-old faith that offers guidance as to the importance of
connecting to the world with a moral agenda requiring action. To help
others, the Talmud tells us, is the way of peace. I take very seriously
the obligation to pursue justice and address the problems of inequity,
injustice and poverty. The American Jewish community in the 21st century
has reached a level of affluence and influence far beyond what our
grandparents could have imagined. While the Jewish community still faces
serious problems, there are billions of people whose lives are worse
off today. As citizens of the world, not just of our own community,
whether this becomes a world of greater or less equity and justice will
reflect on us all. A more just world is one that will hopefully be one
of less intolerance and less violence. Because we have the capacity,
because we have the obligation, because it directly affects how we’re
seen in the world and because it creates a better world for us and our
children, we should take action.
Ruth Messinger is the president and CEO of American Jewish
World Service.
Leonard Nimoy
I’m a first-generation American. My parents were
very ghettoized people; they were immigrants. For everything that broke
in the news, their concern was: “Was it a Jewish person?” and “Is it
good or bad for the Jews?” If there was something terrible that somebody
did, you prayed that it wasn’t a Jewish person because it would inflame
anti-Semitism. We’re past that to some degree. We don’t have Father
Coughlin on the radio spouting anti-Semitism. Still, we take pride in
the accomplishments of Jews and worry about the negatives. What can we
offer the world today? It would be wonderful to say, “Oh, we’re honest,
striving, liberal, educated, persevering, cultured, sophisticated,
people of the book, all that good stuff.” But it’s not so easy today to
hold ourselves as an example. Just look at the question of Israeli-Arab
relations. I was having a conversation with an Israeli cab driver once
and he said, “They lie to us! We can’t negotiate with them; they lie to
us!” After a moment’s pause, he added, “And we lie right back!”
Leonard Nimoy is an actor and photographer.
Sherwin Nuland
Our faith is based on learning and a constant
increase in knowledge and understanding. We believe in improvement and
progress, based on our notion of free will. We live for the here and now
rather than for rewards that will be given to us in some unspecified
afterlife. This is probably why the accomplishments of Jews have been so
remarkable. Remember that famous Rabbi Tarfon quote from the Pirkei
Avot?: “It is not your duty to complete the work, but you are not free
to desist from it, either.” We give the world the Jewish personality,
whose restlessness tells us that this is not a perfect world, and we
have the responsibility to do something about it.
Sherwin Nuland is the winner of the National Book Award for How
We Die.
Judea Pearl
Being Jewish is to see oneself as a member of an
extended family, bonded by shared history and shared destiny. Our whole
culture is based on the tribal idea that we have a special
responsibility to one another and to the world around us. It’s not that
we aspire to greater ideals than other collectives but that we have
found a cognitively compelling way of encoding those aspirations, so
that they will be pursued effectively, using a unique symbiosis between
tribalism and universalism. God promises Abraham: “I will make you into
a great nation and all people on earth will be blessed through you.”
Thus, our reward is in the progress of mankind, not in personal
redemption; to be Jewish is to be universal in compassion and tribal in
responsibility. In the time of our grandfathers, the prayer shawl was
our unifying symbol. Today, Israel is our unifying force, for it is the
most powerful symbol of our potential as a collective. Empowered by
Israel, we offer the world an unprecedented role model of a society that
was blighted by oppression and managed to lift itself from the margin
of history to become a world center of art, business and science. We
also provide an example of a society which constantly creates, questions
the status quo, innovates and aspires to improve the lot of mankind.
The strengthening of Israel and peace in the Middle East should be our
highest priority as Jewish people, for this will enable us to continue
our collective identity and channel all of our cultural charge to the
betterment of mankind.
Judea Pearl is professor emeritus of
computer science at UCLA.
Itzhak Perlman
You’re Jewish, you’re not Jewish, there’s no
difference. Perhaps I think this because of the two places where I’ve
lived my life. The first 15 years were in Israel—it’s your land, your mishpacha,
that’s it. The next 51 years I’ve been living in New York City, a very
special place. There is freedom, and I don’t experience discrimination.
What it means to be Jewish hasn’t changed throughout time, it’s just the
question of others’ attitudes. As far as the Jews are concerned, we are
a people with a serious past history and should always remember who we
are. What Jews can offer the world is what they’ve offered in the past:
Whether in science, art or literature, we excel. I love music. I love
traditional klezmer music and traditional cantorial music. Somebody
asked me once, “Why are so many Jews great violinists?” I don’t know.
It’s a cycle, it’s a hunger. Today, the cycle is not necessarily toward
the Jewish violinists but Asian ones. Koreans are number one right now. A
lot of people say, well, you have to be Jewish to play it this way. I
don’t know if this is true or not. But maybe pain and suffering, a
little krechts in what you’re doing, a sigh—a real sigh—helps.
Itzhak Perlman is a violinist and conductor.
Jonathan Sarna
How is being Jewish today different than it was
500 years ago? Back then, nobody would likely have asked, “What does it
mean to be Jewish?” Today, the question yields over 14 million hits on
the Internet, and the answer, in many ways, is, “It’s completely up to
me.” It is common to suggest that Jews can offer the world Torah or
tikkun olam. The former, though, we have already given to the world, and
the latter tends to be the latest universalistic cause with a Jewish
inflection. I believe that the value that is distinctively ours is the
idea of klal yisrael, the remarkable notion that “all Jews are
responsible for one another” whether we know them or not, like them or
not, agree with them or not. Millions of Jews around the world are alive
today because other Jews—who never set eyes upon them but felt a strong
sense of kinship toward them as fellow Jews—reached out to save them or
their ancestors during times of persecution. Sadly, today less than
half of all American Jews feel comfortable embracing the notion of klal
yisrael. Rather than abandoning this crucial Jewish value, it must
be reinforced and shared with others. If everyone learned to embrace
their own people as family, perhaps someday we might advance to embrace
other peoples around the world as well.
Jonathan Sarna is professor of American Jewish history at
Brandeis University.
Judith
Shulevitz
To be Jewish is to inherit both a wealth of
riches and some daunting, even alarming, responsibilities. The first
part of this inheritance is intellectual and spiritual—the Torah and
Talmud and the rituals endorsed therein and the extraordinary body of
law and legend and philosophizing and interpreting that have grown up
around them. The second part of the inheritance is less appealing; it
features a history of horror, persecution and dislocation. All outsize
inheritances make demands on those who receive them; you can’t hold on
to something you don’t manage wisely. So how are we going to manage our
Jewish tradition? Are we going to be halachic Jews, following it to the
letter? Or are we going to see ourselves as interpreters of the
tradition, bringing it up to date but letting observance wither? How do
we deal with the darkness of our history? How do we make sense of it?
What Jews can bring to the rest of the world—must bring to the rest of
the world—it seems to me, are the good ideas contained within Judaism,
and the lessons we’ve learned both from extreme powerlessness and our
brief period of nationhood. We were slaves, and we wrote the greatest
liberation narrative ever written. We invented the commandment to honor
your father and mother. We invented the Sabbath. We invented the idea
that everyone has the right to rest, an egalitarian notion that is not
only the basis of all thinking about modern labor rights but is
fundamentally the ancient notion of human dignity. To be Jewish is to
remember these things and grapple with the obligation to do right by
them.
Judith Shulevitz is author of The Sabbath World.
Gary Shteyngart
I live in New York, which is, in many ways, more
Jewish than Israel. Yiddishisms are used by everyone: Latinos, Chinese,
Indians, Koreans. It is the lingua franca of New York. The most
important role for Jews has been the ability to migrate between
different cultures, to absorb things and to create a kind of mish-mash
that uses the best ideas from around the world. Jews have been
cosmopolitan in the best sense of the word and, in that way, other
ethnicities are now becoming Jewish themselves.
Gary Shteyngart is author of The Russian Debutante’s
Handbook.
Ilan Stavans
To be Jewish is to have a sense of otherness, to
be at once an insider and an outsider. To be Jewish is to be able to
speak the language of power but not be at its command, for power
corrupts. To be Jewish is to serve as a bridge between cultures. As time
and space travelers, Jews have survived the nightmare of history by
learning the codes of the various environments in which they have found
themselves, although never to the extent of forgetting their inner
essence. I was born and raised in Mexico City, and, in spite of my
Ashkenazi upbringing, I feel a strong connection to the Iberian
Peninsula. I share not only some of its languages but its collective
imagination. The Jews of Spain before 1492 were into materialism while
also devoting themselves to mathematics, philosophy and poetry,
believing—foolishly, as it turned out—in the coexistence of religions.
American Jews have many of those same traits and will share the same
fate. The American experiment isn’t eternal; like other civilizations of
the past, it is meant to give place to other varieties of human
interaction. Medieval Spain disappeared but not its Jews. While this
wonderfully complex nation of ours isn’t ahistorical, the Jews in it
are. That’s an enormous responsibility that dispenses a crucial
knowledge: Jews must always see our day and age from what Baruch Spinoza
called sub specie aeternitatis—under the aspect of eternity. Ilan
Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst
College.
Elie Wiesel
As a Jew, I know that not everyone can make
history. But it’s incumbent on all of us Jews to be part of Jewish
history. And the way to accomplish that is to be part of the community
of Israel. That community includes learning, solidarity and memory with
all of its components, the tragic and the glorious. Memory is part of
learning, but learning without memory is impossible. We should remember
and feel solidarity as a Jewish people, Israel, whatever we call Jewish
destiny individually and collectively. As Jews, we must help teach the
world that whenever a community is targeted, all are affected. Hence, as
Jews, we must help all who need help, wherever they are. We must
understand their needs, understand their fears and understand their
joys. And, ultimately, understand what is theirs is also ours. It is
incumbent on the Jewish people because this is what we have done since
we became a people. God gave us the Torah, and, in a way, he said, “Oh
no, not only for us.” He gave it to everybody.
Elie Wiesel is the author of Night, co-founder of Moment
Magazine and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
Leon Wieseltier
The meaning of Jewishness, however much we
refine it and contribute to it, is not anything that we wholly invent
and is not just an affair of self-expression. It is something that we
inherit. To be a Jew today means still to be a member of a people that
is one of the primary facts of human history, that created an entire
civilization around the religion that is its core. I find it impossible
to imagine a meaningful Jewishness without some deep relationship to
Judaism in its philosophy or its practice. For all our devotion to this
world, which our tradition more or less mandates, Jewishness must also
have an otherworldly element, some acknowledgment of meanings that we
cannot see or touch. Otherwise it will be merely ethnic or tribal or
anthropological. Being born a Jew is a stroke of good luck, and an honor
and a summons to work. We bring to the world all the things we are,
high and low, good and bad. The important thing is to be able to
distinguish between our high and our low, our good and our bad. The
ethical ideals and the spiritual challenges that our tradition teaches
are certainly a light unto the nations, though they ought to be first a
light unto ourselves. As for our low things and our bad things, we are
as human as the rest of the species, but in this regard we at least
offer the example of flawed and fallible people who have (usually)
preferred to be strict with themselves about themselves. We certainly
have been among the world’s great teachers of the spirit of criticism.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New
Republic.
Ruth Wisse
To be a Jew means being part of a civilized
people who live according to the law of Moses and Israel. That remains
no simpler today than it was in the desert, or under the rule of Romans,
Christians or Muslims, though perhaps simpler than it was under Nazism
and communism. The value of Jewish national discipline, creatively
refined over many centuries, was proven when Israel reclaimed
independence three years after the Holocaust. No Jewish offering to the
world could possibly be greater than the example of a people ground to
ashes whose remnants had the wisdom, strength and courage to reclaim its
land and gather its displaced persons. What we can offer the world
depends, alas, on the world. Today, as in the past, the most corrupt and
barbaric forces commit aggression against the Jewish “entity,” forcing
Israel to become the front line of defense for human decency. Until the
aggressors come to terms with Israel, the best we Jews can offer is to
resist our defamers and would-be destroyers. Repairing the world begins
with stopping wars against the Jews.
Ruth Wisse is a professor of Yiddish literature and
comparative literature at Harvard.
Thank you to the team who worked on this
special commemorative issue’s Symposium: senior editor Nonna
Gorilovskaya, who oversaw the project, Abigail Pogrebin, Lynda Gorov,
Johanna Neuman, Joan Alpert, April Baskin, Sarah Breger, Marcy Epstein,
Nadine Epstein, Sarai Brachman Shoup, Michelle Albert, Lianna Donovan,
Ben Ganzfried and Talia Ran.
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