Paranoia

A front-page headline appeared this week in the Times: "At Military Contractor's Trial, Telltale $100,000 Belt Buckle." My immediate reaction was, "I hope he's not Jewish." His surname, Brooks, allayed my anxiety until I read that he had spent several million dollars to celebrate his daughter's bat mitzvah.

I couldn't help my reaction, absurd as it might be. It shows that in my mind's darkest closet lurks the notion that we Jews exist in America on Gentile sufferance, that unless we lie low we could be driven out or worse. While one part of me acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of such persecution in America, the other part of me says, "yeah, that's what they thought in Germany."

My whole upbringing led to this uneasiness, irrational or not. I remember standing in the schoolyard when I was in the third grade. I was vacantly looking into space when an older boy, whom I didn't know, came up to me, punched me on the right arm, spat out "Jew boy," and walked on. This was the only time during my school years that violence accompanied an anti-Semitic taunt, but it was not an isolated event. There were only few incidents, really, perhaps a half dozen, in which I would receive an unpleasant reminder that I was Jewish. As these things go the abuse was minimal, but it was sufficient to make me feel marked as a Jew and slightly alienated from the mainstream.

The Sunday school of our reform congregation taught us Jewish history. We learned about the sufferings of Jews throughout the Diaspora - kicked out of England, expelled from Spain, massacred during the Crusades, and so forth, a morbid curriculum that was repeated from grade to grade. If we were taught anything about Judaism's magnificent heritage, I don't remember it.

At Cornell, where I spent my first two years of college, I joined a Jewish fraternity. A gentile fraternity would not have considered me as a candidate for membership. and when I transferred to Harvard, that college had a Jewish quota. At Harvard Law School, I understood that I would be as unlikely to make the law review as to be hired by a firm like Ropes and Gray when I graduated. Times have changed. Fraternities at Cornell are now mixed with respect to religion, Harvard College no longer maintains a Jewish quota, and Jews now join white-shoe law firms. If anti-Semitism is not as prevalent in America as it once was, it is at least less overt.

Still, I sometimes think it would be more pleasant or at least less troublesome to be a Yankee, until I realize that I wouldn't be who I am if I were not Jewish, an identity absorbed with my mother's milk. So (with apologies to W. S. Gilbert), in spite of all temptation to belong to other nations, I remain a Jewish man. And that implies, at least for me, a degree of paranoia.