{"id":83779,"date":"2021-02-11T17:05:06","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T15:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83779"},"modified":"2021-02-04T14:29:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T12:29:00","slug":"11-05-64","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83779","title":{"rendered":"A Short Biography of an American Jew"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/img\/tablet-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"35%\" \/><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/jonah-raskin-jewishness-memoir\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A Short Biography of an American Jew<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>JONAH RASKIN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\" \/>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/a613afeb8f19636a38ace5713ba0a9a82fd06b18-3500x2868.jpg\" width=\"100%\" \/><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>ERICA HARRIS<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<h4 class=\"Hero__dek color-gray-darker graebenbach text-center font-400\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>\u2018At the age of 78, when I should have accepted my past and the things I have done, I find it challenging to write candidly about my own experiences with anti-Semitism\u2019<\/strong><\/h4>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto text-article-dropcaps\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">It\u2019s the Sabbath and I\u2019m 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\u2019re of Persian descent. \u201c<em>Bonjour monsieur<\/em>\u00a0Jonah,\u201d Najine says. \u201c<em>Bonjour<\/em>\u00a0<em>madame<\/em>,\u201d 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\u2019t talk about anything overtly political. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The pandemic, along with \u201cshelter-in-place,\u201d 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\u2014and with anti-Semitism on the rise\u2014I haven\u2019t been able to wear my identity lightly. I could go into denial about the whole megillah<em>,<\/em> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The novelist Henry James observed more than 100 years ago that, \u201cIt\u2019s a complex fate, being an American.\u201d Much the same could be said for being an American Jew.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">At 17, I tried to pass for a non-Jew; I attended a Presbyterian church because my friends attended services on Sunday in a small town in which Jews were a minority. In my high school graduating class only eight of 350 students were Jewish, one of them my cousin, Richie, who walked to school with me. As a teenager, I could lie about my Jewish identity, but my body couldn\u2019t. I competed in football, wrestling, and lacrosse, and in the locker room it was clear that I had been circumcised.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In the 1960s and \u201970s, I <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/prairie-fire-weather-underground\">rubbed shoulders with radicals<\/a><\/strong><\/span> who liked to create a hierarchy of the most and the least oppressed, with wealthy, white heterosexual men at the top of the pyramid and poor, Black lesbians at the bottom. I didn\u2019t play that game. The man who holds the whip and does the whipping is alienated from his own humanity, or so my Jewish mother-in-law told me. What about Nazis? Was I supposed to empathize with them? I didn\u2019t think so.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In the 1940s and \u201950, I grew up haunted by Hitler and G\u00f6ring, and entertained by the likes of Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks. I remember <em>Stalag 17<\/em> (1953) and the black-and-white Nazi films that documented atrocities at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I have never screamed my Jewish identity, but I have never been unaware of my Jewish past. I have tattooed myself Jewish. Yeah, I\u2019m a victim and a survivor of anti-Semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019t 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 <em>Ramparts<\/em> magazine.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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, \u201cJonah, you owe me big time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I had chosen the old boy network over the office of affirmative action. I didn\u2019t 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, \u201cno thanks,\u201d she said, \u201cbut all Jews love cheesecake.\u201d It bothered me, but I didn\u2019t say anything, didn\u2019t point out that that was like saying to an African American, \u201call Blacks love watermelon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s a Jewish Community Center and an annual Israeli Film Festival, this year virtual, but there isn\u2019t a pronounced Jewish presence. Nas and Najine helped to found a French language school in town, not a shul.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Over the years, whenever I have been in trouble, I have known who to turn to. My helpmates have not always been Jewish, but they have been Jewish much if not most of the time. My ties to fellow Jews have been strongest when discrimination and harassment have been the most intense. There\u2019s nothing like anti-Semitism to raise my Jewish hackles.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Now at the age of 78, when I should have accepted my past and the things I have done, I find it challenging to write candidly about my own experiences with anti-Semitism. One part of me says, \u201cShut up, and don\u2019t make a big deal about it.\u201d Others in my own family, including my grandmother Ida\u2014who survived a pogrom in Romania before she came to Brooklyn, New York\u2014had horrible experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I was never the victim of a lynch mob or tarred and feathered, which happened in Sonoma County, California, in 1935 to two Jews, Jack Green and Solomon Nitzberg.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">If part of me tells me to shut up, another part says, \u201cPut it out there without moralizing or sermonizing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Sometimes I have survived anti-Semitism through \u201csilence, exile and cunning,\u201d to borrow James Joyce\u2019s phrase, and sometimes with words and fists, battling school bullies including one named Calvin, who cried out \u201cKike,\u201d and \u201cGuns for the Arabs, sneakers for the Jews.\u201d In high school, when Catholic schoolmates who belonged to French Canadian families called me \u201cKike,\u201d I called them \u201cFrogs.\u201d The descendants of Sicilians were known as \u201cSwamp Guineas.\u201d The kids from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families were \u201cWASPs.\u201d Eisenhower was president and the American Jewish community was divided by the trial and the legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the accused Russian spies who died in the electric chair. In my own family, Roy Cohn, Sen. Joseph McCarthy\u2019s sidekick, was known as a \u201c<em>shonda fur die goyim.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I am sorry that I didn\u2019t stand up to Black power advocate, H. Rap Brown, who said in a speech on the campus of Columbia University in 1968, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to play Jew to your Nazis,\u201d as though Jews simply rolled over and let themselves be rounded up, sent to concentration camps and exterminated.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s the litany I have heard for decades and on three continents.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 caf\u00e9 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">When Belgians from the two sides of the linguist barrier met and conversed they turned to English. There was plenty of weirdness to go around. A fellow American at the university bore the name \u201cAdolph,\u201d and took me to a bar where the owner told anti-Semitic and anti-Black jokes. \u201cWhy do niggers have sickle cell anemia?\u201d he asked me. His answer: \u201cFrom licking food stamps.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Near the end of my year in Belgium, Eric, the middle son of my landlady, Mrs. Schellermans, took me to a site where Jews were held captive before they were dispatched to Auschwitz. On one wall I read a plaque that honored several Jews, all of them with the last name \u201cRasquin\u201d who died protesting their incarceration. When I used the phrase \u201cconcentration camp\u201d to describe it, I was corrected. It was, I was told, \u201conly a transit camp.\u201d At a dinner party attended by fellow faculty members, the men around the table talked about the \u201cJewesses\u2019 they had known, as though they belonged to an exotic species and who performed sexual acts, non-Jews would not perform.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As a boy on Long Island in the 1940s and 1950s, there was plenty of anti-Semitism to go around. In fact, I was called \u201ca Christ-killer\u201d though it wasn\u2019t until years later that I had an inkling what was behind that remark. Even at Columbia College in the early 1960s anti-Semitism lurked here and there, though the overwhelming majority of students were New York Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Perhaps some of the anti-Semitism at Columbia derived from the fear that Jews were taking over the college, and because Jews were often straight-A students who went on to med school and law school. For years, Columbia had a quota on Jews. In the late 1950s and early \u201960s Jews dominated the culture of the classroom, though not the locker room. The days of running back, Sid Luckman, were long gone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I played rugby for the Old Blues, the Columbia team, and was even elected the co-captain but that was mostly for publicity purposes. I was only one of two Jews on the team, which didn\u2019t want to be perceived as non-Jewish and certainly not as anti-Jewish. I was the Jewish face on a team mostly made up of guys from Irish and Italian Catholic working-class families.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 <em>sangha<\/em>s, the majority of the members are Jewish who described themselves as \u201cJewbus,\u201d or \u201cjubus.\u201d Like my friend, Jimalee, I have attended churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and \u201cpagan\u201d ceremonies. A Protestant minister called her \u201ca spiritual slut.\u201d He probably would call me the same name, and I thought I was a spiritual seeker.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As a census taker in 1980, and as a reporter for local media, both print and broadcast, I have traveled everywhere in Sonoma, from hovels to mansions, vineyards to marijuana fields, and from schools for hippie kids to Sonoma State University, which belongs to the California State University system, and where I taught for 30 years. Once, in the locker room on campus, I heard one undergrad say to another undergrad, \u201cIt smells like a Jew in here.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">At a party, a college graduate insisted, as though it was proven fact, that Jews were more flatulent than Christians because chicken soup was at the heart of a Jew\u2019s diet. If one allowed it, comments like that could drive one crazy. At the home of a biker and methamphetamine addict, I met a fellow who told me, \u201cYou\u2019re the first Jew I have ever seen.\u201d What he wanted to see\u2014I kid you not\u2014were my horns.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Recently, when I described this encounter with my friend Vilma Ginzberg, she laughed and then paused and added, \u201canti-Semitism isn\u2019t a laughing matter. It can be and is often dangerous.\u201d Vilma added, \u201cI married a Jew and carry a Jewish last name, and so Jews and non-Jews alike assume I\u2019m Jewish, but nothing could be further from the truth. It\u2019s been awkward and embarrassing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The American director Joseph Losey made an outstanding film titled <em>Monsieur Klein<\/em>\u00a0(1976) starring Alain Delon about a Frenchman who isn\u2019t a Jew, but rather bilks Jews and is mistaken for a Jew by the Nazis and dispatched to Auschwitz. It\u2019s far more hard-hitting than\u00a0<em>Gentleman\u2019s Agreement\u00a0<\/em>(1947)<em>,<\/em> the Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck that dissected American anti-Semitism precisely when it needed to be dissected in the immediate aftermath of WWII and revelations about concentration camps.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Some of the comments I heard from colleagues at the college were encoded anti-Semitism, like the one from a professor who asked, \u201cWhat are you doing here?\u201d as though I did not have as much right as him to be on campus. Not surprisingly, he said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go back to New York?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">A small number of students in my classes were Jewish. They would invite me to bar mitzvahs and to their homes, precisely because I was Jewish, but sometimes we found we had very little in common. I heard some anti-Semitism from fellow Jews. I considered it anti-Semitism when my friend Richard Silver, who grew up in Cleveland, told me that Jews ran Hollywood and that the overwhelming majority of California marijuana entrepreneurs were Jewish. Neither is true. The Jews I\u2019ve known have been no better or no worse at business and finance than the Arabs I have known.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I have spent enough time among Hollywood producers and directors to know that Jews have played and still do play important roles in the film industry. My closest Hollywood friends have all been Jewish: Bert Schneider, who produced <em>Easy Rider<\/em>\u00a0and other films, and complained about anti-Semitic Hollywood women whose names I won\u2019t mention; and Mark Rosenberg, who belonged to Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, ran Warner Brothers in the 1980s and who produced, along his wife Paula Weinstein, movies like\u00a0<em>The Fabulous Baker Boys\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>Flesh and Bone<\/em>. Legend has it that Rosenberg died on the set of a movie in Texas with a bagel in his hand.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I know that Jews help to create the movie industry, and at the same time I know that early Hollywood giants like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille were not Jewish, and that Thomas Edison, who helped birth Hollywood from his perch in New Jersey, expressed anti-Semitic comments.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">California Jews, or at least Jews in Northern California, have little in common with the Jews I knew as a boy in Brooklyn where whole neighborhoods were Jewish and every neighborhood boasted at least one delicatessen where you could also find lox and smoked white fish. My experience with LA Jews is limited, though I would always visit the Diamond Bakery on Fairfax where some of the women behind the counter had concentration camp numbers on their arms. The raisin bread is as good as any from a New York bakery.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">My two brothers, Daniel and Adam, are imbued with Jewish culture and Jewish traditions. Both of them have become more Jewish as they have aged, which means hosting Seders, belonging to Jewish discussion and reading groups, cooking and eating Jewish foods like potato latkes. Adam keeps Yiddish alive everyday by speaking it. My older brother, Fred Menache Quitkin, a psychiatrist, was in my view the quintessential New York Jew. He was actually a cousin, but after his father Hyman Quitkin died, he grew up with me and my family. Fred struck me as a character out of the pages of a novel by Philip Roth\u2014driven, haunted, and brilliant: a mensch. He died in 2005.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Occasionally, I go to Max\u2019s, the Jewish deli in Santa Rosa, the county seat. I was recently disappointed when Max himself told me, \u201cWe no longer have chopped liver. Nobody ordered it.\u201d Alas, that is the fate of a Jew in much of Northern California. In the 1970s it was difficult to find bagels. Now there are lousy imitations everywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The two books I consider my best are both about Jews: Allen Ginsberg, who wrote <em>Kaddish<\/em>, a great Jewish American epic, and Abbie Hoffman, who liked to say there were two kinds of Jews, those who went for<em>\u00a0<\/em>gelt and those who went for broke. Like many Jews, he went for both. Writing my biographies of Ginsberg and Hoffman deepened my own Jewish identity.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"ArticleView__content-switch bradford text-article-body-md font-300 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I have written about the anti-Semitism of Jack London, the most famous local writer, though his fans have pointed out to me that \u201csome of his best friends were Jewish.\u201d True enough. He was in love with and proposed marriage to a Russian Jewish woman named Anna Strunsky, who called him on the anti-Semitism in his stories. All through his life he described Jews as \u201cmoney grubbing.\u201d Also, in London\u2019s view, African Americans were closer to apes than humans, and greatly inferior to white Americans, especially Anglo Saxons. I tell students and teachers, \u201cRead Jack London, but remember his racism and anti-Semitism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Over the years, when I have wanted a Jewish fix I have gone to New York, stayed with Jewish friends and relatives, ate at places like Russ &amp; Daughters, viewed exhibits at the Jewish Museum, and engaged in lengthy discussions about Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. I have found that conversations with fellow Jews are usually civil, except when the subject is Israel and Palestinians. Then the Red Sea opens and Jews scatter in all different directions. Now with COVID-19 raging I\u2019m not getting on a plane and flying across the county. I Zoom with Jews around the country. For the time being that will do.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">New York\u2019s Jewish cultures made me the person I am today, though I don\u2019t think of myself as a New York Jew, and though I was never bar mitzvahed. That was my father\u2019s decision not mine. He was bar mitzvahed in Huntington, Long Island, where his father, Benjamin Raskin, was one of the founding members of the synagogue and attended services until he moved to Miami with my grandmother. Both of my parents traded the Judaism of their parents for communism and Stalinism, even as they denounced Zionism. One can only shake one\u2019s head.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Not a day goes by that I don\u2019t think of Daniel in the lions\u2019 den; and Adam in the Garden of Eden. I have been imprinted with the story of Jonah and the whale. Not a day goes by that I don\u2019t remember the Holocaust, which my father told me about when I was 4 years old and about to go to sleep. \u201cNot a nice bedtime story,\u201d I told my dad. He told me, \u201cYou had to learn sometime. This is as good as any.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s 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\u2019s no point labeling anyone a Jew or a non-Jew.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">These days I live on a farm in Northern California. I\u2019m the only Jew in a kind of cooperative community. My Jewishness isn\u2019t a big deal. And it is a big deal.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019d be able to go to a real Jewish deli again and feel safe.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Jonah Raskin<\/strong>, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author of 14 books, including biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\" \/>\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" \/>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Short Biography of an American Jew JONAH RASKIN ERICA HARRIS \u2018At the age of 78, when I should have accepted my past and the things I have done, I find it challenging to write candidly about my own experiences with anti-Semitism\u2019 It\u2019s the Sabbath and I\u2019m wearing a mask, standing in line waiting to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83779"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83791,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83779\/revisions\/83791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}