This diary will end with an important (in my view) socio-political observation. But it begins with a story:
Several years ago, I took the esteemed poet, Gerald Stern, out to breakfast. It was on a Sunday morning in the sleepy, North Carolina coastal village of Wrightsville Beach (just outside of Wilmington), where he was living while teaching creative writing at UNCW.
I was his student.
I asked him to breakfast because he is, well, Gerald Stern. He accepted because I was a Jew, one of the few he'd met during his Southern, coastal stint.
And so I took him to the local dive, where the food is awful and joint is always packed.
As he scooped over-easy eggs into his mouth from a white, ceramic plate, he asked about terrorism, about my experiences in Israel, about living with violence. I asked him about a poem of his I could not get out of my mind, "Behaving Like a Jew."
Behaving Like a Jew
Gerald Stern
When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
---I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.
I asked him whether or not he felt uncomfortable with the implicit Jewish exceptionalism in the poem, about the narrator's view that, in a constructed rural world of hunting and highways and death, it is the Jew who stops his car, bends down and mourns. It is the Jew who touches the opossum's body and silently weeps for a life once lived.
He looked me in the eyes, set the fork upon his plate, and recited the poem in his gravely, aged voice, emphasizing the words I am going to be unappeased. Upon finishing, he gulped from a glass of sweet tea, slammed the cup upon our wooden bench, and said, "This is not exceptional."
And for his (or rather, our) milieu, for American Jews living in renewed urban areas, in the suburbs, in the exburbs, he's right: this is not exceptional. Jews in America, a primarily middle and upper-middle class bunch, have almost entirely abandoned pursuits that even hint of real-world violence. Demographically, few Jews serve in the military. Even less own farms with livestock slated for the chopping block. And while I don't have the statistical data to prove this last point, I'd hazard that, if one were to break down the NRA's membership or gun ownership in America along religious or cultural lines, Jews would be at or near the bottom.
Which is to say: Jews in America have chosen to be unappeased by their professional and demographic pursuits. They have chosen to be unappeased by their engagement in progressive social causes and political issues. (I'm not making an exceptionalism argument here – no human's blood is redder than that of their fellow human. I'm simply stating what some are afraid to say: Jews, who make up only 1.2% of the U.S. population, are (in my ranging experiences) disproportionately represented in social action and progressive endeavors in the United States.
Why? I don't know. But as my Mom would say, Every Jewish mother wants one thing for her child more than anything: that he/she be a mensch (a good person). It's cultural, this unique, American melding in Jewish communities of progressive, humanitarian values and traditional Judaism that occurred (remarkably, perhaps miraculously) in the shadow of the Holocaust.
However, in America, while it's not exceptional to find a Jew championing the rights of an oppressed minority – see the civil rights movement then and marriage equality now (Evan Wolfson founded Freedom to Marry) – what is exceptional today is to find American Jews championing the rights of one particular people: the Palestinians.
For one thing trumps being a mensch in that ever-present shadow of the Holocaust: survival. Which is one reason why AIPAC has grown into one of today's more influential lobbying bodies despite its narrow, hawkish positions, positions that, were they transposed onto a different political map or geo-political conflict, would not receive a plurality of support from American Jews. For deep down, existentially, Jews fear one thing more than any other: being exterminated. And Israel is literally and emotionally entwined (inextricably) with such survival.
And so many American Jews allow themselves to largely be ignorant of or ignore the plight of the Palestinians. Not out of malice. But out of an uber-sensitivity and hyper-focus on Jewish victimhood, on Jewish survival.
This is why organizations such as J Street are so critical. It's why films such as Encounter Point are essential. It's why I'm working to find a publisher for my book. For there is a need, as Gerald Stern put it, for Jews to be "unappeased" by the suffering of anyone, be they Jews or Palestinians, for this lack of appeasement in democracies is what leads to changes in policy.
Now, more than at any other point, do Jews in America need to let the Obama administration understand that, while they champion the right of Israel to exist within safe and peaceful borders, so too do they champion the rights of the Palestinians to exist within safe and peaceful borders.
The momentum is building toward such movement, a momentum progressing toward the establishment of a more stable and just Middle East, the strategic and political importance of which cannot be understated for America.
I am a Jew.
I am an American.
And I have chosen not to be appeased.
Not by the criminal violence perpetrated against my people in the name of resistance, nor the criminal violence perpetrated by my people in the name of security.
And those like me are growing. By the day.