The Ironies of Identity

Tonight I went to a birthday party for my friend A.K., which unexpectedly prompted some musings about universalism and particularism, belonging and being an outsider.

I’m always struck by the irony of those Israelis I meet (mostly far-left academic types) who are so opposed to Jewish particularism. Perhaps it’s a kind of reaction-formation that comes from living in the world’s only Jewish state. Moses Mendelssohn's advice was to be a Jew at home but a mensch (human being) in the street. In other words, the particular was to be confined to the private sphere, while the public realm was to be universal -- that was the compromise upon which the civil emancipation of the Jews in Europe was to be based. Tonight I met a woman who wanted to be nothing but a mensch, at home and in the street. Here was a Jewish woman, the child of two Jewish parents, living in the Jewish state, who insisted she wasn’t Jewish – just a human being. She aspired to be what communitarian critics of John Rawls call an “unencumbered self” (i.e., unencumbered by attachments that one cannot freely choose or reject because they constitute and define who one is). She wanted to be what Marx derisively described as an “abstract being squatting outside the world” (precisely what he insisted human beings were not). She wore Stalin’s epithet – rootless cosmopolitan -- as a badge of honor. But what is someone without roots but a luftmensch, suspended in mid-air? The repressed always has a way of returning. The woman reminded me of some typically black Jewish humor: A Cossack is pointing a gun at a Jew. The Jew, waving his arms around frantically, says, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see this is a human being in front of you?” But of course the Cossack doesn’t see the universal. That’s the whole point of the joke. He only sees the particular, even if the Jew frantically waving his (or her) arms can’t or won’t.

I’m not anti-universalist. On the contrary, my political views are strongly imbued with universalism. I’m all in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights precisely because I think human rights are universal. I staunchly support the four freedoms – everywhere in the world. But I have long been skeptical about Kantian dualisms and dichotomies, including the notion that universalism and particularism are sharply and irreconcilably opposed. I’m much more Hegelian in my thinking: I want a dialectical synthesis of the universal and the particular.

Toward the end of the evening, the guests at A.K.’s birthday party dwindled to a small group of old friends seated around the table on the balcony talking together in Hebrew. I stayed for a while, trying my best to understand what was said and relying on A.K. or U. to occasionally translate the highlights of the conversation, but I soon lost interest and said good night. It was just too hard to follow. Before I left, U. apologized that everyone was speaking Hebrew, but I told him that no apology was necessary. If you can’t speak Hebrew here in Israel, I said, then where? Still, as I walked home in the cool Tel Aviv night air, I felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction and unease. It took me a while to understand why, but then it dawned on me. Sitting there in that circle, unable to follow the conversation, I had the feeling of being marginal, being an outsider. And there it was, the second irony of the evening: If there is any place in the world where Jews should feel a sense of belonging, should feel at home, it’s Israel. I was reminded of another joke, one that the olim (immigrants) from Russia tell in Israel: In Russia we were Jews, but in Israel we became Russians. The Ethiopian Jews tell the same joke: In Ethiopia we were Jews, here we are blacks. I think I understand them. Never do I feel more American than when I am abroad – even when abroad is the Jewish homeland.