Exile and alienation in America. (Point/Counterpoint).

Alexander, Michael

Of Marc Dollinger's many interesting insights into American Jewish political behavior, his most daring may be the following: when American Jews feel directly threatened, as during the Holocaust or when they resided in the segregated South, they do not show any particular political affinity with other groups that are even more oppressed. When in trouble, the famous "liberalism" of the Jews disappears. (1) My own work substantiates a complementary phenomenon that is less surprising but perhaps still puzzling. When American Jews are blessed with periods of success and inclusion, they tend to identify with those who remain marginalized, even acting politically to support them. When Jews are making it, they jeopardize their social position by pairing themselves with America's outcasts, not simply by helping them but by claiming they belong among them. I call this behavior outsider identification.

From the perspective of rational self-interest, the former behavior makes a great deal of sense. When under attack, Jews circle the wagons and worry about themselves. Dollinger's insight may be uncomfortable for those who prefer to explain contemporary Jewish behavior in the light of Isaiah's prophecy. However, most Jews realize that the prophetic ethical tradition is not uniquely theirs, but that helping the orphan and the widow is an ideal widely shared in both the ancient and modern worlds.

The latter behavior, however, does not seem very rational. In America, where Jews have been accepted by the host society to a greater degree than most places in the Diaspora, why do they appear to work against their own self-interest by associating themselves with those whom American society marginalizes? While some would claim Isaiah as the inspiration, many others propose a new view, one that is now so common that it is accepted as almost a truism. According to this interpretation, Jewish behavior for the sake of those who remain excluded is an attempt to assure the continued inclusion of Jews in the American mainstream. Although Jews have for the most part enjoyed acceptance in America, they protect their good position by working to include those in American society who have not yet been embraced by the majority. For adherents of this view, rational self-interest on the part of Jews is once again the key to their political behavior.

But if this behavior is in fact rational, American Jewry is strangely exceptional in abiding by this strategy. While enjoying success in America, what other group has adopted a policy of identifying with those who are less fortunate? This behavior is absent among the other immigrant groups that came to America at the same time as Eastern European Jewry, and it is absent among other groups that have immigrated since. It is even found only inconsistently among the Jews who came to America before the great tide that began in 1881, as the divided stand on slavery prior to and during the Civil War indicates. It is true that, as other groups have succeeded socially and economically, some of their members have leaned to the left, but substantial numbers have tilted to the right; some vote Democrat, others Republican. With success and acceptance, groups tend to split politically and socially, and many Christian denominations in America reflect this division. Put another way, when other groups enter the middle class their political affiliations tend to normalize and reflect the change.

In challenging this trend, American Jewry has been truly exceptional. A majority of the Jewish population has voted Democrat in every presidential election since Woodrow Wilson's, with the number voting that way usually reaching 80 percent. Jewish ballot choices and other political activities have gone against the tide of steady incorporation into the American mainstream. Why did this voting pattern begin at the moment when the majority of American Jews first left the factories, scaled the professions, relocated to the suburbs, joined the middle class, and generally became "at home in America"? (2) Can antisemitism be the answer, when anticatholicism, an equal if not stronger movement, did not produce the same political habits among the Irish, Italians, or Poles? It would seem that, unlike any other group, Jews have joined the party of the oppressed and championed the rights of others against their own self-interest. Is this not a riddle still in search of a key? I cannot be the only one suspicious of logic that characterizes such causes as the Jewish civil rights movement for blacks, with all the dangers and passions that went with that cause, to be simply self-interested politics.

Allow me to suggest, briefly, a possible explanation for this unique, apparently selfless behavior. Besides calculated self-interest, which is in some instances beyond doubt, Jewish political behavior in America may also stem from the Eastern European experience of exclusion from the host society and the concomitant Jewish identity of outsider-in-exile that sprang from it. In brief, American Jewish identity is still framed by the corporate alien status Jews knew since the first charter granted to them in Lithuania during the thirteenth century. Remembering that Eastern European Jewry, which ultimately came to comprise 90 percent of American Jewry, never knew real emancipation or the temptations of assimilation, and remembering that identity in that society depended upon a condition of alienation from the host, may clarify why Jews continue to behave as if they belong among the marginalized groups of their new host society in America, even when they do not so belong. Moreover, it may explain Jewish empathy with the plight of America's outcasts, particularly when Jews feel themselves merging with the host, as a kind of nostalgic imperative for alienation. After all, without actually experiencing the sociological condition of outsider-in-exile, how much remains of the Eastern European Jewish identity? That is to say, how much of Jewish identity is founded on the willingness of Jews to remember and reenact their earlier exclusion?

This proposition, which favors culture over politics, may seem extraordinary, but perhaps it will become less so when reflecting upon the Eastern European experience. By the time of their large-scale migration to America, Jews had resided in Eastern Europe for half a millennium. For most of that time they were utterly estranged from native society in ways familiar to every student of Jewish history: in language, religion, culture, demography, citizenship, economy, and so forth. To explain their systematic alienation from their host societies, Jews turned to the sacred texts. They invoked the account of Jewish slavery in Exodus to explain how a wandering nation would one day inherit the promise of the covenant. As Jews had been outsiders enslaved in Egypt, so were they outsiders exiled in Europe. As the Israelites returned to their homeland with the Commandments, so the current keepers of God's covenant would also be returned home. Through the doctrines of exile and covenant, Jews learned that humiliation and alienation were signs that they were God's chosen people. Exile and covenant became the core components of Ashkenazic culture. According to Jacob Katz, the two concepts were "embodied in and permeated all the primary sources on which Jewish education was founded. They were not only formulated in words, but also expressed in ceremonials performed both by the individual and by the congregation." (3)

In time, Jews actually embraced their place on the margins of the host society in order to prove their special status. Jewish communities would sometimes institute their own social policies of "exclusiveness and tolerance" concerning the surrounding communities among which they lived, and would circumscribe their interactions with the Gentile world by cultivating political, economic, and cultural models of "self-conscious distinctiveness." So soundly did Jewish communities mark themselves off socially as well as theologically from their neighbors, and so thoroughly did their neighbors reciprocate the exclusion, that ultimately Jewish identity fused with alienation. In turn, Jewish identity became threatened by any perceived social integration. Katz tells us that Jewish communities revitalized their distinctiveness from time to time in order to halt such integration, and in the process intentionally impaired their relations with the host society in order to mark themselves as a people apart.

Similar behavior can be found in America, but with one notable difference. In Europe, Jewish political activities on behalf of the outcast amounted to pork-barreling because Jews there were, in real sociological terms, themselves marginalized. Whether they adhered to socialism, nationalism, or liberalism, Jews in European politics advocated explicitly for the Jewish population. In American politics, on the other hand, Jews in their political activities often have acted explicitly for the sake of someone else.

American Jews have had needs that have differed from those of their European ancestors, needs that have not been fundamentally political. In particular, there has been the need to demonstrate that they are a people in exile, in a country where that has not at all been obvious. Social acceptance and success in America have threatened the status of the Jew as an outsider. As a consequence, Jewish identity has also been threatened. It was at the moment of their first success, in the Jazz Age, when the children of the Eastern European migration were finally moving up into the mainstream of a host society, that they began to identify down. In America, when Jews were themselves not marginalized they identified with those who were. They explicitly linked this unique behavior to traditional Jewish identity by invoking the language of exile to explain and to praise their new ideology and unusual political behavior. (4)

The tendency to identify with America's outcasts has, since its inception in the Jazz Age, been a riddle for Jewish writers. For example, Jews asked themselves why, if they were neither Italian nor particularly anarchistic nor any longer predominantly in the working class, did they so fervently support Sacco and Vanzetti? And they asked themselves why they, more than any other group, were lured by African American causes, culture, and life? (5) Repeatedly, explicitly, Jews have questioned this seemingly irrational identification with America's outcasts, and then explained it from within the framework of historical marginalization--we have known what it is like to be downtrodden--and with the theological language of exile, often specifically employing the word golus.

We must consider the possibility that Jews actually believed the theology expounded at their most popularly celebrated ceremony, the Seder, and tried to behave accordingly. Perhaps they still do. For now, let me conclude by suggesting that with outsider identification Jews met the obligation of their self-definition as an exiled people. After the influx of Eastern European Jewry, much of the American Jewish story has not been about trying to fit into the American mainstream, but about marking out a distance and distinguishing ourselves from it. The American Jewish tale of the last century has been about making it but behaving as though we have not. It is about being there but believing we are held back. How many of us in America still understand what it means to be a Jew by our association with those who are exiled from the mainstream and with those who are not so comfortably at home in America?

(1) Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, 2000).

(2). See, of course, Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York, 1981), but also Arcadius Kahan, "Economic Opportunity and Some Pilgrims' Progress: Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe in the United States, 1890-1914," in Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago, 1986), 101-17, who argues that, by World War I, Jewish labor history is impossible to pursue because by then so much of the Jewish working class had entered the middle class. What the Civil War had done for the Central European Jewish community in America, World War I did for America's Eastern European Jews.

(3.) Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (West Orange, 1961), 13, 22. I am also often instructed by Yehezkiel Kaufmann, Golah V'Nekhar (Tel Aviv, 1929), I-II.

(4.) For evidence for this assertion, see Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, 2001).

(5.) African Americans have held the position of alien in America. If religion had been the fundamental barrier of exclusion in Europe, with Jews occupying the position of alien, the barrier in America was certainly race. This usurpation of social location (and marker of chosen status among Jews) by another group, may account for both the attraction and the tension between Jews and African Americans in America. Each sees the other as both a mythic idea and as an actual rival for the position of most excluded. This is the subject of my work on Jews, jazz, minstrelsy, and the career of Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson in Seredzius, Lithuania.

Michael Alexander, Assistant Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Jazz Age Jews, is currently at work on a project entitled "Golda and Henry: A Tale of Jews, Power, and the Path to the Yom Kippur War"