Even in America

By JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN

It stands apart these days, lurking in the background of American life—raw, unabridged hate. Tease it apart and much of it is anti-Semitism. "Sophomoric" was how a colleague at the Anti-Defamation League once described the anti-Semitic, right-wing propaganda that crossed my desk during the day, but I found it unnverving. But it is the ADL way to remain calm and thoughtful in the face of extremist activity.

I monitored right-wing extremists for five years, and when people asked me what I did for a living they were either fascinated or repelled. Stories about right-wing extremists came mostly over a news service wire. But that wire was electrifying. If this wasn't important news, it was certainly bad news. And bad news from the extreme right often has a way of ending up as tragedy.

A prime example of such tragedy was the Oklahoma City bombing. Tragedy struck again this summer when a disciple of a loony extremist group went on a killing rampage in the Midwest; Blacks, Jews and Asians were his targets. I first heard about the latest attack in Los Angeles while in London. There is something very unsettling about hearing domestic news like that so far from home. This news was particularly disruptive because it's so damned personal. Things like that aren't supposed to happen in America; Jews are safe and secure here. How do you explain something like that to your children? How do you explain it to yourself? "It can't happen in America" gives way to the shock that it did happen in America.

Writing in Salon, the on-line magazine, journalist Samuel G. Freedman offered what I think was the most cogent analysis of contemporary American Jewry's response to those rare instances of dramatic anti-Semitism. (Freedman is immersed in issues particular to contemporary Jewish America through the writing of a new book, Second Temple: Jew Versus Jew in America. Simon Schuster will publish the book in the fall of 2000). Freedman's argument was a compelling mix of ADL rationality and personal intuition. He writes that "what [Buford] Furrow accomplished with his despicable act was to unite American Jewry by reawakening the single reliable source of identity left in an ever more fragmented community: the fear of anti-Semitism."

There it is; we remember we are Jews when something bad happens. In an e-mail exchange, I ask Freedman if there is anything else that unites American Jewry other than the threat of anti-Semitism. "I worry," he writes back, "apropos of these reactions to the LA shooting, that too many Jews have come in a way to depend on anti-Semitism to force unity upon us. The last reliable unifier was Israel, but as we know both the peace issue and the pluralism issue in Israel divide American Jews. And non-Orthodox American Jews are becoming in general more estranged from Israel in all but symbolic ways. So by default we look for anti-Semitism—which in a strange way is proof that we don't really think that it is so prevalent. It's a process I call sentimentalizing anti-Semitism. You can see it in the upsurge of interest in the Leo Frank case*, for instance, with the novel by [David] Mamet and the play by Alfred Uhry, both of which show Frank becoming meaningfully Jewish only when persecuted. When persecution was a day-to-day reality in America, no Jews were perversely longing for it."

When I ask Freedman about "threats" to American Jewry, he changes my word to "challenges." America has kept its promises of freedom and inclusiveness to Jews. However, along with that promise there is the paradox of assimilation. The better things get, the more tempting it is to shed Jewishness altogether. "What is the triumph of American decency," says Freedman in our e-mail exchange "is a tremendous challenge for Jewry. The two most creative responses by American Jews—Modern Orthodoxy and secular Judaism—are interestingly the most attacked (in the first case) and the most undermined (in the latter)."

But at the JCC, the differences in those creative responses to living a Jewish life in America—in both cases finding a way to participate fully in American society—recede during exercise workouts, the Mommy and Me classes, the art lessons. I have been on the Stairmaster alongside women in long skirts and head coverings. I have participated in Friday morning Shabbat ceremonies with Asians. Inclusiveness is the American Jewish way. To Buford Furrow that inclusiveness is race baiting, spiritual pollution, a mortal threat. And on a sunny Tuesday morning in a Los Angeles suburb he did anything but sentimentalize anti-Semitism. He reminded us that Jews could still die for simply being Jews. Even in America.

*In 1913 Leo Frank, who owned a pencil factory in Atlanta, was accused of murdering one of his employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. He was convicted of the murder on circumstantial evidence and condemned to die. Although his sentence was commuted to life by the governor of Georgia, Frank was lynched while serving time in jail. More than seventy years later, Frank was exonerated of the crime when a man who had worked as a janitor at the factory came forward and identified another worker as the murderer.