by Susan Jacoby
My father, too, said he never gave any thought to the juxtaposition of his own conversion with the still-recent revelation of Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews. “If I had thought about it at all,” he said, “I would have thought that it [the Holocaust] proved my father was right, that no good could come from identifying yourself with a people that had been so victimized, had suffered so much.” Unlike Ozzie, my father began to have second thoughts (not about his conversion but about his assumption that conversion could eradicate his Jewishness) around the time of the Eichmann trial. It still puzzles me that it took him so long to accept what had been clear since the history of Hitler’s war against the Jews began to unfold during the Nuremberg trials—that “race” and “blood,” not religion, had been the determining factor in the targeting of Jews for extermination. Conversions and intermarriages had only served to delay the closing of the vise around most members of the Jewish “race.” In the end, to stand my dad’s observation on its head, little good came to the Jews who did not identify with their own people. By the mid-seventies, though, my father had altered his thinking and come to the conclusion that his father had been badly mistaken in his belief that assimilation, and abandonment of any connection to religious Judaism, would eventually rule out the possibility that his family would ever be identified as Jews. “You’re proof of that,” he said tartly. “I’d say you’re carrying a Jewish gene if it didn’t make me sound like a Nazi.”
My dad continued to be a reasonably observant (much more so than my mother), if hardly devout, Catholic until the end of his life. He believed in God, and in his view, Catholicism was as good as any other religion. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in my late twenties, it drove me wild when Dad would talk that way. Holocaust scholars were beginning to uncover the record of all that the Roman Catholic Church had not done to protest the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. I felt an unquenchable anger at the Church in which I was raised as the unfolding historical record showed that Roman Catholic officialdom throughout Europe had reserved its concern primarily for Jewish converts to Catholicism. Hearing about the noble exceptions—such as the shelter offered by individual convents and monasteries throughout Europe, or the unremitting efforts of many Italian clergymen outside the Vatican (from cardinals on down) to rescue Jews from deportation—only made me angrier. What if the Church hierarchy in Poland and France had demonstrated as much concern for all Jews as the Catholic clergy did after the Nazis occupied northern Italy? My distress about the role of the Church was not based on the mistaken notion that Protestants in Europe had treated Jews with great benevolence during the war; I cared more about the Catholic record because I was still struggling to come to terms with my own religious upbringing and with my father’s decision to convert. This concern was, perhaps, an ironic remnant of the pride-filled “I-am-a-Catholic” training in parochial school; Catholics, the nuns always said, must judge and be judged according to a higher standard than that applied to people of other faiths.
The more I learned about the role of the Church in most of Nazi-occupied Europe, the more trouble I had comprehending how a Jew, any Jew, of whatever degree of deracination, could have converted to Catholicism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. And yet it happened often enough—and even among camp survivors themselves—to have produced a growing body of memoirs by children of Holocaust survivors for whom the subject of conversion is fraught with far more pain and danger than the American-born Jacoby converts could ever have imagined.
To this day, however, I still do not understand how my father, while taking instruction in the Faith, could have accepted his priest’s flippant rationalization of the deicide charge against Jews with the remark that if Jesus had been born in America instead of Jerusalem, he would have been denounced and crucified by Indians. Relations between Jews and Catholics (as well as other Christian denominations) have improved immeasurably during the past forty years, and the change would never have taken place without the Church’s explicit repudiation of the teaching that Jews, as a people, bore responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ. But the alteration in the Church’s attitude toward Jews was part of the spirit of aggiornamento fostered by Pope John XXIII in the early sixties; the transition had not even begun during the period when my aunt, father, and uncle converted to Catholicism. The deicide accusation was not, as my father implied, some irrelevant theological formality but the very heart of the historical Christian (not only Catholic) animus toward Jews. At the time my father and I were watching the Eichmann trial on television, various Protestant and Catholic publications, arguing against the death penalty for the defendant, brazenly compared the proceedings to the condemnation of Jesus. “The difference in the two trials,” declared an article in a prominent Episcopal publication, The Witness, “is that Eichmann’s condemnation does not save a single man from bondage and service to death, while the condemnation of the other defendant [Jesus] set men free from death and from the power of death in their own sin.” Attitudes informed by this view of Jews—and of their historical responsibility for the murder of Christ—were not universal, but neither were they rare among Christian clergymen during the era when my father and his siblings first embraced Catholicism.
I have always disliked the term “self-hating Jew,” and I dislike it even more today because it most commonly appears as a label applied by right-wing Jewish fundamentalists to anyone who does not share their narrow and repressive view of what one must do to live honorably as a Jew. (Fundamentalist is a better term for these people than ultra-Orthodox, because the latter term—even with an “ultra” in front—does not apply to the millions of Orthodox Jewish believers who would not presume to use their own standards of observance as a measure of who is, and is not, a Jew.) In any event, “self-hatred” is far too gross a term to describe my father’s motivation. Shame, not self-hatred, was the emotion that enveloped my dad when, out of nowhere (as he saw it), he was beaten and called a kike in the schoolyard. It is a particularly shaming, and confusing, experience for a child to be persecuted for belonging to a group, a religion, a cultural tradition that he has been raised to regard as utterly alien. What was remarkable about my father, in view of his upbringing, is that he made a real attempt, at a stage in life when it is difficult to reexamine anything, to understand and come to terms with the profound self-doubt generated by the vacuum in which he was raised. My dad often expressed the conviction that a preoccupation with the Holocaust was not the best way for me to honor the Jewish side of my heritage. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m talking about,” he said with uncharacteristic hesitancy, “but I think it’s…well, kind of a dead end to consider yourself a Jew because Hitler would have sent you to the ovens along with all of the full-blooded Jews. It’s…it’s like letting Hitler define the terms. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust—well, it seems to me that being a Jew has to mean something more.”
This conversation took place at some point in the late 1970s, when my father was in his early sixties and I was in my early thirties. I was old enough to listen, and he was old enough to talk in ways that he—and we—had never talked before.
XI
Principles
“AND SO, WHAT DO YOU consider yourself now?” The question was posed in 1984 by a rabbi who had invited me to speak about my recently published book, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, at a current events forum sponsored by his Reform congregation in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In Wild Justice, I had discussed the pejorative Christian identification of Judaism with “Old Testament vengeance,” an identification based largely on a superficial and selective reading of the famous “eye for eye” passage in Exodus. The rabbi—an expansive man whom I remember fondly because he paid his speakers not by check but in cash, pulling out $100 bills from the safe in his office—was interested in my family story because his own congregation included many descendants of assimilated German Jews like Max Jacoby. A few had returned to Judaism after generations of conversions in their own families (though not, the rabbi hastened to
add, conversions to Catholicism). Most of his sheep had returned from Episcopalian or Unitarian folds. He asked, with some hesitation, whether I had ever thought of converting to Judaism, a step that would be required under Halachah (Jewish law) to gather a half-Jew with a gentile mother into the embrace of Judaism. Hating to disappoint the rabbi, I gently told him no, that I was an atheist who would be as out of place at Shabbos services as I had long been at Mass. I believe this was the first time I ever used the uncompromising “atheist” rather than the less certain (by definition) “agnostic” or the wishy-washier “skeptic.”
Make no mistake about it: to most Americans, atheist is an epithet, rather than a reasonable and honorable self-description. It is impossible to imagine anyone running successfully for the American presidency after declaring that he or she does not believe in God. Unlike Europeans, Americans generally view atheists as disturbers of the peace on the one hand (those grinches who want to spoil everyone’s Christmas by keeping carols out of the schools), or pitiable crackpots on the other. More than once, newspaper editors have suggested that I strike the word atheist from personal essays because “it makes you sound like an extremist.”
A significant number of my contemporaries, mindful of the American cultural injunction to believe in some Higher Power but unwilling to subject themselves to the demands of a traditional religion with an internal logic, have embraced New Age mush. With its prattle about a “Universal Spirit,” New Age religion—which bears the same relationship to traditional religion as New Age music does to a Bach fugue—offers the befuddled a comforting set of associations requiring no intellectual consistency. This bland form of “spirituality” is far more acceptable in American culture than atheism, which does have an internal logic and, above all, demands consistency. I do not share the doctrinaire and self-congratulatory view of atheism as externally and objectively verifiable, à la “scientific communism” as defined by the onetime priests of the Soviet Union; I am quite willing to concede that mine is a theology like any other. I often try to dodge the so-what-are-you-now question, because any reference to atheism is frequently greeted by, “Oh, you mean you’re nothing.”
The rabbi, however, deserved an honest reply. And being a man of both secular and sacred Jewish tradition, he was not taken aback by the A-word. “Well, you can be a Jewish atheist,” he said cheerfully. “It’s certainly not outside Jewish history.” “Half-Jewish,” I reminded him. He countered: “Don’t you think it’s your Jewish half that made you an atheist?”
—
IT WOULD be much easier to write an ending to the story of my family if mine were one of the “return-to-religion” odysseys so characteristic of my generation. I have friends who, after at least two decades of nonobservance, can now be found at Mass on a fair number of Sundays or in temple not only on the High Holy Days but on ordinary Sabbaths. Whether this new observance will metamorphose into a permanent and fundamental change of heart and habit, to be passed on to the next generation, or whether it is merely another hyped, evanescent stage in the baby boom generation’s progression from cradle to grave, remains to be seen.
“Reverse converts”—those who have returned to a faith originally held by their ancestors but obliterated by accident or by design—occupy a much smaller and special place among the rediscoverers of religion. Their stories have a powerful symmetry and a powerful emotional appeal, especially for American Jews, as a minority threatened not by persecution but by generations of assimilation and intermarriage. Such journeys suggest a continuity and permanence in which most of us want to believe. They also imply that nothing is ever really lost—that a family like mine, so careless of its heritage and its gifts, can reconnect with its past if only someone has the will to do so.
Christian conversions to Judaism, virtually nonexistent in the history of European Jewry, have also become a small but significant factor in the current mix of American Jews. Most of these new converts to Judaism are formerly Christian women married to Jewish men, and a few are half-Jews, with gentile mothers, who were required by Jewish law, as I would be, to undergo formal conversion in order to return to the faith their fathers (or grandfathers) had abandoned.
When children are involved, such conversions represent a real alternative to the confusing arrangement described by a couple interviewed for a 1997 Newsweek cover story on mixed marriages. “We’re going to position this as ‘Daddy likes this and Mommy likes that,’ ” declared a Wisconsin management consultant, raised a Methodist and married to a Jewish woman. Newsweek reported that the couple’s four-month-old son had undergone neither a ritual circumcision nor a baptism but an ecumenical “dedication” at a Chicago church. “He’ll get exposed to both [religions],” the father declared, “and won’t be overdosed in either.” O my America! In this brave new nation, religion is not an organic way of being in the world but something, to use the language of marketing, that a parent must “position.”
If I believed in any god, it would be the God of the Jews. If I could be consoled by any prayer, the Kaddish would be my first choice. But the possibility of religious consolation was closed to me long ago—not by my parents’ mixed marriage but by my own nature. Had I grown up in a somewhat observant Jewish home (I can so easily see my father as either a Conservative or a Reform Jew) and been exposed to a good dose of Hebrew school, I am quite certain that I would still have turned out to be a nonbeliever. I would have choked on the El Mole Rachamim—God, full of mercy—as I used to choke on Catholic prayers when I was old enough to comprehend the meaning of evil. As a Jewish child raised by Jewish parents, I may have been even less disposed than I was as a Catholic child to believe in the mercy of a God who was allowing other Jewish babies to be murdered while I was thriving in my mother’s womb. I cannot honor the Jewish side of me by embracing Judaism as a religion, but my father was right when he suggested that “Jewish identity” cannot be based solely on remembering the Holocaust. “Never again” is a noble admonition, but it does not provide an intricate, authentic pattern for a life. By the early 1980s, when I was working on Wild Justice, which drew heavily on my Catholic background as well as on my newer interest in Jewish law and philosophy, my pattern was emerging more clearly. But my search, and my dialogue with my father, had been delayed for some years by the marriage that began with a busman’s honeymoon in Russia.
—
THE FORM OF my wedding to Tony Astrachan, on June 22, 1969, was one manifestation of the confusion engendered by my (and, in a very different way, his) upbringing. I was the first Jacoby in two generations to marry a Jew, but the wedding was celebrated in the inner-city Episcopal church of St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation, by a close friend who was also an Episcopal minister. It was the kind of half-baked ecumenical service, with the outward form but none of the inner substance of religion, that began to proliferate in the sixties. Such services were made to order for couples disinclined to confront sticky questions of exactly what they believed and what the ceremony represented. Tony’s parents, Irving and Manley Aaron Astrachan, were not merely secularists but committed atheists; they had nothing but disdain for the sort of German Jews, like my great-grandfather, who had opted for Ethical Culture as an easy way out of traditional Jewish observance. But Tony, unlike his parents, did believe in God. In 1945, he had insisted on a bar mitzvah—much to the dismay of Manley and Irv, who had to join a temple so that their son could make his formal entry into Jewish manhood. Astonishingly (in retrospect), Tony and I never really discussed the decision to be married in a Protestant church. He was emphatic about not wanting to be married by a judge—his first marriage, which, like mine, ended in divorce, had been a hastily arranged civil ceremony—and he wanted a “real” wedding this time. In Washington during the sixties, it would have been difficult (though certainly not impossible) to find a rabbi willing to violate Halachah by marrying a Jew to the daughter of a non-Jewish mother. Our apostate Christian service satisfied Tony’s desire for ceremony and acknowledgment of a Supreme Being.
I was so much in love, at twenty-four, that I would probably have married Tony (to paraphrase Uncle Ozzie’s description of his wedding) in front of a Druid altar. That my acquiescence in this ceremony represented a denial of some of my deepest convictions, and was therefore a poor way to begin a marriage, was a harbinger of trouble that I did not see at the time.
My Washington wedding had brought together both sides of my family for the first time in many years. My brother and parents made the trip to Washington from Michigan; my still-vigorous Broderick grandparents flew in from Chicago; Uncle Ozzie dropped by en route from Dallas to yet another bridge tournament; and Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted tore themselves away from Staten Island for the day. This would turn out to be the last family occasion to bring my father, aunt, and uncle together under the same roof.
The Jacobys, Brodericks, and Astrachans voiced no reservations about this wedding. My in-laws, who were married by a judge in 1926, had already seen their son through one broken marriage to a shiksa. What was one more non-Jewish wedding in the scheme of things? My Broderick grandparents saw nothing strange about the service; they had, after all, watched my mother marry my father in a Lutheran church. Even Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted, the most devout Catholics on hand, seemed content. After all, the semi-Episcopal service sounded something like a Catholic marriage ceremony without the Mass. (Ted’s only comment on the wedding and the reception was that he had never seen so many black people together at one time except in the news photographs of the crowd listening to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Tony and I probably did have an unusually large number of African-American friends, because we both belonged to Washington’s integrated Capital Press Club. The organization had been founded as an alternative to the National Press Club, because the latter institution had a virtually all-white membership at the time and was also closed to women.) My father-in-law’s best friend took my hand outside the church and said, “I’d give anything to have a woman look at me just once in my lifetime the way you looked at Tony in there.” Who would have been churlish enough to spoil such a joyful and promising day with talk or thoughts of religious and nonreligious principles?