THE JEWISH QUESTION

This essay is not about the integration of Jews into the societies of 19th Century Europe; it is also not about Karl Marx and his essay On the Jewish Question; and it is emphatically not about Jean Paul Sartre’s Semite and Anti-Semite. It is, however, to a certain extent about the Seinfeld episode with the dentist who converted to Judaism so he could tell Jewish jokes to his patients.

This is the Jewish question: Have you met any nice Jewish girls? I have been asked this question many times, but only on the coasts, far away from where I grew up in the high plateau and Rocky Mountain regions of Montana, Wyoming and Utah. The question contains the implicit assumption that I am Jewish, and I have only been asked the Jewish question by people who are Jewish, usually someone who knows some nice Jewish girl and has also seen Fiddler on the Roof. Very few Jews live in the regions where I grew up, so I suppose it would not be surprising if all of the nice Jewish girls had already met and married someone by the time I became a logical suspect suitable for interrogation. How few you ask? One family of four and one bachelor diner owner in my hometown of Helena, as far as I know.

Although I have never been asked the Jewish question by a non-Jew, I have observed some behavior by non-Jews that clearly indicated, in retrospect, that they also assumed that I was Jewish, which brings me back to Fiddler on the Roof. Norm Jewison, a nice Canadian goy, directed of the movie version of Fiddler. A syndicate of Jewish backers bought the movie rights and asked Jewison, assuming that he was Jewish, to direct it. In his Turner Classic Movies interview, Jewison gives a side-splitting account of the jaw-dropping reaction to his response, “You know that I am not Jewish, right?”

In Jewison’s case, at least in the instance of being offered the job to direct Fiddler, the assumption embedded in the Jewish question worked in his favor. For the most part, in my life, the assumption has also worked in my favor, and sometimes produced similarly comical results. Shortly after arriving at Williams College, my small freshman political science class, in keeping with the college ethic, went to dinner at the professor’s house. During the usual get to know you chit-chat the professor asked in his thick ex-patriate Austrian accent, where I had gone to prep school, guessing a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. “Prep school? I went to Helena Senior High School in Helena, Montana.” “Really?” he said in obvious amazement and some disbelief, “You seem to have a well-trained mind.” That comment can tell you a whole lot about the then prevailing stereotype of Montana on the east coast.

A few years later, while considering the possibility of graduate school, the chairman of the philosophy department called me into his office to talk about schools, and also about academics as a profession generally. At one point the conversation took a strange turn. Out of the blue, he put the question: “What do you make of the fact that all of the professors in the department that you have worked with come from Christian backgrounds and two are Catholic?” I was tempted to say, well my grandmother was Catholic and I learned a lot from her, so what would you expect me to make of it? My Spidey sense counseled silence, so I waited for him to answer his own question, which he had a history of doing. It was not all that usual for this professor, who had a degree in theology as well as philosophy, to come at something sideways, but this question was a little more sideways than most, so I said, not committing to anything, “I hadn’t really thought about it”, just to see where he was going. He then went into a kind of confessional mode and said that, because of the way he was raised, he only recently was able to stop categorizing people by their last names. After that brief statement, this professor from a starchy New England family who had, perhaps, the biggest influence on my thinking at college and afterwards, went on to write a glowing letter of reference that assured my acceptance to all the law schools and graduate schools to which I had applied. Not until many years later did I realize that he also had assumed that I was Jewish. Did his interest in my career somehow assuage guilt over a self-discovered latent anti-semitism?

In law school, students and professors alike continued to assume that I was Jewish. In general, this worked in my favor because they all assumed, in keeping with stereotypes, that I was smarter and more capable because of it. Professor Kaplan, who recruited me to be a research and teaching assistant for his undergraduate course, was quite surprised by my German Lutheran upbringing, but then became fascinated by the cultural differences and similarities. He grew up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Woody Allen, with some of the same neuroses and sense of humor and exactly the same accent. Kaplan eventually paved the way for work at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford Campus, and then a position at the Department of Justice that I declined in favor of a better offer, economically, at private law firm, the most prominent partners of which --- were Jews.

My first and best mentor in the firm was a semi-observant Jew. At the first firm function his wife turned to me and asked, “Have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?” I felt it necessary, at this point, to make full disclosure. She was obviously disappointed, but then brightened and said, “But have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?”

Oddly enough, she did turn out to have a connection to the woman I married a few years later. Her mother taught English Literature at the University of Illinois. One of her best students, a descendant of Mayflower era Puritans and recently arrived Irish Catholics, later became my wife.

Several years later, on a business trip to Chile, one of the larger vineyard owners of Palestinian extraction hosted a relaxing afternoon at one of the best restaurants on a hillside near his plantations. After a pleasant afternoon enjoying the view and some very good Chilean wines, my gracious host put his hand on my shoulder, leaned toward me and said in his broken English, “We are brothers.” I said, in my less than adequate Spanish “We are brothers?” He said, “Yes we are brothers. Your people and my people come from the same place and the same tradition.” I said, “The same place? You came from Montana?” He said, “No, not from the mountains. My people come from Palestine. Your people come from Israel. We are brothers.” After I explained and we had a good laugh at the misunderstanding, my host said, “Well, it’s too bad. We know the Jewish lawyers are the best ones, so maybe we need somebody else.”

Perhaps fate predestined a second marriage to a nice Jewish girl, which came about in 2000. With some trepidation, I prepared to meet her conservative-orthodox parents, not sure at all what the reaction would be. They turned out to be wonderfully warm people with pretty much the same basic values as the parents that raised me. At the end of that first meeting, my future mother-in-law took my future wife aside, smiled mischievously and said, “He looks Jewish." I believe that she was thinking, "He could be Jewish.”

My mother and siblings connected immediately with Roslyn, seeing what I saw, and universally concluded that I was “marrying up.” Mom, in particular, liked the match. A year or two after the wedding, inspired by the Friday at sundown prayers that Roslyn and her father did every week by telephone, I started having long distance Sunday at noon “services” with Mom. She was pleased, but kept asking why I was suddenly doing this. Eventually, I told her about the Friday prayers. With no sense of irony, she said, “That Roslyn! I really like her! She will make a good Christian out of you yet!” And she just might. And maybe there is a place in the afterlife where both mothers will get their wish.