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The much advertised statistic is that 50% of Jewish marriages today are interfaith, though I think this figure is already somewhat dated. Websites such as “Half Jew,” “Who’s A Jew?” and “Jew Or Not A Jew?” proliferate.

This indicates to me that American Jews are approaching a “tipping point” in their American history– not so much one of losing Jewish identity (which the Rabbis are always concerned about) – but of having tweeked the noses of the mainstream too often by showing up at their Christmas dinners, and that, sooner rather than later there will be the historically unfair, unequal, and unimaginable reaction.

It wouldn’t be the first time or the first place this happened.

Quo Vadis?

On the other hand, with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel at the point of “blending in” almost completely with the American custard, there is a growing possibility that American Exceptionalism will absorb us peacefully and permanently, even as Jews are not being so comfortably taken up in countries such as France, or Germany, or even in Canada – all places where there are growing threats from Moslem immigrants.

Moslem anti-semitism is an oxymoron and also an historical contradiction; in the Middle Ages (especially in Spain, but later in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire) Moslems, if not the Jews’ best friends, let them into their circles of power and they more or

The Golden Door

less accepted each other. Not so now, though here in America, the seas remain calm: Since September 11, 2001, Christians and Jews look at Moslems as their “common enemy.”

Now, some quick conclusions about my own “brief” ancestry: the Chosen People, the People of the Book, those who were here To quote the Arabs: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

At The Creation and who wrote about it.

Now the Christians are our friends. If it were up to me, I’d encourage their immigration to Israel.

Jews, as always, are a work in progress: a building which has been torn down so many times, it is the wonder of the Universe Here in America these days people divorce because they can’t stand each other, not because they have lately “discovered”

that anyone even attempts to reconstruct it again. But throughout history Jews have been described as a “stiff necked” people, where their spouse’s, or “significant other’s,” or “partner’s” ancestors came from. Both informally and formally, the walls that who, despite our losses, have refused to disappear. If this was an Irish trait, they’d sing about it; if this was Italian, there would be used to separate all of have been peeling away. “At least he’s not Catholic,” has been replaced by “At least he reads the same lots of T-shirts saying, “Kiss Me. I’m stiff necked.”

Bible,” which has been replaced by “At least he’s white,” which has been replaced by: “At least he’s of the opposite sex,” and has But because it is a Jewish trait, being stiff necked is meant to mean: “We have a noose waiting for your stiff neck. Why won’t finally arrived at: “At least my son is finally happy.”

you put it in there so we can break it.”

And all this has evolved in barely three generations.

And the answer throughout the centuries was always, “No!”

And here, I hope, it rests.

Before the Holocaust they used to call it “Jewish Paranoia.”

The magic of America can be seen in these pages, admittedly more in the Dixieland sections than in the recent history of my If “they” left Jews alone for a while, we’d disappear – but they won’t – so they’re stuck with us and we’re stuck with each family who entered the Golden Door just about 120 years ago – although, given the recent influx of immigrants, we’re beginning other.

to look like Old Americans.

So, whatever we are: the descendants of ancient Semites, Canaanites, Slavs, Tatars, Egytian slaves, Italian converts, Greeks, Still, questions for further research are emerging, both about our recent European ancestors and our American.

or any of the rest – we’re still here.

One of the most intriguing in these days of DNA analysis has to do with the genetic composition of the descendants of The Holocaust was the worst event to ever happen to the Jews in the entire span of their existence, not just because of the European Jews.

numbers killed, or the horror involved, or the deliberateness, but – for those who enjoy learning about their families’ pasts – because Every ethnic group that I’ve encountered finds ways to separate parts of their sub-groups from other sub-groups – on many of the destruction of at least two thousand years of records which were kept in the synagogues they burned, preserved on the tomb-levels. Jews still talk formally about Sephardim and Askenazim, and informally trade complaints about “Galicianers” and stones they destroyed, remembered in the minds and spirits of the six million relatives they murdered in an historical instant.

“Litvaks.” But with the Holocaust still fresh in the Jewish mind (as it fades from the general public’s) these divisions are hardly Organizations such as YIVO in New York City, and Yad Vashem in the beleaguered “homeland” of Israel, are attempting to anything more than friendly jibes. Even the formerly cursed intermarriage (“She is dead to me. I am sitting Shiva for her,”) is reconstruct the connections: trying their best to fill in the enormous blanks that the Shoah, the Chisto-centric histories, and the fading as a memory, long after it has been left behind as a practice.

confusions of relocation, language, and persecution have left us. It’s a formidable task, and I wish them well in it.

On the other hand, Jews are distinctly aware of their different appearances and their various European origins, and the ques-I suspect that if we have any chance of being left alone, it will be here in the land of the Golden Door, where, I like to imagine, tions still remain, and only the field of genetics can resolve them. In a perfect world, the differences of a genetic mutation or two identifiable Jews will become a group worthy of no more comment than the Amish or the Mormons or the Pennsylvania Dutch, wouldn’t matter very much, and genetic similarities between Jews and Palestinians could become the Kumbaya moment that and that some day Jews too will be listed casually in family records along with mention of other ancestors.

brings both of them together.

But we’ll just have to wait and see about that. They say the German Jews were very patriotic during the First World War and Forget that it hasn’t worked with the Irish, the Spanish, or the Nigerians: it could still work for us.

some wore their battle ribbons into the furnaces; and even though many German Jews were intermarried, it didn’t save most of But don’t hold your breath.

them.

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