Jewcy hosted its first lit cafe at the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side last night. We read from various pieces published in the mag, drank Jell-O shots whenever someone unwittingly spoke a "banned" word or construction ("Trotsky," "neocon," "Hitler," "Manhattan is an island ghetto," etc.)
One of the more interesting discussions occurred in response to Jeff Koyen's "Israeli Asshole" essay, which argued that in places like Myanmar — where hotels post signs saying they won't cater to obnoxious, peremptory Israelis — what we're seeing is not old-fashioned Jew-hatred but the equivalent of anti-Americanism. This is a good thing in that Israel has now taken on its own national and cultural identity divorced from the aery and baroque tendencies of the Diaspora, and so even mean generalizations about Israelis are not ipso facto generalizations about Jews.
Think of how far, then, the tribe has come in such a short time. Henry James surveyed a ghettoized (chug!) Second Avenue at the turn of the century and decried the pungency of Yiddish vaudeville and "hard glitter of Israel" that had everywhere transformed his beloved, abandoned city. What would the Victorian novelist of expatriation have made of Menachem Begin or Golda Meier, or Ariel Sharon, I wonder.
There were a few Israelis on hand last night, who, despite seeing themselves mercilessly treated in Koyen's piece, stood the very picture of good humor. By and large they agreed that the Jewish-American luftmensch has got less in common with a retired IDF soldier than he does with a Hapsburg in Vienna, or a skittish bellboy in southeast Asia. It then occurred to me that the Jewish relationship to motherland on the one hand and exile in the United States on the other was an inversion of the Irish relationship.
Not long after Henry James' nostril-wrinkle, James Joyce remarked that second and third generation Irish-Americans in New York had little in common with Dubliners. Consider the Hibernian stereotypes now. The Diaspora Irish are seen as brusque and rude renditions of their sweet-tempered originals. (The Notre Dame mascot could go a few rounds with any Jim Crow depiction of a pickaninny for the simian nature of its caricature.) Yet cultural assertiveness was conditioned in the orphans of Eire not by messianic, Jabotinskyite rhetoric — "we do not have to apologize for anything" — by a hellish immigration and assimilation experience in the 19th century. The racism of "Irish Need Not Apply" went a long way toward yielding the kitsch of "Kiss Me, I'm Irish," not to mention the green beer and the clean-up crews of St. Patrick's Day parades.
My brother-in-law is from Moville, a smallish town in Donegal. He's constantly embarrassed at pubs in Manhattan when the brogue gives him away to some investment banker who thinks true blood flows black and tan under the skin. The look on his face at moments like these is the closest approximation to the look on an Israeli's face when some aliyah-averse JewBu talks of "one people, one destiny." (The Sabra's response to this is always the same: Bullshit.)
So in honor of this holiest of holy days, I offer a tribute to the complicated comforts of Diaspora and the hard-knock glories of ethnic authenticity. Below you'll find the Irish band Black 47 performing "Funky Ceili."