Is Estrangement the New Jewish Identity?

Josh Corey might be surprised to find himself quoted at Faithhacker (as he doesn’t often self-identify as a terribly affiliated Jew), but this morning I cannot stop thinking about a recent post from his blog… so I’m directing you there now. I think it might lead to an interesting conversation.

Josh was at the same conference I attended this week, but he managed to attend a panel I was sorry to miss (chock-full of the poets I linked on Monday), “Nu? What’s New About Jewish Poetry?”

He begins his description like this:

At first I was irritated with what I took for the panelists' devotion to a Jewish identity heavily invested in a kind of perverse (but all too common) nostalgia for the immigrant experience and even the Holocaust. Since for me what's most difficult and alienating about my Jewishness has to do with the disintegration of the legacy of the Jewish left—the fact that names like Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin have been succeeded by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Ariel Sharon—I was impatient with what seemed to be their preoccupation with the past.

But then his thought process shifts. He continues a little later:

By panel's end, I was actually feeling surprisingly warm and fuzzy about the panel and my Jewishness, because we are all united in complex layers of self-estrangement and attachment. One of the panelists, I can't remember who, used the example of the Jewish mother who embraces and criticizes at the same time. I did ask a less angry version of my question and got some good answers—Ilya's was brief and to the point: "I choose diaspora, a new diaspora," and I think that comes close to expressing my own position vis-a-vis my Jewishness. One is never entirely unconscious of difference, and there is a special difference in the difference you feel from your fellow Jews—a difference that unites us…

And this is very very interesting to me. In many of my posts here, there is this idea (which I sometimes think of as a chip-on-the-shoulder) of being “outside” the Jewish mainstream. Typically, I consider this “my” issue and not a trend.

But it attaches to issues of affiliation, denomination, observance, and intermarriage. It connects to how I relate to the non-Jewish world. It pushes me to be critical of myself and other Jews. It compells me to seek out other fence-sitters, and individual ways of practicing my faith. It causes me to approach Judaism in a pretty academic/thinky way.

But what if this isn’t such an extreme and unusual position? What if it isn’t just me? What if this is a new Jewish identity? What if this is an overwhelming reaction/relationship young Jews have to the nostalgia of previous generations, the tropes and stereotypes, the political climate?

What if we feel most Jewish… when we feel most alone?