LITMIR.BIZ

      3

       An Intimate Accusation

      The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was thirty-nine, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age fourteen, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a foot soldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.

      As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice, and at college he was drawn to the Communist Party, which is how John Marqusee ended up with Janet Morand, Ed and Olga’s daughter, the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-Communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean War at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who had stood stubbornly by his side when his life seemed most precarious.

      They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, reached a deal and agreed to name names. “To this day we regret the mutual decision we made,” my mother wrote. “It has been a source of incredible pain and shame.” When my father, forty-five years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. “I fucked it up,” he moaned. The note of helplessness went right through me. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he’d made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.

      In the early 1960s, somehow having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home, a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother both threw themselves into the struggle in the American South, raising money, organizing meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964 my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed up by his participation in the Selma march a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, who for me in those days included everyone from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael.

      All of which partly—but only partly—explains why, when he lowered the boom on me in the autumn of 1967 by suggesting I was a self-hating Jew, it came as an uncushioned blow, an attack out of nowhere, or out of a place of which I was previously unaware. For my parents, as for others of their generation, the post-World War II realization of the scale and nature of the holocaust had prompted a return to organized Judaism. They felt a duty to respect and preserve this entity that had come so close to extinction, a need to embrace Judaism more explicitly, more positively, coupled with shame at the very idea of trying to escape one’s Jewishness—when the Nazis had shown that it was inescapable. It was decided that I would be sent to Sunday school and receive the kind of Jewish education of which my parents themselves had no experience. Like others of my generation, I was expected to pay the price for their renewed sense of Jewishness. As a result of this, I quickly came to know more about Judaism than they did.

      The first step for a young couple newly resident in the suburbs (we lived in Westchester County, twenty miles north of New York City) was joining a temple. Interestingly, my parents’ first choice was a Reconstructionist congregation. This fourth major branch of organized American Jewry, the only one born and bred entirely in the USA, defined Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, left ultimate beliefs about the deity up to the individual, and stressed Jewish “peoplehood” and the centrality of building Israel. Crucially for my parents, it also embraced an ethic of social responsibility.

      Reconstructionism was then in its infancy, and the congregation we joined was a small one, housed in an old mansion in a neglected neighborhood. I remember it as dark and cavernous, with creaking wooden floors and classes held in rooms without blackboards. The guiding spirit here was the rabbi, portly and smiling but nonetheless in deadly and perpetual earnest. I knew my parents respected him as a man of ideals and integrity. I was enrolled not only in Sunday school, where we learned Torah stories, but also in Hebrew classes. These were taught by an Israeli woman with a heavy accent and a heavier hand. I suspect we were even more incomprehensible to her than she was to us. When one of my classmates just couldn’t fathom the difference between ch as in church and ch as in chutzpah, she berated him and he broke down in tears. I remember feeling profoundly relieved that I had been able to master this alien sound and had escaped, for the moment, the verbal lash.

      In contrast to my own weekly routine, the only synagogue activities my parents took part in were the High Holidays, Passover (Reconstructionism favored a communal seder) and occasional meetings with our Sunday school teachers. It must have been in the course of one of these that complaints about the Israeli teacher’s methods were voiced, and subsequently we had a visit from the jolly rabbi, who tried to explain to us that different cultures had different expectations of behavior. The teacher had been spoken to, but the students also had to do their part.

      Sometime after this, my parents decided to leave the Reconstructionists and join the local Reform temple, the most popular in the area and the one whose approach to religion was least likely to disturb our family priorities. (“It was also all tied to being a giver to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and the United Jewish Appeal,” my mother wrote.) The Reconstructionist rabbi asked for a chance to talk my parents out of the switch, and they must have felt they owed him at least a meeting. He came to our house with his usual smile, shook my hand, and joked with dad. Then I was sent upstairs to my room while the adults met downstairs in private. I was aware that for my parents this was an unpleasant task. And I felt complicit: in some way this was being done for my sake, to give me an easier life, because I’d chafed under the Israeli Hebrew teacher. But years later, I learned that I had nothing to do with it. “The rabbi decided that John should be bar mitzvahed,” my mother recalled. “He was then

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