March 27, 2008
Yiddishist Michael Wex once wrote that his column in the Forward is “structured on the talmudic principle of ‘that reminds me.’” That’s why, he wrote, he might start out talking about Yiddish curses and end up talking about driving a car.
I am starting to feel the same way about the presidential race, which started out as a referendum on four (now five) years of war and a tanking economy and has lately been about Barack Obama’s relationship with his former pastor. And I definitely feel that way about my columns, which lately start out talking about Obama but end up being about the ways in which Jews behave in synagogue, on line, and in the voting booth.
And that reminds me of a conversation I had this week with Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America. The ZOA is demanding that Obama resign from his Chicago church over remarks its former pastor made about America, Zionism, the AIDS virus, and Louis Farrakhan. The ZOA’s press release had a curious P.S. by Klein, which this week he expanded into an op-ed that appears on the ZOA Web site.
Klein refutes Obama’s statement about “the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.” According to Klein, the Philadelphia of Wright’s youth was “hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright’s anger and what I describe as his hatred.”
That’s how we learn that Klein and Wright went to the same elite public high school in Philadelphia. Klein describes it as a “virtually all-white school” that attracts “the most serious academic students in the city.” When Klein attended, a few years after Wright, its student population was 80 percent Jewish. Klein relates that Wright’s father was a “prominent pastor” and his mother a high school teacher and administrator.
“African-Americans suffered, many even horrifically, in the past,” writes Klein. “But Rev. Wright was not one of them.”
I suggested to Klein that this was a non sequitur in a news release that raised troubling questions about Wright and, more to the point, about Obama. And that it was more than slightly presumptuous for a member of the school’s white Jewish majority to claim to understand the experience of one of its few African-Americans.
Because if Klein is suggesting that Wright hasn’t “earned” his anger, you can say American Jews, like Klein, have no business being passionate advocates for Israel. We don’t live there, haven’t fought in its wars, and do not face the daily threat of terrorism or rocket attacks. In fairness to Klein and the Rev. Wright, the tug of peoplehood often proves stronger than one’s personal experience. That’s why an American Jew becomes a Zionist; that’s why a middle-class black might feel compelled to speak for those less well off.
Klein said he was merely pointing out that there is no “excuse” for Wright’s worst rhetoric (although, I insisted, that would be true no matter his background). And Klein reminded me that he is the son of Holocaust survivors and hardly grew up well to do.
Klein’s op-ed is a curious echo of one of the central themes of the Obama candidacy, if not his campaign: authenticity. As the son of a black father and white mother, Obama’s racial identity has been a double-edged sword. Obama grew up in diverse communities in Hawaii and abroad, but not in what most people would consider a “black” neighborhood. African-American commentators have spoken about his need to prove his “blackness”; indeed, some critics say Obama joined the Afrocentric church to shore up his bona fides and advance his political career on Chicago’s South Side.
Obama also takes it on the chin from whites, who see how he cozied up to radicals and rabble-rousers during his political rise and assume he shares their extreme views. When Obama writes, in his memoir, that he understood the “suppressed rage” of the black activists he was meeting as a young community organizer, some take this as evidence of deep-felt emotions that will bubble up were he to make it to the White House.
There’s a cottage industry of memoirs by Jewish leaders who remember their “radical” days and the way their views matured over time. (Klein himself told me how he was drawn to the radical side of the antiwar movement in the 1960s.) Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi and You Don’t Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right by CLAL’s Rabbi Brad Hirschfield come to mind. Both writers are honest about the attractions of Jewish extremism — and why they put it behind them. Both emerge as stronger and more credible thinkers and advocates for having wrestled with their community’s baser instincts.
Perhaps the weakest part of Obama’s important speech on race was his condescending statement that “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” It goes against the thrust of his speech, in which he seemed to say, “I can’t disown the black community, but I do insist, as a role model and perhaps as president, that we raise the level of discourse and channel our understandable anger into more constructive forms of protest and activism.”