I am not going to write a family biography here, but I think a few highlights may be illustrative of the nuance of belonging and disbelonging (to use a term being popularized by my friend Roberto Bedoya, Secretary of Belonging on the National Cabinet of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture). My father was born in London, where his family had emigrated not long before from Poland. He had his nose broken so many times by anti-Jewish thugs that by the time he emigrated, the nose on his identity card photo looked like a smear, not an organ of breath. My grandmother was pregnant with my mother on the boat from Russia; she and my grandfather had run away under cover of night after her father was killed by Cossacks and my grandfather received a draft notice from the Czar's Army, which was a death sentence for Jews, frontline fodder. Through their early decades in the U.S.--uneducated, hard-working, dazed and never feeling anything one could call belonging--they were sadly able to share many stories of being turned away from jobs, restaurants, and accommodations on account of being Jews.
My father was a housepainter, one of many working-class Jews in our circle and family. I grew up in California, where our multiple generations settled into one crowded house bought on the GI Bill after my father mustered out of the U.S. Navy, a citizen at last. We lived two blocks from a Catholic school, where in pre-Vatican II days the catechism included condemning the Jews for killing Christ. I am unable to count the times I was chased home when this point in the curriculum arrived. I am not going to detail the insults and slurs. I will mention that it has been my good fortune to work in many regions of this country with many different types of people, and I believe that it sheer ignorance, utter lack of exposure, that led me to hear many years ago in the hills of Kentucky that Jews carry the mark of the beast. But I also want to say that ignorance and lack of exposure take many forms. I have heard many such things in towns and cities large and small, and know that what I have heard is only a fraction of what is believed or expressed in my absence. My greatest sadness is to hear such things from companions on the left.
I imagine many of you could tell a rich and nuanced story of personal heritage and ancestral experience that can't be summed up by a single word, whether Jew, white, Black, Muslim, Latino, Asian, or any other large racial or religious category (and of course I have not even mentioned categories such as gender and orientation). And I imagine many of these stories will have as much to say about why we are aligned so strongly with a vision of justice tempered by love (to quote the Reverend James Lawson's beautiful trope) as my own does. As Bernie Sanders' story does.
I am in no way equating my experience with anyone else's, nor am I suggesting some type of ranking of the pain of disbelonging in this country. Only that it is incumbent on us to do justice to the truth in all its complexity and contradiction. One of my personal visions of heaven on earth is to imagine a day when all of us are invited to share those stories in fullness and respect, when we find ways to talk with and about each other that honor these truths in fullness.
Avishai Cohen and Mark Guiliana perform "Come Together" by the Beatles at a 2007 concert in Germany. (It starts with a string bass solo, FYI.)
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