Immigrants from the Woodstock Nation
Bush, Lawrence
IMMIGRANTS FROM THE WOODSTOCK NATION A Jewish journey from the 60s to the 80s LAWRENCE BUSH I begin with my acid trip not to be lurid or audacious or irreverent or for the shock value, but...
...But the Jewish Currents mentschn were liberated, not defeated, by the truth...
...Jewish Currents was a periodical that turned up predictably in the homes of Communist and former Communist Jews, along with such books as The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, The Power Elite, Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht or Mission to Moscow...
...We beat the warmakers so why quibble...
...The New Left became America's Randle MacMurphy...
...The Reconstructionists have even elevated this human "will to redemption" to godly status—it is, in a sense, their definition of God—and in their terms, I am no atheist...
...And is there anyone here who does not know the names of at least some of the Hebrew prophets...
...If we could quote Mao or Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bisseau about the role of folk culture in national liberation struggles, why not Chaim Zhitlovsky, for whom Yiddish was a vessel of revolutionary, national and romantic fervor, and who made what I think is the most sage, concise state-I ment about nationalism and interna-i tionalism to date: that the key to inter-nationalism is in the hyphen...
...In fact I think our notion of "cultural revolution" had real moral force in our advanced industrial society...
...The dose was heavy and my emotional grounding was insecure: I was 3,000 miles from home, without money, without glasses and eventually without clothing as I ran about the streets of Los Angeles, stark naked, proclaiming the glories of creation to shocked passersby...
...IMMIGRANTS FROM THE WOODSTOCK NATION A Jewish journey from the 60s to the 80s LAWRENCE BUSH I begin with my acid trip not to be lurid or audacious or irreverent or for the shock value, but because I represent a particular subgroup of American Jewish life...
...Let there be peace, oh, please...
...Then finally, mercifully, I passed out...
...His subject: the anti-gay bias of the New Right...
...And their survival was my hope...
...how to sit on the hyphen in Zhitlovsky's formula for Inter-nationalism without losing our balance...
...What can be the good news...
...I ask questions of Larry Bush to learn about his struggles, his sexuality, his human-ness, his community...
...Perhaps, yes, ethnic renewal in America is like the growth of religious fundamentalism: the clutching to obsolete tradition by a desperately alienated public, the reflex of a drowning populace...
...Je pane seulement frangais et anglais and a bissel Yiddish...
...In short, we have vanquished our Jewish guilt...
...In this age of totalitarianism, after Hitler, after Stalin, after the corruption of so many of our dreams, do you really trust anyone to do unto you in the name of a better world...
...we were "freaks" in "straight" society, and by and large we viewed that straight society as a collection of voluntarily-committed inmates...
...support for fascism in El Salvador and U.S...
...The same knowledge of Jewish history that makes me appreciative of the American people's democratic achievements also makes me painfully sensitive to our failures, to the oppression that is rampant in our country...
...Moreover, the New Left did have tremendous impact upon the American political scene, despite our eventual and sudden disintegration into sectarianism and impotence...
...Jewish tradition teaches us to open our door to Elijah, to the poor and hungry...
...And when I struggle against injustice or unfair privilege or outright villainy in America, my commitment is no longer based on some guilt about my "white skin privilege"—it is based on my identity, my name itself...
...The responsibility to be a "light unto the nations" remains ours...
...The words were haunting but the history was mythical...
...That was in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan had four million members...
...We knew...
...How many of the same prejudices—the same stereotypes—that led the Babushkins to alter their name now hung on the gay Larry Bush's byline like a pink triangle on his breast...
...Knowing about Hitler, feeling my knowledge about Hitler, I cannot now spell America with a "k" as I did during the 60s...
...I would never advocate drug use—the casualties of drug abuse have been too, too many—but I do not regret my own experience...
...But with a Jewish sigh of hope, I remain a committed radical in America...
...My grandmother, at 89, often warns me that she can't make a revolution against old age...
...Of course, our marginality, whether self-imposed or historically caused, was not solely responsible for the demise of our movement...
...And if our stomachs did not turn, if we could not rouse ourselves to protest, then we were indeed voluntarily committed to evil, to an insane asylum...
...MacMurphy, like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement two years later, shows how the word "fuck" can topple a repressive edifice...
...He would not disavow my people, not as long as we were suffering...
...And if I succeeded that night in "perfecting" myself, the New Age would be ushered in...
...It is only within the past two years that I've begun to recognize that my "born again" Jewish consciousness is not merely my idiosyncracy but reflects a movement-in-the-making...
...Fate tested me on that score very recently...
...What if some editor or publisher confused me for him, thought me gay and discriminated against me...
...You'd be spared the statistics about cancer, suicide, wife-beating, rape, prison conditions, unemployment, radioactive leaks, drug abuse, alcoholism, homelessness, hopelessness...
...Co-optation did, too—at the Ronald Reagan victory party following the November 1980 election, the Republican Party band was playing "The Age of Aquarius" from the rock musical "Hair" to announce the dawning of their Neanderthal counterculture...
...I could understand their blind faith in the Soviet Union as hubris...
...But perhaps our failure to reach out to traditional sources of humanism, both religious and revolutionary, was historically inevitable, especially for Jewish youth...
...For them, continuity means the preservation of resources and the continuing interpretation of progressive Jewish traditions by younger generations...
...So I end as I began, with a personal anecdote...
...Wise guys who go around saying things like 'Workers of the world unite,' or 'Every guy wants to screw his mother,' or ? = mc2,' obviously choose to go for broke...
...What about the 1909 Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, the first major labor struggle in the New York garment industry, led by and consisting of Jewish and Italian women and girls...
...Ahh, hopelessness.-Yes, it is true that the fact that McDonald's has sold enough hamburgers to stack up to the moon has nauseated my idealism...
...the widespread effort of the New Right today to promote censorship in schools and libraries across the U.S...
...Schappes beautifully formulated this as the conflict between the prophets and those who stoned the prophets...
...I weep to protest the laughter of television commercials that proclaim carbonated sodas to be more precious than human blood...
...1 agree...
...Knowing how many different kinds of patches were worn in Hitler's concentration camps—red for leftwingers, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, brown for gypsies, pink for homosexuals, yellow for Jews—I cannot now ignore the rainbow sign that unites the peoples of the world in struggle against holocaust, for I belong to one of the primary color bands...
...Recalling at my seder last Pesach that we were slaves in Egypt, I cannot now ignore the awful residues of Black enslavement in America...
...the sad reminders about growing old in America, being young in America, living with the constant threat of nuclear holocaust and economic disaster in America...
...Eventually he is martyred, but not before he has inspired Chief Bromden to break with silence and flee to freedom...
...Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew...
...Don't forget Chief Bromden, the Native American who broke with silence and ran for freedom...
...We knew that words can topple walls in America...
...white working class by the Weathermen and their above-ground supporters...
...I could see my grandmother's odyssey to the goldineh medineh of America as a kind of acid trip, as described in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" ("Picture yourself on a boat on a river...
...They began to think, to question and re-examine, and they challenged others in their camp to do likewise...
...Instead we were first and foremost rejectionists: rejecting our parents' consumerism not as a symptom of their oppression and ours, but as a symbol of their participation in the system...
...do it, our politicos preached...
...With a groan of realism, I embrace this country as a democratic haven...
...I believed these to be the H-bombs, coming closer to ground zero, growling their terrible warning...
...Nixon, Mao, Martians, God...
...On the other hand, the simple act of Jewish affirmation for young Americans today seems to me to be a political act...
...the fact that Richard M. Nixon's name is mounted on a plaque up there has curbed my utopianism...
...My Jewishness is secular, humanistic and intellectually, politically and culturally radical...
...Mostly I want to trace the journey that some of us have made from hippy consciousness to Jewish consciousness...
...In that year, during a summertime of crosscountry pilgrimage, I took LSD, not for the first time...
...To save my skin from prison, and to regain some place in the world, I phoned my parents from jail...
...And what of Joshua's shofar sounding at the gates of Jericho...
...Oi vey...
...Niemoller, now 90 (and active, I understand, in the West German peace movement), ended up in Nazi camps for seven years...
...I believed that all activity on the globe had paused and that all human consciousness was aware of and focused upon me and my endeavor...
...individualistic society of ours, such continuity is itself a "countercultural" impulse and requires sweaty effort to happen...
...He offers as the antidote to this "relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony"— questions and tears...
...Didn't I have to defend my name against this dybbuk...
...Where was our sense of history...
...For we must be realistic—our prospects for continuity are only as great as the progressive aspects of the new Jewish renaissance, and that new progressive Jewish movement is very small indeed...
...And I quoted to him the words of the Austrian Auschwitz "survivor" Jean Amery (I write "survivor" in quotation marks because Amery ended up a suicide): that the Auschwitz tatoo on his arm "reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information . . . more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence...
...Now I should personalize this odyssey into Jewish consciousness, since for me it has been a most personal journey...
...So for us, Jewish affirmation involves a process of voluntarism and active seeking...
...The first lures of Jewish identity— usually very personal, the stirrings of nostalgia, the memories of family ceremonies, the discovery of a grandparent's anecdotal treasure house— make the process of Jewish renewal so very powerful, especially for young, mostly middle-class people whose prior political commitments have been by and large abstract and full of self-denial...
...Yet for all these drawbacks, there has been a crucial breakthrough: We have made the commitment to Jewish identity, recognizing the dynamic bond between our politics and our heritage...
...Larry Bush was gay...
...The central, almost exclusive focus of the American Jewish community in Israel, especially after 1967, seemed to make Jewish identity irrelevant or even antithetical to our central focus on anti-imperialism...
...We were not so much confronted by an assimilationist culture as were our immigrant grandparents, as we were born into that culture, already deeply alienated from our roots...
...In 1962 Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a metaphor for my generation's alienation from capitalist America...
...Our alternatives to the mainstream culture were lovely but flimsy: flower power, two-day rock festivals, eight-hour enlightenment trips on LSD...
...Again I return to the metaphor of my LSD trip, at the risk of sounding like a sentimental codger...
...I take comfort from the Passover season, when Jews all over the world are sitting together to express not their despair but their hope for liberation...
...My boyfriend's a doctor," he replies...
...Ours was the conceit of the precocious, of the new convert...
...But the sudden materialization of the other Larry Bush forced me to grapple with my own homophobia in a deep and immediate way...
...In his memoir, Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture, he identifies with our tribe in the opening chapter: "Jews, especially first-bom male Jews, have to make a choice very quickly in life whether to go for the money or go for broke...
...They had managed to ignore, or even defend, Stalin's crimes against the Soviet people, against the Soviet Communist Party and especially against the Soviet Jews...
...Like Adam, like Eve, we bite the apple and gain both wisdom and shame...
...We have to pursue our principles, search for our self-determination, despite hardship and possible isolation...
...We knew that one burning draft card could give a hot foot to Kissinger, Nixon, Haig and Westmoreland because, as Mao told us, "A single spark can start a prairie fire...
...I would call that the working class...
...So poorly had I performed as messiah that God had simply cast me off, as if to say, "I'm not gonna save or destroy the world on account of this zhlub...
...Our Jewishness is more than a defensive reaction to anti-Semitism...
...The magazine was desperate for a young person to get involved...
...And that "rejection"—the realization of my utter irrelevance following a delusion of such grandeur—was most difficult to absorb...
...yet the Methuselahs of her movement are giving the Angel of Death one hell of a time...
...When the police came and handcuffed me, I preached to them...
...I still had LSD in my blood, enough to still believe in God, and I was crushed by my irrelevance...
...Similarly, the impact of the Women's Movement upon America's culture and legal system is hard to exaggerate...
...Now I prefer to be an adult...
...To have been able to manipulate my psyche like a Colorforms set and emerge with all the parts was a frightening but extraordinary experience...
...Abbie Hoffman, a pacesetter for my generation (however critically we might evaluate his political strategies), ended his acid trip—six years underground in flight from a drug bust—also proclaiming, "Yahoo, I'm a Jew...
...Momma," says the Jewish son to his mother, "for you I have some good news and some bad news...
...political tactics ranging trom Abbie Hoffman's dumping of dollars on the New York Stock Exchange to "armed propaganda," that is, terrorism...
...Capitalism teaches us to keep a fence between our door and the people...
...In fact, our focus on "national oppression" sometimes reached absurd extremes—I remember a period during which I could not sing Woody Guthrie's folk anthem, "This Land Is Your Land," without being criticized for "covering up" the injustices of American history from a white supremacist perspective...
...More generally, to have, felt the thrill of idealism-in-action, to have believed naively and deeply in the goodness of people (under 30), left me philosophically impervious to cynicism and materialism...
...So 1 landed in my padded cell for a night...
...That was hubris...
...They had been a Communist magazine, as worshipful of the false messiah of Soviet socialism as any fundamentalist might be of his or her god...
...Once upon a time, I thought I would participate in that cause as a member of the Youth Nation...
...The moming after my madness, when I awoke naked in my padded cell, the principal thought I had was not of panic about being in jail, or of shame for being so foolish, but rather, of disappointment...
...how to foster ethnic pride without breeding ethnic chauvinism...
...We are removed by at least a generation from what I call "organic" Jewishness—the Yiddish language, its literature and music, the pioneering days of Zionism and early socialism, raw anti-Semitism, etc...
...Revolution, my grandmother taught me, is not like brewing a cup of coffee...
...Was I going to alter my byline and thereby disavow this man...
...Liebman, but unlike him I applaud this tendency insofar as "rightwards" means toward moderation and the acknowledgement of complexity and away from what Lenin called the "infantile leftism" that plagues middle-class revolutionaries...
...Atheists all, they have no faith in an afterlife, and so they stay alive to promote their secular alternative: continuity...
...Again, the vehemence of the New Right assault against feminist gains serves as a testament to the progressive impact of the movement of the 60s and early 70s...
...how to embrace Israel's regenerative political and cultural influence upon us while grappling with the challenge that Zionist "normalization" presents to our Jewish identities...
...compared to the prophetic ideals they cherished, America needed a revolution...
...I want to examine what was real in my madness—the anguish that sparked it and the yearning for redemption that it represented...
...But when the reckoning came in the form of Khrushchev's 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress, in which he partially exposed Stalin's crimes...
...Second, with tears...
...In this fast-changing, youth-worshipping (in appearance only...
...How do I survive my night of wild messianism and my morning of naked wretchedness...
...We hippies had thought we were a vanguard, the wave of the future...
...I want to examine the acid trip within the context of the 60s and apply whatever lessons I learn to the 80s, when the yearning for redemption is stronger than ever, the alienation is more widespread than ever, yet the true mashiach is not in view, perhaps not even yet envisioned...
...I ask questions of Jewish tradition, to help keep it fertile...
...And the mushroom cloud, the sign under which we were all born, cast a dark shadow across our futures, which in turn devalued our collective past...
...I am an immigrant from a padded cell who has settled down in a tradition of Yiddishkeit and mentschlichkeit, of history and bubbe meises, that now forms the inspirational core of my world view as much as Black blues form the core of our precious rock and roll...
...Shout," Joshua cried to his people, "for the Lord hath given you the city...
...Does our predicament simply illustrate the Jewish proverb in Nathan Ausubel's A Treasury of Jewish Folklore: "A drowning man will grab even for the point of a sword...
...But I'm not talking about payiss...
...This Jewish dialectic—the groan of realism, the sigh of hope—helps me gain an intimacy with my country, a radical patriotism for which, I believe, all progressives who seriously wish to win should strive...
...I did change my name from Larry Bush to Lawrence Bush, after meeting with Larry Bush, because I came to understand that my responsibility is not to be him, but to be in solidarity with him...
...My journey from the Woodstock Nation to Jewish Peoplehood does not bring me from LSD to Kabbalah, from the commune to the kibbutz, from the Merry Prankster bus to the Lubavitcher mitzvah-mobile...
...A Jewish man prayed to God," she said...
...So I ran out naked to the street, preaching to people...
...We believed we were the first to burn draft cards, the first to curse at walls...
...Putnam's Sons...
...Such a conflict was replayed last year as the tortured prophet Jacobo Timerman was stoned by the neo-conservative, beardless Jews at Commentary Magazine...
...Trade unionists and Catholics were next, and then the Nazis came for the pastor himself...
...It left me alone in the 80s, with a lifestyle made far less flexible by tfte economic crunch...
...Lawrence Bush is Assistant Editor of Jewish Currents Magazine and author of the forthcoming novel, Bessie, to be published by G.P...
...When we came to assert the leading role of women, as doubly-oppressed human beings, in progressive struggles, why did we limit our examples to Cuba or Vietnam...
...It was the world of history—radical history...
...We are an adult people, among the only adult peoples in the world, because of our questions and our tears...
...My Jewish identity, which first I clutched at as an "alternative" identity—an alternative to my alienation from the soulless corporate spirit that is our country's disease—is now bringing me closer to what is most healthy about America—its uneasy, rickety but precious democratic pluralism...
...This world of the Jewish left, even without senti-mentalization, seemed full of idealism and romance, of an abiding, prophetic humanism, of a search for values deeper than material gain, of revolutionary striving and revolutionary heartache—a complex spirit that seemed to mirror my own...
...So it was for me...
...as well as "Yippee, I'm still a hippy...
...my responsibility is not to surrender my "privilege," but to use so-called privilege towards the liberation of others, guided by Jewish ethics, so different from capitalist ethics...
...Most quests for knowledge seem to involve some such process of alienation, of detachment from our own experience...
...how to reconcile a Marxist class perspective with the Jewish prophetic tradition, with the sticky fact of tenacious Jewish liberalism despite Jewish upward mobility...
...Kesey's symbols of authority (unfortunately both misogynist and racist) were Nurse Ratchett and her Black orderlies, who enforced the rules of the ward...
...Alternately groaning with realism and sighing with hope, our grandparents became citizens of America...
...Such a view yielded political slogans like, "If you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem," political analyses like the "white skin privilege" charge leveled at the U.S...
...On a more personal note, 1 do not regret my acid trip, my participation in the counterculture...
...Perhaps the sheer complexity of every political and social question facing the world today should convince me of another of the Jewish dicta that Ausubel presents: "Silence is the fence around wisdom...
...I mean no sarcasm, nor by the stuffy wisdom of hindsight, a disavowal of the New Left...
...I believed, moreover, in the slogan of Chicago, 1968: "The whole world is watching...
...rejecting history as the progenitor of monopoly capitalism and imperialism rather than seeing it as the rape victim of imperialism...
...I ask questions of progressives who are stoned on certainties to warn them of the padded cell...
...Through manipulation, co-optation and strong-arm tactics, Ratchett and her goon squad kept the inmates— most of whom were voluntarily committed—well-behaved, full of self-loathing, sexually crippled and aspiring for "normalcy"—the ability to screen out or compromise with the madness of a hypocritical society...
...He was an ex-Mormon, not a Jew, so my metaphor is appropriate...
...and what was unreal in it—the Christ metaphor and the utter egocentricity of it...
...Just one century ago, the massive Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe began, bringing, by World War I, over two million Jewish pilgrims past that statue to that island...
...I was failing, I was failing utterly...
...How many young Jews, I wonder, were irrevocably alienated from the Jewish community by that shameful spectacle...
...Without even John Lennon, now...
...So please, God—give me a penny?' And God said, 'Wait a minute.' " Now, I've just recapitulated a sociological process of several years in two enthusiastic paragraphs...
...This was a movement that did use history—"herstory"—both to deepen its inner solidarity and to challenge both ideological and systemic sexism and anti-gay prejudice...
...Whereas in 1966, in an essay entitled, "Who Is a Jew...
...But perhaps my blithe treatment of the so-called "Jewish renaissance" in America reflects how natural the journey has felt for Jews from the Woodstock Nation...
...Watching other people eat tends to stir up the appetite...
...In 1977 the paper folded, only months after I joined its staff...
...Lord of the Universe, to you a thousand years is just a minute, and a million dollars is just a penny...
...Instead, I believed that I had discovered a Perfect System of Communication—a sort of instant intimacy based on making presumptuous remarks to people after peering (sans spectacles) into their inner souls...
...when their own dogmatic behavior, plus McCarthy's savagery, left them as isolated as I was in my padded cell...
...so our survivors were left watching reruns of Rebel Without a Cause and feeling downwardly mobile...
...My shame came in 1970, during the heyday of my "subgroup," when we had enough group identity to gain media labels: "Youth Nation," "Woodstock Nation," "the Movement," "the counterculture...
...What is this behavior if not the hallmark of political activism...
...we were, as the Jefferson Airplane sang to us, "Volunteers of America," a select generation...
...yet, as a novelist, as an editor who needs to recognize or generate story ideas, as a political activist with a headful of theory-practice-theory formulae and as a closet mystic, I made that passage from the personal to the general, from the subjective to the so-called objective, as often as a hobo rides the rails...
...In 1976 I was working on a radical monthly newspaper that was loosely, ideologically associated with the now-notorious Weather Underground and their above-ground support networks...
...I'm gay," says the son...
...Repression, both subtle and bloody, played a significant part...
...rejecting Jewish bourgeois values and forgetting Jewish prophetic values...
...Six times Abraham dared to protest until God agreed to spare the city if ten righteous men could be found there...
...In no time at all, oral history projects, historical works of art, drama, dance, fiction and film, and revivals of klezmer music, shundt theater and other aspects of Yiddish culture were blooming all over...
...I weep because while I have seen cruel laughter, I have never seen cruel tears...
...The Jewish people, like all others," wrote Morris U. Schappes in 1961, "has, since tribal days, been divided in various ways along class and social lines, with conflicts among them...
...Last summer I became a very happy fiction writer when a silly science fiction piece I wrote about human cloning, "Designer Genes," was accepted for publication in The Village Voice...
...Along comes Randle MacMurphy, an idealized ganeff who epitomizes Bob Dylan's words that "to live outside the law you must be honest...
...We progressive Jews are a minority within a minority in America...
...Yet even after such committed seeking, the most difficult aspect of taking on a Jewish identity remains: the fact that this so-called "long hair of the 80s" is itself full of snarls, tangles and split ends...
...Extremism aside, however, it was not a huge leap for young Jews involved in other minority cultures to become involved with their own...
...The 60s left me with a commitment to collectivity, to feminism, to feelings to pursuing an identity as an artist and activist...
...The joke typifies what had been my blas?, even-handed approach to "gay rights" as a civil liberties issue...
...We burned the American flag without thinking of the women who sewed it or the revolution that spawned it and in the process we burned our bridges to the Silent Majority and burned ourselves out...
...Our union was a wedding of political survivors...
...I take strength from the assertion of Mordecai Kaplan, the Reconstruction-ist rebbe, now a century old, that "no matter what its context of time and place was, the [Jewish] tradition was somehow related to man's search for salvation...
...that alienation could be overcome...
...How, then, do I apply that teaching...
...You'd be spared, then, my litany about sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, exploitation in America...
...I'll be brief—I assume the FBI can fill in the details...
...I said to him, "You're not thinking as a Jew...
...I would agree with Dr...
...and as young Jews in an aging movement, we could subdivide even further...
...First, with questions...
...that we would somehow merge and find peace...
...Decent living conditions, general education and democratic political structures do raise the ante on the matter of personal responsibility for evil...
...she cries...
...I weep because so many deaths that might have been valued as necessary, a sacrifice, had we learned from them, taken heed from them, have turned out to have been unnecessary...
...And it is politically primitive, too, still grappling with fundamental aspects of "the Jewish Question": how to reconcile support for Israel as a Jewish State, as an affirmative action for the Jewish people, with support for Palestinian rights...
...Now my generation is recapitulating that process...
...This, like a feminist consciousness, cannot be unraveled, especially as it involved a struggle with a subtle but potent form of internal oppression, namely, Jewish self-hatred, the internalization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the belief that we Jews are powerful and rich, oppressors not oppressed, which are traits that any self-respecting radical would disavow...
...His elder brothers had legally changed the name to Bush when they entered business so as not to seem quite "so Jewish"—so as not to be accused of being "clannish" and hateful of non-Jews, of being specially talented and too influential in certain spheres, of being oversexed and subhuman, a corrupting force in decent society...
...One chronicler of the progressive Jewish movement, Prof...
...Outside my cell the toilets of the jail flushed automatically every few minutes...
...Ah, yes, Jewish Currents...
...When I oppose the anti-democratic hypocrites who rule the U.S., I am more likely now to use a quotation from Thomas Jefferson— or from Isaiah—or from the revolutionary Jesus of Nazareth—or from Sholem Aleichem—than I am to use a quotation from Chairman Mao...
...I believed that through this system the physical and spiritual gap between human beings could be bridged...
...And that act was paradigmatic of the New Left, following our general nervous breakdown...
...The tentativeness of both the Carter and Reagan administrations' draft registration programs, the embarrassingly deceitful efforts of Reagan, Haig and company to justify U.S...
...I tried to make contact with the Martians...
...The institutions, ideals and movement of the old progressive Jewish circles are too much alive and kicking for that...
...The Czech novelist Milan Kundera defines totalitarianism, whether of the right or left, as "Laughter and Forgetting...
...Hitler had made stumps of our family trees...
...I would pay tribute, but paying tribute is too akin to eulogizing...
...These are examples from Jewish history that Jewish New Leftists might have employed to broaden their appeal and their sincerity...
...Finally, I thought about Pastor Martin Niemoller's famous statement of guilt—the guilt for oppression that is absolved only by resistance...
...Or was I going to bear his cross with him...
...I had lost all sense of objective reality: the awareness that I was under the influence of a drug, that other human beings were not actively sharing my hallucinations, that life goes on, as George Harrison wrote, "within you and without you...
...To Che Guevara's startling statement that "Revolution is an act of love," they added, "Revolution is an act of humbleness...
...Recently a friend proposed to me that Christianity had improved upon Judaism by asserting a positive golden rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—as a replacement for the Judaic negative golden rule—Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you...
...Knowing how Jewish refugees from Hitlerism were barred from America's harbors in the 1930s by a wall of anti-immigration bills, anti-Semitism and scapegoating for the economic crisis, I cannot now tolerate similar treatment, for similar causes, of the Haitian refugees from Duvalier...
...I hate to describe that group in a few stereotypic images, just as I hate to reduce my own life to two-dimensionality...
...As we cast about for security or, at least, for a treaty with worlds more established than our embattled Woodstock Nation, we discovered what Irving Howe called "The World of Our Fathers...
...His parents, still practicing Mormons, face excommunication simply for maintaining contact with their son...
...I then recalled the long history of secret Jews, from the Marranos right down to my own father, formerly Morris Babushkin...
...I don't tell about my experience to amuse the reader by humiliating myself...
...Isaac Deutscher wrote: "Only if the search for an identity can help the Jewish intellectual in his struggle for a better future for the whole of mankind is that search at all in my view justified," in 1982 many of us would assert almost the converse: "Only if the Jew's struggle for a better future for the whole of mankind is rooted in his or her search for an identity as a Jew will that struggle in my view be genuine...
...so anywhere between 300,000 and 3,000,000 young people landed in religious cults, lobotomized like Randle MacMurphy...
...But if I failed, we were kaput—the H-bombs would fall...
...We knew ridicule's power—to dissolve apathy...
...Yet I take comfort from Morris Schappes' follow-up question: "Is there anyone here who can remember the names of those who stoned the prophets...
...In this survival and growth, the Jewish Currents veterans proved their revolutionary grit, upheld their Marxism, humanism and Jewish identities, more fiercely than in the hey-day of their movement...
...Back to the Old Country, the padded cell...
...Americans could not say about Vietnam what many Germans said about concentration camps: "We did not know...
...And I—I was still on unemployment, economically, politically and spiritually...
...The idealistic, almost romantic core of our commitment rarely reveals itself as poetry, more often as fund appeals...
...We had no awareness of the dozens of oases between us and Eden, nor of all the pioneers who had attempted the trek before us...
...Moreover, Schappes wrote, "The prophets were decidedly in a minority when they announced programs and ideals for the benefit of the majority...
...I prayed to the world's leaders, chanting, "Nixon, Mao, Kosygin . . . Nixon, Mao, Ko-sygin...
...My gripe—my regret— about the New Left is that we were conceited...
...Nor is the lesson to climb to the top of the list and martyr yourself...
...I ask questions of reactionaries lest their unchallenged doctrines, like the county jail toilets, turn into H-bombs...
...To achieve this, we have to study (how often I have postponed making a commitment to learning Yiddish, though without it, I fear, my Jewish identity will remain more sentiment than substance...
...Arthur Liebman of the State University at Binghamton, NY, hypothesizes in his very useful Jews and the Left that the growth of Jewish consciousness among radicals tends to move them rightwards politically...
...We have to resist assimilationist temptations that still exist (but will the Jewish community support me as a novelist if I restrict myself to Jewish themes...
...When I was thrown into a small padded cell in the county jail, I preached to myself...
...But my naches vanished when my editor called the next week to inform me that I myself had a human clone: another writer named Larry Bush, who was about to have his own piece printed in the Voice...
...it is a search for positive values, for a folk culture in the face of mass mindless-ness, for a Jewish calendar and clock instead of the rat race...
...Instead I want to generalize from my experience of false messianism (which, in fact, was a common theme among LSD users...
...It left me . . . Ah, but there's the rub: It left me...
...we can't plead the excuses of hunger, illiteracy or brutal repression...
...All of these responses would have been perfectly human and understandable, if pitiable...
...By that time," he reports, "there was no one left to speak up...
...How devilishly difficult it is to shed a stereotype not of inferiority, which constitutes the internal self-loathing that most minorities, as well as women, must overcome, but of privilege and superiority...
...And today, how many does the Moral Majority claim...
...Simultaneously, we extremist youngsters began to learn the first key lesson of Jewish survival: patience...
...it left me deeply alienated without alternatives, radical without resources...
...Only their survival was far more impressive than mine...
...But my name...
...It's the greatest Jewish tradition...
...We were outlaws, like Bonnie and Clyde, thrashing our way out of constricted life-styles...
...covert destabilization of Nicaragua's popular government, and the widespread public opposition to such involvement—all this is strong evidence of the New Left's anti-war work at home...
...However, the cultural revolution did reach deep into the armed forces fighting in Vietnam and in doing so solidified their resistance...
...The movement it represented was desperate for continuity...
...In fact we were a last-ditch resistance to what Alvin Toffler calls "future shock," the corporatization of our society and the utter abandonment of humanistic values...
...Where does this leave us...
...The answer, to my amazement, is America itself: the land of gold-paved streets and sweatshops, the land whose harbor has a statue with a welcoming poem by a Jewish woman engraved on it and a place called "The Island of Tears...
...There is nothing more Jewish, and I'm not ashamed of it...
...when the illusions of a lifetime were exploded by revelation—these folks had not crumbled into despair or cynicism, had not turned into rabid reactionaries, had not gone out to make a buck and numb themselves with material comfort...
...That Auschwitz number, which I now wear as a psychic dog tag in my struggle for Jewish survival and for a better world, gives me license to appreciate America...
...Obviously the lesson is not to scramble down the list as far as you can go and hope they won't reach you...
...And I ask questions of myself, to build the hunger that allows me to overcome my laziness and my ignorance...
...On television we watched the napalm fall as we ate our dinners...
...How can I reconcile such'illusions with such disillusionment...
...Knowing what price Jews have had to pay for the lack of religious pluralism in countries both Christian and Moslem, around the world, I cannot take kindly to Jerry Falwell's preachments against "secular humanism" and for a "Christian America," no matter what kind of self-serving support he might lend to Menachem Begin's version of Israel...
...Abbie Hoffman asserted this in a February 9, 1981 letter to Jewish Currents, the magazine I help edit, in response to my review of his book...
...I called out to God...
...To a red-diaper baby like me, Jewish Currents was a fond memory of a pocket-sized magazine that always sat on the coffeetable outside the bathroom, along with my Mad magazines...
...By genuine I mean honest, rooted in and moderated by self-interest, and historically aware...
...And their yiddishkeit was my rock and roll, and their choruses, clubs and fraternal organizations were my communes...
...Kesey's character was right up our alley, for our anti-imperialist politics had involved us with all kinds of nationalisms and ethnicity, especially with the cultures of America's oppressed national minorities: Black, Native American, Puerto Rican, Chicano...
...For Jews, it was the shtetl, the early Zionist movement, the Jewish Labor Bund, the debates over Jewish nationalism, the mass emigration to America . . . where it took form as the Jewish Labor Movement, the folk culture of the Lower East Side, the finest works of the Yiddish writers...
...Oh, how we identified with these characters...
...so*that they wouldn't be persecuted, perhaps even beaten, on the streets of America...
...The point about how we in the 60s didn't relate to the working class is basically correct," he wrote...
...A generation of assimilation and plastic slipcovers veiled from us the vibrant, progressive Jewish past...
...Totalitarianism," he says, "deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children...
...The "discovery" of a generation of revolutionaries who survivedibitter defeats, won tremendous victories, outlived their sectarianism with ideas mellowed but intact—all this buoyed young radical Jews incredibly...
...Be here now, our spiritualists taught...
...so Jerry Rubin landed on Wall Street...
...Kesey presented us with a native American, Chief Bromden, who had withdrawn from all the sickness and insanity around him to live in a reservation of sorts, in near autistic silence in a mental hospital...
...Joni Mitchell prayed for our Woodstock Nation: "We are Stardust," she sang, "million year-old carbon/we are golden, caught in the devil's bargain/ and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden...
...It is worth repeating, like a piece from the Haggadah: "In Germany," he said, "they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist...
...is a testament to that truth...
...They had ignored the gross disparity between their humanism, their anti-fascism and the realities of the undemocratic system to which they gave their unstinting support, or else they had managed to reconcile this disparity with a heavy dose of moral relativism, dumb dogma and "Party discipline...
...I then recalled an item I'd read in the Morgn Freiheit, about how Charlie Chaplin, when asked during the 30s and 40s if he was Jewish, would decline to answer the question, saying, "I would be proud to be identified with the Jewish people"—though in fact Chaplin was only fractionally Jewish, if at all (I'm probably more gay than that...
...Bad news first," insists the mother...
...the fact that the loftiest goals of so-called socialist countries seem to be to have their own stacks of hamburgers to the moon (and to jail vegetarians who object) has given me a bitter taste in my mouth...
...What about Abraham the Patriarch, who conscientiously objected to God's plan to blindly destroy Sodom...
...Though earlier I described a certain natural evolution from involvement with other minority cultures to involvement with our own, the fact of the matter is that the search for Jewish identity is an arduous one, a swim upstream...
...Compared to the bitter realities of the life these Jews were leaving, America was a blessed cornucopia...
...More accurately, it was the world of our fathers and mothers and especially our grandparents...
...For Hoffman, and certainly for me, Jewish identity has become our long hair of the 1980s...
...Among the people to whom I had gone seeking funds to prop up the paper were some family friends who were stalwart supporters of Jewish Currents, to which they steered me...
Vol. 7 • September 1982 • No. 8
