Minority Rites
Walzer, Michael
Jews are not officially a minority in the United States today, but we were once, when I was growing up, the quintessential minority. We were the model with reference to which everyone else's...
...But I played with all the kids on the block, and expected nothing less (though I remember hoping that my new friends would not associate my complete ineffectiveness on the football field with my being Jewish...
...I could have argued about the value of mutual accommodation in a pluralist society...
...All the kids in my New York school— at least all the ones I knew—were Jewish (the teachers were Irish Catholic...
...The games, as I was emphatically told, had always been held on Friday nights...
...We were, in our own estimation, just two American kids with different political ideas...
...Had there been a number of Orthodox kids, I might have had an argument, though (as I think now) not about rights, which are best reserved for more important matters...
...it doesn't advance common interests...
...The opening jump will still be at seven o'clock on Friday, the principal might have said to me, but I will do what I can to make sure that the Jews are included in the course (there was only one) on world history...
...it must be even more tempting when you say, "Here I am" with the disturbing sense that you are here alone or that you aren't yet really here...
...it doesn't bring minority groups into the liberal-left mainstream...
...I can't have meant that...
...Today coalition politics always requires patient and careful organization...
...Maybe I was thinking strategically: let the principal know that, along with all his other problems, he now had a Jewish problem—so that arguments about quizzes onYom Kippur or Christmas carols in music class might be a little easier...
...We were in and out of each other's houses, and I even managed, a little later on, to associate a few of them with my first political venture, a little hectographed newsletter called Between the Lines, in which I discussed and ultimately disapproved of Henry Wallace's presidential campaign...
...But why not...
...How can I explain, then, what I did immediately after my election...
...mine was an early and small example...
...In a radically individualist society like this one, it's not easy to move from these passionate minority rites to a politics of common interests...
...no cross was burned, no swastika scrawled...
...But its structure has become familiar...
...I also went to basketball games...
...I am not sure what that move would have meant in Johnstown in the forties, where Jews were already a (small) part of the new alliance that, after the victory of the steel workers' union, took over the city government, sent a Democrat to Congress, and gave Harry Truman a big majority in 1948...
...Remembering my own brief gestural moment, however, makes it easier to understand how people fall into that sort of thing—and how they get stuck there when coalitions come apart and common interests are neither acknowledged nor advanced...
...I was a Jew with a chip on my shoulder, though nothing had ever happened to me, personally, that could account for the chip...
...But all that happened in Johnstown was that our neighbors on Franco Avenue never spoke to us— except for one sweet man who came over, after watching us for a few months, to offer advice about our "victory garden" (who says that Jews cannot be farmers...
...in Johnstown, there were only a couple of Jews in each class (and the teachers were mostly WASP...
...Later still, I went with a Catholic friend to hear Joe McCarthy speak at a fairgrounds outside of Johnstown...
...Our apartment house in the Bronx was overwhelmingly Jewish...
...My outburst was an announcement: Here I am...
...And you better pay attention...
...Though I usually went to religious services with my family on Friday night, I had no deep religious sensibility...
...But I am sure that I wasn't thinking along those lines...
...This is not a story about antiSemitism...
...It gains drama and intensity, magnitude too, in our contemporary urban centers...
...It just made me feel good to bring the principal up short...
...In 1944 my parents moved from the Bronx to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, taking my sister and me from a world where minority status was, so to speak, theoretical to a world where it was real...
...I can't say that they attended only to my wonderful qualities...
...More than that...
...the coalition hardly had to be organized...
...I think that they were grateful for that—and also angry about its limits...
...We have to affirm, first of all to ourselves, that we haven't bought into the majority world...
...It was satisfying to confront the resident adult...
...In my high school class of seventy-three, there were five Jews, two boys and three girls, and the two boys (this was 1951) turned out to be the two most successful class politicians...
...I can't have believed, I don't believe now, that I had a right or that Jews in general had a right to, say, Wednesday night basketball...
...But it is gestural in much the same way, with the same absence of political follow-up, the same contentment with provocation and shock...
...I wasn't ready for a war with my fellow students...
...Even when you can say, "Here I am," and mean it, provocation is enormously tempting...
...I was elected president of the student council, running against the captain of the football team, and the other Jewish boy (but no one except me thought of him that way) was elected president of the senior class...
...they didn't care where my parents were born...
...The American ideal is that each person should be judged "blindly," as an individual with a proper, not a generic, name...
...The rest of us should certainly pay attention, but since demands like my own in 1951 won't be met, and probably shouldn't be, we had better have some serious alternatives ready...
...Surely that is what we all want, and yet when we succeed, however modestly, we want something else as well: to be recognized as a representative, standing in for all the others, whom our success can't help or hasn't yet helped...
...And our responses to the "others" were the responses of a classical minority: eager for recognition and respect, always suspicious that we weren't being recognized and respected enough...
...Living in the Bronx was a way of avoiding the minority experience, but knowledge about that experience was unavoidable: conveyed from one generation to another with a grim certitude...
...Why shouldn't it have been required to accommodate them...
...Nowadays, I am very critical of gestural politics...
...I didn't want to be the principal's tame Jew, so that he 54 • DISSENT Minority Rites could boast of my earnest compliance and his own tolerant cooperation...
...pay attention," isn't in any obvious way the beginning of that process...
...q SUMMER • 1996 • 55...
...In the twenty years that they lived in Johnstown, my parents never set foot in the home of a non-Jew...
...Lots of students signed my petition, just as lots of students voted for me in the council election...
...in Johnstown, we were the first Jews on our street (which was called, jarringly to my politically precocious ears, Franco Avenue...
...Hearing about my petition, the world history teacher called me in to tell me that this wasn't an American thing to do...
...I thought it was ridiculous...
...Since being recognized as a "credit to your religion" (or race) is a very uncomfortable business, we have to be aggressively, provocatively, representative...
...She asked where my parents were born...
...I was frightened and hostile, but our friendship outlasted the disagreement, and we never thought of it as a disagreement between a Catholic and a Jew...
...Orthodox kids would not have been able to play on the school team or to attend the games—and this was, after all, a public school...
...But there was no follow-up in my opposition to Friday night basketball, no petition campaign this time...
...My friend was half attracted...
...It was a gesture of solidarity...
...I felt that I was being faithful to all those Jews who had endured real persecution and real discrimination...
...But I doubt that I was much of a strategist either...
...I argued with the principal on a few other occasions, but I never discussed the matter with the other Jews in the class or with my non-Jewish friends, all of whom would have thought I was crazy...
...Bethlehem Steel didn't hire Jews during my Johnstown years, so we were naturally on the other side (we had other reasons too...
...I didn't want—and I can see this same negative intensity in minority kids today—to make things easy for him...
...they just let me play the game of high school politics like everybody else...
...anyway, none of the Jews in my class were Orthodox...
...the star player two years before had been a Jewish kid—he regularly played on Friday nights...
...The school had had a series of exciting teams...
...My parents took this as an anti-Semitic question, which it probably was...
...I think now that I was acting out an American minority rite, one of the ceremonies of arrival in this society, and one that I now see all sorts of other people acting out...
...We were the model with reference to which everyone else's moral and political attitudes were determined Other people were judged tolerant or not on the basis of their behavior toward the Jews...
...And the provocative announcement, "Here I am...
...But I marched into the principal's office and told him that he would have to cancel Friday night basketball games...
...I can't remember what was in my head, what the chain of ideas was, or what my feelings were...
...I suppose you could say that they were tolerated on Franco Avenue...
...A state law had recently been passed inviting local school boards to establish such courses, and providing cars at state expense...
...Nothing awful happened...
...Here we are...
...In our school district, such provision was taken as a clear example of creeping socialism and immediately refused...
...The move must have been harder for my parents than it was for me, though they probably expected a more difficult reception than they got...
...Today, identity politics is more public and, often, more fierce...
...It doesn't build coalitions...
...My only possible encounter with antiSemitism had come a year or two before, when I SUMMER • 1996 • 53 Minority Rites circulated a petition among the students asking for a drivers' education course...
...I was engaged in . . . symbolic action...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
