Perspective: Jewish Names

...Her parents, both active Zionists, were frustrated about their inability to move to Israel and thus named their daughter Aliya so that they could feel, correctly, that they "finally made aliyah...

...Why, indeed...

...So what's Jewish about Jewish family names...

...Ziggy (Zbigniew) Brzezinski, Carter's ace foreign policy maven, fills the press corps with horror (most of them can write, but few can spell), but he is tonic to the American Polish community...

...Not only that...

...Aliya grew up as a fine young Jewish woman and married a man named Cotel (pronounced the same as Jerusalem's Western Wall...

...The vaunted melting pot never really worked...

...Jews have become sufficiently secure in their Jewishness and in American pluralism to regard changing the family name as an unworthy self-denial, a kind of assimilation on the cheap...

...Meeting with these southerners during the primaries, I was struck not so much by the unfamiliar, soft drawls coming out of those savvy Jewish kops, but by the intensity of their wide-ranging backgrounds and their credible commitments to such things as Jewish education, Israel, and synagogue life...

...In biblical times, names conveyed certain characteristics or experiences...

...Sometimes we went beyond "pluralism" and conceptualized a three-faith America in which we Jews (three percent of the population) emerged on center stage as one of three equal faiths (33 ?? percent)—a stunning public relations coup...

...Among their children, the most popular names seem to be: Abraham, Adam, David, Hadassah, Hill el, Jonathan, Rachel, Isaiah, Rebecca, Joshua, Tamar, Naomi, Aaron, Seth, Aviva, Zipporah, Jessica, Gideon and Yaacov...

...miller, Miller...

...American Jewish names are proving out the validity of the sociologists' classic maxim about ethnic groups: The grandchildren want to remember what their parents wanted to forget...

...She now calls herself Aliya Cheskis-Cotel, a fine Jewish mouthful...

...gardener, Gartner...

...Today it appears to be a political asset...

...All that has changed dramatically...

...One bright young American Jewish woman is named—honest—Aliya...

...In the entertainment field, incidentally, young Jews seem to find no bar to success these days in traveling under their own (Jewish-sounding) names, such as Segal, Steinberg, Feinstein—as opposed to the Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall generation...

...tags revealed interesting nuances of differences among the generations...

...Perhaps no Jewish community in the history of the Diaspora has played so catalytic a role in the larger society, without sacrificing its own unique identity in the process...

...The best current example is the 1976 election which raised to five the number of Jews in the United States Senate...

...Their first child is named Noah, so what else is new...

...Our forefathers often borrowed vocational names: a shoemaker became Shuster...

...Many Jews got their names from the map...

...What difference...

...the worldwide Arab campaign of anti-Jewish boycott and hatred...

...it was a stew, a smorgasbord...

...Names that end in "vich" are Russian, "sohn" is German, "ski" is Polish...

...How come...

...Mostly, they were copies from the non-Jewish surroundings in which they originated...

...We are not certain whether a painter became Paintner, but Sam Schmuckler did not, as might be suspected, bribe an official for the last three letters ; he was a jeweler...

...Courses in Jewish studies have bloomed on a thousand campuses...

...How did it happen that Kimberly and Chad begat Adam and Tamar...

...Similarly, a young Jewish man—professionally engaged in Jewish journalism—is named Manheimer (the family name deriving from a German city...

...Ja-vits (N.Y...

...and Stone (Fla...

...and indigestible...

...Such family names as Berlin, Warsaw, Danzig, Hal-pern, Posner (from the city of Posen), Brody, Horowitz, Ginsberg sprang right from the accidents of geography...

...Did we Jews clang the cymbals or beat the drums...

...It is a positive commentary on the current place of the Jew that such clearly Jewish names proved no impediment in such overwhelmingly WASPish midwestern states...

...Moreover, having felt themselves pushed out of the civil rights movement, many Jews nursed their wounds and asked: If blacks can seek pride in their blackness and Poles in their Polishness, why should we throw away the 3000-year-old heritage of our Jewish civilization...

...Jewish religious and cultural camps have filled to overflowing while private (color-war) camps have languished...

...a printer became Drucker...

...Such Jewish visibility would once have checkmated a political ambition, especially in the provinces...

...Their children—now in their 20's and 30's—flourished such chic American monickers as Kimberly, Bambi, Rex, Blake, Judi, Kathi, Wendi, Margo, Lance, Scott, Dawn, Chad, Debbi, Marci, Cindy, Tami, Toni, Wayne, Jon, Brad and Sherri...

...Because Judith has two sisters and no brother, and she and her husband felt strongly that her family name should be maintained also, the young couple legally changed their names to Aron and Judith Hirt-Manheimer, thus doing homage in one fell swoop to Jewish ancestral traditions, feminism and Jewish survivalism...

...Surnames appeared among Sephardic Jews in the Middle Ages...

...Metzenbaum is active in Fair-mount Temple in Cleveland, is a former chairman of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, past vice president of the American Jewish Congress, the whole gamut...

...Names may not be the name of the game, but they bespeak our full arrival in the mainstream of American society...

...In other cases, anti-Jewish officials afflicted their Jewish subjects with such names as Eselkopf (donkey's head) and Fresser (glutton...

...But wait: that batch of Jewish toddlers didn't name themselves...

...Among Ashkenazic Jews, they appear to have become common in the Eighteenth Century...

...the miracle of Soviet Jewish Zionism...

...YIVO— in New York City—which two decades ago threatened to become a Jewish mausoleum, has found itself thronged with young Jews fervently mastering the Yiddish language and exploring their grandparents' origins in Warsaw and Posen and Zhitomir...

...Instead of melting, each group lay in the pot, simmering in separate globs...

...Similarly, Zorinsky is a member of Temple Beth El of Omaha and is identified with many Jewish causes in Nebraska...

...An American who hides his ethnic heritage would probably be in more trouble in American politics than one who affirms it...

...a merchant, Kaufman...

...One had the feeling that they were on the Carter team not in spite of their Jewish particularities, but in some measure because of them and precisely in order to best fulfill them...

...The American way is to make a virtue out of necessity, so America hailed the failure of the melting pot and called it religious and cultural pluralism...

...they are "good" Jews whose communal involvement has been both deep and visible...

...The names are illuminating...

...The variety of names is evident in the fact that one finds very few repeats in the long list of "begats" in the Bible—our forefathers looked upon each child as unique...

...One could—in most cases—identify the generation by the first names...

...to the messianic age, were shaken by such events as the terror and anti-Semitism of the Communist world...

...The middle-aged and older generations sported such stolid first names as Shirley, Marvin, Milton, Harold, Max, Howard, Albert, Irving, Reuben, Thelma, Helen, Sadie, Edith, Ruth, Mel-vin, Sidney, Gladys and Morris...

...and the sour backwash of the once grand struggle for civil rights in the United States...

...Israel has had a magnetic impact on Jewish self-awareness...

...The name "Isaac" flows from the Hebrew word for laughter because Sarah, wife of Abraham, burst into laughter when she learned she would bear a son at the unlikely age of ninety...

...Jews, of course, have no monopoly either on ethnic pride and unpronounceable names...

...During most of Jewish history, we did not have surnames...

...Shaken by anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish discrimination, many Jews were quick to change their noses and their family names in order to "pass as goyim" in a deracinated WASP America...

...Ziggy may not single-handedly stop the avalanche of Polish jokes in their tracks, but his decided brilliance—and his proud, jaw-breaking, undiluted Polish monicker—will give his landsmen untold naches, which would hardly be the case if Ziggy had laundered and anglicized his name to something like Zane Briggs...

...We Jews are Exhibit A of a super-successful minority group adjustment to American life...

...Even liberal, universalist Jews, who once saw socialism, integration, or radicalism as the shiny route Albert Vorspan's most recent book is I'm O.K., You're a Pain in the Neck...

...A new wrinkle in names—Jewish and non-Jewish—is the current trend toward two last names...

...The dizzying changes in first names reflect profound cultural and ethnic changes in American life...

...What's going on here...

...Only a generation ago, Jews—like other immigrant groups—were hellbent on diving headfirst into the American melting pot where, in accordance with conventional mythology, they would emerge as Americans in gray flannel suits...

...The Austrian government issued a decree in 1787, requiring Jews to adopt surnames...

...Thus, most of the names we now think of as so Jewish have non-Jewish origins...

...Added to the incumbents—Ribicoff (Conn...

...The "Hello, I am...

...He married Judith Hirt...

...the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations...

...It wasn't a melting pot...

...Indeed, millions of young Americans—including many Jews—have gone back to their roots...

...And when, not so many generations ago, we acquired family names, usually there was nothing Jewish about them...

...Tracing her family background, they found that Hirt ("shepard" in German) goes all the way back to the Abravanel family of Spain...

...An aromatic flavor to a name, redolent with history and meaning, can have a subtle but no less real impact upon the personality...

...Even before we Jews burst forth with Hebraic and biblical first names, in the United States as in Israel, the leakage in our family names had already been substantially plugged...

...President Carter—who himself proudly affirms his particular religious and southern heritage— made his extraordinary run for the presidency with a supporting cast of Georgians, including Stuart Eisenstadt (issues coordinator), Robert Lipschutz (treasurer) and Harriet Zimmerman (Jewish desk...

...The false image of the melting pot was replaced by the romantic image of an orchestra, combining the distinctive tones and ambience of a dozen separate instruments into one magnificent symphony...

...We were assuredly one of the boys in the band—accepted and respected—and we helped America to play sweet music...

...a tailor, Schneider...

...This young Americanized generation—products of the decade of the youth culture and the most traumatic era of recent American history—has produced smaller families (average: two children, and alarmingly closer to the goal of zero population growth than any other group in American life), but they have—generally and unaccountably—stamped much more Jewish brands on their progeny...

...Cohen and Levy may be the only completely Jewish names among us...

...Howard Metzenbaum and Edward Zorinsky are not just good Jewish names...

...were Metzenbaum of Ohio and Zorinsky of Nebraska...

...Reflecting the power of feminism, many couples now travel under the combined names of the wife and husband...