Funny, But I Do Look Jewish

...So, more famously and pointily, did Franz Kafka, giving him the look of a bat, or other member of the order Chiroptera...

...Brenner supplies a variety of Ashke-nazi and Sephardi Jews, and his selection of photographs emphasizes more the distinction between them than between German and Eastern European Jews (both of whom are Ashkenazic...

...I'm fairly sure I didn't always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough...

...Go, as the Jews say, figure...

...If I can survive another fifteen or so years, I shouldn't at all mind having a face approximating his, thoughtful, ironic, melancholic...

...But there is also the cerebral Jew (J...

...How was Brenner able to get the women to pose for it...

...Consider his photograph of fourteen Jewish shrinks, in a tight grouping off to the left, shot in the library at the New York Psychoanalytic Society...

...An example of this aspect of his work is seen in a photograph of ten defiant-looking young female rabbis and cantors at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in prayer shawls with phylacteries, or tefilin, wrapped round their forearms...

...Books and busts and photographs of Sigmund Freud are scattered throughout the room...

...The pressure of history makes it a tough question to block out...

...The photograph in this book for which I do not possess a proper introductory adjective—shocking...

...desolating?—is one of six Jewish women from Los Angeles with their blouses off who have had mastectomies (five single, one double...

...It was supposed to have been put to rest with the founding of the State of Israel, but, just now, a good part of the world seems to be asking the Israelis and their nation precisely this question: What are you doing here...

...Brenner, in this collection, provides Cohens from Venezuela, Kushners from Birobidzhan, Aarons from Calcutta, Bermans from Paris, and Hershs and Freys from Antwerp...

...Among other things, Diaspora demonstrates the demographic ubiquity, if not everywhere the density, of Jews worldwide and in countries where they are often deeply rooted and not in the least cosmopolitan...

...Underlying this is the notion of the Jew as someone who is skeptical, quick in response, verbally menacing...

...What, one has to ask, is the moral of this picture: You survive the Holocaust, and you still get a lesbian for a daughter...

...Of my two sides, the right is the more lined, weather-beaten, battered-looking...

...Surveying the immensity of Jewish types, might he be the philosopher Martin Buber, the gangster Meyer Lansky, the comedian Woody Allen, the sports announcer Howard Cosell, the operatic singer Beverly Sills...

...One can perhaps see the possibly cathartic effect of having done so...

...Robert Oppenheimer), the sensitive artistic Jew (Yehudi Menuhin, Vladimir Horowitz—this one comes in handsome and homely versions), the genius Jew (Albert Einstein), the infuriating Jewish woman (Barbra Streisand, she should only mind her own business), the Rebecca-by-the-wells beautiful Jewess (Marisa Beren-son), and a full typology of other Jews, enough and more than enough, really, to go round...

...One of the points Brenner attempts to make in Diaspora is that it's no longer so easy to tell Jews from non-Jews...

...an old joke asked...

...is a question that plays somewhere in the back of every Jewish person in whatever country he or she takes up residence...

...And yet Jews remain, at least to most other Jews, identifiably, unmistakably Jewish...

...My own nose is fairly regular, in shape and in size, though its straight bridge now seems a touch high and it has become a tad beaky and, in profile, begins to seem more prominent...

...They can be garish and vulgar, pushy and wild, sensitive and cerebral, artistic and conservative, but they are rarely dull, except of course when trying to pass themselves off as something other than Jewish...

...Most of Brenner's photographs in Israel are not of the appealing Israeli young that characterize the place for many of us but of Hasidic Jews...

...Noses used to be considered the defining Jewish physical characteristic—"chosen noses," in the phrase I myself sometimes use...

...Some attempt a smile, but without much success...

...I hope not, because not only have I never knowingly suffered in America for being Jewish, but I also take genuine pleasure in thinking myself a Jew, or member of what I, perhaps chauvinistically, prefer to think the most lively minority group in the United States...

...In a novel called Cafe Berlin by Harold Nebenzal, I came across the amusing generalization that the real division between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews is that no true Sephar-di, at least one raised in the Middle East, can abide gefilte fish, an Ashkenazi dish...

...Gee," remarks Julius Lester of this photograph, "but they don't look Jewish...

...I once saw a man who was a dead ringer for the old actor Cesar Romero wearing a bright red T-shirt with bold white lettering that read "I Am Not Cesar Romero...

...The Harvard philosopher Stanley Ca-vell, another frequent "Voices" contributor, is reliably disappointing...

...Powerful it is...

...Perhaps so...

...a visit to many Reform Jewish synagogues today can sometimes make one feel as if one has just attended a platform session of the McGovern wing of the Democratic party...

...Rather than feeling that I was home at last among my people, I thought how, given a choice, I preferred instead to be among a small minority in a larger, free country...

...The passages written by Andre Aciman (a Jew born in Alexandria, Egypt), Julius Lester (an African-American who many years ago converted to a Judaism he takes seriously), and Tsvi Blanchard (an American orthodox rabbi) are easily the most penetrating...

...And on occasion, so can a measured distancing of oneself from full participation in the life around one...

...Against much scientific evidence to the contrary, I happen to believe there is one, too...

...They sit at a table, each holds the hands of the women on both sides of her...

...Is the authentic Jew an earlock-wear-ing, tsitsit-on-the-undergarments-bear-ing Hasid in the Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem, a merchant originally from Iraq living in Calcutta, a Marrano praying in an attic in Portugal, a golfer in plaid pants and peach-colored shirt teeing off at the Lakeshore Country Club in Glencoe...

...Perhaps people with Jewish-sounding names ought to wear T-shirts, or at least carry business cards, that read, "I'm Sidney Ross, But Not Really Jewish...

...My ears have always stuck out, but now they seem to be growing larger, in proportion to my head, and a bit pointy into the bargain...

...As for that quintessential Jew, Brenner allows that he has never found him and suggests, as does the impressive variety of his photographs, that he may not exist...

...Tsvi Blanchard remarks that "this photograph nearly convinced me that Groucho Marx was the official logo of Jews in exile...

...Frederic Brenner's point is precisely that there may be no quintessential, authentic, absolute Jew...

...Proudly Jewish though I may be, pro-Israel though I shall always remain, I have never wished to live anywhere else than in America...

...Admitting all exceptions—Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, "was not distinctively Jewish [in appearance], all observers drawing attention to his resemblance to the Assyrian rather than to the Jewish type"—the article nonetheless insists there is a "Jewish expression...

...Among the earliest anti-Semitism I encountered as a boy came from Chicago Jews returning, in the early 1950s, from Miami Beach, saying that the chief thing wrong with the place was that, as far as they were concerned, it had too many New York Jews...

...The "voices" are in fact brief passages written by novelists, poets, historians, scholars, and critics stirred by particular photographs...

...The article "Types, Anthropological" in the old Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), written at a time when the Jews were anthropologically still considered a race, notes that "persons who do not have the Jewish expression in their youth acquire it more and more as they grow from middle to old age...

...Funny, I don't seem to myself New Yorkish...

...A French social anthropologist, Frederic Brenner has been photographing Jews in their diasporic condition over the past twenty-five years, in what began as a search, as it was described in a New York Times article about him, for "the quintessential Jew...

...None of Brenner's photographs carry titles or captions, but this one might have been entitled "Not Your Mother's Judaism...

...What—or on whom—is the joke here...

...Careful scrutiny will inevitably reveal that, funny, but they really do look Jewish...

...Years later Brenner photographed the sixteen-year-old and now married Lewi Faez and his wife and infant child in a nearly empty modern apartment in Israel in a manner meant to suggest his loneliness in his new country—the implication here being that Yemen, with all its primitiveness, may have been better...

...He has photographed Jews in fifteen republics of the old Soviet Union, in Yemen, India, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Greece, Tunisia, New York, along the Amazon, in Brazil, Argentina, China, Hong Kong, Africa, Germany, Holland, and most other countries of Europe...

...His better ones usually come by way of the settings he arranges for many of his subjects...

...Traditionally, the German Jews held themselves to be above—more assimilated, more cultured—Eastern European Jews, while the Sephardi Jews, who were exiled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, held themselves to be more aristocratic and hence above both...

...Saul Bellow, who also appears in this photograph, here resembles nothing so much as an ancient parrot, but, it must be added, a distinctly Jewish one...

...If there is an equivalent power of discernment that allows one to spot Jews, even where they do not conform in any obvious or even subtle way to stereotypical notions of the Jew—let us call this "Jewdar"—I like to think I possess it in reasonably good working order...

...Different as they all are in the quality of their minds and outlook, all look distinctly Jewish...

...But anyone dedicated to being a person on whom little is lost will notice it playing somewhere in the expression of almost all Jews...

...Only the motives of the photographer are really in question here...

...First, there would be the worry that someone might hold your being Jewish (when you're not) against you...

...Hasidic Judaism harks back to the eighteenth century...

...Jacques Der-rida, a Jew born in Algeria, is interesting only when he is autobiographical and is otherwise his old charmless, obscurantist self...

...At other, rarer times, the complication of being Jewish seems heavy, or "fraught," as is nowadays said, and what it is fraught with, I believe, is the feeling of never quite feeling altogether at home anywhere...

...Am I equating suffering here with looking Jewish...

...I can recall one evening in Jerusalem, awaiting the performance of Shlomo Mintz and the Jerusalem Music Center Chamber Orchestra, thinking that everyone else in this room could, theoretically, be Jewish...

...I think of this side of my face as even more Jewish than my left side, which, to be sure, I don't exactly think of as Swedish...

...Is iconoclasm part of Brenner's project...

...On the other hand, I have always wondered what it might be like not to be Jewish but to have a Jewish-sounding name—Sarah Jacobson, Norman Davis, Mark Steyn—and often be taken for Jewish...

...He has, that is to say, a taste for the stark and even the freakish...

...Eastern Jews referred to German Jews as yekkes, probably from the German word for "jacket" and a metonym for the notion that the stiffer, more formal German Jews never took off their suit jackets...

...The Jew as witty radical is also suggested, for almost all the Marx Brothers' movies are attacks on what were once established American WASP institutions: Ivy League higher education, the opera, first-class ocean travel, thoroughbred racing...

...in case you missed the message, this photograph says, there are dangerous Jewish criminals and they aren't all Jewish men, either...

...We can only imagine the Jew as people we do not wish to be...

...The human face, we now know, is not symmetrical, a fact that painting seems to capture better than sculpture...

...One extraordinary photograph, shot from above, shows a circle of twelve women, six Holocaust survivors, back to back, arms entwined with their lesbian daughters...

...this position might even be considered a natural one for a writer who longs for objectivity, which is to say to be a little distanced from the life around him...

...I fear that our photographer intends the politically correct, drearier, and much more boring second interpretation...

...A set of photos, taken-roughly a decade apart, shows a perhaps six-year-old, earlock-wearing Yemeni Jew, Lewi Faez, studying a Jewish book in his grandfather's jewelry workshop, a room that does not seem far advanced above a cave...

...A Jew," Andre Aciman remarks "is always someone about whom one asked: Why on earth isn't he where he belongs...

...Sometimes I think I can have had no better luck than to have been born Jewish, even though I am in my religious belief a pious agnostic and far from a sedulous practitioner of the Jewish religion...

...The remainder of the Jewish Encyclopedia article, which is accompanied by illustrations ("Composite Portrait of Ten Jewish Lads, New York"), works around the notion that the precise nature of the Jewish expression "is very difficult to determine with any degree of certainty or accuracy...

...I have myself been taken for a New York Jew, and once read, in a biographical note accompanying an essay of mine reprinted in a college reader, that I had attended CCNY and then Columbia, when I've never set foot in either...

...despite and perhaps because of all this, why is it that I continue to feel that I can recognize a Jewish face at twenty paces, no matter what its possessor's politics, nationality, personal history...

...Another is a Chap-linesque little Jewish man, with yarmulke and cane and cavalry mustache and bemused smile, standing against a blank wall in Calcutta...

...Above all there reigns the paradox that, as some branches of Judaism make more and more concessions to modernity—female rabbis being the most notable step in this direction— more and more young Jews seem to be returning to Jewish orthodoxy...

...Gaydar" is a word, formed from "radar," that describes the ability to discern a gay man, especially one attempting to pass as heterosexual...

...Another of Brenner's photographs has sixteen actors all in Groucho Marx makeup and poses...

...Perverse...

...Might this couch stand for the boat that all these shrinks, still working away at their now quite dead ideas, seem to have missed...

...Posing for this picture with these women was a very intense experience," one of them remarks, and then, alas, breaks off into psycho-babblish jabber about meditation and the sense of connection required to summon the bravery for allowing the photograph...

...The camera, it is said, does not lie, but the man behind it can have his devious subtexts and political agendas...

...True enough in my case, apparently, though much material in the rest of the article now seems comically antique: such as that Jews commonly wear their hats on the back of their heads because of the need to put their phylacteries on their foreheads, or have posture of a kind known as the "ghetto bend" from studying Talmud so relentlessly...

...But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...grotes-querie seems to light his fire...

...Brenner provides a rigged up photograph of Jewish American celebrities, each appearing in a nineteenth-century gold gilt frame, out of which some place a hand or even their full head...

...Glenn Gould, whose name and face and manner all falsely suggest Jewishness, could have used such a T-shirt...

...and, second, there is the discomfort entailed in getting special treatment from another Jew or philo-Semite because that he or she thinks you are someone you are not...

...Yet my Jewdar rings even when I gaze upon most of the Chinese Jews in his photographs from Beijing...

...Jews come in all shapes and sizes, tastes and temperaments...

...I don't know the state of Brenner's belief in psycho-analysis—though anyone who has read my previous sentence now knows the state of mine—and so I could be wrong about my interpretation of this photograph...

...a very Jewish-looking gent...

...Aggressiveness can sometimes mask this feeling of outsiderishness on the part of Jews, sometimes irony can attempt to do the same thing...

...Numbers of Jews are found," the Jewish Encyclopedia notes, "who possess none of the characteristics here noted, and yet are recognizable as Jews...

...Who might he be...

...He makes this point, over and over, by showing Jews in unexpected connections...

...Where I think I may look most Jewish is in the eyes...

...and yet...

...An often-disputatious people, the Jews, and never more so than among themselves...

...And yet...

...Thousands of words are in this text volume that aren't worth a single one of Brenner's pictures...

...Brenner might be called the Jewish Diane Arbus, if Miss Arbus herself weren't Jewish (having been born a Nemerov, sister of the poet Howard...

...The New York Jew may be a spin-off from the Groucho, wise-guy-son-of-recent-immigrants Jew...

...How perfectly, absolutely, delightfully wrong he would be...

...More in his smash-face mode, he provides a picture of a Passover ceremony at a maximum security women's correctional facility in Bedford Hills, New York...

...One picks up bits of anti-Israeli feeling, for example, in some of his photographs...

...The rivalries and little snobberies among these three divisions of Jewry are themselves of humorous interest to those who consider themselves connoisseurs of Jewishness...

...When you're in love the whole world's Jewish, was an old joke line...

...Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, had such ears...

...What are you doing here...

...But the brilliance of his arrangement makes it certainly possible, amusing, and, to me at least, persuasive...

...Brenner frequently attempts to score subtle jokes with his photographs...

...Once dark brown, my eyes are now more mottled, even containing bits of blue...

...But it's the look in my eyes that strikes me as most Jewish: It seems to me worldly, not to say a trifle world-weary, melancholy, if not mildly depressed...

...But dominating all—even the fourteen shrinks—is a large psychoanalytic couch at the picture's center, which, in the context of the photograph, resembles a mastless Egyptian boat...

...High arching, aquiline, hooked, long, nostril-flaring, sometimes bump-bearing noses have generally been taken for Jewish...

...I somewhere read the phrase "Jewish ears," implying large and fleshy appendages, and, if such Jewish ears exist, these I indubitably have...

...Ah, a landsman" lights up on the screen in my mind when I encounter a person I take to be Jewish...

...By their combination of knowingness and ag-gressiveness—a combination that is not everybody's cup of caviar—is how New York Jews are generally characterized...

...Some of them even claim the cachet of having been exiled in 1492 in the same way that some old-line American WASPs used to claim coming over on the Mayflower...

...But to what end...

...What is the difference between a virgin and a yekke...

...A photograph of the members of a Jewish motorcycle club in their leather and on their bikes before a synagogue is a notable example...

...The skin over my right eye is beginning to sag slightly— my mother's right eye did something similar late in her life—and my eyebrows are growing grayer and bushier, more unruly...

...and yet...

...I don't believe so...

...I am not sure how one is supposed to react to this photograph...

...Profettas has thin lips, deep-sunk, pouch-underlined eyes, a straight but prominent nose, and no fewer than seven deep furrows in his forehead, with white hair brushed straight back...

...A man named Sam Profettas, a Greek Jew from Salonika, photographed in 1991 by Frederic Brenner for Diaspora, his two-volume photographic study of Jews, has the face I may have a chance of attaining...

...I feel that I can see through the occasional name change, cosmetic surgery, or sad attempts to pass oneself off as something other than Jewish that come within my purview...

...that is beyond question...

...The answer is of course all and none of the above...

...The people in the photograph range from Henry Kissinger to the swimmer Mark Spitz, from Isaac Stern to Betty Friedan, from Philip Roth (the frame in which he appears is set horizontally on the ground) to Lauren Bacall...

...Whether in the Catskill Mountains, Mea Shearim, on 47th Street in New York, at a study or dining table, or out in an open field, the Hasidim bring their complete world with them, which perhaps accounts, at least in part, for why they are as photogenic as any subject going...

...The text—contained in the slenderer of the two volumes of Diaspora—includes what Brenner calls "Voices," or commentaries on smaller versions of many of the full-page, sometimes two-page-wide photographs found in the photographic volume...

...devastating...

...Some of his photographs are distinctly "in your face," or, to use the pro-football term, "smash mouth...

...Or might Brenner have intended that women who have gone through the Holocaust and lesbians, mother and daughters in this instance, share equal status as victims...

...The first time he saw troops from the Israeli Army, so in shape and formidable did they seem, Jackie Mason claims that he thought they were actually Puerto Ricans...

...Much modern Judaism, in its liberal strain, makes a conscious attempt to be as inclusive as possible...

...He provides photographs of a midget Jewish hatter in the Ukraine, rabbinic couples (men and women rabbis) on beds together at a bargain furniture store in New York, a Jewish drag queen stretched along the sandy ground in Johannesburg, South Africa...

...If one of the contributors to the text volume of Brenner's Diaspora were asked to read a photograph of my face, he might well find in it a longing to return from my post-exilic existence in America...

...Names, too, can give to Jews an odd sense of worldwide connectedness...

...sometimes these passages entail a reading or interpretation of the photograph, sometimes they occasion autobiographical sorties suggested to them by the photographs...

...In the photographs that he took of Jews in Italy, for example, especially those of men, none looks especially Jewish: They seem purely Roman or Venetian or Florentine...

...Tsvi Blanchard remarks of a photograph of two, dark, bespectacled, spindly-legged Hasids: "How curious this is...

...A name can sometimes be more suggestive of Jewishness than physical appearance...

...The answer was that a yekke remained ayekke...

...Closer to the truth is that when you're in New York, everyone seems Jewish, sometimes including Irish cops and Italian priests...

...Only one actual Jewish boy, Jerry Burnstein, the driver of the truck and perhaps one of the owners, is in the picture...

...Brenner seems to play off this point with a photograph of a group of black and Hispanic moving men seated by a truck in Palm Beach, Florida, on which is written the company's name: Nice Jewish Boys...

...Over time," Tsvi Blanchard remarks, "Brenner's work will increasingly undermine our conscious belief that there is only one way to be Jewish...

...Brenner does not emphasize the Holocaust in this collection, though it was Hitler who sent more Jews off into a second diaspora than did the Romans when they destroyed the Second Temple...