This was part of my luck, the luck of someone born in the right place at the right time; and that I was lucky was impressed on me from the time I was young. I knew I was lucky. I knew that many people – most people – were not. I was brought up with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. If this had embarrassing manifestations – and: believe me – it seemed salutary in an America where the ostentatious, the unscrupulous, seemed to come out on top. There was a sense of the duty that our luck brought with it. There was a sense that this luck was fragile: that it could run out.
It hadn’t. It didn’t. And so the main lesson was to do things for others. This was not, of course, a very original lesson, and it hardly required a deep engagement with Judaic religion or culture. Yet it had a specific political and ethnic tinge. Emanu El was a congregation where everyone, as far as anyone knew, was a Democrat. I remember the frisson caused when a Jewish Republican appeared, and how he was snubbed, and how he eventually moved to Las Vegas.
This was less a matter of ideology than of hygiene. We might not always have known what we were – it was not an overtly political crowd, I don’t think – but we sensed what we were not, and spurned such people as instinctively as we turned from spoiled food. In this, too, we were typical of American Jewry. The Jews had always been the most liberal, progressive ethnic group in the United States. Our liberalism was older than the Holocaust, more deeply rooted – rooted in the awareness of being a minority, in a remembrance of past persecutions – and the point of Holocaust education was not, at least as far as I understood it, only about the Jews.
This seems so obvious that it is tedious, now, to restate it. I am bored typing this, as I would be bored explaining something again to a person who, the first time I explained it, was scrolling through his phone. But as I type, I feel something worse than boredom. I feel something like biting into a rotten fruit. My face contracts. I cringe. Because for so many people, the point that seemed so obvious even to schoolchildren turned out not to be obvious at all. For so many people – Jews, of course, but also the kinds of gentiles who ‘support Israel’ – it was just about the Jews.