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Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”
It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color.
I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.
“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”
Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.
For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct.
Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.
In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.”
Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.
A poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement in 1917 warns that the American war effort might be harmed by a “hyphen of disloyalty,” suggesting immigrants with ties to their homelands were working to aid the enemy. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.
According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.”
Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.
When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.
They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together.
Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.
Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”
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Why is the biggest soccer team in the world talking about Joseph Goebbels?
The biggest rivalry in international soccer — between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — has erupted in recent months, as Madrid pushes the Spanish soccer federation to punish Barca for alleged referee bribery.
But the ugly sparring between the clubs took an unexpected turn last week when Spanish league president Javier Tebas entered the fray with a shocking comparison.
“Real Madrid’s management directs an orchestra of mouthpieces and Real Madrid TV leads the singing,” Tebas wrote Oct. 15 on X. “Their score is always the same: select the plays that suit them, repeat the grievance, feed the suspicion, and point fingers at the enemies.
“That method recalls propaganda mechanisms exploited by Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda: systematic repetition, construction of an enemy, and subordination of facts to the narrative.”
Real Madrid, which has employed such stars as Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham, condemned the remark with a statement calling for Tebas’ resignation both from the Spanish league, La Liga, and the Royal Spanish Football Federation, where Tebas serves as vice president.
“Real Madrid C. F. considers it absolutely intolerable and extraordinarily serious that someone holding two positions of utmost responsibility in Spanish football resorts to a comparison with the propaganda methods of the Nazi regime to discredit our club, its management, and its television,” the club wrote Oct. 16.Tebas has thus far refused to resign or even take down the post, and has defended his critique by pointing to other Spanish leaders who have made similar comparisons in the past.
The Goebbels controversy comes amid growing concerns about antisemitism in Spain, including in sports, where thousands of protesters blocked an Israeli-branded cycling team from competing in the Vuelta race last year.
The bribery accusations against Barcelona first surfaced in 2023, when it was revealed the club had paid millions of dollars to companies linked to the former vice president of the Spanish refereeing body, José María Enríquez Negreira. A Spanish court dismissed the bribery charges in 2024, but the investigation continued, and earlier this month Madrid submitted a tranche of documents it said proved the bribery claims.
The conflict between the club and Tebas dates back at least to 2021, when Madrid club president Florentino Perez spearheaded a breakaway international league that would have threatened Spanish competition. Barcelona had also agreed to join the so-called Super League, but the plan was scuttled after enormous backlash from fans across the continent.
Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s most devoted followers, led the German Propaganda Ministry after the Nazi party came to power in 1933. He and his wife died by suicide in 1945 after killing their six children with cyanide.
The post Why is the biggest soccer team in the world talking about Joseph Goebbels? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s election may hinge on whether Netanyahu’s opposition will accept Arab support
Israel’s approaching election is developing into an extraordinary paradox: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government presided over the catastrophe of Oct. 7 and whose record since has been a succession of security failures, assaults on democracy, capitulations to Haredi interests and international embarrassments, may yet survive politically because his opponents cannot bring themselves to accept the parliamentary support of Israel’s Arab citizens.
The polls have tightened, the opposition has conducted a strangely timid campaign, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu over the weekend introduces an unpredictable element into a contest that should by any reasonable accounting be a referendum on utter failure. Yet given the picture emerging in the polls, the decisive question is whether the opposition’s leaders possess the courage to reach out to the one-fifth of Israelis who are Arabs – who are expected to vote in very high numbers on Oct. 27.
Since 1973, Israel’s classic center-left has never secured an election-day parliamentary majority without the seats of Arab parties. Yitzhak Rabin’s victory in 1992, for example, depended on a parliamentary balance that included Arab representatives, whose support later became essential to his government’s survival. By most credible polls, that is the picture that emerges now, and with that support, the opposition could become a comfortable majority of close to 70 of the 120 Knesset seats.
But things are not so simple. In 2020, most of the Joint Arab List – an alliance of Arab parties in Israel – recommended opposition leader Benny Gantz for prime minister, producing a numerical majority that collapsed because several opposition lawmakers simply could not stomach the prospect. But the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government that removed Netanyahu in 2021 included the Arab party Ra’am, demonstrating that cooperation across this divide was possible even among politicians with profound disagreements about national identity and the question of a Palestinian state.
Throughout these episodes, the challenge was the elementary democratic principle that the votes of Arab citizens should carry precisely the same weight as those of Jewish citizens. And yet there are complications with these political alliances: the Arab parties are not “Zionist” – and more relevantly, they have real difficulty in a situation that involves conflict with the Palestinians, who are their non-citizen brothers and sisters.
Netanyahu has spent years exploiting the discomfort of his opponents with this reality, transforming the prospect of Arab political influence into a weapon against anyone seeking to replace him. During this election, his campaign has placed particular pressure on Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, portraying any government of his, if it’s dependent on Arab parties, as compromised from the outset.
Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and other opposition leaders are trying to win over former right wing voters who may have tired of Netanyahu’s endless scandals and failures – but those voters also have serious reservations about the Arab parties. So their prevarications are not hard to understand.
There is, of course, a double standard: Netanyahu routinely counts on the ultra-Orthodox parties, whose demands for military exemptions, public subsidies and educational autonomy have profound consequences for Israel’s security, economic resilience and civic solidarity. Their representatives are treated as legitimate negotiating partners whose seats belong automatically in the right-wing bloc, even when, indeed, they call themselves non-Zionist.
Arab political leaders are now offering the opposition passive support in parliament for free, meaning they do not even demand a seat at the government table. According to all credible polls, the opposition plus the Arab parties should have a comfortable majority after the Oct. 27 vote.
Mostly Muslim, with Christian communities and the distinct Druze population, these citizens share aspects of the language, culture and historical grievances of the surrounding Arab world while participating in the institutions, economy and daily life of the Jewish state. Two stories convey this complexity.
The first: A wounded Jewish reservist, a new immigrant and Technion engineer, was driving toward a hospital for treatment of a hand injured during service in Lebanon when police stopped him for speeding last year. As the Maariv newspaper’s columnist Ben Caspit reported, the reservist presented documentation of his medical circumstances, yet the officers, who were Jewish, issued a fine and delayed him despite the potential danger to his injured finger, behaving at times with an astonishing lack of consideration.
The case eventually reached a court, where the fine was canceled in a ruling that criticized the enforcement as falling short of reasonable, proportionate and fair administrative discretion. The judge was Rasha Saadi Atamna, an Arab woman whose decision recognized the wounded soldier’s service and circumstances while holding an institution of the Israeli state accountable to its own standards. It was a recognition denied by fellow Jews.
The second: On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin minibus driver from Rahat who had dropped off a group of young people at the Nova music festival, showed extraordinary courage.
When Hamas launched its massacre, one of his passengers called desperately for help, and Ziadna drove toward the festival, entering an area where gunmen were murdering civilians and vehicles were fleeing in panic. Near the Gaza border communities, a man running from the slaughter warned him to proceed no further, and moments later gunfire sent Ziadna and others diving into a roadside ditch.
The danger was clear, the route home was available, and every ordinary instinct of self-preservation pointed toward escape. Ziadna instead continued toward the festival, found the people who had summoned him, collected other terrified and wounded Israelis and eventually squeezed roughly 30 passengers into a minibus designed for 14. Drawing on his knowledge of the terrain, he drove across fields and away from the gunmen, with other fleeing Israelis following behind him.
The people Ziadna carried to safety were Jewish Israelis, while his own Bedouin community was suffering murder and abduction in the same assault. Speaking to Israel Radio during Oct. 7 commemorations, he explained his decision in words that deserve to resonate far beyond the immediate story of his heroism: “I could have turned around and did a U-turn, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. I am a human being first. We have to live together in this very fine country of ours.”
The election, of course, will be decided by parliamentary arithmetic rather than inspiring anecdotes, and the stakes extend well beyond the composition of the next coalition.
Consider the government’s continuing failure to confront Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, where extremist settlers have now assaulted an American journalist and European diplomats in successive days. Heidi Levine, a Washington Post photographer whom I have known for decades, was brutally beaten while covering the Palestinian olive harvest, suffering injuries requiring surgery.
The following day, settlers attacked European diplomats and a French mayor near the Christian village of Taybeh. Netanyahu’s response was to question the evidence, emphasize the diplomats’ failure to coordinate with the army and suggest a campaign to smear settlers. Such indulgence of violent extremists disgraces Israel and accelerates its international isolation.
Trump’s endorsement this weekend of Netanyahu may influence some voters, but the fundamental choices belong to Israelis.
Let’s hope they are more thoughtful than to listen to the U.S. president and reelect a leader who would endanger lives by continuing to block an Oct. 7 inquiry, redouble efforts to instill an elected dictatorship, continue to absolve the Haredim of military duty, do nothing to stem the disgrace of Jewish terrorism, and hasten the onset of global economic sanctions upon the Jewish state.
The post Israel’s election may hinge on whether Netanyahu’s opposition will accept Arab support appeared first on The Forward.
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Bob Dylan is changing his lyrics and his set list; what is he trying to tell us?
Nobel Prize-winning rock poet Bob Dylan once famously wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (in his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”). That may have formerly been the case, but it didn’t stop Dylan from kicking off his “Lights of Autumn Tour” in Oslo on Saturday, Oct. 17, with a setlist chock full of warnings about floods and extreme weather — a veritable apocalypse of natural disasters. He even rewrote some lines in one of his most famous and beloved songs, “Tangled Up in Blue,” to make the weather a new character in the song.
Playing “Tangled Up in Blue” in concert for the first time since 2018, Dylan revised a few verses. Where he originally sang “I had a job in the great north woods working as a cook for a spell” to kick off the third verse, Dylan instead sang “Way up in the frozen woods, teardrops touch the sky / The leaves are falling one by one, and the moments passing by,” in keeping with the “Lights of Autumn” theme. (It should be noted that Dylan has been rewriting and changing the lyrics to “Tangled” at least since 1984, when he also included the song on his opening concert of a European tour.) “Way up in the frozen woods” may also refer to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, which is so far north that you can practically see Canada from there.
On Saturday, Dylan continued to rewrite that third verse with the line “Sometimes I get so tired, sometimes I’m getting away / Lucky you found another, tomorrow’s another day.” In a clever twist, Dylan inserts the new word “lucky” into the number, which recalls the phrase “I can’t help it if I’m lucky” from the song “Idiot Wind,” also found on the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks where “Tangled Up in Blue” originated. “Lucky” also resurfaced as a cryptic moniker for Dylan himself when, in the superstar group the Traveling Wilburys that included George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison — all of whom took new names ending in “Wilbury” — Dylan opted for “Lucky Wilbury.” He can’t help it, indeed!
Dylan kicked off another rewritten verse with the phrase, “Things were gettin’ to cost too much,” leaving one to wonder if this was a pre-midterm election reference to the state of the U.S. economy and therefore an implicit criticism of the MAGA leader and his acolytes. Dylan also revised the music somewhat, slowing the tempo of what was once a mid-tempo rocker to a rubato ballad; he also inserted a minor chord that doesn’t exist in the original.
As noted, Dylan’s 19-song setlist included copious references to weather disasters. “The Man in the Long Black Coast” opens with the line “Crickets are chirpin’, the water is high,” and refers to trees that are “bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze.” The aptly titled “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” which he performed for the first time in over two decades, includes the lines:
Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row….
If you go down in the flood
It’s gonna be your own fault…”
Even Dylan’s choice of cover tunes seemed oriented toward the apocalyptic theme. For the first time ever, Dylan sang a Randy Newman song in concert. Keeping with the flood theme, he chose Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” which recounts one of the worst floods ever to strike the U.S.
What’s happened down here is that the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north, and it starts to rain
Rained real hard, it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
River rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right
Dylan also covered “Share Your Love” — originally recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland in 1963 but also recorded and performed by Dylan’s former backup group, The Band — which kicks off with the line “Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.”
But Dylan didn’t have to go far from his own catalog to rack up mentions of climate insanity. He performed “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” which includes the lines “The air is getting hotter, there’s a rumbling in the skies / I’ve been wading through the high muddy water, with the heat rising in my eyes.” In “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Dylan sang, “Clouds so swift, rain won’t lift / Gate won’t close, railings froze / Get your mind off wintertime, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.” And on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” the seasonally appropriate narrator says, “I saw the first fall of snow, I saw the flowers come and go.”
Dylan’s tour continues tonight (Oct. 19) in Gothenburg, Sweden, before making its way through Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria, and concluding in the UK in November and early December. The forecast for Sweden tonight is clear, but later in the week, the weather report says there’s a chance of a hard rain.
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