An Assimilated Jew Speaks: Notes on "Jews Without Memory"

"Jews Without Memory" may be the most forgetful essay I've ever read. Only in the last two sections of it, however, did I notice that what induces both its amnesia and its infelicitous mix of ethnic narcissism and paranoia isn't William Styron, Sophie's Choice (1979), "liberal anti-Judaism," or even Nazi genocide; it's "assimilated Jews." The two final sections also show that when the essay, shaky from the start, at last addresses the matter which most troubles it, it comes completely, and informatively, unhinged.

Charges of guilt by association, for example, which appear as early as the opening page, now predominate. Assimilated Jews, Styron, John Rawls, and the New Left are lumped together as sharing the view enunciated not by any of those stigmatized, but rather by an anti-Jewish Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday Times editorial written in 1845 to the effect that Jews must remember, "you shall not disturb the Christian."

As this instance of reductionism in overdrive indicates, the essay's grip on history, never firm, has loosened altogether. Another case in point appears in the closing words of "Jews Without Memory": "[F]irst the Enlightenment and now the New Left would oblige [the Jews] to abandon the sources of their collective memory." In the face of so grandiose a historical synthesis one is entitled to ask: "and now the New Left?" In the year 2001 is there a New Left, let alone one capable of obliging anyone to do anything? And does the essay really believe that the Jews have a single, unified, Holocaust-centered "collective memory"? Or consider the apparently historical insight that is presented earlier in the essay with unwarranted glee: that the Left has failed to understand how exclusivist Jews, by their refusal to adapt to modernity's Christian and anti-Jewish ways, have been the real opponents of the modern state. It's hard to take this seriously as a historical thesis because it makes sense only if there were no such thing as Zionism or Israel.

When it comes to labeling, moreover, the essay is tireless. Styron's view of the Holocaust, we're told in the early pages, is "the Left-liberal position." Later, without comment on the differences, Sophie's Choice is linked to "the New Left position," and then to the Old Left position, when a 1947 poem by one Fred Blair of the Milwaukee branch of the Communist Party, USA is offered as the secret inspiration for Styron's views on the Holo-caust. More than once, when speaking of "the Jewish exclusivist view" the essay blithely turns it into "the Jewish view." "Jews Without Memory" makes demagogic use, throughout, of the definite article, and is prone to such formulations as the one which turns into a hostile party, that is an organized force, what is hardly even a group of commentators who dissent from what the essay calls (and fervently defends as) "Jewish hegemony" over Holocaust interpretation. This, in turn, enables the essay to claim that one of these dissenters (David Stannard) speaks for all of them when, in fact, he doesn't. Nor does anyone else.

To me, these are instances of a rigid and phobic way of thinking. In each of them, the movement of history is frozen. It is also shelved and replaced by the presupposition that, while the specific expressions may alter, the underlying reality is Jew hatred as a continuum, unbroken to this day and for the foreseeable future: 1845, 2001, whenever. "Jewish exclusivism" seems to rest on this assumption, and on its corollary: that assimilated Jews are, in perpetuity, the ones who have made their own the commandment not to disturb the Christian. "Jews Without Memory" forgets the elementary idea that, like anyone else, Jews, assimilated or not, exist in particular circumstances; that these circumstances change; and that, therefore, the meanings of such a term as Jews, assimilated or not (and of the term Gentiles...