Hyphenated-Jews and the Anxiety of Identity

My unlikely starting point here is a trivial item of grammar (to slight it further, of punctuation)—little noticed even on occasions when grammar or punctuation do raise serious conceptual questions. The lowly hyphen is bound by few set rules; it rests on a convenient escape clause that allows users themselves to decide at times to do away with it—turning hyphenated phrases back into two distinct words (as in "science fiction" or "peer group") or, in the opposite direction, blending hyphenated phrases into a single word (as in "postmodern" or "subdivision"). These shifts are closely tied to history: the more frequent the usage, for instance, the more probable the single-word option (as in the last two examples, and often now in the term "antisemitism"). Unlikely as it may seem, this same link to history in another of its aspects makes the hyphen both informative and provocative on the question of Jewish identity. Or so, at least, I propose here in considering the syntax of "hyphenated-Jews," as that group characterization figures in the American-Jewish and other Jewish Diaspora communities—and as the hyphen in them draws on and shapes Israeli-Jewish identity and, arguably, Jewish identity as such. An alternate title for the discussion here—evoking still another tradition—might well be "The Hyphen and the Jewish Question."

This account of the hyphen in an uncharacteristically influential role begins with statements by two American presidents, speaking at a time when elected officers could still admit openly that political power directly affects public discourse. Woodrow Wilson (who was president of Princeton, after all, before the United States) declared that "The hyphen is the most un-American thing in the world"—an assertion that sounds both cryptic and dogmatic (the more so since the term "un-American" is itself hyphenated). This mystery recedes, however, when Wilson's statement is juxtaposed to an earlier one by Theodore Roosevelt, as he declared "There is no room in this country [the United States] for hyphenated Americanism."¹

A number of issues collide in these two assertions, but their common focus is clear. Reacting to the waves of large-scale immigration to the United States, the presidents were addressing that issue through the medium of punctuation, objecting to those newly arrived immigrants (in a country, after all, almost entirely composed of immigrants) who thought to preserve a conjunctive identity between their countries of descent and their new, adoptive home in hyphenated formulas like "Irish-American," "German-American," and "Italian-American." Roosevelt and Wilson, by contrast, were affirming a project of nation-building in which Americans were to be just that: Americans, without hyphens or other conditions—the whole then warmed in the "melting pot" that Israel Zangwill had emphatically cast in his 1908 play by that title. Stirred briskly, the melting pot would, in these presidential views, produce an undiluted national identity that dissolved or at least dominated any other allegiances the new arrivals might wish to carry along with them.

It has been objected that, for all its vividness as an image, the melting-pot ideal never struck as deeply into the American psyche as has usually been assumed. (Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan make this claim more bluntly: "The point about the melting pot . . . is that it did not happen.")² In any event, whatever its past force, that ideal clearly no longer stands unchallenged; the principles of diversity and multiculturalism exhibit at least as strong a contemporary presence. Through the latter, moreover, the hyphen has gained a new lease on life, often in applications quite unfamiliar (though perhaps no more likely to have been agreeable) to Roosevelt and Wilson—for example, in relation to Hispanic-Americans or African- (or Afro-) Americans (now the first and second largest hyphenated groups, respectively, in the United States).

This change in the direction of social discourse—from melting pot to multi-pot, as it might be—warrants its own discussion, but my interest here is with hyphenated-Jews in particular. And for them, I shall argue, even the dramatic political social developments confronting the world Jewish community...