I'm Jewish. I know this because my mother mentioned it every few years, and because when I married a woman from an orthodox Jewish background, her parents didn’t regard it as an intermarriage, since my mom was 100 percent genetically Jewish and in such matters, by Jewish law, one follows one's mother. (This was good, because when one of her sisters proposed to marry a genuine Catholic, the response was explosive.) They did require some Hebrew study and some sort of late-breaking pseudo-Bar Mitzvah, if I recall correctly. As well they might have, because I had no background at all. In my head, I was pretending to be Jewish to get to the wedding.
My family was mixed, Dad raised Catholic in DC. And my mother was, as they say, "assimilated." Born in 1925 (and still persisting), she was then and is now an atheist and very vocal and pointed about it. The journey to assimilation in my family is not like that, say of the Wittgensteins in Vienna in the 19th century, in which an eminent family of bankers and artists slowly forgets that they're not ancestral Austrian Protestants, and maybe is surprised to find that the authorities are identifying them as Jewish when the round-up begins. My family's secularization and deracination came suddenly, and largely from radical politics.
My mother's mother's father Herman Bernstein emigrated from what is now Lithuania as a boy in the early-1890s. A writer who was proudly identified as Jewish, he eventually edited a Jewish daily newspaper in New York City, while belonging to a mainline temple there. He ended up an eminent Jewish journalist, suing Henry Ford for the latter's anti-Semitism, and wrote a book exposing the wretched antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a favorite of both Ford and Hitler. He was also a political conservative and wrote the official campaign biography Herbert Hoover: The Man Who Brought America to the World.
In some ways it's not surprising that his daughter made a hard left turn. Many young Americans, and in particular young American intellectuals, did, in the 1920s. My mother's mother joined the Communist Party, perhaps while she was still attending Barnard, and married a fellow member, also Jewish by background (he was a novelist). One thing about communism: it demanded atheism, and thought of ethnicity as an irrelevant distraction from class. My grandparents must have regarded their own religious background, or even the sheer fact that they had one, as pointedly unfortunate, and by the time my mother was born hadn’t expunged it, exactly (everyone in the family was always aware of our Jewishness), but transcended it or just emigrated again, this time conceptually.
I can only imagine the struggles this created in the family between Hoover's biographer and his communist daughter. That was one of several lurches in which family lore must have gotten lost or repressed.
I suspect that my mother as a child spent more shabbats at party meetings than at temples. By the time she was trying to convey to me what it meant that we were Jewish, she presented it not as a matter of religious belief or as a matter of ethnicity, or even as a function of a few Yiddish words, such as “chutzpah.” She just said we came from "the people of the book," and that Jewish people were scholars and intellectuals. All Jewish people, is the message I got, as though Judaism were the scholarly caste, rather than a belief system or an ethnic identity. (Honestly, I'm still not sure what Judaism is, exactly.)
The discontinuity also had something to do with DC, the city where I grew up. Looking back on it, a lot of the kids in my cohort in upper Northwest had Jewish surnames. There was a small inconspicuous Reform temple over on Military Road, but any families who thought of themselves as Conservative or anything else (I've found out much later), had to take a long drive out to Rockville or northern Virginia. I never saw an orthodox person that I recall. There just was no visible Jewish life in Chevy Chase DC. When I was a child, my parents let me go to church sometimes with the parents of my friends. I don't believe I went to a synagogue even once.
Adding to all this historical dislocation was family estrangement: my mother cut off all contact with her parents before I was born, and contact with aunts, uncles, and cousins was occasional and limited. I didn't experience myself as having an extended family at all, much less a practicing Jewish one, though I definitely did. There were few family stories, and the people we’d descended from, like our Jewishness, were more rumors or mere names than presences. Like our Jewishness itself.
Early on, I didn't know enough to ask about any of this, nor would I have, by choice: I was a vociferous atheist by age 13, and pointedly uninterested in Judaism or any other tradition of belief, except perhaps that instituted by Friedrich Nietzsche. I regarded Judaism, if I regarded it at all, as some kind of long-dead anachronism. We learned about the Holocaust in school, for example, but I never took it to be something that happened to us. With both sides of my mother's family coming straight from the shtetl as described in Fiddler on the Roof, we must’ve lost many relatives. But my family had no contact with the old country by the 1940s that I know of.
Speaking of, I found out about all that when my mother took me to a production of Fiddler on the Roof, I believe at the Kennedy Center around 1966, and put the soundtrack album on heavy rotation. She loved the music, but she also didn't look me in the eye and say, "this is our story." I had to work that out for myself.
Marrying a Jewish girl from Baltimore in 1983, I entered a different ethno-religious situation. Pikesville, where she grew up, was a notably Jewish neighborhood. On Friday nights, a stream of orthodox men walked to their shuls. People talked about Israel, a lot, and sent their kids there on “aliyah.” I accompanied her father on holidays to his Orthodox shul, or her mother to her Conservative one, and we were married by a Reconstructionist rabbi in Columbia, Maryland. I learned some of the basic prayers and got somewhat into the rhythm of the yearly holidays. I came to own a tallis and a Talmud.
One thing I understood immediately: Jewish people weren't all intellectuals and scholars with radical politics. There were a lot of doctors and accountants, a lot of businessmen, salesmen, and enthusiastic golfers. The Jews of Pikesville were both more American, overall, than the Jews of upper NW Washington (being crazy fans of the Baltimore Orioles, for example) and more ethnic. And they were definitely somebody as a group, which my family wasn’t, as I grew up. It wasn't until I moved to Baltimore with Rachael that I even realized what a city is, with its distinct accents and food items and brands of beer and ethnic enclaves.
Being Jewish in her Jewish family, I felt like I was pretending. And also, we did end up divorcing. Then I married another Jewish woman, this one from New Jersey. The family, among other things, owned the Ronson lighter company and lived on the sixth hole at a golf club in very Jewish Ocean Township and were heavily ethnically identified, with no religious commitments that I could detect.
I came from a Jewish family but came to know Jews, or even to understand my own family history, only when I married into other families. In them, stories of pogroms and Ellis Island and how they came to spell their name like that and who among them died in the Shoah persisted and were central to each person's identity, taken for granted almost, basic. They might’ve realized after a while that my participation was… speculative and inauthentic.
I didn't yearn for a religious background that I lacked; I don't know who I'd be with an upbringing that different from the one I received. Even when I ended up questioning my own atheism during periods of crisis, even when I came to believe in God and started worshiping each week, I didn't gravitate toward Judaism, but toward Protestant Christianity; I became a Quaker. This would’ve bewildered and outraged the families of the women I married, and vaguely all Jews everywhere. Jews becoming Protestants is one way a people might die.
But in my own life, it represented only the most abstract of betrayals. My mom was more disgusted by my no longer being an atheist than by my not going in a more Jewish direction. My third marriage is to a WASP; everyone seems well past even noticing things like that. It's not like we're having babies.
So even if I ended up yearning for some sort of spiritual connection, I don't feel deprived of the religion of Judaism, per se. I do feel the erasure of family history acutely, however, and still wish I’d heard more, and more directly, about our experiences. I sort of wish, as well, that I’d grown up in a more real city than DC, with a reservoir of shared experience. DC assimilates people undetectably as soon as they cross the border. Anyway, I thought Pikesville was interesting and fun, even if some of the kids who grew up there wanted to escape to DC in turn.
Also, I probably gained things in my deracination. I wanted to be a philosopher, and one point of view for that is some kind of abstract universal human identity, or a kind of cosmopolitanism. I'm not speaking from a particular orientation, or on behalf of or to a particular community, I sometimes like to believe. I'm speaking as an abstract and general human to the abstract and general questions about human existence. I'm not denying that my abstract generality is a delusion. But I’m saying that lacking a particular parochial identity also yields certain resources for this kind of work.
I'm still more worried about being the child and grandchild of communists than of Jews, still feel the radical politics as an identity I'm struggling with or toward. But the Judaism—for me—is something real, but not something felt: an interesting fact but not exactly an experience. I'm capable of wondering whether or how it could’ve been otherwise, but not of seriously wishing that it was.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
