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Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Seth Feldman; David Finkelstein; Ally Freeman; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; David Phillips; and Joseph Pinson. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the JFO are: Institute for Holocaust Education, Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Community Center, Jewish Social Services and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

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Antisemitic garbage fires

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor Here’s the headline: “London theater group cancels Nazi-Jewish Romeo and Juliet after wave of criticism.” Of course, a retelling, fictionalization of the Holocaust experience (via Shakespeare, no less) is a phenomenally bad idea. What makes it even worse: this is not the first time someone thought this would be okay, and went so far as to write the script, hire a venue, hire a staff and cast, only to cancel at the eleventh hour. But: at least they canceled. Back in 2017, a small independent ballet company put on a show named Romeo and Jewliet, “a modern ballet of the Shakespearean love story set in Vienna, 1938, back in town after its debut three years ago,” Lana Guggenheim wrote for Jewcy and Tablet Magazine. “It’s as terrible and offensive as it sounds,” she added. A quick Google search results in evidence of various amateur — and high school — performances who are equally tone deaf. I have to be honest: I am biased against fictionalizing any part of the Holocaust. I did not enjoy Schindler’s list. I despise the striped pajamas-book. I think the real stories speak so loud and clear, we do not need to make things up. Not to make it easier to understand, to make it more palatable, to make it simpler to digest, none of that. The truth is the truth, and that’s that. When you start embellishing, it never ends well. Johnny Teague is a GOP candidate for Congres in Texas’ 7th district. He is also a business owner and an evangelical pastor. In 2020, he published The Lost Diary of Anne Frank, which picks up where Anne Frank’s diary left off. In Teague’s imagination, she goes to Bergen Belsen and finds Jesus. I don’t have to tell you how wrong that is, but what sur-

Romeo woos Juliet on the balcony in a 1937 litho-

graph from the American School. Credit: Image via Getty. Design by Mollie Suss. prises me is that there are people like Teague who see no issue with it. Like, how? How could you possibly think this is okay? About the 2017 Ballet, Guggenheim wrote: “Goyim seem to like writing stories that have Jews and Nazis falling in love with each other. Never is any Jew involved in creating these stories, because the thought of a romantic connection with someone who wants to turn us and our families into ash is not just revolting, it’s impossible, and indeed sometimes the plot demands that the Jew convert, obtain false papers, and live under a new, false name. Love requires parity, and you don’t get parity when the other person doesn’t consider you human.” There’s the essence of why these types of fiction make us so uncomfortable: at the very root is the notion that we are not fully human, that we are not good enough, coupled with the desire to either kill us or fix us. Like Martin Luther concluded a long time ago, if we could only convert, we’d be okay; if we don’t, we should go away. Because of this underlying idea, most Holocaust fiction occupies both an antisemitic and philosemitic space. It’s how people like Teague can spout the most antisemitic nonsense while being convinced they are doing the Jews a favor, because they ‘really love Jews.’ “That’s it,” Guggenheim said after she spoke with the creator behind the Romeo and Jewliet ballet, “That’s how we get this antisemitic garbage fire. Well-meaning ignorance and utter disregard for the kind of trauma and society-deep sickness that genocide both causes, and requires.” The ‘antisemitic garbage fire’ seems an apt description, but ‘well-meaning?’ I am not so sure about that anymore.

Seattle’s climate is changing, and so are our Jewish rituals

HANNAH S. PRESSMAN

JTA People in Seattle praying for rain — only on Opposite Day, right? Admittedly, the rain jokes write themselves, but there is no humor to be found in this situation: The Pacific Northwest found itself desperately hoping for precipitation over the past several weeks. Seattle’s hottest summer ever on record extended into a toasty October with regional temperatures in the 80s, typically unheard of at this time of year.

The Tacoma News Tribune reported that we were experiencing the driest October since the 1940s. The Bolt Creek Fire, which erupted in early September near Skyhomish, has been burning for over a month and tarnishing Western Washington with unhealthy smoke levels for days on end. On Oct. 19 and 20, the website IQAir reported that Seattle’s air quality was the worst on the planet. So yes, Seattle has been praying for rain; in the era of extreme weather events, ironies abound. For Jews living in the Pacific Northwest, it has become an unwelcome part of our seasonal preparation to anticipate how wildfire smoke might throw a wrench in our holiday plans. Parts of the High Holiday liturgy now strike me with new and disturbing resonance. I can’t read “who by fire” in the Unatenah Tokef prayer without thinking about the wildfires around the Cascades and the dangers they pose to people and animals both near and far. Years of severe drought up and down the West Coast have laid the groundwork, literally, for wildfires to spread and affect increasingly large areas, disrupting daily life on an unprecedented level for people in this part of the country. Despite media coverage, I am not sure how much our lived reality has penetrated the awareness of people outside this region. As a Puget Sound resident for the last 15 years, I’ve watched the news follow a certain pattern: local reporting, followed sometimes by national reporting; a drop-off in national coverage as the crisis lingers; then an occasional swerve into arguments for or against the existence of global warming, forest mismanagement or whatever other polarizing environmental issue is on the table. And while raging fire becomes an opportunity for raging voices, real-time human suffering is ignored. I am not an environmental scientist, so I cannot prove or disprove whichever theories the recent wildfires are supposed to uphold. What I can provide is testimony about living through this moment and its impact on my Jewish holiday observance. I can tell you about putting up a sukkah two weeks ago and staying outside just long enough to make a quick kiddush and say the blessing “leishev basukkah,” which expresses the commandment to sit in the temporary huts that are the enterprise of the Sukkot holiday. This year we may have fudged a little on the halakhic requirements for making that blessing, because the air smelled so terrible that we scurried back inside to eat our meal. I can describe my fiveyear-old daughter patting the air purifier in my bedroom, trying to appease it whenever its red light indicated that it had detected something toxic in the air. “You’ll be OK,” she reassured the machine (simultaneously not reassuring me at all). She brought the purifier things to help it feel better, like a blanket and Laurie Berkner’s recording of All the Pretty Little Horses — a child’s offerings to an angry god. A Sukkot week with only one or two days of moderate-enough air quality to spend time in the sukkah really doesn’t feel like z’man simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing. When the skies appear apocalyptic, when ash rains down on you from a mountain burning miles away, how can you make the spiritual pilgrimage that our High Holy Days require? Which brings me back to the prayer that is added to the daily Amidah prayer on the last day of Sukkot: “Mashiv haruach umorid hageshem” — the Jewish prayer for wind and rain. This year, looking at that line, I felt a convergence of my current reality with the liturgy and language of my ancestors. For Jews, this appeal to the One who can make the wind return and the rain fall is invoked from the

end of Sukkot until the beginning of Passover. After the smokiest Sukkot in memory, a frustrating and frightening week of diminished rather than increased joy, I think everyone in this corner of the country was crying out for wind and rain to relieve us of the unbreathable, unthinkable air that had refused to budge for so long.

“A Sukkot week with only one or two days of moderate-enough air quality to spend time in the sukkah really doesn’t feel like z’man simchateinu, the season

of our rejoicing.” Credit: JTA Illustration Last Friday, based on weather predictions, I dressed my daughter in rain pants and boots. Like my fellow Seattleites, I walked out the door hoping against hope that it would finally be the day to break the dry spell and drive away the cursed smoke. And lo, as we got in the car, the first spattering of rain in weeks began to softly descend. We drove to school with the windows down, reveling in the rain that began to fall more steadily and insistently. My daughter laughed and shouted a prayer of thanks towards the heavens: “Thank you, rain, for getting the smoke away!” Our air and our sky have been returned to us. Let us rejoice, for now.

Hannah S. Pressman is the Director of Education and Engagement for the Jewish Language Project. She received her Ph.D. in modern Hebrew literature from New York University. You can find her writings on Jewish culture and Sephardic family history at hannahpressman.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

JTA The history of Jewish identity and politics in America has been told as a triumph of spiritual renewal (“A Certain People,” Charles Silberman, 1986), as an overdue flexing of political muscle (“Jewish Power,” J.J. Goldberg, 1996) and as a series of clashes between denominations and world views (“Jew vs. Jew,” Samuel Freedman, 2006). Emily Tamkin takes a different tack, tracing the history of American Jewry through the ways Jews on one side of social upheaval seek to discredit the very Jewishness of those on the other side. In Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, Tamkin writes about key moments in American and American Jewish history — the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise and fall of the labor movement, the internal debate over Israel. Jews didn’t just disagree with one another during these debates, but charged that their Jewish antagonists were “self-hating,” “kapos,” “radicals,” and “antisemites” — in short, bad Jews. But her goal, Tamkin writes, is not to reveal Jews as hopelessly divided or judge who is and isn’t a “good Jew,” but rather to describe how these debates are part of a constant conversation about “who is Jewish, and how to be Jewish, and what it means to be Jewish.” In fact, Tamkin, 32, calls “Bad Jews” a “love letter to Jewish pluralism,” celebrating the many ways Jews have come to define themselves, as well as a corrective to historians, journalists and politicians who treat Jews as a social and political monolith despite their diversity. If some of these expressions make readers uncomfortable — Tamkin writes about Jewish anti-Zionists, Trumpists, atheists, religious zealots and the proudly intermarried — that, she writes, is the price and glory of being an American Jew. “Somebody wrote that she thought this was going to be a new framing about who was a bad Jew,” Tamkin said in an interview from her home in Washington, D.C. “And actually, it seems like I was talking about all the ways that people try to be good Jews.” Tamkin is the senior editor, U.S., of The New Statesman, and author of The Influence of Soros, a 2020 study of the Jewish philanthropist’s liberal causes, business legacy and the vitriol he draws from the right. She has her master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor’s degree in Russian literature and cultures from Columbia University. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let’s start with the genesis for the book: What’s the problem or challenge that you saw and that you felt the need to address?

Emily Tamkin: Well, I’ve been saying that my villain origin story for this is that my last book was on George Soros. And one of the things that came up quite a lot as a sort of defense by his critics accused of being antisemitic that, well, it can’t be antisemitism because he’s not really Jewish. “Look at his relationship to Israel, look at his relationship to religion,” they’d say. And this really upset me.

Because he was critical of Israel, for instance, that made Soros a bad Jew.

Exactly — that he’s somehow not Jewish because he doesn’t check a certain number of boxes. What was upsetting me was not only the treatment of this billionaire, but I was having a personal reaction to it as well. Also, all of this was happening in the Trump years where it felt to me like the label of “bad Jew” was being tossed back and forth across the political aisle. And I thought that it would be useful to put that moment in historical context. I saw a tweet at one point saying there’s a Jewish civil war going on. And I don’t disagree with that, but it’s been going on for at least 100 years in this country. And I think sometimes it’s useful to let that inform our present discussions and debates.

When you said personal: What personally triggered you when Soros was being labeled a “bad Jew”?

As I write in the introduction, I really went back and forth on whether or not I could write this book — because my mother had converted to Judaism before I was born or because my husband isn’t Jewish or I’d never been to Israel before writing this book. I didn’t go to Hebrew school — on and on. And I came to conclude that [my biography] is a very useful framing for thinking about authenticity. Obviously, one needs to have a certain amount of knowledge to write any book, but the idea that there’s a certain set of preconditions that you have to hit to be considered Jewish or sufficiently Jewish? I think that’s really wrong. When I started writing this book, I probably would have used the label “bad Jew” half-jokingly about myself, but I don’t do that anymore.

Let me just clarify the title for people who haven’t read the book: You’re not calling yourself or others bad Jews, but you’re describing the ways the term has been repeatedly weaponized by various sets of Jews against other Jews.

Exactly, or against ourselves, because it’s quite internalized as well. I have had a couple of people say to me, “Well, how could you call a book Bad Jews at this time of rising antisemitism?” And to this I would just say that, actually, a time when our political leaders are speaking about American Jews as though they’re bad Jews is exactly the time to have a book called Bad Jews.

You describe a number of Jewish internal battles in the book, including deep schisms over Israel, civil rights and interfaith marriage. Is there one that really encapsulates how Jews use “bad Jews” as a label against each other?

The back and forth on intermarriage is a good example. It is wrapped up in the debate over who we’re supposed to be in this country and how we’re supposed to relate to the United States and to what extent do you assimilate to a culture. What sometimes gets lost, not just in the debate around intermar-

Jews argue outside of the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates were scheduled to speak during the American Israeli

Public Affairs Committee convention, March 21, 2016. Credit: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images riage, but generally, is that there are many ways that people can explore Jewishness in a way that’s meaningful to them. And we lose sight of that, when we’re focused on “Oh, I’m doing this right. I’m doing this wrong.”

In the book you include a critique of the Jewish philanthropic establishment by suggesting the debate over intermarriage was a not-so-implicit attack on Jewish women who “are not having enough babies,” as a critic of the organizations tells you. Can you expand on the ways you feel the establishment sort of weaponized what they came to call the continuity debate?

As you know, I’m not inventing this research — especially women in Jewish Studies have made this case. Basically, the idea is that Jewish organizations went out and paid for studies that sort of told them what they wanted to hear in terms of how threatening intermarriages are. And in one case, [sociologist] Stephen M. Cohen, this was being done by somebody who has been accused of sexually harassing women. I think it’s important to draw attention to the episode in which people said. “Okay, can we look at how to be more inclusive of Jews who are marrying people who are not Jewish?” And how instead they were told, “Let’s focus on the core and not the periphery.” People sometimes say, “Well, you know, Jews are more likely to raise Jewish children if they marry other Jews.” Well, if you’re talking about people who don’t marry other Jews as the “periphery,” how welcome are they going to feel in Jewish life?

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes. Like, how welcome are they going to feel to explore the different ways in which Jewish life can be meaningful? More generally, something we have seen throughout American Jewish history, or at least the last century, is that American Jewish institutions tend to be more conservative than American Jews at large. Which is fine, except to the extent that these same organizations, the same donors, purport to speak for all American Jews — which they don’t and in fact can’t because it’s such a pluralistic set of communities. I hesitate to say that there is an American Jewish community — certainly not one that can be spoken for by a single institution or set of social scientists or what have you.

There’s a lot of discussion about whiteness in Bad Jews. I know you draw on and credit fully Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks.... They argue that while Jews were not quite accepted as wholly American by other, non-Jewish whites, they nevertheless benefited from policies and structures that enabled people who presented as white to become upwardly mobile, while people of color were intentionally left behind. Why is it important to understand the history of American Jewish identity in terms of race and whiteness?

I think because it’s American history. And because so much in this country comes back to race. Interracial hierarchies tend to favor white supremacy. To understand Jewish history in the United States, for better or for worse, you need to understand how it relates to race and racism. I think that’s particularly important to do now for two reasons. The first is that we’re in, unfortunately, a moment of pretty blatant white supremacy for many political quarters. And I think it’s important that American Jews, most of whom go through life as white people for all intents and purposes, understand the ways in which some of us have upheld some of the racial hierarchies in the United States. And the second thing is that the face of American Jewish life is changing. I’m not a Jew of color. I don’t try to speak for Jews of color. But I do think that it’s important to understand that the majority of American Jews historically have had a very different experience and different relationship to whiteness in America than Jews of color.

Maybe it is no coincidence that the biggest Jewish conversation right now is a tweet by Donald Trump that was perceived as antisemitic and comments by Kanye West, a Black rapper, which I would say were blatantly antisemitic.

I mean, [Kanye’s comments] were, like, pretty textbook. I don’t know that you can get more antisemitic than saying “a Jewish agenda is ruining my life.”

Let’s focus on Trump for a second. Basically he said Jews who don’t put Israel first in their political thinking are not only ungrateful to him but are, essentially, bad Jews. What was your take?

I think it displayed a deep lack of understanding about most American Jews. Most American Jews do not vote with Israel as their top issue. Most American Jews lean liberal, and especially younger American Jews are more critical of Israel. The part that was antisemitic is this idea that if you’re an American Jew you are supposed to have loyalty first and foremost to another country, but also that your status as a good Jew is contingent on your loyalty to a political party. Like, no: We’re Americans, whether or not we vote for Donald Trump. I did see some Republican Jews or conservative Jews who came out and said no, Trump is right. The second-to-last chapter of my book looks at Jews who were supportive of Trump and said that those who weren’t were bad Jews. Obviously, I think that that’s wrong and that it’s not helpful. But conservatism is also a strain of American Jewish thought, just like liberal pluralism is a strain of American Jewish thought.

Fighting antisemitism used to be a great unifying force among Jews – but today the right insists the anti-Zionist left is the biggest threat and the left says white supremacy is the biggest threat.

Yes, Jewish people define it quite differently. I thought that what Trump said was antisemitic, and there are conservative Jews who disagree with me on that. There are criticisms of Israel that I don’t consider to be antisemitic that others consider Jew hatred. Having said that, this is not a book about antisemitism. Because antisemitism, it’s about Jews, but it’s also not about Jews, right? It’s about antisemites, and I think American Jewish history is so much bigger and richer than the people who hate us.

You write something at the end of the book I’d love you to expand on: “your favorite part about being an American Jew.” What is that?

It starts with something I heard a lot in Israel: “We don’t have to think about being Jewish.” That’s not totally true. There are debates on how to be Jewish in Israel, even if they’re quite different, but I think someone said to me, like, “We’re not paranoid about it like you.” But I love my paranoia. I love gazing in my own navel and thinking about what it means to be Jewish and what it means to be Jewish in America and changing my mind about what that means to me and rethinking it. I didn’t think that I would be a person who grew up to belong to a synagogue and then I did. I didn’t think that I would be a person who takes Yiddish classes in my free time and now I am. I really didn’t think I would be a person who writes about these issues in print, and here I am. I think there are many things that one can do in life and point to and be like, “ah, that’s Jewish.” Just asking these questions, even though there’s not an answer, is a part of Jewishness and Judaism that I really love. I do hope that comes across in this book. It’s a love letter to Jewish pluralism in some ways. I love being an American Jew. And I would hope that despite the title and despite the infighting and despite the self-doubt, that comes across to readers and invites them to think, “What do I love about it, what is significant to me, what parts of the American Jewish experience can I latch on to?”

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News. @SilowCarroll.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media. This article was edited for length.