Jew-bilation: The Existential Agony of Mistaken Ethnic Identity

Below is yesterday's entry at Boogie Woogie Flu, one of my favorite music blogs. It's deals with a rarely sounded theme--at least recently--in American letters: being mistaken for a Jew and the existential crisis that often ensues as the "victim" realizes he is both the target of undeserved prejudice and a coward for feeling so insulted by it. There's a rich post-war literature rich in such encounters--and where they lead. But I didn't know this remained a modern danger--until I looked at my own life.

There are so many variations on the theme of mistaken Jewish identity. I, for one, am often incensed when I am correctly identified as Jewish. Immediately these days I lapse into a Jackie Mason Yiddish-ized minstrelsy to conceal my anger and to prove an ingratiating (but subtly derisive) mock-comfort with my identity. In other words, I practice a kind of defusing akido of amenability that makes my assailant feel at ease with his prejudice or discomfort and in no way threatened by me for having these feelings. Prejudice is an entitlement for many who feel them. It's almost as if you live in an urbane post-Nazi Nazi Germany where people don't turn you in but simply remind you to wear your arm band next time you go outdoors. "Frankly, I don't need such badges to tell me who you are," you are told over and over. "But you know how easy it is to fool the man on the street."

Most Jews I know aren't trying to fool their neighbors anymore--just themselves. They revel in a kind of Jewish "white face" minstrelsy. The Coen Brothers "A Serious Man" is a superb deadpan Jewish minstrel show, but you don't know it until you examine the guest intrusion of a Korean family stereotype used to mock or merely to remind us of the stereotyping that is going on. The movie is both homage to and subversion of defining stereotypes. Jewish identity is, at its worst and most banal, racial. Why anyone, including me, would revel in ethnic stereotypes is a mystery I must solve before taking leave of this birth. If I don't, I fear being saddled in some future incarnation with the infamous "black-skin" life-conundrum in 1931 Scottsboro Mississippi. (Who said time has to go forward?) Africa is another story about a different matter. There my race would be mainstream and I would feel safe as, possibly even taking for granted, my racial self. Of course, there might be tribal riffraff to contend with. But that's why I would keep a machete under my bed (all the while longing to live in America where the people have a gods-given right to own guns).

Okay, what does a non-Jewish victim of mistaken identity do? In an interview, John Lennon conceded he was often mistaken for a Jew and said it gave him no offense. Indeed, given Jewish suffering, he was flattered. I wonder if he really felt that way. Certainly, it was a great response from a rock and roll rebel. But I digress.

If blacks are cursed by "invisibility," Jews are cursed by "visibility." I mean, no black man runs the casual, daily risk of routine mistaken identity such as described here--or even the "honkie" caricature of a white man in his own mind. [I remember a black next door neighbor character in the TV sit-com "Family Ties" who shared the secret sin of loving white man's mood music with "young Republican" Michael J. Fox every week. It was supposed to be walk-on sabotage of stereotypes.] That separateness is unique to African-American alienation. On the other hand (or is it foot?), every white man is potentially a victim of being mistaken for a Jew--a kind of inverse alienation based on the anxiety of suddenly losing the security of being unconditionally "white" and "wasp." Apparently, such vulnerability and the cowardly confusion it generates is an infuriating regular occurrence for lapsed Catholic blogger Chris O'Leary. He starts a remarkable Hanukkah-season essay with a quote from poet John Berryman's famous prize-winning remembrance, "The Imaginary Jew," published in the Fall 1945 issue of Kenyon Review. Its author, a lapsed Catholic, committed suicide in 1972. Many commentators see the seeds of that act in his story. I don't see all roads in such identity-tormented lives leading to sleeping pills or pistols. I see the "peace" made with such encounters like that made here. I know that I took refuge in Sufism, in part, to remove any eligibility for mistaken identity and any emotion if I failed in that intention.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Mistaken Identity

By Chris O'Leary

"Listen, I told you I'm not a Jew."
"I don't give a damn what you are," he turned his half-dark eyes to me, wrenching his arm loose. "You talk like a Jew."
"What does that mean?" Some part of me wanted to laugh.
"How does a Jew talk?"
"They talk like you, buddy."

-John Berryman, "The Imaginary Jew"
The Kenyon Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1945.

Although my name is Christopher Paul O’Leary and I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church (that’s as far as it went: no communion, no confirmation), I am regularly taken for a Jew. This could be simply because I have a beard and wear glasses, or maybe whatever Irish Catholic residue I still carry reads instead as Jewish: a faulty translation.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia, where there are few Catholics, let alone Jews. My identity was fixed then. My third-grade teacher had me stand in front of the class and explain what a Catholic was. I stammered and tried to remember something from the masses I attended in the summer, when I was under the care of my grandmother in Connecticut. At last I said, “Well, we have the Pope.” The teacher, a brutal mountain-bred descendant of Covenanters, nodded. “That you do,” she said, and silently consigned me to hell.

Something changed. The Jewish confusion, let’s call it (it would be a good band name), first occurred in Boston, while I was in college. A Hasidic teenager with a clipboard (I never learned what he wanted) was approaching students on Commonwealth Avenue. He quickly appraised me: “Jewish, yes?” He startled me and I sharply replied no. He stepped back, stared at me again and said, “Well, good!”

It was a backwards curse. Once I moved to New York, the Jewish confusions multiplied. A typical example: I was walking on Eighth Avenue and ahead of me a man was passing out fliers for a strip club while he kept up a running patter. “Hey come on down. Come on down the block. Your wife don’t have to know. Your girlfriend don’t have to know.” He spun towards me. “Your rabbi don’t have to know. Come on down the block.”

I was even Jew-bashed once, in Sunnyside, Queens, while walking to the subway. As a group of teenagers passed me, the largest one nearly knocked me to the sidewalk as he sneered, “Well if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood Jew!” The rest laughed and cursed. I stewed over the encounter for days—angry at being harassed for something I wasn’t, then feeling guilty for being indignant about that factor. But there are more legitimate reasons to harass me, I countered. I was the victim of inaccurate bigots. I grew paranoid and wondered if people in the local market called me “the friendly neighborhood Jew” after I left. I stopped being friendly.

I married a half-Jew (I still have a menorah in the basement), we moved to Massachusetts, we divorced. Soon after the latter, I had to drive to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to cover a conference. Old Greenwich is the sort of place where money goes for its retirement. Even the sewer grates look pristine. I pulled into a palatial hotel. The attendant at the gate was a West Indian man who offered me a wide smile and pointed at my chest: “Let me guess---you’re Jewish!” he boomed.

He seemed to savor the last word, drawing out the vowels. He seemed elated he had found a Jew. Was he one too? Was he grabbing at the opportunity to bond with any type of perceived outsider? Or was he just some lunatic? I denied the charge yet again, shaking my head no, took my ticket and drove past. He looked so sad. I’ve since regretted not temporarily converting for him: for a moment I finally would have been what the world wanted me to be.