“Are you an American, or are you a Jew?”
Sara Anderson posed this question on March 29, 2024. She is a cantor at Temple Emanu-El, one of the oldest and largest Reform synagogues in the world. In the fourteen-minute excerpt posted on YouTube,
she discusses four existential crises faced by specific individuals in the Torah. Then, she poses a new existential question for herself and others without providing her own answer.
“Are you an American, or are you a Jew?”
I was surprised—shocked, even—by the question. It’s not one I’ve ever been asked by anyone, much less myself. My own answer is that I am both. As Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” However, in the way the question is being asked, that answer is not permitted. It is a binary choice. You must choose one or the other. It’s like those multiple-choice questions in tests that ask for the most correct answer. When I was taking the SATs in a long-ago time, I couldn’t avoid answering. As an adult today. I refuse to answer it; I refuse to play the game.
The question, though, is more complicated than it appears because it asserts that there is a fundamental dichotomy between being a citizen of this or any country and being Jewish. The sad fact is that for almost a thousand years, the dichotomy has been real. As a Jew, one could be a citizen of a country, but one could also be banished from the country. In 1290, King Edward I expelled all Jews from England; they were not permitted to return for 360 years. They were expelled from Spain in 1492. In Portugal, Jews were expelled in 1496; they were given eleven months to either be baptized or leave the country. In France, Germany, and Russia, they were expelled between 1290 and 1315 and then once again from 1394 until 1655. Do you see a pattern?
The expulsion of Jews throughout Europe was not simply a political decision by Kings. It was fully endorsed, encouraged, and promulgated by the Christian Church. During the Middle Ages, the Church — its clergy, not its parishioners — decided that Jews were not really an integral part of the particular society in which they lived. They were a separate group and not part of the nation, a fundamentally foreign body within the body politic, their presence to be tolerated to a greater or lesser degree until it wasn’t.
In 1654, a group of 23 Sephardic Jews arrived in New Amsterdam (pre-Colonial New York) after fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil, the first Jews to arrive in North America. The Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, famed for clopping around on his peg leg, tried to banish the Jews from the city. However, after an appeal by some of the town’s citizens, Stuyvesant’s overseers at the Dutch West India Company ordered him to let them stay. Russell Shorto, in his book The Island at the Center of the World, argues that this, along with other events, made New York into the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, (relatively) tolerant city that it became — so different from, say, the nearby Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony — and a vital contributor to the ethos that underlay the formation of America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights.
For Jews all over the world (including the USA), there is always a question of assimilation. That is, how deeply to integrate yourself into the fabric of the country in which you are living. And, of course, there is the corollary: How deeply will the rest of the country allow you to become an integral part of it? In Germany prior to World War 2, most Jews who were born there thought of themselves as a fully integrated part of the society and were reluctant to leave the country even as the Nazis’ anti-Semitism grew ever more virulent. Besides, there was no European country in which anti-Semitism was completely absent. That was true of America as well, a country that, despite its commitment to religious freedom, found itself unwilling to allow Jews to immigrate here in any significant number. No country was completely safe.
My great-grandfather, Eliakum Zunser, emigrated to America from Russia in 1890. In 1905 (when the New York Times called him the “father of Yiddish poetry”), he wrote a brief autobiography in which he talked about assimilation. When he was born (1840), Jews were confined to living in certain areas of the country and were extremely limited in their choices for education (no college, e.g.) and employment. In 1860, with the ascension of Alexander II to the throne, that began to change. Living restrictions were lifted, and many Jews rushed to cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg; they were allowed to attend colleges, and more professions were open to them. Many, too, became less Jewish or more Russified as they became more assimilated. Throughout the period, Eliakum would warn against being too committed to thinking Jews had been fully accepted as part of Russian society. He was proved prescient when Alexander was assassinated in 1881, and, once again, Jews were subject to pogroms and ostracized from the rest of the society.
In 1878, Sir Christopher Oliphant, a British evangelical Christian, became passionately committed to the idea of Jews settling in agricultural communities in Palestine to alleviate the suffering they experienced in Eastern Europe. In fact, he raised money to establish such a colony in the Galilee and, after Russian pogroms in 1881, settled in Palestine himself. Originally called “Restorationism” by evangelicals, Oliphant’s efforts became known as Zionism in 1890. Eliakum thought of himself as a Zionist and urged Jews to emigrate. Thinking of Palestine as a place that needed young people, by the time he decided to leave Russia, he thought himself too old for the rigors of agricultural life and, instead, left for New York in 1895 with his wife and five children. But much as he loved America, loved the degree of freedom he found here, he was always wary that the country might turn on him, that anti-Semitism, in its more virulent forms, might overtake the Jews in America.
I would note that my parents, involved as much as they were in this country and its civic life, always suspected that latent anti-Semitism lay within almost every Christian heart.
For myself, both as a child and an adult, I made no such assumptions. The fact that I was frequently called out as a Kike or Christ-killer by the boys who went to a Catholic parochial school just a half block away from my public school didn’t make me assume anything about other people that I knew, like the kids in my public school almost none of them Jewish. But though my parents were assertively Jewish but secular, working as they did in the world of Jewish philanthropic community services, having or attending Passover services from as far back as I can remember, extolling the virtues of my mother’s family — of her parents and grandparents — I came to think of myself as being Jewish. And the more I knew of Christianity, of the history of the Church in general, and, more particularly, of its attitude toward Jews and anyone who wasn’t Christian, the happier I was that I wasn’t a Christian. Christianity had, I thought then and now, too much to answer for. This had nothing to do with individual Christians. Most of my life, I’ve lived with, worked with, married (nominally) Christians, and never felt unwanted or … well, anything at all other than we were all people, each with our own experiences, virtues, and flaws. We’re all human.
As for being an American, outside of the coincidence of being born here, there is this one episode. In 1952, upon graduating from elementary school and about to enter high school, my grandfather took me on a week-long trip to Washington, DC. He thought that I should learn what being an American meant to him. The America he wanted me to know about was contained in the places we visited. The Jefferson Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial. The Washington Monument. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights all housed and viewable in the National Archives building. That was Grandpa’s America, and that became my America. Not the America of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or any of the other candidates for being the “great American novel.” No, it was something much simpler and much grander. It was the America of our founding fathers, the America of aspiration, of liberty, of freedom, of equality before the law and of opportunity, a land of both rights and obligations both explicit and implicit. That is my America. That is why I’m an American.
So, on the first night of Passover, I will not say the familiar, “Next year in Jerusalem.” And no, I will not choose between being an American or being a Jew. I am both. I contain multitudes.
I have a similar bio-born in NYC. Jewish Paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents emigrated from Russia. Raised in secular Jewish home—no Seders, not kosher,etc. never had any interest in Israel. Proud to be American. But never under any illusion. Somehow from childhood, having learned some history and also experiencing anti-Semitism , I never believed that Jews were only safe here. I always said “it can happen here.” I’ve been hateful and un-American for saying as much.
But since 10/7 it is painfully clear. Here and around the world. A Jew is only temporarily tolerated.
My answer to the question? I’m both—if they will let me be. That is IMO the only rational answer. The sooner we all recognize that and defend our accepted status, the safer we will be.