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05/13/2008: ""Double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance for an American Jew""

I think that the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance for me as an American Jewish writer. If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without
relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews. While I don't think that the American and the Jewish identity principles are always necessarily opposed, I do think that keeping both ideas in one's head at one time can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension.

It is also inherently deceptive, in the sense that one is quite often signaling to others that one has agreed to dissolve one's particular heritage and historically bound point of view into a common Christian-inflected, highly individualistic and alienating, yet incredibly productive future-oriented social whole that most American Jews view with a high degree of distance and skepticism. The only real parallel for the ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea is the experience and behavior of blacks --- whose situation is radically different because of the overt and inescapable historically-bound prejudice directed at the color of their skin. Blacks
can't dissolve themselves in the American melting pot, and so they often see the American idea as a open lie at the same time as they taste its sweet honey.

[ Blacks are not the most influential ethnicity in US politics. Jews admit that it is they. What is "the American idea" that the writer finds so weird? The American dream is the gospel of consumption - and Jews fit into that like a hand in a glove. ]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=982708&contrassID=25&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=1&listSrc=Y&art=1