Michael Chabon on being Jewish

Michael Chabon wrote a piece for the New York Times on "being Jewish" as part of the backwash caused by the recent interdiction of a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. It is classic Chabon. You can see The Yiddish Policemen's Union all over it. When I saw that the next day's New York Times brought seven letters in response, I decided to play with Chabon and his respondents a game I play in my upper division classes at PSU. The game is: read the responses first and form the best idea you can of what the original article must have been about. THEN you read the article. Playing the game was pleasant, as always, and enlightening, as usual.

Chabon's major point was that the notion is maintained by scanning over the Jews you know, counting the best ones as "typical" and passing over the others. You learn not to see, he says, the blockheaded Jews who are so bountifully available and to see the best, the most accomplished, as typical. That is how Jewish kids are taught that Jews are special.

Even Chabon did not attempt to reflect on how the notion of Jewish exceptionalism got started, much less whether it is justified. He did say that Israel's ability as a nation to stay in play this deep into history was a matter of luck, not of merit.

No one responded to his thesis. None of the seven. He might as well have written a piece inviting readers to submit "your thoughts about Israel and Jews." It was like the movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, in which a group of people get together to discuss one after another of the Austen novels, only to have each meeting, one after another, highjacked by the host for purposes of her own.

Of the seven, I found my heart going out to the writer who gave what I thought was the wittiest response. He said it was true, as Chabon argued, that "Jews" are not exceptional, but who is going to explain that to his 82 year old mother? Denying and affirming Chabon's thesis in the same few words.