From: Shmuel Rosner

To: Adam LeBor

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your thoughtful response. The lesson of your experience seems quite obvious: if even someone like yourself, whose instincts (I suspect) are much more pro-UN than mine, has turned skeptical, then the organization is really as useless as I imagined. And the point you've raised regarding its treatment of Israel is but one example of why it should be scrapped, or at least marginalized. Giving it more power will be very costly to Israel, as instead of working to better the world as it should, what I expect the UN to do it is to try and use any power it might obtain to make Israel less secure.

So let us agree (I think we do) on that, and turn to the question of Darfur, and to Jewish-American involvement in trying to make this cause a keystone of using Jewish political power to improve the world.

The facts are indisputable: Jewish Americans were on the forefront of the battle toScene From The Armenian Genocide: Jews fought against genocide even before the Holocaust save Darfur. If you happened to attend the largest Washington demonstration for Darfur you couldn't ignore the fact that although it wasn't a "Jewish" rally, most of the participants happened to be Jewish. Jewish legislators (among them the late Tom Lantos) were vocal, Jewish activists were, well, very active, Jewish organizations were, and still are, making space for this issue on their agenda.

But what is the reason for all that?

One possible explanation should make all of us very proud: Jews, who suffered the most from genocide, feel compelled to raise their voices against it in every part of the world. They feel they have the moral authority and obligation to do so. And they're right.

But there's also a second possibility (which isn't mutually exclusive from the first): For the past few decades, American Jews were spent most of their political capital on the just cause of securing Israel --- and then got tired of it. They got tired of being seen by some elite groups as particularistic and tribal. They got tired as the cause (Israel) has shifted from being David to being Goliath. And they were looking to prove that American Judaism is not a hostage of the Israel-first school of thought, that it has its own priorities.

This comes out in discussions of Darfur as well as other humanistarian causes. One expression of those sentiments the outrageous letter (former IDF civilian volunteer) Representative Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) sent to Israel's Ambassador in Washington, demanding that Israel be more receptive to Sudanese refugees who reach Israel's borders. Another expression was the denunciation (in which Jewcy played no small part) of the Anti Defamation League after its leader, Abe Foxman, came out in opposition to the Armenian Genocide bill presented to Congress by --- you guessed it --- a Jewish legislator. (The bill was defeated for the very reasons on which Foxman based his opposition, but you didn't hear much criticism of its sponsors and of the leadership of the House when they failed to deliver on their unrealistic pledges).

So you see where I'm going with this --- and I hope the readers will spare me comments blaming me for not caring enough about genocide. I'm happy to see the Jewish community as active as it is in humanitarian causes. I do also think, however, that there's some merit to this niggling question that keeps coming back: Will universalist causes eventually replace Israel as the great political cause of American Jewry?

One might suspect that domestic considerations are also in play here. American JewsBeta Israel: The Jews of Ethiopia were always at the forefront of fighting for the rights of African-Americans. They were marching alongside Reverend King in the high days of cooperation between the two communities, but sometimes along the way the bond between Jews and African Americans have soured. The Jewish community has been trying to prove, ever since, that it did not abandon African-Americans for racial reasons --- hence some of the appeal to Jews of Barack Obama, offers the community the intriguing hope of repairing those historic relations.

That's why Israelis interpret the intense involvement of American Jews in shaping the policies toward Ethiopian Jews, as being motivated by domestic considerations. The same logic applies to the very active role Jews are playing in trying to help Darfurians. The Jews, arguably, were not as involved as a group during the crisis in the former Yugoslavia. (Interestingly, Ariel Sharon opposed international involvement in the crisis, fearing it would set a dangerous precedent. He anticipated an effort by the countries in control of international organizations hostile to Israel to influence the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the use of international force).

And again, this is not an indictment of the Jewish community for acting for the "wrong" reasons. Motivations that lead to the outcome of fighting genocide are all "good". However, I think one should be able to have an honest discussion of such motivations, because other than implicating the just war against genocide, it also raises issues related to the relations between Israel and Diaspora Jews, especially in cases in which the interests of the communities come apart.

Such contradiction was visible in the case of Turkey and the Armenian genocide, when fighting to establish historical truth ran contrary to Israel national interests (and American interests, to judge by the coverage and the outcome). The case the Ethiopian Jews was a similar story of American Jews pressuring Israel to accept more immigrants than it wanted to.

So: we started with the UN and its inability to stop genocide, and we now turn to explore Jewish involvement with stopping genocide. Is there a special Jewish responsibility here? Does it also apply to Israel? And what happens when the preservation of the State of Israel contradict the cause of stopping genocide?

I'm looking forward to your answers.

Best,
Shmuel

To: Shmuel Rosner

From: David Samuels

Oh, come off it, Shmuel.

You don't think American Jews are a tiny little itty-bitty bit weird? You think that Israeli Jews are a proud, normal, happy, contradiction-free people inhabiting our ancestral Jewish homeland of Israel-Yesha-Palestine-Hamasland? The Israeli religious establishment isn't corrupt, isn't an arm of the state, and doesn't decide who can get married, buried, or divorced based on its medieval definition of Judaism? Iran doesn't pose an existential threat to Israel? Gee, sign me up for whatever planet it is that you are living on.

I thought Ha'aretz correspondents spent their time moaning about the evils of checkpoints and Occupation, urging the government to negotiate with Hamas, covering up the corruption of Israel's Prime Ministers, and sucking up to Norwegian diplomats. And here you are, telling me that everything is perfect.

While I plead guilty to provoking you for the sake of argument, you are guilty of the greater sins of silly logic-chopping and arguing in bad faith. You turn my musings about existential conflicts and contradictions between the American and Jewish identities into "allegations" that "Jews are liars" and then say that such statements are "dangerous" and that "words can be weapons" while proclaiming yourself to be an "adult" and calling me a "rebellious child."

So please believe me when I assure you that the goyim in the FBI are too busy worrying about Barack Obama and John McCain and the price of gas right now to revoke your visa or put me in prison for speculating about the deeper implications of the fact that thinking American and thinking Jewish are not always and exactly the same thing. No one cares besides us Jews and the 15-20% of the population who are already confirmed antisemites. In fact, no one is reading this dialogue on Jewcy besides you, me and my mother, a beautiful and highly intelligent lady who doesn't like it when you call me a Nazi.

So why not be honest, Shmuel: You know that what I am saying about the creativeNow doesn't this look a tiny little itty-bitty bit weird? tension and lack of total congruence between Americanism and Judaism is true. You would just rather that I didn't say it. In fact, you think that I am an idiot for saying things that could "ruin" America for the nice Jews who are all exactly like their neighbors despite the fact that they hurry their children past Christmas trees (guilty!) and celebrate New Year's in September, (guilty!) and pray in synagogue for Ehud Olmert and the IDF (guilty!) --- the same way that Italian Catholics pray for the health of Silvio Berlusconi and the carabinieri in Milan (not).

I speak Hebrew and go to shul every Shabbat, so enough with the personal slurs and the self-righteous propaganda, please.

What do you imagine might be the results of further public discussion of the weirdness of American Jewry? Pogroms? Show trials for Elliott Abrams and Norman Podhoretz? A ban on playing "We're an American Band" at Bat Mitzvah parties? Luckily for us, the real America is a pretty tolerant place that long ago embraced the real world knowledge that blacks, Jews, gays, Hispanics, woman --- nearly everybody, except White Protestant Males, as far as I can figure out --- think about the world in ways that run counter in small and big ways to more commonly accepted American narratives, with blacks and Jews being the most visible and influential counter-narrativists.

I think that discussing the often productive and creative tension between American and Jewish identity is important for the present and future of the Jews who choose to live here. What I said was:

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.

I am not saying that "Jews are liars" (or traitors) but that there is an inherent and often productive contradiction between the life-shaping stories that "normal" American Christians and American Jews tell each other about where they come from and where they are going. As a writer, I believe that people live through stories that are handed down through the ages by parents and grandparents and that we pass on in turn to our children.

Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each individual has the capacity for finding God's grace within him or herself, and can only find it by being born again --- independent of family history and ties. While you don't have to be a Christian to accept historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in their history and, I would argue, in their essence.

The stories Jews tell ourselves are different. We tell ourselves stories about our unbroken connection to a common set of tribal ancestors to whom all Jews are connected by blood. We tell ourselves about the unbroken chain of interpretation that connects today's Torah sages to the medieval commentators to the sages of the Gemarra and Mishna to the revelation given to Moses on Har Sinai. We tell ourselves stories about our survival as a people through thousands of years of exile and persecution in which we still claim to be able to see the hand of God.

As a Jew who was educated in religious schools until I was 18 years old, and who travels often to Israel to do reporting and blah blah blah, I have a pretty good grasp of what our common Jewish narratives are supposed to be. I also believe that the stories that American Jews tell themselves fuse elements of American narratives and traditional European Jewish narratives together in ways that don't always make sense.

Now for the question of deception. Let's look at what I actually wrote:

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.

This part of what I wrote is more controversial, even if I don't state (or believe) that "Jews are liars," to quote your phrase. There is an added complication in the way that Jewish narratives contradict mainstream American narratives: Jews can pass for "normal" Americans today in a way that most blacks or Hispanics can't. And yet the personal, internal, mental act of identifying ourselves as Jews necessarily commits us to some version of a story about Jewish specificity and difference that in turn contradicts some fundamental aspects of the larger story that unites most other Americans.

I am not saying any of the things that your very literal-minded way of reading is forcing on our patient readers. I don't believe that American Jews are likely to spy for Israel, or that being Shomer Shabbat is un-American. I don't believe that the way Jews understand ourselves and our relation to society is a superficial question of customs and manners (although manners too can be important).

I am talking about something deeper. The ways that Jews see the individual and his or her place in the world contradicts core American beliefs about abolishing the past, living in the future, and making yourself up from scratch. Sometimes we acknowledge this contradiction to ourselves, and sometimes we pretend that we think and see the world the same way as everyone else. Sometimes we acknowledge our difference to ourselves and to our friends but not to our Christian neighbors. We are double agents. That's what it means to be a Jew in America.

As an American Jew, you can chose to make sense of the inherent contradictions of our existence in a creative way, which is what I try to do in my own life. Or you can simply live your live as a Jew who randomly happens to reside in America as opposed to Israel or France, like the ultra-orthodox do. Or you can embrace mainstream American notions of personal identity and cease being Jewish in any meaningful way. Finally, one can gratefully acknowledge the contributions of one's long-ago Jewish ancestors (see: John Kerry, William Cohen, Madeleine Albright, etc.).

You are way too eager to overstate the case that superficial cultural blending is somehow essentially "American" and that therefore no contradictions between being a Jew and being an American can possibly exist. That's a silly, ahistorical argument. American history is not Jewish history. You can understand your life according to one narrative, or the other narrative, and sometimes according to both at the same time; but they are two different stories.

Perhaps the one-dimensional version of American Jewish life that you offer is intended to make you sympathetic to your English-speaking audience while concealing your actual, more nuanced and interesting views of the relative weirdness of Jewish life in Israel and America.

It is also possible to understand your arguments here as a symptom of a larger American disease. Not the repugnant suggestion that Jews in the state of "exile" are diseased --- an idea that was and is part of the foundational myth of Zionism, and which has little to do with the history of the Jews in America. What is most American about your argument is the fact that you are lying to yourself and to others by reasoning backwards from what "should be true" --- for pragmatic reasons --- to what is true.

I admit to using techniques of misdirection and deception in my writing in order to bring readers closer to a more nuanced perception of some fraction of reality. Your behavior in this argument is no more or less calculated than mine. The difference between us is that you expect to be taken at your word --- and when your convenient version of "reality" is challenged or questioned you get angry and call people names. If that's what you mean by "adult" behavior, don't blame mean-hearted skeptics like me when your kids turn out to be rebellious.

Yours,

David

To: David Samuels

From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

How lucky I am to have a thick skin.

So, thank you for complimenting my relatively meager talents; I'll just ignore the insults, as I'm sure you did not really mean any of the bad things you said about my lack of literary skills. You're right: "Kafka and Babel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth" were all geniuses of literary work. It was probably my short-sightedness that prevented me from making the connection between your work and theirs.

Moving forward: you started by asking many questions, and some of them merit an answer. But I need to warn you first: this might not be the literary, sophisticated answer you'd expect, but rather an answer that resonates with the simple narrow-minded people of "Potomac, Maryland" (I'm in Rockville, not far but a little bit different). Anyway, I'm going to try:

Why do they pray every Sabbath for the welfare of a foreign government and its leaders, and the soldiers who defend its borders?

That's easy: because they care about this country and believe it is the homeland of the Jewish people. They also see the people inhabiting this country as their brothers and sisters, and wish them well.

Why do they celebrate the new year in September instead of in January?

Because they are Jews, and according to the Jewish calendar the year starts in the fall, not winter.

Why do they insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them chose to be whoever they want to be?

Because people, generally speaking, tend to want their children to value the same things they value. That is why educated people tend to want their children to succeed at school and artsy people tend to want their children to go to the theatre.

Now let me turn to one of the things you've said at the bottom of your letter. "You", you write, referring to Israelis, "live in the largest Jewish ghetto in history, under threat of nuclear catastrophe, and under the thumb of a corrupt ultra-orthodox religious establishment whose definition of Judaism is quite literally medieval." Like many of the other assumptions you've made in your letter, this is both condescending and factually wrong.

Israel is not a ghetto, but rather a place in which Jews get to live and make decisionsIsrael: Not a ghetto about their own lives. If the ghettos of the past were like Israel, there would be no Zionism --- which, contrary to your assumption, is not just about making Jews safer, but even more so about making them the masters of their own fate.

But this is not the end of it: You also claim that Israelis live under the "thumb of a corrupt ultra-orthodox religious establishment." I don't know when and if you ever visited Israel, but such description is laughable. I could easily argue that the influence of religious zealots in the US is much more significant than the influence such zealots have on Israel's society and daily life. (Though of course, you can always argue that your literary imagination allows you to fabricate such nonsensical-realities.)

And anyway, how did this become a debate about my assumed Israeli mindset? I think what happened is that you pushed aside all the arguments I was making and was trying to get away with it by simply claiming that as an Israeli I'm probably too dumb to understand your position. Then again, your position is not that complex, and the quasi-courageous posture you've adopted cannot hide its many flaws. So many, in fact, that it's scarcely a position.

To make this long story short let me first summarize our differences:

You said that Jews are liars, pretending to be Americans when they are not.

I disagreed and said that the "weirdness" you ascribe to Jewish Americans is what makes them even more American.

You got angry, though I'm not exactly sure why. "We live as Americans even as we also live sometimes contradictory lives as Jews," you wrote. I can live with that, but still insist that "contradictory lives" is not the equivalent of "double-ness, lying and imposture." I also said that such allegations are dangerous. This is not a difference of opinion, but one of style. Like a rebellious child, you're toying with naughty words so as to impress us with your "speaking the truth." Sorry, but I'm not at all impressed. Words are not just toys, they can also be weapons. Maybe it is time to grow up?

You argue that if all Jewish Americans are lying, because their Americanism is a posture. But on the other hand you seem to praise the Jewish "outsider" state of mind. It seems as if your prescription will only allow American Jews to be in one of two problematic situations: the lying outsiders, or the boring insiders. They can never get it right, can they?

And this is funny because you blame Israelis for thinking that "the doubleness of the Jew in exile is a diseased condition." But the way I see it, you're the one claiming time and again that the American Jewish condition is inherently diseased.

In holding this position, you're certainly in the company of many thinkers. And I was not thinking of Babel and Kafka.

Regards,

Rosner

To: Shmuel Rosner
From: David Samuels

Dear Shmuel,

You are right to say that we do different kinds of work. You are a reporter with a gift for simplifying Israeli politics and Jewish institutional wrangling in a way that makes outsiders like me feel like we are informed about an exotic world that we actually know very little about. My purpose is to captivate readers into leaving the orderly and reasonable-seeming place that you inhabit when you sit down at your keyboard for the wilder pastures of reality. I take the same facts you have available to you, filter them through my subjective consciousness, and create a universe whose particular combination of familiarity and strangeness causes readers to get The New York Times and Shmuel Rosner out of their heads and see the world with fresh eyes.

American Jews: Freaks even by their own standards So yes, when you seem unsettled by the idea that life is full of paradox and contradiction, I feel like I am doing my job --- though I also wonder why you have chosen to devote your particular gifts to thinking about literature. The demand that people "mean what they say and say what they mean" is futile in everyday life, and simply nonsensical when applied to literary work. If you think my mildly personal and contradictory brand of journalism is troubling and frustrating, just wait till you clap eyes on Kafka and Babel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, or any of the other major or minor literary masters whose habit of forceful contradiction defines 20th century Jewish writing everywhere except perhaps in the Hebrew language --- and even there.

Now that I've complemented your very real talents while mocking your naïve and uneducated approach to literature, let's get down to the thread of my response that worries you the most, namely the idea that American Jews may not be exactly like other Americans.

I am sure that you have met plenty of patriotic, God-fearing Jews in Potomac, Maryland who say hamotzi every Shabbat under a Norman Rockwell portrait of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. But please believe me when I tell you that these people are freaks even by their own standards. If these people are really so uber-American, why do they pray every Sabbath for the welfare of a foreign government and its leaders, and the soldiers who defend its borders? Why do they celebrate the Independence Day of a small country in the Middle East? Why do they celebrate the new year in September instead of in January? Why do they insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them chose to be whoever they want to be? I'm telling you, Shmuel: by American standards, American Jews are pretty weird people.

But a more germane question may be why even such a mild assertion of the fact that American Jews are not exactly like all other Americans makes you so nutty. You say that my rather benign allusion to the double-ness of American Jewish identity is "a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences." I assure you that the Cheka or the FBI will not come knocking on my door --- even in this age of AIPAC prosecutions, and with Jonathan Pollard still behind bars.

I believe that American Jews are different, in the same way that blacks are different. Jews and blacks are both guilty of embracing an alternative historical narrative that at times trumps the mainstream narratives commonly accepted by our fellow citizens. I am not "ruining" anything for my fellow Jews in America by speaking the truth about the fact that we live as Americans even as we also live sometimes contradictory lives as Jews. Telling the truth is part of how I see my job as a writer, even if I choose to speak in opposites and misdirection some of the time.

One reason you may be such a timid mouse when it comes to discussing these subjects is that the word "double" suggests "double agents." To clarify this point, I want to state clearly that I do see American Jews as double agents in American society. I think both Judaism and America have been greatly enriched by the creative tension produced by trying to live two very different narratives at the same time.

Look at the history of progressive political movements in America in the 20th century, and lo and behold, you find Jews. Look at the history of anti-Communism in America, and lo and behold, you find Jews. You find Jews on the front lines of aesthetics and commerce, and for the same reasons, namely, that we don't see things exactly the same way that lots of our fellow citizens do. The struggle of American Jews to be both American and Jewish, and to bring two sometimes conflicting kinds of narrative consciousness to bear on the society in which they live, has had such an outsized effect on American life over the past century in part because many of the best minds of the Jewish people emigrated here. There is also the fact that the country was founded by a group of uniquely philo-semitic Protestant dissenters for whom "Jewish" ways of thinking and acting were more congenial than they were to the Catholic regents of France or Spain.

The other reason this conversation scares you is that you are an Israeli, meaning that you are a product of a 19th century ideology that believes that blood, soil and language must be united in order to form a healthy, unified self. It is no secret that Theodore Herzl and his fellow Zionist ideologues were heirs to many of the antisemitic stereotypes of the 19th century European nationalists they sought to imitate.

Israelis can't help but believe that the doubleness of the Jew in exile is a diseased condition that needs to be healed, and that the mark of being a healthy Jew is to be a member of a free nation living in its own land. That's why Israelis have such trouble understanding what it has historically meant to be a Jew in all other times and places --- and what it means to be Jew today for those of us who are not Israelis. The irony of course is that the Jews of Israel are in many ways the ones who are stuck in the past: You live in the largest Jewish ghetto in history, under threat of nuclear catastrophe, and under the thumb of a corrupt ultra-orthodox religious establishment whose definition of Judaism is quite literally medieval.

While I am a strong political supporter of the State of Israel, I don't see Israel as the necessary solution to the historical condition of the Jewish people, just as I do not necessarily believe that American Jews will always be at home in America. Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that I believe that the Jewish condition is, in its essence, contradictory. I am Jewish, not because I think things are rosy, but because I chose to be Jewish, because I feel lucky to carry the historical weight of 3500 years of contradiction and argument and exile, and because there is something irreducibly slippery and human and contemporary about having to be two or more things at the same time.

To: David Samuels
From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

Thank you for your explanation. My impression is that this could become a long and detailed dialogue about the nature of journalism, literature and all things in between, but I'm really not sure Jewcy's the right venue for such discussion.

However, after reading your comments, I think we stand to benefit from summarizing the differences between our respective approaches to our journalistic work. While I think my job is to make the world more orderly and understandable for readers, to try and overcome the chaos, your work does the exact opposite: You meddle with your readers' minds and make them more confused.

The American Melting Pot: Where do Jews fit? Having said that, I'm a little confused now myself: Is what you say in your letter is what you really think or just one of your mind-games? You write a lot of things (that's one lengthy letter, why do they tell me to write up to 800 words, and let you go crazy with a 1300 words - I wonder), but do you really mean them? I'll take a chance here, and assume that you do. So let's make this our topic of discussion for today:

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.

This, you imply, is the reason that "the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance" for you "as an American Jewish writer." And these qualities are self-evidently vicious: Lying isn't be good, trying to have a cake and eat it too is what our mothers warned us not to do. But therein lies your irony. You go on to say that such characteristics "can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension." Which is a good thing, isn't it?

Basically, what you're up to is blaming American Jews for misleading their fellow-citizens, their communities, their friends: pretending to be aligned with American society while they really aren't. This is a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences --- a charge that shouldn't be made lightly just for the sake of toying with outrageous ideas. And I must say I am not yet convinced about your motives (if you haven't noticed, I'm the self-appointed responsible adult in this crowded neighborhood of rogue writers).

So the question arises: Is this accusatory description of American Jewry even accurate? Many American Jews whom I know --- who take the trouble to constantly marvel at the extent to which they are an integral part of the great American melting pot --- might dispute your narrative. And they might be even right. They see a tolerant society that can put up with the cultural and religious differences inherent in so many groups playing a part in it. They see an influential group overcoming the difficulties of being a true American minority while preserving its distinctiveness and uniqueness. This, they will say, is not "lying" or "posturing," but rather living a complicated and rich life in this shining city on the hill.

You want to ruin this for them, and one has to ask oneself why. What's bothering you?

"Life Is Full Of Important Choices" is the name of an article you published in the second book you've just released, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of articles you wrote for all sorts of magazines. Supposedly, the piece is about 9/11; it takes time for the reader to realize that as most of it is dedicated to, well, David Samuel's life. And too some degree, this old article of yours pulls the rug out from under the argument you made in your letter to me:

No one could dispute how beautiful Brooklyn was less than one year later, the summer after the towers fell. It was as if the ashes from the tower had fertilized our neighborhood. The local population of stoop-sitters, myself included, were the recipients of an unexpected bounty.

Can't this description of your Brooklyn count as proof that this joint venture of Americanness is no mirage, but rather the daily reality of "worshippers at the Mosque," and of your wife's mother who "called to tell us that Jesus Christ offered the only pathway to salvation," and of "Virginia and I" who "lit the Sabbath candles together, and said our blessings over the wine"?

"What is happening?", Virginia repeated as we stared at the picture on the television screen of the towers falling, one after the other. We went to the hardware store and bought white paper masks so we could safely breath, and then we went down to the Promenade, where my father used to take me to look at the cargo ships. We stood in the crowd of onlookers and watched the black cloud cross over the river.

Thus you, with your candles, and your decision to "not eat pork," were an integral part of an American tragedy. Not as a pretender, but as a participant. I'm no American, but it seems to me that your behavior that day, and the days following, is anything but part of an "ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea."

It is your American-Jewish weirdness, your American-Jewish scariness --- that is the American idea.

Best,
Rosner

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