E102 - A Brief History of American Jews w/ Emily Tamkin
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Jun 20 • 48M
E102 - A Brief History of American Jews w/ Emily Tamkin
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American Prestige
A podcast from Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison that provides listeners with everything they need to know about what’s going on in the world.
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Danny and Derek welcome journalist Emily Tamkin to the podcast to discuss American Jewish identity and politics over the past 100 years. They get into the salience of the term “Bad Jew”, how Jews fit into American social and legal definitions of whiteness, how American Jews have grappled with the Zionist project, generational shifts among American Jews, and more.
Be sure to grab a copy of Emily’s book Bad Jews, and check out her recent article for +972, “‘A moment of disillusionment’: American Jews torn as Israel turns 75”.
Recorded in March 13, 2023
E102 - A Brief History of American Jews w/ Emily Tamkin
I am the product of a "mixed" marriage: my parents and grandparents passed off my Texan father to my very devout, bearded Russian-speaking great grandfather as Jewish. And the beaming patriarch, according to my grandfather, whose favorite he was, pretended to believe them. My grandparents, who partially brought me up after my parents' acrimonious divorce, were non-observant. Whenever I had a Jewish boyfriend, my grandmother would ask anxiously, "Is he a good Jew?" meaning "is he observant?"
I think my grandparents, who gave to B'nai Brith and bought Israel bonds, were good Jews, in the sense of good people. When Grandpa's nephew, a doctor, married a non-Jewish nurse and was declared dead by his mother and father, my grandparents hosted the wedding reception.
Until the 1960s anti-Semtism was the American norm. I still remember overhearing discussions about how Jews couldn't get hotel reservations because they had Jewish sounding names. All this had begun slowly changing after the war, with various Court decisions against restrictive covenants and the like. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/17/1049052531/racial-covenants-housing-discrimination
After the war, US conservatives, like W.F. Buckley (CIA operative? ) had also made an effort to purge anti Semitism from the Conservative movement, because it was a bad look.
Perhaps you are familiar with the sociologist Digby Baltzell, who wrote The Philadelphia Gentleman and The Protestant Establishment (1964). Uncle and consultant of the film director Whit Stillman, Baltzell was a mediating figure, who, after being semi-excluded from the WASP elite because of his father's alcoholism and embezzlement (?) history, had decided to study it and explain (and defend) it to others. He wrote "It was good to be born rich, because if you’re rich, you have freedom. But if you can’t be born rich, then the next best thing is to be a professor” . While upholding the gentlemanly ideals and strict moral code of Boston and Philadelphia's WASP elite, Bartzell fervently advocated the admission of excluded groups such as Jews and African Americans, provided they were talented.
"Balztell did not believe that an all-Protestant club was wrong per se. If the members had no Jewish friends, it would be natural that there would not be Jews in the club. What he found appalling was that the Protestant upper class would live near, work with, dine with, befriend, and even sail with Jewish peers but would not allow them to join their societies [clubs]. He wrote, 'There are few leaders in America today who do not have friends who have suffered indignities because of their Jewish origin. And most of them have remained bystanders, while their friends, and even relatives, have been treated dishonorably.'” https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/02/rediscovering-e-digby-baltzells-sociology-of-elites/