The Names of Mexico City’s Streets

There are neighborhoods in Mexico City in which the names of streets are not the result of historical or random developments.  The street names, in the areas I have in mind, are organized by themes and with the exception of an occasional interloper, each street within that area falls into the chosen category.  The large upscale section of Polanco is a splendid example.  There the streets have the names of novelists, of scientists, of poets, with a few politicians thrown in—in effect the streets are named after writers of many different kinds.  Polanco is literate!

   Almost twenty years  ago I spent many hours walking through that neighborhood, taking note of the intersections.  I even took snapshots of many crossing street signs.  I still have a very long list of intersections, but I threw out the poorly done pre-digital black and white photos.  My intention was to make a selection of crossings and create a brief conversation between the two authors, imagining what they might say to each other.  A few would be easy, the intersection of Newton and Galileo, for example, but many would challenge one’s imagination.  Try to envisage an exchange between Poe and Homer or between Plato and Dickens, a conversation between Shakespeare and Madame Curie, not to mention one between Spencer and Euler.  I may one day tackle that formidable problem, but not just yet.

   Here I want to acquaint you with our own neighborhood, never going beyond an easy walking distance from the house—my little camera, a Canon PowerShot 800 IS with a really good zoom—strapped to my belt.  I have not yet graduated to do photographing with a cell phone.
   We not only live on Atlanta, but the streets in our immediate neighborhood are all of them the names of United States Cities.  Here is a small sample; there are more.

Other streets in our neighborhood are named after artists.  There are a great many of those, ranging further South, beyond easy walking distance.  Herewith  a few samples.

And if you walk in a Northerly direction, you will be crossing a whole cluster of American States.  Again, just a sample and, as above, in no particular order.

Come visit and see for yourself!

A Request of My Readers

   I started this blog last January and while my readership is not huge, the number of so-called Pageviews has slowly but gratifyingly been increasing.  What has been quite disappointing, however, is that I just about get no comments.  I understand that commenting via the feature at the bottom of a particular post is cumbersome.  To go around that obstacle, a very simple feature has now been added at the bottom of the column on the right, below a second picture of me (which we couldn’t get rid of).  By that method you can send a message directly to the inbox of my email address.  You need not identify yourself and while a return address email is required, nothing prevents you from putting in a fictitious one.

   I am not fishing for praise nor for expressions of agreement.  I want to hear other views on the topic of the post or objections to mine, where such are relevant, or any other remark that comes to mind.  My blog may be a Home of Strong Opinions; but it is not the home of dogmas.

Rudy Weingartner

Liberal Zionism and I

   An op ed piece by Antony Lerman, “The End of Liberal Zionism,”  in the New York Times of August 24 spoke to me.  I urge you to read it:

            http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/israels-move-to-the-right-            challenges-diaspora-jews.html?emc=eta1

   Current events in Israel make it tough for Jews who also propose to uphold humanistic values, for want of a better word.  I’ve expressed my views as they pertained to a stage before the current conflict in a post of  May 31 of this year.  But I am perplexed as to what I should now do, if there is anything that I could do in response to current Middle East events.  Let me just use the Lerman piece as an excuse for giving a brief history of my relationship to Israel, starting well before the creation of the Jewish state itself.

   As a kid in Germany (which I left in 1939 at the age of twelve), I belonged to the Habonim and vaguely recall talk about the possibility of a Jewish state, but remember better the Hebrew songs we sang, especially the Hatikvah, the Jewish national anthem avant la lettre—that is, avant l’état.  I became a Zionist, if not a very reflective one.  My next (relevant) recollection, either just before or just after the creation of the state of Israel, is seeing a cover of the New York Times Magazine depicting “soldiers” of the Haganah marching diagonally across the entire page.  I recall being very dubious about the suggestion of Jewish militarism and even thought vaguely about the desirability of a  bi-national state.

   In Jewish fashion (a practice certainly not limited to Jews), I have been writing modest checks annually, ever since I had a predictable income and some of those checks went to the United Jewish Appeal (which supports Israel) and a couple standard Israeli organizations.  I might also add that I much enjoyed two visits to Israel.  During those years of the Mapai there was no conflict for me between Zionism and liberalism.  But this harmony came to an end.

   At Northwestern University, where I was dean of arts and sciences at the time, it ended with a bang.  In 1976, a Northwestern faculty member, Arthur Butz, associate professor of electrical engineering, had published a big book entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jews, making him a member of the species now known as Holocaust deniers.  All hell broke loose in the Chicago area Jewish community when that became known, propelling NU’s president into a defensive crouch. 

   In response, several high profile Philo-Judaic events were scheduled, with Elie Wiesel among the speakers.  I was tapped to introduce Lucy Dawidowicz, author of The War Against the Jews.  Since there had been a lot of pressure to get Northwestern to fire Butz, my tack, appreciated by some, was to contrast the policies of our university that only considered a faculty member’s professional behavior with those of the Germany Butz defended.  It had been established that he kept his political views out of the classroom, where he stuck strictly to his engineering subject.  Hence no procedure would be initiated that would lead to his being fired.

   Northwestern’s penance concluded with the awarding of an honorary degree to Menachim Begin—at a specially created ceremony rather than, as was normal, at an end-of-academic-year graduation.  By then, given the Likud practice of establishing settlements, my liberalism had tested my Zionism severely, so I actually considered staying away from the Beginfest.  I showed up, as did a bunch of vigilant athletic-looking Israeli bodyguards, since I feared that the absence of the Jewish dean would be interpreted in fanciful and undesirable ways.

   Not long afterwards I stopped contributing to the United Jewish Appeal and limited my modest charity to dissenting Israeli organizations and to local Jewish outfits.

   Now we have reached a new low, rightly dubbed the end of liberal Zionism.  I fear that for me at least liberalism is more basic than Zionism.  Yes, nothing excuses or justifies the actions of Hamas.  Still, I cannot help but believe that the Israelis are powerful and astute enough to contain Hamas without large numbers of civilian deaths and the destruction of countless homes that appear to have no military significance.  Netanyahu may be retaining the support of his own citizens, but he is in grave danger of turning a larger world against Israel.  After the demise of liberal Zionism, will Zionism of any kind also come to an end?

  

The True Meaning of the Tea Party

Rudolph H. Weingartner

   On March 10, 2010, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an op ed of mine to which the editor provided this headline:

                            Tea Party paranoia is nothing new

                           Fear-mongering has always been with us, but it never wins in the end

The editor there captured what I had argued in the piece, which had made use of Richard Hofstadter's 1965 essay,  "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."  This is how I concluded:

   History  teaches us  that  we've  been  here before. History teaches  us that  fear-mongering can  cause  great  annoyance, Injury,      turmoil,  even death.  But  history also teaches us  that  paranoia in  American  politics, in  the  end,  does  not  prevail. 

This  too  shall  pass.

   I may have been right in making paranoia the main impetus for the arrival on the American scene of Tea Party polititicos, but I can’t quite think myself back into those four-plus years ago.  However that may be, that’s not how I see the Tea Party now.  Paranoia is a disease; those afflicted with it may be disliked, but should not really be blamed, since they actually can’t help themselves.  Now I believe that people who identify themselves with the Tea Party—and their friends and sympathizers—are mean-spirited reactionaries—not a disease but a constellation of beliefs, not imposed but assumed voluntarily.  (Tackling the question of the plausibility of that common sense assumption would take us two hundred pages into the thicket of controversies about the freedom of the will.) 

   Yes, reactionary, because, without actually saying so, those proponents favor returning to a considerably earlier state of American society, that of the decade, say, of the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, 1923 to 1933, that is, to the time before FDR changed the role of government with the creation of the New Deal.  To call Tea Partiers “conservative” is thus a grave misnomer; they want to change things to the way they were almost a century ago; they are not aiming to conserve what exists now.

   Mean-spirited, because many, indeed most, of their proposals aim at taking away some benefit provided to fellow human beings or of preventing their gaining such a one.  Obamacare, they claim, is a bad law.  The aim, therefore is to kill it off, without even a suggestion as to what might replace it, so that more of their fellow Americans have access to medical insurance.  In effect, the naysayers don’t regard it as a problem that so many of their confrères are without that safety net.  Similarly, Medicaid—an existing healthcare program for people with insufficient income to afford it on their own—need not be expanded to cover more people, even when you federal government will foot the bill. 

   And why has the Tea Party not tackled Medicare?  Surely only because a larger proportions citizens over 65 vote than does of the population generally.  Surely for similar reasons, there have not been loud demands to revive the George W. Bush proposal to privatize Social Security, though there has certainly been propaganda to reduce benefits and to up the age of eligibility—to be sure, not starting with the generation that votes now.

   Finally, to conclude with two additional economic targets, Tea Partiers have dragged their feet about increasing unemployment benefits.  Never mind that the surge in unemployment was caused by the recent Great Recession, for which those unemployed bear zero responsibility.  Wall Street does (and they are not suffering) and so do those Tea Party sympathizers avant la lettre who steadfastly opposed effective regulation of the financial world.

   And second, Tea Party and friends have persistently opposed raising the minimum wage, now a shabby $7.25 per hour.  Give me a couple of sentences to say what that means.  If someone who is paid that hourly wage works a full forty hours a week for each of the 52 weeks in the year (and who actually does?), he or she will have earned $15,080 for the year, supposing no deductions.  Posit against this that the poverty level for a family of four is now $23,850 a year and   for a family of two it is $15,730.  Think single mother with one child, working non-stop for the year and think of inevitable expenses for the care of the child.  Is it not the case that to be satisfied with this situation is a symptom of mean-spiritedness?  Also reactionary because, since asks for a return of the days before the New Deal.

   Finally, a couple of paragraphs about the Tea Partiers views concerning immigration, knowing full well that they will be inadequate, even though I will not take up the recent surge of unaccompanied children from Central America.  But let’s begin with children.  There may be as many as four million born in the United States, but to illegal immigrants.  According to our law, the requirement for citizenship (other than via naturalization) is not parentage, but the place of birth—that is America.  This simple criterion has historically distinguished us from many a more finicky country, in Europe and elsewhere.  But it has been a good law for the US and accounts in part for the “attractiveness” that has produced so varied and versatile a population.  Still, there are those who want to add further requirements: now that I’m a citizen, let’s introduce hurdles that resemble nothing so much as those of a class-stratified society of 18^th-century Europe.

   The central issue, however, for Tea Partiers, is what they have called amnesty.  At this time, there are about 12 million people living in the United States who entered the country illegally.  They all broke the law, so they should not escape an appropriate punishment—not to mention that they should not be rewarded for their transgression with legitimacy or, perish forbid, citizenship.

   I will confine myself to two observation, granted that this is a much bigger topic.  First, a significant number of those “illegals” are illegal in a Pickwickian sense at most.  A sizeable number—I was unable to find a reliable estimate—were brought here as children by their illegally arrived parents.  We consider giving amnesty (or not) to someone for something she or he did, for an action performed.  Those children did not do anything, they did not decide to come here and then come; their parents did that—they were just taken along.  The issue of amnesty is as irrelevant for those children as it would be for someone who failed to show up on time because he got lost in the woods.

   What about the issue of amnesty for the bulk of those 20 million illegals, that is, the adults?  As far as I can determine, Tea Partiers are opposed to a procedure that leads to any kind of legal status.  That would be rewarding people for having committed a sin, to express the point in terms of the Calvinism that underlies the ideology we have been discussing.  But on the other hand, no one proposes out loud that those millions should be deported, not because that would be found to be undesirable, but because it just isn’t feasible.

   Where does that leave us?  Nowhere.  Tea Partiers, to be sure, recognize that there is a problem, a serious problem.  But for them, no solution is acceptable.  So much for governing.

   A final observation of a quite different sort.  Those adherents of this ideology who are members of Congress or are officeholders in various so-called conservative foundations and institutes will not at all be negatively affected if everything all they agitate for were to come to pass. These folks are employed, “earning” salaries that vary from very comfortable to cushy, scare quotes intended.  The same cannot be said for the many ordinary citizens who subscribe to these Tea Party views.  Indeed, any number of those who put their vote where their beliefs are may be unemployed or in danger of losing their jobs, be without adequate health insurance or are liable to be, or are disadvantaged because of the stinginess of the minimum wage.

   To me it is a matter of amazement that so significant a number of people should vote against their own interest.  In the end, I can only suppose that for many the Tea Party ideology is not a bundle of mere beliefs, but amounts to a theological dogma.  After all, the United States is the most religious country in the developed world. 

Is the Demise of the Student-Athlete in Big-time Sports Finally in Sight?

   There is rumbling in the world of big-time college sports and with a little luck there will be an uproar before too long.  It’s about time, since for many decades—a century really—unending numbers of deep problems have been seen to be rooted in the fact that college students, who as such are subject to academic requirements for admission and continuation as students, are the agents who carry out the mission of entertaining untold thousands by playing basketball and, especially, football.  (The football stadium of the University of Michigan has an official capacity of 110,000 and is said to be able to hold crowds larger than 115,000.)  Each time a new problem pops up, a band aid with ineffective adhesive is applied, leading to a concatenation of rules and principles that, while making Ptolemy’s epicycles look streamlined, manage above all to inspire evasions of every variety.[1]

   The recent rumbling began with former football players at Northwestern University who, as co-founders of the College Athletes Players Association, proposed to have such college athletes unionize.[2]  They convince me about the many issues they raise, grievances that reveal that these high visibility student athletes are exploited in a variety of ways.  Indeed, the whole notion of student-athletes in Division I mainline spectator sports is deeply suspect. 

   As long ago as in the first decade of the 20^th century—a hundred years ago, that is—David Starr Jordan, then the founding president of Stanford University (after having served a stint as president of Indiana University) declared, presumably with a sigh, that it would be much better if the University hired young men just to play for Good (not very) Old Stanford, letting them take courses if they wanted to.  If the pattern he had in mind were followed, a group of colleges and universities would take on the role for football and, presumably, basketball that minor league clubs do for baseball.  Perhaps the step now taken by the Northwestern football players will lead there in the long run. 

   Were this proposal implemented, there would of course have to be various rules concerning the conditions under which these young athletes are hired, rules about their compensation, treatment, and how long they may retain their positions, and so on.  Such a batch of regulations, however, could easily be a model of simplicity and succinctness compared to the wads of pre-and pro-scriptions of the NCAA.  I would propose that part of the compensation of these youngsters be the permission to take courses and even work toward a degree, but that, on the one hand, they would not be required to do so but, on the other, that in their (voluntary) role as students, they would be subject to the same rules and requirements as are “regular” students, except that they would be permitted to take fewer courses at any one time than those regulars are or, indeed, none at all.

   I flatly reject two possible objections to such a scheme.  The less plausible one is the supposition that these hired hands would not give their all in playing their athletic roles for the institution.  Why wouldn’t they if they are treated well, especially considering that their performance will surely be the main determinant as to whether they will be promoted, so to speak, to the major leagues.

   A more plausible one—or at least one that I have heard expressed a number of times—is that the fans of the University of Michigan’s Wolverines (and their equivalents) would less enthusiastic about their team and lessen their attendance at the games.  I concede that there may be a wobbly period of transition, but I would confidently predict that it would not last very long.  The difference between before and after is, after all, purely cerebral and not at all experiential.  Whether a spectator sits in the first row or in the gods, as the French say, he or she would not note anything different from what they had seen before: broad-shouldered young men running and throwing and clobbering each other.  (See “Gladiators Then and Now,” my post of February 11, 2014.)  Assuming the spectators are there because they enjoy watching football, they will continue to enjoy just as much as they did before the change of the players’ status; they will get used to it.

   And while we are deflating myths, let me conclude by denying two additional ones.  A vigorous student-conducted athletic program is needed to inspire donors to contribute to the coffers of the college or university.  People make contributions for all kinds of reasons, from everywhich sort of motive.  Those who give money because they are enthusiasts for one or another college sport, it has been noted more than once, don’t endow chairs in literary study, the give money that will support some aspect of athletics.[3]

   Nothing wrong with giving money for athletics, especially—to turn to the second myth—since all kinds of games are played with the budget for that enterprise.  The fact is that a woefully tiny fraction of institutions actually derive an income from athletics.  At the vast majority of colleges and universities more is spent on spectator-oriented athletics than it brings in.  This would even be clearer if the bookkeeping were honest.  Alas, it is not unusual to have the recruitment of athletes charged to the Office of Admissions, the maintenance of the stadium debited to Buildings and Grounds, the use of college vehicles charged to the carpool—and so on.  In short, many institutions don’t even know what their big-time athletic costs them—especially when they don’t really want to find out.

   The Northwestern footballers have started something that ultimately may, finally, see the transformation of athletics in higher education.  But while I am eighty-seven years old and don’t expect to live long enough to see the culmination of this new start, I hope that some of my readers will.  

---

[1] When I was provost at the University of Pittsburgh, I was asked to be the new member of the group of three that would determine which football player candidates would be recruited as one of the few permitted by the NCAA who did not conform to standard requirements.  When I suggested, when the first case was being considered, that we look at his transcript, I was puzzled by the raucous laughter by my experienced partners.  The transcript, I was told, came from a high school that specialized in feeding football players to colleges such as Pitt and that they were all doctored—a euphemism for falsified.  

[2] In the interest of full disclosure, I was dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern from 1973 to 1987.  During some of those years Northwestern and my alma mater, Columbia College, were neck and neck for the longest losing records of their football teams.  Northwestern has done somewhat better since.

[3] When I taught at Vassar, its president came back from a trip to California and reported to the faculty that an alumna had given the College a tidy sum to create or refurbish (I have forgotten which) a playing field.  When he was chastised by the faculty who had very different priorities, he said rather plaintively that this particular donor was a sports enthusiast and would not have provided funds for anything else.  “Should I have turned down her gift?”

 When Will We Be Civilized?

Rudolph H. Weingartner

   In the recent New York Review of Books blog, Garry Wills gives four tough “assignments” to Pope Francis, that must be carried out if he is to succeed in eliminating sexual predation by members of the Catholic clergy.* I don’t think that he is optimistic about their implementation.  The issue is hardly new.  Discussion of priests molesting children goes back some decades; the practice, I would guess, goes back centuries.  Discussion, moreover, has largely focused on responsible supervision of clerics in their interaction with children, with special emphasis, of course, on the removal and punishment of transgressors.  Carrying out these two functions effectively are surely necessary conditions for the elimination of sexual predation but just as surely not sufficient.  But the elimination of the priestly requirement of celibacy, which would take us closer to sufficiency, is not likely in the foreseeable future or even beyond it.

    No command to maintain celibacy, to say the least, is a cause of sexual harassment and rape in the American armed forces.  The increase in the last few years of such incidents is no doubt related both to the increased numbers of women who have entered the military and to the considerable broadening of the roles they there assume.  But the fact that these crimes occur at all is rooted in the arrogance of the perpetrators that they can just take what they desire and in the abysmal failure of the the military establishment to deal with the issue—from being discreet recipients of complaints to conducting tactful investigations to meting out effective punishment when guilt has been determined.

   Sexual harassment to the point of rape is clearly widespread on college campuses all around the country.  The causes are similar to those in the military: arrogance and institutional failure to deal with the issue, from dubious agencies where complaints can be lodged to inadequate methods of investigation to punishment that mostly falls far short of serving as a deterrent.

   We are more than a decade into the twenty-first century, and are speaking about the United States, a country that prides itself to be a leading member of the enlightened West.  We have made great strides in the acceptance of homosexuals, even if we have not yet reached the open-mindedness of ancient Greece.  And of course we have long professed to believe in the equality of men and women, looking down on those corners of the globe—in the Middle East and Africa in particular—where women are treated as inferior to men. 

   And yet, in three large spheres of our own world we are only beginning to learn to cope with a serious aspect of the reality of the inequality of men and women, not to mention to implement adequately our professions of love for our children.  Ongoing discussions make it clear that the will to do the right thing is at best half-hearted and that a country rife with investigative know-how and sophisticated policing and judicial institutions is unable to deal with widespread criminal behavior.  When, indeed, will we become civilized?    

---

*http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/11/pope-francis-and-pederasts/?insrc=hpbl

How I am Jewish

Rudolph H. Weingartner

   My pedigree is spotless, at least as far as I can determine.  My maternal grandparents were named Kahn, the Jewishness of which needs no explanation.  An ancestor of my paternal grandfather was an inhabitant of the little town of Weingarten in the south of Baden and when it became customary to add a surname to the given name, instead of referring to a trade—that is, instead of Joe the Cook—his surname became Weingärtner, somebody from Weingarten, in accord with the widespread practice of naming Jews as residents of the towns they lived in, as with the more familiar Hamburger, Berliner, or Frankfurter.  The four of them—born in the middle of the last century in small towns in Baden—were quite strictly observant Jews, close to what today would be called “modern orthodox.”  They dressed like other middle class townspeople and while they interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors, they didn’t socialize with them.  (The same, I might interject, was true of my parents, even before the Nazis came to power.)

   My father followed in his parents’ observant footsteps and while my mother had a streak of skepticism, she was an obedient wife, mostly.  When I was a child in Heidelberg, where I was born not long after my father went into business there, our home was quite strictly kosher.  The Sabbath was observed: we walked a fairly long distance to the synagogue, not taking the trolley and we abstained from all work including homework for school.  But we did use light switches and while my mother finished cooking before it was time to light the Sabbath candles by sundown on Friday, she did turn on the gas to warm our meals.  The holidays were observed with all the trimmings, such as eating on two special sets of Passover dishes, one for meat, the other for dairy; a Sukkah was created on an open porch, there was fasting on Yom Kippur—and so on around the year.

   From a young age, I received religious instruction after school, never very high powered, nothing resembling a Yeshiva.  That practice that continued in New York, where we arrived shortly after my twelfth birthday.  For my Bar Mitzvah, I read quite a few portions from the Torah plus the haphtarah, singing lustily and in tune—music was already my thing.  I did not make a speech—no “today I am a fountain pen,” as the joke then had it.  That was not the custom in this rump German-Jewish congregation that held its Sabbath service in the hall in which Malcolm X was murdered a quarter of a century later.  When we moved from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, I sang in the Synagogue choir and came to conduct it at the conservative after-dinner Friday night service, while Felix Alt accompanied cantor and choir on the organ.  A much smaller group of orthodox congregants had had their service earlier—without organ of course.  No organ at any of  the High Holiday services, so Felix conducted and I just sang, by then a baritone.

   When I left for the Navy in 1945, after graduating from high school, I was thanked by the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights for my services and given a silver bracelet engraved with my name and a woodcut-illustrated Haggadah, the book that contains instructions and text for the Passover Seder.

   Things went downhill from there, but at a slow pace.  I mostly lived at home (for financial reasons) while going to College at Columbia after a stint on an LST.  I joined my parents for High Holiday services and some of the other holidays, but seldom on the Sabbath.  I never sought out kosher food when eating out, while my parents’ eating habits also relaxed so much that they would have been sharply reproved by their parents had they still been alive.  Still, for them emphatically no pork.  I  promptly joined the Seixas Society, then Columbia’s Jewish students’ organization with a bona fide rabbi in charge.

   It never occurred to me not to join.  More broadly, I have always felt that I must identify myself as Jewish.  I don’t have any of the cliché Jewish characteristics—in behavior or appearance.  The grotesque cartoons of Jews in the Stürmer, the Nazi “newspaper” entirely devoted to maligning Jews, resemble none of my blood relatives; my mother’s father looked  like President Taft and my father’s father blended in very well among the farmers of the small town where he lived most of his life.  Moreover, in spite of what I have said above, my name actually does not reveal that I am Jewish, because it turns out to be a homonym.  There are  plenty of non-Jewish Weingärtners whose names do not  derive from a town, but, in conformity with medieval practice, from the occupation of  vineyard-keeper, which is what a Weingärtner is.  That makes it like  other profession names like Müller or, in English, like such surnames as Smith, Carpenter, or Cooper.

   Nor do I assertively proclaim my Jewishness, rubbing my interlocutors’ noses in that fact.  But somehow I soon manage to convey my affiliation to all but the most casual acquaintances.  You can give credit—or blame—to Hitler for this proclivity.  On the one hand, I lived through the Kristallnacht, seeing the smashed furniture of the couple of rooms of the Heidelberg Jewish school, saw the smoke rising from the burning synagogue as I biked back home and from there, watched when, a few hours later, my father was arrested to be taken to Dachau.  On the other hand, because we were Jewish, we emigrated from Germany to New York when, as I mentioned, I was twelve.  In the United States I came to lead a life that has been radically different, I surmise, from that I would have led as the son of a minor businessman in a very pretty but provincial town.  Perhaps I would have enjoyed that life; who knows?  But rather than speculate about what did not happen, it is no counterfactual but reality that the rich and varied American life that I led was thanks to the fact that I am Jewish.  You will have to take my word for “rich and varied” or go to the two autobiographical books I have published.*

   But I certainly don’t want to leave it at that and have my Jewishness be dependent on the anti-Semitism of the Nazis!  For starters, Judaism consists of a set of beliefs and of practices.  Without getting into a quasi-anthropological discussion, I will simply assert that in my view Jews are not a race.  I am as Caucasian as Billy Graham, my elder by nine years. From that it would follow that the issue is not readily settled by the fact that my parents and known forbears were Jewish.

   So I turn to beliefs, at the center of which is of course the belief in God.  As the often-recited single sentence has it—congregation standing—“Shema Yisrael, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”  For many years I never really thought about this central issue.  I was no precocious intellectual.  I sang with the rest of them and went with the flow.  But that gradually changed; not surprising as philosophy became my main subject in college.  The flow was no longer good enough nor, as it turned out, was anything else.  I bring no news when I say that none of the extant proofs for the existence of God does the job.  Theists and deists, however, might be comforted by the fact that when, many years ago, Michael Scriven, then a philosophy professor, gave a paper to the San Francisco State Philosophy Club that consisted of a number of proofs of God’s nonexistence, the only instance of such an effort familiar to me.  No competent person in the audience thought he had succeeded.

   That leaves at least two sets of additional possibilities, one classical and one modern.  Faith stands at the center of the first: believe in God on the basis of evidence unseen.  While for some that may be convincing, I may be simplistic in holding that in order for that to work, a person somehow must want to believe.  However, I neither want to believe nor do I want not to believe.  What I do want is evidence, arguments, anything that makes me, pushes me to believe.  In the Enlightenment version of this path, God is posited to explain the order of things in the universe, an elaboration of the Argument from Design.  But besides the retort that much of this order is in the eye of the beholder, it is also possible to hold that we simply don’t know just why the world works the way it does.  What is wrong with such modesty?

   Of course, since those 18^th century deists, scientists have found out a good deal about how the world works.  Just consider Einstein and his physicist descendents and Darwin and the biologists who have been refining and elaborating his theories.  Their discoveries explain a good deal of why things are the way they are.  Everything?  Certainly not.  But ignorance of, for instance, what caused the Big Bang or the fact that there are gaps, unknowns, in evolutionary theory strikes me as a feeble reason for positing a divine cause or adopting a doctrine of creationism.  There are lots of things we don’t know, some of which will in time be found out, others not. The end of the sciences is not in sight.

   I am not attempting to persuade anyone with these few paragraphs; I am only  stating what I think.  And I realize that what I think makes me an atheist.  I accept that label rather than that of  agnostic because rather than being open to supernatural answers to questions that remain unanswered, I am willing to say that we just don’t know, at any rate, not yet.

   That makes me a Jewish atheist, an odd combination of labels though perhaps not all that uncommon.  There are those, after all, who maintain that the Jewish religion is not so much rooted in a set of beliefs, but in the myriad behavioral prescriptions to be found in the Old Testament as subsequently interpreted.

   So, how well do I manage to follow those Old Testament commandments? Very very poorly indeed; that is to say, not at all except for now and then desultory observances.  While I can claim that this laxness is in part the result of the way my entire life has changed during the last two decades, that is hardly an excuse.  The fact is that in abstaining from virtually all prescribed practices, I acquiesced to the attenuation of my Jewishness insofar as it is embodied in those traditional observances.

   What remains of Jewishness besides beliefs and prescribed behaviors?  A number of what might be called secondary characteristics that are, to be sure, shared with very many who are not Jewish, but are statistically more prevalent among Jews.  Placing a high value on education, is central and has happily been passed on to my children and grandchildren.  Political liberalism is another, rooted in a concern for fellow human beings, perhaps unconsciously engendered by a history of persecution—as in there but for the grace of God go I.  While his term is about to end, the arch-conservative Eric Cantor has been the only Republican Jew in the House of Representatives where Republicans are in the majority.  The odds are that after the coming election there will be none.  An excellent sculptor acquaintance of mine, an African American, once quipped to me, “The only people who collect art are artists and Jews.”  I have purchased works of art all my life—of course no Rembrandts.  On the other hand, I lack the interest in and cleverness with money widely believed to be a Jewish trait.  But then all of my cousins seem in that way to be apostates.

   More such “secondary” traits could probably be listed, but no one of them nor all of them together would really answer the question posed in these reflections.  In the end, I may have to accept the answer that is provided by most of the world, in contradiction to the stance I took above.  Let me explain my thought in a roundabout way.  An American youngster, Anthony, the son of devout Roman Catholic parents, faithfully goes to church with them, receives communion, follows all the rules.  Later, away from home, say in college, Tony stops going to church nor does he go to confession. Moreover, he ceases to believe in the virgin birth and divinity of Jesus nor does he assent to any of the other components of the Credo.  At that point he will surely say of himself that he is no longer a Catholic.  Nor will the world regard him as a Catholic.  Someone who knows his background might refer to him as a lapsed Catholic, but a lapsed Catholic is not a Catholic. 

   Compare and contrast.  Aaron is the son of observant Jewish parents, attends all synagogue services with them, eats only kosher food and more.  As an adult, however, Aaron does none of these things; indeed, he insists on crisp bacon for breakfast.   And yet, whatever Aaron holds himself to be, the world will not call him a lapsed Jew.  There is no such thing.  He is, rather, a non-practicing Jew or a secular Jew.  What Aaron does or does not do is irrelevant to the way he is regarded; he remains a Jew—as do I.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

   Let me conclude with a coda.  Even though there was plenty of anti-Semitism in America before World War II, I was never aware of having been treated positively or negatively because I was a Jew. I became the first Jewish dean at Northwestern, but never knew who noticed; no one mentioned it.  But now I want to tell of two occasions in my professional career that took place  in the early 1980’s  incidents in which my Jewishness played very different roles.

   When, as a finalist for the provostship of Duke University, I became the only remaining candidate, the then Duke Chancellor and a strong supporter arranged a three-person dinner with the university’s president Terry Sanford.   There was pleasant chit-chat until, at dessert-time, Sanford picked up my curriculum vitae, probably looking at it for the first time.  “I see you were born in Heidelberg” he said.  My cheerful response, “Yes you are looking at a standard issue German Jewish refugee.”  Dead silence.  Quickly the conversation petered out and the dinner ended.  I never heard again from Duke.  But I finally did learn that Sanford’s vaunted liberalism was compatible with quite virulent anti-Semitism.

   Another time I was one of the finalists for the presidency of Brandeis University, all three of us Jewish of course.  Invited to the campus, I was quizzed by a large number of people arrayed around a big conference table—trustees and accessories.  It was a lively and friendly conversation, lasting more than an hour, as I recall it.  I enjoyed it.  What remained for me was breakfast the next morning with Abram Sacher, the university’s founding president.  An interesting experience, all of it, but no offer of the presidency.  Brandeis appointed its first woman president.  I understood that; end of story.

   Not quite.  Many years later I spoke to someone who was familiar with that search.  He told me that many among the deciders thought that I was a good fit for the institution.  The fatal reservation was that in some way I was not sufficiently Jewish.  No one ever raised that issue in our interchanges, so, of course, I did not address it.  Had I known, I would happily have sung for them my favorite Sabbath hymn, though I would have done so in the Ashkenazi pronunciation of my youth.  Ve’shomru benei Yisroel es ha’shabbos . . . .  I have a terrific melody for it.

 July 6, 2014

---

*Mostly About Me: A Path through Different Worlds (2003) and A Sixty-Year Ride through the World of Education (2007).