Loyalty and Patriotism: The View from the Rathhausstrasse

The President’s series of comments and tweets about the questionable loyalty— both towards our own nation and towards Israel—of American Jews who do not support the Republican party came as a shock to many. This was not, however, because the President hasn’t made outrageous comments before or because his lack of personal restraint hasn’t surfaced in more contexts that I could list in just one letter, but because the specific nature of the charge was so overlaid with so many disconcerting overtones at once that it was hard to separate them one from the other even just for the sake of discussing them discretely.

When we lived in Germany in the mid-1980s, Joan and I were part of the Jewish community in Heidelberg. In those days, it was a small operation: a series of rooms rented on a busy shopping street near the center of town with windows only facing the inner courtyard of the house in which the community had both its offices and its modest worship space. This specific arrangement, I was told, had been set in place years earlier for security reasons: by choosing a building housing only stores and offices that were closed on Friday evenings and on Saturday mornings, no one other than members of the community or their guests would have any reason to enter the property when services were underway. And that, in turn, was intended to make it as simple as possible for the police officers guarding the building to do their work successfully. (This European model of a back courtyard leading to a building without its own address and all but invisible from the street—like the Achterhuis in which the Franks hid out in Amsterdam—will be unfamiliar to most North Americans. But it’s the way most of Heidelberg’s buildings were built—and also most older buildings throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe—and the seclusion suited the community’s needs to a tee.) Even though this concept of being both in full view and yet somehow also invisible, thus simultaneously present and absent, was peculiar in the extreme to me as a new arrival used to our American ways. In time, I got used to it. Even the irony of being guarded during worship by German policeman faded and eventually became just part of how things were. By the time we were ready to leave, I hardly noticed the officers other than to wish them a good day on the way out and to thank them for watching over us.

Nor was any of this viewed as excessive by anyone at all, including not by myself or Joan: on our way to shul on Shabbat, we never failed to notice the granite monument marking the spot on the Rathausstrasse where the Rohrbach synagogue stood before the neighbors burnt it to the ground on Kristallnacht. (Now part of Heidelberg, Rohrbach was then its own little village with its own tiny Jewish community and that is where we lived during our years in Germany.) Nor were we alone: people to shul coming from the other direction just had a different marker to pass by—the one on the Grosse Mantelgasse marking the spot on which the synagogue of Heidelberg itself was burnt to the ground in 1938. (Click here for a photo montage connected with that site and its terrible history.) And that experience of walking by those sites provided more than enough historical background for anyone to feel entirely secure about having maximal security arrangements in place when the community met for prayer or for study, or in communal fellowship.

One of the interesting features of life in Germany in those days was the fact that the expression “German Jews” was not ever used to describe the Jews we met in Germany. At first, this struck me as odd: referencing myself as an American Jew seemed entirely natural to me, but that was not at all how things were in Germany, where the members of the community referenced themselves solely as “Jews in Germany,” reserving the title “German Jews” for the pre-war community that was either murdered or hounded into exile. Those people, the usage seemed to me to be saying, they were the ones who were insane enough to think of themselves as some version (i.e., the Jewish version) of German, who were oblivious to the degree to which they were despised, resented, and disliked by their neighbors and colleagues in the bank or in the academy or in the workplace…and who paid an unimaginably huge price for their own naiveté. (The reverse usage, “Jewish Germans,” was also in use in the pre-war period, although mostly as part of the strange expression deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischer Herkunft, meaning literally “German citizens of Jewish origin.” That expression, though, I only read in history books and never heard anyone use in normal discourse other than ironically.) Nor was this a mere local usage: even the national association representing Jewish interests to the public and to the German government referenced itself that way, calling itself the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (that is, The Central Council of Jews in Germany), a title weirdly reminiscent of the name of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (meaning something like “The Reich-wide Union of Jews in Germany), the umbrella organization that represented Germany Jewry during the Nazi years until its final members were deported to their deaths in the course of the war and the organization stopped existing.

So that’s the baggage I bring to this conversation: years among people who couldn’t even begin to describe themselves as Jewish Germans, even though many of them were born in Germany, had German passports, spoke only German to each other or to anyone, and had no other nationality to claim other than their theoretical right to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Except that they all (or mostly) had German citizenship, these people were truly stateless, the human version of flotsam adrift in a world that somehow had room for them but couldn’t quite figure out where they belonged. I myself, of course, didn’t feel that way at all: in those days I felt as unambiguously American as I do today. As noted, I got used to how things were in Germany. But I came from an entirely different world, one in which it would be unthinkable for a leading academic to publish a book presenting an analysis of the place of Jewish Americans in the national fabric of the United States as being about the relationship in the U.S. of Americans and Jews. But even Jews in Germany spoke that way in those days: unselfconsciously talking about “Jews and Germans” without suggesting even obliquely that the Jews in questions were themselves also Germans…or at least citizens of what was then called the Federal Republic of Germany.

Here, things are supposed to be different. And, by and large, they are different. And yet, there is apparently still enough self-doubt underlying the whole Jewish enterprise in America for the President’s comment to have struck a nerve in a way that some equally inane comment that didn’t call into question the American-ness of American Jews never would or could have.

The notion that American Jews are being disloyal to Israel by supporting the Democratic Party, after all, is one thing. Among the Democratic leaders of things in the Congress are people like Chuck Schumer, Nita Lowey, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi—all of whom have very strong pro-Israel voting records. And, indeed, a group of forty freshmen Democrats visited Israel a few weeks ago and came away, judging from their own post-trip comments, both impressed and encouraged in their pro-Israel orientation. Yes, there are the odious Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar, about whom I wrote last week and whose statements about Israel, as I said then, fall in my estimation somewhere between bizarrely naïve and wholly dishonest. But to condemn any Jewish American who is a member of the Democratic Party or who votes Democratic as disloyal to Israel because of a tiny handful of backbenchers whose views are specifically not shared by the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues—that really does suggest a level of willful invidiousness hard to square with reality.

But the other part of the President’s comment—that by not supporting his bid for re-election, American Jews are being disloyal to their own country—that is, and by far, the larger and more serious accusation. (For my comments from last January when Congresswoman Tlaib raised the same dual loyalty issue, click here.) It’s hardly a new canard. Indeed, words spoken by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis more than a century ago are suddenly eerily relevant: “Multiple loyalties,” he wrote in 1915, “are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule [i.e., in an Ireland then fighting for its own independence from Britain] was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” In other words, Justice Brandeis was saying simply that feeling a deep sense of interest in the wellbeing of people to whom one is tied by bonds of ethnicity, culture, or religion is not inimical with being a patriotic citizen of one’s own country. And, really, why should it be?

To wave away the President’s remark as just another over-the-top comment reflective solely of an idea that momentarily popped into his head and thus nothing to take too seriously is an extremely tempting way to respond. And, indeed, the fact that no one at all appears to have taken that approach could itself be waved away as an example of extreme over-sensitivity on the part of our American Jewish leadership. But I would like to think that the tidal wave of angry responses to the President’s remarks were and are indicative, not of a lack of self-confidence, but rather of the willingness of the Jewish community to speak out against bigoted canards questioning our loyalty even when given voice by the President himself.

I lived among people so unsure of themselves that they couldn’t even bring themselves to self-define as citizens of their own country, of the country they actually were citizens of. I understand the historical circumstances that led, not at all unreasonably, to that extreme level of insecurity. But our American Jewish community is nothing like that, nor should it be. The across-the-board responses to the President’s remarks were universally condemnatory. Even in the right-wing press, I didn’t see anyone—and certainly no one of stature—eager to walk along with President Trump on this one or even to appear mildly supportive. That, in and of itself, is more buoying and encouraging than the remark itself was disconcerting. We live in a vibrant, dynamic American state. That Jewish Americans have no need to disguise their feelings or hide their true sentiments about Israel—or about anything at all—is a sign of the health of the republic and one of which all Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, should be proud.