“I’m a bad Jew” is a typical admission amongst American Jews, generally sheepish, generally boastful, and sometimes containing a dose of reality. But in her new guide, Bad Jews, journalist Emily Tamkin units out to show that the topic of her title is a fantasy. “It is my best attempt,” she writes, “to wrestle with what I believe to be the one truth of American Jewish identity: It can never be pinned down.” The result’s alternately perverse and insipid past perception. Let me present you what she means.
“The story of Ethel Rosenberg is, in many ways, a Jewish story,” writes Tamkin, after an uneven sketch of the Nineteen Fifties spy case. “Who, in this, is the Good Jew or the Bad Jew? Is it the Communist Jewish woman who was executed? The Jews who stood by her? Or the Jews who called for her death? The sons, years later trying to push for the exoneration of their mother? Or Roy Cohn, the Jewish man who helped create the environment that killed her?”
Like most questions within the guide, these are left unanswered, presumably as a result of Tamkin thinks they’re unanswerable. But the solutions are blindingly apparent.
Ethel Rosenberg was a nasty Jew. We know from Soviet cables and KGB memos that she urged and aided within the recruitment of her kinfolk as nuclear spies. She betrayed her nation, the United States, the perfect dwelling in exile the Jews have ever recognized, to arm Joseph Stalin, a demon answerable for the homicide of hundreds of thousands and an anti-Semite who tried to stamp out Jewish faith. Ethel was “totally uncritical” in her devotion to communism, a totalitarian ideology that crushes the human spirit and seeks the dissolution of all Jewish id. Right till the final second, Ethel had a possibility to save lots of her life and spare her kids from changing into orphans. All she needed to do was inform the reality. Instead, she continued to lie, selecting loyalty to Stalin over obligation to her kids.
The Jews who stood by Ethel had been duped or had been themselves fellow vacationers. The main Jewish organizations that Tamkin scolds, together with the majority of American Jewry, for supporting the prosecution, noticed extra clearly than she does. Historian Lucy Dawidowicz, singled out for her help of the Rosenbergs’ execution, devoted her profession to the examine of the Nazi War Against the Jews and the Jewish tradition that the Nazis sought to destroy. Her work helped protect that custom for Jews at the moment. Finally, Roy Cohn didn’t assist “create the environment that killed [Ethel],” as a result of Ethel wasn’t killed by an atmosphere.
When she desires to be, Tamkin is rigidly against judgments of any kind. She denies even the potential of one thing being “good for the Jews,” or dangerous. Her cause is that Jews differ—as if this, too, is an unanswerable objection.
Leave normative phrases apart; Tamkin is simply as obtuse relating to descriptive assessments. At occasions, she appears impervious to sociology. For instance, she takes nice challenge with Nathan Glazer’s remark that the interval of immigrant Jewish life on New York’s Lower East Side was “when the [American] Jews were thus most Jewish.” She protests, “But what did ‘true Jews’ or ‘most Jewish’ actually mean? What made one Jewish life more or less authentic than another?”
Behind these questions is the dogmatic insistence, essential to Tamkin’s liberal Judaism, that nobody is any extra Jewish than anybody else. Fine. Some folks, nevertheless, have a thicker id than others. Some Irish-Americans have a deep connection to Ireland and a few merely drink Guinness on St. Paddy’s Day. Jews who, say, spoke a Jewish language in every day life and had actual information of Jewish custom had a thicker Jewish id than most American Jews have had since.
Tamkin can’t admit this as a result of, as she writes, she is deeply anxious about her personal Jewishness. Though Bad Jews is “a roughly hundred-year history of Jewish American politics, culture, identities, and arguments,” in step with the trendy fad it’s also a private exploration. Tamkin shoehorns the difficulty of intermarriage into a number of chapters, typically discussing her personal marriage, which is to a non-Jew who didn’t subsequently convert.
Tamkin objects to “the insistence that intermarried Jews are less serious about Judaism and somehow not fully capable of passing  Jewish values on to their children.” She even has an imaginary dialog with a number one Jewish philanthropist on the difficulty. It ends with the conclusion that he wouldn’t care in any respect about her “hypothetical future children” on account of their non-Jewish father, making clear that she fails completely to grasp the opposing perspective.
No doubt Tamkin will instill Jewish id in her kids; she writes books on the subject. But basically, one Jewish dad or mum and one Christian dad or mum aren’t as probably as two Jewish mother and father to lift kids who determine strongly as Jews. This is widespread sense, and the data are clear that kids of intermarriage really feel that Judaism is much less vital to them (because it was for his or her mother and father) and act accordingly.
Tamkin’s private leanings typically make her an unreliable narrator. She tries to sanitize the Second Intifada as “a Palestinian uprising that came from the failure of the peace process in the first decade of the 2000s and the violence that ensued,” a sentence worthy of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” She describes Jewish Currents, which she admires, as “the magazine founded for the Jewish Left back in 1946,” leaving out that it was Stalinist. She congratulates Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) for apologizing for an anti-Semitic comment, with out mentioning that Omar shortly walked back the apology and reiterated her conspiracy idea.
Notably dangerous is Tamkin’s dialogue of the neoconservatives. Hostile framings and poor paraphrases of Irving Kristol arguments are one factor. Another is that she doesn’t appear to know what she’s speaking about. The first phrases she makes use of to explain neocon intellectuals are “free-market capitalists”; in actual fact, they had been notable throughout the conservative motion for accepting limits on the free market and making peace with the New Deal, whereas critiquing excesses of the Great Society on empirical grounds. Next, she writes, “Neoconservatives actually started out as leftist radicals. They were disciples of Leon Trotsky.” For most neocons, that is false. Norman Podhoretz, for example, was by no means a Trotskyist. Some, like Kristol, had been Trots in school, however their Marxist credentials had been far inferior to, say, these of many founding editors and writers of the conservative (no “neo”) National Review.
The downside may be traced to the guide’s citations. Tamkin’s sample is to depend on a single secondary supply for information, citing it a number of occasions consecutively to cowl a subject, earlier than shifting on to a different single supply, additionally cited a number of occasions in a row, for a brand new subject. In her neocons chapter, she cites Benjamin Balint’s book on Commentary 16 occasions in a row. I’ve learn the guide and it’s serviceable, however it’s only one view on a subject on which numerous phrases have been written. Commentary’s archives are additionally accessible on-line. To rely so completely on single sources is indicative of laziness, frankly, and lack of know-how.
Tamkin claims to argue that there’s no such factor as Jew or dangerous Jew. But her coronary heart isn’t in it. At each alternative, she valorizes her dangerous Jews, those who vilify Israel and the American Jewish group. They’re the heroes. Eli Valley, the Jewish cartoonist recognized for drawing Israelis and pro-Israel Americans as Nazis, she fawns over. Her remark that “multiple people, on learning that I was writing this book, told me that I had to speak to Valley. His work meant so much to them, they told me. It had helped them figure out their own relationship to Jewishness” is probably extra revealing than she meant.
The flip facet is that Tamkin clearly thinks her good Jews are dangerous. The main Jewish organizations are portrayed all through as morally indefensible; even Jewish management within the civil-rights motion is unconvincingly labeled a “myth.” Anticommunists and Israel supporters are solid as fear- and guilt-ridden tyrants, synogogue-goers as conformist and xenophobic. In her most disgusting passage, Tamkin blames the lethal 2018 capturing at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on Donald Trump after which instantly makes use of the tragedy to dump on Orthodox Jews—themselves the victims of most anti-Semitic violence—for a number of paragraphs.
At the tip, Tamkin has one final somersault to carry out: excusing left-wing anti-Semitism. “When I hear that the fixation should be on antisemitism on the left,” she writes, “I recall that there was a reason that American Jewish professionals in the 1960s decided not to focus on the antisemitism within the Nation of Islam,” particularly, that it might detract from the broader progressive battle. She then has a quote that the response to left-wing anti-Semitism ought to be “to show up more” to left-wing causes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), it’s made clear, is the perfect kind. At final, and in so many phrases, now we have Tamkin’s elusive definition of Jew: a leftist.
Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities
by Emily Tamkin
Harper, 320 pp., $28.99
Elliot Kaufman is the letters editor of the Wall Street Journal.