Disorientingly Jewish
Volume 1: Uptown
There was a time when I was a fan of Sam Harris. So much of what he said resonated with me at a moment when I was wrestling with a lot of the same moral dilemmas that Sam thought about. He felt like a genuine person looking for good in the world, honestly presenting a perspective and inviting engagement.
Then in 2018, Bari Weiss coined the term Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), a loose collection of heterodox intellectuals who felt canceled or marginalized by mainstream media and academia. It consisted of Sam, Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and they all used Joe Rogan's platform to fret about cancel culture.
I couldn't help but wonder why my friend Sam was affiliated with a group I looked at suspiciously.
The IDW has largely disbanded after fracturing along the Trump axis. Sam was always the staunchest against MAGA, validating a part of an old me.
Still, when I saw the title — "Why I won't debate critics of Israel" — I could feel an itch starting on the inside of my veins. One moment you're reading about someone else's Jewishness, and the next you're thrust into a creative flow state about your own.
Here's a funny joke: A Jewish man gets shipwrecked on a desert island. Years later, rescuers find him. They ask about two structures he built. "That's the synagogue where I pray," he says about the first. About the second: "That's the synagogue I never set foot in."
As someone who grew up in a town with two synagogues positioned on opposing sides of the same corner, it felt extra funny to me.
The more and more I read why Sam won't debate critics of Israel, the more and more I grieved the former version of me that endorsed Sam's brand of linguistic defense. Now I see it as poor conflict resolution and ironically the very post-hoc rationalization that he built a career noticing in others.
But that's the thing. My affair with Sam was but a moment in time. We both moved on towards what pulled us, and Sam fell for a familiar trap: success locks you into being pulled by an audience that shapes your very development.
I told myself, "Sam's only doing what Sam is programmed to do." Benadryl for that itch.
The world today is forcing Jews to have a fully formed position on something we're all still inheriting.
Sam's instinct is to write 2000 words defending a position his elephant took long ago. Haidt's rider and elephant are concepts Sam's crowd is surely familiar with.
My instinct is less about being right and a lot more flavorful.
What's now colloquially referred to as Uptown, Cheltenham, PA was really popping off back in the '80s, and a lively destination for city-born Jews and new parents looking for a suburban home.
A few years ago, I was riding in an Uber, talking with my driver. I have a distinct accent, and the driver asks, "Yo man, where you from?"
"Right here in Philly, born and raised." I already knew what was coming next, because Philadelphia could mean so many things. "Yeah, which part?"
"Cheltenham" I told him.
During the Civil War, Camp William Penn housed 11,000 troops on parcels of land inside Cheltenham, donated by the son-in-law of famed abolitionist and suffragist Lucretia Mott. After the war, William Ritchie encouraged Black families to buy homes in a corner of the township that was eventually named "LaMott" (after Lucretia Mott), and Catholics and Jews migrated during the boom of the mid-20th century.
If you weren't welcome in the Main Line's wealthier enclaves, Cheltenham's door was open.
Upon my arrival in 1984, Cheltenham had served for 150 years as one of the region's great experiments in tolerance.
Back inside my Uber, the next five minutes we talked about Cheltenham, and he taught me about Uptown.
"Uptown! What!?" I was surprised, and something deep inside me was soothed. Uptown, that's cool af.
In July 1898, as America was busy fighting Spain, a Lithuanian-born writer named Abraham Cahan published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly arguing that Russian Jews were becoming patriotic Americans who deserved trust and acceptance. He was writing on behalf of the two million Jews who had fled the Russian Empire between ~1880 and ~1925, pulled towards a country with a nativist fervor temporarily pointed away from immigrants and towards the wartime enemy: the "dastardly Dagoes." Cahan knew an opportunity when he saw one, and my Grandfather's grandfather journeyed in 1900 from Ternopil, Ukraine to Philadelphia, where he Americanized to Harry Paul.
In the early 20th century, the Jewish population of North Philly brought a world of synagogues, delis, labor unions, and Yiddish newspapers within a single generation. But like the rest of those Jews, Harry brought something over with him he had not yet named.
By the post-war period, Jewish families migrated into the Northeast section of Philadelphia, from Oxford Circle to the Bucks County line, and northwest into Germantown and Wynnefield. My parents were both born in the '50s and lived equidistant from Five Points, the Northeast Philadelphia landmark.
Then the GI Bill came, the highways came, the FHA loans came, and suburban America opened up. While the Main Line kept its doors selectively closed, another migration in the 1970s spread out along the Old York Road corridor to Elkins Park, Cheltenham, and Jenkintown. So families who had crossed an ocean to escape one kind of exclusion spent the postwar decades crossing Cheltenham Avenue towards the gravitational pull of upward mobility.
My generation grew up on the Cheltenham side with cousins and grandparents still on the Philadelphia side, and we code-switched depending on who was asking. Even today, my soul is satisfied with a Philadelphia mailing address. After my Uber, I didn't even bother to check my driver's math. It could be just us two that call it Uptown, living happily ever after.
By the time my parents arrived in Uptown in the '80s, they were another generation of a very specific Jewish centrifugal force resulting in 25,000 Jews and six synagogues along Old York Road.
25,000 Jews, approximately 1 out of 4 in the area, can leave quite an impression, and they all loved Israel.
Volume 2: My Jewish Elephant
Jewish identity is uniquely slippery because it operates on two axes simultaneously: it's a religion that's also an ethnicity. On top of that, being Jewish today comes with 2000 years of immigrant lineage. So each axis is subjective and immigrant identity is always downstream of wherever you landed and how long ago. "What are you" as a Jew is genuinely hard to answer, and most Jews are making it up in real time, including the 25,000 Jews of 80s/90s Elkins Park.
But Israel cuts through all of that, because by the time Israel was created in 1947, Jewish political sovereignty had been out of style for a couple thousand years. Jerusalem was a recognizable regional power before Pompey walked in. When Rome destroyed the Second Temple, Jews already had a theological framework for surviving destruction: build something, watch it be destroyed, survive and carry it forward.
The Roman diaspora event is when Jews scattered in two main directions: those who settled in the Iberian Peninsula became Sephardic, whereas those who settled in the Rhine Valley of Germany and France became Ashkenazi, kicking off a millennium of divergent culture, language, and liturgy. I'm sure some of you are thinking right now: "The history is more complicated, Jarrett." This is my essay, not yours.
The Sephardic Jews actually had a style of living otherwise uncommon in Jewish history, in medieval Spain under Muslim rule. The Golden Age produced philosophers, poets, physicians. But then in 1492, Christian Spain took over and expelled the rest of the Jews, pushing the Sephardim into North Africa and east into the Ottoman Empire.
Meanwhile the Ashkenazi were not as lucky, getting crushed by a Medieval Western Europe that pushed them east. By the time the Sephardim were on the move again, the Ashkenazi had already been pushed all the way to the The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who welcomed Ashkenazi Jews as a needed merchant class in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Surely Harry Paul's legacy traces through this story, as Ternopil, Ukraine sits squarely within the region. When he left in 1900, he was part of a people that held belonging loosely because belonging had always been revocable.
All 25,000 Jews along the OYR corridor in the 1980's descended along this pathway, and Ashkenazi Jewishness came in a few main varieties.
Around the same turn of century that Cahan published his essay, William Lukens Elkins built the Elkins Park train station at his own personal expense, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places.
He bought a neighborhood, named it after himself, built a train station, and fifty years later, 25,000 Jews followed the Reading Line four stops from Center City, where it was close enough to feel like the city and far enough to have a lawn.
A few steps up Montgomery Ave. running parallel to the tracks was Frank's Pizza, opened by a guy named Frank in 1983 and a community staple in the 80s/90s. If you grew up anywhere near New 2nd. and Ashburn, Frank's was likely a homebase.
There was one group of walkers that most frequented the segment of Montgomery Ave. between Frank's Pizza and the Elkins Park Train Station: the Orthodox Jews, who don't drive on Shabbat.
What this meant practically in Elkins Park was that every Saturday, the most visibly Jewish people in the neighborhood were also the ones walking the furthest in the most clothing. I remember as a child looking at them through the window of the car I was in, wondering what it was like to live by such adherence to rules. Life is so much fun to explore, I thought, aren't they missing out? In 80s/90s Elkins Park, Orthodox was the top-tier of Jewry, with two tiers below it.
The Reading Line brought the Jews, and the Jews brought the synagogues. Enough Jews landed in Elkins Park that by the 1980s there were three fully functioning synagogues all within 0.5 sq mile of the train station their lineage arrived at.
Up the block from the station was Adath Jeshurun, or AJ for short. It's also the oldest by far. It's so old that its original lessons were in German. It joined the Conservative Movement in 1910, which basically means Orthodox with mixed seating. A mechitza is what stands between the Orthodox Jewry tier and the Conservative Movement on the tier below it.
Two other synagogues landed in Elkins Park after WW2, following their congregants. Each chose a corner of an intersection at Old York Road and Township Line. Their opposition was always subtle and transmitted silently, as Jews are wont to do.
Beth Shalom was also part of the Conservative Movement, whereas Keneseth Israel, or KI, was Reform, which is Conservative with English and shorter service, and the lowest ranking tier of 80s/90s Elkins Park Jewry. Adding to the prominence of Beth Shalom's side of the corner was the Frank Lloyd Wright design, the only synagogue Wright ever designed in his career and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But if all you had was showing up twice a year, Reform was for you and KI was your synagogue. All my Dad had was showing up twice a year. My Mother's identity was more up for grabs, and she became a teacher at the synagogue she then forced me to attend. Oy vey.
The Jewish Mother is a cultural icon that's endured from the Roman exodus. It's common in immigrant communities to find matriarchal households, because "men left to earn and women ran everything else." The man doesn't speak the language, can't navigate the system, and often worked below their station, shifting the household's power to the woman running it and managing the children's assimilation.
Jews were no different, and the Ashkenazi Jews have been on the move for 2,000 years. Jewishness itself is matrilineal. You're Jewish if your Mother is Jewish for a reason.
The Yiddishe Mama was celebrated in the shtetls of Eastern Europe and the American immigrant neighborhoods. The nagging version came alive in post-war America largely because of male Jewish comedians processing their own complicated feelings about their mothers like I am doing now.
The end result is that by the 1980s, the Ashkenazi Jewish Mother held both things at once: the warmth that held the household together and the expectations that came with it. Every Jewish mother of Elkins Park 80s/90s landed somewhere between the nagging and the Mama.
My younger brother, like my Dad, was amenable to the bare minimum to maintain social status.
On the other hand, I negotiated early: I'd get Bar Mitzvah'd, and then I'm out.
Like Sam, my elephant is Jewish, but even back then I knew I had to leave the synagogue to find it.
Volume 3: Outward
The Millennial Philadelphia Jewish college pipeline had a well-worn groove.
Penn for the high achievers and Pitt, rich with its own Jewish identity, for the Conservative Movement of the Philadelphia 'burbs. Plus a cluster of what was colloquially known as "Jewish schools" that weren't really Jewish at all: University of Maryland, Indiana University, and Penn State. It's not an exhaustive list.
Of all the colleges, Penn resembled Cheltenham the most at roughly 1 out of every 4 being Jewish. But I wasn't that smart, so I applied to one school and Penn State is where I joined 40,000 other students. For the first time in my life, I felt like an actual minority.
I was 19 and missed a club hockey game. Naturally it arose in conversation following practice.
I answered for my absence, "I had to go home to a bat-mitzvah…" producing a locker room wide "the fuck?" look.
Right then, at that moment, I felt like more than a minority: I was the only one.
And I was. I was the first Jew some peers in that locker room ever met. They couldn't believe I was Jewish, and had all sorts of questions.
I was experiencing the moment of being the first Jew my peers ever met, and being asked what it meant at the same time.
But I could play the part, so I performed the story of driving with air conditioning along Montgomery Ave., turning left onto Ashbourne Rd at the corner of Frank's Pizza, looking out the window at Orthodox Jews walking in full wool in the middle of July. I had the boys howling about the four tribes of Elkins Park.
In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street happened outside my window at work and defined a generation's politics. Maybe coincidentally, or maybe not, one month before that I was at its precursor, the "tent revolution" of the 2011 Israeli Social Justice Movement.
I finally made it to the homeland on Birthright, or Taglit if you want to sound more Jewish, which is a program founded in 1994 that offers free trips to Israel, after the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey showed that "diaspora Jews were drifting, and that physically putting young Jews in Israel for ten days was the most efficient intervention they could design."
Like Elkins Park Jewry, there were tiers to Birthright trips after different organizations started offering unique variations. By the time I was ready to go, I could only qualify for one, where I learned in secret that a couple of the friends I became close with weren't really Jewish at all. Hmm, that makes sense.
There's upside to showing off Israel to people on a free trip with a bunch of new friends, so if your 2nd Aunt was Jewish then it was kinda all good.
Elkins Park had three tiers of Ashkenazi, but in Israel Jewishness came in many different flavors. There were Black Jews and White Jews. Jews with olive skin and black hair as well as white skin and red hair with freckles, affectionately known in Israel as a "gingi." I loved the Jewishness Israel was selling, and I wrote about it in my blog at the time.
By the end of the trip, every Birthrighter faces the most critical decision: "should I stay?" I chose to extend, because DJ Tiesto was coming to Tel Aviv and I just had to see him live.
Around the same time, a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef found herself priced out of the Tel Aviv rental market, so she pitched a tent on Rothschild Boulevard and started a Facebook group. One Saturday night in August 2011, I joined 250,000 Israelis supporting Daphni and her tent revolution.
"Gays Are In The Closet Because They Can't Afford An Apartment" I titled a blog the following day.
"Quite a shocking title, maybe.. But this is just one of the signs I saw in the social protest acted out here in Tel Aviv and across Israel last night. About 250,000 people showed up, or 3.5% of the population.. which equals ~10 million in the states… WHOA!"
Someone might need to check my math.
Birthright was specifically designed for someone like me, and boy did they do a good job. After returning, I began dating a friend of my trip organizer. She had olive skin and was significantly more Jewish than me, but we shared something older than time.
About 90 percent of all Syrian Jews in the United States live in a neighborhood nicknamed "Aleppo in Flatbush." The insularity is famous. It's the kind of thing some might say you escape, and also a fully functioning neighborhood of 30,000+ Jews. It toes the line, where some people grow uncomfortable.
One summer day in 2012, I visited with a unique insider's perspective. My ex-girlfriend was invited to a wedding inside the patriarchy of her family, and she felt compelled to attend. Before going "back there," she gave me a bit of a rundown. A warning, if you will.
We jumped on the Subway and hopped into a Taxi for the last stretch, and there I was riding in air conditioning, middle of July, looking out the window at the Orthodox Jews of my childhood. It was one of those moments that raises the little hairs on your arms. The black fedoras of Syrian Sephardic Orthodox men resemble the silhouette of Ashkenazi Orthodox of Elkins Park.
My Grandmother, who grew up Orthodox and then downgraded to Reform, used judgment as a tool the rest of her life and lived near my ex's grandmother in South Florida. Jewish grandmothers absolutely love a good social event, and I knew how to be a good Jewish boy.
One year I organized a dinner between my Ashkenazi family and my ex's Sephardic family, including our grandmothers. It felt like 2000 years was on the line, but if there is one way to get someone to fall in love with a culture, it's through a grandmother's home cooking.
She was my first real understanding of that dynamic of Jewishness. We survived as long as we could on the thing we couldn't name: we were both Jewish. Whatever that meant, because once I saw the difference in charoset, I had more questions than answers.
One night in my late 20s, I was out with coworkers, including an Israeli student at Penn, who collapsed the distance between "Jewish by culture" and "Jewish by blood" over a few beers.
Up until that night, everything Jewish that I experienced was chosen or inherited culturally. You could theoretically walk away from it if you wanted to. My Dad basically did and so did my ex in their respective ways. If you wanted to pray, whether 2x per year or all the times per year, Jewishness had a tier for you. It didn't have a tier if you didn't want to pray at all.
But Tay-Sachs doesn't care if you show up on the High Holidays. It cares about how much the journey from Rome is written inside of you.
Yichus is a Yiddish concept that means lineage, distinguished birth, pedigree. Basically, bragging rights based on respected family history or status. You might hear someone say "They're poor, but they have really good yichus."
From the 14th century onward, yichus was a central concern for Eastern European Jews arriving at the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Good yichus came from Torah scholarship or wealth and determined who you could marry. It was the mechanism of social hierarchy.
Yichus was originally tied to Torah scholarship, but with the secularization of Jewish society it shed the religious genealogical aspect while the core learning endured. So by the time yichus landed with the Ashkenazi Jews in Elkins Park, it was less "who's the most learned rabbi" and became the three tiers. Orthodox beats Conservative beats Reform.
Suffice to say, if there was a group that would compete over genetics, it's the Ashkenazi Jews and their concept of yichus.
By the time I was turning 30, 23andMe had been out for nearly a decade, and religious and cultural Jewishness had defined me for three decades. After a few beers that night, I was interested in a new dynamic.
Conan O'Brien told the story of taking his DNA test live on air. His doctor called two weeks later: "I've never, ever, ever had a DNA result like this before, and I've been doing this for ten years. You are 100% Irish. I've never seen a 100 percent anything." When Conan asked what it meant, the doctor said: "It means you're inbred."
My DNA test came back 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. Inbred status, which explains a lot to those who know me best.
Harry Paul was of the first wave of Russian Jewry that fled a Czarist Russia. They largely went Democrat and The New Deal felt like the opposite of everything they'd survived. Russian Jews fleeing the Soviets, on the other hand, arrived already suspicious of collectivism and found the Republican party waiting. Yet despite their polarity, Russian Jewry shares one defining feature: they all love Israel.
Bethlehem Steel was the industrial anchor of the Lehigh Valley, a stark contrast from the train station near where I grew up. But where there is work, you'll find a working class, and Jews made a smaller and slower trek to the area up the Northeast Extension along the same two eras as Jews made their way to Philadelphia. By the end of the Cold War in 1990, the Lehigh Valley Jewish community resettled a new stream of Jews from the former Soviet Union, including a Soviet Jewish Mother and her family of three.
If the Jewish Mother survived 2,000 years of immigrant trauma, then the Soviet era Jewish Mother is to be feared above all others, because Soviets lived through pogroms and revolution. She held the culture close and did not let go easily.
I fell in love with her daughter, a second generation Russian Jew who had been absorbed into American society by the time we met. We grew up eating the same borscht and matzoh, but she had Russia and the immigrant experience and I had the tribes of Elkins Park.
I also had tattoos and I debated critics of Israel, which was not allowed inside the Soviet era Jewish Mother household of Allentown, PA. Maybe that's why Sam won't do it.
I brought my DNA results with me the first time I was introduced to the family in Allentown, a token of yichus.
"I'm Jewish, and I love Israel," I told them. But in the end, the Soviets closed their doors on me, after I gave 100% Jewish DNA to twin grandchildren. The Soviets are a tricky tribe.