Have Your Say

YOSLY is not courageous at all but instead reveals several large blind spots and lacks in both theoretical coherence and understanding of Judaism (the religion and the culture). The character Anne (and, I believe, Burr the author) is not at all interested in her husband’s heritage— she doesn’t love him for all of who he is but for the fact that he has rejected his background in order to be with her. She has been wounded by the hurtful language and attitudes of her in-laws (fair enough) but rather than acknowledge these wounds and engage at all with Judaism on its own terms, or even on her husband’s, she develops what she believes to be a clear-eyed theory about the “toxicity” of Jewish identity.

This theory is flawed and shaky on many levels: it conflates prejudice with all positive identity and sense of peoplehood; in its self-proclaimed “anti-racialism” it disregards the fact that if Judaism was truly racist then conversion would not be allowed; it blames Jews for anti-Semitism by having a group identity (equivalent to blaming gays for homophobia because they are sexually attracted to the same sex); it confuses all Jews with the very orthodox and/or very prejudiced, which is like confusing all protestants with the radical right-wing; and it behaves as if the goal all of the Jewish religion is to proclaim different-ness, as if it would have no reason for existing otherwise. For example, Burr creates characters who believe that in order to love their daughter’s non-Jewish boyfriend they have to jettison kashrut and their own engagement with Judaism. (He also thinks that they would go to a “temple” which shows his level of ignorance, an annoying detail in a novel that represents itself as trading on insider knowledge.)

Anne is blind to the possibility that Howard might have deep positive feelings towards his Jewishness— in fact she is blind to everything about Jewishness besides the capacity of some Jews to exclude others (her code word for this is tribalism). Incidentally, the fact that the Christian, let alone Muslim, world would also reject and hurt her son is not on her radar, nor is the fact that Israel, despite its problems, is one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.

Overall, the book is intellectually agile but hollow. Anne talks about people being able to see everything but themselves, but she never once pauses to critique her own motives or underlying assumptions. Moreover, she feigns disgust for organized religion but raises her son with the religion of literature and even temporarily becomes a high priestess herself (and a very organized one at that). Sad to say, I was disappointed that Howard comes back to her at the end— not because she isn’t Jewish, but because she has taken him back purely on her terms. The same theology of separatism that she despises when expressed toward her son is one that she feels free to practice towards her husband and his longing to connect with the Jewish part of himself and his humanity.

Isabelle Headrick
Austin, Texas

Chandler Burr responds:

Isabelle Headrick presents an Anne who “doesn’t love [Howard] for all of who he is but for the fact that he has rejected his background in order to be with her.”There is nothing in the novel that suggests this is why Anne loves her husband and everything to illustrate its opposite. But Headrick’s misreading of “You” is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem, which is that she is defending Jewish theology, a tribalist, separatist theology dangerously maladapted to the modern world and directly at odds with humanist democratic universalism. Jewish theology classifies human beings according to racial and nationalistic criteria. I imagine (because this is often the case with educated, non-orthodox Jews) that were you to ask Headrick, she would also profess to believe in the infinitely better, more advanced, anti-racist universalist understanding of all human beings as, simply, human beings; I assume she would tell you that people who are Japanese, African, Indian, Hispanic are not less in God’s eyes than she. But these two views are mutually incompatible, and deeply and obviously so. Jews like Headrick compartmentalize. “I’m Jewish. Except that you black people are my moral equals. Except that Jewish theology explicitly says only Jews have a sacred covenant with God. Except that we’re all equal. Except that” etc. etc. It’s irrational, but it’s extremely common.

Hutus and Tutsis slaughtering each other over their identities. Serbians cleansing their identity of Bosnian identity. Aryan identity that undergirded Nazi Germany. The Chinese elites in Indonesia who keep themselves strictly apart from the Indonesians among whom they live and who they consider inferior. These are Headrick’s “identity and sense of peoplehood.” At least the Chinese don’t believe in some God who deems the Indonesians inferior; the Chinese simply make the distinction in terms of wealth and culture. Truly religious Jews on the other hand obligatorily believe that the Creator of the Universe holds non-Jews as strictly secondary. This bothers Headrick not at all, but probably she, like most everyone else, has not thought these things through to their logical ends.

“Identity” is a sickness, and like every addict who has not yet acknowledged her disease, Headrick lays out the standard kit of justifications and engages in the usual hypocrisy. An elegant proof that Judaism is racism is found in this Nov 8, 2009, New York Times article on a ruling from Britain’s Supreme Court: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/world/europe/08britain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=”Sarah%20Lyall”&st=cse Israel is a racial security state with an apartheidist political system.. As Bill Maher points out, we understand why people make up mythical Beings that favor their groups over other groups— the primitive Japanse made up the goddess Omaterasu Omikami, Zoroastrians made up Ahura Mazda, the Hebrews made up Yahweh, etc.; our species, like other social species, has many dangerous instincts toward tribal identity — but we need to transcend identity and separatist theology and other stupid, dangerous little games.

This is what Anne Rosenbaum is saying.

Moreover I would like to point out that non-religious Jews are world leaders in this extremely important work of shedding antiquated paradigms. Just one example: Former Israeli education minister Shulamit Aloni called the notion of a Jewish state “antidemocratic, if not racist” and worked to reverse the State Education Law that sought to inculcate “the values of Jewish culture” and “loyalty to the Jewish people.” “What’s important,” Aloni explained, “is that they [become] better human beings, not better Jews.”

Aloni’s is the most concise response to Headrick. As for a description of Headrick and those who think like her, here is Anne Rosenbaum: “There are people who tell you that you are a kind of person , I say. Not a person. A kind of person. And that all other people are another kind. Who take your desire for good and your talents and your spirit and twist and twist till you instinctively say, ‘He is one of mine. He is not. She is one of mine. She is not.’ And then convince you that there is a god sick enough to want this. Or, if you’ve no use for the god, that there is reason to perpetuate this culture.”

Headrick has a desire for good, she has talent and intelligence. She uses them to advocate for Jewish theology, which is morally unacceptable, exactly as advocates for Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism advocate for their unacceptable moral systems that divide people into Those God Likes and Those God Doesn’t. Were she to take her talents and use them for a better morality, she could make the world a better place. Here is a better morality, the words Denise gives to Anne when her husband, sickened by an ancient theological poison, leaves the wife he dearly loves: “I will call them my people which were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”