Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik Page A

true,” I said.
    “Of course it's true,” Martha said. “It's just not appropriate.”
    I was trying out possible spiels on the more Jewish of our many Jewish friends. We have a certain number of friends who, though coming from backgrounds not unlike my own, have recommitted themselves to Jewishness in a serious way. While Yiddishkeit as a practice had nearly disappeared from New York, one of the things replacing it, paradoxically, was Judaism. A number of our friends are what I have come to think of as X-treme Jews, who study Kabbalah or glory in the details of the lives of Jewish gangsters and even like to call themselves“Hebes,” in the manner of young black men calling each other “niggas.”
    I envied my friends the seeming clarity of their Jewishness, just as I envied, a little, the clarity of the family of observant Jews who live down the hall from us. On warm Friday evenings, one or two of the adolescent boys in that family will come knocking at our door, galumphing in heavy shoes and with pale faces, and, looking woeful, say, “Could you come and turn on the air conditioner in our apartment? We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” I admired the simplicity of their self-definition: “We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” We are unashamed of our essence, even as it makes us sweat.
    But whatever the appeal of that plain faith, I can't say I was inclined to follow them. It seemed to me that my contemporaries, in contrast to the boys down the hall, had chosen Jewish—they were
majoring
in Jewish, just as my father had majored in English—when the force of the tradition was that it was not elective. And since the choice of what to consider properly Jewish was always interpretive—nobody except the very simple or very faithful actually believed or followed it all, seven days of creation and the rules of animal sacrifice in the temple—there were only competing styles of Alexandrianism, of Jewishness rather than rote Judaism, some recognizing themselves as such.
    I decided to sit down and read what I imagined was the Bible on the subject of New York Jewishness, Alfred Kazin's memoir
New York Jew,
a book that, over the years, I had neither read in nor read past but simply not read, thinking, unforgivably, that I already knew its contents. (The forties, boy! The fifties, joy! The sixties, oy!) In fact, it's an unpredictable, rhapsodic, uncontentious book—but for all the stark-ness of its title, its premise is that Jewishness is the board from which one springs, rather than the ground one must dig. To be a New York Jew is, for Kazin, like being a New York tree. It is what you are.
    Reading Kazin, I became a little impatient with my own apologetic attitude toward the poverty of my Jewishness. Wasn't it the invigorating inheritance of the self-emancipation of my parents? My father had done the deracinating, to become a devotee of Pope and Swift, Molière and Shakespeare, and to reracinate was to be disloyal to him, to the act of emancipation from tribal reflexes that, with a considerable effort ofwill and imagination, he had pulled off. What is bracing about Kazin is not his Jewishness but that he makes no effort to pretend he is something else. His liberation lay in not pretending to be Van Wyck Brooks; the liberation for us surely lies in not pretending to be Alfred Kazin.
    In the midst of these bitter-herb thoughts, Luke came in.
    “Here's the new version,” he said. “Man says to a waiter, ‘What's this fly doing in my soup?’ ‘Shhh,’ the waiter says, ‘everyone will want one.’ ” It broke me up. Whether or not there are Jewish essences, there are surely some essentially Jewish jokes. That was one, and I was in the middle of another.
    I was about to call the Jewish Museum and give it all up when a friend suggested, “Go see Rabbi Schorsch. He's the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He's a terrific guy, and I'm sure he'd be glad to help you out with the spiel thing.” I vaguely remembered hearing