Talk About Bupkes! LIVE at Writers Festival of Belgium
Talk About Bupkes! is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts.We are fresh back from Antwerp, a.k.a. the city for people who don’t like Brussels, on the kind invitation of Writers Festival of Belgium. It was a great day of words, ideas, and nice people.If you didn’t make it—and we know who you are—the live reading by our good-for-nothing Mid-Senior Talkie is now available to watch and listen to as much as you like.And share as much as you like! Why haven’t you yet? Your enemies aren’t going to suffer by themselves, you know.For those who like to read—and we don’t know who you are (but would like to!)—you can follow along with the full text below. Mind you, it’s just an excerpt of an excerpt.Be sure to make it all the way to the end for the stirring Q&A!Remember! If you don’t subscribe, you can’t unsubscribe.A Yid By Any Other NameI was born like what Hebrew National claims its hot dogs are: 100% kosher. Unlike what credible allegations have claimed, though, against that Jewish-coded subsidiary of the Conagra food conglomerate, I actually am. You just wouldn’t know it, because my parents gave me the WASPiest name imaginable. I ended up as William, after a great-uncle whom, per Jewish custom, died before I was born. He apparently went by Willie—the worst of all William variations. It was the Wall Street yuppie years of Reagan-era materialism, so perhaps my parents were hoping to give me a leg up in that future. There was no way to have foreseen how identity itself would become commodified as a currency of cultural capital by the time we would be old enough to spend it. While great respect is given to one’s preferred pronouns these days, my preferred name has always been a hard sell. That could be due to an asymmetry: Whereas pronouns help a person feel comfortable in the body they are in, I have never been comfortable in any of the names assigned to me.I’m told that my family started out with William before I could talk, which is a disproportionately formal thing to be called when you still need your diaper changed. No wonder I was 60 when I was 12 and, like the emotional corollary to Benjamin Button, have been coming down in age ever since. If you’re going to use William on a baby, at least get that baby a tweed blazer. Once consciousness started to form, however, I downshifted to the more age-appropriate Billy. My family and oldest friends can still get away with that diminutive, and I was apparently still going by it when I went off to college. Bill became an unhappy compromise for bylines and remains the name I use to talk to myself.Around 2015, I let a friend convince me to revert to my legal OG. Not because William fit any better, but because I didn’t have anything better and at least I was finally old enough to pretend to be that formal. The transition happened during a Jewish summer retreat in Germany, incidentally at a former camp for East German young pioneers. This sort of collective Jewish “fun” serves as soft scaffolding for the Cult of Zion by mixing co-ed sexual energy with awkward Jewish mating pressures and “educational” workshops to put on your CV that all implicitly circle around Israel as the organizing principle of your entire life. Combined, this creates a warm-weather social environment inundated by a low-intensity sense of survival that buzzes around endlessly like an Israeli drone over southern Lebanon. Just brushing your teeth in the morning becomes an act of resistance against an inescapable history that tried to exterminate you. The twist, because this is Germany, is that probably half of the participants are converts or just Jewish-curious. That means new-age victims are the old-age perpetrators looking for a home to launder intergenerational guilt. Zionism is more than happy to do the washing.It’s not like I am the only Jew with a goy name, but I am one of the few Jews I can think of with a very goy name who is also very inescapably and consciously Jewish. And what’s a more Jewish conundrum than that, especially an American one? Central to the sales pitch of the American Dream is the idea of starting over. Starting fresh. From scratch. You can be anyone and anything, regardless of who you were or where you’re from. For pariahs fleeing Old World pogroms and socioeconomic suffocation, this was an understandably appealing offer. Yet the other side of that coin is an atomized identity attached to nothing and nowhere. This is what makes America so attractive and also so repulsive. It is, foremost, the freedom to know nothing and live without history. Jews are precisely the opposite: People of the book in pursuit of knowledge, clamoring for a way into a history they were pushed out of. To be a Jew in America, and especially a Zionist one that most of them are, is to confront an irreconcilable tension between collective redemption and individual reinvention. To thrive as a Jew in America undercuts the Zionist case for ethno-national exclusivity and supremacy, producing a latent guilt that Zionism effectively weaponizes into supporting it. To modify the classic Jewish joke: America is the synagogue you go to, and Israel is the synagogue you feel bad not going to, so you do everything possible to make sure it is there for some other poor shlemiel to go to—like the Mizrachi (don’t dare call them Arab!) or the Soviets (don’t dare call them Christian!). A Jew may be nothing without his past, but discarding it allows him to live fundamentally contradictory realities at the same time. The spiritual emptiness of Billy/Bill/William maps perfectly onto this function of modernity. Maybe that makes them very Jewish names, after all.This dialectical unmooring reflects the historical vacuum into which I was born. Lacking any meaningful intergenerational connection to either the Holocaust or Israel—a rarity in the transatlantic Jew trade—my family can’t even manage to belong to the club of not belonging. We are on the outside of the outside; when our fellow Tribespeople gather to mourn national destruction or celebrate national restitution, we can only hope that no one notices we are phoning it in. Unsupported by these pillars of Jewish modernity, this poses a serious challenge to our claim to Jewishness. Until a visit to Poland confirmed our original last name, Głuchowicz, the Glucrofts had no roots at all. We just appeared one day out of the Big Bang of the Jewish-American experience. In this regard, Holocaust Jews are lucky. Thanks to the banality of German record-keeping, at least they know where they came from and where they died. An entire industry has cropped up since to ensure we know who every last Jewish victim was, down to the most minute biographical detail. That gives these Jews narrative and continuity. We can mourn and remember them. Their absence has a site. Our absence from absence does not. There can be no “stumbling stone” for having never been deported or murdered because you never existed in the first place. How do you build a future without memory? How do you participate in a community that operates with a cultural vocabulary you can’t genuinely access?Most Jews who see the folly of Zionism as clearly as I do come from a long and distinguished line of great intellectual or revolutionary thinkers. I do not. My forefathers did not demonstrate with Rosa Luxemburg or sit in lectures by Martin Buber. They did not drink coffee with Walter Benjamin or engage with Theodor Adorno. (They don’t even know who these people are.) They were not communist members, resistance fighters, or Bundist agitators (as far as I know). Hannah Arendt did not come over for shabbes. My family would watch the 1990s drama School Ties, taking away its earnestly Christian morality tale of martyrdom, but the more Jewish storytelling of Billy Wilder wasn’t on our watch list. An entire canon of Western Jewish intellectual thought silently passed us by as we fastidiously embraced the Protestant work ethic required to join … Get full access to The Bupkes at www.thebupkes.com/subscribe
