by Howard Wach (New York, NY)
I’m a baby-boomer, Bronx-born, a grandchild of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, raised in a 1960s Long Island suburb, which was half Jewish and half other white ethnics, everyone newly migrated from city neighborhoods. I matured in the ‘70s, when Jew-barring (or Jew-counting) barriers collapsed across all kinds of American institutions.
But sudden indifference to Jewish catastrophe and open Jew-hating—the post October 7 legacy—has pushed me and my boomer peers to revisit what we thought were rock-solid certainties. The last eight months changed everything.
I’m a knowledgeable guy, a teacher, a scholar in my own modest way. But now I wonder what I’ve ever really known. History lulled me to sleep, then woke me with a klop. My everyday worries—money, family, health—have new company, a dangerous twist on the tribalism splintering our civil society. Suddenly, the hyphen connecting “Jewish-American” feels frayed, eroded, anything but certain.
All my life that hyphen signaled a balance I had no reason to doubt. A birthright, if you will. It never felt conditional or one-sided.
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In 1906 Shai Wach, an 18-year-old immigrant from Warsaw, arrived in New York and renamed himself Charles. Eleven years later he returned to Europe, a doughboy drafted into the 77th infantry division, the “Melting Pot” division, a polyglot mix of immigrants from lower Manhattan. Charlie fought with the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest and returned to New York with a fistful of medals, his patriotism signed and sealed. He marched up Fifth Avenue with his old unit every Armistice Day for decades. Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, my father Daniel, Charlie’s older son, absorbed the lessons of those parades.
I never heard my grandfather talk about Israel. New York was his home. The United States was his homeland, and he had the medals to prove it. But his brother perished in Auschwitz (also never discussed); his sister disappeared forever into a wartime Polish convent. I suspect that like his Workmen’s Circle comrades, he had no personal Zionist convictions but believed that the Shoah made Israel necessary. Just not for him, or for his son, or for me.
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My father spoke more often about his World War II service as he aged. Before he became too frail to travel, he eagerly embarked on a veterans’ “Honor Flight” to visit war monuments in Washington. The day he died a biography of Churchill lay open on the magnifying reading device the VA had given him.
I turned eighteen just as the Vietnam-era draft ended. A graduate of my high school was killed at Kent State. Some classmates sewed peace symbols on their jeans and joined antiwar protests. Others sneered at the “footprint of the American chicken” and enlisted the moment they could. My peacenik mother hated the war; my proud veteran father defended it. I didn’t know what I believed, but I acted the teenage antiwar hippie, singing along with Country Joe and the Fish and listening to Hendrix tear through the national anthem.
It never occurred to me—or to anyone I knew—that Jewishness could have any relevance to that all-American strife. National identity was properly a civic affair. We all belonged to this country. I had no Zionist feelings, no desire to make aliyah. But I knew—even through the fog of adolescence—that Israel was a fulfillment, a source of ethnic pride heightened by the miraculous Six-Day War. I grasped its importance and celebrated the victory, but we were Jewish Americans, secure in that solid identity, feeling no unsettling contradiction or tension. All the old barriers were falling. Wartime dissension aside, what could disturb our happy condition?
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I have a different question now. What made me think I’d escape the history I studied and taught? I’m a lucky Jewish baby-boomer born into the post-Holocaust truce that sidetracked Jew-hating and enabled some of us to vault into corporate suites and institutional power. The truce has faltered for a while, but the October 7 aftermath blew it apart.
We disappeared into benign, assimilated invisibility. Or so I thought. That dreamy moment in the American empire is over. The sudden disregard for Jewish lives unearthed my half-buried boomer memories: Charlie’s brutal, unspoken knowledge of genocide, my parents looking sideways at goyim, their memory of “Gentiles Only” warnings in employment and real estate ads. Blue numbers tattooed on the forearm of my friend Paul’s father. It all flooded back when I saw torn, defaced posters of Israeli hostages and heard noxious chants rising from massive rallies. I was rudely yanked back into history.
The shock unleashed a stew of unwelcome emotions in me: anger at “progressives” who abandoned moral sense, who preach simple-minded theories of power, seduce the ignorant, and make Israel the centerpiece of global evil; anger at Israeli zealots who reinforce that corrosive lie—lunatic settlers running wild and the politicians who coddle them; fear for my children, who witness Jewishness embroiled in today’s American strife and may never recover the assurance that “Jewish-American” once meant, the hard-won allegiance my grandfather and father gifted to me.
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In the 1980s I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Brandeis University about civil society in nineteenth-century Britain. One day I was sitting with friends in a common room when a professor in the History Department, a brash and funny character, dropped by to share his latest insight. “Brandeis has a new theme song,” he announced, “a medley of Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Then he laughed and walked away.
Until recently the joke made playful, ironic Jewish sense. It fit perfectly at Brandeis, that model of postwar Jewish-American identity and ambition. In the last eight months I think of it more than any time in the last forty years. But its playfulness is gone, its irony soured.
Here’s a sign of the times. Brandeis is recruiting Jewish students feeling displaced or frightened at campuses where keffiyehs are fashionable and Zionism is a seven-letter version of a four-letter word.
That old joke isn’t funny at all anymore.
Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. He’s written and published articles on educational technology and academic history in various journals, and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. Palisades Review published his short humorous piece about not buying a time share.
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