Why Be a Nebbish? A Response to Marshall Grossman

Abstract

The version of Jewish history implicit in Marshall Grossman's article would have it that the Jewish people, between the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and the establishment of the state of Israel (1948), were continuously, monolithically, and indiscriminately reduced to the status of the nebbish. It is in relation to this historical degradation that Zionism defends its own ideology of salvation through identity, strength, and homeland, and is able to condemn its and the Israeli government's Jewish critics for threatening the unity of the Jewish people. In Israel, where I was raised and lived until 1976, we were taught year in and year out that the two thousand years of Jewish Diaspora life was a virtual eternity of destitution, homelesness, and exclusion. Our educators aimed to convince us that Jews living in the Diaspora were a culturally static pariah people without dignity, able to live only by plying the unseemly trades of middlemen, innkeepers, tax collectors, shmate (junk) dealers, and the like; they were doing nothing besides praying three times a day, so that upon the arrival of the Messiah, they would be counted among those who will return to Zion live, dead or resurrected. The lesson, which remains one taught throughout Israeli culture, is that Messianic aspiration and the unyielding adherence to their God were the principle reasons for their persecution and the emergence of anti-semitism throughout the ages. The Jews as despised, degraded, and abject: the allegory of Diaspora is only completed with the metaphorical reconciliation of world Jewry in the reality of the Jewish state of Israel; through the purging of centuries of negativity and passivity, uncompromising aggression against those who would deny Israel its exclusivity and its will to power, its right to name its enemies, and its claim that it alone has an interest in national security that is moral as well as practical. This history and its allegory is intended to highlight the immanent significance of the Zionist revolution and to insure that it be a per