Samuel Edelman: Nurturing and Sustaining His Jewish Cultural and Religious Identity
Samuel Edelman describes his personal choices in nurturing and sustaining his Jewish cultural and religious identity in the face of the many pressures to assimilate and thereby blur the lines separating Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors and friends. Through descriptions of his journeys to Central Europe and to. his hometown in Pennsylvania, Sam explains the alternative possibilities facing Jews in the United States. This essay also provides a larger framework for understanding the experiences of people who must live among and interact with those from more dominant cultural groups.
To Pass or Not to Pass, That Is the Question: Jewish Cultural Identity in the United States
Samuel M. Edelman
Not long ago, with only a few weeks between them, I took two voyages into my past. On the first I toured Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany with 27 professors of the Holocaust. On the second I returned to my hometown in cen-tral Pennsylvania to see my parents and to show my children where their fa-ther grew up. I returned from these trips a changed man.
In Poland I discovered memorials to millions of dead Jews. Before World War II Poland had a Jewish population of 3.8 million people; today it is 2,500. Yet with almost no Jews remaining, I also found a schizophrenic Poland- anti-Semitic to the core, yet curious about and searching for a culture that is as Polish as Poland but was eradicated. Poland seems to have a split personal-ity. Much of the wall graffiti is violently anti-Jewish, blaming communism and all of Poland's ills on phantom Jews, on the ghosts of the murdered. News-papers, politicians' speeches, and Polish parish priests' sermons rail against hidden Jews; during the last presidential election, one of the candidates was "accused" of being Jewish. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp several Polish skinheads even confronted us as we toured. I was stunned by the anger in their words and actions. Yet other Poles forcefully confronted the skin-heads,
To Pass or Not to Pass, That Is the Question: Jewish Cultural Identity in the United States
Samuel M. Edelman
Not long ago, with only a few weeks between them, I took two voyages into my past. On the first I toured Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany with 27 professors of the Holocaust. On the second I returned to my hometown in cen-tral Pennsylvania to see my parents and to show my children where their fa-ther grew up. I returned from these trips a changed man.
In Poland I discovered memorials to millions of dead Jews. Before World War II Poland had a Jewish population of 3.8 million people; today it is 2,500. Yet with almost no Jews remaining, I also found a schizophrenic Poland- anti-Semitic to the core, yet curious about and searching for a culture that is as Polish as Poland but was eradicated. Poland seems to have a split personal-ity. Much of the wall graffiti is violently anti-Jewish, blaming communism and all of Poland's ills on phantom Jews, on the ghosts of the murdered. News-papers, politicians' speeches, and Polish parish priests' sermons rail against hidden Jews; during the last presidential election, one of the candidates was "accused" of being Jewish. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp several Polish skinheads even confronted us as we toured. I was stunned by the anger in their words and actions. Yet other Poles forcefully confronted the skin-heads,