Against the Hyphen

In May 1916, exactly one hundred years ago this month, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech on the subject of being an American:

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere matter of convenience . . . I speak of and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

The speech is a powerful one, entitled “America for Americans,” and it is best understood in the context of the run-up to America’s entering World War I. It was in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania, with the death of 128 American citizens causing a storm of protest in the United States. As public opinion shifted back and forth on whether or not to enter the war, Roosevelt decried what he dubbed the “moral treason” of anyone acting or speaking as a German-American, Irish-American, English-American, or any other hyphenated identity. Our loyalties and duties are, first and foremost, and only, as Americans.

Notwithstanding the charged context in which the speech was given, the roots of Roosevelt’s speech against the hyphen date back to a handful of years prior, to a play written by Israel Zangwill called The Melting Pot. The play, a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, tells of the love affair of two Russian immigrants. It offers a grand vision of America as God’s crucible, in which all the diversity of European immigrants is melted away, thus the name The Melting Pot. Roosevelt was present on the play’s opening night, October 5, 1909, and leaned over his box shouting “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play.” In fact, a few years later, Zangwill received a letter in which the former President shared, “That particular play I shall always count among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life.” From that point onward, time and again, Roosevelt would give expression to an anti-hyphenated, melting pot vision of American life: No matter your origins, ethnicity, or religious background, you were American – first, foremost, and only. In his words: “Our children’s children will intermarry, one with another, your children’s children, friends, and mine.”

Not everyone, we know, was taken by Zangwill and Roosevelt’s vision. Despite its seemingly inclusive message, it had an underbelly, in that tucked away in its allure of acceptance there was also much that was being lost. Rabbi Judah L. Magnes of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El sharply rejected the vision, for if, he preached, “all men will give up the particular traditions of their own history . . . [then] Americanization means just what Mr. Zangwill has the courage to say it means: dejudaization.” (Cited in Kallen, Culture and Democracy, p. xx) Ours is a polyglot nation, and to ask Jewish-Americans to drop their hyphenated identities was, in Magnes’s words “preaching suicide to us.” A counter-narrative of America’s promise would soon emerge, perhaps best articulated by the prophet of cultural pluralism, Horace Kallen. It was Kallen who, by way of Magnes, offered a musical metaphor for American life, an orchestral symphony in which “every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality.” (p.116) “Men may change their clothes,” he wrote, ”their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers.” (p. 114). For Kallen and for those who would follow, it is the very hyphenated nature of American identity – Polish-American, Jewish-American, Mexican-American – that is the promise of this country. We must embrace the otherness of the other all the while retaining our own particularity; that is the thread that binds the sacred narrative of our country together, the cacophonous symphony of American life.

As long as Jews have existed, we have wrestled with what it means to be both of and other than the majority culture, how we straddle the multiple pedigrees of our identities. That struggle is introduced in this week’s Torah reading, in a dispute between an Israelite and a half-Israelite, a person of Jewish and Egyptian parentage. It has continued unabated since. Here in this country, we have traveled far since the arrival of the huddled masses of over one hundred years ago. The Zangwill vs. Kallen, melting pot vs. symphony debate is but one of many markers of this ongoing tension. Oftentimes popular culture tells the story best: Think of the Superman comic, invented in 1938 by two children of Jewish immigrants. A superhero who had to hide his true identity in America – how is that not a statement about being a hyphenated American? Post-World War II, the sociologist Will Herberg modified Kallen’s thesis, stating: “one can be expected to change many things as he becomes American – nationality, language, culture. One thing, however, he is not expected to change – and that is his religion.” (Protestant, Catholic and Jew, p. 23) In the decades that followed, one can track the degree to which Herberg’s thesis is or isn’t true. On the one hand, a more assertive Jewish identity emerged parallel to other such movements in the 60s. Think of Leo Rosten’s late 60s Joy of Yiddish. Alternatively, Jews were able to wrestle publicly with the hyphen of their identity, as evidenced by Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, to name but two of many examples. The Eichmann trial, the Six-Day War, the fight for Soviet Jewry – each and every one of these moments reflected a tug of war on the hyphen at the heart of every Jewish-American.

All of which brings us to the question of today. Where are we now? Is ours a time when a Jewish-American, or really any hyphenated American, can comfortably assert and embrace a distinctive religious identity, or has the pendulum swung to the melting pot model of eliding all our differences? The answer, I believe, is complicated. On the one hand, our world is more balkanized than ever. Our neighborhoods are isolated ethnically and economically, gerrymandered into red districts and blue districts with information narrowcasted to suit our particular interests. There are visible and invisible boundaries all over this country. On the other hand, identity – religious, ethnic, sexual, and otherwise – is more porous than ever. The notion of erecting boundaries of any sort is altogether displeasing to the coming generation. Ours is an age of hybrid identities, fluid identities and malleable identities.

Most of all, we live in a time when everyone must be validated in their identities, whatever they may be. The coming generation looks askance at assigned or inherited social identities. Lately, this conversation is most conspicuous on the subject of gender. Just ask a student in any of your children’s or grandchildren’s schools; children’s genders in all their evolving configurations are to be wholeheartedly embraced. This was brought home to me a few week’s ago, when one of my own kids advised me that when I bless the children at Friday night services, I shouldn’t bless them distinctly as boys and girls; after all, there are those still figuring it out or somewhere else on the continuum, and they too are deserving of God’s blessing. It never occurred to me that I was being exclusive. We are living in a whole new post-gendered, post ethnic, post-everything world. Yes, of course, I replied to my child, the last thing I would want is to have anyone feel excluded.

But here’s the thing. If everyone is to be validated in their choices, affirmed in all their identity decisions, if the worst thing we can say to someone that they are not OK in who they are, then have we not lost the language and ability to assert meaningful boundaries? To be inclusive and embracing speaks to all my highest values as an enlightened human being. But I am also in the business of building Jewish identity, Jewish homes, and Jewish families. How does one maintain one’s liberalism while maintaining that not all lifestyle choices are equal? I want Jews to engage Jewishly, to affiliate Jewishly, and to marry Jewishly. As an American and as a Jew, I want the ethnic kaleidoscope of this country to be maintained. Not every choice is equally OK. I do not seek or imagine some sort of John Lennon vision of a world with no religion. Jews, of all people, should be very cautious of anyone preaching a sort of “America for Americans” ideology. I want Jews, and for that matter, all people to opt for particularism over universalism, collectivism over individualism. Ours is not the time of the Zangwill’s melting pot or of Kallen’s symphony. It is a whole new era, and we are still figuring it out. In our post-ethnic world of unending validation, we need to retrieve a language of difference, to wear our hyphenated identities proudly, in full confidence that in doing so we are not rejecting our American ideals but actually, actualizing them. This is not just the promise of being an American Jew; this is the promise of what it means to be an American.

Tonight at the conclusion of Shabbat, as on every Shabbat, I will recite the havdalah prayer with my family. Havdalah means separation; it is the blessing that marks the distinction between the Sabbath and the rest of the week, the difference between the sacred and profane, night and day, the seventh day from the other six, and the difference the Jewish people and the rest of the world. It a beautiful and beautifully countercultural blessing that we must learn to say. For the blessing to become a reality, for us to have a distinct Jewish people one hundred years from now, more than saying it, we must live it. Ours must be a generation ready to live vibrant, committed, and engaged lives as Jews. We must find a language of tribalism without triumphalism, affiliation without parochialism, peoplehood without ethnocentrism. In other words, we need to find a language and lifestyle of havdalah, of Jewish difference and distinction appropriate for our age. It is not easy. In fact, it is a very narrow path to walk. But it is upon that narrow hyphen of our identities that we will find our way towards actualizing the symphony of American life.