Unique Jewish Experience

The world has reneged on the bargain, so we should collect

A bargain was struck in New York harbor: the Jews traded the unique Jewish experience for the right to be treated the same as everyone else. The Jews would not say, anymore, that there was anything difficult about their lives to set them apart from the rest of humanity, while in turn, they would be subjected to no experience by external forces that would uniquely alienate them (“An antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”)

I bring this up not to praise, nor even to blame, but, indeed, to bury. It didn’t work out. We continue, more and more now, to receive unique experiences. For example, when was the last time (if ever) that Ukrainians or Russians in the US were required to denounce their European homes to socially exist in America? Do Han Chinese have to defend themselves against claims of genocide or political repression? Who else can claim to be Vice President Vance’s absolute favorite?

Many Jews seek to get rid of these resoundingly Jewish experiences and return to the status quo ante. I would like to propose an alternative: take back the right to claim the unique Jewish experience that is already being imposed upon us. With one comes all; if the Jew is an entity who knows things that can be known only by dint of being a Jew, why couldn’t it include our ongoing and historical relationship with G-d—Jewishness as a way of being chosen to be different by the Creator of all being? The world’s inability to explain its obsession with us itself testifies that we aren’t generic. May as well accept it.

We could end the long practice of reading the Torah with the assumptions that the “human mind” or “history” are genera and the Jewish mind and Jewish history merely species. We tend, when the world tells us repeatedly that we’re different, to lick our wounds and seek out all the ways we’re definitely, for sure, the same. This has led to Jewish politics that sound Southern Baptist, Jewish history that seeks to file the holocaust as an example of genocide, and Jewish religion yearning for universal natural law. “If we accept we are different, we will become the very insular, arrogant tribe they accuse us of being” is yet another refusal to admit that the Jews are different, that this may be a dilemma for other groups but isn’t for us. It is more comforting, for many Jews, to play the villain that fits into the world’s narrative than to say, “You have no idea what a Jew is at all.”