The Jews and the West

"I intend to live forever, or to die trying"

A big cultural event here in New York City is the opening of the Whitney Museum's new building. I was working away on the treadmill at the gym this morning when the Whitney director, Adam Weinberg, was being interviewed on TV. (The gym is festooned with huge TV screens.) I was struck by his name, clearly Jewish. I say "clearly," which is a response of a late day. When I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, I didn't know a single soul who could be identified as Jewish. I kid you not. I did not know that Groucho Marx or Jack Benny, two of my favorite TV entertainers were Jewish. It never dawned on me.

Most Americans in fly-over country in that decade lived a rather hermetic familial existence. In the 1950s people were aware of "their place," and ours was among people like ourselves. For us kids the world consisted of home and school, and all schools then, whether public or parochial, were local. Unless you lived on a farm and rode a school bus, you walked to school, so that the children from even the next school district might as well have lived in another state. Such boundaries narrowed the range in which girls and even boys roamed, which resulted in much labor-saving for parents who, lest we forget, were still the primary caretakers of their children in the 1950s. Middle-class kids in the heartland simply did not roam. Where would they have roamed? There were no amusement arcades, no malls or cineplexes.

We were all Americans. Irving Berlin, for goodness sake, wrote one of our national anthems.

In retrospect, I realize that Louisville, judging from the size of the Jewish Community Center there, must have had a sizable Jewish population when I was growing up, just as it had a sizable Catholic population, of which may family was a part. But it was only in college that I came to know Jewish students. I went to a state university, Indian University, and the identifiably Jewish students there had a decidedly urban background. They were from Chicago, Philadelphia, even New York, and stood out just as strikingly in the small-town Midwestern environment of Bloomington as they would have in the small Midwestern towns from which most I.U. students came.

The Jewish students at Indiana University expressed their cultural distinctiveness in a less quiet manner. It was my first encounter with people my own age who really talked, not in the decorous and correct manner of my parents, but who were instead always voicing strong opinions on any subject, whether you asked for their opinion or not, or who would quote you the opinions of others on the subject. In high school I never heard even the smartest kids –– the student body president, the valedictorian, the obvious eggheads –– speak their mind on politics or on any non-teenage matter outside the classroom. The Jewish students were quite different in this respect. Since the most vocal and visible ones came from large cities, that meant in the 1960s that they conveyed the attitudes that flourished in such urban environments. They were, politically, “liberal," a concept with which I was then unfamiliar, and their position on the issues of the day were at some variance with the values of the American heartland, especially with the conservative milieu that reigned then at Indiana.

It was the first time that I became aware of the cultural variety of the U.S. Still, I reached an advanced age before I knew about Jack Benny and Groucho Marx. I moved to New York, I married a Jewish. It was my husband who told me that if a comedian was funny, he was Jewish!

The above is a very long preface to some thoughts about the different relationship of Jews and Muslims to Western "civilization." The Jews are clearly a part of it, indeed so much an intricate part that Hitler tried to excise their contribution to our shared cultural heritage. Starting in the 19th century Jews began to play a role in all aspects of Western life, from science to the arts. To come to the present day, it is not at all surprising that Adam Weinberg would be director of a major U.S. museum. It's not necessary to name names: Jewish scholars have been major path-breakers in the study of Western art, even of the Christian art of the Middle Ages.

In what sense can something similar be said of Muslims? Where are the Muslims who occupy important cultural institutions in the U.S. or Europe? No one denies that Muslim scholars were important transmitters of Western science and philosophy, especially back in the so-called Dark Ages. But they did not transmit the art; in fact, in some places Western art was probably destroyed for religious reasons.

I have known many Muslim students, starting back in my undergraduate days. The first ones I was acquainted with were Persians, who were then being sent by the Shah to U.S. universities to study and to return home with their expertise. Well, we know how that turned out. All of the students I knew then and have since come to know have studied science, engineering, computer science, and so on. In other words, the practical arts. I have never known one to study art history, unless it be to concentrate on Islamic art. Their lack of interest in art history or, for that matter, English or German literature, even sociology or anthropology, is not surprising. It is only "the West" that displays interest in other cultures. Since the 17th century, Western scholars have made important contributions to the study of the languages and literatures of China, of India, of the Islamic world, and so on.

A Chinese scholar

Of course, the Chinese, the Indians, the Muslims also studied their own heritages, but they never felt it necessary to go outside of that heritage. Marco Polo traveled to the East and brought back news of the peoples and cultures he found there, but the Chinese had no interest in the West, aside from technical innovations. An extreme instance was the Japanese, who actually closed off their nation for several centuries to avoid contamination with outside influences.

The West's greatest civilizational contribution may be science, which erects no ethnic or national boundaries. It is an open-access field. Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, and Muslim scientists have already produced great contributions in science, and many even teach at Western institutions. But none of them show as much interest in our cultural and artistic practices as we do in theirs. For the West, this is not simply a matter of curiosity, of an attempt to under "the Other." Indeed, under the forces of globalization, it might be said that we in the West, with our economic and technological power, are eroding cultural differences among all people, making the world less heterogenous.

Picture credits: Media Guy; Scott W. Palmer: China Page