Against this glum backdrop, there is only one success story: the Palestinian Authority’s state-building effort, a unique example of positive Palestinian achievement in the fields of security, economics, and institution-building. Given that bilateral talks appear to have failed, the state-building plan has a political endgame—international recognition of a Palestinian state—that must be addressed soon. What’s more, it holds out the possibility of serving Israeli as well as Palestinian interests.

This is not the sort of unilateral declaration of independence that was trumpeted in the 1990s by Yasser Arafat. In contrast, this Palestinian plan is to be activated only if and when the institutions of state are in place in the West Bank and bilateral peace talks are deemed to have failed. Happily, the institutions increasingly are in place; sadly, the U.S.-sponsored peace talks are already a failure. At some point next September, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, will have built up sufficient diplomatic momentum through the recognition of statehood by a growing community of nations that it is almost certain to ask the United Nations for recognition of a state within the 1967 borders, including Jerusalem.

Notably, the PLO is not expected to ask the United Nations to pronounce on refugees and their right of return or on control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is important: These two existential issues have been the biggest deal breakers in the repeated attempts to negotiate a comprehensive settlement, both officially and in informal meetings, attempts with which I have been associated for more than two decades.

For it is here that the narratives of Israel and the PLO clash most resoundingly—even as the two parties agree on the need for two states side by side. In direct talks, the PLO insists there can be no formal deal on borders without Jerusalem acquiescing to a right-of-return agreement that certifies for future generations that Israel was “born in sin” in 1948. And it demands (because “there never was a temple there”) that Israel cede full sovereignty and control over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. But within the framework of a unilateral/international partial solution at the United Nations, the PLO is prepared to postpone resolution of precisely these two issues in order to achieve a two-state solution.

In responding to this Palestinian plan, which is coordinated fully with the Arab League, Israel is in a paradoxical position. On the one hand, it supports the Palestinian Authority’s state-building program; on the other, it opposes the PLO’s effort to recruit international support for a U.N. declaration of Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government appears to be relying on an American veto in the Security Council. Yet this is not at all a certainty: The Obama Administration takes a much more international approach to Middle East issues than did its predecessors, and it is clearly unhappy with Netanyahu’s policies. Note that last fall, in the course of efforts to persuade Netanyahu to extend the settlement freeze, President Barack Obama reportedly offered to oppose Palestinian efforts in the United Nations as long as active peace talks continued. This can be understood to mean that, without active peace talks, there is no promise of a veto.

As matters currently stand, a Palestinian statehood resolution is almost certain to reach the Security Council with the massive backing of the international community. If the United States does veto it, Israel’s international isolation and de-legitimization will be severely exacerbated. If Washington doesn’t use the veto but Israel opposes the resolution, Jerusalem will find itself totally isolated and at the center of a major international controversy over a U.N. decision to recognize a Palestinian state that Israel opposes.

***

There is one obvious alternative. Israel and the United States could begin, now, discussing ways in which U.N. creation of a Palestinian state could be leveraged by Israel to serve its larger purposes. Jerusalem and Washington could set about ensuring that the relevant Security Council resolution, along with U.S.-Israeli side agreements, reflect Israel’s strategic interests. This could conceivably be an opportunity to put Israel and the United States, and potentially the Palestinians and the Arab League as well, on the same page.

Israel and the United States would ensure that U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders would also include a mandate to that state and to Israel to negotiate land swaps, security and water provisions, disposition of Israeli settlements remaining in Palestinian territory, and to work out the parameters for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. The holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere and resolution of the refugee issue would only be addressed once a Palestinian state begins functioning. But the creation of that state based on international recognition of successful Palestinian state-building would not be dependent on solving these issues.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict would then become a state-to-state issue—no longer a conflict between Israel and an elusive and problematic nonstate actor, the PLO, that represents the Palestinian diaspora. Mahmoud Abbas would negotiate with Israel as president of Palestine, not chairman of the PLO. The U.N. resolution that creates the state of Palestine would be worded to refer back to Resolution 181 of 1947, which created “Arab and Jewish states” in mandatory Palestine and to reaffirm U.N. recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Israel could leverage its agreement and seek out significant security benefits from the United States to compensate it for the risks it would be taking. It could also bargain for incentives from the Arab League, whose Arab Peace Initiative offers Israel normalization and security in return for peace and for whom the emergence of a Palestinian state could conceivably open new channels of cooperation with Israel against Iran and the militant Islamist movements it fosters. Israel could, together with Washington, identify and neutralize any potential negative ramifications posed by international legal aspects of the emergence of a Palestinian state by dint of U.N. decree. Whatever bilateral talks Washington succeeds in convening between now and next September could be channeled toward facilitating the territorial aspects of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state.

Obviously, there are also drawbacks to the approach outlined here. It would only produce a partial, not final agreement, thereby leaving aspects of the conflict to fester. While the Gaza Strip would undoubtedly be declared a part of the state of Palestine, it would remain a separate and dangerous problem. Then, too, this is a best-case scenario that could go wrong; reliance on an international track could turn into a slippery slope for Israel, wherein Jerusalem loses control over the process.

Yet these dangers must be assessed not only in the context of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state but also against the backdrop of the likely alternative—the present situation. The absence of either a peace process or a Palestinian state almost certainly means an eventual return to violence. Hamas in Gaza threatens both Israel and the West Bank-based PLO whether or not a Palestinian state emerges. And Israel showed in 2005, during the Gaza withdrawal, and 2006, ending the war in Lebanon, that it is increasingly ready and able to work with the international community—but also to put on the brakes when necessary—if for no other reason than its inability to come up on its own with viable military or political strategies for dealing with the nonstate actors on its borders.

The current failure of the peace process and the risks for Israel that this project represents should impel both Washington and Jerusalem to engage urgently in an analytical exercise:

First, the two countries must acknowledge that the present approach for ending the conflict with a single agreement has, like its predecessors since 1993, failed.

Second, they must recognize that the Palestinian/Arab League plan for international recognition of a Palestinian state, backed by universally approved achievements in state-building in the West Bank, is gaining momentum and will confront Israel and the United States with a major challenge.

Third, they must acknowledge the dangers for Israel of an American veto of a Security Council resolution to recognize a Palestinian state, or, alternatively, of an American “yes” vote at the United Nations that is not coordinated with Israel on the basis of a joint effort to leverage the U.N. resolution to Israel’s advantage.

And finally, they must understand that the state-recognition plan embodies risks but also potential advantages for Israel and for U.S. interests in the region, which can and should be leveraged.

In short, it’s time we began talking seriously about this contingency.

Yossi Alpher, who edits Bitterlemons, is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. In 2000, he served as special adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David talks.

Speculation varies as to why women generally are so conspicuously absent from leadership posts; some believe it has to do with the fact that women more often than men take off time from their careers to raise families and that they may be less aggressive about professional advancement and pay hikes. But why Jewish organizations seem to demonstrate an even larger gender disparity is unclear. One factor, write Jane Eisner and Devra Ferst, is “what communal insiders describe as the familial, sometimes paternalistic nature of Jewish organizations.” In other words—good old-fashioned, father-knows-best sexism.

Jewish Women Lag Behind Men in Promotion and Pay [Forward]

OK. But what starts out seeming like an attempt to defend religion from fed-up spiritualists turns quickly back-handed (“lame synagogues do promote mind states”), and Michaelson ends up subtly advocating for a more conventionally “New Age” spirituality by using the concepts of “values” and “states of mind” almost interchangeably. Secular Judaism offers “integrity, ethics, authenticity”; “social justice” Judaism’s got “righteous indignation, sense of moral goodness”; Zionism—“patriotism, strength, belonging”; and old-school synagogue Judaism has this loaded foursome: “particularism, security, traditionalism, Jewish survival.” Given this array, followed by his sly suggestion that “[m]aybe other mind states like inspiration, joy or introspection, might work better,” it seems that while he says, “[w]hat I’ve tried to suggest is that these seemingly Californian spiritual values are not so distant from hard-core New York religious and political ones,” he’s actually trying to sell one to the other.

Religion is Actually Spirituality [Forward]

Israel Joshua Singer Appreciation Society [Facebook]

“If you look at my comics outside the context of what they’re making fun of they might seem even more outrageous, but if you’re familiar with the Jewish community and what I’m making fun of, it’s actually not that great a leap,” Valley told Tablet. He declined to comment on why the Forward killed the comic; Forward editor-in-chief Jane Eisner said she had no time to speak because of the paper’s impending deadline. So, for now, the answer to why a Jewish newspaper refused to run a comic in which Israelis are depicted as non-brain-eating primates must remain a mystery.

Dawn of the Chimpanzee! (Relax Folks, They’re Just a Metaphor) [Gawker]

Harvey Milk To Receive Presidential Medal of Freedom [Towleroad]
Harvey Milk, in Life and on Film, Typified the Proud Jew as Outsider [Forward]

In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common. The major American organization known for its theories of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), received just under $250,000 in contributions for the 12 months ending on April 30, 2008, the last year for which figures are available, and that money could have come from only a handful of contributors; the Institute’s publishing arm had sales of $53,269—or, to give a generous estimate, about 5,000 books. The Institute’s Journal of Historical Review was last published in 2002, and the very next year a rival publication, The Revisionist, which had already folded once before, ceased publication. The world of Holocaust denial comprises one-man enterprises, fledgling organizations with tiny budgets and few followers, and amateurish magazines with the lifespans of fruit flies.

These enterprises seem poised to become even more fragile, thanks to an internecine feud that began early this year and threatens to cripple an already lame Holocaust-denial movement. In January, IHR director Mark Weber posted an article on his web site arguing that Holocaust “revisionism” has failed to gain traction in either history departments or with the public at large: “[T]here has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective,” Weber wrote. And, he continued, it was time to leave the Holocaust behind and focus on Jewish malevolence today: “Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.”

Soon after Weber’s statements became public, his onetime friend and colleague, 79-year-old Bradley Smith, was quick to denounce his former fellow traveler. “There are those who feel he has … betrayed the revisionist movement,” Smith told the Forward.

Holocaust deniers are a touchy bunch, prone to infighting, but the war of words between Weber and Smith, two old allies, was something special; a battle had been joined in the heart of the American Holocaust-denial movement.  I was intrigued by Weber, this man who claimed to be leaving Holocaust revisionism behind. It was easy enough to judge him just an anti-Semite at war with other anti-Semites. If anything, Weber’s shift to anti-Zionism only confirmed his anti-Semitism; after all, if he were just a disinterested, objective historian, then having dropped the historical question of the Holocaust he’d begin a study of, say, the British raj or the history of Hawaiian agriculture. That he continued to be obsessed with the alleged lies and machinations of Jews seemed proof of an objective disorder.

But because I believe in redemption, and because Weber’s web site offered a curious mixture of anti-Semitic nonsense and mainstream news articles about Israel, and even articles from the Jewish press, I decided that it was worth trying to talk to Mark Weber. Maybe he was a new man. Or maybe he was trying to become one. And while I was at it, I figured, I might as well also try to talk to Smith.

Between February and May, I met in person and spoke multiple times on the telephone with both Smith, who lives in Mexico and whose cuddliness in person seems to mock his reputation as a dangerous extremist, and Weber, a 57-year-old native Oregonian who seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful. These were men whose friendship was on the outs, and each was eager to emphasize his differences with the other. But they were also similar, in ways I did not expect. For example, both Weber and Smith seem to think of themselves as Enlightenment liberals: Smith fashions himself a free-speech absolutist, whose Holocaust skepticism is merely about usefully breaking taboos, while Weber sees himself as a positivist, sifting evidence to determine what is true and what is not. Each man, too, seems to want to be loved and, I thought, a bit puzzled that it has not worked out that way.  Most surprising, both Weber and Smith loved Jews. They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he has had a close relationship. Discovering these contradictions in the lives of Smith and Weber did not arouse in me any sympathy, and of course it doesn’t discredit their ideas, which are wrong on their own merits. But to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.

****

After I had secured the Weber interview, Smith, whose home in Mexico is just 100 miles from where Weber lives in Southern California, volunteered to drive across the border and meet me. For one airfare, I could meet two extremists.

Of the two men, Bradley Smith is much closer to the common perception of a classic Holocaust denier, singularly obsessed with disproving the existence of the Nazi machinery of death. But the elderly Smith was kindly enough to endure the traffic jam at the Mexican-American border and meet me at the Starbucks in San Clemente, California, the beach town where Richard Nixon began his exile. Smith had left a message on my mobile phone saying that he would wait for me in the parking lot, and that’s where I found him, snoozing behind the wheel of his pickup truck. I rapped on the window, and the aging radical opened his eyes with a start, remembered where he was, smiled at me, popped open his door, and lumbered out, smiling warmly. In his worn flannel shirt and jeans, a scraggly white beard dressing up his weather-beaten face, Smith looked like an old, sagacious cowhand, the kind of guy whose favorite story is about how he forgave the beloved bull who once got startled and kicked him in the head.

Once we were both seated at the coffee shop, I tried to ask Smith about possible flaws in the works of great Holocaust historians.

“You’ve read all the standard accounts,” I asked, “like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg?”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “that’s what I started with, I read Hilberg. I didn’t read them very closely. Because I’m not really interested in the history of the period.”

I was a little shocked. “I mean, you read Lucy Dawidowicz’s book on the period? You read David Wyman?”

“Not thoroughly,” Smith said. “Wyman, I didn’t read. He came a bit too late.”

I was astounded. “But that’s kind of amazing, right? Because here are these classic works of Holocaust literature that purport to show it all and you say you haven’t read them closely. So you have read Arthur Butz, who’s a nobody in the field, closely, but you haven’t read the great titans in the field closely?”  “You know what? I’m not interested in the story,” he replied. “Revisionists have written very detailed documents about the holes—”

“So what are you interested in?”

“In a free exchange of ideas.”

“But you aren’t interested in trying to find out which ideas are right?”

“Not particularly. You know what I’m really interested in? Every generation has its taboo, and I happen to be here with this taboo. I happen to be here with this one. And I can see how it’s exploited, and who benefits from the exploitation.”

And so it went for a while. As we got up to leave, Smith said that he had a gift for me. He reached into his bag and produced paperback copies of The Man Who Saw His Own Liver and his self-published memoir, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He assured me that they were both good reads.

TOMORROW: Part II of “The Denial Twist”: Meeting Mark Weber.

As Layoffs Mount, Which Jewish Executives Shared the Pain? [Forward]

With too few Jews around to merit a synagogue, the Concord Area Jewish Group, which we joined when my mother took a job in town, found a temporary home in the historic First Parish Church, set back from the oak-lined road that led off Route 2 from Cambridge.

The odd locale of my bat mitzvah would be merely idiosyncratic if it weren’t indicative of a much bigger karmic joke. My Jewish lineage—which on my Sephardic side can be traced back to Hebron, where my ancestors touched down in 1492 after leaving Spain, and on my Ashkenazi side includes the celebrated Yiddish writer who coined the term yenta—is rivaled only by my father’s Episcopalian Anglo-Saxon pedigree. “Don’t you ever forget it, young man, that’s blue blood that flows in those veins, the finest, purest blood that God ever gave to man,” my great-great-grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap, once told my paternal grandfather, Lewis Spence.

Had Dunlap lived to see his great-great-granddaughter recite her haftorah (even in a church), he surely would have blanched. He was not just an anti-Semite but a racial purist so consumed with the superiority of his Scotch-Irish bloodline that he wrote a thousand-page book on Dunlap genealogy, which wound back through antebellum Kentucky and still further back to the early Highland Scots.

He even made a point of avoiding Jews in public places. Family legend has it that Dunlap—a self-styled publishing tycoon who founded the first trade magazines, among them the scintillatingly titled India Rubber World—struck a deal with the head waiter at his favorite Manhattan restaurant that no one with “Jewish features” would be seated near his regular table by the window. But one afternoon, the joke was on the old man: When he sat down for lunch wearing a skullcap (his doctor had insisted that he cover his bald scalp), a waiter mistook him for an observant Jew and asked him to move. Later that same day, Dunlap snipped off his wife’s hair and promptly placed an order for a toupee.

In keeping with the requisite lifestyle of a baron of the Gilded Age, Dunlap—known for touting his credentials as a “Kentucky colonel” despite his lack of military service—spent his summers in the Adirondacks and his winters on Florida’s Gulf Coast—though it was in his beloved Manhattan where he died in the spring of 1935. One year later, another of my great-great-grandfathers, Jacob Adler, who wrote in Yiddish under the penname B. Kovner, published Laugh Jew Laugh, a collection of short stories about immigrant life in the Lower East Side that he had published over the preceding three decades in the Jewish Daily Forward. At that time, the Forward‘s readership hovered around 250,000 and Adler’s humor column was a favorite among the hordes of Yiddish-speaking newcomers who looked to the legendary paper for guidance on adjusting to life in this Promised Land. In Adler’s outlandish characters, they could see aspects of their irksome upstairs neighbor or—God forbid!—their own husbands and wives. So popular was one of Adler’s protagonists, Yente Telebende, who harangued her unfaithful husband and made everyone’s business her own, that a woman known to gossip has ever since been referred to as a yenta.

The only commonality between Jacob Adler and John Dunlap, I’d always assumed, was their progeny. I was wrong. Last fall, while scanning a copy of Laugh Jew Laugh in my Park Slope studio, I was struck by a small but significant detail: Adler’s introduction is signed off from St. Petersburg, Florida, the very same resort town where Dunlap spent his final months. As I discovered, St. Petersburg was not only the winter home of my Anglo-Saxon antecedent but also the year-round residence of my Yiddish forebear. I don’t imagine that they sipped martinis at the same social club or traded tales on the putting green, but they certainly could have strolled past one another on a white sand beach, two proud men wholly unaware of how human destiny would one day render their legacies intertwined.

Born in 1873 in Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, Adler was not unlike the multitudes of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and lived out the American dream. Upon arriving in New York in 1895, he began working arduous hours for a tailor in a sweatshop, all the while nursing his dream of becoming a writer. Only two years later, in 1897, he published his first poems in the nascent Forward. He soon joined the ranks of Di Yunge, or “The Young Ones”—the circle of Lower East Side literati who rejected the hard-edged political slant of their predecessors and introduced florid romanticism to Yiddish poetry—before making his mark as a humorist. By 1907, he had already published his first book, Zikhroynes, a memoir of shtetl life composed in verse, which was hailed by critics in New York and Europe. Zalmen Reisen, editor of one of Eastern Europe’s largest Yiddish newspapers, The Vilna Day, described it as “full of quiet, sad longing and heartfelt love for his childhood and the idyllic life of the Jewish shtetl.”

Adler wrote prodigiously, and somewhat obsessively, until the age of 99; he died in 1975, the year before I was born, at the age of 102. In just under a century, he churned out some 18,000 poems, more than 30,000 columns, and published work under almost 20 different pen names. He even went on publishing after his death, having written hundreds of Forward columns in advance.

Needless to say, he set the bar high for writers in the family. While I don’t foresee ever approaching his prolific—or, perhaps more accurately, lunatic—output, I do have one important thing in common with Adler: I too am a writer at the Forward (albeit the English paper, not the Yiddish, which is still printed weekly in New York). Add to the mix my Israeli family history dating back more than ten generations, and being Jewish feels like an ineluctable fate. I did, however, have a choice. In an alternate universe, I could have taken my cues from Dunlap and turned out a Protestant preppy. So what made me a Jew? Considering that I practice neither religion, it’s got nothing to do with theology.

It may be as simple as this: WASP culture, as embodied by my perennially depressed grandparents, felt painfully austere and witheringly cold. Grandma and Grandpa Spence, living in an isolated farmhouse in Cranbury, New Jersey, were the proverbial descendants of characters in a Henry James novel; two cash-poor aristocrats forced to live out the tragic indignities of a ruling class in decline. My grandfather, Lewis, who grew up in Long Island with a coterie of servants and was shipped off to boarding school in the first grade, drank bourbon every night at 6 o’clock, cursed the creeping onslaught of low culture, and wrote books that were never published. His wife, an intellectually adroit woman who languished as a housewife and elementary school librarian, joined him in his misery.

Jewish life, as embodied in my great-grandmother—Adler’s daughter Bertha Klausner, a crackerjack literary agent and the family matriarch—stood in sharp contrast. A fiercely independent and forward-thinking woman, Bertha entertained the leading writers, producers and performers of her day from her capacious apartment on 38th Street and Park Avenue. She served up lunches of whitefish and brisket and inked book deals for her bevy of celebrated clients, among them Marcel Marceau and, once upon a time, Upton Sinclair.

As a child, I instinctively gravitated toward this beatific woman with her huge bosoms and crown of silver hair. She fed me Entenmann’s chocolate cake, smothered me in mama-bear hugs and was known for her constant refrain at family gatherings: “All my great-grandchildren are geniuses.” Lewis, on the other hand, made no secret of the fact that he didn’t much care for children. I can hazily remember fishing for rainbow perch with him off the dock on Upper Saranac Lake—on the very patch of Adirondack land inherited from Dunlap—but I can more vividly recall how, when I was a distressed seven-year-old, standing on his weathered gray deck in a puddle of tears, he exploded in anger and refused me entry into the house.

“My home is no place for children to cry,” he bellowed down at me.

I was scared; the memory stuck. More importantly, I don’t think I stopped crying. Several years later, when he took me for Sunday services at Saranac’s rustic lakeside church, where patrician men in pastel blazers worshipped beside their trim, smiling wives, I winced with every ministerial reference to Christ, wanting to scream “But I’m Jewish!”

When my mother and father met in Boston in the early 1970s, the bigotry and cultural divisions that would have kept their ancestors from crossing paths in St. Petersburg only a few decades earlier had dissolved into the collective memory of America’s ugly past. In Cambridge, the ethnically mixed corner of the Northeast my parents inhabited, activists and academics freely commingled in the progressive political circles at the crest of the anti-war years. Vietnam protests in Harvard Square were just petering out and echoes of Joan Baez playing at Club 47 could still be heard in the vibrant folk scene that continued at its successor, Club Passim.

My parents—two tenacious and idealistic bureaucrats—first met while working for Massachusetts governor Frank Sargent (one of many liberal Republicans to lead the bluest state in the Union). My father agreed to raise his children Jewish, though we celebrated Christmas and Easter, and nobody flinched. The mountains of conflict that eventually overtook my parents’ marriage had little to do with religion or ethnicity, although family life might have been far more peaceful if that was all that divided them.

This isn’t to say that their interfaith union produced no fallout. We have been subject to the rips and fissures that intermarriage inevitably seems to create. My mother’s father, a sociology of religion professor who has become increasingly observant in the years since my parents were wed in the Berkshires in 1973, has done his part to carry on the tradition of shunning the young who choose partners outside of the fold. To date, he has boycotted three family weddings, all of them his own children’s and grandchildren’s. Still, he relents and resumes relations if the kids are raised Jewish.

Standing in an Episcopal church on the Upper West Side last June, watching my brother’s two sons being baptized, I couldn’t help but wonder how things might have been different if my grandfather had taken a less punitive approach. It certainly wasn’t his committed observance or disdain for mixed marriages that molded my identity. And while I take issue with his tactics—in part because of the hurt they inflict, and in part because they only serve to further distance people from Jewish life—I do understand the sentiment. It was not easy to attend that baptism. I flinched at every reference to “our lord Jesus” just like I did at age nine, sitting in the pine pews at Upper Saranac’s Church of the Ascension. Only this time it was my own sibling’s ritual, not that of some ruddy-faced stranger in Nantucket red pants, that foisted the sense of otherness upon me.

Yet in spite of our obvious cultural differences—my brother and I seem to have split our parents’ ancestral traditions straight down the middle—we nevertheless share what our parents had in common: a commitment to social responsibility and an engagement with the politics and culture of our time. During the fifteen years that my parents were married, their respective relatives grew to love coming together at family gatherings, where they could discuss what most bourgeois intellectuals from the Northeast tend to discuss: wine, presidential races, and their undying aspirations for the Democratic party. Lewis, in particular, enjoyed parsing politics and theology with my mother’s father, an exceedingly scholarly Jew, and talking theatre and books with Bertha. In some sense, they all may have had more in common than not.

Lewis’s fortunes also turned: He finally published a book, though he didn’t live to hear about it. Two weeks after his death (I was twenty-one and just about to graduate from Barnard) we got the news that a small upstate publisher specializing in Adirondack literature had accepted his manuscript. It was a memoir of the four childhood summers he spent on Upper Saranac Lake with his grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap. In reading A Mountain View, I saw where the stern, imperious grandfather that I knew in my childhood had come from: By Lewis’s own account, Dunlap, with his eye patch and cane, was the scariest grandfather of them all.

I also grasped the depth of my great-great-grandfather’s anti-Semitism—and just how far my own grandfather had strayed from that past. The fact that not one, but two of his children married Jews gives some indication. On a recent visit to my aunt’s home in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, where she lives with her Jewish husband of twenty-five years, I noticed another, slightly more subtle indication: Hanging on the wall was a lithograph inscribed “For the Spences,” signed by an artist friend of my grandparents who had lived not far away from them in Roosevelt, New Jersey. The artist? The Jewish Social Realist painter and photographer, Ben Shahn. Perhaps the occasion of my bat mitzvah wasn’t the first time that Dunlap had rolled over in his grave.

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side.

Gordin was won over, however, by stars such as Boris Tomashevsky and Jacob Adler, and went on to write plays—like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Jewish King Lear—that unflinchingly portrayed the conflicts and difficulties faced by new immigrants. His often heartbreaking, sometimes incendiary works earned him a devoted following (they called him “the Shakespeare of the Jews”), and more than a few enemies, among them Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who made it his mission to destroy Gordin’s career.

Today Gordin is all but forgotten. But that may change with two recent publications: a biography by Beth Kaplan, Gordin’s great-granddaughter, and a new, annotated translation of his King Lear by Ruth Gay and Sophie Glazer.

Eric Molinsky speaks with Kaplan, along with Yiddish theater scholars Barbara Henry and Stefan Kanfer, about Gordin’s work and legacy.

Photos: From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.