Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about Jewish people in our house. No, Kari and I haven’t begun exploring the mystical system of belief known as Kabbalah.
Frankly, Jewish identity has become such a hot topic because thinking about it is part of Kari’s new job description. I’m proud to announce Kari Wagner-Peck is the new executive and creative director of the Maine Jewish Film Festival, which arrives in Portland next spring.
I’m not surprised that the festival’s board chose Kari – a talented videographer and co-founder of a film festival in Biddeford – and I know she won’t be satisfied with doing a merely good job in her new role. But it would be naïve to believe that no one will raise an eyebrow when they learn Kari Wagner-Peck, executive director of the MJFF is also Kari Wagner-Peck, Wisconsin-born Lutheran of Norwegian descent. For the record, none of those surprised will be members of the MJFF board who hired her.
This is a touchy subject, not Kari’s directorship, but Jewish identity and its relationship to the largely Christian west – fraught with stereotypes and suspicions both ancient and modern and one Kari probably wishes I avoid altogether. But it is a subject that has always fascinated me and now I have my entrée to broach it.
Sorry, Kari.
My first conscious memory of modern people being Jewish (I believe it’s acceptable to drop the –ish in Jewish, but for me that word has been used in such awful connotations that it makes me uncomfortable), was in the fourth grade. In my elementary school grades were divided into units (first and second grade, third and fourth and fifth and sixth). The memory picks up as the third and fourth graders in Mrs. Bender’s class were lined up outside her classroom.
Mrs. Bender was extremely upset, as was Hannah, a girl in third grade whose eyes were red with tears. I remember her name was Hannah because on a happier occasion she brought in a book titled “Hannah is a Palindrome,” and to this day, whenever I meet a Hannah, I say, “Hannah is a palindrome.”
On this less happy day, Hannah sat down at her desk in Mrs. Bender’s classroom to find something written on it: a swastika. To this day, I don’t know if there was any malignant motive in the drawing. It was the first time I remember realizing that symbols carried meaning and, for all I know– some kid unaware as well– was just drawing a design they saw in a movie or comic book, oblivious to the painful cultural weight it carried. Then again, I have been in homes where anti-Semitism is pervasive to the point of being an all-consuming obsession and it is possible the appearance of the perverted cross with its perverted meaning on Hannah’s desk was less than coincidental.
I’m old enough that the grandparents and even parents of my peers – like Hannah– had direct experience of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. In the same school a few years later, as a form of show and tell, a classmate’s grandmother came to talk about her experience in a concentration camp.
Like the American G.I.s of World War II whose stories now fill the obituary pages, that generation is disappearing – the men and women who hunted Nazis and founded a nation or moved to America to begin anew yet again (as their grandparents did when they arrived in Germany) are dying the natural deaths a society made its mission to deny. With their deaths that connection between past and present becomes all the more tenuous and their accounts all the easier to deny.
Already in her brief tenure Kari has run into some who believe the statute of limitations on Jewish people’s claim of victimhood has expired. Look at the names of benefactors of museums and hospitals, look at the forces behind film and finance, these people say, if that’s oppression, then oppress me.
But these people miss the point by a mile. It is that success by so many; that influence disproportionate to their numbers and the value (and values) added to our society by a group of people who are a part of and simultaneously apart from our western culture – by choice or by prejudice – that should be a source of awe. Instead, many see it as evidence of some defect. It should be celebrated; rather it is discussed in hushed and conspiratorial tones.
The point is not where the Jewish identity fits into a culture; it is how quickly a culture can come to the decision to remove it.