The Closet
LAWRENCE BUSH
There is a secular Jew in your closet. She used to date Karl Marx. She believed in
Black-Jewish solidarity. She believed in Yiddish as a portable homeland for Jews.
She believed in Israel as a socialist state at peace with its neighbors (but her dream
of a lifetime was to go in the spring to Paris).
She thought that
being Jewish basically
meant being kind,
thoughtful, leftwing,
passionate, interested
in books and culture,
self-examining, and
funny. Irreverent, even.
She was a labor
organizer and a rent
striker. She signed
petitions to stop
lynching and integrate
Major League Baseball.
She had fantasies
about Paul Robeson.
She fought against
fascism in Spain. She
led the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising and the revolt
in Sobibor. She was the
first Jew in America
to commemorate the
Holocaust, and the first to document that Jews fought back.
She built the Zionist
movement and launched
hundreds of kibbutzim.
She started the Israeli
folkdance craze in America,
alongside the modern
dance movement. She wrote
fantastic, modernist novels
in Yiddish. She performed
puppet shows in Yiddish, too.
She paid for her kids to go to
the South as Freedom Riders.
Instead of praying for them,
she worried.
She never believed in God.
Just didn’t, couldn’t, even
when they shaved His beard.
But she had faith in human
beings and (maybe) in a time
of universal redemption.
Anyway, as a Jew, she was
going to work for it. That was
her commitment.
She’s still there in your
closet. You should let her
out, she might make you
a kugel.
Lawrence Bush edits
Jewish Currents, a secular,
progressive magazine
( www.jewishcurrents.org).
June 2009/Sivan 5769
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