A Special Kind of Exile by Alice Rothchild, M.D

Published by Americans for The Link Middle East Understanding, Inc. Volume 48, Issue 4 Link Archives: www.ameu.org September-October 2015 A Special Kind of Exile By Alice Rothchild, M.D. I once heard a speaker refer to those Jews who engage in critical activism on Israel/Palestine as entering a “special kind of exile.” I started my life in a very traditional American Jewish place, but faced with the activism of the 1960s, Israel’s increasingly belligerent occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, multiple hard- to-defend wars, and a growing awareness of “cross sectional” issues around racism, police brutality, militarism, and U.S. for- eign policy, I was forced to re-examine much that my family once held dear and to face the consequences of my actions. As an increasingly secular person, I also began to scrutinize the meaning of my Jewishness, the uncomfortable consequences of Zionism, and my personal responsibilities in a world rife with contradiction, fear, and conflict. So how did that all happen and where am I now? (Continued on Page 2) The Link Page 2 AMEU Board (Continued from Page 1) of Directors About This A Special Kind of Exile Jane Adas (Vice President) Issue By Alice Rothchild Elizabeth D. Barlow Edward Dillon I first heard Dr. Rothchild The Jewish Story Rod Driver speak earlier this year at a confer- I was once on track to be a nice Jew- ence in Washington D.C. co- John Goelet ish girl, growing up in the small New sponsored by the Washington Re- David Grimland port on Middle East Affairs England town of Sharon, Massachusetts, Richard Hobson (Treasurer) (WRMEA) and the Institute for with liberal minded parents who fled the Anne R. Joyce Research: Middle Eastern Policy narrow confines of shetl Brooklyn for the Kendall Landis (IRmep). dreams of 1950s exurbia, a sparkling lake, and a moderately out-of-tune Robert L. Norberg (President) The subject of the conference though touchingly aspirational civic or- Hon. Edward L. Peck was “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the U.S.? Is it Good for Israel?” chestra. I played the cymbals, perhaps a Donald L. Snook The day-long event was well at- warning of crashes to come. When I look James M. Wall tended and offered an impressive back at that pre-Betty Friedan life, we list of speakers, including the Is- were living the immigrant-assimilationist AMEU National raeli columnist Gideon Levy. American dream in all its glory and con- Council But the speaker I was moved to tradiction. We cheered at the Fourth of William R. Chandler invite to write for The Link was Al- July parade with its shiny red fire trucks Kathleen Christison ice Rothchild, a physician from and balding World War II veterans Paul Findley Boston. At a time of growing dis- marching in step down Main Street, and Moorhead Kennedy trust and racial divisions in the at the same time we were an intensely Ann Kerr Middle East, and elsewhere, hers is insular family. a personal journey of outreach and Nancy Lapp of healing. I had a solid dosing of Hebrew George E. Mendenhall school three days a week and services at Mary Norton All of the photographs in the article are courtesy of the Temple Israel Saturday mornings, ate my Don W. Wagner share of gefilte fish and flanken in my author. grandparents’ tiny Brooklyn apartment, Executive Director On page 13, we note the pass- and pushed countless quarters into blue John F. Mahoney ing of Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a and white tsadakah boxes, buying a former AMEU Board member and, small forest of trees in Israel by the time at the time of his death, a member every friend and cousin had completed AMEU (ISSN 0024-4007) grants of our National Council. his Bar Mitzvah. There were lots of rela- permission to reproduce material On pages 14 and 15, we offer a tions, but we were one of the few fami- from The Link in part or in whole. AMEU must be credited and one select list of books and videos, lies who escaped New York City. My copy forwarded to our office: available through AMEU, that mother, Sylvia Rosner Rothchild, was complement our feature article. A one of twenty grandchildren of Josef 475 Riverside Drive, Room full listing of our books and videos 245, New York, New York Neuberger, an orthodox Jew with a is available on our website: 10115-0245. bushy red beard and a reputation as the www.ameu.org. Other Contact Information: family’s loving but fierce patriarch. He hailed from a shetl in the sometimes Tel.: 212-870-2053 Fax: 212-870-2050 John F. Mahoney Austrian, sometimes Romanian, lately E-mail: [email protected] Executive Director Ukranian area of Vizhnitsa and, like many immigrants, made his way to a Website at www.ameu.org. hardscrabble life in the tenements of Wil- The Link Page 3 liamsburg. “World Peace” was considered to be moderately peculiar. In college I met upper class, private school My parents grew up a few blocks from each girls who wanted to touch me, gushing, “I’ve never other, met at night school at Brooklyn College met a Jew before.” (Rosner sat next to Rothchild), and were both rebels in their outward rejection of As the good, oldest daughter, speaking Yiddish as our I followed my mother’s lead mamaloshen and maintaining when it came to politics. The an Orthodox kosher home, and founding of Israel was a pre- in their eagerness to embrace a cious miracle, a haven for Jews modern American life with after the Holocaust, a country mowed lawns, a love of that was to be “a light unto the Mahler, and occasional goy- nations.” As a teenager I was ishe friends. My mother read in love with the kibbutz move- Women’s Day, a guide to be- ment and Israeli dancing. I ing a good housewife, and prayed unambivalently at my along with chicken and challah Bat Mitzvah, singing of my on Shabbos, made orange jello love of Zion, and reveled in a molds with grated carrots lay- family pilgrimage to the magi- ered at the top, a distinctly cal land of Israel when I was post-war dessert, the bland fourteen. My teenage diary happy taste of the 50s. packed with graying post- cards spoke of a “young hope- At the same time, my par- ful…promised land” where ents managed to let me know “everyone has the right of way that we were different, that we and maintains it.” I described were from a distinct and en- “former Arab homes” in Jaffa, dangered tribe. I marvel at that and took note of Bedouins and inherited sense of being at backward Arab villages, wrote odds with American culture of “Arabs, dressed in long and society, of feeling so Jew- black robes and dirty head- ish in a non-Jewish world despite Bat Mitzvah party with my sister Judith, dresses….,” and lumped my de- rising economics and acceptability. 1963. scriptions of Arabs and Oriental I learned early that I was an out- Jews as “fat, unsanitary looking sider in the dominant American culture, that stories women.” That was the narrative of my youth. keep our history and culture alive and also create the learned truths about that history. I have also I had a little taste of anti-Semitism around a come to understand in my own journey that people Christmas tree crisis that erupted in my public survive by telling their stories and that the victors in school where the growing numbers of upwardly history most often create the prevailing and ac- mobile Jews moving into the town from Jewish cepted narrative. ghettos in Dorchester and Brooklyn were accused of destroying Christmas at a very public and very ap- And I was deeply enmeshed in that Jewish palling town meeting. Because my mother wrote an story; there was my unlikely love of gefilte fish and early book on the Shoa, Voices from the Holocaust, my real talent for making matzoh balls, as well as and the wife of our rabbi and my Hebrew school the level of guilt and responsibility I felt for the principal were both slightly damaged (but we gen- world’s disasters. In sixth grade each student was tly forgave them) survivors, I also developed a asked to draw a picture of what he or she really youthful obsession with the Nazi Holocaust in par- wanted. I do not recall what my fellow classmates ticular and injustice in general. yearned for, but I do recall that my desire for The Link Page 4 While my mother was eager to break out of her I think that sense of our “specialness,” where the Orthodox familial prohibitions, her short stories of fear of extermination intersected with religious belief suburban life in the 1950s and 1960s often struggled and the perceived mark of permanent victimhood, is with the hard edge of anti-Semitism and the insensi- where my Jewishness merged with my mother’s per- tivities of her Christian neighbors who could not dis- sonal terrors. Our particular place in the world, our tinguish a Rosenthal from a Schwartz. I suspect role as the “chosen people,” meant that not only these life experiences, coming on the heels of the de- were we singled out for persecution, but we had spe- pression, World War II, and the Nazi Holocaust, cial responsibilities, that the admonition to make the marked her for life. I also inherited and bore the im- world a better place was actually a very personal call print of those difficult times.

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