kosher bookworm: alan jay gerber

Are Jews a people 'in between'?

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Recently, a new book was published with a curious title, “The People In Between,” by Robert Marx of Chicago’s Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. This interesting work, brought to my attention by Meryl Zegarek, deals extensively with the role that anti-Semitism has played both in the history of the Jewish people and the history of the world at large. A term unique to this book and its author is utilized by him to describe this the Jewish people’s historic paradox “interstitiality.”

The definition of this term as explained by its author goes like this: “As it applies to Jews, interstitiality is the understanding of the ways that Jews occupy unique roles between larger segments of society, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Muslim, black and white.”

In other words, we as a people and religion have always been caught in an in-between position, which helps explain our predicament in today’s world. Yes? Well maybe, and for certain, we do live in a ‘’bein hashemasos’’ milieu, praying for peace and fully armed and prepared for war.

Given the recent events in France, consider several historical events in this work as well as other essays recently published that involve Franco-Judeo relations as apt examples of how we find ourselves in that so-called in-between fix.

One example that author Robert Marx cites, in detail, is that of Theodore Herzl and his experience with anti-Jewish bigotry in Paris, which inspired him to found the Zionist movement in the mid-1890’s. As a reporter for his hometown, Vienna, newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, Herzl covered the infamous Dreyfus trial in 1894. Herzl witnessed, first hand, the riotous Paris street mobs in the thousands who yelled “death to the Jews,” “death to the traitors,” and of the smashing of windows at Jewish-owned stores, all of which served to increase his determination to resist this bigotry with ever greater resolve.

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