Dual Vision

(This is my second newsletter of the week. I didn’t plan it that way. I wrote this one before I realized I needed to write another in response to the upcoming Republican vote to overturn the election. Serves me right for writing too early. New Year’s Resolution: More procrastination! Anyway, here it is.)

When I learned that Jonathan Pollard—the most famous American Jewish spy since Julius Rosenberg or maybe Moe Berg—had arrived last week in Israel, it made me think of my great-uncles. As a kid, I’d see them on family visits to Cape Town where, in their thick French accents, they’d tell me how lousy America was for Jews. I remember thinking it odd that men who had lived most of their lives in Alexandria, Egypt and Lubumbashi, Congo were telling me Boston was unsafe. But I was afraid if I contradicted them they might berate me in some combination of Ladino and Swahili.

(Want to know how my grandmother’s family ended up in the Congo? Sorry. This newsletter’s only a couple of months old; I’m holding the good stuff in reserve. In The Undoing, did they reveal the murderer in episode two?)

What bothered my great-uncles was my patriotism. I boasted so much about the United States that they worried I felt more American than Jewish. They hoped to nip that pathology in the bud, and they largely succeeded. I love America but it’s not my only national loyalty. Whatever my views about the Jewish state, I feel an allegiance to the Jewish people.  

That’s the weird thing about dual loyalties: Lots of people have them, but everyone is supposed to pretend they don’t. The same Jews who would be outraged if someone accused them of dual loyalty attend synagogues where an Israeli flag stands on the bimah alongside an American one, and where the prayer for the state of Israel follows the prayer for the United States. I’m not saying we’re a community of Jonathan Pollard’s. Most American Jews would never harm the United States. (Pollard, by the way, didn’t only spy for Israel. He also spied for apartheid South Africa, and got paid for it. Heck of a guy.) I’m saying that, in a nation where almost everyone has roots overseas, it’s normal for people to feel some devotion to their ancestral lands. The Congressional Black Caucus pushes the US to open its markets to products from Africa. In a post-election phone call, Joe Biden—whose great-grandfather hailed from County Louth—twice warned Boris Johnson not to sign a Brexit deal that creates a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That was dual loyalty too.

The real question isn’t whether Americans feel dual loyalty. Many do. It’s why certain overseas allegiances are considered subversive and others aren’t. A century ago, Biden’s fidelity to Irish Catholic interests would have sparked outrage because Catholicism was widely considered anti-American. In 1928, when the Democrats nominated New York’s Irish Catholic governor, Al Smith, for president, Republicans handed out photographs of the newly built Holland Tunnel. They told gullible Protestants that Smith had built a passageway underneath the Atlantic Ocean so that, once he was elected, the Pope could come to America and rule.

As late as 1960, John F. Kennedy thought it necessary to reassure Protestant ministers that he opposed appointing a US ambassador to the Vatican. Now the US not only sends an emissary to the Holy See, it usually gives the job to a prominent Catholic. Similarly, Thomas Friedman has written that until his appointment in 1984, there was an “unwritten rule at The New York Times of never allowing a Jew to report from Jerusalem.” (Friedman notes that his boss, Abe Rosenthal, “thought he had broken that ban five years earlier when he sent my predecessor, David K. Shipler, until he boasted about it one day at a meeting with editors and was informed that Shipler was a Protestant; he just looked like a rabbi.”) Today, by contrast, the Times’ correspondents in Israel are so Jewish that when Benjamin Netanyahu greeted Pollard by reciting the blessing thanking God “who sets captives free,” (the same blessing Nathan Sharansky recited when he left the Soviet bloc in 1986) David Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner flexed their Judaic literacy by noting that the “prayer is ordinarily said upon waking to refer to freeing the worshiper from the bonds of sleep.” Somewhere, a Hebrew school teacher is cheering.

As a general rule, the longer an immigrant group has been in the United States, and the better America’s relationship with their ancestral homeland, the less controversial dual loyalties are. Peter King, the Irish Catholic former Congressman from Long Island, illustrated that double standard in 2011. As chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, he held hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community.” Peeved at being singled out as potentially disloyal, some American Muslims noted the irony that they were being lectured on “radicalization” by a guy who had allegedly raised money to buy weapons for the Irish Republican Army.

What was once said about Jews, that their allegiance to Israel made them disloyal, and Catholics, that their allegiance to the Pope made them disloyal, is now more often said about Muslims. “Do you think that Muslims that are sharia-adherent can actually be…integrated into a society where you have the rule of law?” asked Steve Bannon in 2016. (Better question: Can Republicans who are Trump-adherent be integrated into a society where you have the rule of law?)

As America descends into a new cold war, the same question, tragically, is increasingly being asked of Chinese-Americans—who are accused of allegiance to Beijing. Last year, an FBI official told The Intercept that the Bureau’s leaders believe “Chinese Americans are being weaponized as a tool by foreign nationals.” The FBI’s crackdown on researchers with familial ties to China has become so draconian that in 2019 the president of MIT reported that, “Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge – because of their Chinese ethnicity alone.”

If history is any guide, this onslaught will not only ruin some people’s careers. It will also force many Chinese-Americans to do what previous immigrant and minority groups have done when subjected to nativist scrutiny: Pretend to be deracinated, unhyphenated Americans with no special concern or affection for the country from which their families hail. In one painful example, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang last spring suggested that Asian-Americans “wear red white and blue” to “show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans.” (Yang’s proposal produced this pungent and hilarious response from comedian Jenny Yang). 

Spying for foreign governments is bad. But just as most Jews don’t worry that they’ll be called disloyal for buying Israel bonds (if you haven’t heard Woody Allen on the subject of Israel bonds, by the way, do yourself a favor—it’s at the end of the video), Chinese-Americans shouldn’t worry that they’ll be called disloyal for advocating good relations between Washington and Beijing. For that matter, Palestinian-Americans like Rashida Tlaib shouldn’t be told to “go back” to the places “from which they came” if they advocate boycotting Israel on behalf of Palestinian rights.

Jonathan Pollard is a schmock (no, that’s not a misspelling. That’s how South African Jews pronounce it). But in a nation of immigrants, many of us contain multitudes. And that’s just fine. 

Other stuff:

As I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, this Friday’s Zoom call at Noon EST for paid subscribers will be about efforts to overturn the election. We’re delaying the call with Princeton Professor Joshua Freeman, one of America’s foremost authorities on the Uighurs, until Friday, January 15. We’ll send a reminder for the Zoom call on Wednesday.

Hope to see you Friday,

Peter