Jews in Second Place
Remember the scene in
Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint where the newly teen-aged Alex Portnoy
goes to a frozen pond in his hometown of Newark to gaze upon gentile girls
ice-skating?
So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the
puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange
shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing . It is almost
more than an angry thirteen-year-old little Jewish Momma's Boy can bear.
Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my
life I'm talking about--I learn the meaning of the word longing , I learn
the meaning of the word pang .
This scene often involuntarily flitted across my mind
during the past winter, when I spent a lot of time watching people glide across
expanses of ice on skates. The reason is that my 11-year-old son, also an Alex,
was playing in a hockey league. Having grown up in the Deep South, I was
entirely innocent of ice matters when I first got into this. At my inaugural
hockey-parents' meeting, I realized that I had wandered into a vast and
all-encompassing subculture. Two, three, four times a week, we had to drive our
children 30, 60, 80 miles to some unheated structure for a practice or a game.
Often these were held at 6 o'clock in the morning. South Kent, Conn. West
Point, N.Y. Morristown, N.J. We parents would stand at the edge of the rink in
a daze drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee and griping that they weren't hustling
enough out there.
For
Alex Portnoy, athleticism was something alien. It was part of a total package
that included not only the golden shiksas but their brothers ("engaging,
good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks"), their fathers
("men with white hair and deep voices"), their mothers who never whined or
hectored, their curtained, fireplaced houses, their small noses, their lack of
constant nagging worry--in short, the normalcy and confidence that go along
with belonging, with being on the inside.
In the Portnoy household nobody played sports--bodies
existed only to generate suffering--and there was only one thing that really
went well. That, needless to say, was Alex's performance in school. "Albert
Einstein the Second," his mother called him, and thought it may have been
embarrassing, he didn't really disagree. By the time Portnoy's Complaint
came out, in 1969, it was clear--and this was part of the joke of the
ice-skating scene--that people like awkward Alex were going to wind up ahead of
the gliding shiksas and their halfback brothers, because they were more
book-smart. The goyim were wasting their time with all those sports.
What the Jews had was the real ticket. Alex's overwhelming insecurity wouldn't
have been so funny if it hadn't been unjustified.
In my
many hours standing next to hockey rinks last winter, I sometimes engaged in
one of the Jews' secret vices: Jew-counting. All over the ice were little
Cohens, little Levys, their names sewed in block letters on the backs of their
jerseys. It was amazing how many there were. Occasionally, an entire front line
would be Jewish, or even the front line and the defensemen. (Green--is
he one? Marks?) The chosen people were tough competitors, too.
In fact, a Portnoy of the present, a kid with his nose
pressed up against the window (to borrow the self-description of another
ghetto-bred Jewish writer, Theodore H. White) would surely regard these
stick-wielding, puck-handling lads as representing full, totally secure
membership in the comfortable classes of American society. Some Lysenkoist
suburban biological deviation, or else intermarriage, has even given many of
the hockey-playing Jewish boys blond hair and even blue eyes.
More to the point, these
Jewish kids and their parents have decided to devote endless hours of childhood
to an activity with no career payoff. Do you think they're going to 6 a.m.
practices for a shot at the National Hockey League? Of course not. They're
doing it--mastering hockey, and every conceivable other sport--to promote
"growth," "teamwork," "physical fitness," "well-roundedness," "character," and
other qualities that may be desirable in a doctor but don't, as a practical
matter, help you get into medical school.
What
all the hockey-playing Jewish kids in America are not doing, during their
hundreds of hours hustling to, on, and from the ice rink, is studying. It's not
that they don't study at all, because they do. It's that they don't study with
the ferociousness and all-out commitment of people who realize (or who have
parents who realize) that outstanding school performance is their one shot at
big-time opportunity in America.
Meanwhile, there is another ethnic group in America whose
children devote their free time not to hockey but to extra study. In this
group, it's common for moms to march into school at the beginning of the year
and obtain several months' worth of assignments in advance so their children
can get a head start. These parents pressure school systems to be more rigorous
and give more homework. This group is Asian-Americans.
At the
front end of the American meritocratic machine, Asians are replacing Jews as
the No. 1 group. They are winning the science prizes and scholarships. Jews,
meanwhile, at our moment of maximum triumph at the back end of the meritocracy,
the midlife, top-job end, are discovering sports and the virtues of being
well-rounded. Which is cause and which is effect here is an open question. But
as Asians become America's new Jews, Jews are becoming ... Episcopalians.
The one extracurricular venue where I run into a lot of
Asian-Americans is a Very Serious music school in Scarsdale, the suburban town
in the New York area that (because of its famous school system) has the most
name-brand appeal for transferred Japanese executives. Music is a form of
extracurricular activity that Mrs. Portnoys approve of, and the atmosphere at
this school would be familiar to earlier generations of American Jews. In the
lobby, children waiting for music lessons bend over their homework, mom perched
at their shoulder. Musical exercises drift through the air, along with snatches
of conversation about AP courses, recommendations, test prep, tracking, and
nursery-school admissions.
The
hockey ethos is to be elaborately casual and gruff about competitive
achievement: Outstanding performance gets you a little slap on the helmet, a
good-natured insult. At the music school they take the straightforward
approach. At my younger son's first piano lesson, his teacher, Mrs. Sun,
explained the rules. "Every week, Theo, at the end of the lesson, I give you
stamps," she said. "If you're a good boy, I give you one stamp. If you're a
very good boy, I give you two stamps. And if you're a very, very good
boy, I give you three stamps! Then, every time you get 25 stamps, I give you a
statue of a great composer." Watching 7-year-old Theo take this in, I could see
that he was hooked. Ancient imperatives had kicked in. When he hit 25 stamps
for the first time, Mrs. Sun gave him a plastic statuette of Mozart. "Do you
know how old he was when he composed his first piece of music, Theo?" A look of
rapt anticipation from Theo. "Four years old! Three years younger than you."
Theo, get to work .
My mother grew up in New Jersey, not too far from Philip
Roth. I was raised on the story of her crushing disappointment over being only
the salutatorian of her class at Perth Amboy High School, when she had been
valedictorian of her junior high school class. Her father, a small-town
pediatrician, had somehow gone to medical school without having gone to
college, or possibly even (here we begin to slip into the realm of Marquez-like
fable) finishing high school. Every relative in my grandparents' generation
seems to have graduated from high school at some improbable age like 14 or 12.
Then, for the most part, at least as the story was received by the young me,
life turned disappointing. Why? Because school is the only part of American
society that's fair. Afterward, a vast, subtle conspiracy arranges to hold you
back in favor of those more advantaged by birth.
Even by my school days,
the academic hunger had begun to wane. By now, it is barely producing a pulse,
except among Jews who are within one generation of the immigration cycle. Jews
have not become notable as academic underachievers. But something is gone: That
old intense and generalized academic commitment, linked to sociological
ambition, is no longer a defining cultural characteristic of the group.
What
has replaced it is a cultural insider's sort of academic preoccupation: a
task-specific, in-the-know concern with successfully negotiating the key
junctures--mainly, college admission. Jews are now successful people who want
to move the levers of the system (levers whose location we're quite familiar
with) so as to ensure that our children will be as successful as we are. This
is quite different from being yearning, not-successful-enough people who hope,
rather than know for sure, that study will generate dramatic upward mobility
for our children.
Jews' new second-place status in the strivers' hierarchy is
most noticeable in places with good public school systems like Westchester
County, N.Y., (where I live) and the San Gabriel Valley, outside of Los
Angeles. The same is true of super-meritocratic public educational institutions
like Lowell High School in San Francisco, the University of California at
Berkeley, and Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New
York, which are all now Asian-plurality.
By contrast, the Asian
presence is noticeably less, and the Jewish presence noticeably more, in
private schools. In these, no matter how great the meritocratic pretenses, the
contest is always less completely open than it is in public institutions. Just
at the moment when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have presidents named
Rudenstine, Levin, and Shapiro, those institutions are widely suspected of
having informal ceilings on Asian admissions, of the kind that were imposed on
Jews two generations ago.
Asian
achievement is highest in areas like science and classical music, where there
is no advantage from familiarity with the culture. This also once was true of
Jews (why do you think my grandfather become a doctor?) but isn't any more.
Several years ago, Asian-American groups in California successfully lobbied to
keep an essay section out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It's impossible to
imagine organized Jewry caring.
In his famous 1958 book, The Rise of the
Meritocracy , British sociologist Michael Young proposed the following
formula: IQ plus effort equals merit. Young, like many theorists of
meritocracy, assumed that ethnicity would become a nonissue (should be
nonissue) under such a system. Instead, it's an overwhelming issue. Accounting
for ethnicity, you might amend Young this way (to the extent that "merit" and
academic performance are the same thing): an ethnic group's long-term cultural
orientation to education, plus its level of sociological ambition in American
society at the moment, will equal its members' merit. The cultural connection
seems so obvious that it amazes me how often ethnic differences in the
meritocracy are explained in terms of genes.
By these standards,
Asian-Americans today have two advantages over Jews. They have a lower average
income, and so are more motivated. And most back-home Asian cultures rival or
surpass Jewish culture in their reverence for study. Therefore Jews are going
to have to get used to being No. 2.
In the past, when this
fate has befallen the reigning ethnic group in American society, the group's
standard response has been to redefine merit. It's not academic performance (or
whatever the prevailing measure of the moment was) after all! It's something
else, which we happen to possess in greater measure than the upstart group.
Jews know all too well what the alternate form of merit that we didn't have
used to be: a certain ease, refinement, and grace. This may be what has led
today's generation of Jewish parents to athleticize our children. We want them
to have what Alex Portnoy longed for: a deeper sort of American comfort
and success than SAT scores and music lessons can provide.
But Jews are not alone in
having this thought. Recently, I've been interviewing Asian-Americans for a
book on meritocracy in America. A sentiment that emerges consistently is that
meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall
behind because they don't have quite the right cultural style for getting
ahead: too passive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough. So, in many of the
Asian-American families I met, a certain Saturday ritual has developed. After
breakfast, mom takes the children off to the juku for the day, and dad goes to
his golf lesson.
The final irony is that
golf and tennis are perceived by the Asian-Americans not as aspects of an ethos
adapted from the British landowning classes (which is the way Jews used to
perceive them), but as stuff that Jews know how to do. The sense of power and
ease and comfort that the playing field symbolizes is now, to non-Jews, a
Jewish trait. The wheel of assimilation turns inexorably: Scratching out an
existence is phase one, maniacal studying is phase two, sports is phase three.
Watch out for Asian-American hockey players in about 20 years.
