Where Have All the Jews Gone?
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The train ride from the Long Island suburbs to Stuyvesant High School on the lower East Side of Manhattan produced a culture shock.
The only Jewish family in our neighborhood had changed its name suddenly from Weinstein to Winston. But Stuyvesant was about eighty-five percent Jewish and one of the three public high schools in New York that had an entrance examination. At first it seemed to me that everybody wanted to go to Harvard and become a doctor like my classmate Gary Felsenfeld. Otto Eckstein, however, took a different route. He became an economist, taught at M.I.T., and was on Lyndon Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors.
Stuyvesant was an old building, dingy even, with paint peeling on its greenish walls and steam pipes that hissed in the winter, old and overcrowded with morning and afternoon sessions. We had no study halls, but three hours of homework every night.
Gradually individuals began to differentiate themselves from the crowd around me. I became friends with another freshman named Marshall Goldberg, who turned out to be a Trotskyite, the first time I’d heard of such a thing. The Talmudic arguments he had with other kinds of Marxists were fascinating. Of course I knew nothing about the texts under discussion, Marx, Engels, Stalin, Trotsky, but what attracted me was the intellectual intensity of the arguments, as if the future of the world hung on the interpretation of a text. And not only the future of the world, but some kind of individual salvation.
Goldberg tried to interest me in Wagner and chess. Wagner pulled me in and lasted. The Introduction to Meistersinger[ITAL] has established itself in my mind. I later recognized in it analogies to Hitler’s rhetorical strategy before those mass audiences, starting slowly, hesitantly, but building to an overwhelming, an empowering, crescendo, a transcending resurrection drama. But chess, slow and cerebral, never drew me.
Naturally, at Stuyvesant, striving for grades was intense. You didn’t get into Harvard with Bs. Grades were posted on the wall outside the administrative offices. Once I received a 96 out of 100 on the New York State Algebra Regents Exam and my friends asked me if I had been sick.
Nearby, in Union Square Park, elderly men played chess on cement tables. Often, other men stood on chairs with an American flag standing next to them, and argued about capitalism and revolution. When my Stuyvesant friends spoke about “the party,” they didn’t mean fun, but the Communist Party, whose headquarters was in a building on the other side of Union Square. Everyone seemed on familiar terms with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, that had consisted of American volunteers fighting for the Loyalist side in Spain. My friends called it the “Abe” Lincoln Brigade. Familiar indeed. I later learned that most of the volunteers had been Jewish, most of them Communists.
South from Union Square on 4th Avenue and on Broadway there were at least a dozen second-hand bookstores. The only one left now is the Strand, about which George Will has said that if it had a football team it would be a university. In these stores you could find any book you could possibly want, from inexpensive sets of Dickens or Balzac to more recent works like Hemingway and Steinbeck. Some of the bookstores amounted to informal clubs, the same elderly men hanging out in a given store, drinking tea and arguing about books. Was For Whom the Bell Tolls bad for Communism? Steinbeck’s politics? Doubtful. Hot water always ready for tea. All of these men were Jews.
Dr. Shipley—he had a PhD—was the teacher I remember most clearly, a small and portly man with a tiny goatee. He was the drama critic for The New Leader magazine, a fact that he was a regularly published author, also that we sometimes brought up one or another of his articles and discussed it, added interest and authority to his teaching.
Years later, long after Stuyvesant, when I was in the Columbia English Department and conducting a seminar in Eighteenth Century English Literature in the graduate school, I found myself on the dissertation committee for a young man who turned out to be Dr. Shipley’s son. He had written a dissertation on 18th century drama, a period characterized by great acting, David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, but weak play writing. With his father in the audience for his dissertation defense, really just a conversation, young Shipley did very well, and now he himself was Dr. Shipley too, clearly following his father’s fascination with the theater. After this session my old teacher at Stuyvesant and I had a warm reunion, my Dr. Shipley almost in tears.
Stuyvesant is now in a modern building, on the lower West side of Manhattan. Yes, Stuyvesant has been maintaining its high standard for faculty. Once the students were mostly Jewish. Otto Eckstein, a year ahead of me became an economist at M.I.T. and a member of Lyndon Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors. Gary Felsenfeld went on to do work in neuroscience that even when it is explained you don’t understand it. Now the students at Stuyvesant are mostly Asian. n
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