Unhip Commentary

I grew up in a home of Commentary Magazine readers. Every month the magazine found its way to the ottoman where it would wait for my dad to finish his Friday night dinner and stumble the four steps to his easy chair, where he would pass out within minutes, the magazine laid spreadeagle over his chest. When I got old enough to care, I’d sometimes slip it from his grasp and have a look myself (he’d usually startle for a second and go right back to snoring). Its pages were sparse and uncolored, and the lack of illustrations and awful typography made it a laborious read. But also a refreshing one, if only for its unrelenting assault on virtually everything I thought I believed and its consistency in upholding positions I thought most civilized sophisticates had long since abandoned. When the world hated George Bush, Commentary reliably came to his defense. When the Iraq war looked beyond unwinnable, Commentary offered rosy predictions. When peace in the Middle East seemed all the rage, Commentary remained a sourpuss. But the arguments were normally cogent and well reasoned, and I ultimately came to enjoy its company.

Not so with D.G. Myers article in the current issue (“The Judaism Rebooters”), which assaults the notion of “Jewish hipsterism,” the “specter” of which is “haunting American Jewry.” For the unfamiliar, Myers offers a quick primer. Hipsterdom is about seeing Judaism as “cool.” It’s about being at the leading edge of the cultural category known as “indie” and contemptuous of all things mainstream. It’s about all-night parties — “known as raves,” Myers helpfully informs us — and the recreational use of prescription meds. It’s about the pretense of revolution, but ultimately about conformity.

It’s not a pretty picture and, “Reefer Madness”-style, it’s coming soon to a community near you. It’s not hard to conjure up pictures of older Jewish adults much like my father unsettled by the indigestion of their Shabbos meals brought on by Myers’ vision of what the future of American Judaism portends.

More caricature than fact, Myers’ depiction of the state of Jewish hipsterdom bears little resemblance to anyone or anything with which I’m familiar, both as a reporter on trends related to American Jewish life and as a participant in many of the cultural activities Myers loathes. No one I know thinks Arab Americans are cool because they are a persecuted minority. No one I know has ever used the term “reboot Judaism” — “an expression that is popular with them,” Myers writes, sounding much like the field guide to a cultural Galapagos. Eco-consciousness isn’t cool — it’s a moral necessity, and if it’s presented as cool it’s only as a marketing gimmick. Most folks I know get the difference.

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The piece is in the tradition of Commentary’s concern with issues of Jewish peoplehood. Jack Wertheimer is a regular presence on its pages, bemoaning the loss of Jewish collective identity or rising intermarriage rates or the internal contradictions of the Conservative movement. But Wertheimer, though sometimes dismissed as an alarmist, at least has a healthy respect for the facts. Myers sounds  more like someone who read a book about hipsters than someone well practiced in the mores of Williamsburg.

If I seem agitated, it’s probably because Myers has taken aim, at least indirectly, at me. I’m  certainly not a hipster, Jewish or otherwise. Most of the markers Myers offers to help the uninitiated identify this unfamiliar species do not apply to me. But some of my best friends are hipsters — or at the very least, own enough American Apparel T-shirts and find Sarah Silverman sufficiently funny to make clear that Myers is pointing his accusatory finger squarely at them. And so I’m not exactly a disinterested observer, either. I’ve been to my share of Jewltides and Downtown Seders. And though such encounters don’t occupy the bulk of space in my psyche that I identify as “Jewish,” they’re enjoyable enough. My beef with Myers is much more elemental: He’s wrong.

For Myers, Jewish hipsterdom is a cipher, denoting the displacement of a responsible, communally-oriented people mindful of their historic responsibilities with a self-indulgent, self-obsessed, and self-referential “movement” that spells doom for the Jewish people. Hipsters have no concern for the community, he wails — though here, Myers really means communal institutions, for the synagogues, and federations, and defense organizations. And he has a point. They have little use for those things, and little inclination to support them. But the same is true of most unmarried Jews, even those with decent hair cuts and office jobs. Community — in the real sense of the word, not the give-us-money-and-we’ll-add-you-to-our-mailing-list sense, is something hipsters, or the hipsters I know anyway, are actually quite interested in.

Myers links the birth of Jewish hipsterdom to the creation of Heeb magazine — “the in-house journal” as he calls it. Since its start in 2002, the magazine has subjected us to a steady stream of crudity that presaged the rise of Judd Apatow (note to Myers’ readers: Apatow is a Jewish film director responsible for several popular comedies. He is also very popular with hipsters.) Its circulation is negligible, and for a while its editor was shamelessly begging his readers for money. In other words, the 2,000-year-old rabbinic tradition needn’t be worried. Even Heeb doesn’t take itself seriously, and it’s bizarre that Myers does. (Myers also gets the name of Heeb’s founder wrong, but why quibble? Factual accuracy should never get in the way of a good polemic, but for the record her name is Jennifer Bleyer, not “Breyer.”)

“Unlike earlier and more influential Jewish journals, Heeb is not interested in providing an outlet for Jewish thought or introducing Jewish writers and artists to a wider public,” Myers writes. True enough. As the pseudo-intellectual I have always fancied myself, I too lamented the squandered opportunity for a smart take on contemporary Jewish culture when Heeb first landed. (That role was briefly filled by Guilt & Pleasure, a journal published by the actual Jewish “rebooters,” the non-profit Reboot, which would have been a far more appropriate, though far less easily caricatured, target for Myers.)

Following his screed against Heeb, Myers abruptly moves from his take-down of the magazine — irreverent, glossy, silly, ribald — to Danya Ruttenberg’s “The Passionate Torah,” a collection of thoughtful essays on Judaism and sexuality that draw from Foucault, Levinas, and the Talmud. In Myers’ alternate universe, Ruttenberg’s project is to “to introduce the concerns of hipster Jews into the tradition.” How does he know? Because Ruttenberg notes in her introduction that Judaism’s view of sex sometimes seems out of step with our contemporary ethos. She then goes on to point out how, citing the view in some rabbinic texts that the sexual urge emanates from the evil inclination, or that piety means never looking at one’s genitals, among others. Ruttenberg’s uncontroversial conclusion? “As much as Judaism has to teach us about sexual relationships, there are also places where, from our contemporary perspective, its teachings may feel uncomfortable or deeply troubling, or both.”

There’s nothing particularly unique or scandalous or worthy of ridicule in Jews, and particularly younger Jews living in an era of rapidly evolving social norms, struggling to find means of expressing  their Jewishness in a contemporary form. In a sense, that’s precisely why the Conservative movement exists, in theory anyway. But Myers has taken the path of least resistance and gone after the low-hanging fruit, excoriating the silliest — and frankly, least consequential — of the manifold efforts to do precisely that.

His observation that the term hipster itself emerged from jazz and the counterculture is instructive. Then too, it was fashionable for elite intellectuals to attack the craven self-indulgence of hippie culture. They were an easy target: pot-smokers who dressed funny and smelled bad and spent their days listening to the Dead and having casual sex. (Hippies also spoke about radical freedom and unfettered personal expression but then, depressingly, everyone wound up agreeing on the sartorial virtues of tie-dye and bell bottoms.) But the hippies were just the most conspicuous and easily derided of a wider cultural movement that ultimately changed America. If it was an exchange of ideas you were after, the movement’s intellectual leaders were the right address. If you want to condescend, go after the hippies.

Myers has chosen to condescend, a genre that requires glossing over certain truths which are really rather obvious. “The shift from external authority to individual control over Jewish identity is the hallmark of the hipster movement,” he observes. It’s also the hallmark of contemporary society, and we have come up with lots of words to describe it: personal autonomy, individual sovereignty, the sovereign self. Jewish thinkers considerably less lazy than Myers have spent a good amount of time thinking about how to reconcile that ethic with the external demands that Judaism has traditionally sought to exert. They recognize, as Myers seems to as well, that some sense of obligation must be felt by individual Jews if the Jewish collecitve is going to persevere. But how to do that in an age when personal autonomy is deemed sacrosanct and in a country where notions of liberty and freedom from government interference have birthed a culture of radical individualism? It’s not an easy question, and answering it is going to be the work of a generation, though the heavy intellectual lifting is probably not going to be done by the readers of Heeb.

Myers knows this, of course. He probably also knows that American culture is becoming ever so gradually more communitarian, the election of a community organizer and a growing ethos of environmental responsibility being just two recent examples. Which is why his real targets are not the Heebsters themselves, but the Jewish organizations that want to engage them. They are throwing good money after bad, he asserts, in chasing a cohort that has turned its back on Jewish fundamentals. The hipsters (gasp!) are secular. No matter that many of those same organizations funneling money towards the hipsters are themselves the temples of a secular religion. Go to an ADL meeting, or a Federation mixer, and count the number of yarmulkes in the room.

Myers manages, in his final paragraphs, to redeem himself only marginally, by making the essay’s single defensible point: as a means of transmitting Jewish identity, Jewish hipsterism is too insubstantial, too vague, too inarticulate. For the products of a Hebrew school education, however confining and boring, Jewish concerts and books might be an adequate adult substitute for traditional modes of identification. But will the hipsters subject their kids to the same indoctrination they suffered? Doubtful. Myers is probably right to say that reading Jewish comics and buying ironic T-shirts is probably not enough to sustain deep Jewish identification across the generations.

Unfortunately, he tells us nothing about what would. Myers offers no answer to the question of how to engage Jews in contemporary times. He has nothing to say about how to understand an ancient tradition in a radically changed world. He offers no thoughts on what sorts of Jewish expression he would like to see from Jews raised on the Beastie Boys and Adam Sandler. That’s the important challenge, and he has shrunk from it. Much easier, not to mention more fun, to tear down a marginal social trend. And in this, Myers is little different from those Heebsters he despises; both are more comfortable mocking that which they are not than engaging the major issues of the day.