Deep Time

By Bill Felstiner

This book captures fifteen episodes in Bill Felstiner's life as student, naval officer, lawyer, government official, law school administrator, participant observer, teacher, disaster and relief administrator, boat person, dog owner, and book collector. The narrative stretches from Antarctica to the Beaufort Sea, from the lush estates of San

• Language: English
• Publisher: El Bosque Editions
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088021620

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Introduction

This book consists of fifteen discrete episodes in my life as student, naval officer, lawyer, government official, law school administrator, teacher, disaster and relief administrator, boat person, dog owner, and book collector. The reader will find only intermittent reference to my parents, my only sibling, my wife (sixty-six years together), emotional life, deep-seated friendships, and personal and professional squabbles. With the exception of reactions to anti-Semitism, this book is not about me as a person, more about me as an actor in a set of events.

Over these ninety-odd years I kept no journal. With two exceptions, other than the occasional letter, email, or other scrap of information I happen to have preserved or an infrequent relevant journal entry based on my wife’s habit of chronicling trips, there were no prompts.¹ Otherwise I have written strictly from memory. I am acutely aware of how fallible that makes me. What I provide is an account, my account as best I can fashion it, long after the events themselves. In all probability I am off from time to time about the details but able nevertheless to capture the spirit, the geist, of the episodes themselves.²

But what about connective tissue? Are these episodes related at some meta level? Some I think are, by four early life experiences. I saw the movie Lost Horizon in 1938, when I was eight years old. I remember it beginning with Ronald Colman in a trench coat with epaulets, a hat with both brims down, standing on a windswept, barren Tibetan plain in considerable trouble but for the fortuitous arrival of a DC-3 that whisks him away from danger. I was not seriously interested in the rest of the picture. It was the frieze of Colman, where he was, dressed as he was, that was imprinted deep unto my psyche. It was where my love of adventure, of wild places, was born. I still have a replica trench coat in my closet, and if I ever wear a hat again, it will have both brims down.³

Secondly, I experienced and reveled in long summer canoe trips in Algonquin Park, Canada, from age nine to thirteen. And then my mother, a free spirit for her time, solidified those impulses. Before the war and gas rationing, she, my brother, Jim, and I would play a game we called Three Lefts and a Right. We’d pile into her gigantic black Chrysler and head out to follow the rubric of the day, three lefts and a right or four rights and a left or whatever. If along the way any side activity was on offer, we’d do it. Here’s an airport, we’ll hire a plane for a quick tour of the neighborhood. Here’s a lake, we’ll dive in. You get the idea. But for these early experiences I might never have lived in France, Turkey, India, Spain, England, Wales, nor been on eleven missions to Chad. Nor climbed or hiked in the Rockies, the Sierra, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Himalaya, and in Snowdonia, Patagonia, the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, and Joshua Tree.

The other formative experience was at boarding school, at Exeter. To this day Exeter is a serious academic institution, but it even more embodies a program oriented toward goodness. I know it sounds hokey. I don’t even recall the exact measures through which it operated, but we learned—I learned—non sibi, that life at its most important levels is not about oneself. That the life well lived is a life of service. I do not mean that I wake up every morning trying to figure out whom I could help that day. I just mean that some important decisions, reflected in this book in chapters on military service, hurricane relief, development work in India, and African aid, were made because I was trained to do good, to contribute, to be a good citizen.

To read this volume, think not of a book but of a set of biographical essays. Here you will find tales of adventure, disaster, youthful escapades as well as political lawsuits, academic intrigues, and angst about religion, identity, and social convention. I am the only common thread. I was there in one role or another, sometimes as the principal actor, at others as observer, narrator, or victim.

_______________

1 One exception is the chapter on relief work in Chad. In that instance I have been overwhelmed with thousands of emails, proposals, summaries, and reports. Another is the part of the boating chapter that describes Mystic’s voyages, where I have copies of the boat’s daily logs.

2 My friend Jim Krier has cautioned me: We should both keep in mind what Thurman Arnold once said in a speech late in his life: I’m an old man and some of the things I remember best never really happened. More or less what Sybille Bedford had in mind: Is everything only what we remember it to be? Where, then, and when is truth?

3 After writing this Introduction I watched the film. In actuality, no Tibetan plain, the actor John Howard was the one wearing the trench coat, and the back of their hat brims were not down. Nevertheless the effect on me over the years of the picture in my mind is what counted.

PART I

BACK EAST

Race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.

TA-NEHISI COATES

Between the World and Me

CHAPTER ONE

Am I Jewish?

AT FIRST BLUSH, my brother, Jim, and I had it all.¹ We were rich, educated, pampered, and loved. We were happy kids. But there was a dark side. The America in which we grew up was a Christian world. I mean that everyone who was not accepted as a Christian was somewhat off, like sour milk. And we were Jews. We were second-class citizens. It was not that anyone ever said anything to us. No taunting in the suburbs. But we knew. We were on the wrong side of difference.² We lived on a golf course, but that club did not take Jews. My father had spent some time at Princeton, but the Princeton Club, which was two blocks from his law office, did not take Jews. Good old Exeter gave me a Jewish roommate, as if normal people wouldn’t sleep soundly with a Jew in the room. Good old Yale had a quota for people like us.³ Its fraternities and secret societies didn’t take people like us. I think I was warned away from graduate school in English by a teacher concerned about the anti-Semitism he had seen in the department. When I became a partner in a New Haven law firm, the local eating club had to choose between accepting its first Jewish member or losing the firm lunches. It needed the lunches.

But that is not the half of it. The worst part is that I bought into these values. It is not that it was a constant preoccupation. I might go for months without thinking about the Jewish issue. And it has its upside: a sensitivity to intolerance that might not have come so easily. But at some nagging level, I felt like damaged goods. And there is no doubt that I devoted practical and psychological resources trying to repair the damage, trying to pass.⁴ Gray, my wife, and I bought one eighteenth-century house, then another. We had horses in Connecticut. I rode at the Delhi Polo Club. I made sure I didn’t learn the difference between one Jewish holiday and another. I’ve long since put all of that behind me. I’ve learned that the real dangers are not biased people but biased institutions and have come to abominate any social arrangement that treats people as second-class.

In my struggles with identity, there were two great liberating experiences — spending forty months in the US Navy and moving from Connecticut to California in 1972. In the spring of 1951, I had to go to graduate school, join one of the armed services, or get drafted. My father had been in the navy during World War I, I had a lot of sailing experience, and, socialized at Exeter with the spirit of non sibi, I did not want to not serve. So I applied for admission to naval officers’ candidate school.

First time around I was rejected because I was too thin. The navy had a minimum weight for each inch of an applicant’s height, and I was way short of the standard for my six-foot-two-inch frame. The chief petty officer in charge told me to eat a lot of bananas and come back eleven pounds heavier. Instead I called my father, who knew an admiral, and the next day I successfully enrolled in the program. After four months of training at Newport, Rhode Island, I received a commission and reported to the USS Sturtevant (DE 239) on which I served for three years.

That was my real introduction to American democracy. The crew was from all over, from every background imaginable, and yet, because the navy knew how to do its job, was melded into one community, where people had likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, but not on religious or ethnic grounds (black sailors, unfortunately, being an exception). No one, at least no one that I worked with, cared about anybody else’s religion or lack of one.

My fellow officers were my friends. We lived in close quarters, we suffered together through hard and sometimes dangerous times, and we partied together whenever we could. Some of us stayed in touch for many years afterward; my shipmate Jim Shiver was the best man at my wedding. I served with three captains. One, Robert Redmayne, had been the engineering officer on the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, sunk with great loss of life after delivering the first atomic bomb from Mare Island, in California, to the air force at Tinian in the Northern Marianas. But for most of my time aboard, the captain was Joseph La Liberte, a mustang—an officer promoted from the enlisted ranks who in most cases, unlike ordinary officers, had not been to college. La Liberte was tough, gruff, funny, fair, and skilled in both technical matters and human relations. I liked him, and he liked me. My most distinct memory is standing on the open-air bridge, on watch, while he was below in the heated pilot house yelling at me stuff like, Skinny, where the fuck are you going?

The point is that liberated from the social patterns and structures of the wealthy suburbs and elite institutions of my previous life, I was no longer conscious of, or sensitive to, being on the wrong side of difference. Rank aside, I was just another sailor from somewhere and happy at being that.⁵ Did the enlisted men feel the same inclusiveness as I? Well, it is not so much a matter of being included as not being excluded on ascriptive grounds. On that basis I think the experience was general, if not universal.

In 1972, after four years at the Yale Law School as associate dean, senior fellow, and research director of the Program on Law and Modernization, I moved to California to teach at the UCLA law school. We lived, as we still do, in Santa Barbara because my wife, Gray, had grown up there, her parents lived there, and, steeped as I was in the anthropology of law, I believed in the advantages of the three-generation family. How that worked out is another story, but how did Gray’s parents come to grips with a Jewish son-in-law in the midst of their Social Register milieu?

The tale begins in Paris. When I met Gray she was working at the American Students and Artists Center, a club I had joined to use its bathing facilities. The first time I went to the club to take a shower, the girl renting towels lit into me in French: You Americans come over here and make no effort to learn our language. You’ll get no towel until you ask for it properly in French. The next day in the cafeteria an acquaintance said, You know the girl that gave you such a hard time last night? She speaks better English than you do.

Of course, the girl was Gray, a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Bryn Mawr College. Her boss, a cousin of some sort, was the retired dean of the American Cathedral in Paris. Later, on hearing of our impending wedding, he wired the head of the family in New York: "Gray Struthers about to marry Jew. What shall I do?" After he became reconciled to the inevitable, he wanted to conduct the ceremony. As he was a racist in other respects—he once introduced the Philippine ambassador to France as Our Little Brown Broth-er—we chose the current dean, the Rev. Sturgis Riddle instead. And in the event, Gray’s parents, James Struthers and Almira Foster Struthers, were politically progressive and socially tolerant. We got along fine. Both Jim and my mother liked the sauce; they especially got along fine.

Anyway, California was new ground. The first tip-off to our fresh egalitarian circumstances was when the chap who installed our hot tub had a PhD in marine biology. I know you could alternatively chalk this up to a tight market for marine biologists, but I interpreted it to mean that the old class distinctions and social barriers had less meaning in the land of eternal sunshine. By the mid-1960s California had created not a new class structure as had the influx of immigrants to the eastern cities at the turn of the century, but rather the nearest thing in the United States to a classless society since the Civil War.⁶

And it is true. In New Haven I had belonged to the Fence Club, the Elizabethan Club, the Graduate Club, and the Quinnipiac Club. But snotty clubs, though a few existed, played no role in our California lives or in those of our friends, mostly academics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). One reason that an entrenched aristocracy, if it existed in Santa Barbara, had no sway over us is that virtually everyone we knew came from somewhere else. We are part of a group of ten who have had dinner together on Monday nights for more than twenty-five years. The others in the group came from Kansas, Iowa, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Wales, Scotland, Missouri, and Northern California. Even Gray, who moved to Santa Barbara in 1938, was born in New York.

I am not particularly naïve. I know that in the 1970s Santa Barbara was a community of immense wealth inequality and ethnic separation. It still is. On Election Day in 2018 I worked as a clerk at our local polling place. Our precinct included the area in which we live, a place as well known for its billionaires and famous entertainers (Ellen DeGeneres for a brief time was our next-door neighbor; Meg Ryan lives close by; Oprah has a house a few blocks away, as do Prince Harry and Meghan) as for its devastating debris flow in January 2018. More than 600 of our neighbors came through the polling place. No black voters, a few folks identifiable as Hispanic, two or three women of South Asian descent—everyone else was white.

What then am I trying to say? Simply that in our circumscribed little world national origin, religion, wealth (there were significant differences in the circumstances of our friends, from middle-class academics who were not paid as generously then as now, to those way up in the scale) made no difference. These were matters to which no one attended. And the liberating dimension is that they were also matters to which I paid no attention, just as in my time in the navy.

As Sartre famously said, The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew.⁷ So in this sense I was Jewish in New Rochelle, New York, in the 1930s, but I am not Jewish in California in 2021. Put differently, I am seen as Jewish in two different ways. In the back east way, the way of my childhood, to be Jewish was to be different—to have a different God, if one goes in for that sort of thing; different holidays; different foods; and the can’ts. That is, you can’t join my country club, build your house on my block, work at my law firm or corporation,⁸ run for certain kinds of office, stay at certain hotels, get a fair shake at admission to my university, and so on. But in the golden west of my mature years to be Jewish is just a detail, like being a Dodger fan, a good golfer, a decent cook, and a left-wing Democrat. Just an unimportant detail.⁹

These recitations described how I reacted to the social environment. But what is the interior narrative? What was going on in my head and heart? To begin, I am a secular person. That means religion plays no part in my life. I do not belong. I do not believe. From childhood, there was no Jehovah, no Moses, no Mohammed, no Moroni, no Jesus, no Mary, and the Holy Ghost sounded like a joke. With John McPhee I shared a spiritual wasteland.¹⁰ When I was about twelve, my mother’s mother asked her if we were not to get any religious education. So Jim and I were sent to meetings of the Ethical Culture Society. Although they had the nice touch of being held in Thomas Paine’s pre-Revolutionary house, we rebelled after a few weeks and reclaimed our Sunday mornings.

At Exeter, church—denominationally Congregational— was part of the program. I liked the hymns. Some of the liturgy sounded good. I did not believe a word of it. I’ll take it several steps further. I am angry that they sneaked God into the Pledge of Allegiance. I am an atheist. I deny the literal existence of anybody’s supernatural. As Einstein said: no uncaused causes.

So did I think of myself as Jewish? In the main, I won’t get entangled in an extended discussion of whether Jews are a race or a religion. Clearly the proposition that the significant increase in the number of Jews in the Hellenistic period was due chiefly to conversion argues against race as the crucial factor.¹¹ It is all too vexing. Ivanka Trump and Madonna are Jewish, right? Benjamin Disraeli, whose parents were Jewish, but who became an Anglican at age twelve, was or was not Jewish. What I can say is that something was imprinted in my psyche at an early age. I knew in a deep sense that people considered me to be Jewish. Was it an inescapable consequence of the parallel worlds—the way that affluent Jews mimicked the social institutions of affluent Protestants? I do not know, but I notice things. For instance, that the baseball players Shawn Green and Ryan Braun were Jewish. Meaning what? That Jews were not just good at chess and making money. That they are like everyone else. That I am like everyone else, though I had to go to absurd lengths to prove it to myself. That whatever stamp the world put on me, I did not have to buy into it.

At lunch the day after I wrote the preceding bit, Dana White (a descendant of the author Richard Henry Dana and Charles A. Dana, Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war)—a man I had had lunch with once a week for twenty years— asked me why nonreligious Jews described themselves as Jews. He, for instance, would never call or think of himself as a Christian. He is just who he is. Well, I thought, why is Barack Obama black? Biologically he is just as white as he is black. But race, according to conventional wisdom, is a matter of social construction not biology. And as social construction, it is not a matter of individual choice. We, society, think of Obama as black; we apply that label. My point is that if the label is experienced at an early enough age, it is hard to eradicate, even to ignore. Or maybe total assimilation is uncomfortable because in denying one’s Jewishness one is tacitly acknowledging that there is something wrong with being Jewish.

This exact point is made in Gentleman’s Agreement, the famous Gregory Peck film of 1947. In the picture a renowned physicist is going to mount a crusade to declare that he is not Jewish because he has no religious belief and Jews are not a race: There must be millions of people nowadays who are religious only in the vaguest sense. I’ve often wondered why the Jewish ones among them still go on calling themselves Jews? He answers his own question: Because the world still makes it an advantage not to be one. So, you see I will have to abandon my crusade…only if there were no anti-Semites could I go on with it.¹²

Can I really be just me? Can I honestly endorse Nora Ephron’s maxim: "I serve Yorkshire pudding and potato pancakes"? I am a fan of both Yorkshire pudding and potato pancakes, but I resent the notion that I ought to like potato pancakes. An Episcopalian friend who has been married twice to Jews seemed surprised that I do not like bagels. Why, in the twenty-first century, am I expected to like bagels? My friend Roger, who is very bright but radically undereducated, thinks it is a compliment when he asserts that Jews are smarter than other folks.

When I wrote a first draft of this chapter, I missed something important. I was looking, for the most part, from the outside, thinking that Jewishness was constructed rather than inherited. But as several friends who read that draft forcibly reminded me, the other side of being a Jew is being involved in a culture, a tradition, a history, and a community. Jim and I had virtually no connection to that side of Jewishness. We were, in that sense, rootless. We lived in the suburbs. We had no regular contact with family who were observant. Our paternal grandparents were two stuffy, old-world figures in the city whom we would visit very occasionally. I have absolutely no memory of that grandfather ever having been in our house.

My maternal grandparents lived in Chicago, and, given the wartime restrictions on travel, we hardly ever saw them. That grandfather and I were only connected by a passion for baseball—the White Sox vs. the Dodgers. My grandmother was an imposing and successful businesswoman, public figure, and intellectual who had attended the University of Chicago—unusual for a woman of her generation—but a distant figure for me.¹³ Of course, never going to a temple, celebrating Christmas rather than Hanukah, attending at most one or two Seders and no other rituals, we led a nonobservant, secular life.¹⁴ Not having had a connection to community through a religious institution, I never felt the need of it.¹⁵

One last thought along these lines: I haven’t mentioned group identification as a matter of support. My compatriot in African relief work, Rebecca Tinsley, wrote me: In my work, I bump up against identity issues all the time. Most recently, in Iraq, there is a parallel to the Jewish identity issue: the Yezidi. They are both an ethnic group and a faith. They have also endured persecution for thousands of years…. They take the view that their identity is a source of strength, however. It holds them together and gives meaning to their lives. I’ve encountered the same attitudes among the Acholi minority in northern Uganda ... .Although it has brought them suffering, it defines who and what they are: they don’t want to see themselves as Ugandans: they’re Acholi. They have nothing else to hold onto, put bluntly: this is who they are....Your lack of need for a Jewish identity may reflect your success in life as an individual, and your relative privilege. You don’t really need to fall back on group identity to sustain you… .Maybe people who have little to hold onto, and few individual achievements, cleave to group identity.

My friend John Balkwill, who did the design work for my 2018 book, What Lawyers Do, asked me whether I had ever thought about changing my surname to something less Jewish. Of course I had. Every American Jew probably does.¹⁶ Fletcher was high on my imaginary list. Among other matters, I admired Frank Jack Fletcher, hero of the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. In my own field, the sociology of law, luminaries like Nils Christie, John Hagen, and Donald Black are Jewish. DNA tests even reveal that Black and I are cousins, way back. An Exeter roommate, Martin Markovich, became Martin Mark when he played football for Princeton. My wife, Gray Struthers as she was, and I have joked about the amalgam McStruffels. Now, at 90, I’m glad I did not do it. We Felstiners have carved out a nice perch in North American life.

My father, William as well, was a distinguished corporate lawyer in New York City. Looking like a cross between Dean Acheson and Alistair Cooke, he had a far-reaching reputation as a just and wise man. My brother, Jim, was for many years a distinguished judge in the Ontario provincial courts. My cousin John, a prizewinning professor of English at Stanford University, was the world’s leading authority on the literature of the Holocaust. His wife, Mary Felstiner, is a renowned historian at San Francisco State University.

Gray, a family therapist and experienced teacher of English as a second language, is widely known, at least in our social circles, as a breathtaking polyglot, flat-out fluent in French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and Hindi and skilled as well in German and Italian. Our sons, Ben and Paul, have done well. Ben is one of the leading workers’ compensation lawyers in Los Angeles, and Paul, a high school science teacher in Sandy, Oregon, is known to legions as a skilled rock climber, mountaineer, fly fisherman, surfer, sailor, and boat builder.¹⁷ Paul’s wife, Susan, is a clinical professor of law at Lewis and Clark University. My grandson Carl had two National Science Foundation fellowships in nanotechnology before graduating from college. And then, truth be told, going through life in the United States in the twenty-first century with a non–Anglo Saxon last name is a lot easier, one might almost say nonproblematic, than when I was a youngster.

Family, 1941. I am on the right.

Jim and me, 1939

Columbia College tennis team, 1919.

My father back row, second from right

Mother, World War II civil defense uniform

Jim, Haverford, 1950

Gray, Japan, 1967

Ben and me, 1970

Paul, North Guilford, 1970

Ben 18, Paul 16, 1980

Susan Trump Felstiner, circa 1990

Gray, Madagascar, 2005

Alden (grandson), 2018

Carl (grandson), 2014

George and Henry (grandsons) with Gray, 2021

Jim and me, Toronto, 2018

There is even a positive dimension to an unusual name— recognition by strangers. In the fall of 2019 my daughterin-law Susan Felstiner was at a board meeting of a community clinic in Portland, Oregon. Approached by a stranger, Susan was asked if she were related to John Felstiner. She replied that he was a cousin of Bill Felstiner, her father-inlaw. Lo and behold, the woman had been the fifth-grade teacher of Alek Felstiner, son of John and Mary. Alek is now a labor lawyer in New York. Felstiner had stuck with the gentlelady for more than twenty years.¹⁸

I was working on this chapter shortly after the bombing of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. According to the mainstream media, there has been a significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States since Trump’s election. Nevertheless, I believe that attitudes toward Jews in this country took a major turn for the better in the 1960s, as it did toward Catholics after the election of President Kennedy, and have been on a steady track toward tolerance and acceptance ever since. Jews run major law firms, universities, corporations, and government offices with such frequency that it is not worth notice. Compare this to my time at university when there was only one Jew on the Yale College faculty and a quota on Jewish applicants to the college. Just before World War II there was even a need for a Yale Law School seminar for Jewish students about the barriers they would face in job hunting at premier law firms in East Coast cities.¹⁹

I can also recount two stories that illustrate an advantage of being thought Jewish. My friend Birgit Gessner grew up in Germany during World War II. She told me that in the aftermath she and her friends pretended to be Jewish. Why? If you were Jewish you could not be blamed for the Holocaust. The other story is about our son Ben, adopted when he was three weeks old and definitely not religiously, biologically, or culturally Jewish. His full name is Reuben James Felstiner. He was named after the American destroyer Reuben James, on which Gray’s father, James Struthers, had served and which was torpedoed on October 30, 1941, by the German sub marine U-552. (It was the first American naval vessel sunk in World War II and memorialized by Woody Guthrie in the song The Sinking of the Reuben James.) But to us inside the family and to the world, into his twenties, he was Ben. After he had been practicing law for a few years we realized that in Los Angeles he was known as Reuben. When I asked him about this, he said: Dad, down here they think that Jewish lawyers are smarter, so Ben, always focused on developing a client base, became Reuben. Which reminds me of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David is crestfallen when he finds out that Mr. Berg, his divorce lawyer, is Swedish.

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

In 2019 I went to a lecture by Harold Koh, onetime dean of the Yale Law School and Obama’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Harold was born in Boston. Yet he calls himself an immigrant, I assume because his parents were immigrants from Korea. So who among us is not an immigrant? (Let’s not quibble about Native Americans, who are now, unfortunately, only 0.8 percent of the population). My paternal grandparents came from Austria and Poland. Am I not an immigrant because an intervening generation—my parents—were born in the United States? Put another way, what is this hyphenated-American notion all about? Who gets the prefix and who does not? What is the point of it? When is it relevant and to what? Is it descriptive, a shorthand way to characterize one’s appearance, tastes, interests, culture, politics, wealth, or what? We can check the appearance box for certain of our fellow citizens. But not for many others. Everything else being equal, do you think you can recognize Polish-Americans at a glance? If you believe you can recognize Jewish-Americans by looks, you will not be able to do that for long since 70 percent of non-Orthodox Jews marry non-Jewish partners.²⁰

As to culture and tastes, are we on the right track if we think most blacks eat collard greens and are good at basketball, that Jews love lox and trading stocks, that Hispanics prefer tacos to sourdough? Do you think that Scottish-Americans are tight, Italian-Americans are great flirts, and German-Americans are well organized? (As an aside I once was involved in a rural health center in Chad at which a German NGO had put the solar panels on the north side of the roof).

So the hyphenation phenomenon is not necessarily evidence based and, even if it were, not sufficiently stable to be useful. And more often than not, it is nasty, a descriptor neither neutral in tone nor rank. Has one ever heard the term English-American? Of course not. Check Wikipedia: Americans of English heritage are often seen, and identify, as simply American. That this minority segment of the population is the only one not subject to hyphenation certainly suggests that there is something not quite right about all the others.²¹ If descriptors like Polish-American meant only that the person in question is an American with Polish ancestors, if it did not signify anything about cultural or social proclivities, it might not be objectionable. But often it does; Polish jokes were a staple when I was a child. What I am saying, at least in a social rather than political context, is that we ought to try to escape the prison of identitarianism, and become simply American.²²

Of course, I am not alone in this respect. A Vietnam-ese-American student at Harvard was recently quoted saying: In other words, the only relationship I wanted to have to my Asianness was through transcending it.²³ We can also see the change by heeding the contemporary political scene, as noted by a Washington Post reporter: It’s not just Irish heritage that has become a nonfactor. I’ve heard a lot of people ask how to pronounce the name ‘Buttigieg,’ but none have asked the question that was so common a generation ago: ‘What kind of name is that?’ (Maltese.) Same with ‘Klobuchar’ (Slovenian). As recently as 1988—Biden’s first presidential foray—the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, leaned heavily into his Greek American heritage. Today, the geographic origin stories of white candidates rarely come up.²⁴

On the other hand, during and after the 2020 election, Douglas Emhoff was frequently identified as the first Jewish Second Man, and Jon Ossoff was labeled the first Jewish senator from the South. No one noted the religious affiliation of Mrs. Pence or Senator Perdue. What is the significance of this difference? Does it not signal that there is something different, something odd, even freakish about Jews in politics? That you are alert to something about Emhoff and Ossoff that you would not recognize if you did not know their religious affiliation. That to be Jewish is sufficiently off the mainstream of American politics that it must be acknowledged. A bit of soft anti-Semitism.

Finally, as Garrison Keillor notes: "I don’t care to be called Anglo-American— I’d rather be called