Stranger in a Strange Land

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA • Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

I was born in 1948, a few days after the founding of the State of Israel, and like many evangelical Christians of my generation I grew up amid speculation about what that might mean eschatologically. Many preachers were sure what it meant: We had entered the End Times. My mother and grandmother were not quite so dogmatic, but they were nevertheless convinced that the return of the Jews to Palestine was an event of immense spiritual significance. God’s covenant with the Jews was still in force, and they had a prominent role yet to play in salvation history.

In any case, I was raised to be philo-Semitic. But I didn’t know anyone Jewish, not even casually, and my ignorance of Jewish life and history was almost complete.

In September of 1962, having graduated that June from a small Lutheran school that ended with eighth grade, I began ninth grade at a large public school, John Marshall Junior High, in Pomona, California. The school was already showing signs of the changes that the sixties would bring, but there were also touches that appear in retrospect as incongruous vestiges of an earlier era.

One such vestige was “The Ambassadors,” a group of students selected to “represent” the school. We were told: “You are the cream of the crop.” We were given blue sweaters to wear, like lettermen, and we met at the beginning of each day as a class (our “home room”).

A newcomer seeking friends, I quickly fell in with a group of three other “Ambassadors”: Richard (known as Dick), another Richard, and George. We ate lunch together, we talked, we watched girls, we loaned one another books.

Then one day, still fairly early in the schoolyear, when the four of us were walking along, I heard someone say, “Here come the Jews.” That was all. The tone was unmistakably unfriendly, but there was no name-calling, nothing in the least dramatic.

Ridiculous and improbable as it may seem, I didn’t know until that moment that my new friends were Jewish. And I realized at the same time that in the minds of some people at the school, I was Jewish too—a judgment later confirmed in several instances.

Our friendship continued. We all joined the debate team. We spent a little time at one another’s houses—the first Jewish homes I had visited—and I learned a bit about the range of Jewish convictions (or lack of same) represented by their families, but somehow that setting was very different, awkward. I tried to convert one of my friends, the one I was closest to (he had introduced me to Leon Uris), and that put a distance between us that was never reduced.

The following year my family moved, and many years passed before I again entered a Jewish home. Book-learning slowly reduced my ignorance: Isaac Bashevis Singer was my first guide, and I happened to be carrying one of his novels the next time I was taken for Jewish.

By then I was married, the father of a seven-year-old daughter, and my wife, Wendy, was pregnant with our second child. We were living in Pasadena, and I was teaching part-time at California State University, Los Angeles, from which I returned one spring day, walking from the bus stop with an armload of books. (Soon a backpack would change my life.)

Our neighbor across the street was a violent, unpredictable man who claimed to have played with Coltrane years earlier. Some said he was addled by drugs. If so, his speech centers were unaffected, and he could summon eloquence for charm or denunciation. The neighborhood was never dull.

Since he and his family—which grew to fourteen children over the years—had moved in six months before, we had not fallen afoul of his rage. Not an angry word had been exchanged between us, and he had even offered to teach me how to drive, appalled that a man would not possess this skill. (I politely declined, explaining that my brain wasn’t wired for driving.)

But on this day, as he saw me walking toward our house, he burst into a torrent of abuse. “I know you Jews! You and your books!” He pronounced that last word with infinite disgust. I stood dumbstruck as the diatribe continued, and Wendy came out, drawn by the commotion. She was quickly included: “Your dirty kike of a wife.” And so on, for many minutes even after we had gone inside. I never knew what triggered this.

Mistaken for Jewish? The air of absurdity, confusion, and miscommunication that hangs about these incidents, with a faint undercurrent of menace, seems to me entirely characteristic of evangelical relations with Jews. Hence the two articles that begin this issue, by David Gushee and Lauren Winner (the latter opening a five-part series, “Jews, Christians, and God“). Don’t miss them.