I love Jews. I love Jewish culture. It has been my favorite culture in the world for decades.
I didn’t put that affection into writing until April 13, 2020, in a blog post that grew out of an acid trip the day before — ironically, Easter Day — as I was trying to find a way forward given the state of the country. By then I had come to believe that the best part of the American project, at least as I understood it, was in its death throes. Like every national project, it was built on real ideals and deep contradictions. Still, for much of the twentieth century, progress in addressing those fault lines felt real. From the 1930s onward, things seemed to get better – imperfectly, but persistently – until, at some point, they didn’t. I had always liked Martin Luther King Jr.’s framing that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” By 2020, it felt to me as if that arc wasn’t bending forward anymore – but moving backward.
During that trip, I found myself thinking not about nations or ideologies, but about culture – about models for how people live, and keep living, when history turns ugly. If the arc really does bend back at times, the question isn’t just who’s right, but how you respond without losing your moral footing. The stance I came to was this: history shows, over and over, that those who crave power tend to defeat those who put love, justice, kindness, and fairness first. I did not want to be them. I did not want to win that way. Even if the cost of integrity was loss – even literal death – so be it. And then it struck me: there was already a culture that had been through all of this and hadn’t lost itself.
I’d been calling myself a FOT – a Friend of the Tribe – for years. In 2020, as I was trying to get my footing, Jewish history and Jewish culture turned out to be a pretty good port in a storm – and not in some vague, comforting way. The effect was immediate. I came out of that day with a direction and a settled position, long before I was thinking about conversion. At the time, it never occurred to me that I could be Jewish. I just wanted to live that way. So, in that 2020 post, I put into writing what had been true for me for years: “I want to be like the Jews – specifically secular or lightly religious Jews – who have my favorite culture in the world, and yet integrate beautifully into the broader society. They are a model for how to survive and thrive in spite of whatever happens.”
That wasn’t an abstract admiration. Jews had a very long tradition of learning, argument, and survival in a hostile environment, while still managing to keep their humor and community intact – and accumulating a lot of well-earned wisdom along the way. I saw the results embodied in the people I knew. I got to know, and deeply love, many Jews – mostly secular. I felt like I was a kindred spirit in shiksa form.
I didn’t grow up around Jews. I was raised in a very WASPy world, and until college, I knew exactly one Jew well. Then I went off to college in the early 1970s, to the most selective UC campus of the time, and suddenly Jews were everywhere. Analyses of elite colleges from that era put Jewish enrollment somewhere in the 20–30 percent range, wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. That imbalance will be a recurring theme in this blog, I am sure. But what mattered to me wasn’t the statistic; it was the result. I met dozens of kind, smart, passionate, funny Jews. I fell in love – with the culture, with my friends, and, yes, with one particular woman who became my first romantic partner.
What I loved about Jewish culture wasn’t belief. It was how people behaved – how they talked, kvetched (yeah, Yiddish words entered my vocabulary), laughed, worried, and took responsibility. Arguing wasn’t a breakdown of civility; it was the point. Disagreement meant engagement. People interrupted – which I, a natural-born interrupter, particularly loved. And the humor was the best: sharp, self-aware, often dark – a way of dealing with anxiety and contradiction without pretending they weren’t there. God was fair game. Tradition was fair game. The self was especially fair game. Humor didn’t cheapen seriousness; it made it bearable.
What struck me most was the comfort with ambivalence. People could love a tradition and criticize it in the same breath. Pride and guilt coexisted. Belonging didn’t require certainty. Complexity wasn’t something to fix; it was something to wrestle with – baked into the tradition itself. Israel literally means “one who wrestle." Jewish culture also modeled how to be a minority without disappearing. They carried a strong internal identity that didn’t demand dominance or universal agreement. None of this meant Jews were necessarily better people (though I admit, I think many were). Individuals, as always, were all over the map. Taken together, the culture felt grown-up to me – serious, curious, comfortable with doubt, and very creative.
Art and entertainment were a big part of how this culture entered my life. Long before I had any religious interest at all, Jewish writers, creators, and thinkers were shaping my inner world. As a kid, I loved Superman, Leave It to Beaver, Bewitched, The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Later it was L.A. Law, Seinfeld, Frasier, Alias, Once and Again, The Good Wife, and The Good Place. Only one of those wasn’t created or co-created by Jews (that would be Frasier). The same goes for movies: more than half of my favorite films were written, directed, or shaped by Jewish artists. Jews make up about two percent of the American population. That level of cultural contribution isn’t just notable – it’s astonishing.
I can’t imagine America without it. I don’t want to. Long before I ever considered conversion, Jewish culture had already been teaching me how to think, how to argue, how to laugh, how to live with contradiction, and how to take ethics seriously without needing certainty. When I eventually began moving toward Judaism, it didn’t feel like a leap of faith. I was naming something that had already been shaping my life for years.
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