Birthrights, Jews ... and Brahmins?

Right from the first paragraph, this essay resonated with me in so many different ways.  A couple of hours later, I wrote to the author, William Deresiewicz, whom I have met in the real world and with whom I have corresponded.  In this blog, I have made plenty of references to his writings, like this one, and even reviewed one of his later books.

A few years ago, I invited him to talk with students and faculty.  He was ready and eager to do it for practically no fee at all.  I was excited, until the managers nixed the idea.  I suppose it was yet another piece of evidence that I was a misfit at my old university.

So, yes, I wrote to Deresiewicz.  He replied right away that he loved my feedback.

The following is mostly what I wrote to him in an email with the subject line that is the title of this post:

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We have met and corresponded during my efforts to bring you to Western Oregon University.  The managers nixed that idea, much to my disappointment.  Unrelated to all that, and because of the ongoing financial crisis, I was recently laid off--one of the many tenured professors whose careers abruptly ended.

But then I never did fit into the university's faculty culture for various reasons.  One of them is related to what you write in Birthrights: "the group demands unswerving adherence to norms. Deviate, and you’re no longer part of the us."

It is not about higher education that I write to you about, though there is plenty to share.  Your essay made me think, yet again, of the parallels between the Jewish traditions and the Brahminical culture in which I was born and raised.

In the Jewish environment of your childhood, you write: "There were things you couldn’t say and things you had to say, things you couldn’t do and things you had to do. ... To violate one of these precepts, which carried the force of taboo, was to commit an unthinkable act, an offense against the group as well as God. It was to mark yourself as other, beyond the pale, a kind of pollution. And in our tightknit world, with scores of families living in close proximity, you felt the eyes of the community eternally upon you." 

That can easily describe my formative years too--in a totally different culture and halfway around the world.

Like it was for you, it was in my early teens that I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong about the faith (Hinduism) itself, the faith that also created castes and all the rules that governed everyday life.  Slowly and steadily, Dickens and Dostoevsky and Maugham and Gorky and more helped me understand the world in ways that I had otherwise not imagined. 

Before I knew it, I had also outed myself as an atheist! 

While you spent some time in Israel trying to figure out whether that would be a better home than America was to you, I was fleeing the old country that was choking my thoughts.  Even now, it is only the elderly parents and a few others who draw me to India. The old country has become far more intolerable than it was a few decades ago because Hindu religious nationalism has infected what was the country's secular space too! 

So, though the old country is beautiful and charismatic, with a long and rich history with which I can easily and effortlessly relate, your bottom-line is no different from mine: "My home, with whatever ambivalence, was America. My home was with other Americans."

There's a lot more that I could write--in agreement--with your wonderful essay, particularly on topics like Latinx and punctuality and the long list of uber-left talking points that are just bizarre.  But, I shall stop here.