Books, Arts & Manners: All Nice, All the Time

NEW York City has been arguing recently over the Vatican’s statement on the Holocaust. Catholics v. Jews: it is a special New York experience, like a Subway Series of fifty years ago, Yankees v. Giants or Dodgers. The letters pages of the newspapers were filled with learned analyses by disinterested correspondents named Kelly and Berkowitz. Of course it is a serious matter, but the way New York takes it to its bosom manages to make it local and little. I don’t know how the larger issue will turn out, but a bar mitzvah I attended this month prompts me in the spirit of the times to offer an apology of my own, on behalf of WASPdom, for what we have done to Judaism in this country.

The service was on the Upper West Side, and the congregation was middle of the road for that neighborhood (call it middle of Broadway): neither a turn-of-the-century Power Temple, nor yesterday’s gay or Lubavitcher improvisation. The lad who became a man was a bright kid. The service, however, was dismaying. I could tell we were in for trouble as soon as we entered the sanctuary and saw, on a metal stand behind the rabbi’s pulpit, a guitar.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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NEW York City has been arguing recently over the Vatican’s statement on the Holocaust. Catholics v. Jews: it is a special New York experience, like a Subway Series of fifty years ago, Yankees v. Giants or Dodgers. The letters pages of the newspapers were filled with learned analyses by disinterested correspondents named Kelly and Berkowitz. Of course it is a serious matter, but the way New York takes it to its bosom manages to make it local and little. I don’t know how the larger issue will turn out, but a bar mitzvah I attended this month prompts me in the spirit of the times to offer an apology of my own, on behalf of WASPdom, for what we have done to Judaism in this country.

The service was on the Upper West Side, and the congregation was middle of the road for that neighborhood (call it middle of Broadway): neither a turn-of-the-century Power Temple, nor yesterday’s gay or Lubavitcher improvisation. The lad who became a man was a bright kid. The service, however, was dismaying. I could tell we were in for trouble as soon as we entered the sanctuary and saw, on a metal stand behind the rabbi’s pulpit, a guitar.