Asking how Jewish culture has evolved over time may be just as important as asking where it has best flourished, according to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.
For him, the answer is nestled in the disparate chapters of history as Jews have repeatedly migrated to cities.
On Tuesday, about 350 people listened at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco as Gopnik wove a thread through his decades of writing on Jewish Scripture, history and culture — exploring their relationship to cities, both ancient and modern. His position on city life is clear.
“The best lives are double, and the best communities are ones that have the city virtues, the particular cosmopolitan virtues of passing, from block to block, learning,” Gopnik said. “Wine and rapture, those pagan joys, are good opiates. Coffee and consciousness, the Jewish ones, are better.”
JCCSF partnered with the Contemporary Jewish Museum to invite Gopnik as the Marilyn Yolles Waldman Distinguished Speaker, part of a series launched by the CJM last year. Because the CJM has temporarily closed its doors due to financial problems, JCCSF provided the venue for this year’s lecture.
Gopnik opened his lecture by calling back to “A Purim Story,” a New Yorker piece he wrote in 2002, about his consultations with Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Ismar Schorsch after getting invited to serve as the “Purimspieler” for the Manhattan-based Jewish Museum’s Purim Ball.
At the time, Gopnik wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the Book of Esther. At Tuesday’s lecture, more than 20 years later, he reframed the story of Esther as an ancient symbol of how Jewish culture thrives in cosmopolitan environments.
“The point of the Book of Esther is exactly that Esther can be of her people and of the adopted Persian life of the king who she marries, without it being contradictory,” Gopnik told the audience.
But he also did not sugarcoat the history of Jewish urban life as an ever-peaceful coexistence with other cultures and religions. When Gopnik was invited in 2016 to speak at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of its exhibition “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven,” he recalled his surprise at learning how swiftly the Crusades tore through the delicate social fabric among the Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the holy city.
“That uneasy practice of coexistence not only dissolved very rapidly when the Crusades came, it dissolved in blood in the most horrific ways imaginable,” Gopnik said. “How do you turn the human practice of coexistence, however uneasy, into an ongoing principle of pluralism that not only sustains a kind of coexistence, but insists on the mutual respect of different groups?”
In an attempt to answer that question, Gopnik called back to his readings on the role of 18th and 19th century European coffeehouses as engines of the Enlightenment, inspired by the works of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Hebrew literature scholar Shachar Pinsker. Jews, recently arrived from the shtetl, found solace in these urban coffeehouses among writers, philosophers and artists.
“Coffeehouses were where that double consciousness of modern Jewishness were made,” Gopnik said. “[They] created the kind of space in which it was possible to escape the narrowness of your own identity while asserting the Jewishness of your identity as a writer or thinker.”
That paradoxical ability of Jews to assimilate into local cosmopolitan culture and civil society while maintaining their unique tradition is the very thing, Gopnik said, that drove the Nazis to pursue the elimination of the Jewish people.
In what he describes as the hardest piece he has ever written for the New Yorker, Gopnik closely examined in 2020 the life of Dr. Josef Mengele, including his infamous post at Auschwitz where he performed horrifying medical experiments on Jewish prisoners.
What’s stuck with Gopnik to this day was the extent to which Jews’ flexibility and versatility threatened the pure Aryan racial identity the Nazis strove for.
The assimilated Jews of Western Europe, Gopnik said, were the “real danger because they speak two tongues at once, they live two lives at once, they understand what it is to be practitioners of their own faith, and yet at the same time participate in the broader democratic enlightenment culture of yore… capable of having plural identities.”
Rather than tracing the origins of this quality to a specific moment in history, Gopnik said that the ability of the Jews to thrive in diverse cosmopolitan settings is baked in.
“Jewish tradition, in its very nature … is mutable, changing, liquid and liminal,” Gopnik concluded. “The great virtue of these 25 years I’ve spent studying Jewish history, Jewish writing, Jewish experience is to make us aware of the special virtue, the unashamed virtue, of living double lives.”