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Paul Jacobs "It wasn't Difficult for Me to Reject Judaism (1965)"
Contributed by Sam Stabler

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It wasn't difficult for me to reject Judaism. Whatever content it had was completely lacking the pallid diet of pap I was fed every Sunday at temple. And all I learned about being Jewish at home was a set of defensive standards. There were limits, for example, to what Jews could expect from Gentiles, and proper behavior for Jews was based often on the fear that the Gentile world might respond badly to other patterns of action if taken by Jews. All of this knowledge was encompassed in one of the few Yiddish phrases I learned at home: a Jew did not make "rishis"

To "make rishis" was to stir up a fuss of some kind, and it was a cardinal sin, for it supposedly made Jews vulnerable to the potential wrath of the Christian world. This world was conceived of as something like a potentially evil sleeping giant who, if awakened by a loud noise, might, and probably would, turn on the disturber of his peace and do him harm.

I have a hunch, too, that one of the unconscious precursors toward radicalism was the movement provided an atmosphere in which I could reject being Jewish without any feelings of guilt. One of the first rituals in the radical movement was the adoption of a party name by which one was to be known in the organization. The origin of the custom was legitimate enough: revolutionists in Europe and Russia always took false names a device to handicap police persecution. The same technique in American radical organizations may not have been justified by that reason, but it did give us a link, a romantic identification, with the revolutionary heroes of the past.

Even granting the legitimate need we felt to change our names in order to escape possible consequences, why was it that so many of the Jewish radicals took as their cover names that were conspicuously non-Jewish? No comrade Cohen ever adopted Ginsberg as a party name; instead he became Green or Smith or Martin, or something equally bland. So, too, when for a short time I became Paul Jackson in the little red membership book, it was because Jackson was a less Jewish name than Jacobs and therefore somehow more American.

Yet many of the comrades I met then came from Yiddish-speaking homes, and their conversations were so strewn with the rich Yiddish phrases they had learned from their parents that I too, began to absorb them into my vocabulary. But the pronounced Jewish flavor which permeated the New York radical movement had nothing religious about it. Quite the opposite: the entire Yiddish Socialist and radical milieu was militantly atheist or agnostic. 
haggadah Section: Urchatz

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