The End of Jewish Radar

For some 50 years my Jewish Radar has served me faithfully. Ever since it was installed, around my eighth year, I’ve been able to spot another Jew a mile away. Lately, though, I’ve noticed failures. Some Jews—for example, a newly-minted Reform convert from Arkansas--did manage to fly under my radar. The extent of the problem, however, only recently became clear. I’ll describe this moment of truth at the close of this rumination. But first, let me describe my once-state-of-the-art Jew-spotting equipment. The software was developed gradually, in a series of up-grades, from the mid-1950s through the early-60s. The hardware was manufactured in Franklin Square, NY, one of a chain of “incorporated villages” entwining Long Island’s Southern State Parkway. These were the boom times for the generation that spawned the Boomers! Easy mortgages lured thousands of Jewish G.I.s and their families away from stuffy Brooklyn and Bronx apartments into suburban bungalows with lawns. Jews, of course, weren’t the only newly-white ethnics abandoning The City to the not-yet or never-to-be-whites transforming New York’s ethnic politics. The same flood brought thousands of Italian, Polish, Greek, and Slavic families, like us, only a generation or two removed from the immigration trauma. Wherever the tides dropped us, we took root, blossoming overnight into Suburbanites. In this laboratory of polyglot pluralism, Jewish Radar was developed as intelligence technology: to enable me and mine to distinguish “us” from “them.”