Alex Cocotas is a writer living in Berlin. He’s written about Jews, memory culture, and expats in The Baffler.1
Folly reached out about an interview in December 2024, a few months before the recent German elections, where for the first-time in post-war German history a far-right party attained a second-place result in the cabinet, and before the incoming coalition announced an agreement to bypass the debt ceiling. Cocotas discusses American and Israeli Jews in Germany, the politics of memory and guilt, and its official expression in the repression of pro-Palestinian protests and a stifling elite consensus on Israel. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CG: You used to live in Tel Aviv. You live in Berlin now. What does Jewish life look like in both of those cities today? What does American Jewish life look like?
AC: Speaking about Jewish life in Tel Aviv is a bit of a misnomer. Because walking down the street is Jewish life in some ways. American Jews in Israel tend to be extremely right-wing – and tend not to be in Tel Aviv. They gravitate towards Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank. And in Tel Aviv, you’ll meet some kind of suspicion usually around being an American Jew. There’s not really a left-wing scene in Tel Aviv anymore; it’s the same hundred people at the protests, and they all know each other. [Israeli leftists] are all moving away now, as far as I know. They have a bit of a suspicion around American Jews because of what they regard as America’s support of Israel, and they have a really simplistic view and formulation of American Judaism. Their formulation comes from Americans who come through on Taglit [Birthright, a free trip for diaspora Jews to visit Israel.] Yeah, but that is a certain fascination. This is an intersection point for the Israeli men. They develop a certain view of America based on sexual experiences [on Taglit]. It’s quite different for the women who go on these things.
CG: Did you find [when you were there] that the left-wing scene was more lively than it was today? Have they continued to move to Berlin?
AC: I don’t know what an Israeli left-winger is anymore. My ex-wife is one, for example. But she’s quite rare that she held on to her principles since October 7th. Her cousin is a hostage in Gaza and it’s still didn’t sway her to give up on [Leftist principles]. She votes for Hadash [left-wing, mainly Arab, anti-Zionist party in Israel]. And my friend Nimrod Flaschenberg, who used to work for Hadash, his wife, Tamar, is in the same writing group as me. I see them quite a bit. But overall I don’t think [leftist Israelis] are coming to Berlin. Because Berlin is not what it used to be. I think it appeals to a certain kind of Israeli, but not the left-wing one. I don’t know where they’re going, to be honest.
CG: What kind of Israeli does it appeal to? The kind who wants to get fucked up in a club?
AC: Even that, I think, is going. I think now it’s those who want to park their money somewhere. Somewhere, basically. And be in a country where officially the government still owes you money.
I kind of keep my distance from Israel. Because I don’t really like it, to be honest. I speak Hebrew fluently. Or I did. I don’t know if I still do. But I spoke Hebrew as my main language for six years. My view of how things operate in the world is that I just don’t like being involved in Israel, period. Because I think that in my personal megalomania, which is vast and far-reaching, I think I’ve cracked the code, the dialectic of Zionism. Which is the more attention you give it, the more central it becomes. And then, for me, after living there, I understood that how you weaken Israel is just not paying attention to it. Because it’s a place that demands attention constantly. And I’ve just reformulated an identity around Judaism that doesn’t involve Israel, basically. Not for nor against. Obviously, I feel strongly about what’s happening there right now. But it’s not the crux of my identity as a Jew. And for me, it’s far more important to go to read Franz Rosenzweig. Or to go to a Talmud reading group. Or to read Max Blecher. These things are more important to me in maintaining a Jewish identity than Israel and having a position towards Israel. I think it’s quite facile to base your life around Israel. Because for me, I’m interested in basing my life around Israel, the conception of Talmud. Not the temporal state. And for me, a lot of people come out of the woodworks as Jews in these moments of strife in Israel and war or whatever. And I think, do you maintain a Jewish identity and take on a Jewish identity even when it’s not convenient for you? I don’t want my identity to center around being a Jew, basically. I want to center it around being an artist. Being Jewish is a private aspect, not a public one.
But to your question about American Jewish life in Berlin. It’s quite strong. And it’s become quite strong since October 7th because one of the strange effects of October 7th was that the crackdown on Palestinian rights and all this stuff created this community out of nothing, basically. Emily Dische-Becker and others, were trying to make something happen with that before. But most of the [Jewish-American intellectuals in Berlin] are focused around Israel. And no one gives a shit! People care about their immediate reality. This is a real kind of foundational viewpoint for me. Because what’s going on immediately around you is what’s important and not what’s going on halfway across the world. No one in Israel gives a shit what I think. And nothing I think is going to change anything there. But you can change things on your immediate level. I live in Neukölln. And one of the largest Palestinian diasporas in Europe lives in Neukölln. And after October 7th, there was these [pro-Palestinian] protests going on. The neighborhood went under police occupation, basically. But Ben Mauk and I did an open letter that appeared in n+1 in English and in Taz 2 And in the letter we criticized the government’s policy on cracking down on Palestinian protest rights. That came out October 23rd. It actually helped shift the tide a bit. Restrictions were lifted on the protests. And [repression] still happening, obviously, but it’s not as bad as it was in those first weeks.
CG: Who was reading that letter? Was it the Berlin police, the Berlin city council that read that?
AC: Well, it ended up on national television and Robert Habeck, the Vice-Chancellor at the time was confronted with it. She went on this huge monologue on Markus Lanz. And then, in some bizarre moment of political theater, she confronted Robert Habeck with this letter on national television, and it ended up going massively viral.
CG: Holy shit.
AC: And so it went beyond my wildest dreams. And all these kinds of new cultural formations started forming as a result of it. There was a moment after this essay came out in which I recognized that I could become this person, basically, where I’m just like, well, today, “Germany banned a talk from Nancy Fraser in Frankfurt or whatever. Like, can you believe what’s going on in this country?” And then I would get a little thousand retweets or whatever. And I could boost my cultural profile. But I don’t want to be that fucking person. Like, I don’t know how to do that. And anyways, in the skew of things, I don’t give a shit about politics. I care about art. I care about poetry. These are the things I care about. I only do politics to the degree that I feel it’s a moral obligation to take part in these things and make sure I can intervene in points where I think I can make differences. And otherwise, I don’t really care.
CG: A lot of Jews, both American and Israeli, have moved to Berlin. Do you think it’s created a new sort of Jew? I mean, if you put an American and an Israeli Jew in the same room in Berlin is there a big divide?
AC: Definitely, yeah. I have a big essay coming out in January in The Baffler about expats in Berlin, which will address some of this. And that’ll get to, I think, what is going on in Berlin. But I’m in this writer’s collective that’s half Israeli and half American Jews. So I get to see up close some of the divide. I mean, like one, I think for these Israelis, they’re still grappling with what it means to be in the diaspora. And they also kind of latch onto this idea of being diasporic and talk about being diasporic and I don’t really know how to react to that, because it’s not really a question to me. I look in the mirror and there’s a diasporic Jew. You know, I don’t need to formulate it to myself. And they’re also much more focused on Jewish things in general. I can see it in the writings [of expat Israeli Jews]. There’s always Jewish characters and they’re always kind of grappling with Judaism, whereas with the Americans I think the Jewish thing is a bit more an incidental aspect, and they have other cultural ambitions beyond just being Jewish.
You’ve probably read the [Message of] the non-Jewish Jew by Isaac Deutscher [Jewish Left intellectual] and you know I think for the essence of me being a Jewish intellectual is also the engagement with these non-Jewish cultures and then intermixing your powers of interpretation into these non-Jewish cultures. But yeah, [the Israelis] get taken up by Germans a lot more. Germans do not really know how to deal with American Jews and are kind of conflicted between hating Americans and not hating. Because they think [being attached to Israel] is foundational to being Jewish, they can’t imagine that you don’t care. American Jews are also part of just a larger formation of American intellectuals living in Berlin. The Anglophone literary scene which is mostly Americans in Berlin is huge and has a lot of extremely talented people. For me it’s more interesting than what’s going on in New York City at this point.
CG: Really? Wow.
AC: Going to New York City feels like stepping into the past to me. Everyone there seems so intellectually backwards to me. Because they’re so provincial or insular. They don’t know anything going on in the world. On the other hand, American intellectuals, when they really become cosmopolitan, are more intelligent than anyone. When you’re abroad and you’re American you can have a sort of career as a cosmopolitan like no other nationality.
CG: American Jewish culture is so prominent in the world. Why is it, then, that Germans seem so unable to separate Israel from the Jews, if they know that there is a vibrant Jewish culture outside of Israel?
AC: German media and culture are still predicated on the idea of the nation-state. And they conceive of Israel as a national homeland for the Jews. I’m not sure to which degree they register American Jews as “coded Jewish.” I think things that are obvious to us as being coded Jewish might not be obvious to them. Part of this is that there’s been spillover, so that American Jewish culture is just seen as American culture, generally speaking. Israel meets Germany’s standard of what they think Jews should be like: self-obsessed with their tragedy and self-obsessed with their identity, because they’re like Germans, basically. And at the core of Israeli culture are German Jews. This is something very critical to understanding Israel in general—the two things to understand about Israel are the connections of German and Polish Jews to their society. The intellectual culture in Israel develops on German cultural lines. You see writers like David Grossman, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and they’re essentially counterparts to the post-war German writers like Günter Grass or Martin Walser—these big moral voices. I don’t want to be unfair to David Grossman, because I think he’s a bit more than that, but they fit this same role of the writer as a sort of prophet of the nation. The Germans understand this intuitively. Yehuda Amichai is kind of like the national Dichter of Israel in a way that Germans understand as well: “Here our writers explain to us our condition.”
CG: Is that role—of the writer as prophet—unique to Germany and Eastern Europe? You might see it in France with a figure like Bernard-Henri Lévy.
AC: Not in France. But France is a peculiar case in the world, because while everywhere in the world is an oligarchy today, France is the only country in the world that’s an intellectual oligarchy. You go to Sciences Po, and then you’re a part of the oligarchy there, but they don’t have the same writer-as-prophet tradition. This is essentially a Central European and Eastern European tradition. The ultimate example being Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, who inspires not one but two revolutions, which is something that you couldn’t find in any other country in the world. It occurs there for many reasons, one of them being the presence of a self-conscious intelligentsia, which sees itself as representative of the nation—something that is lacking in Western Europe. The second is the role of intellectuals in nation-building in Eastern and Central Europe, which is much different than in Western Europe. In Western Europe, you have something like a French identity which exists on some level for a thousand years. They don’t need to completely build a national identity, not to the same degree as Eastern Europeans. Nonetheless, in Eastern and Central Europe, because of the tripartite destruction of Poland and the ethnic fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you have a different dynamic of cultural politics. Urban intellectuals are at a remove from rural areas. Peasants in Eastern Europe lacked strong national attachments for much longer than other groups; they might have religious identities, but the lack of national attachment set off huge demographic competitions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These are demographic factors which also carry into Israel today. I always tell people that Israel is the last Austria, the last Habsburg state in the world, basically. It’s the only place in the world where the annual report on demographics in the country is news every year. I can’t think of anywhere else like this. But if you have this kind of dynamic, it’s basically a result of peripheralization and colonization.
CG: What you’re saying is that the role of writer-as-prophet is a result of peripheralization and colonization of parts of Eastern Europe? But is that really happening to Germany?
AC: No, but Germany was scattered at a time when its intellectual formation was coming together. When Goethe and Schiller were writing, there was no Germany. So they developed an analogous process, believing themselves to be part of a scattered, victimized people—except their victimization was to the French or the Austrians. And the fact that there were so many Germans in Eastern Europe—you have to remember that the dynamic in Eastern Europe before the First World War was that the cities, basically, were Jews and Germans, and the countryside was the Poles or the Bessarabians or Ukrainians. So Germans play a huge role in developing these cultures, and Jews play a huge role in transmitting this culture, as fanatics of German culture.
CG: Yeah. They were “more German than the Germans.”
AC: But [with the end of the Second World War], this connection is severed: not only are most of the Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe, but there’s also no more Jews to transmit that culture anymore, and this connection that’s been going on for hundreds of years [between Germany and Eastern Europe] comes to an abrupt and sudden end at that point. But still, the other way too—you have something like a sort of intelligentsia in West Germany that offers a sort of conscience of a nation. And this intelligentsia serves as the avant-garde of this memory culture that comes into birth today, basically. They’re trading in this stuff long before it becomes normal currency in Germany.
CG: Is it such a barren cultural landscape because the Jews aren’t around anymore?
AC: German culture is underwhelming to the extreme, yeah. Prior to the emergence of memory culture, you have a lot of interesting things happening in German film, literature, dance, and art in the 70s. No one had to make [Werner] Herzog into an apologist for German identity. He has this kind of swashbuckling identity, where goes off into the world and does whatever he wants. I don’t think someone like that could exist today, because we are so hung up on the idea of being German and what that means that that openness to the world can’t take place, or you’d spend so much time doing an Aufarbeitung [tr. processing] on yourself that there would be no time for the rest of it. But in general I don’t think there is a modern German culture without Jews. Their culture is still fundamentally based on Jewish achievements in the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century. There’s no German culture today without Benjamin, without Adorno, without Hannah Arendt. The reason why we know Bach today is because of Mendelssohn – he resuscitates Bach. Joseph Roth wrote about this: about how German literary culture heading into the Nazi period was all Jews basically. German theater in Berlin was all Jews. Max Reinhardt was Jewish, Hugo von Hofmannstahl was [partly] Jewish.
AC: I think essentially Europe got what it wanted during World War II and this is why there is kind of a quietness about it. They wanted the Jews dead. They got what they wanted. They wanted ethnically pure societies. That’s why there’s nothing like “Oh we miss you, you gave us so much, you are a part of us.” No one’s ever said a fucking thing like that to me in Germany and I come straight from this intellectual tradition also. My family way back when or a part of my family founded the seminary in Breslau which was a very important cultural institution of the German Jews.
CG: Yeah, it’s always stuck out to me that the one figurehead of German intellectual life is the token gentile of the Frankfurt School, [Jurgen Habermas]. And there’s not really a Jewish life in Germany that’s distinctly German.
AC: No, there’s not really, but there could be. I don’t know if you read the book The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine?
CG: I’ve skimmed it.
AC: He’s a professor at Berkeley. And he opens up a lot to understanding certain patterns. You don’t have to agree with his sort of nebulous formulation of Marxism and Freudianism as sort of Jewish ideologies which I think – you know, there’s some truth to it but some of its debateable. But the hard facts he brings in there about Jewish intellectual life in Europe in the 19th and 20th early 20th century are things that are not going to be discounted.
CG: And parallel to that you kind of mentioned in your essay that you think that within memory culture there isn’t space for a positive existence of German identity. How would any new Jewish identity help seed or help create some German identity that isn’t just nostalgia or AFD-style revisionism?
AC: I mean the problem with stuff like the AFD, even the Nazis is that there is a kernel of truth in what they’re talking about. Pinning war guilt on Germany after the First World War was obviously bullshit. So they’re acting off of real phenomena and I think also guilt to me is essentially a narcissistic emotion. “Look at me, how bad I feel.” Without any kind of proactive action, guilt doesn’t necessarily mean you go out into the world and do anything different the second time around. We had a joke in my WhatsApp group about Germans as they set us off in the cattle cars to the east again for our own good. This time with tears and handkerchiefs. It’s a joke a German would never understand. But anyways, guilt has kind of run into a dead end. Why do you want to reenact this role of being a perpetrator. I always say to people what did you do? Like why do you feel guilty? I understand it obviously: you didn’t do anything. In my view, you should feel guilty about the things you actually did in the world: if you’re a bad son or a bad friend or whatever. Not some kind of nebulous conception in which you are a part of.
CG: Sure, like your nation.
AC: You didn’t choose to be born. I can stand with Heidegger on that. You’re thrown in the world. So for me the idea that we have to assume guilt or something because of what happened in the past is ridiculous. To be American – well, you have the American dream. To be French, there’s a positive identity, though anybody can become French.
CG: But to be German is being miserable.
Yeah. You’re basing your identity around “oops, we did that.” And it includes so many people who had nothing to do with that. Do you know what the largest minority in Germany is?
CG: Turks or Syrians?
AC: I guess that’s what a lot of people think, but it’s actually Polish people. And they’re mighty victims of the Germans as well. Not that the Germans give a shit about this. They’re not part of this history either, because they’re victims to a great degree – not quite to the same degree as Jews but to a very big degree as well. There needs to be a formulation of German identity — there was one for a long time in the 19th century which is that we create Wissenschaft [tr. Knowledgeship]. Because Germany created science as we know it today. And not only in the academic sense. And we’re innovators, and we’re intelligent and all these things. And there a striving for knowledge that was once a very important part of German identity, and a very important part of German Jewish identity. There’s questions about what degree that drive for knowledge and for greatness leads into Hitler, of course, but nonetheless there is a sort of positive identity formulated. Their identity at that time was much different than today. If you look back at German novels, German films, they’re funny! Germans used to be very funny! So many of the things we associate with being German today are things that came out of Nazism. They still haven’t left that behind. They used to have a lot more scoundrels in their society, they used to love scandals and rebels.
But the entire national cliché, that they love rules, that they’re stuck in a Nazi-era mindset of order. They needs to break free from that if they’re going to formulate some other positive identity. They also don’t have a clear conception of what immigration is, like most Europeans to be honest. All they do is talk about integration the entire time. But no one talks about integration in the U.S. It’s a totally moot point because [the U.S] is one giant integration machine. Immigration is always a give and take and they don’t want to give nor do they want to take but it happens anyway so I think [integration] is happening regardless and so I’m not as pessimistic about it as some people. I mean maybe there’ll be a few bumps along the way. And I’m not totally convinced the AFD are the Nazis, but I don’t think its going to be good when they’re in power, either.
CG: Do you think the AFD will be in power one day?
AC: Absolutely. In five years.
CG: But they’re still kind of limited to the east. They haven’t really nationalized themselves yet as a party.
AC: Well they’re the second largest party according to percentage polls. Not so far off from the position where the Nazis ultimately took power from. And I was at an event with Michel Friedman, Felix Klein who’s my bete noire, and then [Horst Seehofer, the head of the Verfassungsschutz]. I thought it was going to be a hate fest about Muslims, which it looked like it was going to be the first five minutes and then Michel Friedman; though he’s from Poland, Polish Jew, and has a real Yiddishkeit about him. And he started just toying around with Klein and Seehofer like a cat. They thought they were going to kiss his ass about how much they love the Jews but he turned it around and started talking about the AFD. He asked, you know, “Are the AFD going to come to power here” and they both said the same thing, “it shouldn’t happen.” And at that moment I realized oh shit, it’s going to happen. Because if its so unthinkable for these people, then to me it basically guarantees it happening. And all the parties are just trying to triangulate. And ultimately people are going to see through that and just go for the real thing. It basically was a question of when, not if, and his name. And they’re the only, for lack of a better way of saying this, alternative to the inside political formation, which is totally failing at the moment. Things are falling apart. I mean, we have no idea what’s happening with the German economy, but of course, they choose to do austerity, which they’re doing now in Berlin and elsewhere.
CG: Do you think Sahra Wagenknecht’s party could work as an alternative to it? I think Sahra Wagenknecht’s party is probably the most interesting political formation in the world right now, even if I don’t really like it very much. But it’s trying to offer a way out.
AC: I think she’s more truly a creature of the East than they are.
CG: She’s also really only like the only politician outside of Die Linke that takes any stance that isn’t philo-Semitic and deferent to Israel.
AC: If you separated the German elite from a German population, the population at large, like 70% of the population is against the war in Gaza.
AC: Basically, there’s German fetishism for the Jews is basically a ticket to you getting into the German elite.
CG: Why?
AC: It’s just an expediency or a shorthand for a set of cultural values. It’s always about Germany’s self-image and German nationalism, basically. German elites are trying to maintain Germany’s image in the world.
It’s a constant fear of being seen as Nazi Germany. The average German does’t give a shit about Vergangenheitsbewältigung or Aufarbeitung. But in elite circles, journalism and so on, these things matter a lot. That’s where it gets formulated. That’s why it seems in Germany that everyone is on one page. Because if you look at journalism, it is 100% all on the same page. To find an article that is critical of Israel, that happens once every two or three months, basically. Even The New York Times is not like this. Thomas Friedman is more critical of Israel than almost any columnist in Germany.
CG: Anti-Deutsch groups are obviously at the far end of memory culture. Are they in some way fundamentally different from the elite consensus? Or are they just the most extreme expression of it? Because they’re not obviously not very influential in German life beyond their little sphere but they do make up a pretty big percentage of the anti-anti-semitism commissioners.
AC: I think for the most part they’re numerically insignificant. It’s true, though, that in the Green Party, a lot of those people started as anti-Deutschers, which is part of the reason that the Green party has a more hard-line view on Israel than even the SPD, although the Green party also has or had actual Jews in it as well. But the anti-Deutsch phenomenon is essentially limited to Berlin. It does not exist in Frankfurt, really. Or there’s very small groupings. It really only finds its kind of expression in Berlin. But there’s a lot of overall antifa stuff as well.
CG: In terms of the general debate about memory culture their position is really interesting. Because they come at the end of Historikerstreit in the 90s as the ultimate expression of the center-left view there. They’re marginal, sure, but it seems to me they punch way about their weight in German life.
Why do you think that philo-Semitism has not just stuck around but even taken on a stronger hold among elites in the last 15 or 20 years?
AC: Well, it’s not totally unlike similar cultural movements in the US. It can’t be totally isolated from analogous phenomena. And truly living in Germany as a Jewish person — I think it’s an interesting place to be a Jewish person in the world today. But you get the full experience of what it’s like to be Jewish. But it’s like I feel like I understand Black people in the U.S. way better than when I was living in the U.S. Like when people talk about Black trauma and how they want to be able to see and feel Black joy — I feel that in Germany also. I’m so sick of Jewish tragedy. I want some Jewish joy. And I get also the way people fetishize them, the way people talk to you like “you know I have a friend who’s Jewish.” I understand it viscerally where before I only understood it intellectually. So I mean there is a kind of analogous phenomenon elsewhere for sure. But I think also you know with Native Americans I think actually that’s probably the more exact analogy because there are, so few Native Americans left in the United States. Population-wise it’s not dissimilar from the population of Jews in Germany. And we can think of Berlin as being one little reservation of Jews and Frankfurt being another. I mean that in the sense that most people don’t interact with Jews in Germany. You’re fetishizing something that doesn’t exist, basically. Because it’s no longer a danger. And so there’s that historical distance between you and the living phenomenon that you can create this philo-semitic viewpoint towards it. The joke being, as my friend always says, what’s the difference between a philo-semite and an anti-semite? One of them is telling the truth. And I think in in a more immediate sense what’s been going on with this kind of hysteria around BDS is that that is a response to the AFD. So is a lot of this hysterical cracking down on Palestinian stuff. Because you can’t be seen as being in solidarity with Muslims at this point in Germany. And for me it’s the Muslims who are really under threat in this country.
CG: I don’t know how much I believe this myself. But do you think that in some sense anti-Semitism has been transferred onto anti-Arab or anti-immigration sentiment or is it something different?
AC: This was a popular view among left-wing Jews in 2016-2017. I fundamentally disagree with it though because it is embedded with a revisionist historical viewpoint; which is that my grandparents weren’t immigrants to Germany. They were from Germany. And you’re embedding this anti-Semitic view into history. The fact is that my grandparents were natives of Germany, and they spoke better German than most other Germans. My ancestors were German war heroes from Breslau. They were Prussian citizens before they were German citizens. There’s a very different historical memory. The phenomenological experience of being a Jew going into the early 20th century – it’s not something that can be recreated anywhere. It’s a totally unique history. There are some valid comparisons, maybe. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Armenians. But Jewish cultural phenomena – the Haskalah, stuff like that —, that passion of people taking up culture will never be recreated.
CG: From my perspective it seems like Jewish cultural life, Jewish intellectual life in America is in a historically weak position. Because of the distance we’ve got from the experience of Europe, the distance we have from a vibrant religious life, and probably how much American Judaism revolves around Israel. Do you see a way out of that trap for Jewish life in Europe? A way for Jewish life to keep moving, to trend away from mediocrity.
AC: Well, yes, American Jewish life is very moribund. It’s ensnared it a rancid nostalgia, I think. I have sort of a strange story; my story in the US isn’t that of a typical American-Jewish story, because my grandparents came over in the 1940s as refugees, much later than most. I’m a bit closer to the trauma then most. I know who my ancestors were. I feel connected to them in a real way. So, I don’t need to fabulate a new Jewish identity for myself.
CG: Sure. It’s just there for you.
AC: Yeah. And in general identity politics is an expression of identity’s weakness, and not an identity’s strength. That was the point at the end of the essay [in the Baffler], where I thank my family. Being Jewish for me is my family. It’s not anything that much bigger or beyond that. I don’t want to reach into romantic conceptions of that stuff. I have a direct concrete experience of that.