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Identity Politics

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

J. M. COETZEE

My first college memory is at the gym. There are three basketball games going on—a black game, an Asian game, and a white game. I am confused, but not about who I am. I know I am white. I have spent years making myself so. That is why I started playing basketball in the first place. It is what the popular white kids at my school did. I figured the physical defect of my brown skin would be overlooked if I perfected a fifteen-foot jump shot. The basketball court, to my eyes, was a big bucket of skin whitener.

I looked at the black and Asian kids. They seemed so comfortable. They shouted at one another up and down the court in a distinct flow, ran pick-and-rolls and give-and-gos in their own unique rhythms. Didn’t they want to play on the white court? Hadn’t they spent years studying the white game so they could make its moves their own? Isn’t that what it means to be colored in America?

The world has never seemed so new to me as it did during those first few months of college. My first lesson was on race. I was stunned to learn that not everybody wanted to be white. I remember seeing a Korean girl I had gone to high school with across the hall at the Illini Union. “Kristen,” I called out. But she didn’t turn around. “She went back to her Korean name,” a mutual friend, also Korean, later explained when I told her about the incident. “She won’t answer to Kristen anymore.”

“What the hell is that about?” I asked.

“It happens to a lot of Koreans when they go to college. They become more involved in their own ethnicity and culture. They hang out only with other Koreans.”

She was using college as a place to de-whiten herself. The more I looked around, the more I realized that she wasn’t the only one. Cafeterias were balkanized by race and ethnicity. Unlike in high school, where the popular (mostly white) kids sat at one table and others longed for a place there, people wanted to be where they were. In fact, they were fiercely proud and protective of their own zones.

Every residence hall, in addition to having a general student council, had a black student union. I had a class with the president of the black student union at Allen Hall, where I lived during my freshman and sophomore years, and was impressed by his intellect and passion. “Why don’t you run for president of Allen Hall Council?” I asked. “I think you’d be great. I think you’d get elected.”

“Fuck Allen Hall Council,” he responded. “Everything I do, I do for black people.” The black kid sitting next to him didn’t even turn to face us. He just nodded.

I remember the moment that this made sense to me. During the first semester of college, I found myself entranced by a beautiful young woman in my geology class. It goes without saying that she was white; that was the definition of beauty to me. Class after class, I looked for my opening, and one day I got close enough to flash a direct smile at her and approach. She shot me a look of disgust, turned around, and began walking the other way with a group of equally beautiful, equally white girls.

I remember thinking, “Well, I shouldn’t have tried anyway. Girls like that don’t go for guys like me.” And then I stopped in my tracks. What did I mean by that? Basically this: pretty white girls don’t go for brown guys. My skin color, my ethnic name, the food my mother cooked meant no access to certain circles. I had learned that rule at a very young age and lived by it for many years. Violating that invisible code risked the punishment of ridicule.

For so long, I had simply accepted this as a fact of life. But college gave me a different framework in which to see race. The problem was not with my skin; it was with her eyes.

Having swallowed the pill of white supremacy whole during high school and allowed its poison to spread through my body, I suppose it should have come as no surprise that I would accept uncritically the first elixir that presented itself. That elixir was identity politics, and it was in full swing during my undergraduate years.

The grand idea of identity politics circa 1994, or at least the way my crew and I understood it, was this: the world, and one’s place in it, was entirely defined by the color of one’s skin, the income of one’s parents, and the shape of one’s genitalia. Middle-class white men had built a culture, an economy, and a political system designed to maintain their own power. First they called it Western civilization, then they called it America, and now they were calling it globalization. These people were the oppressors. The rest of us, the oppressed, had been pawns in their game for far too long. A few heroes over time had picked up on this, and the bravest among them—Nat Turner, Lucy Parsons, Stokely Carmichael—had revolted. The rise of identity politics was the beginning of a new age, a great intellectual liberating force that allowed us not only to understand the true workings of the system but also to perceive and return to our own authentic selves.

Our authentic selves were, of course, totally determined by our ascribed race, class, and gender identities, which shaped everything from one’s politics to one’s friendships to one’s tastes in food and music. To be black was to be liberal, at least; if you knew anything about your history (which, to us, meant a brush with Marcus Garvey or Frederick Douglass), you were awakened to your true political nature, which was to be radical. A black Republican? No such thing. What of Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas? We had two explanations: they had been duped by the white power structure (and therefore weren’t really Republicans), or they were willing to sell out their own people for personal profit (and therefore weren’t really black).

We spent countless hours discussing nomenclature: black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native American or Indigenous Person? We argued to the point of blows over the nature of various oppressions. Were black women more oppressed based on their race or their gender? Who was more marginalized, African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans? The Asian Americans, feeling a bit left out, invited a radical Asian American speaker to campus who gave a talk called “Where Are the Asian American Malcolm Xs”?

“The personal is political” was our battle cry. Selective individual actions were immediately refracted into large-scale truths. It wasn’t just four white cops who beat Rodney King; it was every white person oppressing every person of color on earth.

In high school history class, America had been presented as the land of opportunity and freedom. I had been told almost nothing about its dark side. But now I couldn’t get enough. I read Howard Zinn’s account of Columbus’s voyage and was sickened that the man we celebrate as “discovering” America made plans to exploit the indigenous people here as soon as he laid eyes on them. I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, was probably based on a lie. President Lyndon Johnson had sent waves of poor and minority Americans to destroy a country because of his ego. Power will always oppress people, one of my professors said.

The evidence for that was right in front of me. Champaign-Urbana wasn’t much of a city, but it had many more social problems than Glen Ellyn. All you had to do was open your eyes to see Vietnam vets on the street drinking mouthwash for the alcohol and black kids in the poor part of town going to schools far inferior to the tony University High where the professors sent their children.

I began to see the world through the framework of my radicalizing political consciousness. As I watched drunk white frat boys mock homeless people on Green Street on Friday nights, I saw corporate fat cats eating caviar while poor Americans starved during the Great Depression. When the crowds of Fighting Illini fans streamed by on their way to a basketball game wearing T-shirts and hats displaying the university’s demeaning mascot, Chief Illiniwek, I saw the spirit of Christopher Columbus crushing the natives.

My response was to rage. I remember shouting down my fellow students in sociology classes at the University of Illinois for suggesting that welfare should be reformed so that poor people took more personal responsibility, angrily protesting against conservative speakers who came to campus, calling anybody who applied for a corporate job a sellout. “America is bent on imperialism” was the first thought I had every morning and the last thought I had every night.

I was guided mostly by 1960s-era radical black thought—H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, early Malcolm X. The key lesson I took from this material was that progress was a myth. It was revolution or nothing. I quoted Malcolm X to the mealy-mouthed liberals who cited the victories of the civil rights movement: “You can’t stick a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call that progress.” I found myself increasingly enamored of the occasional references to the value of violence. “Every time a cop murders somebody in Harlem” I read in one volume, “we will retaliate by murdering someone in midtown.” “By any means necessary” was Malcolm X’s famous line. It made infinite sense to me. If the American system’s primary tool of engagement was violence, then those of us who sought to change it would have to become fluent in that language.

I found myself pushing the envelope more. I started calling liberals “house niggers” a term I learned from reading Malcolm X, meaning they were too domesticated and comfortable to take the necessary actions to bring down the system. My father, growing increasingly frustrated by my stridency, told me to stop talking about politics when I visited home. “You’re too bourgeois to see what’s really happening in this world,” I responded. He exploded in anger, saying something about how his “bourgeois” ways were paying my college tuition. I took his anger as evidence that I was on the right path. Every radical had been rejected, even mocked, when he first spoke truth to power. My father’s frustration was confirmation that I had gained entry into the tradition of righteous revolutionaries.

I searched for models of people who had tried to block the machinery of American imperialism. One of the campus radicals said to me, “Have you ever heard of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn? They started an outfit in the 1960s called the Weather Underground that did strategic bombing here in the U.S. You should check them out.”

I filed that away in the back of my head. I was sure the reference would come in handy someday.

Gone were my high school dreams of a perfect LSAT score and a prime corporate law job in LA. I had liberated myself from the capitalist framework that provides comfort for some and poverty for most. I had left the known world and entered the universe of myth.

The one thing that connected me to my past was volunteering. Something about my YMCA experiences and my parents’ insistence that service was essential stuck with me. Also, I needed the human connection. My head was swimming with radical theories and my spirit was bursting with anger. The moments I spent trying to concretely improve somebody’s life kept me from falling over the edge. Every Sunday morning, I went to a nursing home and played my guitar for the residents. On alternate Monday nights, I helped cook dinner and clean the kitchen at the women’s shelter. Thursdays I picked up cakes and cookies from a local bakery and delivered them to the Salvation Army. The leaders of local social service agencies became some of my closest mentors in Champaign.

But my intellectual and activist friends were cool toward such activities. They thought that social services were part of the “system” and that by volunteering I was helping perpetuate the injustices inherent in capitalism. The litmus test they used for any initiative was whether it was “radical,” by which they meant, will this activity ultimately destroy the current system? I stopped telling them about the new programs I had started as president of the Allen Hall Volunteer Group because they would inevitably dismiss them with a wave of a clove cigarette and a single line: “That sounds like just another middle-class liberal program.”

No doubt there was something superficial about a good deal of the volunteering that took place when I was a student. The other students I worked with at homeless shelters and tutoring programs took their volunteer activities seriously, but when I tried to start discussions on the causes of homelessness or educational inequality, they didn’t want to hear it. “Volunteering at the Salvation Army for two hours on Thursday night makes me feel like I am giving back,” one of them told me. “Then I don’t feel bad when I go out and have fun on Friday night.”

“Yeah, but those guys you play cards with on Thursday night are still at the Salvation Army on Friday while you are out partying,” I thought. If the primary purpose of volunteering is to help other people, not to assuage our own guilt, shouldn’t we spend some time thinking about how to improve the situation of homeless people in a more permanent way?

But I was also aware of a more creative movement bubbling up. It had volunteering at its core, but its broader mission was social change. Organizations such as Teach for America, City Year, and Habitat for Humanity combined the concrete activities of typical volunteer programs with an exciting vision of large-scale transformation. If you volunteered with a Habitat for Humanity project, you weren’t just building houses; you were ending poverty housing. If you joined Teach for America, you weren’t just helping 30 fourth graders; you were transforming American education. At City Year, you weren’t just doing jumping jacks in the park wearing a bright red jacket; you were showing the world that young people were idealistic change makers, not self-absorbed cynics.

Moreover, these organizations took diversity seriously. They realized that service was an ideal place to bring together people from different racial, ethnic, class, and geographic backgrounds. People built a special relationship with one another when they passed bricks at a Habitat for Humanity site or planned lessons for children at an inner-city school. The common purpose gave them a common bond. Furthermore, because these people came from different backgrounds, they inevitably brought different perspectives to the various challenges that emerged in their service projects. In other words, a diverse team made for better service.

As my angry activist friends bemoaned the lack of participation in our political meetings, I watched thousands of people, from economics majors to English majors, flock to Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, and City Year. These organizations had managed to create an aura around themselves. They were far larger than the particular programs; they had become ideas in the culture. President Bill Clinton recognized this and created AmeriCorps to build on that energy. The New York Times and other major publications took notice and wrote articles extolling these groups. I realized that Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, Vanessa Kirsch of Public Allies, and Alan Khazei and Michael Brown of City Year were not much older than I was. They had founded their organizations when they were recent college graduates. I had been made to believe that our only heroes were martyrs of the 1960s. I was proud to know that my generation had produced leaders, too.

The dorm I lived in, Allen Hall, was a temple of radical politics and cultural creativity. It was the University of Illinois’s first Living-Learning Community, meaning that academic courses were offered in the dorm itself, with the intention of cultivating a liberal arts college–type intellectual atmosphere. “Freaks and geeks” was what the rest of the campus called it.

One of the first people I met at Allen Hall was a tall, lanky senior named Jeff Pinzino. He embodied Allen Hall perfectly. When I came back from class in the afternoon, he was inevitably on the porch, playing Hacky Sack and harmonica with the hippie types. He was into things like ethnomusicology and Alan Watts, and had organized theater troupes, writing groups, and political discussion circles in the hall. Jeff had an almost perfect grade point average, but nobody had ever seen him study. The only time I ever saw him in the library, he was listening to Delta blues musicians in the music archive. I once saw him reading a brochure for the Maharishi University in Iowa. When I asked him about it, he told me it was one of the graduate programs he was considering, along with Stanford and the University of Chicago.

I loved Jeff’s offbeat interests, but even more I loved his ability to make things happen. “Why do you spend so much time starting little groups?” I once asked him.

“Because the most important thing you can learn is how to turn an idea into reality,” he responded. I wrote that phrase down in my journal and underlined it three times.

The director of Allen Hall, Howie Schein, was an aging hippie who had received his PhD from Berkeley during its political heyday. Committed to social justice and student empowerment in his own low-key way, Howie attracted the campus’s most politically radical and student-centered faculty to teach courses at Allen. Allen’s section of Introduction to Political Science was famously taught by a Marxist who had played a prominent role in the organization of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Howie also had music rooms and art studios built in the hall, found funding for students to create political and cultural programs, and started one of the nation’s first guest in residence programs, which brought writers, artists, and political agitators to live in the hall and interact with students for one to two weeks. The purpose, he once told me, was to show students that accounting, law, engineering, and medicine were not the only life paths available.

It was a guest in residence at Allen Hall who nudged me toward my second serious relationship. Emily Shihadeh, a Palestinian American playwright, performed her one-woman play about growing up in Ramallah and inventing her own destiny in San Francisco to a rapt audience at Allen Hall. I loved her. She had my mother’s strength of will and my father’s sense of humor. She wanted to see Champaign, so I took her to all the places I volunteered: the nursing home where I played music, the homeless shelter where I served dinner, the elementary school where I taught peace games to children. Driving back to Allen Hall after one of these excursions, she turned to me and said, “I can see what you are doing. You are trying to give all of your love away through these different service activities. It is good you are helping people, but you will never get full from it. This kind of love you have has to be given to one person, a special person.”

I told her about Sarah. We had met at a student leadership conference and been friends ever since. The activist circle at Illinois was small, so we ran into each other a lot. Earlier that year, we had founded a program that took residents of one of the homeless shelters for social outings once a week. We were often the only two students who showed up, and after we took the residents back to the shelter, we would go to Zorbas for a sandwich and some late-night blues. One night, after we dropped the guys off, Sarah looked up at the sky and said, “Tonight is a perfect night for star spinning.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You’ve never been star spinning?” she asked in mock surprise. And so we drove to a field a few miles from campus, crossed our wrists, grabbed each other’s hands, and spun around looking skyward. We fell down, arms sprawled out, laughing hysterically.

If I hadn’t felt so dizzy, I might have reached for her, I told Emily. “Oh, habibi,” she said to me, using an Arabic term of affection. “You go to this beautiful girl before she concludes you are too stupid and looks for someone else.”

Being Jewish was central to Sarah’s identity. She had been raised in Jewish youth programs; had twice been on the March of the Living, where young Jews visit the sites of concentration camps in Europe; and had served on the international board of B’nai B’rith’s youth organization. When we met, she was studying Hebrew in preparation for a semester in Israel.

Whereas Lisa’s religiosity was based on notions of truth, Sarah’s was based on commitment to peoplehood and social justice. She did not strictly keep Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, but she lit candles every Friday evening in honor of its arrival. “My great-grandmother lit candles, my grandmother lit candles, my mother lights candles, so I will light candles,” she explained to me. Her parents had escaped Romania’s brutal dictator Ceausescu in the early 1970s and moved to Israel. They had left Israel for the United States, then returned when war broke out in 1973. Sarah would joke, “Most people leave countries when wars happen. My parents moved back.” But I understood the seriousness behind what she was saying. Her people had been willing to fight for Jewishness, and Sarah felt it was her honor and responsibility to be a part of the tradition and community that others had fought and died for.

Sarah spoke often about tikkun olam and tzedakah, the Hebrew terms for repairing the world and doing charity. These were the most important principles of Judaism to her, and in her eyes they commanded Jews to help all humanity, especially those who are suffering. I remember going with Sarah to Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois to hear a Holocaust survivor speak about his experiences. Sarah wept throughout the talk. She had visited the concentration camp this man had been in. When the speech was done, Sarah asked the first question: “I have been involved in Holocaust education since I was twelve. I lived by the motto ‘Never again.’ But it is happening again, now, before our eyes, in Bosnia. What will make it stop?”

A hush fell over the audience. The man onstage mumbled something weak, congratulating Sarah for caring. The Q and A continued, but Sarah’s question hung in the room for the remainder of the event. She and I left. I was quieter than usual. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing really,” I told her. “It’s just that the only other person I’ve heard talk about what’s happening in Bosnia is my dad. He’s so angry that it’s Muslims being massacred there. He’s convinced that if it was Christians or Jews, the rest of the world would try to stop it.”

“I just think it’s horrible, all those people being killed,” Sarah said. “I didn’t even know they were Muslims. But whoever they are, the world should come to their aid.”

Something occurred to me. In all the sociology courses on identity I had taken, in all the late-night conversations we had at Allen Hall on the subject, the issue of religion rarely came up. We were always talking about freedom for women or Latinos or lesbians. Identity was always defined as race, class, gender, or, occasionally, sexual orientation. When I became a resident adviser, half of my training focused on dealing with issues around those particular identities. The service learning movement took diversity seriously, but it was always about blacks and whites, poor folks and rich folks, urbanites and suburbanites; never about Muslims, Christians, and Jews. I had been to many programs at the Office of Minority Student Affairs, and they also had always focused on the same things. We talked about the limited roles for black actors, the discrimination that kept gay politicians in the closet, the burden of the second shift for women, the cultural capital that accrued to middle-class kids because of the circumstances of their birth. We extolled bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua for their ability to write about these various identities in an integrated way, and filled hours debating whether the oppressions associated with each identity added together or multiplied together. But right now, as we griped about Denzel Washington getting passed over for the Oscar for Malcolm X, a religious war was raging in the Balkans, tens of thousands of people were dying, and faith was nowhere to be found in the diversity discussion.

What I didn’t tell Sarah at that time, what I had told few people actually because I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself, was that I had recently discovered religion.

I had come across a copy of Robert Coles’s The Call of Service and was drawn to one of the people he wrote about: Dorothy Day. He spoke of her with absolute awe, as if she was a force of nature. In her thirties, during the Great Depression, Day had started something called the Catholic Worker movement, which combined radical politics, direct service, and community living. For nearly half a century, Day had given up her own middle-class privilege to live with those who went without in what was called a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. The original House of Hospitality was on the Lower East Side of New York City, but it inspired more than a hundred others across the nation.

Like everything else that seemed good, I was convinced that the Catholic Worker movement had faded away in the 1960s.

“Oh, no,” somebody told me when I made an offhand reference to the Catholic Worker and bemoaned its disappearance. “There are still many, many Catholic Worker houses left. In fact, there is one here in Champaign.”

“What’s it like?” I asked, shocked.

“Part shelter for poor folks, part anarchist movement for Catholic radicals, part community for anyone who enters. Really, it’s about a whole new way of living. You’ve got to go there to know.”

From the moment I entered St. Jude’s, it was clear to me that this was different from any other place I’d been. I couldn’t figure out whether it was a shelter or a home. There was nobody doing intake. There was no executive director’s office. White, black, and brown kids played together in the living room. I smelled food and heard English and Spanish voices coming from the kitchen. The first thing somebody said to me was, “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Yes,” I said.

The salad and stew were simple and filling, and the conversation came easy. After dinner, I asked someone, “Who are the staff here? And who are the residents?”

“That’s not the best way to think about this place,” the person told me. “We’re a community. The question we ask is, ‘What’s your story?’ There is a family here who emigrated from a small village in Mexico. The father found out about this place from his Catholic parish. They’ve been here for four months, enough time for the father to find a job and scrape together the security deposit on an apartment. There are others here with graduate degrees who believe that sharing their lives with the needy is their Christian calling. If you want to know the philosophy behind all of this, read Dorothy Day.”

I found some of Day’s old essays and a copy of her autobiography. In those writings, I found an articulation of what it meant to be human, to be radical, and to be useful. Recalling the thoughts of her college days, Day wrote, “I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn’t see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too.”

Elsewhere in her autobiography, she wrote: “Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? . . . Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”

Here was what I had been seeking for so long: a vision of radical equality—all human beings living the abundant life—that could be achieved through both a direct service approach and a change-the-system politics. For so long, those two things had existed in separate rooms in my life—a different group of friends, a different way of talking for each. Here was a movement that combined them. Finally, the two sides of myself could be in the same room.

The most radical part about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement was the insistence that everything the movement did was guided by a single force: love. “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community,” Day wrote at the end of her autobiography. I felt as if she was talking to me one-on-one. I was tired of raging. It left me feeling empty, and what did it achieve anyway? I wanted to improve people’s lives because I loved humanity, not because I hated the system. Sometimes, I thought, my activist friends hated the system more than they loved humanity.

The Catholic Worker became my community. I started making weekly visits to St. Jude House while I was in Champaign. And the summer after my sophomore year, Jeff Pinzino and I did a seven-week road trip through Catholic Worker houses ranging from the Northeast to the Deep South. I cut up carrots for the soup kitchen at St. Joseph’s House in New York City; demonstrated at the Pentagon with Catholic Workers in Washington, D.C.; heard the inspiring story of a Vietnam veteran in Atlanta who had climbed back from addiction and mental illness and was now helping others do the same.

More than anything, I marveled at the spirit with which Catholic Workers carried out their tasks. The only word to describe it is grace. I was accustomed to seeing the staff at social service agencies get frustrated, even angry, with the people they were working with (whom they referred to, strangely, as “clients”). I never saw that at a Catholic Worker house. The Houses of Hospitality were, by and large, cultures of kindness. And unlike most of the other demonstrations I went to, which were dominated by anger and self-righteousness, speakers at Catholic Worker demonstrations spoke even their most radical statements with an air of humility and love. When I demonstrated at the Pentagon with a group of Catholic Workers, they didn’t shout about how evil soldiers were; they sang hymns and said they would pray for the military brass walking in. Even when Dorothy Day referred to America as a “filthy, rotten system,” she somehow managed to do it in a way that called for hopeful, loving change, not anger and rage.

I was intoxicated by Day’s vision and felt deep admiration for the Catholic Workers I met. I found myself asking constantly, “What is the source of the love you so often speak of?” Their answer came in one three-letter word that I had rarely heard during my time in college: God.

In The Call of Service, Robert Coles described a conversation between one of his Harvard undergraduates and Day in the late 1970s. The young man, a science major, told Day, “You’ve done so much already for these people.”

“The Lord has done it all; we try to be adequate instruments of His,” she answered.

“Well, it’s been you folks who have done all this,” the young man insisted, pointing to the soup kitchen in which Day and other Catholic Workers were busily preparing a meal, skeptical of calling in a supernatural power for what seemed clearly to be a human action.

Day was gentle but equally insistent that God was the source of her work. “Oh, when we pray, we are told—we are given answers to our questions. They [the answers] come to us, and then we know He has sent us the thoughts, the ideas. They all don’t just belong to us. He lives in our thoughts, the Lord does.”

According to Day, all we humans can do is be grateful for the opportunity to hear God’s call and ask for the strength to answer it. For Day, that answer came in the form of prayer and work, which to her amounted to much the same thing:

I may be old and near the end, but in my mind, I’m the same old Dorothy trying to show the good Lord that I’m working for Him to the best of my ability. I pray that God will give me a chance to pray to Him the way I like to pray to Him. If I pray by making soup and serving soup, I feel I’m praying by doing. When I’m in bed, and the doctor has told me firmly to stay there for a few days, I don’t feel I’ve earned my right to pray for myself and others, to pray for these poor folks who come here for a square meal.

My college years were about entering alien territory intrepidly. What was a suburban, middle-class, Indian kid doing in Marxist circles and homeless shelters? I wore the unexpectedness of it all like a badge of honor. Sometimes I wondered whether shock value was more important to me than social justice.

The Catholic Workers were the least likely circle for a kid like me. They were more radical than the Marxist intellectuals I knew, more gentle than the social service types I volunteered with, more intelligent than the professors who taught my classes, and more effective than the activists I protested with. And yet I felt so at ease with them. Reading Dorothy Day, I realized why: they knew that God had created humanity with the hope that we would achieve the Kingdom on earth. Their purpose for doing this work was in their bones and emerged with every breath. Once one realizes that, what can one do but obey with joy? As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “[Faith is] the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

One of my discomforts with radical politics was that it deified the individual. The underlying belief of all the radicals I knew was that our reasons, our methods, our ability to help others all came from our own minds. We were so smart and smug. I even felt a peculiar similarity with the Jeopardy battles my friends and I had had in high school, except the game with my radical friends was who could most elegantly apply Fanon to current events. Day’s view that God is the source of love, equality, and connection—and that He requires His ultimate creation, humanity, to achieve the same on earth—made sense to me in a deep place, perhaps the same place I was trying to fill in high school by fasting.

When Catholic Workers asked about my religion, I told them that I didn’t really have one. They were happy for me to participate in their prayer life anyway, and they made it clear that I should do whatever felt comfortable to me and no more. I found the singing and praying and moments of silence deeply inspiring. I bowed my head and followed along as best I could. But I always found myself standing at a slight angle to the core symbols of the Christian faith—the Cross, the blood, the Resurrection—and I never felt any desire to convert. Nobody in the Catholic Worker movement ever suggested that I do so.

They saved me just the same. I realized this years later, when I met Bill Ayers. I was working in Chicago and interested in new models of youth development. Several people suggested I go see Bill, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a key figure in both local school reform and the small schools movement. “Where have I heard that name before?” I thought, and suddenly I made the connection to the Weather Underground, the radical sixties group that had planted bombs in federal buildings as a strategy for bringing down the system.

Bill had recently published his memoir, Fugitive Days. The similarities between our stories was scary. We were both middle-class kids from Glen Ellyn who had discovered the dark side of America in college and responded with rage. We both had contempt for liberals and romanticized the violent rebellions of John Brown and Che Guevara. We were both familiar with the Jeffersonian line that the people should rebel during every era. We both fancied ourselves in the vanguard.

Sitting at the kitchen table one night in 1968, talking about the death machine that was the U.S. government, a new guy in Bill’s circle, Terry Robbins, had suggested that things had gone too far and it was time to bomb the pigs into the Stone Age. At first Bill and his friends resisted. That’s crazy, they said. “There’s got to be a place in this revolution for a man of principled violence,” Terry responded. Bill found the image intoxicating, and he spent the ensuing years doing violent battle with cops, learning to build bombs, and calling for all “mother country radicals” to bring the war home with acts of violence on American soil. He lost several friends and a decade of his life in the process.

What if I had been at that kitchen table that night? What if a Terry Robbins figure had crossed my path, showed me his sketchbook full of bomb designs, encouraged me to study the Blaster’s Handbook? At nineteen, I was already convinced that America understood only violence. I was just this side of believing that it was my responsibility to inflict it. I only needed a nudge.

My father couldn’t make it all the way through Fugitive Days. “It reminds me too much of you,” he said. “It scares the shit out of me, what you could have become.”

It had been chance—grace—that I had sat at the Catholic Worker table and it had been Dorothy Day’s book that had fallen into my hands.

______

On our summer road trip, Sarah and I visited Emily Shihadeh in San Francisco. She received us warmly, with big hugs, and after spending a few minutes with Sarah, she declared that taking her advice and making my move was the smartest thing I had ever done. Then came the platefuls of hummus, falafel, and pita. “I love Middle Eastern food,” Sarah said.

“This is Arab food, Palestinian food,” Emily responded, growing suddenly cool. “The Israelis occupy our land, but they cannot take our culture.”

Sarah understood that comment in context, as illustrative of the sentiment of the people who had lost something, in some cases everything, when Israel had triumphed. She did not grow defensive or angry. Instead, she resolved to explore the Palestinian side of the matter during her semester in Israel.

I visited her in Israel, at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, where a few years later a close friend of hers was in the cafeteria during a suicide bombing. We floated in the Dead Sea, wandered through Jerusalem’s markets (where Sarah bought a plaque for my parents with IN THE NAME OF GOD written in Arabic on it), ate hot bagels with savory zatar (an aromatic spice mixture), went to the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock, visited the Way of the Cross. In Haifa, we walked through the gardens of the Baha’i Temple and listened to an earnest young man in pleated khaki pants tell us about the need for unity.

Sarah delved into the Palestinian situation and into Jewish history in Israel. She was heartbroken by both. I knew little about either. Sarah took me on a tour of the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The tour guide was a friend of hers, a young American Jew who had moved to Israel, what Jews call “making aliyah.” He and the Arab kids who gathered spoke in both Hebrew and Arabic, talking about life in Arab villages, the simple pleasures of backgammon games and Arabic coffee on Sunday afternoons, the frustration of waiting for hours at Israeli checkpoints on their way to visit family in the West Bank. Sarah put her hands over her face when she heard this. “I hate that their lives are like this,” she told me later.

Our tour guide at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, was another American who had made aliyah. He came across as a smooth intellectual, mentioning his two PhDs in passing. After he had caught us in the web of his seductive intellect, he carefully injected his right-wing poison. He told stories of the destruction of Kristallnacht, the livelihoods lost, the intimidation of children and women in Jewish neighborhoods, the fear of men that it would only get worse. He ended the story in a flat voice, saying that the world had done nothing then, and why should Jews expect the world to pay attention to their suffering now? He walked us through the various halls of Yad Vashem, telling more stories of suffering, bringing half the group to tears, and continuing to press his particular politics. “Oslo,” he said, and shook his head in disgust. “Haven’t we Jews heard this before? Land for peace. It didn’t work when Neville Chamberlain, that spineless wimp, tried it sixty years ago. Look what it led to then. Who can believe it will lead to something different now?”

I knew little about international peacemaking and nothing about the Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, but I could tell a spoiler when I saw one. Sarah was as furious with him as I was. “There are so many people who are trying to create a just situation here, and people like him are working to defeat us every day,” she told me on the way out.

Jewish identity issues had always played a large role in Sarah’s life, and they became paramount in Israel. “The most important thing to people here is that you marry another Jew,” she told me. “The intermarriage rate between Jews and non-Jews is so high now that some Jewish leaders are saying that the Jews are killing Judaism ourselves. They would rather a Jew eat a bacon double cheeseburger than marry outside the faith.” In her own gentle way, Sarah was telling me that she was struggling with our relationship. She felt as if she had an obligation to her tradition, her people. I was too daft to catch her drift.

We went to a Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with a group of young American and Israeli Jews. The conversation shifted back and forth between graduate school plans and social justice issues. These were the things that college students and recent graduates talked about all the time. I felt completely at home. I wound up in a conversation with a young Jewish woman in a long skirt. It looked like a religious outfit. I asked her about it, and she explained to me that she was an Orthodox Jew and followed a tradition called shomer negiah. In her community, unmarried men and women could not date, could not touch, could not be in the same room together unsupervised. “I will marry a Jew,” she told me with total certainty, “and I will do it according to the dictates of my tradition.”

She motioned toward Sarah and said, “The girl you came with, she is your girlfriend? She is a Jew?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you, what are you?”

“Nothing really, I guess. I’m exploring different spiritualities right now,” I told her.

“Will you and Sarah marry?” she asked.

“Um, we don’t really talk about that right now,” I said. “I mean, we’re together. That feels like a lot for where we are at in our lives.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at me with some suspicion. I realized that she was younger than both Sarah and me, but she did not consider marriage too much of a responsibility for her. It would be an honor and a duty for her to be married; it would be carrying out the will of her community and continuing with the practices of her tradition.

“And if you get married, what will your wedding be like? Whose tradition will it follow?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had thought about. It didn’t seem important.

Sarah had been listening to our conversation, and I could feel her getting increasingly uncomfortable. At the mention of our wedding, she got up abruptly, disrupting the conversation she was in, and said to me, “I want to go.” I could tell she was mad, but I had no idea why. I got our coats, hailed a taxi, and waited for her to lay into me.

“Do you have any idea what you were doing tonight?” she said. “That girl you were talking to is a devout Orthodox Jew. She lives by rules that were handed down by God. She is part of a tradition that is thousands of years old. Every question she asked you was a ridiculing of me. There was an invisible conversation that you were totally oblivious to, whose main theme was that Sarah is a bad Jew because she is dating a goy. The only reason she kept on asking you questions was to get more details on how wayward I am.”

I wanted to say, “Screw her. Why does she get to tell you what to do?” And then I realized something: Sarah wanted that. She had come to Israel to connect with her community, her tradition. What is a community but a group of people who have some claim over you, and what is a tradition but a set of stories and principles and rules handed down over hundreds or thousands of years that each new generation has to wrestle with?

I started sobbing. The cabdriver must have thought we were crazy. Sarah, warm and sweet, moved over to me and put her hand on my back. I had totally lost it by this point, weeping uncontrollably, as if a loved one had died.

“What is it, my love?” Sarah asked.

I finally pulled myself together. “It’s just that you feel like you have something to live up to, this Judaism thing. You have these principles you talk about, and this community that watches out for you, and even when it feels suffocating, at least you know they care for you. I have none of that. I just have some things that I’m interested in and a bunch of groups I come in and out of. But I could leave them at any time, and they wouldn’t know I was gone.”

It was a harsh truth I was telling. For all my talk of identity politics, I had yet to develop much of an identity.