By Richard Abowitz
Las Vegas has the fastest-growing Jewish community in the United States. It is a statistic that I contributed to when I moved here in 1999. Or, did I? I don’t believe in God. I don’t think anyone in my family has been religious in any way for three generations. When, as a kid, I asked my mom why I had to have bar mitzvah, she told me it was for her mom, my grandmother. I went at once to my grandmother, who never went to a synagogue (before the day of my bar mitzvah). As for my grandmother, she told me I had to do it, because I was at that age and that is what Jews do at 13. Even to my grandmother, the bar mitzvah had nothing to do with God. But I did my bar mitzvah.
However unsound that logic, fraught with contradictions any teen would call a parent on, it penetrated deep in my otherwise very rational family. After my little sister’s bat mitzvah taking place a year after my bar mitzvah, was like Jewish graduation for my entire clan. Not even for the High Holidays did anyone in the Abowitz family return. My dad would spend Yom Kippur at the Golfagogue with his Jewish friends participating in an annual tournament (the winner got in The Book of Life) my mom shrugged once and offered there was nothing she could think of to repent this year to bother going to Synagogue. She meant that as a joke. Yet, neither of my parents would think of going into the office on a High Holiday and when I went to college classes one year I got a lot of disapproval. Respect for a tradition no one believed in the roots of was grilled into me. I recently bought a condominium. I am still trying to decide if I should put a mezuzah on the door.
So, like my parents, even without the slightest hint of religion, I never stopped viewing myself as Jewish. But my heritage was not something that had any practical impact on my existence or thoughts. Secular Jews like Bob Dylan, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow offered me more than all of the pages of the Talmud. Actually, I never saw a page of the Talmud. We never even got much torah before my bar mitzvah. I learned a couple prayers and how to light a candle at the Sabbath meal my family never had. I had no complaints. And, by the time I moved to Las Vegas, my background seemed, well, all in the past.
Like many people who move to Las Vegas, I was looking to become my future. I did not feel any need to wash off my Jewishness, for example, the way earlier generations of Jews routinely altered their Jew-y names (Lou Rabinowitz becoming Lou Reed and even the mighty Bob Dylan famously born Robert Zimmerman). But I also had no reason to wander Las Vegas looking to connect to the Jewish community. I never felt the need to go to a place for those who wanted to socialize on the basis of shared Jewishness (and there was no discrimination to throw me with my kind as in the days of ghettos and shtels). I was accepted everywhere in Vegas. I made friends with the people who interested me. But everywhere I go there are Jews. Not that we ever really discussed or acknowledged that common fact of being Jewish. Do we even notice?
Many generations fought, and in America for the most part won, the war of Jewish identity politics in the United States. Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow had to be Jewish writers in a way that no one expected their contemporaries like Robert Lowell or John Updike to represent their heritage (though in particular Lowell chose to do so). Those days have certainly changed. I once was assigned to teach a course at the University of Minnesota called Literature of American Minorities. I tried to include a Jewish- America writer on my syllabus, and the choice was rejected under the logic that Jews were not an American minority. That decision was made by a Jew, by the way, and my appeal was rejected by the Jewish department chair. Both professors would have been old enough to have gone to college when the best universities still had Jewish quotas to limit the number of Jews enrolled. There is still horrifying anti-Semitism in the country and even more in the world, and, even if I haven’t experienced any, it exists in Las Vegas, too. But just because the question has remained increasingly confusing to me, the people who hate Jews -- from Nazis to Louis Farrakhan -- seem to have no doubt who is a Jew. Yet, I don’t intend to leave it to the anti-Semites to answer this crucial question.
But is there an answer? Outside of haters, this sense that we have fully assimilated pervades the American Jews I know. It pervades me. My grandparents had answers. Jews were the Chosen People who stuck together through two thousand years of persecution. They had a right to their opinion. They fled Nazis. But I have never been persecuted for being Jewish. As a kid I was very turned off by any conversation about Jews as “chosen people.” Its elitism smacked of the sort of overt bigotry against outsiders, of course, that almost all religions (believing they have the exact truth of God) to some extent must carry. But since Jews and the religion of Judaism in my family had such a wide separation, this retained view of a Chosen People could almost be interpreted as some deep ethnic arrogance. I certainly never felt inferior for being a Jew but I didn’t think it made me better than anyone else either.
But mostly I am an American Jew with only the slightest adult connection to traditional Jewish culture, religion and mores. I have gone my own way. I know more about Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald than I will ever know or care about Maimonides. Yet, that isn’t so far from the contributions of American Jews. Aretha Franklin was recording in sessions with the material picked, arranged and produced and championed by Jerry Wexler. Ella Fitzgerald’s finest moments, arguably, can be heard on her songbooks of the Gershwins, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart.
Here is my point: there was something very special in what I received from being raised in a Jewish culture, and that value is now available to all. The Jewish sensibility, loves and affinities and attitudes have all permeated us as Americans as surely as blues has been available to more than the black folk in the Mississippi delta who originally created the sound. The blues are everyone’s music now. Toni Morrison once referred to Bill Clinton as “the first black president.” Similarly the contribution in the last century by American Jews in so many ways, in so many fields, means that to some extent we are all Jews now. When I was young, older Jews liked to know who was a Jew in the world of politics, business and celebrity. But that game has yielded to a generation of Jews who have poured their creativity, energy and vibrancy freely into the greater melting pot of America and in doing so they have totally left behind the communities, institutions and culture that birthed them. So, this far out, does that leave anything that is special that is unique to being actually born or choosing to become a Jew?
I don’t know the answer. But I know where the answer is coming from. Certainly, Las Vegas is going to be the first city to find out. We may be the fastest-growing Jewish community, but it is hard to imagine a more disparate and unconnected one. Jews move here from all over the country lacking the history and family ties and connections to the longstanding Jewish community here. They will not be showing up, out of habit, or duty, to their dentist’s kids’ bar mitzvah as I had to do decades ago. Like it or not, Las Vegas is the future of other Jewish communities around the country except, to our advantage, we keep growing. And, in that lies the very special opportunity and responsibility for Las Vegas Jews.
The late Vegas historian Hal Rothman understood what I am talking about here better than anyone. In his book, “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century” he included a chapter, “Community from Nothingness: Neighborhoods of Affinity” that recounted his successful efforts to start a local synagogue in Green Valley. I walk past that synagogue, Midbar Kodesh Temple, sometimes since it is near my new home, the condominium where I am still wondering: Should I put a mezuzah on the door?