Kerry the Torch
Sen. John Kerry, probable Democratic nominee for the presidency, found out last year?courtesy of a Vienna genealogist on the Boston Globe's payroll?that his familial roots lie in the Czech town of Horni Benesov, that his grandfather, a Jew by the name of Fritz Kohn, was born there in 1873, to Benedikt Kohn, a local brewmaster who worked for a fellow Jew, Jacob Beck. And that soon thereafter Fritz found his way, following his brother Otto, to Vienna, where he converted, changed his name to Kerry and eventually left for America, his Hungarian-Jewish wife Ida in tow. While in America, Fritz Kohn (now Fredrick Kerry) walked into the lobby of a posh Boston hotel, his Caddy idling outside, and shot himself in the head, bleeding all over the probably just-mopped tile.
Skip a generation's worth of begats and begets, mop up the lobby again and John Kerry is born a Forbes and becomes, through marriage, a Heinz. In November, he might become president, the first with known Jewish roots. And so this story of ascent from Silesian Jewish Kohn to Boston-Catholic-Heinz-Forbes-Kerry has been sold to most consumers as an example of the American dream. And maybe it is. But it's a dream whose interpretation isn't what you think.
What most of the media coverage has missed in this heart-warming story of Horatio Alger luck and pluck is the psychology of European Jewry around the turn of the 20th century. Fritz Kohn, Kerry's ersatz Jewish ancestor, was one of many village Jews flocking from backwaters to the grand Austro-Hungarian metropolises at this time (a period referred to as the Enlightenment, following the Emancipation of Jews by Joseph II, allowing them many previously forbidden basic freedoms, including that of relocation). Other notable examples of this trend would be Franz Kafka's family: coming from Osek in Bohemia to Prague, from Yiddish-speaking rabbis and ritual slaughterers to petit-bourgeois German-speaking hat salesmen in two generations flat. Or Sigmund Freud: leaving Moravia for Vienna, farm life forsaken for the university and the dreams of an entire diseased culture. But the further step, the extra dollop of Heinz 57th variety on the kaiser roll, a step none of the previously mentioned Jews took, is the Kohn/Kerry instance of conversion.
The question this decision suggests is not an easy one: What would make a Jew forsake his religion?
Back in the dying Habsburg Empire, if a Jew converted, everyone knew it. His friends knew. His enemies. His neighbors. Even the charwoman he's shtupping on the side. Yes, the municipal records state the fact plainly: "Fritz Kohn, converted," an entry reads on the "Page for Israelites" in a ledger housed in Opava, Czech Republic, the municipal seat for Horni Benesov's area of Moravia. "Kohn to Kerry"?the name change is plain to anyone who wanted to look, even now, 100 years (and four regimes) later.
A Jew converts for economic freedom, for better employment, to avoid persecution?but not for himself. A Jew, in short, converts for the generations to come. For his children and his children's children to taste the fruits of the secular world. In two generations, and only in two generations, is a convert's conversion fully realized?John Kerry was a card-carrying Brahmin just a few months ago, and now the whole country seems to be shepping nachas over his refound ancestry.
But, in Judaism, there's never only one question. Or, rather, each question is answered with a question. And so we have to ask: If Kerry started his campaign as a Jew?or, as numerous white supremacist groups have put it with surprising journalistic integrity, "a suspected Jew"?would he have gone the way of Elder of Zion Joe Lieberman? And now that this information is public?Kerry's of Jewish descent, Kerry's of Kohanic (priestly) lineage, many of Kerry's relatives were sent to Terezin and then murdered in Auschwitz?how will this information affect the vote?
It won't. Not even the Jewish vote.
Polls have shown that some Jews didn't vote for Lieberman (and Gore) in the last election because they were afraid of courting American anti-Semitism, because they were afraid of having a Jew in office dealing with critics?both domestic and European?of his administration's policies regarding Israel. Some Jews just didn't want the hassle, the community-wide scrutiny, then, and some obviously don't want it now. Despite Lieberman's palpably goyish evocations of the "Lord" in his stumping, his centrist approach failed to capture even conservatives in the Democratic party (both Jewish and non) and so he's bowed out.
But deep down in the bleeding cockles of America's heart, everyone wants a Jewish president. And it's about time everyone admits it. Anti-Semites have their rhetoric, their grammatically challenged websites, sure, but the second they get rear-ended they go and hire a sheeny lawyer?no racist throughout the 50 won't let Dershowitz represent his/her interests on an ingrown toenail suit, to say nothing of begging him to help them beat a murder rap. America will make anti-Jewish jokes at the backyard pork bbq, but the minute the wife has a lump in her tit, let's call Dr. Feinberg?he'll know what to do. Alan Greenspan used to be another example.
And so Kerry's a perfect candidate, because he's just as much a Jew as is safe (and smart) for any party, for any voter. Which is to say that he's not a Jew in the eyes of the Jews, but that he's a Jew to everyone who wants to think he is. Lenny Bruce once cracked that the wearing of a yarmulke won't keep anyone out of the White House, unless the person wearing it is Jewish. Leonard Alfred Schneider probably thought he was saying something shocking, something new, but I'd like to think that Fritz Kohn, Kerry's Old World grandfather, had dreamed it all along.