My Jewish Culture - American Innocence by Anna Gát

American Innocence by Anna Gát

SubscribeSign in

My Jewish Culture<br>What is in your head.

Anna Gát<br>Jul 08, 2026

67

18<br>26

Share

The reason why I have rarely been homesick in the past 15 years of my wanderings is that what I really long for is Jewish culture. Jewish culture, unlike my birth city or my old school friends, is everywhere where I happen to be — I rebuild it from some mysterious source code wherever there is a moment to sit down with a book or time to play with a thought — and nowhere at all.<br>The longing for the lost past that none of us can remember is vividly alive in me as it is at the heart of all Jewish prayer. You honor a destruction with your life, and you never stop. Jewish culture, as it must, always leaves you unsatisfied and somewhat lonesome, because no actual Jewish person or resident philosemite of course can live up to the Platonic ideal (wasn’t he Jewish?) of Jewish culture.<br>I, the mutt, a descendant of debauched film stars and Communist economists, a convert to Roman Catholicism of all things, carry around the world my Jewish culture. It was passed down into me in the 5th district of USSR-satellite Budapest, and it pulls me more strongly into what my life can be than absolutely any other thing that has ever happened to me.<br>I sit and I write and I work and I remember and I befriend and I judge people contained by my Jewish culture. If everything else was taken from me, this one thing would remain. In country after country, climate after climate, now on a new continent, I furnish my homes with sofas and counter-stools, and end up sprawled out on a carpet with a book. As my legs go numb in most uncomfortable positions I think there should be much more, more knowledge, more debate, more conversation, because this un-knowledge is impossible. Unbearable! What is wrong with everybody??! Don’t they understand there is so much to do; do they still not know there is no Heaven, this is heaven?<br>You turn the page careful never to leave Jewish culture (it would just catch you anyway and then you’d both be embarrassed). You look out at the mountains as the sun rises over Wyoming and you’re an outpost of Jewish culture. You watch as the sheep crawl down into the valley and wonder if this is the most efficient route between A and B.<br>Before I moved to America I was terrified of getting lost, of disappearing into this vast country, of being swallowed up. But how could I ever be when, like some migratory bird, I have an incessant programming for how to nest, and I will do it on any tree, anywhere. (Clip my wings, and I’ll use my beak, nice try.) You do things and you don’t know where they come from: the indomitable ambition, the certainties of duty, the split-second mapping of the social, the all-night hunger to learn that’s never sated. Give me five sticks, a puppy, a butcher, and a truck, and I’ll build you a cultural organization where everybody knows everybody and works together and marries, and studies and quarrels, and is absolutely miserable at all times in their wanting better and bigger and faster, and it will be my joy, my Jewish culture.<br>I can tell which of my friends have been exposed to Jewish culture because they think more and do more and are constantly unhappy. Fun! People can friend-group their way into it or colleague into it or date into it, and they are now performing Jewish culture. The great heirs of the Levantine and generally Mediterranean traditions of inquiry, academy, and a polemic God, the sages under the tree talking all day like it’s a trade (“school” in Greek means leisure - you give up the arable land for arable ideas), Jewish culture doesn’t change when everything around it changes. The great artistic institutions of America are Jewish culture. Claude and ChatGPT are Jewish culture. Long live your liberal Wissenschaft! The apotheosis of loquaciousness cannot be undone, it undoes all that is stiff and backward and heartless and lacking belonging. Your information theory forgets mutual information but not in Jewish culture. My most Jewish-culture friend is 100% Indian. It is fine, we’ll take him, nobody’s perfect.<br>And I feel that bone-chilling cold wherever there is no Jewish culture. The towers and totems of unmoving thought. The motions of learnedness without obsession. The aims of the mind with no humility toward the social. That he is brilliant — he reads all the books and strikes all the poses but he doesn’t feel the love and loyalty that are the wells of shared discovery and knowing. That she is wonderful — but she doesn’t get that the dead leave us duties, they never absolve, that no community benefits from self-erasure. Jewish culture is a community of thought (hence all the arguing): communities are enriched by individual excellence and hard-won relations, it is the responsibility for every individual to do their best, to share and learn and fail and then do their best again. And again. And again. Like...