Proud To Be A Rootless Cosmopolitan

"Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s. But as an African Jew with roots in Eastern Europe and before that France, raised under the cultural aegis of the British empire but living in the great global transit lounge that is New York (still playing the odd game of tennis-ball cricket with Jamaicans or Kashmiris in the parks of Brooklyn), I'll happily answer to "rootless cosmopolitan" – even wear it as a badge of honor.

Rootless cosmopolitanism may describe my experience of Jewishness, but its hardly exclusive to Jews: It applies equally to most of the people I love and respect from every corner of the planet who see themselves as citizens of the world, their identities defined by multiple affinities formed in their movement through the spaces between cultures, their instincts including a disdain for racism and cultural (and geopolitical) arrogance, and a tendency to understand and respond to events through a global prism, rather than via the ties of blood and soil. Whether they were raised Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist; whether their origins are Jewish, Indian, English, Scottish, Irish, German, Chilean, Persian, Basque, Israeli, Palestinian, Australian, Serb, Libyan, Midwestern or what have you, they are always most at home among people of similar heart and spirit.

All of the great Jewish intellectual, philosophical, moral and cultural exemplars I can think of were products not of a separate Jewish existence, but of the Diaspora, our dispersal among the cultures of the world. Whether it's Maimonides or Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein or Derrida; Kafka or Primo Levi; Serge Gainsbourg or Daniel Barenboim; Lenny Bruce or Bob Dylan; Mike Leigh or Ali G; kneidlach or rugelach or so many of the brooding operatic tunes I heard in synagogue as a kid; all are products not of Jews living only among themselves, but of our interaction with diverse influences in the Diaspora.