Disclaimer: This article was originally published on November 11th, 2019. It has since been taken off the website, edited and published again after the website's redesign.

Woody Allen's 1983 mockumentary "Zelig" tells the tale of Leonard Zelig — a New York Jew who seamlessly blends into any social group.

Zelig develops Asian features in Chinatown, becomes obese among overweight people, and sneaks into the Yankees' training camp as if he were one of the players. When inevitably admitted to a mental hospital, he claims to be a psychiatrist — not a patient. Newspapers pick up this story, and Zelig becomes a celebrity freak, "the human chameleon".

As Woody Allen comedies go, "Zelig" is not that funny. But no other work paints such an accessible picture of Jewish self-erasure, a process that stems from an intergenerational identity crisis and a specifically Jewish attraction to universalism.

Jewish universalism as death drive

The Jewish identity is a signifier reducible to its boundaries. While other nations get to be someone, all we get is limits. What makes us holy (קדש) is what makes us separate (בעֵבֶר¹), and vice versa. We are defined from without — including by our perpetual conflict with G-d² — and can only make sense of this identity through the lens of the Torah.

The resolution of this paradox renders our identity meaningless. We disintegrate as we regress to the universal. But the pull for its resolution is so prominent that it has become an essential part of the Jewish experience. That's why many Jews manifest boundary-negating universalist tendencies as a form of collective death drive.

Christianity is the best known example of self-destructive Jewish universalism. Christian teaching flips the Torah on its head, and presents its historical narrative as that of continuous connection, rather than separation and delineation. The sacrifice of Jesus — an entirely human, yet entirely divine being — erases boundaries and obsolesces the Jewish covenant.

Jewish universalism as survival strategy

Jewish universalism also functions as a survival strategy. In pursuit of safety and solidarity, diaspora Jews often attempted to water Judaism down until it neatly fit the Gentile world.

Many proponents of Haskalah (the Jewish enlightenment) wanted to transform Judaism into a self-contained religion. Moses Mendelssohn called for Jews to reimagine themselves as full members of the German society. His spiritual descendants, the reform movement, even argued for their right to be called "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion". Predictably, all but one of his actual descendants ended up converting to Christianity. And in the minds of the German elites, Jews remained "incapable of integration and thus damned to wander the world"³.

Ludwig Zamenhof, the Jewish creator of the Esperanto language, took the diametrically opposite approach. Zamenhof saw the Jewish experience as fundamentally nomadic. He claimed that Jews have "become a metaphor"⁴, and that the Jewish religion has to, likewise, let go of its particularities. As such, he proposed to reform Judaism with a focus on ethics, rather than the Jewish Law. This transformation, Zamenhof believed, would spell the end of anti-Semitism. Long after Zamenhof's death, Adolf Hitler would call Esperanto "A Jewish plot to break down national differences"⁵, and all three of Ludwig's children would perish in the Holocaust.

Soviet Jews sacrificed the integrity of their identity for the promise of emancipation. Their Jewish status was reduced to a passport entry.⁶ Jews were workers first, members of an ethnic minority second, and followers of the Jewish religion third. Even the two Russian words that denote Jewishness — "еврей" (from Heb. עברי) and "иудей" (lit. "Judaist" from Heb. יהודי) — drifted apart in meaning during the Soviet era, the first losing what was left of its religious connotation⁷. Jews continued to be institutionally oppressed up until the dissolution of the communist state.

Jewish universalism in post-war politics

After the end of the Second World War, Jewish universalism, once again, evolved to fit the environment.

The post-war political discourse focused on equality and justice. Everyone had their answer to the question of "How do we avoid another such catastrophe?". People on the right blamed overreaching governments. People on the left blamed inequality — with the Jewish cause serving as an example of what happens when minorities aren't protected.

Both sides were convinced that, in order to eradicate violence, they had to eradicate ideology⁸. As if the moment we strip ourselves of our ability to rationalize violence, the violence will go away.

Equality was presumed to be a natural consequence of political objectivity. Right-wingers saw this objectivity in the 'scientific' free market theory. The left relied on the equally 'scientific' materialist methodology. These assurances created little space for the particular.

Jews with universalist tendencies were prominent voices in the progressive space. Some even referred to the experience of participating in progressive movements of the time as "religious"⁹. But Jewish identity still rotted in submission to an intellectual culture that valued a forced sense of impartiality above all.

The crime of being exceptional

In the post-war political environment, claims of exceptionality were looked down upon.

Buddhism, a religion of radical impartiality, was gaining traction precisely because of its universalist claims. To this day, a westernized version of Zen is promoted as "the most rational of religions", with an emphasis on its lack of exceptional claims. For many Jews, this framework was appealing precisely because it was the polar opposite of the Jewish tradition, which is occupied with the particular.

Academia was no different. In an otherwise wonderful 1969 essay Bullshit and the art of crap detection, Jewish media theorist Neil Postman launches what could be construed as a full-on attack on Judaism:

The life of a human chameleon

We still feel the aftershocks of these cultural shifts. That's why "Zelig" has aged so well.

'The human chameleon' embodies the tension between the Jewish particular and the Gentile universal. He is a rootless Jew that has come to be defined by an identity crisis he cannot ever fully resolve. Zelig's adaptability, his most prominent characteristic, reflects his desire to make sense of himself, but only serves to sabotage this project.

Many Jews still find themselves in the same predicament. Their desire for universality, coupled with their inability to negate the boundaries they inherited, becomes an identity of its own. They desperately want to belong and to understand what makes them different, but lack the tools to do so.

Jews from the former USSR are particularly affected by this syndrome. My grandmother was born with a blank ethnicity entry on her birth certificate. Her Russian father didn't care enough to "make her" Russian. Her Jewish mother, a pogrom survivor, didn't want her to be Jewish. She spoke Yiddish, but probably couldn't say the Shema. Her identity, untethered from the Torah and the rest of our people, came to be defined by the trauma of her survival.

Two generations later, I felt the effects of growing up nothing. I was told that I'm Jewish, but nobody really explained to me what it meant. I was asked to keep quiet about it at school. To me, being Jewish meant being afraid.

After a while, I embraced the black hole of my identity. Like many modern Jews, I formed a connection to Buddhist philosophy and liberal frameworks that turned my lack of self into an advantage. I was cosmopolitan. A citizen of the world. But, in reality, there was nothing I wanted more than to belong, like my classmates did.

In the film, Leonard confesses that having nothing to call your own is safe. Anonymity gives you love and safety. But it doesn't quite work like that. In real life, the people you meet go back home to their families, their culture, their place of belonging. Meanwhile, you are left wandering the realm of the temporary.

A look at the invisible

For some Jews who fit Zelig's profile, assimilation might be a question of time. After all, you cannot sustain this crisis forever. People find communities that let them start anew. If not — their children do. What Zelig demonstrates with such eloquence is that assimilation is not the worst possible outcome. People who successfully integrate into other cultures get to have closure. Sure, they used to be Jews — now they're Buddhists with an interesting origin story.

"Zelig" remains relevant because it makes us think about Jews who are stuck in-between. Those who are given all of the intergenerational trauma with none of the tools to make sense of it. After all, with a lack of identity — even if it becomes an identity in and of itself — comes invisibility.