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| Undercover Jew Dave O'Neill on the top of Mt. Washington with his daughter Amy (mid-1970s). |
CONFESSIONS OF AN UNDERCOVER JEW
Dave O'Neill first wrote this essay in the early 1990s, and has been revising it ever since.
I have been an undercover Jew for 60 years. I had a Jewish father, David Stein, and a German (non-Jewish) mother Margaret Sievert. My father died when I was 12 and my mother married an Irishman, Thomas O’Neill. It was too complex at that early school age to have one name in the mailbox and to use another at school, so I became Dave O’Neill and was destined to be told by many people that I had the map of Ireland on my face!
I have many vignettes to relate because of my hidden Jewish identity, some funny, some sad, some annoying. I recall some now because a few days ago, while buying lunch with my Baruch College nametag around my neck, a fellow Baruch employee compared his nametag with mine, smiled and said we were from the same tribe! That’s an example of the funny kind, still happening after 60 years. One clarification. I know that to the Orthodox I am not a Jew at all until I formally convert, which I never have and probably never will. What attracts me to Judaism is not the details of its religion, but the great struggles and injustices its people have had to endure while, along with Christianity, helping to civilize the world and make democratic forms of government possible. At any rate I have always felt like a Jew and this combined with being undercover has enriched my life and given me a greater sense of purpose. So on with my vignettes!
Growing up in a tough Italian neighborhood on the lower west side of Manhattan I did not advertise my Jewishness. The term “Christ killers” was still occasionally heard. . In fact, I was at some pains to explain why I was circumcised to my Italian buddies. In effect, I had to invent an early version of “You don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s bread”. Years later while in the Army I had a hernia operation and was put in a ward with a few non-Jewish guys recovering from circumcisions---the Army required this at the first sign of any infection. The slightest movement gave them such agony that anyone who told a joke was cursed the funnier it was. How funny, how ironic, escaping the agonies imposed by Paul on the Christians.
At age 14 my family moved to a Bronx neighborhood that was at that time mostly Jewish-- around 170th Street between the Concourse and Jerome Ave—and I revealed my Jewishness to most of my Jewish friends. And this continued for a two-year stint in the Army, only with relatively far fewer Jewish buddies. I fell into my lifelong habit of not mentioning it, unless some specific issue would make it important. After the Army I worked my way through college as a bartender in a bar owned by two Jews. Given their mixed Irish, Italian and Jewish patronage they thought I was perfect with my Irish name and underlying Jewish identity that would be known to some of the customers but not others. This was where I used to hear the occasional, “Davey my boy you have the map of Ireland, etc”
I attended the Baruch School of Business which at that time (1955) was part of the fabled City College of New York (CCNY) (the “poor man’s Harvard”) which was the premier college of the public university system of New York City. In 1955, CCN, and especially the Baruch school, was solidly Jewish. So it was perhaps not surprising that a few days after I registered for my freshman term I received a letter from the Newman Club asking me if I wanted to join. The Newman Club is sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church to help students of that faith adjust during their college years. In those days they must have had such difficulty finding members at Baruch that they watched the names of new students for those that might be Catholic! And what goes around comes around. Fifty years later I am back at Baruch as an Adjunct Professor of economics. There are now practically no Jewish students at Baruch. One day I noticed a small group of students talking together, with one or two wearing yarmulkes. I realized they were members of a now struggling Jewish student organization (Hillel) which, like the Newman Club of 50 years ago, is having trouble finding students of their faith. For a few seconds I was tempted to go over, reveal my undercover status and offer any assistance. Given my energy level and not wanting to risk losing my adjunct teaching job, I decided against it. At 72 the only way to keep my treasured chance to go on teaching is to put a lot of time and energy into preparing lectures, get very good student reviews, which then prevents, or at least inhibits, the full-time faculty from dumping you for a younger man.
After Baruch I attended the Graduate Faculties at Columbia University and obtained my PhD in economics. Before leaving Columbia I had also found my wife June. During my first two years I was an assistant to the great economist Jacob Mincer helping him with his famous introductory statistics course for economists. My job was to give exams and review questions with the students once a week in a “lab” session. After spotting my beautiful future wife I took full advantage of my position by constantly writing on her answer papers that she should “see me”. After a while Juney gave in and we were married just before leaving for our first teaching jobs in Philadelphia.
Getting married to a full-blooded Jewish girl also gave rise to some amusing contretemps. I had to convince my soon to be aggressive (Jewish!) mother-in-law that it was too late in my professional career to change my name back to Stein. Also my soon to be father-in-law had a hard time finding a Rabbi who would give us an official Jewish wedding given all the loose ends—e.g.since I would not convert, the Rabbi had to be assured that the children would be raised as Jews. An agreement had to be signed, etc. Of course it turned out that my stepson was never even bar-mitzvahed, and our daughter Amy has never seen the inside of a synagogue and is now married to an Irish-catholic guy.
And for all her concern about my bollixed up jewishness my mother-in-law (Matilda) soon became reconciled and like the typical Jewish mother-in-law was not disinterested in how we were bringing up my stepson Peter and Amy. In retrospect, her influence, although causing some misery at the time it was being administered, had a definite positive effect on both of our children. In addition, I learned a scientific principle from Matilda, that I never knew existed despite my Ph.D. in economics. During many, often heated, discussions about some untoward happening (e.g. not bringing along enough milk and diaper-changes for Amy on outings when she was still very small) I learned that for Matilda, nothing happened by chance. For Matilda every effect had to be blamed on someone. The only problem with this approach—I called it “blame and effect” to distinguish it from the more traditional “cause and effect”---was that I could be to blame, my wife June could be to blame, Louie, Matilda’s husband could be to blame, but Matilda was never to blame! The long suffering Matilda lived until 93, only needing assisted living at the very end, outliving her husband by ten years (and without his teacher’s pension, because he had taken the option that ends with his death and nothing for the widow), taking up to 30 different pills a day, and still managing to leave her two daughters almost $400,000 in stocks and bonds. Quite a gal.
During my professional career I lived for many years in Washington D.C. and one incident, I would say it was a sad one, I always remember. We were looking to buy a house and answered a real estate broker’s ad to inspect one in the Spring Valley section of DC. This neighborhood had a reputation for having been “restricted” to non-Jews. The agent took the names of all the potential buyers on arrival. During our visit the agent waited till we were alone and said to me softly “Mr. O’Neill I just wanted you to know that we are still restricted.” At that time the career of Henry Kissenger, an obvious Jew, was approaching its zenith, he was known to be the most influential advisor in the Nixon White House and soon to be named Secretary of State. It seemed so pathetic that this little Wasp lady would still think it would be important to someone not to live near a Jew, that I said nothing. I have always regretted that I missed my chance for a great Henny Youngman moment with the response—“You mean you don’t take Irish people”?
During our stay in DC, we discovered a rather large numbers of Jews, while not undercover in the same way I was, were to put it mildly, not very observant. One of these was my great friend the late Harry Gilman who had barely survived the death camps as a teenager but did not have much interest in being observant. He had managed to find his way to Chicago after the war and although speaking only Polish still managed to get a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. He taught himself English by attending English-speaking movies every spare hour he could afford. We started playing tennis each week and after a few years my wife and I became fast friends with Harry and his wonderful wife Marsha. Two tidbits about the wonderful Harry.
Every year he would announce that all of us non-observing Jews should at least “hang out the flag” as he put it, by not going to work on Yum Kippur and one night during Passover. Our group of non-observant Jews actually managed to find a Christian church that they let us use for Yum Kippur service each year, with defunct Rabbis doing the service and even singing the Kol Nidre. My wife and I would always attend and even Marsha, Harry’s wife would attend, but not Harry, staying home from work was the farthest toward orthodoxy he would go. Harry had had a particularly bad time in the camps and he once told me that he had not been able to get himself to visit Germany until the late 1960s, and then only when accompanied by two fellow survivors.
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As far as I can judge, Harry is also responsible for the funniest self-deprecating Jewish joke I have ever heard. The Cossacks in 19th Century Russia routinely raided shtetls and during the raids their favorite pastime was to rape whatever Jewish girls they happened to find there. During one raid the usual rapes were carried out except that one particularly ugly girl is passed over by the rampaging Cossacks. As they are starting to leave the shtetl the passed-over girl gets herself in front of them and shouts: “Stop! Remember a pogrom is a pogrom”.
After our long sojourn in DC we returned to Manhattan in 1987. I worked at the New York Fed for a while and frequently walked around Wall Street during my lunch hour. One day a Lubavitcher Mitzvah van was parked along the sidewalk, and an Orthodox Jew was asking people as they walked by if they were Jewish. As I passed him I said “I am half-Jewish” and he said “which half”? When I answered “my father” he looked the other way for the next passer by. Then I said “but my wife is Jewish” and he started filling me in with information about holidays, how to celebrate them etc. At some point in the conversation I offered him the profound observation that a drawback of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism was the insistence on marriage only between Jews. I have never had the experience of having an observation so thoroughly ignored by someone. Afterward it struck me what a jerk I was to think that you could blithely question important tenets of a person’s strongly held religious belief—e.g. do we really need all Ten Commandments?
June has also had a few amusing events because of my name. On a trip to Israel we were boarding El Al at Kennedy airport and June was selected out of the line for their intensive interview. Asked why she was going to Israel, she replied that she was Jewish and she wanted to visit since she had never seen it before and had friends there. Noting her name was O’Neill, she then assured him that her maiden name was Ellenoff which clearly could be a Russian Jewish name. But still the questioner pursued evidence of her Jewish roots and finally asked her what Jewish name her mother had given her. Luckily June remembered after not having thought of it for years, it was “Shifra”.
Recently June appeared on the McNeil-Lehrer show to debate the wisdom of raising the minimum wage. Given her training and research in economics, my wife was, of course, against raising it, for which she received at least 30 outraged e-mails the next morning. Then a few days later she got a phone call while at her office at Baruch from a viewer who had also objected to her views. But this gentleman,who had gone to the trouble of finding her phone number, was friendly and clearly respected her academic bonafides. Then at one point he asked her “you’re not really an O’Neill, are you?”. My wife answered “you mean I look Jewish,” he answers “yes,” and she tells him he’s right. My wife also missed a great Henny Youngman moment. She could have said “no, although I look Jewish I am really Irish, it is my husband who is really Jewish despite his Irish name, and after living with him so long I have picked up his Jewish mannerisms”!
A final vignette, definitely in the “annoying” category, concerns the effect of my hidden jewishness on my ability to fight for Israel through letters to the editor. The name “O’Neill” signed to a pro-Israel letter makes me attractive to papers who are pro-Israel—it is slightly more eye catching to see an Irish name rather than a Jewish name attached to a pro-Israel letter. On the other hand it has made me anathema to papers who are pro-Palestinian, like the NY and LA Times. I have noticed over the years that whenever they publish a pro-Israel letter it is always signed with an obviously Jewish name and frequently from someone associated with a pro-Jewish or Israeli organization. (Abraham Foxman, a “heavy Jew” as Mel Brooks would say, is always allowed to speak by the NY Times). I have sent dozens of pro-Israeli letters to the NY Times over the years and never got one published. I even tried signing one Dave Stein O’Neill but no luck. (See the next essay for more on the Times)
Although it is difficult to explain why, I feel that my 60 years as an undercover Jew have given me a slightly special view of the world. I think it has made me more of a fervent fighter for the survival of Israel and the extermination of anti-Semitism than if I never had the undercover status. A final effect is that it has made me very ecumenical—a big fan of Jesus and Paul as well as Abraham and Moses.
