The Six Degrees of Joe Lieberman

In the game of Jewish geography, there are rarely more than two or three degrees of separation. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone else. My brother-in-law David is getting married next week to Shira, who is from New Haven and grew up next door to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

In fact, it's not even two degrees: I met Senator Lieberman at Shira and David's engagement party in June. He was wearing a yarmulke. He was eating lasagna and miniature quiches. I am pretty sure he joined in for the singing of the traditional wedding song, "Od Yeshama." Everyone I know seems to knows someone who knows him. They went to school with his kids, they go to the same shul as he does in Georgetown. He is one of us, and this is where the anxiety begins.

People are asking: Is America ready for this? So Gore/Lieberman will win New York and other states with large Jewish populations. But are Americans--in Alabama and Iowa and Texas--really so comfortable with diversity in general and Jews in particular that a kosher-keeping, shul-going vice president is going to fly? But more than wondering if the rest of America is ready for this, I wonder first: Are we?

If Madonna's and Michael Jackson's interest in Judaism signaled that we were on our way to full mainstream, pop-cultural acceptance, surely this means we have arrived. Now there might be a Seder in the White House on Passover. State dinners might be kosher. Just imagine a sukkah--a temporary booth Jews use during autumn's Festival of Booths--out behind the vice president's residence, the vice president demonstrating for the press corps how exactly he shakes the lulav and esrog, the palm branch and citron used on that holiday. Will he be photographed in tallis and tefillin?

Am I the only one who is starting to feel a little nervous?

Having grown up as an observant Jew in Memphis, I am used to feeling self-conscious. When I explained to non-Jews that I kept kosher, I felt a prickle of nervousness as to what the reaction would be. In Tennessee, wearing a yarmulke is not a sign of being an observant Jew; it's a sign that you have some strange I-don't-know-what-that-is on your head. Even during my first week at Columbia University, when I tried to explain to a non-Jewish suite-mate why I couldn't turn the bathroom light on or off on the Sabbath, she asked me if this was a sorority thing. She wasn't being unfriendly or judgmental: It just seemed strange to her that I was going to the bathroom in the dark, which, I suppose, it was.

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