I don't suppose

that Groucho Marx looms large on anyone's agenda of burning

Jewish issues. But along with such "Kings of Comedy" as

George Burns, Sid Caesar, and Jack Benny, Groucho and his

brothers worked one of the great miracles in American

popular culture. They got Jew-hating farmers from Indiana to

Idaho to laugh out loud at jokes that germinated in the

shtetlakh of Jewish Eastern Europe, took root in the

holds of trans-Atlantic steamers, and flowered in the

pushcarts of the American Jewish urban ghetto.



If Jews feel at

home in Tuscaloosa in 2004 (where, we recall, the elephant

hunting is terrific because "the tusks are loosa"), it's in

part because of Groucho. He taught even the Mayflower WASPS,

who counted on two hands the Jewish admissions to Yale in

the 1930s, to see their own reflections in that defiant

dialectic of Marxist, self-definition: "I would never join

any club that would have me as a member"



One of the clubs

that Groucho and most of his buddies from Orchard Street

never joined, of course, was the local shul. Drenched

in immigrant Yiddishkeit though it was, the

Jewishness of the Kings of Comedy was that of the upturned

skeptical eyebrow and the sly rejoinder to pompous power,

not the Judaism of eyes reddened from tears shed over the

pain of the Shekhinah's exile. No, Groucho would

never have been able to make sense of a totally

unpredictable fact of contemporary American Jewish life.





According to the

recent National Jewish Population Survey, some 200,000

Gentile Americans - about 4 percent of the American Jewish

community - have voted with their feet and entered the very

Jewish club that Groucho wouldn't join.



Not an enormous

number, but still, it means that conversion to Judaism is

now more common than at any moment since the late Roman

Empire. In those days, entire communities of Gentiles, known

as "God Fearers," flocked to the Sabbath and festival

celebrations of synagogues from Gaul to Rome to Asia Minor

and beyond. Some historians, in fact, believe that by the

first century of the Common Era, the Jews and their converts

formed about 10 percent of the population of the Roman

Empire!



Can you imagine

life in America if the Jews accounted for such a percentage?

Never mind a kosher kitchen in the White House. How about a

mikvah!? Why, if 10 percent of the American

population had been Jews during the Reagan years, we might

have seen garlic designated as a vegetable in school

lunches! But before we indulge our fantasies, however, let's

ask: what's going on here?



One implication

of all this is that the American Jewish family is becoming a

very complicated institution. Increasingly rare is the

Jewish family of a single ethnic stock, able to trace its

ancestry back several generations through the stately

portraits of solemn, bearded men in dark coats and square

yarmulkes or grim, box-shaped women whose sheitlakh

recall the homeyness of crow's nests. The new Jewish family

includes born-Jews, converts, and their non-Jewish

birth-families. Jewish children in Hebrew schools, day

schools, and even heders are learning about Gentiles

not merely from religious texts, folk memories, or

fist-fights on the street. They know them as grandparents,

aunts, uncles, cousins, and even brothers and sisters.





And in the same

way, American Gentiles are learning about Jews. Not only

from the neurotic self-projections of the likes of Woody,

Seinfeld, and Sandler - but, more importantly, from people

they love and share their lives with. Paradoxically, the

entry of non-Jews into American Judaism makes it easier for

Judaism to be part of America, and also to define itself as

separate and unique. What Lenny Bruce used to say of New

Yorkers - "even the goyim are Jews!" - now holds true

in every major American population center.



Let's say your

daughter is a convert. Go to a couple of her seders and

you'll understand why your Jewish office colleague isn't

just "taking vacation time" when Pesach comes around!

It's easier to tolerate a "clannishness" in which you are

included.



At a deeper

level, however, the numbers game masks a more important

question. Namely, what do these people see in Judaism?





In the Roman

Empire, it was the monotheism of Judaism, its antiquity, the

humaneness of the Torah's laws, and the strong sense of

concern for one's neighbor that drew Gentiles into the fold.

The invisible, morally stern Jewish God seemed somehow more

godly than the fornicating child-murderers who could attain

divine status in the Roman pantheon.



Jews raised all

their children to adulthood instead of exposing their

superfluous girl infants to certain death in forests and

urban alleys. And everywhere you traveled in the Roman

world, there was a Jewish community whose synagogue offered

the weary Jewish wayfarer a bed and a meal.



Does the

situation of ancient Roman Judaism teach us about our own

day? After all, monotheism is no longer a remarkable

religious innovation. And, in the era of Dubya's

"compassionate conservatism," who can accuse American

society of systematic neglect of the underfed, under-housed,

and under-employed? What explains the charm Judaism works in

the hearts of so many non-Jewish Americans? In the absence

of scientific data, I'll offer a guess inspired by Groucho.





Americans are

discovering just how important it is to have a "club" after

all. The age of the melting pot is over. We are desperate

for genuine rootedness in a community whose wisdom has aged

well and adapted to countless challenges. At the same time,

we are more mobile than ever. Few die in the town or even

region of their birth. Marriages routinely dissolve and

reconstitute themselves, and families grow with little sense

of continuous identity over time. Our autobiographies are

defined as a random sequence of commitments to endlessly

changing, instrumental communities: the school, the

workplace, the neighborhood.



In this setting,

the Torah offers a unique place of rest and nourishment.

Conversion offers entry into collective memories that go to

the foundations of world civilizations. The life of Torah

offers stable, repeated rhythms of day, week, and year that

must be celebrated with others. Isolated individuals find

themselves drawn into a broad network of obligations that

draw them beyond themselves into caring communities.





Just as the

ethnic traits that made Groucho recognizably "Jewish" yet

utterly secular are fading away, a new Jewishness has

emerged. Our converts teach us that it is not "Jewishness,"

but "Judaism" that is the main thing. The thing we take most

for granted - our Jewish heritage - is a prize and a

challenge, a treasure which we are challenged to turn every

which way to find all that is hidden within it.