Deep Identity: An Essay on Prestige, Israel and America
One bright Friday morning last month in Tel Aviv, I sat for coffee with an old friend on the lazy, colorful chairs on the artificial grass by the fountain at Dizzengoff Square. She brought along her friend: a peppy, well-dressed New Yorker with boat shoes.
She was considering moving to Israel, and asked me about the process: logistically, socially, romantically. I tried to express in words the joy of living out the Jewish Project, the hyper-closeness of people, the unprofessionalism and embarrassing mistakes speaking Hebrew. She listened earnestly.
Then peppy New York friend interjected: “I would never move to Israel.”
“How come?”
He answered nebulously. Not the same opportunity. My family is far. No social network.
“What is it really?”
Hard to get a job. My Columbia degree doesn’t mean anything here.
Interesting. If by “not mean anything,” you mean that people aren’t familiar with Columbia and its reputation as a storied Ivy League institution, that’s right. It’s true that a Columbia degree doesn’t carry the same prestige points or brand signaling here. Most people haven’t a clue about their acceptance rate or perceived exclusivity.
To be clear, the degree is valuable for what you actually learned: the knowledge, skills, and “education” part of “higher education.” But not the brand name.
All this got me thinking: prestige—the social prestige from association with Brand X or Club Y—seems to exist less in Israel. Nobody seems to care. More than that, many Israelis resent it.
I want to understand why.
When I worked at KPMG in Tel Aviv, one of our responsibilities was to create management presentations, or “CIMs” in industry jargon, for clients. Sprinkled with infographics and hockey-stick graphs, these were 50-70 slide PowerPoints with succinct summaries about everything the company did. Read in totality, CIMs are like biased Wikipedia articles. “Adobe” the headline might say, then review “products,” “services,” etc.
One slide was always about management’s professional experience and competency. If our goal was to sell the company, this slide showed its leadership.
I worked on 5-6 projects during my 10 months at KPMG, and what I am about to say happened every time. We would ask them to explain their professional experience and credentials, how many years they had been at the company, etc. Without exception, the first thing each member of management would say is the name of their marital partner, how many children they have and where they lived. For instance: “I am married to Yifat, we live in Hadera, and have three beautiful children.” Sometimes they would say their names. But only then, after providing bigger context of Things That Actually Mattered to them, would they continue to list their PhDs from Hebrew University.
This isn’t to say that they thought their job was not important, but that there were things that mattered more.
Contrast this to the infamous first-question-after-what-is-your-name, “What do you do?” in the States. What does that question really seek to know? In New York, my friend there says, it’s how much money do you make. In Washington, it’s your proximity to power.
It is cliché in 2022 to call Israel’s culture “direct” or “full of emotional expression” or the opposite of conflict-avoidant. Or to mention that only in Israel do prime ministers have nicknames. But there’s something else: that empty prestige, that thing acquired from Exclusive Brand X or Hyper-Competitive University Z, doesn’t really exist. (Of course, this is a general comment with exceptions.)
One reason is probably that Israelis see through bullshit, a cultural trait encouraged or maybe forced by Hebrew, which doesn’t allow for the muddling of facts, “kill-em-with-kindness” niceties, or time-sucking prevarication. My late Grandfather, like many other Israelis, gesticulated more than he spoke. “He compensates,” my Grandmother said.
Another reason is tight social networks. In a tiny country with high emotional expression (a fancy way of saying that if someone isn’t yelling at you, you should be concerned because they probably don’t care), friends and family and colleagues are often close, super close. And with shared values, shared calendar and shared ancestry in a tiny ethnic state, why would you bother calling your brother by His Title, or impressing your 3rd cousin that you work at Google?
But the most important cause of prestige’s glaring absence in Israeli culture is not Hebrew’s compact style and limited lexicon, nor Israel’s thick webs of social connection.
It is because deep, unchosen identities—People, Religion, Family, maybe Nationality, to name a few—remain at the center in Israeli life. In their absence, thin and temporary affiliations, like to Big Tech Company X or University Y, replace them.
Deep Identity is generational (vertically spanning time), group-based (horizontally spanning people), and received (unchosen). One example is Judaism. Natalie Portman was born a Jew, in a family narrative, with Jewish ancestors and Jewish descendants. She did not choose to be a Jew, and cannot choose to unbecome one. Deep Identity is eternal, at least for that person.
In contrast, Thin Affiliation is temporary, individual and chosen, and therefore fickle.
Since humans have a basic need for belonging, we form and join groups. Among other things, groups help us define who we are. They help us build identity. And since our need for belonging is essential, when certain affiliations or group-memberships fray, they become replaced by others.
At the same time, all humans have values. Let’s agree that some are good and some our bad. Without good ones, we inevitably adopt bad ones.
The famous incident in Genesis when Joseph’s brothers cast him into a pit can shed light on this idea. “The pit was empty, there was no water in it,” the Torah states. If you understand the Bible not to use superfluous words, the statement seems redundant. If the pit was empty, we know there’s no water inside. The 11th century Biblical exegete Rashi asks this question. He answers: “Water, indeed it did not contain, but there were serpents and scorpions.” A Rabbi of mine once explained: nothing is neutral. The pit could not have been empty. Without water, slimy creatures must have lived inside. It is the same with our time. If we don’t spend it wisely, we waste it. Indeed, studies show that crime rates among children rise in the summer months, when boredom strikes.
So too with belonging and values more generally. When our ties to Deep Identities like People or Religion fray, we do not become entirely untethered. We cannot. We cling instead of Thin Affiliations like Google Vice President or Lawyer or Democrat.
Prestige-addiction may be a manifestation of our human need to belong, or more broadly a value that we’ve adopted as other values like Family and Nationality have receded. The upshot is the same: prestige is but one thing filling the hole left by the departure of Deep Identity in the west.
One common replacement for Deep Identity in America has turned out to be career. For generations of students advised to “make their work their passion,” this isn’t surprising. But it is damaging. “If you like what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life,” we were told. The underlying message? Do what you want. Do what you want and you’ll be fulfilled.
The more I grow older, the more I realize the gaping elephant-sized hole at the core of this silly philosophy. To the degree that a career can provide fulfillment—and I believe that it can—it comes not from self-gratification, but rather obligation and need. In other words, “I’m doing what I want” may be a thrilling expression of freedom and empowerment, but it does not provide as much long-term fulfillment and belonging as much as, “I’m working where I’m needed. I’m going where I’m missed.” (Of course, the ideal is both.)
All this is an aside from the brutal fact that your company is not your community. It is not your family. It is a business. In startup culture, with happy hours and yoga sessions, it’s easy to forget that. After all, you will probably stay two years at said company. If you buck the trend and stay another two, half of the company’s employees will have churned. “New family.” When you’re sick, your coworker is not coming to the hospital. Temporary, individual and chosen Thin Affiliation is not enough. It is not enough to create obligation to help others in times of need and not enough to provide belonging.
Why do post-moderns seek Thin Affiliation? One reason might be that if self-expression, enabled by freedom, is the highest ideal, then we seek to diminish the importance of “conditions” in contrast to our “decisions.” We see this play out with sex and gender—a disdain for genetics and glorification of changes in sex and gender. Without judging this particular issue, I note that the road to hubris is paved with the exaltation of human agency. And human behavior not tempered by humility is dangerous. It once ended with the Tower of Babel and dispersal of mankind.
Of course, we know instinctively that the company logo on our LinkedIn page is A Thing That Doesn’t Matter, and our relationship with our parents is A Thing That Does.
We know that impressing two people at a cocktail party with “I work at Big Company X” is not worth suffering though 21 ten-hour working days that month.
Many graduates of elite universities in the US have “the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige,” writes William Deresiewicz, a former Yale admissions officer.
We know these things belong in the category of Things That Don’t Matter. We do. But sometimes we forget. Somewhere among the sea of social-validation and external credentials and nods of approval, we begin to confuse the sexy stuff in the spotlight for the only thing that’s actually real. And what is that if not love, the crux of Deep Identity.
Cole Aronson once expressed it this way to a group of students at Yeshivat Har Etzion, where I was learning. Thank God for voice memos. Here’s what he said:
The irrelevance of all things in the face of love is really difficult to overstate. My best friend from Yale called me today and told me he was rejected from Harvard Law School. He was distraught. “It matters,” he said.
“It doesn’t only not matter, it doesn’t even make the list of the Top 50 Things That Matter,” I replied.
"But it’ll matter to the lawyers that I work with in the future.”
“But what they think doesn’t matter.”
So it’s just an endless regress of Things That Don’t Matter.
Where you go to law school doesn’t matter.
The fact that you went to Yeshivat Har Etzion doesn’t matter in the sense that the prestige of the institution is a social fact, not a fact intrinsically related to the decency and the sagacity of the people in the institution. And the same is true with universities or whatever job you’re going to have. The only thing that matters, really, is how worthily you exert yourself in the enterprise of loving and accepting the love (which is just as hard) of other people…
Friendships…passion in a marriage…dissolve much quicker than anyone expects. But all they require is the same thing that [the winter session of Yeshiva] requires: an indefatigable desire—more than a desire—a practical commitment to getting up every day and doing the hard work of loving God and other people. Everyone who does a bad thing does a bad thing because they can’t do that. And there’s something heroic about it, not in the grandness of the act, because the acts themselves are not grand, but in the importance of the partnerships to which these millions and millions of quiet and seemingly insignificant acts contribute.
As we enter Rosh Hashanah and the new year, may we learn to properly identify and invest in Things That Matter: namely, Deep Identity. This is something that American Jews can learn from Israelis generally speaking. For when we fail at this all-important task, Things That Don’t Matter, like Thin Affiliations, cloud our lives with mirages of love and meaning. Much like clouds, when you try to grab them, there’s nothing there.
great article
Loved this