As an American sit-com loving child of the 1970s, I grew up with Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern and mentioned her only a couple of days ago in a post. Which is why the news that she has been diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer and given only three months to live is so sad to hear.
Ms Harper was born in New York in 1939. She grew up with many Jewish friends and always regarded them as her chosen family. It's not surprising, therefore, that she'd be so convincing in the role for which she is famous and that she would not only win four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for her performance, but make so many young boys of my generation want to grow up and marry a nice Jewish girl.
Rhoda taught us that becoming-Jewish is something that affects Jews and non-Jews alike; that anyone can be deterritorialized culturally-racially, which is to say swept up and carried off along a line of flight towards a minoritarian position. In other words, in becoming-Jewish, one is removed from the majority (which refers not to a greater relative quantity, but, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the determination of a norm or standard in relation to which everything else can be said to be minoritarian).
As Deleuze and Guattari also write, we can be thrown into a strange becoming by anything at all - a book, a piece of music, or even, as in this case, a TV show. But perhaps it always requires an element of love. That is to say, one doesn't deviate from the majority unless there is something (or someone) that attracts and captures ones desire and affection.
And so, like Valerie Harper, if I have become-Jewish it is in my heart as much as in my thinking.
