"You Don't Have to Be Jewish"
Jun. 3rd, 2014 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishSometimes when I mention something anti-semitic that happened to me to a gentile, I get the response that is the title of this essay. If it’s so bad, why do you stay Jewish? I’ve even been told that anti-Semitism isn’t real oppression, because after all, I can stop being Jewish any time I like. Well.
Let’s pretend for just a moment that it isn’t dehumanizing at all to ask someone to strip themselves of their cultural, religious, and ethnic identity in exchange for basic respect. Let’s pretend that forced and coerced assimilation hasn’t been used as tools of oppression , and that this hasn’t let deep cultural wounds in people all over the world. Let’s pretend that our culture isn’t something valuable to us. Let’s pretend that after thousands and thousands of years of gentiles trying to do away with our irritating Jewishness through mass murder and forced conversions it isn’t horribly offensive to suggest Jews give up that Jewishness to be tolerated. Let’s pretend that every Jewish person has the ability to up and move at a moment’s notice to somewhere where no one has ever met them or knows that they were “once a Jew” since after all, in the minds of many, former Jews are just as bad as current ones. Let’s pretend all of that for the sake of this essay and ask, would it work?
My great great grandfather left Oregon and moved to the east coast. He passed himself off as a Christian to go to West Point back before Jews were allowed in. He married a woman from a wealthy Milanese family, who died when their children were very young of Type I diabetes only a year before insulin became available. He discovered [minor but profitable scientific discovery redacted, to protect my anonymity], but his patent lawyer cheated him out of the patent, and sold it, and now my great great grandfather’s name only shows up in scientific texts, and on his court case. In flagrant defiance of the courts, he continued to manufacture his discovery until the corporation that owned the patent had him shut down. It’s pretty obvious reading the court case that my great great grandfather’s opponents didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, and the judge didn’t care. In spite of the fact that my great great grandfather wasn’t open about his Jewishness, he still had a Jewish last name, recognizably Ashkenazi facial features. This was enough. The judge ruled against him, leaving him almost destitute.
My great great grandfather had four children, only the oldest three of them knew about their Jewish heritage. The youngest was from his second wife, and born late in his father’s life. My grandmother remembers him fondly as an older brother type figure, and I have no idea what happened to him after my great grandfather moved his children to Pennsylvania Dutch country. The second youngest was a pedophile who sexually abused his daughters, and my aunt, and the family cut off contact with him. The second oldest brother moved to California, became a screen writer, worked on pro-America propaganda films during WWII, and was a practicing Jew. The oldest was my great grandfather. He raised his children with no idea of their Jewish heritage. This didn’t stop the local Pennsylvania Dutch gentiles from knowing. This meant that my grandmother never understood why when other girls got pregnant in high school and dropped out to get married, people would shake their heads, and that would be the end of it, but when she got pregnant and dropped out of high school to marry her boyfriend, she was a whore who ruined a good boy. My great uncle didn’t know why the families of all the local girls kept running him off. Finally, he confronted his father, after one girl told him her family would never let her date a Jew. The whole town knew, even if they didn’t.
My great aunt married a Pennsylvania Dutch man a few towns over, and their daughter, my mother’s first cousin, came of age in the 1970s. She had thick, frizzy, curly Jewish hair. She never faced overt anti-Semitism. She had a gentile last name, neighbors who didn’t know the family history, and good luck. But she ran right into the beauty norms that label Ashkenazi facial features like hers as ugly and undesirable. After her creep of a husband had spent their whole marriage calling her [name redacted] Africa, and The Great White African, he left her for a gentile girl with sleek blonde hair and a little nose. She now straightens and bleaches her hair, and has had a nose job. She looks ridiculous, and she still talks about how much she hates the looks she inherited from her mother.
My mom also had a childhood without overt anti-Semitism. My grandmother took her children to live in the same town as her sister, and to hear my mother tell it, her childhood was downright idyllic. Here too though, there is pain in my mother’s stories of how her grandfather kept his distance, and lied and kept secrets from the grandchildren he so loved in an effort to keep his Jewish heritage from tainting them, his goy grandchildren. My mom also tells stories about the way no one at her school had ever met a Jew, and everyone told anti-Semitic jokes, and she would tell them to her grandfather, blissfully unaware of why he would go so quiet afterwards.
After divorcing my grandfather, my grandmother moved to Florida. Almost all of her friends there were Jewish. Growing up, they took me to the symphony and to art museums, drove me to the library, introduced me to comedy, books, food, and theater. They welcomed me into their homes as if I were their own grandchild, and I grew up thinking all old people spoke with a Brooklyn accent. My grandmother, barely aware of her own Jewish heritage, surrounded herself with Jewish people, because it felt familiar and right to her, because for all her father and grandfather had tried to strip away their Jewish identity and assimilate, there was something they missed, something my grandmother’s Jewish friends shared with her, something that goes deeper than religion or conscious thought, but are instead values and ways of thinking, passed down to my grandmother from her Jewish family. In the last twelve years, they have all succumbed to old age, and my grandmother is the last one left. It makes me enormously happy that they all lived long enough to see their goy adopted granddaughter make the choice to be Jewish.
My mother began studying Judaism when I was ten years old and soon after began taking me to synagogue. This coincided with the treatment for my immune disorder beginning to work, and my neurological state finally improving, which means that these are some of my very first memories. I don’t remember my childhood without Judaism. My mother made the formal choice to begin the process of conversion when I was twelve. She was the only one in her class who wasn’t marrying a Jewish spouse. Her conversion ceremony was held eleven days after my thirteenth birthday, on Halloween. The three rabbis, my mother and I all wore our costumes. It was only after this that my mother found her great uncle’s name on a list of Jewish screenwriters, and my grandmother finally told her about her Jewish heritage. My mother, denied her Jewish identity by her grandfather and great grandfather’s fears, and yet raised disconnected from the mainstream American gentile culture, she like my grandmother gravitated towards Jewish friends, and then Judaism itself, seeking, and finding that which was missing.
I began calling myself Jewish a few months after my mother converted though I have never formally converted myself. Every so often I think about going through the process, but it feels wrong, as if I’m saying, now, now is when I start my Jewish life, as if I am denying the Jewish life I have lived for as long as I can remember.
My town in California where we lived while my mother was going through the process of conversion didn’t have a synagogue, and the synagogue she chose did not happen to be the one that most of the Jewish people in my town went to. No one in town or at my school knew she went there. No one had ever been told she, we, were Jewish. Yet when I was ten, a girl grabbed my arm, pushed herself in close, and whispered “kike!” in my ear. My middle school science teacher made every effort to fail me along with the other Jewish students. In sixth grade, a girl told me that she could never vote for a Jew like me (in reference to Joe Lieberman’s vice presidential candidacy) because you couldn’t be a good person unless you were Christian. This was before I ever called myself Jewish. When my mother converted, everyone in town was surprised. People kept coming up to my mother to tell her they thought she already was Jewish. No one had told them we were Jewish, and yet the whole town knew, even if we didn’t.
For the ambitions of my great great grandfather, and the fears of my great grandfather, my family has been sundered from our culture, our history, and our identity. My mother, my grandmother, and I are left to reconstruct from scraps traditions that should be our birthright. And it didn’t work. No matter how much of our Jewishness my family stripped away from ourselves, it lingered in bits and pieces, like beacons to the anti-Semites. Don’t tell me I can stop being Jewish any time. My family tried that. It didn’t work.
Let’s pretend for just a moment that it isn’t dehumanizing at all to ask someone to strip themselves of their cultural, religious, and ethnic identity in exchange for basic respect. Let’s pretend that forced and coerced assimilation hasn’t been used as tools of oppression , and that this hasn’t let deep cultural wounds in people all over the world. Let’s pretend that our culture isn’t something valuable to us. Let’s pretend that after thousands and thousands of years of gentiles trying to do away with our irritating Jewishness through mass murder and forced conversions it isn’t horribly offensive to suggest Jews give up that Jewishness to be tolerated. Let’s pretend that every Jewish person has the ability to up and move at a moment’s notice to somewhere where no one has ever met them or knows that they were “once a Jew” since after all, in the minds of many, former Jews are just as bad as current ones. Let’s pretend all of that for the sake of this essay and ask, would it work?
My great great grandfather left Oregon and moved to the east coast. He passed himself off as a Christian to go to West Point back before Jews were allowed in. He married a woman from a wealthy Milanese family, who died when their children were very young of Type I diabetes only a year before insulin became available. He discovered [minor but profitable scientific discovery redacted, to protect my anonymity], but his patent lawyer cheated him out of the patent, and sold it, and now my great great grandfather’s name only shows up in scientific texts, and on his court case. In flagrant defiance of the courts, he continued to manufacture his discovery until the corporation that owned the patent had him shut down. It’s pretty obvious reading the court case that my great great grandfather’s opponents didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, and the judge didn’t care. In spite of the fact that my great great grandfather wasn’t open about his Jewishness, he still had a Jewish last name, recognizably Ashkenazi facial features. This was enough. The judge ruled against him, leaving him almost destitute.
My great great grandfather had four children, only the oldest three of them knew about their Jewish heritage. The youngest was from his second wife, and born late in his father’s life. My grandmother remembers him fondly as an older brother type figure, and I have no idea what happened to him after my great grandfather moved his children to Pennsylvania Dutch country. The second youngest was a pedophile who sexually abused his daughters, and my aunt, and the family cut off contact with him. The second oldest brother moved to California, became a screen writer, worked on pro-America propaganda films during WWII, and was a practicing Jew. The oldest was my great grandfather. He raised his children with no idea of their Jewish heritage. This didn’t stop the local Pennsylvania Dutch gentiles from knowing. This meant that my grandmother never understood why when other girls got pregnant in high school and dropped out to get married, people would shake their heads, and that would be the end of it, but when she got pregnant and dropped out of high school to marry her boyfriend, she was a whore who ruined a good boy. My great uncle didn’t know why the families of all the local girls kept running him off. Finally, he confronted his father, after one girl told him her family would never let her date a Jew. The whole town knew, even if they didn’t.
My great aunt married a Pennsylvania Dutch man a few towns over, and their daughter, my mother’s first cousin, came of age in the 1970s. She had thick, frizzy, curly Jewish hair. She never faced overt anti-Semitism. She had a gentile last name, neighbors who didn’t know the family history, and good luck. But she ran right into the beauty norms that label Ashkenazi facial features like hers as ugly and undesirable. After her creep of a husband had spent their whole marriage calling her [name redacted] Africa, and The Great White African, he left her for a gentile girl with sleek blonde hair and a little nose. She now straightens and bleaches her hair, and has had a nose job. She looks ridiculous, and she still talks about how much she hates the looks she inherited from her mother.
My mom also had a childhood without overt anti-Semitism. My grandmother took her children to live in the same town as her sister, and to hear my mother tell it, her childhood was downright idyllic. Here too though, there is pain in my mother’s stories of how her grandfather kept his distance, and lied and kept secrets from the grandchildren he so loved in an effort to keep his Jewish heritage from tainting them, his goy grandchildren. My mom also tells stories about the way no one at her school had ever met a Jew, and everyone told anti-Semitic jokes, and she would tell them to her grandfather, blissfully unaware of why he would go so quiet afterwards.
After divorcing my grandfather, my grandmother moved to Florida. Almost all of her friends there were Jewish. Growing up, they took me to the symphony and to art museums, drove me to the library, introduced me to comedy, books, food, and theater. They welcomed me into their homes as if I were their own grandchild, and I grew up thinking all old people spoke with a Brooklyn accent. My grandmother, barely aware of her own Jewish heritage, surrounded herself with Jewish people, because it felt familiar and right to her, because for all her father and grandfather had tried to strip away their Jewish identity and assimilate, there was something they missed, something my grandmother’s Jewish friends shared with her, something that goes deeper than religion or conscious thought, but are instead values and ways of thinking, passed down to my grandmother from her Jewish family. In the last twelve years, they have all succumbed to old age, and my grandmother is the last one left. It makes me enormously happy that they all lived long enough to see their goy adopted granddaughter make the choice to be Jewish.
My mother began studying Judaism when I was ten years old and soon after began taking me to synagogue. This coincided with the treatment for my immune disorder beginning to work, and my neurological state finally improving, which means that these are some of my very first memories. I don’t remember my childhood without Judaism. My mother made the formal choice to begin the process of conversion when I was twelve. She was the only one in her class who wasn’t marrying a Jewish spouse. Her conversion ceremony was held eleven days after my thirteenth birthday, on Halloween. The three rabbis, my mother and I all wore our costumes. It was only after this that my mother found her great uncle’s name on a list of Jewish screenwriters, and my grandmother finally told her about her Jewish heritage. My mother, denied her Jewish identity by her grandfather and great grandfather’s fears, and yet raised disconnected from the mainstream American gentile culture, she like my grandmother gravitated towards Jewish friends, and then Judaism itself, seeking, and finding that which was missing.
I began calling myself Jewish a few months after my mother converted though I have never formally converted myself. Every so often I think about going through the process, but it feels wrong, as if I’m saying, now, now is when I start my Jewish life, as if I am denying the Jewish life I have lived for as long as I can remember.
My town in California where we lived while my mother was going through the process of conversion didn’t have a synagogue, and the synagogue she chose did not happen to be the one that most of the Jewish people in my town went to. No one in town or at my school knew she went there. No one had ever been told she, we, were Jewish. Yet when I was ten, a girl grabbed my arm, pushed herself in close, and whispered “kike!” in my ear. My middle school science teacher made every effort to fail me along with the other Jewish students. In sixth grade, a girl told me that she could never vote for a Jew like me (in reference to Joe Lieberman’s vice presidential candidacy) because you couldn’t be a good person unless you were Christian. This was before I ever called myself Jewish. When my mother converted, everyone in town was surprised. People kept coming up to my mother to tell her they thought she already was Jewish. No one had told them we were Jewish, and yet the whole town knew, even if we didn’t.
For the ambitions of my great great grandfather, and the fears of my great grandfather, my family has been sundered from our culture, our history, and our identity. My mother, my grandmother, and I are left to reconstruct from scraps traditions that should be our birthright. And it didn’t work. No matter how much of our Jewishness my family stripped away from ourselves, it lingered in bits and pieces, like beacons to the anti-Semites. Don’t tell me I can stop being Jewish any time. My family tried that. It didn’t work.
