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When I was in middle school, my Girl Scout troop had a holiday party and we sang Christmas carols. I sang every one and knew all the words. One of the girls in my troop stared at me stunned.
Fellow Girl Scout: But I thought you were Jewish!
Fish: I didn't grow up under a rock, did I?
I was amazed that she didn't realize that I couldn't ignore Christmas. I wasn't allowed to. Me knowing Christmas carols wasn't like her knowing Hebrew prayers. She could be ignorant about my faith and my holidays if she so chose with no detriment to her, and yet I'd have to be an idiot to not know about Christian faith and Christian holidays.
I am white. I am so white my skin is transparent. My hair is blond before I use cosmetics to make it a lighter blond. But please don't pretend that being a Jew is like being any other white ethnicity. Our issues are specialized issues, secondary issues, and we get this forced down our throats occasionally, like when the Pope revoked the excommunications of four right wing bishops including a prominent Holocaust denier and considers reinstating a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of the Jews when the Catholic Church has a history of forced conversions of Jews.
Yes I can take on and off my Jew hat, and pretend I'm not, (though it's hard when I have a nose I could fish with and very pointy cheekbones, and large round eyes beneath dark bushy big thick eyebrows) but I am still the victim of ethnic prejudice, both of the overt and "I'm not anti-Semitic, I love the Jews" forms. I belong to a different cultural group from the dominant American culture, I have had to assimilate, and I am the victim of frequent cultural appropriation.
When a Christian says, usually in an effort to be tolerant, that Jews and Christians have this or that in common, so we should be united, it's usually not something Jews share with Christians. When a gentile writer puts such things in a Jewish character's mouth, I want to throw the book across the room. When I see a Mezuzah in a gentile house, or see the Star of Bethlehem as a Star of David because "Judaism led the way for Christianity just as the Star of Bethlehem led the way to the Christ child," or when I hear about Christian Seders, or when I hear Rick Warren use the Shema, the declaration of Jewish faith, I feel personally assaulted. I feel robbed. I feel used, and I feel angry.
I have been called a Kike and a Jewbitch and a dirty Jew. I am afraid for my life because it was less than seventy years ago that six million of us died "for our race".
My grandmother was alive then, though thankfully in America, not German conquered parts of Europe, and when I walk outside with a Star of David around my neck, she's terrified I won't come home. When her new husband, whose own father was an anti-Semite, gave me a pendant with "Beloved Daughter" on it, written in Hebrew, it meant much more than I realized before he gave it to me.
And a Jew is always a Jew. they may be Agnostics, Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or anything else, but they are still Jews. So believes the Jewish community, so believe most ethnic but not religious Jews, so thinks most of the outside world. No one but the overtly anti-Semitic claims Jews are a separate race, but everyone sees us as a separate something.
When a Jew does something wrong and ends up in the news, he or she is invariably referred to as a prominent member of the Jewish community, especially if the crimes are white collar crimes. The stereotypical view of the Jew is as greedy, manipulative, pushy, whiny, cunning, tenacious, and dishonest. We have not been economically oppressed, and few fear they will be mugged by Jews, but we are the dangerous Other too.
And since so many of those European mythos speculative fiction novels take place in pseudo Medieval Europe, the absence of my people is even more noticeable. We were in the actual medieval Europe, so why can't we be in the fictional pseudo Europes? Talk about being written out existence. It wasn't until I was in college that it even occurred to me to add Jewish elements to ethnic groups I created for my secondary worlds, because ummm... no one else did?
Why is it that a lot of white gentiles doing their best to be understanding and POC (really more the white gentiles, though, quite a few people of color in the debate have actually mentioned us as another party irritated with the situation) keep saying to us "acknowledge your whiteness and realize you're not part of this debate because you don't suffer the same ways" when we're treated as no other whites are? No, Jews are not free of cultural prejudice of the stain of cultural appropriation. Just as a Jew may reinforce prejudice against African Americans, so can an African American reinforce prejudice against Asian Americans. Just as I have no idea what it means to be a member of any other oppressed ethnic or racial community, neither do nonJewish members of those communities have any knowledge of what it means to be a Jew among gentiles. My only point is, I hate when institutional prejudice happens to me, and I don't want to see it happen or (worse) make it happen to someone else.
Fellow Girl Scout: But I thought you were Jewish!
Fish: I didn't grow up under a rock, did I?
I was amazed that she didn't realize that I couldn't ignore Christmas. I wasn't allowed to. Me knowing Christmas carols wasn't like her knowing Hebrew prayers. She could be ignorant about my faith and my holidays if she so chose with no detriment to her, and yet I'd have to be an idiot to not know about Christian faith and Christian holidays.
I am white. I am so white my skin is transparent. My hair is blond before I use cosmetics to make it a lighter blond. But please don't pretend that being a Jew is like being any other white ethnicity. Our issues are specialized issues, secondary issues, and we get this forced down our throats occasionally, like when the Pope revoked the excommunications of four right wing bishops including a prominent Holocaust denier and considers reinstating a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of the Jews when the Catholic Church has a history of forced conversions of Jews.
Yes I can take on and off my Jew hat, and pretend I'm not, (though it's hard when I have a nose I could fish with and very pointy cheekbones, and large round eyes beneath dark bushy big thick eyebrows) but I am still the victim of ethnic prejudice, both of the overt and "I'm not anti-Semitic, I love the Jews" forms. I belong to a different cultural group from the dominant American culture, I have had to assimilate, and I am the victim of frequent cultural appropriation.
When a Christian says, usually in an effort to be tolerant, that Jews and Christians have this or that in common, so we should be united, it's usually not something Jews share with Christians. When a gentile writer puts such things in a Jewish character's mouth, I want to throw the book across the room. When I see a Mezuzah in a gentile house, or see the Star of Bethlehem as a Star of David because "Judaism led the way for Christianity just as the Star of Bethlehem led the way to the Christ child," or when I hear about Christian Seders, or when I hear Rick Warren use the Shema, the declaration of Jewish faith, I feel personally assaulted. I feel robbed. I feel used, and I feel angry.
I have been called a Kike and a Jewbitch and a dirty Jew. I am afraid for my life because it was less than seventy years ago that six million of us died "for our race".
My grandmother was alive then, though thankfully in America, not German conquered parts of Europe, and when I walk outside with a Star of David around my neck, she's terrified I won't come home. When her new husband, whose own father was an anti-Semite, gave me a pendant with "Beloved Daughter" on it, written in Hebrew, it meant much more than I realized before he gave it to me.
And a Jew is always a Jew. they may be Agnostics, Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or anything else, but they are still Jews. So believes the Jewish community, so believe most ethnic but not religious Jews, so thinks most of the outside world. No one but the overtly anti-Semitic claims Jews are a separate race, but everyone sees us as a separate something.
When a Jew does something wrong and ends up in the news, he or she is invariably referred to as a prominent member of the Jewish community, especially if the crimes are white collar crimes. The stereotypical view of the Jew is as greedy, manipulative, pushy, whiny, cunning, tenacious, and dishonest. We have not been economically oppressed, and few fear they will be mugged by Jews, but we are the dangerous Other too.
And since so many of those European mythos speculative fiction novels take place in pseudo Medieval Europe, the absence of my people is even more noticeable. We were in the actual medieval Europe, so why can't we be in the fictional pseudo Europes? Talk about being written out existence. It wasn't until I was in college that it even occurred to me to add Jewish elements to ethnic groups I created for my secondary worlds, because ummm... no one else did?
Why is it that a lot of white gentiles doing their best to be understanding and POC (really more the white gentiles, though, quite a few people of color in the debate have actually mentioned us as another party irritated with the situation) keep saying to us "acknowledge your whiteness and realize you're not part of this debate because you don't suffer the same ways" when we're treated as no other whites are? No, Jews are not free of cultural prejudice of the stain of cultural appropriation. Just as a Jew may reinforce prejudice against African Americans, so can an African American reinforce prejudice against Asian Americans. Just as I have no idea what it means to be a member of any other oppressed ethnic or racial community, neither do nonJewish members of those communities have any knowledge of what it means to be a Jew among gentiles. My only point is, I hate when institutional prejudice happens to me, and I don't want to see it happen or (worse) make it happen to someone else.
