Being Jewish
I was reading a great piece about queer YA lit the other day about intersectionality, and the multiple ways that characters and people can embody differences from the normative “white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, Christian (or similar morality structure) and more often than not, male.” While I really like this piece, I was brought up short by “or similar morality structure”-I couldn’t help read it as a reference to Jewishness: we’re different, but not quite different enough to count. I blame the right-wing use of “Judeo-Christian,” to be honest, but more on that later. I want to emphasize that I have no idea if Tristina Wright meant it that way-she may have meant something entirely different, and the anger in this essay is not meant to be directed at her. It is directed at what feels to me like an attempt in the US to erase the historical differences between Christians and Jews, an erasure being committed in order to exonerate Christians of their history of violent anti-semitism while demonizing Islam.
I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, meaning that my ancestors came from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. That’s probably the most common, most assimilated kind of Jew in the United States. I’m an atheist and I’m non-practicing, so what I say about my experience is not going to be the same for Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews like many of the students I teach, or any Sephardic Jews, to say nothing of Beta Israel, Bene Israel, or other Jews of color. (For a really good discussion about representation of Jews, including Jews of color, in children’s literature, please see this piece on Reading While White, a dialogue between Hannah Gomez and Allie Jane Bruce. As you can see from the comments, I am less sanguine about the representation of Ashkenazi Jews than they are, but those differences are, in my opinion, relatively minor-I am certainly strongly in favor of recognizing, respecting, and representing non-Ashkenazi Jews.) Nonetheless, my history, my culture, my way of thinking, and yeah, my morality structure is different from Christianity’s.
It took me a long time to realize this, partially because I am very assimilated, but partially because I’ve lived almost my entire life in New York City, where being Jewish, at least if you’re Ashkenazi and white, is as normalized as it is possible to be. The public schools close for Jewish holidays, for instance, and Ashkenazi culture has become so intertwined with New York City’s culture as to be in some places interchangeable. So even though I’m phenotypically very obviously Jewish, at least if you know what you’re looking at (thick dark curly hair, big crooked nose, thick dark eyebrows-flat feet, too, and apparently that’s a Jewish stereotype, who knew?), I’ve never felt singled out for being Jewish; if anything, I’ve felt, on occasion, not Jewish enough, because my family is non-observant. But those differences are there.
I guess I’ll begin by talking about basic word associations. I used to be a regular commenter on Feministe, and at one point, Jill Filipovic, the major blogger there at the time, wrote that she was grateful for her “church,” and one of the things she meant by that was feminist community. For her, using the word “church” was shorthand that denoted community, morality, support, compassion, and love. That’s not what the word “church” means to me. My immediate reactions to the word “church” are suspicion, fear, anxiety, mistrust. My immediate associations with it, with “Christ,” and “Christianity” are murderous hatred, anti-semitism, violence, ignorance. When I hear talk of “Christ’s love” I look around for escape routes. When I hear about “Christianity,” I don’t think “religion of love” or “peace” or “mercy.” I think “pogrom,” “mob violence,” “hatred.” It would never occur to me to use “church” to indicate something positive, and when Jill did, I had to think hard past my initial reactions to understand what she meant. Because not only do I think of churches negatively, but I don’t think of them as places of inclusion, where I am welcome. And no, you can’t just substitute “synagogue,” partially because of my vexed relationship with the religious practice of Judaism, but also because “synagogue” is about a specifically Jewish identity. The idea that you can use your place of worship as a synonym for an inclusive community comes from a place of privilege, of cultural dominance.
Yes, I have Christian friends. I have a friend getting her M.Div. right now, and I deeply respect her practice, just as I respect the role the black church has played in black freedom struggles, just as I respect liberation theology. In my general web of definitions and associations, though, these are golden needles in a generally murderous haystack. They are exceptions that don’t change my immediate feelings, or the history of Christianity toward people like me.
My first serious boyfriend was not Jewish. Once, over dinner, he mentioned my bisexuality to my grandfather, and I kicked him hard under the table. Afterwards I asked him “what the fuck were you thinking?” “I don’t know!” he answered. “We were making jokes about Christ and about gospel! I figured he wouldn’t care!” “We’re Jewish,” I pointed out. “Making jokes about Christian belief is not about being irreverent. It’s about being persecuted, marginalized.” A year later, that boyfriend lied in front of my face about my identity to his own grandfather. “Veronica’s family is of many different faiths,” he said. “So she’s still making up her mind.” Bullshit. My family is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jewish atheists for three generations. There’s no confusion at all. When I took him aside for a knock-down drag-out fight about this he said “You don’t understand! We don’t tell my grandfather anything that might upset him! We never told him when my cousin Bruce went into rehab!”
“I know you didn’t just compare my being Jewish to your cousin’s cocaine addiction,” I said. “So we’re just going to pretend that you didn’t say that.”
“My grandfather’s an old man! He shouldn’t have to worry about whether his grandchildren will be confirmed or [called to Torah]!” (He didn’t know what the correct phrase was, so there was a pointless digression here in the actual conversation.)
“Worried?” I said. “Worried? He should be so lucky.”
Sometime that same year, some scumbag shot up a Jewish daycare center. That, of course, is bad enough, but then I heard callers on talk radio saying things like well, I don’t support what he did, of course, but Jews have been parasites bringing down every civilization they’ve been a part of, so you can understand why blah blah blah…
It’s not really about personal prejudice. It’s about history. It’s about knowing that people like me have been murdered all over Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years by God-fearing mainstream Christians. “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat,” that’s the joke about Jewish holidays. But it’s not wrong. They tried to kill us. By definition, those of us here are the ones they didn’t get. But they didn’t fail, either, did they? How many of us have died?
For me, this influences the way I see the world and my responsibilities in it. I try and often fail to walk in the tradition of Jewish radicalism, of Emma Goldman and Mickey Schwerner and even my grandfather, who lost a job over his participation in CORE’s sit-ins and my parents, who met in SDS in Ann Arbor back in the day. And I try to do this not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because I am part of a people that know what it is to be on the wrong side of a pogrom. That know what it is to be the target of state-sponsored hatred and violence and exploitation. That means, as far as I am concerned, that I carry a special burden, the burden of their memory, the charge not to betray what they suffered and knew, and therefore to be on the side of those suffering and targeted today. This means I was open with my grandparents about my support for gay rights, even if I didn’t feel like discussing my own bisexuality with my grandfather-and as a result, one of my paternal grandparents’ best friends complimented my passion for justice, because whatever his own prejudices may have been, he could recognize what was happening. This means that when recognition and respect for trans women became an issue in my college’s Women’s and Gender Studies program a couple of years before I had tenure, I was outspoken and confrontational about advocating for trans women anyway, because my ancestors had never converted, even in the face of pogroms, and Andrew Goodman had gone down to Mississippi and died, and I wasn’t going to be scared into silence merely by a concern about tenure. I owed it to my people, and because of my Jewishness, “my people” here means Jews, it means Jewish radicals, and it means all oppressed and persecuted peoples.
It means that I’m not a patriot, because sure, I feel lucky that my great-grandparents ended up here rather than staying in Eastern Europe, where they would have been slaughtered, but I know that the US enacted immigration laws in the 1920s specifically to keep people like me out, to strand us in Eastern Europe, and then, twenty years later, when we were being slaughtered again, turned back boatloads of us to die. Am I supposed to feel grateful to that country? Proud of it? To say nothing of what it has done to American Indians, to African-Americans.
It means that I can’t support Israel, because it looks like an apartheid state to me, and of all peoples, we owe it to our ancestors to know better. But it means I can’t reject Israel, because 70 years ago, my people-and here I mean Jews-were being slaughtered all over Europe and nobody took us in. Am I just supposed to trust gentile countries that it won’t happen again? And it means that when I see those same countries turning their backs as refugees from Syria and Iran beg them to save their children, I see the parallels even if the leaders of those countries want to deny them.
It means that when I read about Muslims hearing about the Orlando massacre and praying the shooter wasn’t a Muslim, or when I hear about Trump’s brownshirt wannabes letting anti-Semitic vitriol loose on the internet, or hear him talk about keeping Muslims out, I recognize fascism and its effects when I see it.
This is me. Plenty of Jews feel differently, have different politics, even to the point of being reactionaries. The point isn’t that all Jews are radical leftists. The point is that the history and awareness of our identities of Jews impacts the way we see the world; the way we see politics is influenced in every conceivable way by being Jewish. It makes me radical. It may make somebody else liberal, somebody else conservative, somebody else reactionary. But it is all filtered through awareness of what it means to be Jewish.
I have a friend whose brother used to be in a white-supremacist gang, and who told him sure, we don’t like the blacks, but it’s the Jews we really loathe.
I also have a friend who told me when she gave birth to her daughter, she looked at the infant in her arms and realized, “Nobody is angry at you; you haven’t pissed anybody off. You’re completely new.”
I’ve never felt that. From the minute my twelve-month-old son was born, I’ve known there are people out there who want him dead, who would put the bullet through his head right in front of me. Not just him, but my godson and my goddaughter and my best friend and my mother and me. Not because any of us have pissed somebody off (though some of us have), but because we’re all Jews, and it has happened before, and not that long ago, and that means it could happen again. I worry about how to get my son to safety if I ever have to. And that awareness is part of being Jewish as well.
You know what else is part of being Jewish? A completely different intellectual history. The history of Jewish thought on, say, women, or marriage, or morality is different from the history of mainstream Western, which is to say Christian, thought. Our values are different. Screw this “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric, which is just the religious right’s attempt to make Jews forget that they’d gladly skewer us too, if they could, and enlist us in their attacks on LGBTQ people and Muslims. I never see “Judeo-Christian values” used to garner support for values I recognize as Jewish: “Due to our shared Judeo-Christian values and their emphasis on the importance of study and education, we must insist on full funding for public education, free for everybody, from pre-K through to college, and public libraries that are open 24/7, staffed by highly trained librarians!” Where is that call? Why is it always about how the gays are bad bad bad? Because I have Jewish parents and Jewish grandparents and Jewish great-grandparents and not once did any of them ever tell me jackshit about gay people marrying or trans people peeing, but every single one of them talked endlessly to me about studying hard and getting into a good college because that was what we Jews cared about.
I don’t have a problem with discussion of the Abrahamic religions together-certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share features and origins and scholars of religious studies know those better than I. What I mind is the attempt to portray Judaism as Christianity without Christ, as if sharing some religious texts erases the thousands of years of divergence and violence that came afterwards. What I mind is the attempt to subsume Jewishness in Christian dominance while estranging Islam.
My morality is not like Christianity’s, at least as I have been taught to understand it. I was never taught to turn the other cheek, unless you count the parental saying “if you ignore them, they’ll go away,” which, let’s face it, isn’t even true. I was never taught that the meek will inherit. When my uncle, maybe one of the kindest people I have ever met, told me about going to a counter-protest to a neo-nazi rally in Chicago, he told me that he wore his steel-toed boots, so that if the police lines broke and it came to fighting, he could crack skulls. Not when he was a young hothead. When he was a middle-aged, married father of two. My father took me aside and told me quite seriously once that I should never miss the chance to kill a nazi, because they’d do the same to me. Not when he was young. Just a few years ago. I don’t have a problem with either of these statements. Because fuck those people.
To be Jewish is to have a group history of trauma and persecution. It’s to have a culture that valorizes study and erudition. In the contemporary US, being Ashkenazi is to be white, at least in the places I’ve been, but still to know that your perspective is marginalized. Still to see yourself not represented in any positive way in the mainstream, especially if you’re female (fuck you, Woody Allen, I hated you long before your reprehensible actions were revealed), still to look for yourself in code (many black female nerds saw themselves in Hermione; fair enough. I read her as Jewish, myself). Being Jewish is not just about religious practice, and it’s not just about a structure of morality. It’s about having a particular history and a particular culture (or one of many, as I note above) that has developed in response to that history.
And so is being Christian. Because just as white supremacy can make us whites think that whiteness is default, normal, the unmarked state, just as patriarchy can make men think that they are the standard model of human being, so can Christian dominance make gentiles think that Christianity is just a matter of religious belief, or of the structure of one’s morality. But Christians too carry the burden of history, and a big part of that is violent anti-semitism. They have to come to terms with that, and they can’t do it if they try to erase the differences that mark us and how we experience the world.
I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, meaning that my ancestors came from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. That’s probably the most common, most assimilated kind of Jew in the United States. I’m an atheist and I’m non-practicing, so what I say about my experience is not going to be the same for Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews like many of the students I teach, or any Sephardic Jews, to say nothing of Beta Israel, Bene Israel, or other Jews of color. (For a really good discussion about representation of Jews, including Jews of color, in children’s literature, please see this piece on Reading While White, a dialogue between Hannah Gomez and Allie Jane Bruce. As you can see from the comments, I am less sanguine about the representation of Ashkenazi Jews than they are, but those differences are, in my opinion, relatively minor-I am certainly strongly in favor of recognizing, respecting, and representing non-Ashkenazi Jews.) Nonetheless, my history, my culture, my way of thinking, and yeah, my morality structure is different from Christianity’s.
It took me a long time to realize this, partially because I am very assimilated, but partially because I’ve lived almost my entire life in New York City, where being Jewish, at least if you’re Ashkenazi and white, is as normalized as it is possible to be. The public schools close for Jewish holidays, for instance, and Ashkenazi culture has become so intertwined with New York City’s culture as to be in some places interchangeable. So even though I’m phenotypically very obviously Jewish, at least if you know what you’re looking at (thick dark curly hair, big crooked nose, thick dark eyebrows-flat feet, too, and apparently that’s a Jewish stereotype, who knew?), I’ve never felt singled out for being Jewish; if anything, I’ve felt, on occasion, not Jewish enough, because my family is non-observant. But those differences are there.
I guess I’ll begin by talking about basic word associations. I used to be a regular commenter on Feministe, and at one point, Jill Filipovic, the major blogger there at the time, wrote that she was grateful for her “church,” and one of the things she meant by that was feminist community. For her, using the word “church” was shorthand that denoted community, morality, support, compassion, and love. That’s not what the word “church” means to me. My immediate reactions to the word “church” are suspicion, fear, anxiety, mistrust. My immediate associations with it, with “Christ,” and “Christianity” are murderous hatred, anti-semitism, violence, ignorance. When I hear talk of “Christ’s love” I look around for escape routes. When I hear about “Christianity,” I don’t think “religion of love” or “peace” or “mercy.” I think “pogrom,” “mob violence,” “hatred.” It would never occur to me to use “church” to indicate something positive, and when Jill did, I had to think hard past my initial reactions to understand what she meant. Because not only do I think of churches negatively, but I don’t think of them as places of inclusion, where I am welcome. And no, you can’t just substitute “synagogue,” partially because of my vexed relationship with the religious practice of Judaism, but also because “synagogue” is about a specifically Jewish identity. The idea that you can use your place of worship as a synonym for an inclusive community comes from a place of privilege, of cultural dominance.
Yes, I have Christian friends. I have a friend getting her M.Div. right now, and I deeply respect her practice, just as I respect the role the black church has played in black freedom struggles, just as I respect liberation theology. In my general web of definitions and associations, though, these are golden needles in a generally murderous haystack. They are exceptions that don’t change my immediate feelings, or the history of Christianity toward people like me.
My first serious boyfriend was not Jewish. Once, over dinner, he mentioned my bisexuality to my grandfather, and I kicked him hard under the table. Afterwards I asked him “what the fuck were you thinking?” “I don’t know!” he answered. “We were making jokes about Christ and about gospel! I figured he wouldn’t care!” “We’re Jewish,” I pointed out. “Making jokes about Christian belief is not about being irreverent. It’s about being persecuted, marginalized.” A year later, that boyfriend lied in front of my face about my identity to his own grandfather. “Veronica’s family is of many different faiths,” he said. “So she’s still making up her mind.” Bullshit. My family is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jewish atheists for three generations. There’s no confusion at all. When I took him aside for a knock-down drag-out fight about this he said “You don’t understand! We don’t tell my grandfather anything that might upset him! We never told him when my cousin Bruce went into rehab!”
“I know you didn’t just compare my being Jewish to your cousin’s cocaine addiction,” I said. “So we’re just going to pretend that you didn’t say that.”
“My grandfather’s an old man! He shouldn’t have to worry about whether his grandchildren will be confirmed or [called to Torah]!” (He didn’t know what the correct phrase was, so there was a pointless digression here in the actual conversation.)
“Worried?” I said. “Worried? He should be so lucky.”
Sometime that same year, some scumbag shot up a Jewish daycare center. That, of course, is bad enough, but then I heard callers on talk radio saying things like well, I don’t support what he did, of course, but Jews have been parasites bringing down every civilization they’ve been a part of, so you can understand why blah blah blah…
It’s not really about personal prejudice. It’s about history. It’s about knowing that people like me have been murdered all over Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years by God-fearing mainstream Christians. “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat,” that’s the joke about Jewish holidays. But it’s not wrong. They tried to kill us. By definition, those of us here are the ones they didn’t get. But they didn’t fail, either, did they? How many of us have died?
For me, this influences the way I see the world and my responsibilities in it. I try and often fail to walk in the tradition of Jewish radicalism, of Emma Goldman and Mickey Schwerner and even my grandfather, who lost a job over his participation in CORE’s sit-ins and my parents, who met in SDS in Ann Arbor back in the day. And I try to do this not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because I am part of a people that know what it is to be on the wrong side of a pogrom. That know what it is to be the target of state-sponsored hatred and violence and exploitation. That means, as far as I am concerned, that I carry a special burden, the burden of their memory, the charge not to betray what they suffered and knew, and therefore to be on the side of those suffering and targeted today. This means I was open with my grandparents about my support for gay rights, even if I didn’t feel like discussing my own bisexuality with my grandfather-and as a result, one of my paternal grandparents’ best friends complimented my passion for justice, because whatever his own prejudices may have been, he could recognize what was happening. This means that when recognition and respect for trans women became an issue in my college’s Women’s and Gender Studies program a couple of years before I had tenure, I was outspoken and confrontational about advocating for trans women anyway, because my ancestors had never converted, even in the face of pogroms, and Andrew Goodman had gone down to Mississippi and died, and I wasn’t going to be scared into silence merely by a concern about tenure. I owed it to my people, and because of my Jewishness, “my people” here means Jews, it means Jewish radicals, and it means all oppressed and persecuted peoples.
It means that I’m not a patriot, because sure, I feel lucky that my great-grandparents ended up here rather than staying in Eastern Europe, where they would have been slaughtered, but I know that the US enacted immigration laws in the 1920s specifically to keep people like me out, to strand us in Eastern Europe, and then, twenty years later, when we were being slaughtered again, turned back boatloads of us to die. Am I supposed to feel grateful to that country? Proud of it? To say nothing of what it has done to American Indians, to African-Americans.
It means that I can’t support Israel, because it looks like an apartheid state to me, and of all peoples, we owe it to our ancestors to know better. But it means I can’t reject Israel, because 70 years ago, my people-and here I mean Jews-were being slaughtered all over Europe and nobody took us in. Am I just supposed to trust gentile countries that it won’t happen again? And it means that when I see those same countries turning their backs as refugees from Syria and Iran beg them to save their children, I see the parallels even if the leaders of those countries want to deny them.
It means that when I read about Muslims hearing about the Orlando massacre and praying the shooter wasn’t a Muslim, or when I hear about Trump’s brownshirt wannabes letting anti-Semitic vitriol loose on the internet, or hear him talk about keeping Muslims out, I recognize fascism and its effects when I see it.
This is me. Plenty of Jews feel differently, have different politics, even to the point of being reactionaries. The point isn’t that all Jews are radical leftists. The point is that the history and awareness of our identities of Jews impacts the way we see the world; the way we see politics is influenced in every conceivable way by being Jewish. It makes me radical. It may make somebody else liberal, somebody else conservative, somebody else reactionary. But it is all filtered through awareness of what it means to be Jewish.
I have a friend whose brother used to be in a white-supremacist gang, and who told him sure, we don’t like the blacks, but it’s the Jews we really loathe.
I also have a friend who told me when she gave birth to her daughter, she looked at the infant in her arms and realized, “Nobody is angry at you; you haven’t pissed anybody off. You’re completely new.”
I’ve never felt that. From the minute my twelve-month-old son was born, I’ve known there are people out there who want him dead, who would put the bullet through his head right in front of me. Not just him, but my godson and my goddaughter and my best friend and my mother and me. Not because any of us have pissed somebody off (though some of us have), but because we’re all Jews, and it has happened before, and not that long ago, and that means it could happen again. I worry about how to get my son to safety if I ever have to. And that awareness is part of being Jewish as well.
You know what else is part of being Jewish? A completely different intellectual history. The history of Jewish thought on, say, women, or marriage, or morality is different from the history of mainstream Western, which is to say Christian, thought. Our values are different. Screw this “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric, which is just the religious right’s attempt to make Jews forget that they’d gladly skewer us too, if they could, and enlist us in their attacks on LGBTQ people and Muslims. I never see “Judeo-Christian values” used to garner support for values I recognize as Jewish: “Due to our shared Judeo-Christian values and their emphasis on the importance of study and education, we must insist on full funding for public education, free for everybody, from pre-K through to college, and public libraries that are open 24/7, staffed by highly trained librarians!” Where is that call? Why is it always about how the gays are bad bad bad? Because I have Jewish parents and Jewish grandparents and Jewish great-grandparents and not once did any of them ever tell me jackshit about gay people marrying or trans people peeing, but every single one of them talked endlessly to me about studying hard and getting into a good college because that was what we Jews cared about.
I don’t have a problem with discussion of the Abrahamic religions together-certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share features and origins and scholars of religious studies know those better than I. What I mind is the attempt to portray Judaism as Christianity without Christ, as if sharing some religious texts erases the thousands of years of divergence and violence that came afterwards. What I mind is the attempt to subsume Jewishness in Christian dominance while estranging Islam.
My morality is not like Christianity’s, at least as I have been taught to understand it. I was never taught to turn the other cheek, unless you count the parental saying “if you ignore them, they’ll go away,” which, let’s face it, isn’t even true. I was never taught that the meek will inherit. When my uncle, maybe one of the kindest people I have ever met, told me about going to a counter-protest to a neo-nazi rally in Chicago, he told me that he wore his steel-toed boots, so that if the police lines broke and it came to fighting, he could crack skulls. Not when he was a young hothead. When he was a middle-aged, married father of two. My father took me aside and told me quite seriously once that I should never miss the chance to kill a nazi, because they’d do the same to me. Not when he was young. Just a few years ago. I don’t have a problem with either of these statements. Because fuck those people.
To be Jewish is to have a group history of trauma and persecution. It’s to have a culture that valorizes study and erudition. In the contemporary US, being Ashkenazi is to be white, at least in the places I’ve been, but still to know that your perspective is marginalized. Still to see yourself not represented in any positive way in the mainstream, especially if you’re female (fuck you, Woody Allen, I hated you long before your reprehensible actions were revealed), still to look for yourself in code (many black female nerds saw themselves in Hermione; fair enough. I read her as Jewish, myself). Being Jewish is not just about religious practice, and it’s not just about a structure of morality. It’s about having a particular history and a particular culture (or one of many, as I note above) that has developed in response to that history.
And so is being Christian. Because just as white supremacy can make us whites think that whiteness is default, normal, the unmarked state, just as patriarchy can make men think that they are the standard model of human being, so can Christian dominance make gentiles think that Christianity is just a matter of religious belief, or of the structure of one’s morality. But Christians too carry the burden of history, and a big part of that is violent anti-semitism. They have to come to terms with that, and they can’t do it if they try to erase the differences that mark us and how we experience the world.