Three years ago, I went to a jewelry store in Jerusalem and bought a tiny star of David pendant for 20 shekels - about five dollars. I was on a Birthright trip (an educational tour group for young Jews, in this case for 20 somethings), and a lot of us were buying and wearing silver stars of David, Chai charms, and Hamsa hands. I think it was partly because they were just very, very plentiful, and there’s something nice about having a Jewish symbol that you procured a mere three or four miles from the temple mount. I think it was also because the Birthright propaganda was working on us, despite our best efforts to stay level-headed. I bought the star thinking that I’d wear it occasionally; that it would go into my regular necklace rotation. I’d wanted one for awhile.
I didn’t wear it much on the trip - I didn’t want to seem brainwashed, and the rather smarmy motives behind the Birthright program were manifesting more and more each day - but when I got home, I took the necklace for a test run when I attended a poetry reading by my cousin, a Yiddish translator. I was surprised by how nervous I felt putting it on, and was blindsided by how uncomfortable I felt wearing it. All throughout the event, I couldn’t shake the feeling that relatives and other guests were talking about me, shrugging their shoulders, shaking their heads. I was aware that the star of David is usually considered a religious symbol, and even though it isn’t an inherently religious symbol, I was certain that everyone thought I was some sort of fanatic.
…even if they could somehow tell I was wearing it as a cultural symbol. Even if they themselves were religious.
I think part of my discomfort came from feeling like I was wearing the tee-shirt of the band whose concert I was currently at. Everyone there was Jewish; I wasn’t sure who exactly I was alerting to the fact of my identity. Nevertheless, I tried wearing it a couple more times in non-Jewish settings, but felt equally uncomfortable. It finally came to rest in my jewelry box, silently accruing tarnish.
Recently, I’ve begun examining why it’s been so hard for me to wear it. Yeah, partly it’s the religious thing; religious jewelry has become permanently associated, in my mind, with the crosses the Christian girls in my high school would wear. It’s become unfairly associated with dorkiness and awkwardness, self-righteous virgins, and the fundamentalists who ostracized everyone else. It’s become unfairly associated with the Pagans I knew in college who thought they could see ghosts and sense people’s emotions and control the weather by chanting. Plus, since there’s no way for people to tell that I’m not religious, I know that as long as the boundaries between Judaism and Jewishness - faith and culture, religion and secularism, belief and skepticism - are blurred, I’ll always misrepresent myself a little.
But is being mistaken for a religious person really what I’m afraid of? Maybe there are other forces at work here, deeper than a conundrum over whether to hang a bauble from my neck.
There’s Israel, for instance. I hate the thought of other leftists seeing the star and distrusting me, wondering if I’m one of them or an Israel apologist, one of those infuriating pseudo-progressives with the one blind spot they refuse to examine. But why does Jewish pride seem so intimately connected with hatred for Palestine? Have right-wing Jews really hijacked the discussion so successfully? Why can’t people learn that I’m Jewish without assuming that I’m racist? Is it because other pro-Palestine Jews are keeping their Jewishness and their progressivism separate? Or am I just projecting again?
But that’s not entirely it, either.
There’s the guy who came up to me in Paris a few months before I went to Israel. He was visibly angry (although I’d seen him before and he was a pretty gruff guy to begin with; other people who had dealt with him assured me he was just crazy). He started asking me if I was Jewish, each reiteration of the question punctuated like an accusation. I was too stunned to answer. A friend of mine assured me that I didn’t have to say anything, and the man gave up after a minute or two. I wasn’t yet aware of the widespread antisemitism in Europe, so I was naive enough to wonder if maybe he wanted to conscript me as an ally to bash Palestine; later, though, when I’d had time to process the encounter, it became obvious that he was out to pick on Jews in general.
It took me years to connect that incident to my reluctance to wear a Jewish symbol (not to mention the urge to lock my door when I put out my menorah each Hanukkah). If I’m put into such an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situation just from having curly brown hair, how much more will I put myself at risk if I walk around advertising my Jewishness? Am I prepared to take on more random opponents? I’m reminded of the stories I’ve heard about Jewish activists who show up at anti-racist rallies only to be blamed for the existence of poverty (Wisenberg 54-55, Nepon 53). I’m reminded of the time a friend of mine made an offhand comment about how evil Jews are, and after I reminded her I was half Jewish, said, “Well, then, half of you is all right!”
But even that’s not really it. Because, while those incidents scare me, they also give me a thrill of angry pride.
Here’s what’s disturbing: I’m afraid of being perceived as someone who likes being Jewish. I think about my students knowing that I want them to know I’m a Jew, and I cringe. Why? Have stereotypes managed to instill in me a self-hate so deep that I can’t even perceive it? Lately I’ve been thinking about Kyle from South Park - how for years I’ve thought of him as a positive Jewish character because he goes against stereotypes. But I only recently thought to question why those stereotypes - the realistic ones, that is - are considered bad. What exactly is wrong with a Brooklyn accent or frizzy hair? Why is Kyle’s most attractive feature his ability to pass for a gentile? And why do I feel like overt Jewishness can only be associated with older generations, that I have no way to express it and still be young and hip and cutting edge? Why do I have this perception that young Jews don’t care that they’re Jewish, even though I can think of several counterexamples off the top of my head?
Does my fear of performing as a Jew come from my father and grandparents’ aversion to Judaism, as if it were an Old World artifact to be casually dismissed? Or my doubts about whether my Jewish relatives, knowing my mother isn’t Jewish, consider me legitimate? Or my fear that my mother and sister see me as the other, the daughter who was snatched up by the crazies and drifted away from her Swedish Protestant roots? Does it come from my parents’ divorce? Or lingering doubts left over from fights with my Jewish classmates in college - none of whom were conservative or orthodox - who just couldn’t stress enough that half-Jews aren’t really Jews?
Maybe it comes from my fear that, instead of claiming an identity that’s rightfully mine, I’m merely posturing. Sure, my father and sister and I did some Jewish stuff when I was a kid, but I was never bat mitzvahed, didn’t learn the Hebrew alphabet until grad school, and gathered most of my knowledge about Ashkenazi culture piecemeal as I grew up. Is culture still culture if you don’t learn it from your parents? Why can’t I get over the fact that none of my fully Jewish friends seem to feel this need to express their identity visually? I don’t want to be seen as overcompensating, as overzealous.
And how come even writing about this makes me so uncomfortable? Why can’t I shake the feeling that I want to be Jewish just because I want to be something other than your average White American, that my Jewish half has to be in conflict with my gentile half? How come, whenever something feels real, my strongest impulse is to assume it’s fake?
And all this over a five dollar pendant.
Oh, I’ve been wearing it - maybe you suspected that. But I have a feeling these issues aren’t going away any time soon.
In The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz mentions her “loud proud Jewish energy” (9). It took me a second to figure out why the phrase sounded so weird. It was because I’d never thought to connect myself to that energy. I never truly thought I belonged there.
Sources cited:
Wisenberg, S.L. Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Nepon, Emily. Review of The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere. Make/Shift Magazine Fall/Winter 2007-2008. 53.
Rosenblum, April. The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Antisemitism Part of All of Our Movements. Self published, 2007. www.thepast.info.
