Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2010-03-02 09:59 am
allchildren) wrote2010-03-02 09:59 am
Entry tags:
where we sat down
[Note: I locked this a few days after posting, due to anxiety, but since issues of Jewish identity and Christian privilege are coming back up in a wider conversation, it seemed like only good faith to unlock so if I participate in that conversation, people know where I'm coming from. As mentioned in the endnote, there are some things I said badly which I'm unhappy with, but as ever, this journal is a work in progress. Please do not link in comms.]
I wrote most of this a while back; it seems like time to post.
I've spent a lot of the last fourteen months thinking about race and how I understand and process it. Integral to that is analyzing my identity as a person who is both white and (~ethnically~) Jewish. The Jewish diaspora is not a new topic. But as I inspect it I realize there are less literal diasporas at play as well: the loss of religion, the loss of culture, to the point where sometimes I feel uncomfortable claiming the word at all. And it's a lot of complex interconnected thoughts, and after fourteen months (after twenty six years) I still don't feel it synthesized to the point where I can make strong conclusions. So instead of trying to, I just want to record some memories and moments and people that have been notable to my journey. This is very incomplete, but most narratives are I think.
I. Birthright
What I will struggle to communicate my entire life to most people around me is that I am Jewish and it has absolutely nothing to do with religion. What I circumlocute around explaining is the understanding I form somehow (I don't know how; my dad never talks about these things; maybe it was my mother who told me I was Jewish) as a small child:
My mother's family is Irish Catholic; she was Catholic for 20-odd years; she knows all the words, in English and in Latin. My father's family is Jewish; no holidays, no Hebrew, no matzoh. And never once in my childhood (mother's parents still devotedly Catholic; family lore and sister-reunions full of stern Irish-named nuns) does it ever occur to me that I am Catholic. Clearly, that is a religion, which I don't know much about and have never practiced. Clearly, I am Jewish.
Almost, but not quite, the same way that I'm Irish.
The ways are not the same because being Irish is a big deal. I'm the only grandchild out of eleven with indisputably red hair, see, and my cousin who was born on St. Patrick's Day has Erin for a middle name. (Not until much later will I learn that my thick curls and my first name tell more people about the other side of my heritage than the dark auburn my mother's family claims as Irish.) My grandpa has a mirrored Guinness map of Ireland on the wall of his den, with clan names in lieu of place names. Our name's up there. There are clovers on all the family party signs. I know all about being Irish. My mother's family makes sure I do.
Being Jewish, however, is a blank. If I thought about it, which at that age I don't think I did. TV and books taught me that saying "I'm Jewish" around holidays is important, though the only Jewish holiday I know about is Hanukkah (as I would have spelled it then) and my Christmas and Easter are just as tree-and-bunny-filled as the next kid's. I don't know anybody else who's Jewish, so it feels special. And it (like my red hair, like my temper, like my freckles) is a wedge:
S-amus draws tanks and swastikas and shows them to me and I know enough to feel offended and angry and threatened. He tells me stories about Hitler using Jewish skin for lampshades. Because my dad, his sister, his mother haven't given me anything about being Jewish, haven't acted like family at all, and haven't made anything into a big deal, except that not so long ago some Germans called Nazis killed millions and millions of us (I read Number the Stars and Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself; I learn about Nazis and sitting shivah), and I have something to fear.
My dad teaches me to mistrust Germans (something I take it upon myself to unlearn as a teenager) and experience teaches me to hate visits to Bubbie (as I would have spelled it then). She and my dad only ever argue bitterly about Bill Clinton and Israel; later I will find out that when my dad married a goy she wrote poison pen letters and called my mother a sow's ear. Though she lives just a mile or so away, months and months often go by without us going to see her.
II. K-va
K-va is my best friend and she is the only person I know who is also Jewish. In the same way as me, even: her mother is Catholic, and her father is a Jew. The only time I will ever attend a mass that isn't attached to a maternal family funeral or wedding is with her and her parents; K-va and her mother go up to take communion while her dad and I stay sitting and look around.
I read a lot (One More River and Fitting In are both about Canadian Jewish girls in the sixties, and introduce me to Zionism, the Six Day War, and the term "Christ killers") and I've watched countless hours of Mysteries of the Bible and Ancient Mysteries on A&E and I'm beginning to discover that I know more Biblical stories than any of my friends other that L-ura, the Mormon. I know some things about the ancient Hebrews, too. The Catholics of my generation don't seem to know a thing, not like my mother and her sisters. I am still, whenever it can be worked into conversation, a Jew. I am uninterested in the fact that I have never attended a Jewish religious ceremony in my life.
III. K-m
K-m is my first really really close friend online; she's also the first one I ever meet in person, a few months after my sister leaves her UC for a year abroad in Israel. I am, as always, a Jew, and we probably bond over her being one too. Early in our brief but exciting bestfriendship, she writes me a handwritten letter that includes references to "temple" and the community there. She says that her dad is an agnostic Jew and wonders if that's a contradiction; I sure as hell hope not.
I am thirteen and am struck with the realization that Jewish communities don't just exist in fictional books and on kibbutzim on the other side of the world. I've said on occasion that I envied L-ura her faith; maybe it is occurring to me for the first time that I could have really had one of my own.
My sister sends me a Steve's Pack and a silver necklace with my name spelled in Hebrew (רחל) that I will wear constantly for the next four or five years. I will be very upset when I lose that necklace -- I only take it off for a moment to try on the folkart pendant of Our Lady of Guadalupe my sister sends me from Chicago, but it disappears just that fast. I will miss strangers who knew the secret code addressing me by name.
IV. Songs
Tor- (yep, one Catholic parent) has a Christmas party that falls on the first day of Chanukah. She and her brother know all the words to the menorah-lighting prayer and sing it. I'm so jealous.
I babysit for El-ana and she shows me her family tree: rabbi, rabbi, rabbi, rabbi. Every night when I put her to bed she sings shema.
Before Tor- and El-ana I don't think I knew that Hebrew prayers were sung. I will get an earful the next year when, at sixteen and eleven months, I attend my first ever Jewish religious ceremony -- the Mexico City bar mitzvah of the eleventh grandchild, son of one of my mother's sisters, who not only also married a Jew, but unlike my mother actually converted to do so. This branch of my Irish Catholic family are the only practicing Jews I am related to (balance maintains -- my dad's sister married two consecutive Irish men). As far as I know, I mean -- my sister, who came to Mexico with me, is two years back from Israel, and now wears a Star of David earring and knows those prayers. But nobody in the family wants to ask her about her beliefs, and I still think that being religious means believing in God as we were never raised to do. In a couple years she'll offend my mother by rejecting her wishes for a Merry Christmas, and by then she and I aren't speaking, so what do I know?
V. Ari-l
Knowing her will be the single most important friendship of my life, and so our relationship is a turning point for all things. In this small thing: we are of a tribe; so if there is a Tribe, for the first time I know I am part of it.
Her mother is A Jewish Mother (her father, of course, of Christian origins). My bubbe hates everybody, especially her son; I had no idea this stereotype existed. But suddenly I have A Jewish Mother, who looks superficially much more like me than my actual mother. More than one person will mistake Ari-l and I for actual sisters. Ari-l is more experienced in the ways of the religion and the culture than I, but she is secular enough that I am not intimidated and intellectual enough that she's thought about it. That we can think about it together. She is the first person to know what my kind of Jewish means, someone in my corner when our ostentatiously Jewish classmates Mir- and Siv-n talk about their families in Israel. We are almost adults.
(In AP US History our teacher explains the concept of the Aryan race to somebody who had the luxury of never knowing. We all turn and look at the only blue-eyed blonde in the room: Ari-l.)
My circle of acquaintances grows wider, now that I'm older: in drama class a stylish underclassman has attached herself to me and jokes about her mother being a shikseh; in the scene (I spend my weekends at shows) young L-zi has had a religious upbringing and takes delight in being the nucleus of a pretend clique: The Jew Crew. My therapist, my trig tutor: both Jewish. Jewishness had once been about isolation for me. Now it is a bond, and nobody questions my lack of religion.
VI. N-vah
Predictably, adulthood and the internet is where my acquaintances explode; relationships and discoveries are no longer linear. So it is before I become friends with Ari-l that I first meet N-vah online, and after we stop being friends that N-vah, who is Orthodox, makes me realize that in more exacting and observant eyes I am no Jew at all. It's such a sad and frightening thought. Later Ari-l and I will reunite, better than ever; later N-vah and I will lose each other to the internet for years, and later still refriend.
I am not a child anymore and so there is no order to anything:
- in college I take philosophy and religion and history classes and am struck with the understanding that without exposure to the faith or wider culture, I still hold most of its principles
- my bubbe agrees: she says I am very Jewish
- I am an atheist, an atheist, an atheist at last!
- I am exploring the world of beliefs. I write against religion, the institution of it. A fairweather friend comes out of the closet as badweather Christian and angrily asks how I would feel if she insulted Moses. LOLOL.
- a friend who in the two years I have known her used to say "I think my grandfather was Jewish" and "I don't think Israel has a right to call itself a state" abruptly becomes, herself, Jewish; abruptly signs up for Birthright Israel. I can't explain this feeling of invasion, this feeling of her taking what isn't hers. I don't have the word "appropriation," but if there is anything I have learned in my own journey, it is the importance of self-definition. One time she will say pointedly that she is as Jewish as I am. I bristle but do not disagree.
- year after year, Ari-l and I discuss making our own Birthright trip. Year after year, we don't go.
VII. Now
I taught myself to feel at home in nebulous secularism, to focus on the bond between all who are making it up as we go along, picking and choosing what we will keep, rallying behind ideas that mean something different to each and every one of us. But I am still lonely. I have friends now who are observant; I have friends now who are converting.
It's not that I'm no longer certain of what I am and how I identify; I know more than ever. And I know too that atheism is not the barrier I once thought it was. But as the cliche goes, I am mostly just more aware of what I lack, what traditions I am not part of, what knowledge others have learned, my great disconnect. I have identified where I might go. I could -- but I can't, not now. It's not something I wish to ape or approximate. It'll happen when it happens, if ever that time comes. There is a yearning still, as there has always been: it sounds pat, but there's my diaspora.
eta 3/3/10: I feel like I made a few poor word choices/omissions here which may have compromised my message from my intent, starting with the intro (as this quickly became not about ethnicity at all, but the search for community) and extending through the end. I apologize for that, and would be happy to engage on those points, but I think it's best to leave the original text intact -- in any case, the point is not to question anybody else's Jewish identity, but merely examine my own.
I wrote most of this a while back; it seems like time to post.
I've spent a lot of the last fourteen months thinking about race and how I understand and process it. Integral to that is analyzing my identity as a person who is both white and (~ethnically~) Jewish. The Jewish diaspora is not a new topic. But as I inspect it I realize there are less literal diasporas at play as well: the loss of religion, the loss of culture, to the point where sometimes I feel uncomfortable claiming the word at all. And it's a lot of complex interconnected thoughts, and after fourteen months (after twenty six years) I still don't feel it synthesized to the point where I can make strong conclusions. So instead of trying to, I just want to record some memories and moments and people that have been notable to my journey. This is very incomplete, but most narratives are I think.
I. Birthright
What I will struggle to communicate my entire life to most people around me is that I am Jewish and it has absolutely nothing to do with religion. What I circumlocute around explaining is the understanding I form somehow (I don't know how; my dad never talks about these things; maybe it was my mother who told me I was Jewish) as a small child:
My mother's family is Irish Catholic; she was Catholic for 20-odd years; she knows all the words, in English and in Latin. My father's family is Jewish; no holidays, no Hebrew, no matzoh. And never once in my childhood (mother's parents still devotedly Catholic; family lore and sister-reunions full of stern Irish-named nuns) does it ever occur to me that I am Catholic. Clearly, that is a religion, which I don't know much about and have never practiced. Clearly, I am Jewish.
Almost, but not quite, the same way that I'm Irish.
The ways are not the same because being Irish is a big deal. I'm the only grandchild out of eleven with indisputably red hair, see, and my cousin who was born on St. Patrick's Day has Erin for a middle name. (Not until much later will I learn that my thick curls and my first name tell more people about the other side of my heritage than the dark auburn my mother's family claims as Irish.) My grandpa has a mirrored Guinness map of Ireland on the wall of his den, with clan names in lieu of place names. Our name's up there. There are clovers on all the family party signs. I know all about being Irish. My mother's family makes sure I do.
Being Jewish, however, is a blank. If I thought about it, which at that age I don't think I did. TV and books taught me that saying "I'm Jewish" around holidays is important, though the only Jewish holiday I know about is Hanukkah (as I would have spelled it then) and my Christmas and Easter are just as tree-and-bunny-filled as the next kid's. I don't know anybody else who's Jewish, so it feels special. And it (like my red hair, like my temper, like my freckles) is a wedge:
S-amus draws tanks and swastikas and shows them to me and I know enough to feel offended and angry and threatened. He tells me stories about Hitler using Jewish skin for lampshades. Because my dad, his sister, his mother haven't given me anything about being Jewish, haven't acted like family at all, and haven't made anything into a big deal, except that not so long ago some Germans called Nazis killed millions and millions of us (I read Number the Stars and Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself; I learn about Nazis and sitting shivah), and I have something to fear.
My dad teaches me to mistrust Germans (something I take it upon myself to unlearn as a teenager) and experience teaches me to hate visits to Bubbie (as I would have spelled it then). She and my dad only ever argue bitterly about Bill Clinton and Israel; later I will find out that when my dad married a goy she wrote poison pen letters and called my mother a sow's ear. Though she lives just a mile or so away, months and months often go by without us going to see her.
II. K-va
K-va is my best friend and she is the only person I know who is also Jewish. In the same way as me, even: her mother is Catholic, and her father is a Jew. The only time I will ever attend a mass that isn't attached to a maternal family funeral or wedding is with her and her parents; K-va and her mother go up to take communion while her dad and I stay sitting and look around.
I read a lot (One More River and Fitting In are both about Canadian Jewish girls in the sixties, and introduce me to Zionism, the Six Day War, and the term "Christ killers") and I've watched countless hours of Mysteries of the Bible and Ancient Mysteries on A&E and I'm beginning to discover that I know more Biblical stories than any of my friends other that L-ura, the Mormon. I know some things about the ancient Hebrews, too. The Catholics of my generation don't seem to know a thing, not like my mother and her sisters. I am still, whenever it can be worked into conversation, a Jew. I am uninterested in the fact that I have never attended a Jewish religious ceremony in my life.
III. K-m
K-m is my first really really close friend online; she's also the first one I ever meet in person, a few months after my sister leaves her UC for a year abroad in Israel. I am, as always, a Jew, and we probably bond over her being one too. Early in our brief but exciting bestfriendship, she writes me a handwritten letter that includes references to "temple" and the community there. She says that her dad is an agnostic Jew and wonders if that's a contradiction; I sure as hell hope not.
I am thirteen and am struck with the realization that Jewish communities don't just exist in fictional books and on kibbutzim on the other side of the world. I've said on occasion that I envied L-ura her faith; maybe it is occurring to me for the first time that I could have really had one of my own.
My sister sends me a Steve's Pack and a silver necklace with my name spelled in Hebrew (רחל) that I will wear constantly for the next four or five years. I will be very upset when I lose that necklace -- I only take it off for a moment to try on the folkart pendant of Our Lady of Guadalupe my sister sends me from Chicago, but it disappears just that fast. I will miss strangers who knew the secret code addressing me by name.
IV. Songs
Tor- (yep, one Catholic parent) has a Christmas party that falls on the first day of Chanukah. She and her brother know all the words to the menorah-lighting prayer and sing it. I'm so jealous.
I babysit for El-ana and she shows me her family tree: rabbi, rabbi, rabbi, rabbi. Every night when I put her to bed she sings shema.
Before Tor- and El-ana I don't think I knew that Hebrew prayers were sung. I will get an earful the next year when, at sixteen and eleven months, I attend my first ever Jewish religious ceremony -- the Mexico City bar mitzvah of the eleventh grandchild, son of one of my mother's sisters, who not only also married a Jew, but unlike my mother actually converted to do so. This branch of my Irish Catholic family are the only practicing Jews I am related to (balance maintains -- my dad's sister married two consecutive Irish men). As far as I know, I mean -- my sister, who came to Mexico with me, is two years back from Israel, and now wears a Star of David earring and knows those prayers. But nobody in the family wants to ask her about her beliefs, and I still think that being religious means believing in God as we were never raised to do. In a couple years she'll offend my mother by rejecting her wishes for a Merry Christmas, and by then she and I aren't speaking, so what do I know?
V. Ari-l
Knowing her will be the single most important friendship of my life, and so our relationship is a turning point for all things. In this small thing: we are of a tribe; so if there is a Tribe, for the first time I know I am part of it.
Her mother is A Jewish Mother (her father, of course, of Christian origins). My bubbe hates everybody, especially her son; I had no idea this stereotype existed. But suddenly I have A Jewish Mother, who looks superficially much more like me than my actual mother. More than one person will mistake Ari-l and I for actual sisters. Ari-l is more experienced in the ways of the religion and the culture than I, but she is secular enough that I am not intimidated and intellectual enough that she's thought about it. That we can think about it together. She is the first person to know what my kind of Jewish means, someone in my corner when our ostentatiously Jewish classmates Mir- and Siv-n talk about their families in Israel. We are almost adults.
(In AP US History our teacher explains the concept of the Aryan race to somebody who had the luxury of never knowing. We all turn and look at the only blue-eyed blonde in the room: Ari-l.)
My circle of acquaintances grows wider, now that I'm older: in drama class a stylish underclassman has attached herself to me and jokes about her mother being a shikseh; in the scene (I spend my weekends at shows) young L-zi has had a religious upbringing and takes delight in being the nucleus of a pretend clique: The Jew Crew. My therapist, my trig tutor: both Jewish. Jewishness had once been about isolation for me. Now it is a bond, and nobody questions my lack of religion.
VI. N-vah
Predictably, adulthood and the internet is where my acquaintances explode; relationships and discoveries are no longer linear. So it is before I become friends with Ari-l that I first meet N-vah online, and after we stop being friends that N-vah, who is Orthodox, makes me realize that in more exacting and observant eyes I am no Jew at all. It's such a sad and frightening thought. Later Ari-l and I will reunite, better than ever; later N-vah and I will lose each other to the internet for years, and later still refriend.
I am not a child anymore and so there is no order to anything:
- in college I take philosophy and religion and history classes and am struck with the understanding that without exposure to the faith or wider culture, I still hold most of its principles
- my bubbe agrees: she says I am very Jewish
- I am an atheist, an atheist, an atheist at last!
- I am exploring the world of beliefs. I write against religion, the institution of it. A fairweather friend comes out of the closet as badweather Christian and angrily asks how I would feel if she insulted Moses. LOLOL.
- a friend who in the two years I have known her used to say "I think my grandfather was Jewish" and "I don't think Israel has a right to call itself a state" abruptly becomes, herself, Jewish; abruptly signs up for Birthright Israel. I can't explain this feeling of invasion, this feeling of her taking what isn't hers. I don't have the word "appropriation," but if there is anything I have learned in my own journey, it is the importance of self-definition. One time she will say pointedly that she is as Jewish as I am. I bristle but do not disagree.
- year after year, Ari-l and I discuss making our own Birthright trip. Year after year, we don't go.
VII. Now
I taught myself to feel at home in nebulous secularism, to focus on the bond between all who are making it up as we go along, picking and choosing what we will keep, rallying behind ideas that mean something different to each and every one of us. But I am still lonely. I have friends now who are observant; I have friends now who are converting.
It's not that I'm no longer certain of what I am and how I identify; I know more than ever. And I know too that atheism is not the barrier I once thought it was. But as the cliche goes, I am mostly just more aware of what I lack, what traditions I am not part of, what knowledge others have learned, my great disconnect. I have identified where I might go. I could -- but I can't, not now. It's not something I wish to ape or approximate. It'll happen when it happens, if ever that time comes. There is a yearning still, as there has always been: it sounds pat, but there's my diaspora.
eta 3/3/10: I feel like I made a few poor word choices/omissions here which may have compromised my message from my intent, starting with the intro (as this quickly became not about ethnicity at all, but the search for community) and extending through the end. I apologize for that, and would be happy to engage on those points, but I think it's best to leave the original text intact -- in any case, the point is not to question anybody else's Jewish identity, but merely examine my own.
no subject
This isn't my personal Judaism but it's my father's and my cousins' and many, many of my friends'. Thank you for writing this. ♥, diasporado.
no subject
♥
no subject