This title is partly a joke; I have obviously been Jewish my whole life. But apart from attending a handful of bat and bar mitzvahs in 7th grade, have I ever set foot in a temple? Studied the torah? Lit candles and said a prayer?
I got into a wonderful and surprising conversation last week with my older brother, who takes issue with this line of thinking - and particularly the phrase on my website that reads: “I wasn’t raised Jewish.” He believes that this phrase perpetuates the troublesome aspects of the complex debate that Judaism is an ethnoreligion, and the only way to be Jewish is to also practice Judaism. But what about the DNA? Fifty percent Ashkenazi Jew! He argued that I wouldn’t say, for example, “I wasn’t raised German” - I just would be German, and my experience would count as part of the German experience, no matter what.
Although I disagree with him slightly, I also believe in the power of semantics to shift thinking and cultural narrative, so I can appreciate that my words brought up a demand for more nuance.
So let’s back up from the religious aspects - beyond not going to Hebrew school or studying Judaism, have I engaged with being Jewish in a cultural way? Memorized folktales, adopted the occasional Yiddish from my mom’s vocabulary, eaten challah/lox/hamantaschen/etc, or personally identified with Jewish news, stories, pop-culture moments?
Not really, no, and certainly not since I was a small child, listening to a Joel ben Izzy cassette tape from the back seat of our minivan (I can only remember one story), or that one year I can hardly remember when I spun a dreidel at Hanukkah (we tried the holiday once, it didn’t stick).
But that wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t want to. It’s just that, growing up, being Jewish felt like my mom’s past, and one that was complicated by her adult distaste for the darker side of organized religion as a whole. There was a fracture between the stories of her Jewish upbringing that the concept that it carried forward into her life with my non-Jewish dad, my brother, and myself. Any time she did bring up something related to being Jewish - say, the memorable New Year’s Eve when she decided we would all sit down to watch Fiddler on the Roof - our family reaction would made her feel like she was being made fun of.
So what I mean, beyond even any religious studies, is that I was not raised to believe that a Jewish identity is one I could also claim. This was helped along by some external forces, too. I remember when I was in middle school, I auditioned to be in the ensemble of the local high school production of, you guessed it, Fiddler on the Roof. The drama teacher said she loved me, but told me outright that she couldn’t cast me because I looked…well, apparently “not Jewish.”
Continually embarrassed by the combination of my dearth of knowledge and my seemingly problematic “non-Jewish” appearance, it’s hardly surprising then that I’d grow to carefully distance myself from my Jewish roots out of a strange idea of respect, not wanting to seem appropriative or pretending to be a part of the tribe.
Fascinatingly, it seems the three years my brother has on me may have bought him more time when my mom was experimenting with Jewish elements in our young lives - he swears we did Hanukkah for multiple years, has memories of mom making cottage cheese latkes, and cites Joel ben Izzy as a formative voice in his own career as a filmmaker. My mom remembers a story from his preschool teachers in which, after a holiday lesson in class, they asked if anyone was Jewish and his little hand immediately and proudly shot into the air. He also apparently went on Birthright in 2014, something I had blacked out entirely (in my defense, it was the same year I graduated college, and the post-academic world shocked me). He also looks more like my mom’s side of the family - we didn’t get into that in our conversation, but I wonder if it helped him feel more belonging than I did?
In any event, this is the cumulative experience behind my opinion that “I wasn’t raised Jewish.” And, for what it’s worth, my mom agrees with me on that. But, to my brother’s credit as well, he is right in sussing out the feeling I had that I wasn’t allowed to explore my identity. It is a new revelation to me that when someone asks if I’m Jewish, I don’t have to say, “well, my mom is Jewish, so technically, but, you know, I wasn’t blah blah blah, you know, Jew-ISH, hahaha….” I could, potentially, just answer: “Yes. I am Jewish.”
Alright, so, with that lengthy prologue in mind, what happened last week for me to call it my First Week Being Jewish? Three main things:
1) My Soul Journey: Intro to Judaism class began.
2) I attended my first ever Shabbat service.
3) My highly-anticipated Hanukkah Barbie arrived in the mail.
And I really want to write about them, but in my never-ending deference to my mother, who continually cites articles as being “just way too long,” I’m going to end this journal entry here. To be continued in My First Week Being Jewish: Acts 1 & 2!