On Jewish Identity

[gaudior]

The other night, I dreamed that someone (I think thespooniest, actually) was telling me I hadn't updated my journal with anything meaningful in way too long. Which is accurate. So, therefore:

Last Friday, as my (you know that stage where you know someone, but s/he's not quite a friend yet, but s/he definitely could be and probably will be when you know him/her better? She's like that.) K and I drove home from field placement, she brought up something she had been wondering about. In our class's many discussions of race, one of our classmates had frequently argued that as a Jew, he wasn't white. This puzzled her, because he certainly looks white (he doesn't even "look Jewish"), and he'd occasionally mention that he had white male privilege. So, she asked, what's going on?



Jews, I explained, have a long history of being Everyone's Favorite Group to Hate in Europe. Oh, there were certainly other groups who were treated badly, but when I went to Sunday School (I was Reform. I don't think I ever went to Saturday morning services in my entire childhood until my Bat Mitzvah, but I was sent to get a Jewish Education one day a week from the ages of about six to thirteen), the impression we got was certainly that Jews got it most and worst. We learned about pogroms, exiles and blood libel in detail-- spent an entire year studying the Holocaust. Jews, we were taught, have always struggled on against persecution, and have never really been safe anywhere. That's why Isreal is so crucial-- it's the first country that we can't get kicked out of, and so would be our safe haven if America ever turns against us.

Which is interesting because America seems, at the moment, extremely unlikely to do so. True, when the first waves of Jewish immigrants came to the country, there was a fair amount of discrimination. My grandmother told stories about want ads making it clear (usually through questions about "regular church attendance") that Jews were not wanted, and my grandfather told about hitting a man ranting on a streetcorner about how Hitler was right. There's a movie (I wish I remembered the title), sort of a precurser to "Black Like Me," about a Gentile reporter who posed as a Jew for six weeks just to see what all the discrimination was like. But even then, the persecution was just not as bad as it had been in Europe at its worst. There were, as far as I know, no massacres of American Jews. And time went on, and Jews took advantage of the educational system, and gained power and prestige and acceptance. Jews were neither a threat to the Christian majority nor sufficiently different to be scapegoats (especially as Reform and Conservative Jews shaved their beards, moved out of the Jewish neighborhoods, and, at least on the part of Reform Jews, started eating cheeseburgers and working on Saturdays and being pretty much indistinguishable from non-Jews), and other groups came to the prejudice-forefront, and anti-Semitism... kind of melted away. I'm sure that it depends on where you are, but for me, growing up in Shorewood, WI, I never faced any anti-Semitism of any kind. No-one has ever in my life called me a "kike," or a "dirty Jew," or a "Christ-killer." No-one has set fire to my synagogue or even spray-painted it. The closest I have ever, ever gotten to prejudice was my step-mother's friend earnestly informing me that "Judaism is an ancient and beautiful religion!" As victimization goes, that just doesn't cut it.

And yet, in the back of my head is the firm conviction that, as a Jew, I am a member of an oppressed minority. Despite never having personally faced any oppression of any kind based on the religion of my birth, I still remember the lessons to me taught by Sunday school teacher and family stories and hundreds and hundreds of Jewish jokes about outwitting Cossacks and Nazis and country-club owners, and those lessons teach me that Jews are just as hated as Blacks or Arabs or any other group.

The problem with this, I think, is that some Jews hold onto the idea of ourselves as victims, or at very least potential victims, and so tend to think of ourselves as a minority. This is obviously true in terms of numbers (2% of the population last time I checked), and it often gives Jews a splendid sort of solidarity with oppressed peoples and makes us do things like be very involved in the Civil Rights movement. However, I think it also gives us a somewhat unrealistic idea of what oppression actually is. I don't have statistics for this, but my impression is that Jews are strongly divided on affirmative action, with some of affirmative action's strongest opponents being Jewish. I suspect that this has much to do with said people saying, "Look, my ancestors were discriminated against-- Jews are hated, too-- but we got over it through hard work. Why can't you?" The answer to which is, of course, that hatred against Jews in this country was just not as bad, historically, as hatred against Jews in other countries or hatred against other groups here. Here, Jews have not been massacred, enslaved, imprisoned, systematically raped and beaten, etc. We've had some nastiness here, definitely, but nothing as bad as we talk about.

And we do talk about it, too. As soon as any discussion of race and discrimination comes up, Jews will talk about our experiences as Jews, and how left out we feel when all the other kids have Christmas trees. In fact, in my experience (particularly this semester), Jews will talk more about our discrimination than members of other groups. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that if people have had really bad experiences in the past, they tend to want to keep that from happening again. Someone who is talking to members of other groups about his/her past experiences with discrimination is running the risk that one of the people to whom s/he is talking will have precisely the prejudices s/he is talking about, and will try to hurt him/her again just as s/he has been hurt before. If, like me, one hasn't had many bad experiences, that possibility doesn't seem that scary, so I'm pretty comfortable talking at length. If one has been hurt that way, I could see being more reluctant to speak up. My (see above re: almost friends) M is a good example of this. She and I are both queer, but I came out in a very supportive environment and time, and have never had that much trouble from it (though certainly more than I have from being Jewish). However, she's about fifteen years older than me, much more butch (there is no mistaking her on sight for a straight woman), and grew up on a rural sheep farm. I talk about being queer all the time at school-- I mention my wife in the first or second conversation, and I loved talking about things from "the queer perspective" in class when issues of sexual orientation and gender came up. She barely mentions it until you get to know her well enough to talk about families and she mentions that her son and daughter are actually the biological children of her partner from her partner's previous marriage. Now, much of this undoubtedly has to do with personality-- but she's fairly outspoken about other things. So I think a great deal of it has to do with the fact that I feel safe talking about being queer, and she doesn't. So I talk about it a lot.

The other thing K said which surprised me was how prominent Jews are at my school. I honestly hadn't noticed, although when I think about it, we're definitely much more than 2% of the school's population. I'm not sure why there are more Jews getting PsyDs in Boston than is proportionate to the general population, but there it is. And K said that some of the students who are members of other minorities-- Muslims and Latinas, to take the example of the people she'd talked to-- feel that discussions of dealing with other races/religions get hijacked by discussions of Judaism. K said that she personally feels no objection to the lack of sensitivity to Scottish people, but that it seems like a shame that people don't talk about their experiences because the discussions that are supposed to be about their experiences--

--are taken over by the experiences of people who have had much less negative ones, I said.

She agreed, and I got out of the car feeling my head spinning a little. Questioning your assumptions is odd.

Comments

[susiesworld.livejournal.com]

Wrong entirely Goat Girl. My uncle, my mom's brother married a Jewish woman and raised their daughter Jewish. I don't know exactly how religious they were only that they certainly didn't celebrate Christmas, which crushed me as a child, to learn that for some reason Santa didn't visit my cousin. This is the same uncle I work for, and at this point in my life, he's a lot closer than any of my other extended family. And it's not as if Minnesota is completely devoid of Jews, as you seemed to have thought when we first met. Hell, there was even a jewish family in my private christian school, poor souls! Anyways, I'm just questioning your assumptions, not trying to say that I was anything like an expert on the subject. Same holding true though, that I have since to hear any of the really bad antisemitic stories from anyone other than jews.

Interesting post about the Russian Jews, I wondered when it would come up. Years ago I started volunteering at a nursing home talking with Russian immigrants who don't speak english. Ukrainian, actually, and let me tell you it is one hell of an experience to listen to these little old people talking about being 14, or 17 during the war, and having nowhere to turn, Germany closing in on one side, and Stalin on the other. We forget how many millions more than Hitler Stalin killed, but it was a political clensing and not ethnic. Still, incredible stories. I tape recorded one and wanted to compile a book of stories, but the language daunted me. One of these days...

[goat-girl.livejournal.com]

I didn't say there were no Jews in Minnesota, and I didn't say you'd never met any Jews. (My stepmother's whole Jewish family lives in Minneapolis.) I said that there aren't many, especially as compared to, say, where I came from, which I think is still a fair statement. So, again, I don't understand what point you're trying to make when you say that you never heard anything bad about Jews except from Jews. Most of the "really bad" anti-semitic stories I seem to reacall telling you - horns and such - were things that happened to my grandparents and great grandparents here in America. The "not so bad" stuff - like my synagogue getting defaced, me being told that I'm responsible for September 11th, you hearing your co-workers suggest that all Jews are misers, little, insignificant things like that - well, it's only not so bad if it's not happening to you.

Now, is this stuff major, life altering discrimination that prevents me from going about and living my life? As long as I have no desire to go see the village my great great grandparents left in Poland, no. Is it stuff that affects me, and other Jews, in ways that most people don't realize? Absolutely. That's all I'm saying.

[susiesworld.livejournal.com]

In my head I was making a distinction that I didn't effectively communicate. By 'really bad stuff' I meant truly outlandish stories about horns and tails and baby eaters. Strangely enough, (as you know) the first Christians were persecuted as baby eaters too, what with the eating of body and blood down in catacombs and all. But I was not, however, referring to the truly horrendous realities of antisemitism which you describe and which are apparent to anyone who follows the news.

My point was that when we educate those around us we should do it in a very inclusive way. From me to you, I felt like my opinion was trivialized by you, and I felt an undercurrent of "What do you know? You midwesterners (or non-new yorkers) don't know any jews, so why WOULD you know anything?" It's not what you said, but judging from Isabel Gold's respeonse, she felt the same thing. I realize my posts too could have pushed some buttons, but the point is to SHARE the experience and emphasize the uniqueness AND similarities of the experiences of those around you. My point of only hearing these outlandish (though once believed) stories about jews FROM jews, seemed like it was these people who were telling the stories keeping them alive. It was as if real, present persecution were not enough, so that one had to keep alive old prejudices to futher the image of jews as a victim. It may seem narrow minded that I got that from the experience, and the only way I can try to convey it to try to critique the METHOD of sharing these stories. I am not saying they should be forgotten, that would be idiotic.

It seems, and seemed to me at the time, to convey an attitude of "You don't get it, you never will, you're not a Jew". Of course not. We can NEVER know what it's like to walk in another's shoes. But all of our experiences have commonalities, and I beleive the only way to bring people together is to emphasize those commonalities, and not the differences in specific details. The details ARE very important, but in speaking about the similarities of discrimination, you can include the entire world, and invite everyone to reflect on thier own experiences as a human being.