Be A Jew

If you’re reading this, it means that you read The Times of Israel, which in turn most likely means that you’re a Jewish Jew—by which I mean a Jew who has skin in the game, who identifies as Jewish and cares about the State of Israel as well as the state of Judaism and Jews in the diaspora. So, nu, mazel tov.  Of course our enemies, now as always, don’t really care who among us identifies or lives Jewishly, and who among us is so assimilated that they could pass as a Kennedy. But that’s not the point. The point is that we’re in the midst of a resurgence of Jew-hatred, which I believe calls for both a collective and an individual response.

Regarding the turmoil in and surrounding Israel, and the rising antisemitism here in the United States, a friend recently told me, “Jennifer, we’re witnessing history.” Perhaps, and perhaps things will turn out well, but no thanks. My first choice remains living in the prosperous, peaceful, post-war world I was born into, where in America Jews were making greater and greater strides in a society that was growing more and more accommodating, and in most of the Western world, Israel was celebrated as a miracle.

I recently heard the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens speak. His theme in general was Jewish pride, Jewish consciousness, and he told the story of his own mother, who had been born in hiding–in Italy at the start of the Second World War. Now elderly, his mother lives in a home, where according to her son, her response to rising antisemitism was to hang a small Israel flag at her door, because though she was born in hiding, she refuses to die in hiding.

Religious Jews, who literally wear their identity in their appearance and garb, have no need to up their game, to “come out,” as it were, as Jews. But what about the rest of us in the diaspora? Those, like me, who have blended in with others of European heritage, with features that could be Greek or Italian or even French, rather than clearly and identifiably and obviously Semitic. For most of my life, when people told me that I didn’t “look Jewish,” I took taken it as a compliment, the unspoken meaning being: you may be Jewish, but you’re not too Jewy. Because who wants to look too Jewy? Or at least that was the thinking in my tiny corner of the world when I was a child. Then again, I was raised in Virginia, among wasps so waspy that they were practically born knowing how to sail.

Jew Up, Jews—that’s the phrase that kept sounding in my mind’s ear. But it makes for a terrible title. Also: who am I to tell my fellow Jews how to behave?

Still, I keep thinking about what Bret Stephens said about his mother’s insistence that she live whatever time is left to her openly embracing her Jewishness, how urgent it is to wear our Jewishness on the outside, rather than hide it on the inside. Perhaps because I grew up in such a non-Jewish place, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t find a way to let people know right off the bat that I’m Jewish. But I can do more: plant a “Bring Them Home Now” or “I Stand with Israel” sign in my front yard, wear an IDF dog tag necklace, put a piece of masking tape on my shirt with the number of days that the hostages have been held captive.  Would such small gestures make a difference? I don’t know, but I do know that they’d help me face the world as myself: a Jewish Jew from a family of Jews going all the way back for as far as anyone can remember.