Being Jewish: An Inconvenient Truth

I have a friend who, for years, insisted he wasn’t Jewish.

His parents were Jewish. His grandparents were Jewish. His ancestry was unmistakably Jewish.

But he wasn’t (DNA aside).

At least, that’s what he would tell you.

What he meant, of course, was that he wasn’t religious. He didn’t practice Judaism. He didn’t go to synagogue. Being Jewish wasn’t an important part of how he defined himself.

And why shouldn’t he be allowed to decide that?

His children, born of a mixed marriage, are even more emphatic. They don’t identify as Jewish. Depending on how you measure ancestry, they’re roughly half Jewish, but that isn’t who they believe themselves to be.

I’ve always found the intensity of that distancing interesting – and lately, a little sad.

Because underneath it I hear something profoundly human: Don’t define me by what I am. Get to know me for who I am.

That’s not a particularly Jewish desire.

It’s a human one.

And since October 7, 2023, many Jews have been confronted with an inconvenient truth:

Sometimes we don’t get to decide which part of ourselves other people see first.

The adjective before the person

My 96-year-old mother is from an entirely different generation. She has occasionally referred to her female physician not simply as her doctor, but as her “lady doctor.”

I’ve always found that expression fascinating.

She’s not insulting the physician. She respects her. But somewhere in my mother’s mental filing system, the fact that her doctor is a woman remains noteworthy enough to require an adjective.

It makes me wonder about my own filing system.

Is Todd my friend? Or is he, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, my Black friend?

And then comes the question I didn’t spend nearly as much time considering before October 7th:

Am I simply my friends’ friend? Or am I their Jewish friend?

There’s nothing inherently offensive about recognizing someone’s Jewishness, Blackness, sex, physicality, nationality, or any of the countless other characteristics that make each of us who we are. Some of those identities are enormously important to us.

The danger comes when the adjective begins to consume the noun. When Jewish stops being something about me and becomes everything you need to know about me.

Three Jews walk into a bar

A Jewish Democrat, a Jewish Republican and a Jewish Socialist walk into a bar.

The bartender looks at them and says, “Sorry, we don’t serve Jews.”

That’s the joke. And that’s the problem.

Those three people may disagree about almost everything.

One may be a Zionist. Another may be an anti-Zionist. One may support the current Israeli government; another may despise it. One may advocate passionately for Palestinians. Another may believe the world fundamentally misunderstands Israel.

One may be Orthodox. Another Reform. Another an atheist.

One may be gay. Another straight.

One may consider being Jewish the defining element of his identity. Another may barely consider it at all.

To the antisemite, none of it matters.

Jew.

The extraordinary efficiency of prejudice is its ability to transform individuals into categories.

It doesn’t have to ask what you believe because it’s already decided what you are.

When identities collide

This isn’t merely hypothetical.

Earlier this year, Keshet Italia, Italy’s Jewish LGBTQ organization, was told it could not participate with its own float in Roma Pride after declining to endorse the organizers’ characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. Roma Pride said anyone sharing Pride’s founding values remained free to march, but participation with a float required acceptance of its political platform. Keshet Italia and Jewish organizations criticized the decision as an ideological test imposed on Jewish LGBTQ participants.

(And I, for one, must question the question: Why would a gay pride parade organizer in Italy even consider Israel’s policies?)

Think about the collision of identities contained in that dispute.

These people didn’t suddenly stop being gay when the subject turned to Israel.

They didn’t suddenly stop being Jewish when they joined the LGBTQ community.

Yet their ability to participate organizationally in a movement representing one part of their identities became conditioned upon accepting a particular political position involving another.

Roma Pride said its criticism was directed at the Israeli government, not at Jews or Jewish LGBTQ people. Keshet’s objection was that Italian Jews should not be required to adopt a prescribed position about Israel to participate as an organized Jewish LGBTQ presence.

Whatever one’s view of Israel, Gaza, or the word “genocide,” there is an uncomfortable question here:

Why should an Italian Jew have to answer for the Israeli government in order to be accepted somewhere else?

Which part of yourself are you allowed to bring into the room?

October 8th

October 7th changed something for Jews around the world.

Hamas invaded Israel and murdered, kidnapped, and brutalized Israelis and foreign nationals (and my adjectives here are tame). But for many Jews outside Israel, something else happened almost immediately afterward.

Suddenly Israel wasn’t somewhere thousands of miles away.

It was at work. At school. On social media. At dinner. Among friends.

People who had never been asked to explain an Israeli election, defend an Israeli prime minister, or account for Israeli military policy suddenly found themselves in conversations about all three.

And sometimes the question wasn’t really, “What do you think?“

It felt more like: “Which kind of Jew are you?”

“Are you one of the acceptable ones?”

That is an extraordinarily uncomfortable experience for someone who may never have considered Jewishness central to his or her identity.

My friend can say he isn’t Jewish because he means religion.

His children can say they aren’t Jewish because they’re describing their identities as they understand them.

I can say being Jewish is an important part of who I am.

And all three statements can be sincere. But an antisemite doesn’t care.

History has demonstrated, sometimes catastrophically, that Jews have not always been permitted to define Jewishness for themselves.

And perhaps that’s why the current moment feels so unsettling even to some Jews who previously felt little connection to Judaism or Israel.

You can resign from a synagogue. You can stop practicing Judaism. You can reject Zionism. You can marry someone who isn’t Jewish. And you can decide that Jewishness is a tiny and relatively unimportant branch on your family tree.

But you cannot control whether someone else decides you are a Jew.

The inconvenient truth

We live in an era in which enormous importance is placed on self-identification.

We are told – and generally rightly – that people deserve to tell us who they are rather than have us tell them.

So what happens when everyone gets to define your identity except you?

Maybe that is part of what some Jews have been confronting since October 7th.

Not simply antisemitism. Not simply arguments about Israel. But something more intimate.

The realization that an identity you considered secondary, cultural, ancestral, complicated – or perhaps rejected entirely – can suddenly be moved to the front of the line by somebody else.

And there’s another danger here.

We Jews shouldn’t respond by demanding that nobody notice we’re Jewish.

I don’t want my Jewishness erased.

It’s part of my history, my family, my culture, and my connection to generations who came before me.

The answer to being reduced to an identity isn’t to eliminate the identity. It’s to remember the individual carrying it.

There are millions of Jews and millions of ways to be Jewish. Religious Jews and secular Jews. Zionists and anti-Zionists. Conservatives, liberals, and socialists. Jews who passionately support Israel and Jews who protest against its government. Jews who observe every holiday and Jews who couldn’t tell you when the next one is – let alone pronounce it correctly.

We disagree. Frequently. Loudly.

We’re actually rather good at it.

But disagreement is evidence of something prejudice cannot tolerate:

Individuality.

Perhaps that’s the inconvenient truth of being Jewish at this particular moment.

For generations, Jews have argued among ourselves about what it means to be Jewish.

Now some who rarely thought about the question are discovering that other people may answer it for them.

So see that I’m Jewish.

Understand that it’s part of me.

Ask me about it if you want.

Just don’t decide that knowing I’m Jewish means you already know me.

See that I’m Jewish. Just don’t stop seeing me.