Hello, I’m Jennifer, and I’m a Jew

Mac I spend my summers on a lake in the Adirondacks, where, every morning after breakfast, I walk Mac, our beagle-hound-something-else mix. Mac’s real name is Maccabee—as in the books of–and that’s because my husband and I brought him home from the local animal shelter on the first night of Hanukkah. And also, because he looks like his name should be Mac.

On Shabbat morning, I stopped to talk to a fellow dog-walker. Her dog and Mac circled each other, eyed each other, sniffed each other, and proceeded to ignore each other as the woman told me that usually she walks her dog along with her husband, but seeing as her husband was at an anti-ICE demonstration elsewhere, she was walking solo. When it comes to politics and random people you meet through your dog, you can never be too careful who you open your big mouth to, but I was pretty sure I’d met a fellow freaked-out traveler, and told her that as a Jew, I (and others of the tribe) can’t help but draw a direct line between Trump’s demonizing, rounding-up, and imprisoning of undocumented immigrants and Hitler’s demonizing and rounding-up of European Jews. (Trump, though a psychopath, a felon, and a thug, has thank God stopped short of murder.)

Most of my life, but especially in recent years, I’ve made it a point to tell people who may not otherwise know it that I’m Jewish, both as a point of pride and to establish my me-hood. The impulse stems from my childhood in an ur-WASP corner of Virginia, where I and my siblings stood out, not only for our dark curly hair and tendency to talk with our hands, but because, though our parents had plonked us down in horse country, my dad made good and sure that we knew we were Jews: none of this passing-for-the-goyim business; none of this Reform (prayers in English) stuff. “Jewish girls hold their strong Semitic looks,” he’d say as one or another of us would burst out into tears because all our friends were tall, thin, freckled blondes who summered in coastal Maine and knew how to sail, whereas we—as a crew—were not. So yeah: I felt like a big spazzy weirdo but at least I owned it.

“So yeah,” I said now, “this ICE stuff is terrifying.”

At which point she said: “Have you lost any of your friends over what’s going on in Israel?”

And I said: “No.”

And then she was off on a diatribe about what she called the clash between the Zionists and Palestinians which struck me as being based solely on newspaper accounts rather than, say, knowing the first thing about history. But it wasn’t until she made some disparaging remark about Zionists that I got my back up.

“I’m a Zionist,” I said, explaining that pretty much all American Jews are—and that the word Zionist had somehow shifted from its original meaning as a person who supports a Jewish state safe within its own boundaries in our people’s historic homeland, and not some whacko with a gun going around killing Arabs in the West Bank. Then she made some remarks about how American Jews have undue influence in Israel, a torrent of babble that I couldn’t follow but which I nevertheless tried to correct.

Afterwards I felt so slimed and gross and helpless with whiney rage at this total stranger that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Which is a problem I tend to have on the best of days: what to do with my raggedy, messy, icky insides? How do I deal with my rage at a world that goes its own way even though I know better—so much better.? . Kol ha kavod on Israel for your massive demonstrations of resistance.

Where’s the resistance here?

The feeling of inchoate fury and helplessness eventually faded, but the question remains: how do you go about your normal, happy-enough and in my case secure life while your own government is destroying lives and wrecking terror and sucking up to Putin and paving over the White House rose garden? Fortunately my husband and I were invited to a dinner that evening, so not only was I being fed, but our host that evening, Cliff, is a rabbi. And if ever I needed rabbinical counseling it was now. So I put the question to Cliff: how can I, how can any of us, go about the daily round, or allow ourselves to feel joyful or optimistic or laugh at a joke or enjoy a good meal when. . . .And Cliff told me to make myself a good stiff drink and said: “I don’t know.”