‘It’s Complicated’: Advocacy and Jewish Identity
Jewish identity is complicated. It’s a religious identity. Or it’s an ethnic identity. Or it’s a racialized identity. Or it’s a national identity. Or it’s a cultural identity. Or it’s a type of ancestry. Or it’s some combination of all of them. Or something else entirely. For this reason, Jewish identity can be compared to the koy, an animal the Talmud tells us is simultaneously domesticated, non-domesticated, both domesticated and non-domesticated, and not-domesticated and not-non-domesticated – all, none, both, and neither.
This makes Jewish identity difficult to map onto modern identities in contemporary North America. While plenty of literature discusses how race, ethnicity, religion, culture, ancestry, and other categories exist and affect each other, “Jewish” doesn’t fit neatly into any of them. Adding to the challenge, about half of Canadian Jews think of themselves as a combination of religiously, culturally, and/or ancestrally Jewish, and about one third of American Jews having similar sentiments.
One response: distilling “Jewish” into one identity category and mostly ignoring the rest. Steven Feldman finds a general campus tendency to treat Jews as a religious group, erasing everything else. Others conclude that Jewish identity is an ethnoreligious one, but the term’s obscurity likely doesn’t make it more accessible or familiar. The upshot of all of this is confusion, and even Jews can be at a loss to explain what Jewish identity is, both to themselves individually and in general.
What does this have to do with advocacy on campus? In short, fighting antisemitism is complicated in part because Jewish identity is complicated. It’s easy to connect certain bigotries to specific categories – race to racism, for example – but if we can’t articulate what Jewish identity is, how can we explain what antisemitism is and enable people to understand, prevent, and fight it?
A few weeks ago, I argued that knowledge and a robust Jewish identity are key to making a good advocate; this provides an example of why. If you want to combat antisemitism and advocate for yourself and other Jews, you need to be able to articulate what Judaism and Jewishness are and how they show up. Being Jewish might be an integral part of who you are, but it’s not enough; if you can’t lay out what being Jewish is in a broader sense, how it shows up in different forms, and how antisemitism morphs to match each of those expressions, you’ll be limiting your own success.
Because leaving it at “It’s complicated” isn’t enough to fight antisemitism.
