Michael's Question

Michael wants to know “Do you identify more strongly with your Quaker or your Jewish heritage or equally with both? Why? What informed your connection?
Can I steal this?”

I’ll answer the last one first: of course!

Before I moved to New York I definitely felt a lot more Jewish than I do now. That identification stemmed less from actual agreement with the principles (in the abstract my spirituality is much more Quaker than Jewish) than from opposition to my surroundings. Growing up one of 5 Jews (yes I know that’s an exaggeration) in a rather conservative and Christian part of the world made me different. In elementary school when we started learning about the holocaust the teachers would turn to me and ask me if we knew any family who had died. In retrospect that seems totally fucked. What 8 year old is equipped to explain their family’s oppression, to talk about genocide for Moses’ sake? But I was the go to girl for Jewish questions for a while, some polite and some hostile.

That period of my life was also the period when the evangelicals stood outside the farmers market and told everyone they were going to hell. It was the period when the Jehovah witnesses came by at least three times a year. And it was when my classmates were starting to go to bible camp and came back with questions about why I didn’t go too. I learned to make Jesus killing jokes really early. I knew of no other way to deal with it. And so I became more Jewish than I have in my life to the point where I was wearing a Star of David necklace. If I was going to be the Jew girl I was going to claim that for myself. And so I answered the questions, and corrected the pronunciation of Yom Kippur (I have heard it pronounced like the fish so many times). This is all funny of course because my family left words out of the Chanukah prayer my entire life. Really I was barely Jewish. My dad, grandma and I would all be hard pressed to tell you anything coherent about Jewish Dogma. But that didn’t really matter. Our last name is Jewish and we are Jews.

One of the reasons I moved to New York was because I wanted to be around more Jews. But once I showed up I realized that I don’t actually believe in the Jewish God and that my identification was based solely out of being an other. I identify with being a God-killing-Jew not so much the normal, everyday Jew.

And so I have faded from that identity. I go to the High Holidays services because it is a connection to my ancestors and I like the food. That’s about it.

Note 1: I have never been physically hurt or threatened for being Jewish so all of the above may come off as a poor-oppressed-me whine. But one of the very first Chanukahs in my memory we wouldn’t put the menorah in the window because a family’s windows were smashed in Bozeman. That sort of thinking at such a young age combined with the fact that the only Jewish history that was taught was the holocaust really affected me for a long time.

Note 2: I’m not Jewish enough for many Jews because my mom isn’t Jewish. Having this strong identification forcibly taken from me by other Jews (Jews from places like New York or California where it was never dangerous to be a -stein or a –berg) made me incredibly angry and sped up my alienation. But that’s a whole other kettle of gefilte fish.

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In reading over this I realize that it is interesting that while I had the choice to identify with either the safe religion (Quaker) or the unsafe one (Jewish) I chose the unsafe one and played it up. Take from that what you will, armchair psychoanalysts.