My five-year-old self with an only somewhat creepy Easter bunny, probably thinking about the matzo ball soup I’d eat at Passover the next day.
A Christian, an Atheist, a Jew, and an Agnostic with a Sikh brother all walk into a Bar.
I buy a drink and leave.
By a strange combination of choice, force, and lineage, my religious identity somehow manages to grow more confusing by the hour. Born to an agnostic, Jewish-identifying father and Protestant mother, I was raised primarily Christian, while still celebrating every high holiday praising Hashem with my father’s family. I was never baptized, never had a bat mitzvah, and have remained in religious purgatory (no pun intended) ever since.
Somehow, my mother managed to convince my father that I should be confirmed. Around age eleven, I starting attending three-hour-long lectures on Sundays, where the two elders taught my classmates and I important life lessons, like how to piss off Jehovah’s Witnesses by asking them why they want to recruit more people when their doctrine says only 144,000 go to heaven during the apocalypse.
One Sunday, Mr. Jones, the older and more decrepit of the two elders, embarked on a rambling lecture about the significance of confirmation in Presbyterian tradition. “We want to ensure that you stay Christian for life,” he grumbled, leaning back in his rickety plastic chair. “Jesus is salvation, and we don’t want you to stray from the path, running off and becoming Buddhists. Confirmation is a promise that you are and will always only be a Christian.” I froze, my stomach growing uneasy. Although I remained calm throughout the rest of class, thinking nothing of my adverse reaction, it wasn’t until I arrived home that I realized the implications of his words.
“I…I don’t want to give up my Jewish side,” I thought, my head spinning with anxiety as I flopped onto my blue tie-dyed comforter. “What am I going to do? How will I tell my father that I can’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover? Maybe I can just sneak in the Jewish holidays and not tell anyone about it.” That night, I struggled to sleep, imagining the same scenario of myself at the pearly gates on an endless loop.
“I’m sorry, Carly!” boomed the voice of God, who strangely sounded like Morgan Freeman. “You didn’t give up your Jewish side after confirmation.” I looked up at him, terrified.
“But…. But… I believe in you! You’re the same for both Christians and Jews, right?”
“WRONG!” He yelled, smiting me. I tumbled down through the clouds, back through the earth, ultimately landing on a piece of brimstone in the depths of hell.
Knowing that I’d be told to just “suck it up,” in the name of Jesus, I didn’t let anyone know of my concerns about being smote. Within two years, I was an atheist, and by my second year of college, I began to identify as agnostic after realizing that just as one can’t prove the existence of a God, one technically can’t disprove it either.
But how I identify doesn’t matter. Due to all the caveats in my background, my father being a Jew instead of my mother, never having a Bat Mitzvah or a Baptism, and my recent passion for learning about Jewish history and philosophy, I’ve realized my identity isn’t up to me. I am a paradox: I will always be too Jewish to avoid anti-Semitism, but will never be considered a Jew by the faith itself.
In second grade, I inadvertently became the “token half-Jew” in my prominently Christian elementary school after bringing in matzo and teaching my classmates the story of Passover. At the time I was thrilled to share my father’s culture with my friends, but I quickly learned the implications of this action.
After that day, no matter how open I was about my love for Jesus, talking with my classmates about attending church and praying before lunch, I soon realized my Christianity was invalid to many of my friends.
“You’re going to hell because your dad is a Jew,” one of my friends said to me as we stood in line to walk to music class. Although I rolled my eyes, I was secretly terrified she was right.
Although these comments were rare, in middle school a large group of boys adopted Nazi philosophy and anti-Semitism became routine part of my day. I was regularly greeted with a “heil”, asked if I was a Jew and laughed at when I would say yes, and often had swastikas drawn on my belongings.Even the detention room had swastikas and phrases like “Death to all Jews!” scribbled in pen on the walls. Nobody ever bothered to wash them off. I’d sometimes laugh along, convinced their behavior was normal, and any other reaction would be overly sensitive.
One day during my seventh grade year, Alex, the leader of the middle school Nazis approached my lunch table. He was the picture of “Aryan perfection”, with beady blue eyes and greasy blonde hair that framed his acne-ridden face.
“Here,” he said with a giggle, his crooked buck teeth peeking out from between his lips. “We made you something.” He opened his palms to reveal a swastika sculpted out of tin foil. I’d grown accustomed to the anti-Semitic remarks, but this time, a rage I hadn’t felt in years began to bubble inside of me. “Fuck you!” I exclaimed, turning around to flip off the table of pubescent Nazi-wannabes behind me. I rolled my eyes and continued eating my lunch. My friends stared at me.
After a few moments, I felt a hand on my shoulder “Uhhhh Carly?” said Josh, my best friend that year.
“What,” I said through a mouthful of PB&J.
“You should tell someone about that. That’s really not okay, that’s anti-Semitism.”
I put down my sandwich and looked at him. “Josh my dear, I’m used to it, it’s not a big deal.” He shot me a strange glance.
“Fine. If you don’t tell on him, I will.” Together we went and informed the teacher monitoring lunch. Alex and the rest of the Nazis were all immediately brought to the principal’s office and given one day of in-school suspension. When they returned from their punishment they began to berate Josh and me at recess.
“Fucking Jew!” they screamed at us from fifteen feet across the blacktop, “Why would any good CCD-attending Catholic sympathize with a dirty fucking Jew!” Josh glared at them. I took a deep breath.
“If that’s what a good Christian is, beating people and being a Nazi, I’m so glad I left the church,” I retorted sarcastically. My pal didn’t laugh. “Look, Josh, I’m so, so sorry about this,” I apologized. He remained silent for a moment, his eyes fixed ahead.
“I’m just doing what’s right,” he said.
A year later, I moved to Skokie, Illinois, famed for having the largest amount of Holocaust survivors in America and a threatened neo-Nazi march in the mid 1970s, the legal case over which went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
On my first day of high school, I was taken aback by the diversity, seeing women wearing Hijabs and men wearing Yarmulkes. “How are they not being harassed?” I wondered as I walked down the hallway. After a few days witnessing no incidents, I soon realized that the anti-Semitism I faced in grammar and middle school was not the norm, and was a product of growing up in an all- white, religiously homogenous suburb. Disillusioned with Christianity and organized religion as a whole after a traumatic incident on a church retreat, and in the early stages of my militant-atheist phase, I only mentioned my Jewish identity in passing. Every time I mentioned this to my new high school friends, they’d make the same joke, “You’re not a Jew! You’re Jew-ish!”
While I laughed along with these remarks, knowing they came from a place of friendliness and recognition for the absurdity of religious law, when I entered college, I realized not everyone approached the subject in a lighthearted manner.
“You’re not a Jew, period,” my then-boyfriend said to me one evening after I asked if I could accompany him to Hillel. “It says so in the Torah. I’m a chosen person because my mother is a Jew. You’re not. You never know for sure who the father is!”
I stood up, wanting to say “Who are you to tell me how I can and cannot identify! You’re a half-Jew too!” But through my anger, deep down I felt he was correct. If he, a “real Jew,” was offended by my request, maybe I wasn’t merely trying to explore my heritage, and instead, was stealing one that never belonged to me in the first place. I said nothing.
As I sat in my dorm room that night, I tried to pen a scathing essay about the encounter, beginning with paternity test results proving my father is in fact my father (when I asked my mother if this could happen, to my abject horror she said, “Your father and I screwed like rabbits during August 1995, and here you are.”), culminating with a grand, dramatic call to end antiquated views on religious identity. To this day, it remains hidden in my notes. I haven’t touched it since, out of a combination of sheer embarrassment at my melodramatic writing and fear it’d be misinterpreted as justification for cultural appropriation.
A few weeks later, I stood in Washington Square Park, catching up with some friends I ran into on my way to class. “Yeah, I’m on my way to journalism right now,” I said looking up at the changing leaves on the trees. It was one of the last warm days in early October.
“DAMN RIGHT YOU ARE YOU STUPID FUCKING JEW!” screamed a man on roller skates as he flew past us towards the arch. My friends’ mouths lay agape. “Fuck yourself you fucking anti-Semite!” I screamed. The whole park turned and stared. My friends and I stood in silence. “Did… Did that really just happen?” whispered my friend Steven. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. I let out a sigh. “I should probably get going, I have a quiz to get to.” After we said our goodbyes and I began walking towards Bobst, the anti-Semite’s words rang through my head. “YOU STUPID FUCKING JEW!”
Through my fury, I thought of my father, and all the ways I look and act like him — our big teeth, the shape of our noses, the way our upper lip flexes back when we smiled, and our love for storytelling. “Why is it that only bigots see me as a Jew?” I thought, stepping on the brown crunchy leaves lying on the stone walkway. “I get all the anti-Semitism that comes along with being a Jew, but will never be accepted as one or encouraged to learn about that part of me. Why does it have to be like this all because of a stupid two-thousand-year-old law?”
Last November, I decided to settle this once and for all, consulting the highest expert on the subject I could find.
“Grandma Judy,” I slurred, holding my glass of wine. It was the first Thanksgiving my mother let me drink, and despite her warnings, I went a little crazy with the alcohol. “Grandma, Grandma, Grandma.”
“Yes?” she replied, her voice gravelly with age.
“Do you consider me a Jew?” I braced myself.
“Please don’t say no, please don’t say no,” I thought
She smiled. “Yes!” she said without hesitation. “Yes I do. It’s your heritage.” I shot her a dumbfounded, surprised look.
“I-I know that,” I said grinning, feeling the red stains on my teeth. “But I’m Jewish on the wrong side!”
She chuckled at my state of intoxication. “In my mind, you can identify however you want to identify. Just know that this is a part of you. We’re reformed Jews. To us, all Jews are Jews!”
I felt my drunken self tear up a bit, moved by her words. “Really? But all my real Jewish friends tell me I’m not a Jew.” She reached for my hand.
“Carly,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. If you feel Jewish, you are a Jew.”
In a perfect world, this would be the fairy-tale ending to my journey of self-discovery. The truth is, it gets increasingly complicated by the minute.
Although my mother guilts me into attending Christmas Eve services with her to honor my late grandmother, I feel culturally connected to the teachings of Maimonides in my Jewish philosophy class, knowing my patrilineal ancestors may have read and lived by those texts. I’m now interested in learning more about Jewish culture, but I can’t help but cringe at my identity when I read about other patrilineal Jews who don’t identify as Jewish.
But most confusing of all, I’ve found myself praying out of desperation when my anxiety grows unmanageable. Even though I am still agnostic, knowing I’m most likely only talking to myself, I can for maybe — just maybe — for a split second, feel hope that my wishes just might be manifested somewhere the universe. But unlike when I was a child, when I believed I was conversing with Jesus, I often wonder to whom who exactly I’m praying — the Father, Jesus, Hashem, or another entirely different deity.
But I’ve come to realize in today’s political climate, my choice of how I identify is much bigger than myself.
Since the election last November, hate crimes against all marginalized groups, Jews included, have skyrocketed. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, hate crimes against Jews have more doubled in 2017 in New York City alone, with 28 of 56 reported hate crimes targeting Jews. These instances include bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers across the nation, anti-Semitic vandalism everywhere from subway platforms to the homes of Jews, and the desecration of Jewish headstones.
When I hear stories like these, I fear for my father and our family. My cousins could have attended that JCC, and those graves could have easily belonged to my great grandparents. But through this anger, I know my privilege of having ghostly-pale skin, big red hair (which is extremely common among Ashkenazi people, but is typically associated with the Irish) blue eyes, and the fact that I don’t attend temple has shielded me from more hate crimes than I likely could imagine. As a half Jew, despite the anti-Semitism I have faced, I know I will likely never encounter the hatred of most Jews experience.
For this reason, I find myself contemplating the same question over and over again: Is it better for me to stand proudly as a Jew alongside my father’s people in the face of anti-Semitism, or should I stand in solidarity as an ally?
No matter how many hours, weeks, days or months I spend pondering this topic, I can never find a satisfying answer. But here is what I do know to be true.
There will always be Conservative and Orthodox Jews who will not accept me without a formal conversion. While maybe someday, I’ll choose to go through the process simply to put the issue to rest once and for all, I truly respect their beliefs and dedication to scripture.
But regardless of what they say, Judaism will always be a part of me. When my great-grandfather and his sister escaped Ukraine in the early 20th century after the government began persecuting Jews, they jettisoned everything from their homeland to assimilate into American culture. As soon as they stepped off the train in Chicago, they exclusively spoke the fragments of English they knew and swapped the Ukrainian clothes they’d worn all their lives for American attire. While I wish they’d retained the traditions of their homeland, giving my family a better understanding of our heritage, to give up Judaism — the one familial institution they held closely throughout their lives — seems almost disrespectful. This is the same reason my father, although clearly an atheist, will always identify as a Jew.
“It’s who we are,” he said on the phone as I interviewed him in preparation for this essay. “It’s our heritage and out of respect for my family, that’s something I’ll never give up.”
Just like my religious identity, my place among the resistance is ever changing. Some days, I know I can and should speak my mind, pulling from my own experiences and those of my family to condemn the attacks against Jewish people and anti-semitism as a whole. Yet my advocacy has its limits. Because of my immense privilege, I know I will likely never experience the trauma many Jewish people experience on a regular basis. When it comes time for them to speak, I know to be quiet and listen, for maybe I could learn a thing or two.
After all, I’m not a Jew, I’m Jew-ish.