My grandmother’s name was Zella. My great-grandmother’s name was Deborah, but everyone called her Florence. My dad wouldn’t have known he was Jewish if Florence hadn’t taken him to synagogue. Zella went to church every Sunday and collected Christmas decorations and spoke Yiddish but didn’t teach it to any of her kids.
I’ve always thought it’s a bit ironic. An Anglo-Saxon name for a devout Jewish woman and a Yiddish name for a completely Christianized one.
I spent a long time embarrassed that I’m more like Zella than I am like Florence. I’ve always idolized my great-grandmother for being a good Jewish woman despite her gentile nickname. I felt like Zella’s name was a wasted coat of Jewish paint on someone so assimilated. But how am I, a Jew who doesn’t go to synagogue, only speaks English, and collects Halloween decorations and crucifixes, any different from her?
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With a Christianized grandmother and a secular dad, it’s really a miracle that I’m Jewish at all. I just wish that Judaism hadn’t come into my life the way it did.
My mom was raised in a denomination of Christianity known as “whatever her mom thought was right.” It gave her what I now recognize was religiously themed OCD. I recognize it in her because I was raised in a denomination of Judaism known as “whatever my mom thought was right” and her OCD gave me OCD. See, people with religious OCD can’t do religion halfway. It’s all or nothing and when my mom decided that she was going to appropriate my dad’s Jewish heritage, she threw herself full-throttle into Ultra-Orthodoxy.
As a result, I spent a very long time feeling guilty for preferring more liberal denominations of Judaism over Orthodoxy, not wanting to drop my entire life to go move to Israel, having moral objections to Zionism, never having attended synagogue, not really wanting to spend hours of my life in synagogue even if I were given the opportunity to do so, being bisexual, being genderqueer, being a patrilineal Jew, not knowing Hebrew, and having no interest in learning Hebrew.
My mother made Ultra-Orthodoxy the stick against which all Judaisms are to be measured and if they didn’t measure up then they weren't “real Judaism.”
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When I was in high school, I was briefly an atheist. My crisis of faith lasted exactly 10 seconds. In quick succession, I realized that biblical literalism was scientifically impossible and decided that if I was going to reject the basis of the religion being spoon fed to me by my mother, then that meant that I had to be an atheist.
It never occurred to me that I could be my own kind of “real Jew” without biblical literalism. Or that I could a real non-Orthodox Jew, or a real patrilineal Jew, or a real genderqueer Jew, or a real bisexual Jew, or a real Jew doesn’t go to synagogue, or a real Jew that’s anti-Zionist, or a real Jew that doesn’t know Hebrew, or even a real Jew that’s an atheist. I knew only one form of Judaism and if I couldn’t adhere to it, then I wasn’t Jewish. Simple as that.
I see now that this leap of logic is not unlike the Haskalah maskilim who discovered the Enlightenment and decided that Jews would be better off without Judaism.
I was not better off without Judaism. There were parts of it embedded in me everywhere I looked. I related to stories from the Tanakh and found personal meaning in them even though I didn’t think they really happened. When my dad stopped being able to keep up with my mom’s Jewish fever, the task of leading kiddush and havdalah fell to me. The duality of performing both masculine and feminine gender roles by lighting Shabbos candles and leading kiddush became an integral part of my gender identity. I could never quite shake my dream of hosting my own Passover seder one day. I even liked learning about the Talmud and Halakah when I could, even if I didn’t want to implement all of their teachings into my life. I didn’t feel Enlightened without Judaism. I felt incomplete.
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My first Dis-Enlightenment experience happened in the holiday decor aisle of my hometown Goodwill. In the place where I’ve collected my own Christianized collections of Halloween decorations and crucifixes, I found a seder plate. My hometown hasn’t had a Jewish community since my dad was a kid. I could count the number of other Jews I know who in live my town on my fingers. Most of them are family. Some of them are dead. But there it was anyway: a seder plate sitting in my favorite Goodwill aisle, waiting for me. I felt like Joseph meeting his brothers in Egypt. I felt like Moses at the burning bush. I felt like Ruth begging to go home with Naomi. I felt like coming home. Atheism be damned, I had to buy this seder plate.
So I did, and I felt extremely uneasy about it. I could accept that Judaism was a part of me but I couldn’t reconcile it with the feeling that I wasn’t part of Judaism.
My second Dis-Enlightenment experience happened on Yom Kippur of my sophomore year of college. Against my better judgment, I attended Kol Nidre service, where I was inexplicably hit with the epiphany that me being Jewish is fate. Out of all of Zella’s children, my dad was the only one Florence took to synagogue with her. That had to mean something, right?
I thought it meant that I had to go back to trying to fit myself in the mold of other peoples’ Judaisms. Being raised in a town with no other Jews meant that I had none of the Jewish life experiences my peers had. I felt isolated, unrelatable, undereducated, alone. These people were real Jews and I still didn’t fit in with them, so something about my Judaism must have been wrong.
My third Dis-Enlightenment experience was watching Green Fields, Grine Felde, for this class. Watching the young Rabbinical student go out searching for real Jews and finding them in the shtetl healed something inside of me. It also made me realize what’d I’d been missing for years:
The guilt about being lacking in my Judaism, feeling inferior to my more learned peers, being raised in a place with few Jews and no synagogue but still loving my diaspora home, the way my Judaism is centered around homemaking instead of the synagogue…
I am essentially the modern version of a shtetl Jew.
The culmination of my Dis-Enlightenment experience was this project. By writing this, I realized that it’s really really hard not to assimilate. And it's not the people who are assimilated that we should be fighting, but rather the forces that drive assimilation in the first place. For the people of the Haskalah and the Hebraist/early Zionist movements, I think a big part of their drive towards assimilation was internalized shame. Being a nation without a state who speaks a language that so clearly emulates the languages of the people who were perpetuating antisemitism couldn't have been easy. It must have sounded so much easier to try to become a "respectable" nation, or even just to assimilate completely. I can't ignore the harm these anti-Yiddish ideologies caused or the classism and sexism that was often intregal to these ideologies, but I can't withhold compassion either, especially when I've been through such similar mindsets.
And maybe assimilation isn’t always something to be ashamed of. I’ve heard my dad’s stories of being called a kike by classmates when they found out that Florence took him to synagogue. Maybe Zella wasn't an apathetic monster who didn’t care about Judaism. Maybe she was just trying to protect herself and her kids. I don't think it was the right choice, but I can hardly say it's shameful. And if collecting Santas made that it all a little easier for her, who am I to begrudge her for that? And if I assimilate a little bit when I collect my Halloween decorations and crucifixes, is that so wrong? If Yiddish, the language of my grandmother and my great-grandmother, the language of my shtetl Judaism, isn’t “pure”, maybe I don’t have to be either.
Shtetl Jews are real Jews. Synagogue Jews are real Jews. Secular Jews are real Jews. Christianized Jews are real Jews. Yiddish-speaking Jews are real Jews. Hebrew-speaking Jews are real Jews. Jews who only speak the language of the country they live in are real Jews. Loud and proud Jews are real Jews. Assimilated Jews are real Jews.
I am a real Jew.