Growing Up Jewish Is Nothing If Not Confusing, Even After All These Years
Once again it is hard to be a Jew but that is nothing new.
Much of the latest surge in anti-Semitism is fueled by the false belief that all Jews support Israel’s ongoing, bloody attempt to annihilate Gaza in futile hopes of destroying Hamas. Many supporters of the Palestinians conflate Judaism and Zionism but for others it is just another in a long, historical line of excuses to hate the Jews.
The rising anti-Semitism makes it particularly painful and confusing for me as I have spent my life somewhere between hiding my Judaism and rejecting it as so much mythology.
It is an appropriate moment to recall two anniversaries of the world’s worst attempts to exterminate the Jews.
Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the day to remember the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust as well as the heroism of those who resisted. This year, it is observed from sundown on Wednesday, April 23 to sundown on Thursday, April 24.
And on the eve of Passover, on April 19, 1943, Nazi forces entered the Warsaw ghetto to complete their deportation and were almost immediately met by gunfire and grenades by the Jewish resistance forces. The fighting would continue for a month, while allied Polish partisan groups attacked the Germans from outside the ghetto.
The Jewish resistance fought valiantly but were doomed to defeat, The revolt ended on May 16, when the Nazis demolished the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, one of the largest and grandest synagogues in the world at the time. Around 13,000 Jews died or were killed during the uprising. The roughly 42,000 who remained were shipped to different death camps.
Survivors Disappearing
There are few Holocaust survivors left to tell their stories. Baby boomers, like myself, are also dying off and they represent the last generation to grow up in the shadow of Hitler and World War II. For too many of the succeeding generations of Jews, they are ignorant of such historic events like Kristallnacht, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the inhuman extent of the Holocaust.
Even at the age of 75, I still struggle with my Jewishness. I would not wear a yarmulke to work because I would be identified as a Jew. I do, however, use frequent Yiddish words, because they are accepted everywhere. But all told, I am a Jew, a Jew who is confused and questioning but still, I am a Jew.
In 1941, the writer Kurt Lewin was among the first to describe a self-hating Jew as someone who “will dislike everything specifically Jewish, for he will see in it that which keeps him away from the majority for which he is longing. He will show dislike for those Jews who are outspokenly so, and will frequently indulge in self-hatred.” I was Lewin’s self-hating Jew, at least outside of my home and to the non-Jewish world.
Robert Wuthnow wrote in his 1982 essay about the “three large clusters of traits are part of the Jewish stereotype. First, Jews are seen as being powerful and manipulative. Second, they are accused of dividing their loyalties between the United States and Israel. The third set of traits concerns Jewish materialistic values, aggressiveness, clannishness.”
Nope, I did not want to be seen like that.
I have, however, come to appreciate Yiddish, a language of many feelings and situations that could not be properly translated in English. My grandmother spoke Yiddish and my parents had a form of broken Yiddish. I took much of it in like osmosis. There are really no perfect English translations of oy vey, chutzpah, nosh, schlep, mentsch, klutz, plotz, yenta and of course, kvetch. Maybe I gobble up Yiddish because it was acceptable among my non-Jewish friends and neighbors. That made it OK.
I was born in 1949 and was raised in a conservative home. I followed the kosher rules but once I left the house, I ate bacon, shrimp, ice cream and hamburgers and generally I tried not to show signs that I was Jewish. I complained that I would rather be playing baseball but I usually relented and went to Saturday morning services. I wore my yarmulke but quickly took it off the moment I left the synagogue. It was the same with the prayer shawl or tallit; I draped it around my shoulders during services but could not remove it quickly enough before going outside. I did not want my friends to know that I was Jewish.
From early on, I did not want to be the nice Jewish boy who has been generally viewed as effeminate in contrast with the violent masculinity of the non-Jewish world. I did not want my friends to see me as an egghead intellectual who put more emphasis on studying that on physical strength and abilities.
I rebelled against being seen as the stereotypical chubby, hysterical Jew with a narrow chest. Above all, I did not want to be seen as a sissy. I knew what I didn’t want to be but I had no clue about what I did want to be so I struggled.
I could not wait for the Christian holidays to end. All that Christmas meant to me was that I could not see my friends; the same with Easter. It was difficult because everywhere I looked were examples of Santa Claus or the Easter bunny with the message that Jews were not part of the fun.
My father died when I was 10 and that made me feel weird so I did not want to broadcast to my non-Jewish friends that I was a weird Jew.
My friends didn’t call it anti-Semitism but their parents certainly did and they somehow blamed the Jews for the war. The kids absorbed their parents’ anti-Semitism and believed that Jewish men were different than the non-Jewish men. My friends couldn’t elaborate but they knew we were different. They didn’t know that in the Middle Ages, Jewish men were accused of menstruating, while during the 19th century, Jews were not considered fit for military service. But they knew we were different and so did I.
My family and my Jewish friends did not look different like the ultra-Orthodox Jews who walk around in black coats and pants and wear furry hats, rejecting the Christian ideal of masculinity. I could hit the ball as far and throw it as fast as the goyim but they had a subliminal belief that Jews were smart but out of shape, generally uncoordinated and had excess fleshy fat. In fact, I did have excess fleshy fat and I wore “chubby” sizes.
My parents lived in the U.S. during the war and fears of anti-Semitism were a fact of my growing up. My mother would consistently remind me that anti-Semitism would never disappear and that the Jews will always be pitted against non-Jews. I would not believe her because it would further my feelings of being different from most of the young people I knew. I wanted desperately not to be different and to be part of the larger, non-Jewish community, in schools, on the baseball fields.
At 13, I had a bar mitzvah and it meant that I was an adult by the Jewish laws. I memorized my haftorah, a speech given by the bar mitzvah boy to the congregation. It was all in Hebrew and I had no idea what I was saying, other than I was fairly rewarded afterwards.
I remember the family seders at Passover and the gathering of my many relatives. I was too young to understand that Passover celebrates the exodus of the Jews from the murdering Egyptian pharaohs. After the war, Passover represented a very real exodus from the murderous hands of the Nazis. For me, Passover was a time to see my cousins, to hope the Passover prayers and service would end quickly so I could enjoy a meal and to try and win the prize of a few pennies by finding the hidden matzoh, the afikomen.
My mother kept kosher with one set of silverware and dishes for meat, known in Yiddish as fleishig and another for dairy, referred to as milchig. I was always confusing the two and constantly being reminded of it.
My mother was always changing the kosher rules. We never had dairy with meat but we were allowed to have ice cream one hour after eating a meat dinner even though Jewish law requires a six hour wait for any dairy.
The laws of kosher require that in addition to not eating milk and meat together, we wait a specified period of time between eating meat and eating dairy. The dietary laws are spelled out to the point that if, while having dairy, a small piece of meat is discovered between the teeth, remove it and rinse the mouth. If even the smallest amount of food is chewed or swallowed, the full waiting period of six hours is required.
Exodus and Deuteronomy note the main tenet of keeping kosher is that you can’t eat the flesh of a kid that has been cooked in its own mother’s milk. Fairly straightforward but that is about the last unconfusing aspect of kosher.
It is kosher to eat mammals that both chew their cud (ruminate) and have cloven hooves but not animals with one characteristic but not the other like the camel, the hyrax, and the hare because they have no cloven hooves, and the pig because it does not ruminate. Stay away from camels, hyraxes and hares.
For those with a hankering for giraffes and their milk, eat well because both are considered kosher. The giraffe has both split hooves and chews its cud, characteristics of animals considered kosher. Giraffe milk curdles, meeting kosher standards.
Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. Shellfish and other non-fish water fauna are not kosher.
Stay away from insects although certain species of locust are kosher. Any animal that eats other animals, whether they kill their food or eat carrion, is generally not kosher, as well as any animal that has been partially eaten by other animals.
Also verboten are all invertebrates apart from certain types of locust, Reptiles and amphibians are not kosher and neither are rodents. Meat from a kosher animal that has not been slaughtered according to the religious laws are prohibited as are animals with a significant defect or injury, such as a fractured bone or particular types of lung adhesions.
Fruit during the first three years after planting may not be consumed. Wines of libation that may have been dedicated to “idolatrous practices” are strictly forbidden. Cannabis grown in Israel is approved. And of course, kosher pickles are kosher.
I thought that keeping kosher was weird, wearing a yarmulke was weird, and wrapping the leather strips of the Tefillin a very explicit number of times around my arm and wearing on my head the small black leather boxes which contained with leather straps containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah was really weird. But what was worse is that my non-Jewish friends also thought it was weird.
There are so many stereotypes about Jews and I’ve heard many from people who didn’t understand how they made people feel. Like the expression “Jew down,” meaning to get a bargain, was a real insult.
Jews, like African Americans, often have distinguishing characteristics that make it difficult to hide. Enduring Jewish stereotypes include the large hook-noses and dark beady eyes with drooping eyelids. The stereotypes remain in part because many Jews have large or aquiline “Jewish nose.” Fortunately, I don’t have a Jewish nose, I don’t think.
Jews are often stereotyped as being melodramatic and over-zealously complaining or in the Yiddish, “kvetching.” And of course, Jews have often been seen as greedy and miserly.
And finally and most important of all, Jews are portrayed as historic enemies of Christianity after the death of Jesus. I don’t think my friends could enunciate it but they blamed me and my kind for killing Jesus.