Underneath the Glitter, I’m Still a Jew

Before I was a pixie, before I was a feminist, almost before I was me, I had two identities: female and Jewish. I was born into them and, not having acquired the power of speech, I couldn’t argue my way out of them. For a while.

I grew wings and learned things, cast off cocoons and made myself anew. But scratch me, and find someone who can sing the Psalms in Hebrew. Someone who knows the lore of the moon and the legends of the shtetl. Make me bleed and I bleed the history I was taught: tales of suffering, of being outcast, spit on, hated.

The stories that we grow up with are the stories that shape us. Before I was old enough to question, I had imbibed, with the Passover wine, the story of exile and return, of the Promised Land and those who would bar the way. Of tiny Israel up against Arab might. Stories that blended with Jack and the Beanstalk, the Maccabees defeating the Greeks, the 300 at Thermopylae. As they were meant to. Propaganda is another way of saying myth, of saying fairy tale.

But the glitter on it all began to fade: being chosen seemed like a burden, not a gift. Those who enforced the rules broke them with impunity. Nothing galls a teenager more than hypocrisy, and the teenager I was shrugged off the bonds of the chrysalid as fast as she could. Spread her wings and never looked back.

But it’s not as simple as rinsing your mouth with bacon milkshake on a Friday night (figuratively speaking). That’s just ritual substituted for ritual. And, even though I had done with Judaism, the world had not. I entered undergraduate thinking, finally, I would be seen for who I had become, not who I had been forced to be.

I was called "Jewess" (by a close friend), targeted by Jewish organisations, targeted by anti-Semitic hate language, taunted for not knowing the New Testament chapter and verse, expected to work on the Holocaust. Ghettoised. Pigeonholed. Everyone thought they knew my opinion before I had formed it. Pro-this, against that.

I moved continents and still it was not enough. Invitations to synagogues, presumptions of my knowledge, my ethics, my arguments. I found that I belonged to a group I didn’t even know existed when, in the middle of a heated argument, my roommate accused me of being "just like all the other leftist Jewish lesbian literary critics with father issues" who apparently controlled every university he had attended.

My very own conspiracy. Protocols of the Lesbians of Zion, breaking balls with our analysis of Freud. Who knew?

And so I retreated further. But the world does not retreat. The world keeps coming and — sooner or later — you have to stop running. You — I — had to speak up. When people presumed they knew which side of the debate — you know, the debate, which begins with who does this bit of land belong to and escalates to who runs the world — I was on, I had to say.

But — cut off from that identity by choice — I didn’t know what to say. Betrayed by fairy tales, I had to unlearn everything, to pursue less certain truths and stories with no heroic ring to them. I had to let the fabric of that residual Jewish identity unravel, only to find it start to reform.

Haha, right. Raised Orthodox, I had been led to believe that Reform Jews were less than Jews, worse than Christians because they were apostate. As a teenager I discovered that Reform Judaism included cool things like lesbian rabbis and bacon sandwiches and people who didn’t think that joining the Israeli Defence Force was the best use for a British kid’s gap year. I learnt, I’m still learning, that it’s possible to be Jewish and deplore the things done in the name of Judaism, whether male circumcision or the bombing of Lebanon. I’m learning that I don’t have to hate who I am in order to hate the lies that I was told.

And, indeed, I’m learning that there’s a long tradition of Jews who have spoken out against those lies. My parents used to play a version of "He’s Canadian" (you know you do it) when we watched TV. "She’s Jewish" or "He’s Jewish but he converted" peppered the broadcast of every show. Now I can do it with my bookshelves: Susan Sontag, Kaja Silverman, Judith Halberstam, Rebecca Solnit, Michele Roberts, Abigail Child, Cynthia Ozick, Jacqueline Rose, Gertrude Stein... The list is surprisingly long to me, even as I type it. Powerful women and brilliant thinkers all. Anti-war, anti-tyranny.

Hmmm. Maybe that army of feminist Jews with a brickbat for patriarchy does exist. I wish it did. Because it could be powerful. It could undermine those broad-brush presumptions about Jews (running the gamut from "Jews support Israel" to "Jews run the media") while also lifting its voice in solidarity with Palestinian and Lebanese people against the occupation and war. But right now it’s inaudible. It’s this half-baked column. It’s Michele Hanson taking a petition to Downing Street and being turned away <http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1833854,00.html>.

It’s having all sorts of things to say, and nowhere to say them from. Because Jew-as-identity has been colonised by the scary people who like bombing Arabs and stoning women, or by earnest Americans who make money off the Holocaust. Sylvia Plath felt like a Jew, and we all know how well that worked out for her. In her film The Tango Lesson, Sally Potter, playing herself, says that she feels like a Jew. Later, her partner Pablo, an Argentinian Jew, asks her what that means. She doesn’t have an answer, and nor do I. But, for the first time in 15 years, I’m asking myself the question.

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Comments

Pixie,
I have to tell you that, without doubt, this is the best article I've read!  You blow me away with your talent and your passion.  I had a crap day today and came home wanting to be stimulated and awakened....and I got it.
Anna.

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