pogroms

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist and more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mish mash that must be confusing to non-Jews but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as a core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace.

That’s how I think. Immerse in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity with some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

I think one reason why this occurred to my wife is thanks to a visit we made to Eastern Europe. In both Latvia and Russia we found that people immediately spotted us as Jews. We never got that feeling in America or Israel. In both America and Israel we were seen as Americans, period. Should we wish to indicate our Jewishness we could, but no one spotted us from a distance and categorized us as Jews. In Latvia and Russia, the recognition was immediate. Sometimes it was matter of fact. On a night train from Latvia to Moscow, a route with few tourists, the woman who checked our tickets look at my wife’s name and first asked if we were Polish. We said no. Her next guess was Israeli. As far as I know nothing about us suggests Israeli, but that was her second guess. Only on her third guess did she pick American. But that was trivial. She was friendly and kind through the entire ride.