In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix Preface Who, what is the Jewish people? The question dazed me when I first asked it. I thought I knew, had always known, the answer. The Jewish people lived in Brooklyn, and if your father made money, you moved to a coveted “private house” on Long Island. (Mine didn’t.) Jewish grandparents had foreign accents. Jewish grandmothers made chopped liver. Only old-­ fashioned Jews went to shul. I grew up in Flatbush assuming that Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat who lost two presidential elections to Eisenhower, was Jewish because my parents adored him in that familial way. Stevenson was ours. Similarly I believed that a picture of FDR on our wall was god in modern drag— Jewish, for sure. The whiteness of their skin and ours made these assumptions possible. I expected all Jews to share my parents’ progressive politics, to support unions and civil rights, to oppose McCarthy and bomb-testing. Some Jews said shvartse. We did not. My knowledge of Jews of color was limited to Sammy Davis, Jr. (who is to Jewish multiculturalism as Anne Frank is to the Holocaust; as, for that matter, Seinfeld is to Jewish culture as a whole; that is, the one scrap of knowledge that allows the knower to imagine s/he knows enough). I was, I see now, a lazily secular Jew in the Jewish land of Brooklyn, for whom Jewish was how you looked, talked, smelled: Jewish was something you were born to. Everything to do with Yiddish as the bass line against which your English resonated (how old was I when I learned that words like tukhes, meshugene, mishpokhe, and bubbe were not English?). Everything to do with cabbage soup and kasha varnishkes and the smells in the stairwell of your walk-up apartment. I don’t remember hearing the term Ashkenazi, or when I learned that it meant Jews whose path, like my family’s, once traced through Germany and so spoke Yiddish. While believing that all Jews shared my family’s politics, I simultaneously longed to escape what I thought of as the “Jewish” Jews—meaning religious or bourgeois. I didn’t yet understand that my attitude was a New York luxury. I was in my thirties when Evelyn Beck, who knew my writing from lesbian and feminist venues, asked me to write something for a book she was editing, which became Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. Though I refused at first—I was Jewish but had nothing to say about being Jewish—  the invitation put Jewishness in my face. I was living in New Mexico. Jews were rare, invisible, or thought to have horns. I began to encounter my own Jewishness. A year later I wrote Evelyn to ask if it was too late. It was not and the book (my essay included) went on to gain a wide readership among feminist and lesbian Jews and to form the rudiments of Jewish feminist community. Included in the anthology were essays by an Iraqi/Egyptian Jew who’d grown up in Japan; a Syrian Jew who’d grown up in England; a Jewish daughter of an African American–Native American mother and an Ashkenazi father. A couple of years later, beginning to work on the anthology The Tribe of Dina, which I coedited with Irena Klepfisz,1 we received work by women from Argentina, Greece, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Spain; from Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews whose paths traced through the Middle East, North Africa, or the Iberian Peninsula; Jews whose ancestors spoke Ladino (Judeo-Español) or Judeo-Arabic. I had thought Jewish identity was simple, but suddenly it was not­ simple at all. I remembered my mother’s hospital roommate with whom she became briefly friendly explained by my mother as “Sephardic,” but as she understood it, confusingly, not through geography, history or culture, but—in a way that now feels ironically, classically anti-semitic—as “Jews who are rich, dark, and stick together.” I recalled my high school best friend Susan Hassan, whose grandparents came from Iraq—the beginning and end of my information. As teenagers, biographical data on grandparents was simply not interesting. Nor, as an early atheist, did I take seriously the concept of Judaism-the-religion as a binding force. To me, you either were or weren’t Jewish; it was not something you could become. As my political work became increasingly focused on Jewish community , on support for the Israeli and Palestinian women’s peace movement, and on racism and economic...

Share