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

  • “On Not Being Jewish . . . and Other Lies”: Reflections on Racial Fever
  • Judith Weisenfeld (bio)

Fordham University Press 2009

On those many Friday afternoons when I have seen a Hasidic man on a street in New York engaging passersby in an effort to persuade them to embrace a greater degree of religious observance, I have never been the target of the question—“Excuse me, are you Jewish?”—that begins such exchanges. Unlike the dark-haired man with whom Eliza Slavet begins her study, who appears to the proselytizer a likely suspect but playfully defers, I have not seemed to be a possible candidate. Dark and curly hair, yes, but also brown skin that makes it easy for the Hasidic man to allow me to recede into the background as he surveys the crowd. That I have never been taken to be a candidate for re-incorporation into Jewish observance has been the source of some irritation to me and I have been known, on occasion, to loiter nearby such an evangelizing event trying to be both conspicuous and inconspicuous at once, resentment brewing inside me. Why [End Page 3] won’t he ask me? Yet I also know that, were I to be asked if I am Jewish, other reservoirs of confusing emotions would flow to the surface as I offered a response: either, “No, I was raised Catholic”; or “Yes, half, but the ‘wrong’ half.” In one sense, then, the answer is simple. I’m not Jewish, either by religious commitment or by the strict standard of maternal descent, because it is my father who contributes the Jewish “half.” Of course, the understanding of Jewishness that leads to the first way in which I am not Jewish—one is Jewish if one believes certain things and engages in particular practices—can and sometimes has been kept distinct from the understanding that leads to the second way in which I am not Jewish—a genealogical definition focused on matrilineal descent.1 However, neither the circumstances of my birth nor of my upbringing conform sufficiently to the strict letter of the law to make a claim on either basis.

Yet I have been prone to occasional bouts of the (Jewish) “racial fever” that Slavet diagnoses, the symptoms of which she describes as “the irrepressible desire of individuals and communities to define themselves and others through genealogy, to discover (and sometimes invent) ancestral memories that can somehow explain the tensions and compulsions of the present, and to reconstruct and return to these narratives as if they were indisputable history and palpable facts” (Slavet 2009, 6). These flare-ups of racial fever might seem especially curious in my case because they emerge in relation to people I know only from photographs who, through their implicit or explicit denial of connection to me, are almost as distant as the anonymous figures in fading photographs I often find myself shuffling through at flea markets. I have long constructed these people, both emotionally and discursively, as my father’s relatives and somehow not my own. I can speak of them with some ease in terms such as “my father’s mother,” but not “my grandmother.” Such a painful contortion is the nature of the disease, of course, as Slavet details its etiology. At times when the fever has raged, I have attempted to sweat it out through long sessions of research in the databases housed at Ancestry.com, only to realize with great alarm that the attempted cure only inflames the condition. It must be racial fever that compels me to pore over names in columns on censuses and ships’ manifests, wondering about the transformation of Malke and Feige to Mollie and Fanny, how Szmiel and Bune became Sam and Bertha, and what it meant for their sense of connection to the past and for their American [End Page 4] present. How do these lines on government forms connect me to the past and to them?

Perhaps it should not surprise me that immersing myself in the 10 billion documents and 34 million family trees of Ancestry.com feeds the fever, since the subscription-based commercial website—billed as “the world’s largest online family history resource...

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