Jewish Enough
[I started this essay last January and held on to it, thinking I might pitch it. There was never the perfect time for it, but because antisemitism is always so prevalent, there was never really the wrong time for it either. Today felt like the right time to send it. It's longer and more personal than what I usually write here, but I wanted to push this out after a night of low-simmering rage that I anxiously spent refreshing Twitter as everyone else was talking about football. There will be no recipe at the end of this newsletter, obviously. Thanks for reading.]
Last December, I was speed-dating rabbis. Each conversation started the same: “Hi, so I’m looking for a connection to the local Jewish community. I know I have an Irish last name, but my mom is Jewish. I was never bat mitzvah’d, but…” Then inevitably I mispronounced a Hebrew word or the rabbi spotted the Christmas tree behind me on the Zoom. I was waiting for someone to call me out as an impostor. I was ready to show them my 23 and Me output that said I was 49 percent Ashkenazi. I hoped no one brought up Israel, but I ended up saying something.
The Zooms were about as awkward as a Tinder date. I would bring a level of earnestness and vulnerability, but I was also trying to play it cool, which was funny because religion felt distinctly uncool. My nearly socialist, atheist friends were all about dismantling systems, and here I was trying to join one. It was confusing to everyone, especially me. After years of being raised by an atheist and a secular Jew, I was suddenly finding religion? All it took was a pandemic to make me have a spiritual crisis.
I somehow felt both not Jewish enough to talk to these rabbis, but also too Jewish to exist in America. I had been feeling this way since Donald Trump’s election. Previously, antisemitism seemed historical. I grew up studying the Holocaust so much in school that I was exhausted by the constant reminder that Jewish existence was precarious at best. Not every cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious group gets multiple units on the genocide of their people, and in that respect it’s almost a privilege to have everyone in school learn about your people's—considering how many other genocides are outright ignored by Americans—but it's also a dark reminder. My family did not escape the Holocaust. They left Russia a few decades earlier to escape the Russian pogroms, something I never learned about in school but a production of Fiddler on the Roof I saw last year. Did it not count as much? Does the world only have so much space for Jewish tragedy? Is this why my mother reads a lot of Holocaust novels? Was this Jewish enough?
When Trump was first elected, I recognized I was too privileged to see it coming. As a white cis-het woman (at the time, at least), I knew my identity wasn’t under attack, but I would still do what I could to fight for others. I never imagined the “other” would become me. At first, the antisemitism felt abstract. But I caught myself having thoughts like, “Oh, I’m so glad I don’t have a Jewish last name, less harassment.” Then cringing at the sentiment. Despite Trump’s cordial relationship with Israel and having a Jewish son-in-law, his unlocking of the white supremacy pandora’s box meant all the antisemites came out. When they marched through Charlottesville, I was haunted by the chant of “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” I first heard it on a news podcast but felt like I was in 1930s Weimar Republic for a second. To others, the tiki torches looked like a joke, but to me the hate felt very real. After Charlottesville, I wrote a set for my stand-up class where the “joke” was how the new normal was abnormal. This was more of an observation than a punchline, and my classmates said it was “too dark” for comedy. It was my first taste of the anger of being denied my own rage.
Still, I felt that the antisemitism was happening elsewhere, to someone else. Then at the beginning of the pandemic, I was walking around my neighborhood when I found the word “JEW” carved into the sidewalk. It was Passover, and this was one of the most Orthodox neighborhoods in Atlanta. But the context didn’t matter. I felt unsafe for one of the first times as a Jew. Not intellectually. Not metaphorically. Physically.
The hate crime wasn’t on my street, and whoever scratched it into the sidewalk didn’t know I lived here. They probably didn’t even know I existed, let alone that I was Jewish enough to feel threatened. Like many Jews before me, I was the only one who recognized it for what it was and cared enough to fix it. I was the only one to report it to the city, my council member, and the neighborhood association. When I mentioned it to one of my friends, they said it must’ve been someone’s initials. If my friends didn’t acknowledge it for the antisemitism it was, then I couldn’t be other to them. Yet if anything, it only made me feel more Jewish in a way I didn’t when I actually grew up with my family of Jews. After all, to be a minority, you need to be outside of the majority.
When this happened, I didn’t really identify with my Jewish heritage either. As a daughter of an atheist gentile who still celebrated Christmas and a Jewish mother, my version of Judaism growing up in a suburb of St. Paul was my parents arguing if the Christmas tree or the menorah was a bigger fire hazard. The only Minnesota Jews I knew were the Coen Brothers. I was Jewish enough to conveniently claim it when my Missouri grad school classmates tried to invite me to Bible study. But not Jewish enough for my Georgia colleagues to even realize I was until I dropped off a homemade challah in the break room around Rosh Hashanah. Yet whenever there was antisemitism in the news, one coworker asked me how I was doing. I was always startled at the thoughtfulness that also surprisingly made me feel guilty for being so disconnected from my religion. Was I Jewish enough to deserve the sympathy? Should I be worried about my own safety?
Yet it’s one thing to feel othered and another to claim it. Unlike many other minorities, being Jewish can be a choice. Whether I decide to go to temple or celebrate Purim or even tell you I’m a Jew is up to me. I always employed the choice like a weapon, defensively when a friend made an off-color comment about Woody Allen changing his name to be “less Jewish," or a burden when a coworker texted me a cute doodle of a frog they found in a classroom that I recognized as Pepe the antisemitic symbol. But the idea I could choose joy and belonging in the identity—not just anger and fear—was alien.
To be fair, hate and persecution are baked into Judaism. Whether fleeing Europe or Egypt, exile is a foundation of the religion—at least from an outsider’s perspective. And that’s how I was viewing it. The point wasn’t the exile. The point was that Jews escaped together and built a new sacred place wherever they went. I had just been missing the community part of it. There had to be more to the religion other than feeling unsafe. After all, this is why many people join churches, less so for the belief but the community they provide. My spiritual crisis was inextricably tied to a personal one. The pandemic had made me feel isolated in more ways than just living alone. I watched as my friends got married, had babies, and bought houses—building communities with each other. Where would I fit in as a single queer woman? Did I even want to?
Then the world intervened and I felt compelled, urgently, to explore my Judaism. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the first night of Rosh Hashanah. Like many politically active millennial women, I’d idolized RBG for her sharp dissents and trailblazing feminist career. She was justice personified, and on that night in the final months of the Trump regime, she seemed like the only thread holding America together. I was at a loss for how to mourn, unable to gather with friends because of the pandemic and unwilling to join the performative outpouring of grief on social media. Then I remembered a link to a live-streamed Rosh Hashanah service in a self-care email newsletter. Just 12 hours earlier I had dismissed this, but now it felt like the only place I could go.
The temple was unlike any I’d ever been to or knew could exist. IKAR is non-denominational with a woman head rabbi and had two other female rabbis on the clergy at the time. Rabbi Sharon Brous didn’t have to tailor her sermon to the news that had happened an hour before, but as I’d learn she’s not a rabbi to miss an opportunity to speak for justice. This was not just a sermon for one of the most important Jewish holidays of the year. It was also a call to action to honor RBG by standing up for her beliefs as we collectively worked to vote Trump out of office. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t something this radical or political. I didn’t expect to be moved by that sermon, but I cried. I closed the Facebook Live Stream that night feeling like I’d actually mourned and catalyzed a final push for democracy before the election.
I didn’t fully understand what had happened to me that night. Is this how people find religion? Sure, we might be born or marry into a faith, but there needs to be some active connection with it to really be of it. I had never really wanted Judaism before, but spiritual journeys are never really about desire but necessity. Now I was willing to admit I needed something bigger than me. As I watched many people in my generation move on through traditional markers and milestones of adulthood that I didn’t want, I was finding a traditional marker of my own.
So I kept answering the call. I cautiously dipped my toe into other IKAR Rosh Hashanah programming throughout the week. I left the services filled up in an area I didn’t even realize was empty. I had stumbled back into Judaism and found it waiting to embrace the woman I’d become: a social justice–driven liberal queer Jewish woman. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I knew enough to know I had to keep following this thread. This is how I ended up Zooming with four local rabbis in the search of a synagogue in Georgia.
Still, feeling Jewish enough to feel the stickiness of antisemitism is very different than being Jewish enough to join a temple. I was such an outsider that I wasn’t aware that we didn’t refer to it as the Old Testament because that implies there is a new one. Every Zoom with a rabbi, textual study I attended, or Jewish meditation group felt like an exam I hadn’t studied for. Fortunately, there is no such thing as mastering the text in a religion where the oral interpretation of it is ongoing and just as important as the original. It’s a religion of questioning, arguing, and constant interpretation. The inherent debate of Judaism appeals to the part of me that’s averse to dogma. No one even required me to believe in God, and I still don't and have no problem with that seeming contradiction. In some respects, there’s almost a benefit to finding the religion later because I can come to it with my full self and figure out what I need from it, instead of having it pushed on me.
A silver-lining of the remote world of the pandemic is that it allowed me to join multiple temples, across the country, and cherry pick the programming that works for me. A little meditation here, a little study there, the occasional Shabbat service. Originally when I told my parents I was interested in finding a temple, my atheist dad scoffed that it sounded more like a hobby than a calling. He challenged me to explain why I felt I needed this. I didn’t have an answer then, and I don’t know if I ever will. It’s an evolving relationship.
I look for the moments that move me in ways I can’t fully articulate, questions that reframe my thinking not just on Jewish teachings but how they apply to my life today, moments I hesitate to call holiness but feel like connection. Even if that connection is not to God but other people, that’s Jewish enough. That’s really why I joined two synagogues during a pandemic: the one in LA and a local Atlanta one. I watch Shabbats at one, do meditation through the other, and take textual classes through both. I attended the High Holy Days for the first time ever this year in Atlanta. It was a very 2021 experience with a congregation in KN95s and cops in bulletproof vests stationed at the doors. I go to an in-person Shabbat once a month with fellow millennial Jews I've met through the temple. The head of security is always thanked along with the AV team and admin staff after every service. This is just what it means to be a Jew these days, a specter of constant danger but a vital need to return and form community whether in a literal temple, outside on the lawn, or a Zoom room—it's a sacred space if we show up.
I know ultimately my return to Judaism isn’t just because of pandemic. It wasn’t just the literal isolation of being alone in my apartment, but the spiritual disconnect of watching everyone live in their separate “pandemic reality” and not even agreeing on the most basic of things. I needed grounding, a spiritual base that I could stand on as reality shifted around me in the pandemic and life promises to be something entirely remade after. I needed something to cling to when I got caught up in the currents of others’ choices. I needed a reminder that the point is to question.