Do Jews Have That "Certain Something"?
I never learned there was any Jewish heritage in my family until I was in my early 40s. There was talk... whispers... but nothing conclusive said or seen. My father is from New England stock. A family that goes all the way back to the Mayflower, a small historic cemetery in Oxford, Mass., familial relations to American writer Booth Tarkington and a pride in all things American.
I only dated one Jewish man - twice. We worked together and after two dinners on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where we both lived I finally told him that he, being a Modern Orthodox Jew and I, being Catholic -- there was no way this relationship would ever be anything but a friendship. I was very involved in my acting career, I was traveling a lot, and while his parents seemed to like me I was a shiksa... I would always be a shiksa and I just didn't have the time or inclination to be involved with anyone, let alone someone who's culture (I felt) would never accept me.
I was involved with one Jewish boy in college, but again, we never "dated." In retrospect I see that this boy didn't want to be seen alone with me -- ever. He was charming, coercive, persuasive and thoroughly convinced me that he had genuine feelings for me. I went through with an abortion, terrified of my Mother finding out, in July 1976 for him -- and after trying to contact him a few weeks later to no avail, I realized what had happened.
Using feelings to "buy" my affections he never truly admitted there was any real attraction or relationship from him to me, a shiksa. It didn't do much for my already shredded self-esteem. I was open-minded enough to believe not all Jewish males were like this, despite a lot of "told you so's" from others.
My other college 'boyfriend' had a Jewish father and Christian mother. His parents adored me but there was no practice of religion in their home. I was slowly but surely losing my devoutness to Catholicism, though I still went to Church -- mostly out of habit. I broke it off with him after 3 years because he was a sociopath who viciously abused me. Yes, it took me 3 years to realize I didn't deserve what he was doing to me. His parents never understood and I never said a word to them about his treatment of me.
My mother's parents were Polish, her father a rabid anti-semite. He died just a few months before my mother and father were married. So despite sharing a birthday, we never met. Grandpa Joe had 5 different fathers in his lifetime. His mother remarried upon the death of a husband, for she despite being an educated woman, the times dictated that women should be married. A few of those fathers were Jew-hating, German men. Abusive, dictatorial and hard. Grandpa Joe inflicted many beatings on my late Mother for her sin of being female. A couple years before she met my father, my mother had been engaged to young, pre-med student -- who was Jewish. Within weeks of getting serious the families broke it off. My Mother was a devout Catholic and despite the fact that her Catholic grandparents may have not only assisted Jews out of Poland, but one or both may have been Jews -- her marrying a Jew was forbidden.
But the Jewish people and Judaism always held a strong fascination for me. At age 9 my family had moved to a rural community in Central New York. The community shunned my family and I as outsiders. I hated it there, never feeling quite right or like I belonged there. My Nana, of blessed memory and late Mother spoke Polish to each other -- a signal to all that something was different. Jews were people who lived in other places and practiced strange rituals behind their temple doors. Judaism was a closed door to me.
My best friend has told me many times when we first met, despite my English-looks she was convinced I was Jewish. She tells me even today I "feel Jewish." One of my Torah teachers had no idea I was a convert until I told him -- even then he was surprised.
So as soon as that "closed door" was opened a crack for me, I peered in -- finding, strangely, a familiarity that was hard for me to ignore.
by Ruth Ellen Gruber
I learned a new word this summer - "allosemitism."
Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar - the idea of Jews as the perpetual "other."
Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews - everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred."
At root is the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick.
The word cropped up during a recent symposium on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) cultures that I attended here as part of a project called, significantly, "The Other Europeans."
It was gratifying to find a term that so aptly describes the ambivalent ways in which Jews are regarded. And it was amazing to me that I hadn't come across it earlier, considering all my reading and writing on the subject, not to mention my experiences over the past decades as a Jew in Europe.
We all know about anti-Semitism and the historic demonization of Jews. But anti-Semitism can be counterbalanced by an idealization of Jews and Jewish culture that also can be divorced from reality.
The project statement doesn't use the term "allosemitism." Instead it describes Jews and Roma as having "transcultural" European identities "in both fact and imagination."
This, it states, has led to the condemnation of both groups as "rootless," "parasitic," "degenerate" and worse, as well as to continuing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. At the same time, it notes, "the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary 'world music' pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore 'hip.' "
The Other Europeans project is the brainchild of the musician Alan Bern, an American who has been based in Berlin since the 1980s.
It is sponsored by three Jewish culture festivals -- the Weimar Yiddish Summer Weeks, which Bern directs; the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, which this year marked its 20th anniversary; and the KlezMORE Jewish Music Festival in Vienna.
All three present and teach Jewish music and culture to a predominantly non-Jewish public.
Bern, a key figure in the klezmer music revival over the past two decades, is a thoughtful observer of the sometimes uneasy cultural dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.
Strict halachic definition may suffice for the religiously observant. But for Jews and non-Jews alike, that has always told only part of the story. And indeed, as experienced so drastically in the Shoah, definitions of what, or who, is Jewish often come from the outside.
Is there, as the concept of allosemitism implies, a "certain Jewish something" that does so set Jews apart?
The Jewish Museum in Munich has mounted an exhibit this summer actually called "That Certain Jewish Something." It takes a creative and rather provocative approach to explore the intangibles that can imbue objects, situations and even individuals with a sense of Jewishness.
The museum called on the public to bring in an object the people felt had "a certain Jewish something" about it with a written statement about why they had chosen that item. More than 120 people, most of them non-Jewish or with only distant Jewish roots, answered the call. All the objects were delivered on one day, June 22, and then arranged in display cases with the stories behind them.
The resulting, wide-ranging collection, as the museum puts it, provides "a multifaceted view into a very personal and modern picture of Judaism." Some of the objects are explicitly Jewish:
A set of faded snapshots shows a smiling, bespectacled fellow attending a party in a Mexican costume. The man who brought them in had found the snaps when he moved into a new apartment, and they apparently showed the previous tenant, a Jewish man who had passed away.
An 11-year-old boy brought in a shirt from the Bayern-Munich football team because he had read that the team's president before World War II had been a Jew.
The ordinary pair of sneakers belonged to a Jewish man. They in fact are a tangible symbol of the force of his faith: He wears them to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, he wrote, as they are made of cloth, not leather, which is prohibited on the holiday.
That allosemitic, "certain Jewish something" is in what they represent, or how they are represented, not in what they actually are.
SOURCE
I only dated one Jewish man - twice. We worked together and after two dinners on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where we both lived I finally told him that he, being a Modern Orthodox Jew and I, being Catholic -- there was no way this relationship would ever be anything but a friendship. I was very involved in my acting career, I was traveling a lot, and while his parents seemed to like me I was a shiksa... I would always be a shiksa and I just didn't have the time or inclination to be involved with anyone, let alone someone who's culture (I felt) would never accept me.
I was involved with one Jewish boy in college, but again, we never "dated." In retrospect I see that this boy didn't want to be seen alone with me -- ever. He was charming, coercive, persuasive and thoroughly convinced me that he had genuine feelings for me. I went through with an abortion, terrified of my Mother finding out, in July 1976 for him -- and after trying to contact him a few weeks later to no avail, I realized what had happened.
Using feelings to "buy" my affections he never truly admitted there was any real attraction or relationship from him to me, a shiksa. It didn't do much for my already shredded self-esteem. I was open-minded enough to believe not all Jewish males were like this, despite a lot of "told you so's" from others.
My other college 'boyfriend' had a Jewish father and Christian mother. His parents adored me but there was no practice of religion in their home. I was slowly but surely losing my devoutness to Catholicism, though I still went to Church -- mostly out of habit. I broke it off with him after 3 years because he was a sociopath who viciously abused me. Yes, it took me 3 years to realize I didn't deserve what he was doing to me. His parents never understood and I never said a word to them about his treatment of me.
My mother's parents were Polish, her father a rabid anti-semite. He died just a few months before my mother and father were married. So despite sharing a birthday, we never met. Grandpa Joe had 5 different fathers in his lifetime. His mother remarried upon the death of a husband, for she despite being an educated woman, the times dictated that women should be married. A few of those fathers were Jew-hating, German men. Abusive, dictatorial and hard. Grandpa Joe inflicted many beatings on my late Mother for her sin of being female. A couple years before she met my father, my mother had been engaged to young, pre-med student -- who was Jewish. Within weeks of getting serious the families broke it off. My Mother was a devout Catholic and despite the fact that her Catholic grandparents may have not only assisted Jews out of Poland, but one or both may have been Jews -- her marrying a Jew was forbidden.
But the Jewish people and Judaism always held a strong fascination for me. At age 9 my family had moved to a rural community in Central New York. The community shunned my family and I as outsiders. I hated it there, never feeling quite right or like I belonged there. My Nana, of blessed memory and late Mother spoke Polish to each other -- a signal to all that something was different. Jews were people who lived in other places and practiced strange rituals behind their temple doors. Judaism was a closed door to me.
My best friend has told me many times when we first met, despite my English-looks she was convinced I was Jewish. She tells me even today I "feel Jewish." One of my Torah teachers had no idea I was a convert until I told him -- even then he was surprised.
So as soon as that "closed door" was opened a crack for me, I peered in -- finding, strangely, a familiarity that was hard for me to ignore.
by Ruth Ellen Gruber
I learned a new word this summer - "allosemitism."
Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar - the idea of Jews as the perpetual "other."
Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews - everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred."
At root is the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick.
The word cropped up during a recent symposium on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) cultures that I attended here as part of a project called, significantly, "The Other Europeans."
It was gratifying to find a term that so aptly describes the ambivalent ways in which Jews are regarded. And it was amazing to me that I hadn't come across it earlier, considering all my reading and writing on the subject, not to mention my experiences over the past decades as a Jew in Europe.
We all know about anti-Semitism and the historic demonization of Jews. But anti-Semitism can be counterbalanced by an idealization of Jews and Jewish culture that also can be divorced from reality.
"People who think Jews are smarter than everyone else don't have Jewish relatives," my brother Frank likes to quip.The Other Europeans project examines some of these issues by focusing on the relationships between Jewish and Roma cultures, particularly in the realm of music.
The project statement doesn't use the term "allosemitism." Instead it describes Jews and Roma as having "transcultural" European identities "in both fact and imagination."
This, it states, has led to the condemnation of both groups as "rootless," "parasitic," "degenerate" and worse, as well as to continuing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. At the same time, it notes, "the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary 'world music' pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore 'hip.' "
The Other Europeans project is the brainchild of the musician Alan Bern, an American who has been based in Berlin since the 1980s.
It is sponsored by three Jewish culture festivals -- the Weimar Yiddish Summer Weeks, which Bern directs; the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, which this year marked its 20th anniversary; and the KlezMORE Jewish Music Festival in Vienna.
All three present and teach Jewish music and culture to a predominantly non-Jewish public.
Bern, a key figure in the klezmer music revival over the past two decades, is a thoughtful observer of the sometimes uneasy cultural dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.
"You define culture through interactions," he told me during one of our many conversations. "What defines something is often the point of view from which you regard it."How to define what is "Jewish" provides endless fodder for debate in post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe. Jews are few here now; Jewish communal life, though reviving in some places, is in flux; and Jewish cultural expression is often embraced or even perpetrated by non-Jews.
Strict halachic definition may suffice for the religiously observant. But for Jews and non-Jews alike, that has always told only part of the story. And indeed, as experienced so drastically in the Shoah, definitions of what, or who, is Jewish often come from the outside.
Is there, as the concept of allosemitism implies, a "certain Jewish something" that does so set Jews apart?
The Jewish Museum in Munich has mounted an exhibit this summer actually called "That Certain Jewish Something." It takes a creative and rather provocative approach to explore the intangibles that can imbue objects, situations and even individuals with a sense of Jewishness.
The museum called on the public to bring in an object the people felt had "a certain Jewish something" about it with a written statement about why they had chosen that item. More than 120 people, most of them non-Jewish or with only distant Jewish roots, answered the call. All the objects were delivered on one day, June 22, and then arranged in display cases with the stories behind them.
The resulting, wide-ranging collection, as the museum puts it, provides "a multifaceted view into a very personal and modern picture of Judaism." Some of the objects are explicitly Jewish:
menorahs, an old container for matzah, kitschy shtetl figurines, family silverware marked for meat and dairy, a Ten Commandments paperweight, a comic book called "Shaloman."But for many of the items - a flashlight, a rock, a tablecloth, a necklace, books, paintings, an ordinary pair of sneakers - "that certain Jewish something" is revealed only through their meaning to those who selected them.
A set of faded snapshots shows a smiling, bespectacled fellow attending a party in a Mexican costume. The man who brought them in had found the snaps when he moved into a new apartment, and they apparently showed the previous tenant, a Jewish man who had passed away.
An 11-year-old boy brought in a shirt from the Bayern-Munich football team because he had read that the team's president before World War II had been a Jew.
The ordinary pair of sneakers belonged to a Jewish man. They in fact are a tangible symbol of the force of his faith: He wears them to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, he wrote, as they are made of cloth, not leather, which is prohibited on the holiday.
That allosemitic, "certain Jewish something" is in what they represent, or how they are represented, not in what they actually are.
SOURCE
Comments