Not Really Jewish

By Lindsey Staub

"I feel fully accepted by the Jewish community here at Berkeley. But more importantly, I have accepted my Jewish identity and the unconventional journey I took to get here."

There were a couple of things I learned early on in life, things I wasn’t explicitly taught but picked up on naturally: things like don’t bring a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, don’t wear ill-fitting jeans on P.E. days, and don’t discuss your Jewish identity.

I am the product of an interfaith marriage between an areligious Ashkenazi Jew and a spiritual woman raised Christian but grown up to follow the words of her horoscope over the word of God. I was never Bat Mitzvah’d and never attended Hebrew school. I know a couple of Hebrew prayers, but not their translations. I attend temple at most twice a year and never celebrate Shabbat at home. Though my mother claims to be naturally attracted to Judaism, she isn’t technically Jewish, so, according to rabbinic matrilineal principle, neither am I. In many Jewish sects, the offspring of a Jewish mother and a gentile father is a Jew, but the offspring of a Jewish father and a gentile mother is a gentile. Though this controversial idea is widely debated in the Jewish community, among those who have accepted it were the people most important to me: my non-Jewish friends and the other non-Jewish students at school.

In an attempt to reconcile all the conflict in my blood, I began telling people I was half-Christian and half-Jewish. I questioned what it meant to be half of something, but as I grew up, I found out — not from a deeper understanding of my own identity, but from snide remarks of those around me. Remarks from a particularly pious girl telling me my father was going to hell for not believing in Jesus. Antisemitic jokes whispered around me as I hid my face and believed that it wasn’t my place to stop it. Christian friends telling me that I wasn’t “really Jewish.” Not feeling comfortable in any community.

I believed that when I went to temple or engaged in conversation about Judaism, I was a fraud. I started attending Christian summer camps and Bible studies in a desperate attempt to find community. In my predominantly Christian suburb, no one questioned me when I claimed to be Christian the way they questioned me when I claimed to be Jewish. My friends equated the mentioning of my Jewish identity with a cry for attention since I wasn’t “really Jewish” anyway. My father, confused by my sudden uptake in Christianity, admitted that he’d be saddened if I didn’t pass any Jewish traditions onto the family I would one day have. He didn’t care so much that I believe in Jewish doctrine or consider myself religious, he just wanted me to retain and pass on the traditions and values that he had learned and passed onto me. I understood that, to my father, rejecting my Jewish identity meant rejecting his legacy and the legacies of those who came before him.

"I believed that when I went to temple or engaged in conversation about Judaism, I was a fraud."

In college, I immediately got involved in the Jewish community, and though I often felt like a fraud (choosing to stand in the back at services and nervously sipping at my grape juice during prayer on Shabbat), no one told me I was. The staff and students at Hillel never questioned my Jewish status, so eventually, I stopped questioning it too.

The dissonance of my identity is not completely resolved. I still get nervous when I think about my future family, nervous that marrying a gentile would erase my Jewish identity completely. I feel embarrassed when people ask me questions about Judaism that I cannot answer. And there is the occasional person who will remind me that having a gentile mother means that I’m not “really Jewish.” But whenever I start to apologize for the Jewish imposter that I am, I stop myself. No member of the Jewish community has rejected my Jewish claim— the opposite, actually; I feel fully accepted by the Jewish community here at Berkeley. But more importantly, I have accepted my Jewish identity and the unconventional journey I took to get here.