Exploring the Jewish Identity in the Contemporary United States

While March Madness rages on and basketball fans across the world commiserate over their busted brackets, someone at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center (JCC) drags out an old poster to advertise a discounted membership rate throughout the duration of the NCAA tournament. That poster features a decade old photo of me playing basketball in the JCC gym—one of a few different times the JCC and their partners used me in advertisements. It never occurred to me that the advertisement painted me as a poster boy for white American Jewish boyhood. Yet I am well aware of the many ways the JCC shaped me into that role. 

Navigating the Jewish identity in contemporary America is a complex task. Luckily for the Jewish youth of today, we have institutions like the JCC and my synagogue to help guide us. I practically spent my entire childhood in the JCC. I joined the swim team, spent countless hours playing basketball in the gym, and attended various after school programs all at the JCC. As seen in other advertisements for its programming, I also went to Jewish Sunday School at the JCC.

Our existence is so intrinsically tied to the pain and suffering in the Holocaust, yet barely any of us remember the Holocaust and even fewer actually lived through it. As part of my synagogue’s celebration of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, survivors would come speak with us about their experiences—ingraining their stories in our memories and ensuring that us, the youth, will “Never Forget” the Holocaust.

The Jewish tradition of Passover works in a similar way. We gather in a family member’s household for the annual retelling of how the Jews escaped enslavement in Ancient Egypt, wandered the desert for 40 years, and finally reached the Holy Land. In “Social Memories: steps towards a Sociology of the Past”, Eviatar Zerubavel describes the Passover story as a part of Jews’ “sociobiographical memory” that connects us to members of the mnemonic community that came before us. The annual telling of the Passover story is a memory practice that shapes how new Jews perceive themselves in relation to their enslaved ancestors.

This year I went to a Seder featuring a cast of Jewish friends from college. Seders frequently extend past midnight as they consist of many courses, stories, prayers, and other mishegoss. In our abridged college-level version of Exodus, one attendee remarked on the irony of our retelling of the story considering the atrocities committed by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. The comment struck me as accurate, but challenged my understanding of the Passover story. Many read the lessons of Exodus as a call for solidarity with the oppressed people around the world that suffer today. Passover, along with the Holocaust, place the main actors into a binary of the oppressor and the oppressed. While we cannot treat Israel as representative of all Jews, its existence proves that Jews are not trapped in the identity of the oppressed.

Lost through engaging the binary of the oppressor and the oppressed is the role of the bystander. Too often Americans Jews have filled these shoes. We have allowed ourselves to benefit from the privilege of living in the United States as white people, thinking that we have finally achieved the goal the Jews in Exodus left Egypt for: freedom from oppression. We are content to enjoy these privileges and do little to nothing in the way of preventing the United States from enabling Israel to cause massive harm to Palestinians. 

The newest generations of American Jews must soon shoulder the trauma of our parents and grandparents that institutions like the JCC placed on us. These institutions have instructed me and countless other American Jews on how to handle this burden: to remember it. Saying “never forget” traps us in the state of “acting out” our trauma instead of “working through” it, a distinction Christina Simko discusses at great lengths in her 2020 paper “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror''. Simko tells us that acting out our trauma traps us in a state of remembrance and repetition, preventing us from moving on from the past. We are not capable of forgetting the hatred that caused last century’s suffering; we will spend the rest of our lives remembering the Holocaust. Rather, we must recognize our capability to grow beyond the identity of the oppressed and to advocate for victims of state violence across the world. This is not a preemptive “mission accomplished” press conference, celebrating the defeat of anti-semitism in the United States. Instead, it is a challenge for us newer generations to do more than our parents did.

References

Simko, Christina. 2020. “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma.” Sociological Theory 38(1): 51–77.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2011. “Social Memories: Steps towards a Sociology of the Past.” Pp. 221-224 in The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. Oxford University Press.