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Jewish Identity with and Without Zionism

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Although the prospect seems scarcely imaginable now, there was a time, not very long ago, when American Jews were free to have no particular thoughts or feelings about Israel. This was true not only of run-of-the-mill Jews but of intellectuals and writers as well. And it wasn’t merely that assimilation—an act at once idealistic, pragmatic, and mortifying—was more pressing to a Philip Roth or a Saul Bellow than one’s relationship, one way or another, to the nascent Jewish state. It’s that Israel, and Zionism, didn’t seem like relevant objects of concern. This is no longer a tenable position. Joshua Cohen’s novel “ The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family ,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2022, is a revisionist history that needed little more than a year to lie in wait for its time. The book is premised on a counterfactual: What if the American Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period—that is, between the end of the Second World War and the Six-Day War—had been forced to wrestle with Zionism? And what if their Zionist challenger hadn’t represented the ostensibly liberal, humanist, kibbutznik wing of the movement that was then in ascendance, but the expansionist, chauvinistic, Messianic contingent then in retreat? These aren’t idle questions.

Cohen’s novel is narrated from the present but takes place in 1959, to coincide with the publication of Roth’s “ Goodbye, Columbus ,” a book with only a single glance over its shoulder at Israel—a reference to the fact that the American Jew, when he thought about Israel at all, then considered it a place that didn’t have enough trees. Very loosely based on a personal anecdote relayed to Cohen (who, I should probably note, is a friend of mine) by the late Harold Bloom, “The Netanyahus” tells the story of an encounter between Ruben Blum, a first-generation scholar of taxation—“I am a Jewish historian, but I am not an historian of the Jews,” he warns, defensively—and Benzion Netanyahu. At the time, Benzion was a largely unknown and quasi-mystical interpreter of the Iberian Inquisition—which, for him, represented the perennial efflorescence of antisemitism as a racialized (and hence ineradicable) phenomenon. Much later, he became known as the (spiritual and, incidentally, actual) father of Bibi, the current Israeli Prime Minister , and as, in Bibi’s retelling, the patriarch of American-Israeli relations. Blum, as the lone Jew on a rural campus that stands in for Cornell, is asked by his Waspy, alcoholic department head to host Benzion for a job talk. Benzion, who believes that the Jewish people can only be safeguarded in perpetuity by Jewish state power, has become persona non grata in Israel in part for the extremity of his views—the territorialist belief, for example, that Jewish sovereignty ought to extend over “Greater Israel.” He has been invited to interview for a joint appointment in the college’s history department and its seminary. The rationale is budgetary, but Benzion, despite his secularism, exploits the irony of the occasion to try out the kind of end-times ethnonationalism that will soon drive Religious Zionism and the settler movement.

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Blum, for his part, has done his best to leave seminarian attachments behind. His Bronx childhood straddled a yawning divide between his religious education—rabbis droning on about the Jew’s existence outside time, in an eternal recurrence of exile, persecution, and dispossession—and its American counterpart: destiny made manifest in ceaseless forward motion. He ultimately chooses to study history of not the Judeo-pessimistic but the Whiggish departmental variety. Benzion’s arrival heralds, for Blum, the return of the repressed. The sly patricidal joke of the book is that Roth was only half right to identify Jewish American repression as sexual. Although the novel culminates in a comic episode of priapism, the libidinal emancipation of the Netanyahu family owes less to Sigmund Freud than it does to Theodor Herzl. What has been repressed, for Blum, isn’t sex but Israel—both the actual state and its reconstituted form of muscular Jewish identity.

In the beginning of “The Netanyahus,” both Blum and Benzion feel as though they have at last entered history. For Blum, this has meant a self-conscious climb into American middle-class hide-a-bed comfort. (He has compromised with the rabbis of his youth by specializing in the subdiscipline of economic history, where Jews might not have been agents but were at least reliable subcontractors.) Benzion, however, is inflamed by the idea that it was only with the “ingathering of exiles to Zion” that Jews emerged as a proper people on the world stage. Benzion considers Blum a delusional fool for having bought the kind of “integration” America is selling him: extermination on the installment plan. (Blum’s daughter effectively risks her life for a nose job.) Blum, for his part, believes that what Benzion professes is not history but thinly veiled theology. He is nonetheless drawn in, to his surprise and discomfort, by Benzion’s provocation that American Jews have ransomed themselves for the fantasy of belonging.

What makes their overlap a “minor and ultimately negligible episode” for Benzion, if not for Blum, is that their encounter is one of ships in the night. The two figures—the uneasily Americanized Jew and the fervently ideological Zionist—glance off each other, bound in orthogonal directions. As Blum reflects:

Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the State of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatreds and subjugations of contrary regimes, in a mass-process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass-process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at mid-century in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them—of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance—became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp.

We never learn much about Blum the contemporary narrator, the Blum who can recall this supposedly “negligible” episode in such agonizing detail, although we can infer from his stray comments about the contemporary campus atmosphere of “grievance” that he entertains some culturally reactionary sympathies. Part of this might be his sense that there is no place for Jews in the new landscape of competitive victimhood—that identity politics has become a militarized option for every minority aside from his own. And one can safely assume that Israel and Zionism are no longer things that Blum feels the desire or latitude to ignore. It’s clear, from his analysis of the “death-rattle gasp” of difference between his own attitude and Benzion’s, that the latter’s views are no longer as alien to him as they were in 1959. The twinned transformations might not have been quite so divergent after all. Like escaped prisoners in a screwball buddy comedy, they’re about to realize that they’re shackled together. Understanding the mechanisms—inevitable and otherwise—that effectuated that shift is an exercise Cohen leaves to the reader.

The problem, as Cohen is aware, is that most American Jews have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, how estranged a figure like Blum might have felt at mid-century from someone like Benzion, and thus have no real idea how we came to take for granted the troubled kinship between American Jews and Israel. How did American non-Zionist Jews become liberal Zionists or even right-wing Zionists? (And how, in turn, did their grandchildren become anti-Zionists?) When Cohen’s book first appeared, it was read as a comic allegory about identity politics. This is true, although it was at the same time a tragic allegory about identity politics. The present moment, when the boundary between identity politics and global realpolitik has become blurry, clarifies the novel’s stakes. Two new books—Shaul Magid’s “ The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance ,” completed just before October 7th , and Noah Feldman’s “ To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People ,” written late enough to be updated—provide judicious, sober genealogies of the political and spiritual conflicts that have afflicted Jewish communities in light of their relationships to Israel. Taken together, they invite a more capacious understanding of Jewish lives and Jewish futures in the diaspora.

Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth and an ordained rabbi with a pulpit on Fire Island, was raised in a New York suburb by secular Socialist parents with ties to the Workmen’s Circle, then a mutual-aid society devoted to the cultivation of Yiddish cultural autonomy. In 1978, as a hippie in his early twenties, he moved to Israel in an aimless search for spiritual communion. He had, by his own admission, no interest in Zionism or even Judaism, but he sought by instinct a sense of cosmic affinity in the sunlit uplands of the ancients. Over the years, he took up with like-minded counterculturalists in a Jerusalem yeshiva, fell in and out of various Haredi communities, and spent time among the early settlers. As he wandered in the desert, he was exposed to crosscurrents of Messianism. On the one hand, he was introduced to the dwindling strongholds of religious anti-Zionism, whose proponents maintained a “spiritual posture” against the establishment of a secular Jewish nation, which violated two thousand years of rabbinical teaching about exile; he eventually came to read Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe and a lifelong opponent of the Jewish state, a homecoming that was supposed to occur only with the arrival of the Messiah. On the other hand, Magid was attracted to the then marginal rise of Religious Zionism, which married Romantic ideals about nation and land to a divine quest for the deliverance of the Jewish people. The Religious Zionists, who looked upon the settlement of their God-given enclave as a necessary precursor to the fulfillment of the covenant, “truly believed they were the vanguard, riding the wave of messianic time.” He writes, “To me, it appeared to be a Jewish spiritual path that had left Europe behind. Its center was not the nostalgia of the shtetl but the mysterious resonance of a more ancient landscape. I later came to see that while the former was quaint and outdated, the latter was powerful yet dangerous.”

He catches an early glimpse of disturbance on the horizon at a Shabbat service in Atzmona, a settlement in Gaza. He writes, “Gazing out at the village of Khan Yunis, seeing Palestinians riding their donkeys and carts home from the market, and hearing the call to prayer from the many mosques that dotted the landscape, I realized that the people in Atzmona did not really see the Palestinians as coinhabitants; they were not part of their project. The settlers viewed their neighbors as part of the background, like the flora and fauna.” Something, he says, “broke inside me in that beautiful spot by the sea.” At the time, as Religious Zionism was beginning to coalesce as a political movement, Magid observes that Palestinians were still not exactly seen as enemies; they were more like natural features of an Oriental panorama, obstructions to the Zionist project to be rearranged or removed by God’s will. By the time Magid served in the I.D.F., though, during the first intifada, the hostility had become explicit. The tensions between his apolitical spiritual yearning and the reality of the political project on the ground became too much for him to bear. Some of his fellow-travellers on the hippie path began to adopt the increasingly common position of “right on Israel, left on everything else,” but he found himself ultimately unable to reconcile “the counterculture’s commitment to the freedom, justice, civil rights, nonviolence, and equality in the context of Israel’s continued occupation that includes systematic discrimination against the Palestinian population.”

The book is a record of his painful surrendering of Zionism, an ideological project that he compares to Manifest Destiny. He advocates instead for what he gingerly calls “counter-Zionism,” a “new collective ideology that, if enacted, could serve Israel as a more liberal and democratic place for the next phase of its existence.” Zionism in its statist form was, in other words, an historically spent force, a nineteenth-century solution to the problem of antisemitism; it is past time, he thinks, to seek a new solution that allows for the self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians. The state’s character, he writes, “would not be structured on the notion that this land ‘belongs’ to anyone, it would be a true democracy.”

The fact that these are not new ideas is exactly the point. Magid’s project—over the wide-ranging, moving, and learned essays that constitute the collection—is to do what Jews have always done when they want to mute or subdue the radicalism of a disruptive proposal: he locates the source of his authority in traditional antecedents. (The oldest rhetorical trick in the Jewish book is to recast one’s defiance of one’s parents as loyalty to one’s grandparents.) The tradition he delivers out of collective amnesia is the long, complicated, and often elided custom of Jewish alternatives to Zionism as a national project. Between the eighteen-eighties and the nineteen-forties, statist Zionism was a minority aspiration. This was true at virtually every point along the spectrum of Jewish observance. For religious Jews, the establishment of a state prior to the arrival of the Messiah was an apostasy. The statist project was avowedly secular—the endgame was the construction of a new Hebrew culture to supplant Judaism as a religion—and observant communities generally wanted no part of it. For many Socialist and communist Jews, nationalism of any stripe was a monstrous and decrepit ideology. They predicted, especially in the wake of the First World War, that it would inspire exactly the kind of exclusionist zealotry that had long been the bane of European Jewish existence. A Jewish nation-state would invariably squander the righteousness the Jewish people had cultivated on the civilizational margins: as it is written in scripture, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” For American Jews, the prospect of nationhood elsewhere undermined their faith in Jewish assimilation. They feared that it would summon the spectre of dual loyalty. These various cohorts didn’t necessarily agree with one another about anything else—they were, after all, Jews—but they shared a deep suspicion of Zionism’s commitment to shlilat ha’golah , or the negation of exile. In other words, the creation of a Jewish state would necessarily debilitate and collapse all other forms of Jewish identity and Jewish observance in the gravitational vortex of nationhood. The Zionists did not mince words about this aspiration; they reached for every standard antisemitic trope—that Jews were sickly, flawed, rootless, desiccated—to demean the forms of Jewish life in the diaspora.

The Second World War and the Holocaust—and the urgent need to get refugees out of Europe—made all these alternative Zionisms and anti-Zionisms seem wishful and obsolete. With the backing of Western powers that felt at once guilty and disinclined to accept the boatloads themselves, the Zionism of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, presented itself as the only viable option. This did not come without serious misgivings, both on behalf of the displaced Palestinians—the “solution” of the “Jewish question” in Europe simply kicked the can down the road to become the “Arab question” in Israel—and on behalf of all Jews elsewhere. Hannah Arendt, the thinker to whom Magid returns most often, had worked for a Zionist agency in her youth but by 1948 had come to warn that “under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.” Late in his life, Gershom Scholem, the greatest modern scholar of Jewish Messianism, allowed that these critics had had a point. “Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of Exile,” he told an interviewer. “The foes of Zionism certainly saw the risk more clearly than we Zionists.” Ben-Gurion’s vision nonetheless prevailed for two reasons. Paramount was the matter of historical exigency: the Holocaust had proved that Jews were not, in fact, as safe in the diaspora as they might have thought, and the refugees were explicitly unwelcome anywhere else. But it also had, in Magid’s telling, just as much to do with a special offer extended to American Jews. In 1942, Ben-Gurion travelled to the Biltmore Hotel, in New York, to meet with American Jewish leaders, who until then had largely been indifferent or opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. The price of their investment, he learned, was to concede that American Jews would not be living in exile—a state of spiritual impoverishment and deracination—but in diaspora, a more neutral characterization of dispersion. The American Jewish project could proceed on its own parallel track. People like Ruben Blum were licensed to look away and do their own thing.

The problem is that most of these Jews soon discovered that doing their own thing was confusing and a lot of work. The outstanding question of American Jewish endurance and vitality—and the vexed relationship of that vitality to Israel—is at the center of Noah Feldman’s “To Be a Jew Today.” Feldman, a polymath and public intellectual at Harvard Law School, picks up more or less where Magid leaves off. Where Magid set out to work through, with lambent melancholy, his personal connection to Zionism and its discontents, Feldman seems to have wanted to write a book about anything but Zionism. The fact that he simply could not write about the condition of American Jewry without devoting more than a third of the book to Israel is exactly the crux of the issue—at one point, he pauses to assure an impatient reader that the Israel stuff is coming. For Feldman, Zionism has both shored up and constrained the American Jewish experience.

Feldman opens his book with two questions: “What’s the point of being a Jew? And, really, aside from Jews, who cares?” He hastens to note that he himself has no existential hangups in this department; he was raised in a Modern Orthodox home, educated at a Jewish day school, and finds meaning, joy, and intellectual stimulation in the tradition. That’s more than enough of a “point” for him. Why, then, if he has personally endured no dark night of the Jewish soul, did he bother to write a book about the attempts to place Jewish identity on a more secure footing? Part of it is that this is just how the tradition works: Jews are commanded to practice, not to believe, so each successive generation is required to gin up some plausible reasons why, exactly, the balls ought to be kept in the air. Modern Jews of a certain intellectual dispensation are quick to cite a Talmudic story about the oven of akhnai , in which a group of rabbis are debating an excruciatingly minor point of law; God steps in to make a clarifying intervention, and the rabbis tell God, in no uncertain terms, to stay in his lane. The interpretation of tradition becomes a tradition of interpretation, and it’s turtles all the way down.

If a sporting Talmudic fussiness were Feldman’s fundamental aim, however, he wouldn’t have written a patient book for a mainstream audience. His deeper goal is to take up, and with any luck do away with, the notion of the “bad Jew”—an epithet that almost all Jews, observant or otherwise, at some point apply to themselves. The question of Jewish legitimacy and authenticity can’t be answered once and for all. As he puts it, Jews should give the bad-Jew shtick a rest: “Nor should Jewish communities, however defined, define others as bad Jews. A bad Jew is just a Jew expressing irony and self-skepticism and maybe a little guilt. In other words, a Jew.”

Feldman spends the first third of the book reviewing the major strains of contemporary Jewish belief about God, ritual, and observance. He’s less interested, however, in how various communities express their Jewish commitments than in how they justify them. Traditionalists don’t bother; the study of Torah is self-justifying. Progressives look to the tradition for its ethical teachings—a lightly particularistic route to a universal liberal humanism. What Feldman calls “Godless Jews” are basically sports fans, who take pride in Jewish accomplishment and identification and kvetching without much else: Larry David, more or less. Feldman’s own heart seems to be with the community he calls the Evolutionists, who attempt to split the difference. Like activist Justices who advertise themselves as strict originalists in their interpretation of the Constitution, they find ways to wield the tradition against itself; they “combine belief in God’s authority handed down via rabbinic tradition with the belief that God wants us, human beings, to evolve the tradition consciously in the right direction as we see fit.”

For Feldman, what’s characteristically Jewish about all these camps is their ongoing struggle—with God, with Torah, with the rabbis, with one another—to determine for themselves the parameters of an authentically Jewish life. Jews are people who argue, ideally with quotes from sources, about what it could possibly mean to be “chosen.” The major predicament for contemporary Jews of all varieties, in his view, is not that the struggle for meaning and self-justification is too burdensome or intractable. It’s that this demand has become too minimally and easily met. And it’s become too easy because of Israel. Feldman’s argument is too sophisticated and manifold to summarize succinctly, but it amounts to the proposal that support for the Israeli state in the wake of the Holocaust has become not just the central political but the central theological underpinning of Jewish identity, at least for most non-Traditionalist American Jews. On the verge of destruction, we were redeemed by a miracle. This story became concrete and sacrosanct in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. The Holocaust itself was not enough—no people can build a sustainable and dignified self-image on the basis of victimhood alone—but Zionism transformed victimhood into triumph. This became the metanarrative that binds many contemporary Jews, from uneasy liberal Zionists to settler fanatics, to a tradition that can feel otherwise unmoored.

In 1959, Ruben Blum could look upon at Benzion Netanyahu as a yahoo, and take his diasporic leave. Over the following fifteen years, the “Zionization” of American Jewry was completed. This was as much a result of top-down planning—beginning in the aftermath of the 1967 war, religious schools rearranged their curricula around not religion but Israel—as a matter of organic demand for a new way not only to rationalize but to consecrate an otherwise assimilated life style. Zionism was, as Cohen insinuates, at the nervous vanguard of identity politics. It’s obvious enough that this has put liberal Zionists in an untenable position, as they’ve had to countenance—or not, as the case may be—an illiberal state. But to Feldman’s mind the issue is much deeper. Insofar as support for Israel has, since 1967, become perhaps the single most important pillar of Jewish identity, it has turned Jews away from struggle and toward dogmatism. The varieties of novelty and vigor on the margin were diminished. (It seems important to note that the dynamics he’s describing characterize American Jews; for Jews in other countries, where it’s more common even today to feel marked as “other,” the situation can be different.) On Passover, Jews celebrate our deliverance from Egypt—in Hebrew, “the narrow places”—but now it is an overweening attachment to the land of Canaan (which, even then, was already inhabited) that has rendered Jewish self-conception increasingly narrow. Like Magid, Feldman aspires to return the possibilities of diaspora to the center of the tradition—to propose that Jewish life can be more vigorous, more sustainable, and more Jewish when it pitches its tents on the periphery. When Roth finally directed his full attention to Israel, in the 1993 book “ Operation Shylock ,” he proposed “Diasporism” as something of an inside joke. A younger generation is calling his bluff.

By the end of “To Be a Jew Today,” the real “bad Jews” Feldman aimed to defend in his introduction aren’t really the bagels-lox-and-Israel Jews: they are progressive Jews who can no longer support the Zionist project, not merely because of Palestinian suffering and the Palestinian right to self-determination, but because it is a failure of the Jewish imagination to act as though Jewish identity is decisively attached to a fallible nation-state—one that, as Arendt and others predicted, was destined to act like any other nation-state. There is a tendency, with the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, to regard Peter Beinart, or the staff of Jewish Currents , or the organizers of Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow, or even at this point the Satmars, as bad or self-hating Jews—as, in fact, Kapos, turncoats more interested in their status as progressives than they are in protecting their people. These important books are not for them; many of them don’t have to be reminded that the comprehensive identification of Jewishness and uncritical support for Israel is an artifact of living memory. But perhaps their self-appointed critics might be served by these reminders of alternate traditions, and Magid and Feldman are serious messengers who cannot be written off as know-nothing social-media sloganeers. As Magid has it, “These enforcers are guilty of flattening the Jewish tradition to serve their chauvinistic nationalist political agenda. To them, what a Jew believes, what she eats, if she davens, or how she keeps Shabbat doesn’t really matter. To be a Jew in good standing only means to support the Jewish national project.”

Feldman believes that it is possible, irrespective of one’s own personal position on Israel, to accept and even refine criticism of the country as a deep expression of one’s relationship to tradition, and perhaps even an inevitable one. Many of these progressive Jews have been told since birth that Israel is an inextricable component of their Jewish self-image; their activism ought best be understood as an articulation of their Jewishness rather than a repudiation of it. In some ways, this attitude has become more difficult since October 7th, and perhaps in some ways easier. There are multiple ways to read the central encounter of “The Netanyahus”: that had Blum paid greater heed to Benzion he might have been better able to anticipate what Israel, with his own complicity, would look like now; that Blum was wishfully naïve in his hope that his own assimilation would somehow prove a sustainable incarnation of Jewish identity; that Benzion was right, after all, in his certainty that enemies of the Jews would rise up in every generation, and that the diaspora provided insufficient protection; or that all these truths have become deeply intertwined in ways that do not, at the moment, permit easy resolution. Jews are still, as Feldman sees it, a family, whose “struggle is a covenant and a conflict and a concord all at the same time.” ♦

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A Guide to Jewish Studies: Identities

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The  Journal of Jewish Identities  is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, Jewish identities in its various aspects, layers, and manifestations. Submissions are invited from all fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences and from the full range of methodologies. Diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches and methodologies, interdisciplinary research studies, as well as instructive case studies are particularly welcome. The Journal publishes empirical and theoretical articles, documents, an occasional debate section, as well as review essays and book reviews.

Submissions must be in the English language and are considered for publication on the understanding that the author(s) offer the  Journal of Jewish Identities , the exclusive option to publish and that the paper is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All articles are reviewed by an editorial board member for suitability in the  Journal of Jewish Identities.  Articles deemed suitable are then sent out for anonymous double blind peer review. Articles are generally sent to two reviewers. In cases where there are strongly divergent opinions on the article, a review from a third reviewer might be sought. Authors are given an opportunity to revise submissions and the revised article is returned to the reviewers and editor in chief for reconsideration. Reviews are typically obtained with 90 days.

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Also of Interest

Anne Reinhardt, Williams College

Ari Kelman, University of California, Davis

Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University; Alisha Rankin, Ph.D., Tufts University; Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Ph.D., Harvard University

Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia

Ruth Oldenziel, Eindhoven University of Technology

Sandie Holguín and Jennifer Davis, University of Oklahoma

Sabine Huebner, University of Basel, Switzerland

Clare Anderson, University of Leicester

Georgia L. Irby, College of William & Mary

Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University; Jessica Cooperman, Muhlenberg College; and  Marni Davis, Georgia State University

Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Deborah Boyle, College of Charleston

Nicholas Morrow Williams, Arizona State University

Steven Miles, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Dr. Nora Gilbert, University of North Texas

Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Temple University

Hopkins Press Journals

January 19, 2011

Jewish identity is subject of new book of essays edited by UW profs

The Percussion Ensemble will perform May 29 in Meany Studio Theater.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

Boundaries of Jewish Identity , just issued by the UW Press, attempts to address these questions from a variety of perspectives. The book is edited by Susan Glenn, professor of history, and Naomi Sokoloff, professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization. The essays within are based on a conference they held at the UW several years ago, which was a subject of much public acclaim. Glenn and Sokoloff brought together a stellar group of scholars in the fields of law, anthropology, history, sociology, and literature to consider three related themes:

• Who and what is Jewish, including controversies surrounding conversion and concepts of Jewish authenticity
• Images and self-representations of Jews
• Boundary issues among Jews and non-Jews.

“What all these essays have in common,” Glenn explains, is their focus on “Jewish epistemologies,” Jewish claims or “ways of knowing who and what is Jewish and how they differ across time and space.”   Glenn points out that current trends in globalization have made issues of identity – particularly Jewish identity, but also other ethnic/religious/national identities – ever more subject to varieties of interpretation.

One example of the mosaic of identities connected with being Jewish is the situation faced by the flood of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who entered Israel in the 1990s, Sokoloff notes. “Under Israels Law of Return [which gives Jews, as well of those of Jewish ancestry and their spouses, the right to migrate and settle in Israel and obtain citizenship], they were welcomed to Israel. However, some of them were not accepted as Jews by the religious authorities in Israel, so they could not marry a Jew in a religious ceremony without going through a conversion process.”

Added to long-standing issues surrounding identity are new ones brought on by breakthroughs in medicine, such as assisted reproduction.  “These have become issues of religious law,” Sokoloff notes, since tradition holds that any individual born to a Jewish mother is a Jew. In cases of a surrogate mother, for example, does Jewishness come from the woman who contributes the ovum or the woman who carries the child in utero?

Examples of different views of Jewish identity abound. In the American Southwest, some individuals have learned that they may have descended from Jews who lived in Spain six centuries ago and were forced to convert to Catholicism under penalty of death; now, these people are rediscovering their  Jewish past and in some cases have claimed a Jewish heritage.

Other people identify with Jewishness without claiming to be Jews, notes an anthropologist who has written one of the essays in this volume. In Kazimierz, Poland, a town close to the former death camps at Auschwitz, the Jewish heritage tourist industry is largely run by non-Jews, some of whom feel a special closeness to Jews. American and Israeli Jews who come to this town, seeking information about their ancestry or attempting to learn more about the Holocaust, at times resent these non-Jews, claiming that “actual” Jews should serve as guides to the Jewish past.  The situation in Poland is complicated, too, by the fact that many Poles have Jewish ancestors. One such Pole cited in this essay describes himself as a Catholic who feels “Jew-ish,” using the word as an adjective.

Both Sokoloff and Glenn have contributed essays to the book, focusing on how stereotypes are used. “Stereotypes have a bad rap,” says Sokoloff. “They can perform all kinds of functions in boundary-drawing. In my study of literature I find that stereotypes can be used in creative and artistic ways, to help define when boundaries are open and when they are closed.”

Glenns essay on this topic suggests that stereotypes about Jewish looks have also provided Jews with a way of knowing who is Jewish. In popular culture and everyday behavior, looking for Jews on the basis of their looks is a very Jewish way of knowing who is Jewish, yet how do we reconcile this behavior with a century of social scientific thinking that attributes stereotypes of Jewish looks to racist thinking? And what does the continuous and shifting public Jewish discourse about whether Jews look “Jewish” reveal about the complex and contradictory meanings that Jews have attached to the notion of their own physical differences?

“Jewish identity is very much a moving target,” Glenn says. “There are always new cases of contest, and as we have an ever more globalized world, they are likely to arise more often.” “Our book is not meant to reach a consensus,” explains Sokoloff, “because the answer to the question “Who is a Jew?” depends on who is asking.

“What holds this volume together,” says Glenn, “is that each essay, in its own way, talks about struggles over definitions and the inability to solve the conundrums of Jewish identity.”

Sokoloff and Glenn will be discussing their book at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 3 at the University Bookstore.

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Boundaries of Jewish Identity

Edited by Susan A Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff

• PUBLISHED: July 2011
• SUBJECT LISTING: Jewish Studies
• BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: 259 Pages, 6 x 9 in, 1 illus.
• ISBN: 9780295990552
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• add to cart

Description

The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question “Who and what is Jewish?”

These essays are focused especially on the issues of who creates the definitions, and how, and in what social and political contexts. The ten leading authorities writing here also look at the forces, ranging from new genetic and reproductive technologies to increasingly multicultural societies, that push against established boundaries. The authors examine how Jews have imagined themselves and how definitions of Jewishness have been established, enforced, challenged, and transformed. Does being a Jew require religious belief, practice, and formal institutional affiliation? Is there a biological or physical aspect of Jewish identity? What is the status of the convert to another religion? How do definitions play out in different geographic and historical settings? What makes Boundaries of Jewish Identity distinctive is its attention to the various Jewish “epistemologies” or ways of knowing who counts as a Jew. These essays reveal that possible answers reflect the different social, intellectual, and political locations of those who are asking.

This book speaks to readers concerned with Jewish life and culture and to audiences interested in religious, cultural, and ethnic studies. It provides an excellent opportunity to examine how Jews fit into an increasingly diverse America and an increasingly complicated global society.

Authors & Contributors

Susan A. Glenn is Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History and a member of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington. Naomi B. Sokoloff is professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations and professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, where she has also served as the Samuel and Althea Stroum Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. Other contributors are Gad Barzilai, Lila Corwin Berman, Laada Bilaniuk, Jonathan Freedman, Calvin Goldscheider, Susan Martha Kahn, Erica Lehrer, and Shulamit S. Magnus.

Acknowledgments

Introduction | Who and What Is Jewish?: Controversies and Comparative Perspectives on the Boundaries of Jewish Identity / Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff

1. Are Genes Jewish?: Conceptual Ambiguities in the New Genetic Age / Susan Martha Kahn 2. Who Is a Jew?: Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in Israel / Gad Barzilai 3. Jewish Character?: Stereotype and Identity in Fiction from Israel / Aharon Appelfeld and Sayed Kashua Naomi B. Sokoloff 4. “Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish”: Visual Stereotypes and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity / Susan A. Glenn 5. Blame, Boundaries, and Birthrights: Jewish Intermarriage in Midcentury America / Lila Corwin Berman 6. Boundary Maintenance and Jewish Identity: Comparative and Historical Perspectives / Calvin Goldscheider 7. Good Bad Jews: Converts, Conversion, and Boundary Redrawing in Modern Russian Jewry, Notes toward a New Category / Shulamit S. Magnus 8. “Jewish Like an Adjective”: Confronting Jewish Identities in Contemporary Poland / Erica Lehrer 9. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos: The Jewish Question in the American Southwest (and What It Can Tell Us about Race and Ethnicity) / Jonathan Freedman 10. The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity / Laada Bilaniuk

Bibliography Contributors Index

"An outstanding collection of essays . . . both scholarly and highly readable . . . It is a quintessential work of Jewish scholarship - the questions are hard and the answers complex, open-ended, and mid-wives of future questions."

"This highly readable co-edited volume . . . . is highly compatible with a critical approach to the study of identity and identity making, a perspective that is increasingly finding its way into the study of identity and identity making scholarship."

Advance Praise

"Jewish identity presents a particular challenge for students of culture because the Jews are at once a profoundly variable group—both religious and secular, national and cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse—and also highly unified by historical and textual associations. Boundaries of Jewish Identity is a provocative and stimulating book on a much talked about but surprisingly under—analyzed subject."

"A wonderfully coherent, superbly edited volume about the incoherence of contemporary Jewish identity. Its lucid, intriguing essays provide a fresh, at times, unsettling perspective on what it means to be Jewish."

Follow YES! For Teachers

Nine brilliant student essays on honoring your roots.

Read winning essays from our fall 2019 student writing contest.

For the fall 2019 student writing contest, we invited students to read the YES! article “ Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself? ” by Kayla DeVault. Like the author, students reflected on their heritage and how connected they felt to different parts of their identities. Students then wrote about their heritage, family stories, how they honor their identities, and more.

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these nine were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners, literary gems and clever titles that caught our eye, and even more essays on identity in our Gallery of Voices.

Middle School Winner: Susanna Audi

High School Winner: Keon Tindle

High School Winner: Cherry Guo

University Winner: Madison Greene

Powerful Voice: Mariela Alschuler

Powerful Voice: Reese Martin

Powerful Voice: Mia De Haan

Powerful Voice: Laura Delgado

Powerful Voice: Rowan Burba

From the Author, Kayla DeVault: Response to All Student Writers and Essay Winners

Gallery of voices: more essays on identity, literary gems, titles we loved, middle school winner.

Susanna Audi

Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, N.Y.

BRAZIL: MY HEART’S HOME

Saudades. No word in the English language sums up the meaning of this Portuguese term: a deep feeling of longing that makes your heart ache and pound like a drum inside your chest. I feel saudades for Brazil, its unique culture, and my Brazilian family. When I’m in my second home, Bahia, Brazil, I’m a butterfly emerging from its cocoon—colorful, radiant, and ready to explore the world. I see coconut trees waving at the turquoise waves that are clear as glass. I smell the familiar scent of burning incense. I hear the rhythm of samba on hand-beaten drums, and I feel my grandma’s delicate fingers rub my back as I savor the mouth-watering taste of freshly made doce de leite .  Although I’m here for only two precious weeks a year, I feel a magnetic connection to my father’s homeland, my heart’s home.

My grandfather or vovô , Evandro, was born in Brazil to a family who had immigrated from Lebanon and was struggling to make ends meet. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, so he remained at home and sold encyclopedias door-to-door. My vovô eventually started a small motorcycle parts company that grew so much that he was able to send my father to the U.S. at age sixteen. My father worked hard in school, overcoming language barriers and homesickness. Even though he has lived in America for most of his life, he has always cherished his Brazilian roots. 

I’ve been raised with my father’s native language, foods, and customs. At home, I bake Brazilian snacks, such as the traditional cheese bread, pão de queijo , which is crunchy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside. My family indulges in the same sweet treats that my father would sneak from the cupboard as a child. Two relaxing customs we share are listening to Brazilian music while we eat breakfast on weekends and having conversations in Portuguese during meals. These parts of my upbringing bring diversity and flavor to my identity. 

Living in the U.S. makes me feel isolated from my Brazilian family and even more distant from Brazilian culture. It’s hard to maintain both American and Brazilian lifestyles since they are so different. In Brazil, there are no strangers; we treat everybody like family, regardless if that person works at the local shoe store or the diner. We embrace each other with loving hugs and exchange kisses on the cheeks whenever we meet. In the U.S., people prefer to shake hands. Another difference is that I never come out of Starbucks in New York with a new friend. How could I when most people sit with their eyes glued to their laptop screens? Life seems so rushed. To me, Brazilians are all about friendships, family, and enjoying life. They are much more relaxed, compared to the stressed and materialistic average American. 

As Kayla DeVault says in her YES! article “Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself,” “It doesn’t matter how many pieces make up my whole: rather, it’s my relationship with those pieces that matters—and that I must maintain.”  I often ask myself if I can be both American and Brazilian. Do I have to choose one culture over the other? I realize that I shouldn’t think of them as two different cultures; instead, I should think of them as two important, coexisting parts of my identity. Indeed, I feel very lucky for the full and flavorful life I have as a Brazilian American. 

Susanna Audi is an eighth-grader who lives in the suburbs of New York. Susanna loves painting with watercolors, cooking Brazilian snacks, and playing the cello. On weekends, she enjoys babysitting and plays several sports including lacrosse, soccer, and basketball. Susanna would love to start her own creative design business someday. 

High School Winner

Keon Tindle

Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

Walking Through the Forest of Culture

What are my roots? To most people, my roots only go as far as the eye can see. In a world where categorization and prejudice run rampant, the constant reminder is that I am Black. My past is a living juxtaposition: my father’s father is a descendant of the enslaved and oppressed and his wife’s forefathers held the whips and tightened the chains. Luckily for me, racial hatred turned to love. A passion that burned brighter than any cross, a love purer than any poison. This is the past I know so well. From the slave ship to the heart of Saint Louis, my roots aren’t very long, but they are deeply entrenched in Amerikkkan history.

This country was made off of the backs of my brothers and sisters, many of whom have gone unrecognized in the grand scheme of things. From a young age, White children are told stories of heroes—explorers, politicians, freedom fighters, and settlers whose sweat and determination tamed the animalistic lands of America. They’re given hope and power through their past because when they look in the mirror they see these heroes. But what about me? My stories are conveniently left out of the textbooks; I have never been the son of a king or a powerful African leader, just expensive cargo to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. It seems we, as a people, never truly left the ship.

Even now, we’re chained to the whitewashed image of Black history. I can never truly experience the Black tradition because there are multiple perspectives. The truth is clouded and lost due to the lack of documentation and pervasive amount of fabrication. How am I supposed to connect to my heritage? America tells me to celebrate the strength of my ancestors, the strength of the slaves, to praise something they helped create. The Afrocentrics tell me to become one with the motherland, celebrate the culture I was pulled away from. However, native Africans make it clear I’ll never truly belong.

Even the honorable Elijah Muhammad tells me to keep my chin pointed to the clouds, to distrust the creation of Yakub, and to take my place among the rest of Allah’s children. Most people don’t have the luxury of “identifying with all of the pieces of [themselves],” as Kayla DeVault says in the YES! article “Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” 

They’re forced to do research and to formulate their own ideas of who they are rather than follow the traditions of an elder. For some, their past works as a guide. A walk through life that has been refined over generations. Others, however, are forced to struggle through the dark maze of life. Hands dragging across the walls in an attempt to not lose their way. As a result, their minds create stories and artwork from every cut and scratch of the barriers’ surface. Gaining direction from the irrelevant, finding patterns in the illogical. 

So what are my roots? My roots are my branches, not where I come from but where this life will take me. The only constant is my outstretched arms pointed towards the light. A life based on the hope that my branches will sprout leaves that will fall and litter the path for the next generation.

Keon Tindle is unapologetically Black and embraces his African American background. Keon is an esports competitor, musician, and producer, and especially enjoys the craft of pairing history with hip-hop music. He is always ecstatic to dabble in new creative outlets and hopes to pursue a career in neuroscience research.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va.

Tying the Knot

The kitchen smells like onions and raw meat, neither unpleasant nor pleasant. Nainai’s house slippers slap against our kitchen floor as she bustles around, preparing fillings for zongzi: red bean paste, cooked peanuts, and marinated pork. I clap my pudgy hands together, delighted by the festivities. 

Nainai methodically folds the bamboo leaves into cones, fills them up with rice, and binds the zongzi together with string that she breaks between her teeth. I try to follow suit, but when I try to tie the zongzi together, half the rice spills out. Tired from my lack of progress, I abandon Nainai for my parents, who are setting up the mahjong table. 

After raising me to the age of ten, my grandparents returned to China. They dropped back into their lives like they had never left, like they hadn’t shaped my entire upbringing. Under their influence, my first language was not English, but Chinese. 

At school, my friends cajoled me into saying Chinese words for them and I did so reluctantly, the out-of-place syllables tasting strange on my palate. At home, I slowly stopped speaking Chinese, embarrassed by the way my tongue mangled English words when I spoke to classmates. One particular memory continually plagues me. “It’s Civil War, silly. Why do you pronounce “L” with an ‘R’?” Civil. Civil. Civil.

At dinner, my dad asked us to speak Chinese. I refused, defiantly asking my brother in English to pass the green beans. I began constructing false narratives around my silence. Why would I use my speech to celebrate a culture of foot binding and feudalism? In truth, I was afraid. I was afraid that when I opened my mouth to ask for the potatoes, I wouldn’t be able to conjure up the right words. I was afraid I would sound like a foreigner in my own home. If I refused to speak, I could pretend that my silence was a choice.

In Kayla DeVault’s YES! article “Native and European – How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” she insists that “Simply saying “I am this” isn’t enough. To truly honor my heritage, I found I must understand and participate in it.” And for the first time, I wonder if my silence has stolen my cultural identity. 

I decide to take it back.

Unlike DeVault, I have no means of travel. Instead, my reclamation starts with collecting phrases: a string of words from my dad when he speaks to Nainai over the phone, seven characters from two Chinese classmates walking down the hall, another couple of words from my younger sister’s Chinese cartoons. 

The summer before my senior year marks the eighth year of my grandparents’ return to China. Once again, I am in the kitchen, this time surrounded by my parents and siblings. The bamboo leaves and pot of rice sit in front of me. We all stand, looking at each other expectantly. No one knows how to make zongzi. We crowd around the iPad, consulting Google. Together, we learn how to shape the leaves and pack the rice down. 

The gap in knowledge bothers me. Does it still count as honoring a family tradition when I follow the directions given by a nameless pair of hands on YouTube rather than hearing Nainai’s voice in my mind? 

Instead of breaking the string with my teeth like Nainai had shown me, I use scissors to cut the string—like I had done with my ties to Chinese language and culture all those years ago. And now, I’m left with the severed string that I must hurriedly tie around the bamboo leaf before the rice falls out of my zongzi.

Cherry Guo is a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. Cherry rows for her school’s crew team and plays the viola in her school orchestra. She spends what little free time she has eating pretzel crisps and listening to podcasts about philosophy.

University Winner

Madison Greene

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

Carrying the Torch

I have been called a pizza bagel–the combination of a Catholic Italian and an Ashkenazi Jew. Over time, I have discovered the difficulty of discretely identifying the ratio of pizza to bagel. It is even more arduous when the pizza and the bagel have theologies that inherently contradict each other. Therefore, in a society that emphasizes fine lines and exact distinctions, my identity itself becomes a contradiction.  

In the winter, my family tops our Christmas tree with the Star of David. I’ve recited the Lord’s Prayer; I’ve prayed in Hebrew. I attended preschool at a church, and my brother was a preschooler in a synagogue. Every week at Sunday morning mass, my maternal family donates money to the collection basket during the offertory. My paternal family has donated authentic Holocaust photographs to a local Jewish heritage museum. Growing up, none of this was contradictory; in fact, it all seemed complementary. My Jewish and Catholic identities did not cancel each other out but rather merged together.

However, the compatibility of my Catholic-Jewish identities was in upheaval when I decided to become acquainted with the Jewish community on campus. While attending Hillel events, I felt insecure because I did not share many of the experiences and knowledge of other Jewish students. Despite this insecurity, I continued to participate — until a good friend of mine told me that I was not Jewish enough because of my Catholic mother. She also said that families like mine were responsible for the faltering of Jewish culture. I wanted my identity to be validated. Instead, it was rejected. I withdrew and avoided not only my Jewish identity but also my identity as a whole.

I soon realized that this friend and I look at my situation using different filters. My Catholic-Jewish identities have evolved into a codependent relationship, and I am entitled to unapologetically embrace and explore both aspects of my identity. I realized that even without my friend’s validation of my identity, I still exist just the same. Any discredit of my Catholic-Jewish identities does not eliminate my blended nature. So, after a few months of avoiding my Jewish identity, I chose to embrace my roots; I resumed participating in the Jewish community on campus, and I have not stopped since.

Kayla DeVault’s YES! article “Native and European – How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” describes the obligation to one’s ancestral chain. The best way to fulfill this duty is to fully dedicate oneself to understanding the traditions that accompany those cultural origins. In this generation, my mother’s Catholic-Italian maiden name has no men to carry it on to the next generation. It is difficult to trace my last name past the mid-1900s because my Jewish ancestors shortened our surname to make it sound less Semitic, to be less vulnerable to persecution. Given the progressive fading of my family’s surnames, how do I continue the legacies of both family lines?

On behalf of my ancestors and for the sake of the generations still to come, I feel obligated to blend and simultaneously honor my Jewish and Catholic heritage to ensure that both prevail. 

Now I know that whether I am sitting next to my Jewish father at my young cousin’s baptism, or whether I am sitting at the Passover Seder table with my mother’s Catholic parents, it is up to me to keep both flames of my ancestry burning bright. The least I can do is hold each family’s candle in my hands. Imagine the tremendous blaze I could create if I brought the flames of my two families together.

Madison Greene is a Communication Studies major at Kent State University. Madison is also pursuing a minor in Digital Media Production. She is currently the president of her sorority.

Powerful Voice Winner

Mariela Alschuler

Behind My Skin

My roots go deeper than the ground I stand on. My family is from all over the world with extended branches that reach over whole countries and vast oceans.

Though I am from these branches, sometimes I never see them. My Dominican roots are obvious when I go to my abuela’s house for holidays. My family dances to Spanish music. I fill my plate with platanos fritos and my favorite rice and beans. I feel like a Dominican American girl. Maybe it’s the food. Maybe it’s the music. Or maybe it’s just the way that my whole family—aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins— laugh and talk and banter in my grandparents’ small, beautiful apartment.

Even though I am blood to this family, I stick out like a sore thumb. I stick out for my broken Spanish, my light skin, my soft, high-pitched voice and how I do my hair. I feel like I don’t belong to my beautiful, colorful family, a disordered array of painted jars on a shelf.

If my Dominican family is like a disorganized and vibrant shelf of colors, then my European family is a neat and sparse one with just a hint of color. For Christmas in New York, there are dozens of us crammed in the small apartment. For Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, there are rarely more than twelve people in the grandiose, pristine house that looks like something out of House Beautiful . I adore my grandparent’s house. It is expansive and neatly painted white. After growing up in a small house on a school campus and visiting my other grandparents’ small apartment in New York, I thought that their house was the greatest thing in the world. I would race up the stairs, then slide down the banister. I would sip Grandma’s “fancy” gingerbread tea, loving the feeling of sophistication. There, I could forget about the struggles of my Dominican family. I was the granddaughter of a wealthy, Jewish, Massachusetts couple rather than the granddaughter of a working-class second-generation Dominican abuela and abuelo from the Bronx.  

I don’t fit in with my European family either. My dark skin and my wild hair don’t belong in this tidy family. In Massachusetts, the branches of my Dominican family, no matter how strong and extensive, are invisible. The same way my European roots are lost when I am in New York.

So what am I? For years I have asked myself this question. Wondering why I couldn’t have a simple garden of a family rather than the jungle that I easily get lost in. As Kayla DeVault says in her YES! article “Native and European—How can I honor all parts of myself?,” “Simply saying ‘I am this’ isn’t enough.” And it isn’t. My race, color, and ethnicity do not make up who I am. I am still a daughter. A sister. A cousin. A friend. My mixed identity does not make me less whole, less human. I may have lightly tanned skin and my lips may not form Spanish words neatly, but behind my skin is bright color and music. There is warm gingerbread tea and golden platanos fritos. There is Spanish singing from my abuelo’s speaker and “young people” songs that play from my headphones. There is a little, cozy apartment and a large, exquisite house. Behind my skin is more than what you can see. Behind my skin is what makes me me. 

Mariela Alschuler is a seventh-grader at Ethical Culture Fieldston School and lives in the Bronx, New York. When she’s not in school, Mariela likes to read, write, do gymnastics, watch Netflix, and spend time with her friends and family. She hopes to be a doctor and writer when she grows up.

Reese Martin

University Liggett School, Grosse Point Woods, Mich.

A True Irishman?

Similar to Kayla Devault in her YES! article “Native and European-How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself,” I hold holistic pride in my cultural identity. As a descendant of Irish immigrants, my childhood was filled with Irish folk music, laughter, and all things green. I remember being a toddler, sitting on my Popo’s lap wearing a shiny green, slightly obnoxious, beaded shamrock necklace. There, in the living room, I was surrounded by shamrocks hanging on the walls and decorations spread throughout, courtesy of my grandmother who always went overboard. My father and his siblings were Irish fanatics, as well. My aunt, whom I loved spending time with as a child, was notorious for wild face painting, ear-splitting music, and crazy outfits on St. Patrick’s Day. The holiday typically started in Detroit’s historic Corktown for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade with the promise of authentic Irish corned beef and soda bread at the Baile Corcaigh Irish Restaurant following the festivities. Charlie Taylor, a local Irish musician, belted folk songs from Baile Corcaigh’s makeshift stage. It was one of the few days a year my father and his large family came together. Although my aunt and grandparents have passed, our family’s Irish pride is eternal.

There was, however, one peculiar thing about our Irish heritage— none of my family looked classic Irish. My father and his five siblings have nearly black eyes and fairly dark skin, not the typical Irish traits of blue eyes and light skin. DeVault wrote, “When I was older, the questions came, which made me question myself.” I fell into a similar predicament, questioning my heritage. It truly came as a shock when a couple of my paternal aunts and several cousins took DNA tests through 23andMe and AncestryDNA. The results revealed the largest percentage of our ethnicity was Lebanese and Middle Eastern, not Irish.

It felt like a punch to the gut. I was clueless on how to move forward. According to the numbers, we possessed an insignificant amount of Irish blood. How was it possible to be wrong about such a huge part of my identity? Not only was I confused about my culture and history, but I also experienced a great deal of shame—not of my newfound Middle Eastern heritage, but the lack of Irish DNA, which I had previously held so close and felt so proud of. It felt as though I was betraying the memory of my late grandparents and aunt.

Even amidst my confusion, I found this new heritage intriguing; I was excited to explore all that my newly found Lebanese culture had to offer: unique foods, unfamiliar traditions, and new geography. In addition to the familiar boiled and mashed potatoes, my family now eats hummus and shawarma. I also know more about the basic facts, history, and government of Lebanon. One thing dampens my enthusiasm, however. I wonder how I can fully develop a love for my newly discovered culture without being too deliberate and appearing to be insensitive to cultural appropriation.

It is here, in the depths of uncertainty and intrigue, I relate most to DeVault’s question, “How do I honor all parts of myself?” Although my Irish ancestry may not be as authentic as I once believed, I still feel a strong connection to the Irish culture. I’ve found that to truly honor all pieces of my identity, I must be willing to accept every aspect of my ancestry. I don’t need to reject Lebanese ethnicity, nor disregard the Irish memories of my childhood. I am allowed to be everything all at once. At the end of the day, with both Irish culture and Lebanese heritage, I am still simply and perfectly me.

Reese Martin is a junior at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. Reese plays hockey and soccer, swims competitively and is a violinist in her school orchestra. She enjoys volunteering, especially peer tutoring and reading with young children.

Rowan Burba

Saluting Shadows

On the floor, a murdered woman lays bloody and dead. Two young boys stare in horror at their dead mother. At only 10 years old, my great-grandfather experienced unfathomable suffering. A generation later, my grandfather and two great-uncles grew up under an abusive roof. My great-uncle Joe, the youngest of three boys, endured the worst of the abuse. Joe’s scarred brain altered during the sexual and emotional abuse his father subjected him to. From the time he was 18 months old, trusted adults of Joe’s community violated him throughout his childhood. These traumas spiraled into a century of silence, the silence I am determined to break. 

My father’s lineage is littered with trauma. Our family doesn’t openly share its past. We constantly masquerade as “normal” so we can fit in, but the alienation we experience is understandable. In Kayla DeVault’s YES! article “Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” she explains her numerous identities, which include Shawnee, Anishinaabe, Eastern European, Scottish, and Irish. Although I don’t have her rich ethnic ancestry, I question my roots just as she does. I have limited photos of my deceased relatives. There are only two prominent ones: my paternal grandmother as a child with her siblings and my maternal grandmother’s obituary photo. These frosted images hide the truth of my family’s history. They’re not perfect 4″ x 6″ moments frozen in time. They’re shadowed memories of a deeply disturbed past.

For 17 years, my family was clueless about our past family trauma. Two months ago, my great-aunt explained Joe’s story to me. Joe developed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) as a result of his abuse. By the age of 18, his brain contained 95 alters (fragments of his identity that broke off and developed into true individuals), causing Joe to appear as the “weird one,” the one who my family dismissed, the outcast of my dad’s childhood. My dad only learned one year ago, long after Joe died, about Joe’s DID. My family’s adamancy to hold secrets outweighed accepting and helping Joe. The shadows around these secrets quickly dispersed. 

The silence and shame from a mother’s death a century ago still have a chokehold on my family today. My family appears a disaster to outsiders.  My mom’s side is so religious they would never fathom a conversation about these harsh realities. In addition to Joe, my dad’s side has uncles who struggle with codependency and trauma from past abuses. Joe’s brother coped by latching onto another “normal” family, and my grandfather coped by never talking about issues. My parents married soon after my maternal grandmother and three of her four siblings died within a few weeks of each other. Despite years of therapy, my parents divorced when I was 11 years old. I grew up surrounded by dysfunction without recognizing it. 

How do I honor my roots? I work to break the silence and stigmas of abuse and mental health. I’ve participated in therapy for about five years and have been on medicine for about two. I must reprogram my brain’s attachment to codependent tendencies and eliminate the silence within me. I’m working through my intrusive thoughts and diving into my family’s past and disrupting harmful old patterns. I’m stepping away from the shadows of my ancestors and into the light, ensuring that future generations grow up with knowledge of our past history of abuse and mental illness. Knowledge that allows us to explore the shadows without living in them. Knowledge that there’s more in life outside of the frames.

Rowan Burba, a junior at Kirkwood High School in Missouri, loves to participate as a witness in Mock Trial competitions, build and paint sets for the KHS theatre department, play viola in her school orchestra, and do crafts with kids. She is involved in politics and wants to help change the world for the better.

Mia De Haan

Estrella Mountain Community College, Avondale, Ariz.

What Being a Part of the LGBTQ+ Community Means to Me

Being queer is that one thing about me I am most proud of, yet also most scared of. Knowing that I am putting my life at risk for the simplest thing, like being gay, is horrifying.

Let’s talk about my first crush. Her name was Laurel, and she was always in front of me when we lined up after recess in first grade. I remember wishing that girls could marry girls because she had the prettiest long, blonde hair. I left these thoughts in the back of my head until middle school. I couldn’t stop staring at a certain girl all day long. That one girl who I would have sleepovers with every weekend and slow dance with at school dances—but only as friends. She changed my life. She was the first person to tell me that I was accepted and had no reason to be afraid. 

Being part of the LGBTQ+ community isn’t all rainbows and Pride parades. It is watching your family turn away from you in disgust but never show it on their faces. It’s opening Twitter and learning that it’s still illegal to be gay in 71+ countries. It’s astonishing that we had to wait until 2015 for the U.S. Supreme Court to make it legal to marry in all 50 states.  

My identity is happiness yet pain, so much pain. I hated myself for years, shoved myself back into a closet and dated my best friend for two years because maybe if I brought a boy home my family would wish me “Happy Birthday” again or send me Christmas presents like they do for my brother and sister.

When I began to explore my identity again, I asked myself, “Am I safe?” “Will I still be loved?” I was horrified. I am horrified. Legally, I am safe, but I am not safe physically. I can still be beaten up on the streets for holding a girl’s hand. Protesters at Pride festivals are still allowed to shout profanities at us and tell us that we are going to burn in hell—and the cops protect them. I am not safe mentally because I still allow the words of people and homophobes in the media and on my street get inside of my head and convince me that I am a criminal. 

When I read Kayla DeVault’s YES! article “Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” I could feel how proud DeVault is to be Shawnee and Irish. While we do not share the same identity, I could tell that we are the same because we both would do anything for our cultures and want to show our pride to the rest of the world.

I honor my LGBTQ+ identity by going to Pride festivals and events. I also participate in an LGBTQ+ church and club, where, for years, was the only place I could be myself without the fear of being outed or harmed. Whenever I hear people being ignorant towards my community, I try to stay calm and have a conversation about why our community is great and valid and that we are not doing anything wrong. 

I don’t know if the world will ever change, but I do know that I will never change my identity just because the world is uncomfortable with who I am. I have never been one to take risks; the idea of making a fool of myself scares me. But I took one because I thought someone might listen to my gay sob story. I never expected it to be heard. If you have your own gay sob story, I will listen, and so will many others, even if you don’t realize it yet.  

Amelia (Mia) De Haan was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. Mia has devoted her entire life to art, specifically theatre and dance. While she has struggled to figure out what she wants to do for the rest of her life, she does know that she wants to inspire people and be a voice for the people of the LGBTQ+ community who still feel that no one is listening. Mia dreams of moving to New York with her cat Loki and continuing to find a way to inspire people.

Laura Delgado

Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala.

I moved to the United States when I was eight years old because my father knew Venezuela was becoming more corrupt. He wanted to give his family a better life. My sense of self and belonging was wiped clean when I moved to the United States, a country that identified me and continues to label me as an “alien.” On U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) documents, I am Alien Number xxx-xxx-xxx.  I will not let that alien number define who I am: a proud Venezuelan and American woman.

In her YES! article “Native and European—How Do I Honor All Parts of Myself?” author Kayla DeVault says that “to truly honor [her] heritage, [she] found [she] must understand and participate in it.” This is why during Christmas I help my mom make hallacas (a traditional Venezuelan dish made out of cornmeal, stuffed with beef, pork, chicken, raisins, capers, and olives, wrapped in a banana leaf that is boiled to perfection), pan de jamón (a Christmas bread filled with ham, cheese, raisins, and olives—the perfect sweet and salty combination, if you ask me), and ensalada de gallina (a chicken, potatoes, and green apple salad seasoned with mayonnaise, salt, and pepper). While the gaitas (traditional Venezuelan folk music) is playing, we set up the Christmas tree and, under it, the nativity scene. The smell of Venezuelan food engulfs our small apartment. Every time I leave the house, the smell of food sticks to me like glue, and I love it.

We go to our fellow Venezuelan friend’s house to dance, eat, and laugh like we were back in Venezuela. We play bingo and gamble quarters as we talk over each other.  My favorite thing is how we poke fun at each other, our way of showing our love. There is nothing better than being surrounded by my Venezuelan family and friends and feeling like I belong.

My ancestors are Spanish settlers, West African slaves, and Indigenous Venezuelans. To my peers, I am a Latina woman who can speak Spanish and comes from a country they have never heard of. To my family, I am a strong and smart Venezuelan woman who is succeeding in this country she calls home. 

I was immediately an outcast as a young newcomer to this country. I was the new, exotic girl in class who did not speak a word of English; all of that led to bullying. Growing up in a country that did not want me was—and still is—hard. People often ask me why I would ever want to identify as American. My answer to their question is simple: This is my home. I knew that the chances of us going back to Venezuela were slim to none so I decided to make this country my home. At first, I fought it. My whole life was back in Venezuela. Eventually, I made lifelong friends, had my first kiss and my first heartbreak. I went to all of the homecoming and prom dances and made memories with my best friends to last me a lifetime. Yes, I was born in Venezuela and the pride of being a Venezuelan woman will never be replaced, but my whole life is in the United States and I would never trade that for the world. 

I am Venezuelan and I am American. I am an immigrant and I am Latina. The United States government will always know me as Alien Number xxx-xxx-xxx, but they will not know that my heritage is rich and beautiful and that I am a proud Venezuelan and a proud American woman.

Laura Delgado is a Junior at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, majoring in Graphic Design and minoring in Hispanic Studies. Laura and her family migrated to the United States from Venezuela in 2007 to escape the Chavez regime. She is a DACA recipient and a first-generation college student who has a passion for graphic design and hopes to one day open her own interior design company.

Dear every human who wrote in this contest or thought about writing,

I want to start by addressing all of you. 

I think stepping out of your comfort zone and writing your truth—even if you think you aren’t a writer— is a brave thing to do. 

I want you to understand that not being selected does not mean your story isn’t valid or that your identity wasn’t “enough.” Remember, you’re always enough. You’re enough to God, to Allah, to your Higher Power, to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky, to your parents, and to your ancestors who endured long enough for you to come into existence. 

As I read through the various essays, I saw a common thread of food . Whether it’s the pierogi sales at churches in Pittsburgh, the neverias around Phoenix, or the soul food joints in Birmingham, the history of our ancestors’ movements have left their impressions in our cuisine. 

Another theme I found in several essays was a “uniformed diaspora.” Some of you talked about not being able to fully trace your lineage, having your history stolen by some method of political racism, and even grappling with finding that your genetics are not all you thought they were. As a Native person, I know all too well that we had much taken from us. I know that the conquerors wrote our history, so ours is recorded with bias, racism, and flippancy. 

And now to the essay winners:

To Susanna: Obrigada for your story. I encourage you to keep exploring your identity and how it informs your existence today on Lenape, Rockaway, and Canarsie traditional lands (New York City). Your imagery reflects saudades well. I think there is an intriguing and untapped story embedded in your father’s experience from Lebanon, and I encourage you to explore how that merges with your Brazilian identity.

When I read that passage about Starbucks, I thought about how the average young American seems to be private in public, but public in private—meaning this culture and its technology isolates us (private) when we are around other people (public), yet so many of us share most about ourselves on social media (public) where we can pick and choose if we want to engage with someone (private). By the way, I, too, played lacrosse… Did you know it has Indigenous roots?

To Cherry: 非常感谢你!  Don’t listen to the American stereotypes of who you are, as hard as that can be. You sadly may always hear them, but hearing is not the same as listening. People undermine the things they don’t understand because the things they don’t understand scare them. While it is not your job to feel you have to educate them, you do have the freedom to choose how you navigate those spaces.

I understand how it may feel inauthentic to learn how to make traditional foods like zongzi from a YouTube video. For me, I have had to learn beading and other crafts because I was too ashamed to learn them when I had the elders still in my life. I  tell young folk to know their elders now while they can. Furthermore, please speak every language no matter how imperfect because it’s a gift. Also, I’ll eat your zongzi any day, even if all the rice falls out!

To Keon: The imagery and symbols of slavery you use, powerfully describe a revisionist history that further blocks access to what would be a culturally-rich ancestry. 

I remember standing on the shores of Ouidah, Benin, from where the majority of slaves left, looking through La Porte du Non Retour (The Door of No Return) memorial, and hearing a local say, “Our relatives, they left these shores for the ships and then… we never heard from them again.” And so we come to realize our stories are known only so far as they have been carried. 

I see hope in the way you have embraced your roots as your branches to move forward. I believe that, in looking towards your branches, you have actually found your roots. You are a product of all the stories, told and untold, remembered and forgotten. I encourage you to keep writing and exploring how your seemingly contradicting and somewhat unknown roots shaped your ancestors and shape their product: you. Don’t hold back. 

To Madison: Grazie and תודה. First of all, pizza bagels are delicious… just saying… talk about the best of both worlds! You write about the challenge of fitting into your communities, and I can certainly see how religious differences can become contentious. 

I am sorry that you had a negative Hillel experience. In the end, we can’t let the persecutors steal our ancestral identities from us because that allows them to win. Cultures are fluid, not rigid and defined as peers might bully us into thinking. It’s rotten when people label us with things like “pizza bagel,” but if you boldly embrace it, you can turn it on its head. So I encourage you to be the smartest, wittiest, and most deliciously confident pizza bagel out there, writing your experience for all to read!

To Laura: Gracias , you write with a motif of sorts, one that conflates your identity to a number and the label of “alien.” For people in the United States to be dismissive of immigrants and judgmental of their cultures and languages is for the same people to forget their own origins, their own stories, and their own roles (as benefactors or as victims) in this age-old system of oppression for gain. It is also rather ironic that we call people “aliens;” unless they are from an Indigenous nation. Are not nearly all Americans “aliens” to some degree?

You write about being bullied as the new, exotic girl in school and I have also experienced that as my family moved around a bit growing up; however, I have also had the privilege to speak English.

It’s sad that these experiences are still so proliferate, and so I think it is vital that people like you share their experiences. Perhaps your background can inform how you think about spaces as an interior designer. 

To Mariela: Gracias and תודה for the story you shared. You write about a complex existence that is a mix of poor and wealthy, white and brown, warm and cool. Learning to navigate these contrasting sides of your family will help you work with different kinds of people in your future.

I can understand your point about feeling out of place by your skin color. Lighter skin is largely considered a privilege in society, yet for those of us with non-white heritages, it can make us feel like we don’t belong amongst our own family. We have to walk a fine line where we acknowledge we may be treated better than our relatives in some circumstances but we have to sit with the feeling of not being “brown enough” other times. I encourage you to keep exploring your branches and sharing your feelings with your relatives about these topics. Perhaps one day you can use your deep understanding of human relations to inform your bedside manner as a doctor!

To Mia: Thank you for your brave piece, despite your fears. Your emotional recollection about the first girl you loved is very touching and powerful. 

I am sorry that you don’t feel as though you are treated the same by your family on account of your identity and that you have to take extra steps to be accepted, but I believe your continuing to be your authentic self is the only way to prove you mean what you mean.

I hope the utmost safety and acceptance for you. I also thank you for seeing and relating to my pride that I have for myself, and I encourage you to consider creative outlets— maybe even podcast hosting—to uplift your story and the stories of others, spread awareness, and facilitate change.

To Reese: Go raibh maith agat . That’s how you thank a singular person in Irish, if you didn’t know already. I enjoyed your piece because, of course, we have an Irish connection that I understand.

I find it pretty interesting that you came back with a lot of Lebanese results in your family tests. Understand those tests only represent the inherited genes, so if both of your parents were a quarter Irish but three-quarters Lebanese, for example, you would get half of each of their genes. You might get half Lebanese from both and you would appear full Lebanese—or any other variation. My point is those tests aren’t exact reports.

I am excited you have found new aspects of your heritage and I hope you will continue to explore—as best you can—what your ancestral history is. And, by the way, I, too, play hockey and the violin—fine choices!

To Rowan: Many families put up a facade, and it’s only the brave ones, like you, addressing the trauma head-on who will be able to break the cycle that causes intergenerational trauma. 

When we explore the parts of our identity, many of us may find how much trauma —including historic policy, racism, and displacement—has impacted our ancestors, perhaps centuries upon centuries ago. Learning about my family history and about religious factors has revealed stories of abuse and secrets that have been hushed wildly, even within my immediate family. Photos can be sad when we know the stories behind them and even when we never knew the person; they’re still a part of us and we can honor them by remembering them. I think you choosing to write about your Uncle Joe and the effects of trauma in your family— especially as you process and heal yourself—will be a tremendous resource both internally and for others. Thank you for sharing and I hope you find happiness in those frames.

Again, thank you all for your essays. It is exciting to see the youth writing. I am grateful for my piece to have been chosen for this contest and, I hope I’ve encouraged readers to consider every part that makes up their whole and how it has informed their life experiences.

Kayla DeVault

“ In seventh grade, I went to an affinity group meeting. And all I remember was being called a bad Asian again and again. I was called a bad Asian because I couldn’t use chopsticks. I was called a bad Asian because I didn’t know what bubble tea or K-pop was. Time and again, I was called a bad Asian because I didn’t know the things I was expected to know, and I didn’t do the things that I was expected to do. That meeting made me truly question my identity. “ . —Sebastian Cynn, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y. Click here to read the entire essay.

“It’s difficult being Dominican but born and raised in New York. I’m supposed to speak fluent Spanish. I’m supposed to listen to their music 24/7, and I’m supposed to follow their traditions. I’m supposed to eat their main foods. I’m unique and it’s not only me. Yes, I may not speak Spanish. Yes, I may not listen to their kind of music, but I don’t think that defines who I am as a Dominican. I don’t think I should be discriminated for not being the same as most Dominicans. Nobody should be discriminated against for being different from the rest because sometimes different is good. “ —Mia Guerrero, KIPP Washington Heights Middle School, New York, N.Y. Click here to read the entire essay.

When I hang out with some of my older friend groups, which are mainly white, straight kids, I don’t mention that I’m Asian or Gay, but as soon as I’m with my friends, I talk about my identifiers a lot. A lot of them are part of the LGBTQ+ community, and 11 out of 14 of them are a person of color. With my grandparents, I am quieter, a good Asian grandchild who is smart, gets good grades, is respectful. And I don’t act “Gay.” … Why do I have to act differently with different people? Why do I only feel comfortable with all of my identities at school?

—Gillian Okimoto, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y. Click here to read the entire essay .

“ Torah, Shema, yarmulke, all important elements of Jewish identity—except for mine. All these symbols assume the existence of a single God, but that doesn’t resonate with me. Religion is a meaningful part of my family’s identity. After all, wanting to freely practice their religion was what brought my great-grandparents to America from Eastern Europe. Being very interested in science, I could never wrap my head around the concept of God. Can I be Jewish while not believing in God? “ —Joey Ravikoff, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ Yes, I am transgender, but I am also a son, a friend, an aspiring writer, and a dog trainer. I love riding horses. I’ve had the same volunteer job since sixth grade. I love music and trips to the art museum. I know who I am and whether other people choose to see me for those things is out of my control.  Holidays with my family feels like I’m suffocating in a costume. I’ve come out twice in my life. First, as a lesbian in middle school. Second, as a transgender man freshman year. I’ve gotten good at the classic sit-down. With hands folded neatly in front of me, composure quiet and well-kept, although I’m always terrified. “ —Sebastian Davies-Sigmund, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ No longer do I wish to be stared at when civil rights and slavery are discussed. In every Socratic seminar, I shudder as expectant white faces turn to mine. My brown skin does not make me the ambassador for Black people everywhere. Please do not expect me to be the racism police anymore. Do not base the African American experience upon my few words. Do not try to be relatable when mentioning Hannukah is in a few days. Telling me you tell your White friends not to say the N-word doesn’t do anything for me. “ —Genevieve Francois, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ I often walk into the kitchen greeted by my mother sitting on her usual stool and the rich smells of culture—the spicy smell of India, the hearty smell of cooked beans, or the sizzling of burgers on the grill. Despite these great smells, I find myself often yearning for something like my friends have; one distinct culture with its food, people, music, and traditions. I don’t have a one-click culture. That can be freeing, but also intimidating . People who know me see me as a fraction: ¼ black, ¾ white, but I am not a fraction. I am human, just human. “ —Amaela Bruce, New Tech Academy at Wayne High School, Fort Wayne, Ind. Click here to read the entire essay.

“‘We just don’t want you to go to hell. ‘ I am not an atheist. I am not agnostic. I have no religion nor do I stand strong in any one belief. My answer to the mystery of life is simple: I don’t know. But I live in a world full of people who think they do.  There will be a day when that capital G does not control my conversations. There will be a day when I can speak of my beliefs, or lack thereof, without judgment, without the odd stare, and without contempt. The day will come when a life without religion is just another life. That is the day I wait for. That day will be Good. “ —Amara Lueker, New Tech Academy at Wayne High School, Fort Wayne, Ind. Click here to read the entire essay.

“¡Correle!” yell the people around him. He runs to the grass, ducks down and starts to wait. He’s nervous. You can smell the saltiness of sweat. He looks up and hears the chopping of helicopter blades. You can see the beam of light falling and weaving through the grass field … out of a group of thirteen, only four were left hidden. He and the others crossed and met up with people they knew to take them from their own land down south to the opportunity within grasp up north. That was my father many years ago. I’ve only asked for that story once, and now it’s committed to memory. “ —Luz Zamora, Woodburn Academy of Art Science & Technology, Woodburn, Ore. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ How do I identify myself? What do I connect to? What’s important to you? Here’s the answer: I don’t. Don’t have a strong connection. Don’t know the traditions. Don’t even know the languages. I eat some of the food and kinda sorta hafta** the major holidays but thinking about it I don’t know anything important. I think that the strongest connection to my family is my name, Mei Li (Chinese for “beautiful” Ana (a variation on my mother’s very American middle name: Anne) Babuca (my father’s Mexican last name). “ —Mei Li Ana Babuca, Chief Sealth International High School, Seattle, Wash. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ My whole life I have felt like I don’t belong in the Mexican category. I mean yeah, I’m fully Mexican but, I’ve always felt like I wasn’t. Why is that you ask? Well, I feel that way because I don’t know Spanish. Yes, that’s the reason. It may not sound like a big deal, but, for me, I’ve always felt disconnected from my race. I felt shameful. I felt like it was an obligation to know what is supposed to be my mother tongue. My whole family doesn’t really know fluent Spanish and that has always bothered me growing up. “ —Yazmin Perez, Wichita North High School, Wichita, Kan Click here to read the entire essay.

“ I believe differently from DeVault, who believes it’s important to connect and participate with your heritage. I believe that our personal pasts have more to do with who we are as people than any national identity ever could. Sure, our heritage is important, but it doesn’t do nearly as much to shape our character and perspective as our struggles and burdens do. Out of all my past experiences, illness—and especially mental illness—has shaped me. “ —Chase Deleon, Central York High School, York, Penn. Click here to read the entire essay.

“ … I can now run that whole grape leaf assembly line, along with other traditional plates, by myself. I have begun speaking out on current topics, such as Middle-Eastern representation in acting. I have become so much closer with my relatives and I don’t mind busting a move with them on the dance floor. Although a trip to Syria is not in my near future, DeVault made me realize that a connection to your geographical cultural roots is important. According to my aunt, I have become a carefree, happy, and more passionate person. I no longer feel stuck in the middle of ethnicity and society. Becoming one with and embracing my identity truly is ‘A Whole New World.’” —Christina Jarad, University Ligget School, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. Click here to read the entire essay.

“While my bow is not made of wood and my arrows lack a traditional stone tip, the connections are always present, whether I am stalking bull elk in the foothills of the Rockies or fly fishing in the mystical White River. The methods and the technologies may be different, but the motivations are the same. It is a need to be connected to where my food originates. It is a desire to live in harmony with untouched lands. It is a longing to live wild, in a time where the wild is disappearing before our eyes. “ —Anderson Burdette, Northern Oklahoma University, Stillwater, Okla. Click here to read the entire essay.

“Black people always say that White people don’t use seasoning. This saying is one of those sayings that I always heard, but never understood. I am Black, but I was adopted into a White household … Even though I identify as a Black woman, all my life I have struggled with breaking into the Black culture because other people around me consciously or unconsciously prevent me from doing so. “ —Brittany Hartung, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala. Click here to read the entire essay.

We received many outstanding essays for the Fall 2019 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

How can other people say that I only have one identity before I can even do that for myself? —Arya Gupta, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y.

‘Middle Child’ by J. Cole blasts through the party. Everyone spits the words like they’re on stage with him. J. Cole says the N-Word, and I watch my Caucasian peers proudly sing along. Mixed Girl is perplexed. Black Girl is crestfallen that people she calls friends would say such a word. Each letter a gory battlefield; White Girls insists they mean no harm; it’s how the song’s written. Black Girl cries. —Liz Terry, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

To me, valuing my ancestors is a way for me to repay them for their sacrifices. —Jefferson Adams Lopez, Garrison Middle School, Walla Walla, Wash.

A one-hour drive with light traffic. That’s the distance between me and my cousins. Short compared to a 17-hour flight to the Philippines, yet 33 miles proved to create a distance just as extreme. Thirty-three miles separated our completely different cultures. —Grace Timan, Mount Madonna High School, Gilroy, Calif.

What does it mean to feel Korean? Does it mean I have to live as if I live in Korea? Does it mean I have to follow all the traditions that my grandparents followed? Or does it mean that I can make a decision about what I love? —Max Frei, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y.

Not knowing feels like a safe that you can’t open (speaking about her ancestry) . —Madison Nieves-Ryan, Rachel Carson High School, New York, N.Y.

As I walked down the halls from classroom to classroom in high school, I would see smiling faces that looked just like mine. At every school dance, in every school picture, and on every sports team, I was surrounded by people who looked, thought, and acted similar to me. My identity was never a subject that crossed my mind. When you aren’t exposed to diversity on a daily basis, you aren’t mindful of the things that make you who you are. —Jenna Robinson, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

When my Great-Great-Grandfather Bill was 12, he ran away to work with his uncles. And then when he was older and married, he called up his wife and said, “Honey, I’m heading off to college for a few years. Buh-Bye!” Because of his adventurous spirit, Bill Shea was the first Shea to go to college. Ever since my mom told me this story, I’ve always thought that we could all use a little Bill attitude in our lives.  —Jordan Fox, Pioneer Middle School, Walla Walla, Wash.

I defy most of the stereotypes of the Indian community. I’m a gender-fluid, American, Belizean kid who isn’t very studious. I want to be a writer, not a doctor, and I would hang out with friends rather than prepare for the spelling bee. —Yadna Prasad, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y.

While my last name may be common, the history behind my family is not. A line of warriors, blacksmiths, intellectuals, and many more. I’m someone who is a story in progress. —Ha Tuan Nguyen, Chief Sealth International High School, Seattle, Wash.

My family is all heterosexual. I did not learn about my identity from them. LGBTQ+ identity is not from any part of the world. I cannot travel to where LGBTQ+people originate. It does not exist. That is the struggle when connecting with our identities. It is not passed on to us. We have to find it for ourselves. —Jacob Dudley, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

My race is DeVault’s childhood kitchen, so warm and embracing. Familiar. My sexuality is DeVault’s kitchen through adulthood: disconnected. —Maddie Friar, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

At school, I was Dar-SHAW-na and at home DAR-sha-na. There were two distinct versions, both were me, but neither were complete. \ —Darshana Subramaniam, University Liggett School, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.

I do not think that heritage and ethnic roots are always about genetics. It is about the stories that come with it, and those stories are what shapes who you are. —Lily Cordon-Siskind, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y.

In my sixteen-year-old mind, the two ethnicities conflicted. I felt like I couldn’t be both. I couldn’t be in touch with Southern roots and Cuban ones at the same time. How could I, they contradict each other? The Cuban part of me ate all my food, was loud and blunt, an underdog and the Southerner was reserved, gentle, and polite. —Grace Crapps, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala.

I thought I was simply an American. However, I learned that I am not a jumbled mix of an untraceable past, but am an expertly woven brocade of stories, cultures, and hardships. My ancestors’ decisions crafted me…I am a story, and I am a mystery. —Hannah Goin, Pioneer Middle School, Walla Walla, Wash.

We received many outstanding essays for the Fall 2019 Student Writing Competition, and several students got clever and creative with their titles. Here are some titles that grabbed our attention:

“A Mixed Child in a Mixed-Up Family” Caitlin Neidow, Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School, Bronx, N.Y.

“Diggin’ in the DNA” Honnor Lawton, Chestnut Hill Middle School, Liverpool, N.Y.

“Hey! I’m Mexican (But I’ve Never Been There)” Alexis Gutierrez-Cornelio, Wellness, Business & Sports School, Woodburn, Ore.

“What It Takes to Be a Sinner” Amelia Hurley, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

“Mirish” Alyssa Rubi, Chief Sealth International High School, Seattle, Wash.

“Nunca Olvides de Donde Vienes ” ( Never forget where you came from ) Araceli Franco, Basis Goodyear High School, Goodyear, Ariz.

“American Tacos” Kenni Rayo-Catalan, Estrella Mountain Community College, Avondale, Ariz.

“Corn-Filled Mornings and Spicy Afternoons” Yasmin Medina, Tarrant County Community College, Fort Worth, Tex.

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Chapter 3: jewish identity.

U.S. Jews see being Jewish as more a matter of ancestry, culture and values than of religious observance. Six-in-ten say, for example, that being Jewish is mainly a matter of culture or ancestry, compared with 15% who say it is mainly a matter of religion. Roughly seven-in-ten say remembering the Holocaust and leading an ethical life are essential to what it means to them to be Jewish, while far fewer say observing Jewish law is a central component of their Jewish identity. And two-thirds of Jews say that a person can be Jewish even if he or she does not believe in God.

To be sure, there are big differences among Jews about what it means to be Jewish. For instance, Orthodox Jews generally attach much more importance to the religious elements of being Jewish. And for Jews by religion, caring about Israel is much more central than it is for Jews of no religion.

There also are vast differences between Jews by religion and Jews of no religion in their level of involvement in Jewish organizations, in their self-reported ability to speak and understand Hebrew, and in their approach to child rearing. In all of these areas, Jews by religion are much more connected to their Jewish heritage than are Jews of no religion.

Denominational Identity

Most Jews by religion identify with either Reform (40%), Conservative (22%) or Orthodox Judaism (12%), with just 19% saying they belong to no particular denomination. By contrast, most Jews of no religion have no denominational affiliation (66%). However, one-in-five Jews of no religion describe themselves as Reform Jews (20%), while 6% identify with Conservative Judaism and 1% say they are Orthodox Jews.

Not all Jews who identify with a denominational movement or stream are members of synagogues. Among Jews who say they are synagogue members, 39% identify with Reform Judaism, 29% with Conservative Judaism, 22% with Orthodox Judaism, 4% with another denominational movement and 6% with no denomination.

Among Jews under age 30, 11% are Orthodox Jews (including 9% who are Ultra-Orthodox). And among Jews in their 30s and 40s, 14% are Orthodox (including 10% who are Ultra-Orthodox). One-in-ten or fewer Jews ages 50 and older describe themselves as Orthodox Jews.

Importance of Being Jewish

Nearly nine-in-ten Orthodox Jews (87%) and two-thirds of Conservative Jews (69%) describe being Jewish as very important in their lives. Far fewer self-identified Reform Jews say being Jewish is very important to them (43%). Among Jews who are unaffiliated with any particular Jewish movement or denomination, just one-in-five say being Jewish is very important to them (22%).

A third of Jews under age 30 say being Jewish is very important to them. Jewish identity is very important to larger numbers of older Jews, including 46% of those ages 30-49, 50% of those ages 50-64 and 54% of those 65 and older.

Pride, Connectedness and Responsibility

Overwhelming majorities of both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion say they are proud to be Jewish (97% and 83%, respectively). Most Jews by religion also say they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people (85%) and that they feel a responsibility to care for Jews in need (71%). Far fewer Jews of no religion share these sentiments.

Large majorities in all of the major Jewish movements express pride in being Jewish. Virtually all Orthodox (99%) and nine-in-ten Conservative Jews (92%) feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, as do 78% of Reform Jews. This connection with the Jewish people is felt less strongly by those with no denominational attachment (53%). Similarly, while majorities of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews say they have a special responsibility to care for Jews in need, less than half of Jews with no denominational affiliation (39%) feel this kind of responsibility.

More older Jews than younger Jews say they feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Eight-in-ten Jews 50 and older (80%) say they feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, compared with 70% of Jews under age 50. Differences among the age groups are smaller on the questions about pride in being Jewish and caring for Jews in need.

Married Jews who have Jewish spouses feel more connected to and responsible for other Jews as compared with Jews who are married to non-Jews. Fully nine-in-ten Jews married to fellow Jews say they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people (92%), and 80% say they feel a responsibility to care for Jews in need. The comparable figures for Jews in mixed marriages are 59% and 49%, respectively.

What Does it Mean to be Jewish?

When asked whether being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, ancestry or culture, six-in-ten (62%) cite either ancestry or culture (or a combination of the two). Fewer than one-in-five (15%) say being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion. About a quarter of Jews (23%) say being Jewish is a matter of religion as well as ancestry and/or culture.

Orthodox Jews are more apt than other Jews to say that being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion. But even among the Orthodox, large numbers say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture (15%) or that being Jewish is a matter of both religion and ancestry/culture (38%).

The survey asked Jews whether each of nine attributes and activities is essential to what being Jewish means to them, is important but not essential, or is not an important part of what it means to be Jewish. In response, roughly seven-in-ten U.S. Jews (73%) say remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of what being Jewish means to them. Nearly as many say leading an ethical and moral life is essential to what it means to be Jewish. And a majority of U.S. Jews say working for justice and equality in society is essential   to being Jewish.

Across the board, Jews by religion are more likely than Jews of no religion to consider the nine attributes or activities as essential to being Jewish. Both groups, however, prioritize the items in a similar way. Remembering the Holocaust and leading an ethical and moral life are most frequently cited as essential by both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion. And both groups rank observing Jewish law and eating traditional Jewish foods near the bottom of what it means to be Jewish.

However, one striking difference between the two groups is the importance they attach to caring about Israel. About half of Jews by religion (49%) say caring about Israel is essential to what it means to them to be Jewish. Among Jews of no religion, by contrast, roughly a quarter express this view (23%). In fact, Jews of no religion are more likely to see having a good sense of humor as essential to what it means to be Jewish than to see caring about Israel as essential to their Jewish identity (40% vs. 23%).

The survey also finds a generational divide in the importance attached to caring about Israel. Among Jews 65 and older, about half (53%) say caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them. Among Jews under age 30, by contrast, 32% express this view. Older Jews also are more likely than their younger counterparts to say remembering the Holocaust, working for justice and equality in society, and having a good sense of humor are essential to their Jewish identity.

The view that remembering the Holocaust is essential to what it means to be Jewish is shared by majorities in all of the large Jewish denominational groupings. But there are sizable differences across denominations in the importance attached to Israel. Half or more of Conservative Jews (58%) and Orthodox Jews (55%) say caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them. Among Reform Jews, 42% express this view. And among Jews with no denominational affiliation, just 31% say caring about Israel is essential to their Jewish identity.

Eight-in-ten Orthodox Jews (79%) say observing Jewish law is essential to what being Jewish means to them. This view is shared by just 24% of Conservative Jews, 11% of Reform Jews and 8% of Jews with no denominational affiliation.

What is Compatible – and What is Incompatible – With Being Jewish?

Jewish college graduates are nearly unanimous in saying a person can be Jewish even if they work on the Sabbath (98%), and three-quarters say a person can be Jewish without believing in God (73%). These views are shared by smaller majorities of Jews with less education. On the question of whether believing in Jesus is compatible with being Jewish, however, those who have not graduated from college are more permissive than Jewish college graduates; 48% of Jews with a high school diploma or less education and 38% of those with some college say a person can be Jewish even if they believe Jesus was the messiah, compared with 28% among college graduates.

The view that a person can be Jewish even if they work on the Sabbath is shared by a large majority of Orthodox Jews (75%). And nearly six-in-ten Orthodox Jews say a person can be Jewish without believing in God (57%). There are, however, large differences between Modern Orthodox Jews and Ultra-Orthodox Jews on these questions, with Ultra-Orthodox Jews espousing a stricter standard about what is compatible with being a Jew. Whereas 96% of Modern Orthodox say a person can be Jewish and work on the Sabbath, far fewer Ultra-Orthodox Jews share this view (64%). And while seven-in-ten Modern Orthodox (70%) say a person can be Jewish without believing in God, just half of Ultra-Orthodox say the same (50%).

Participation in Jewish Causes and Organizations

Participating in Jewish organizations in these ways is far more common among Jews by religion than among Jews of no religion. Synagogue membership is nearly 10 times more common among Jews by religion than among Jews of no religion (39% vs. 4%), and membership in other Jewish organizations is almost six times more common among Jews by religion than Jews of no religion (22% vs. 4%). And while 67% of Jews by religion say they made a donation to a Jewish cause in 2012, just 20% of Jews of no religion say the same.

Having made a financial contribution to a Jewish cause is more common among older Jews than among younger Jews. Making financial donations to Jewish causes is also more common among people in high-income households than among those with lower household incomes. Nearly two-thirds of Jews with a household income of $150,000 or more say they made a donation to a Jewish cause in 2012, as do 60% of those with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 and 54% of those earning between $50,000 and $100,000. Among those earning less than $50,000, 46% say they donated to a Jewish cause. Higher household income also is associated with higher rates of synagogue membership. But the link between income and membership in other kinds of Jewish organizations is weaker.

Compared with members of other denominations, more Orthodox Jews say they belong to Jewish organizations and donate to Jewish causes. Perhaps not surprisingly, relatively few Jews who have no denominational affiliation say they belong to a synagogue (6%) or other Jewish organizations (4%).

Among married Jews, those who have Jewish spouses are much more engaged in the Jewish community in these ways than are those married to non-Jews. Nearly nine-in-ten Jews married to a Jewish spouse (88%) say they donated to a Jewish cause last year, compared with 42% of Jews in mixed marriages. Almost six-in-ten Jews married to a Jewish spouse (59%) say they belong to a synagogue, roughly four times the rate seen among Jews in mixed marriages (14%). And whereas one-third of Jews who are married to a Jewish spouse say they belong to a Jewish organization other than a synagogue, just 6% of those married to a non-Jew say the same.

Jewish Friendship Networks

Jews by religion are far more likely than Jews of no religion to say that most or all of their close friends are Jewish (38% vs. 14%). Among Orthodox Jews, 84% have a close circle of friends consisting mostly or entirely of other Jews, compared with 39% of Conservative Jews and 28% of Reform Jews. Among Jews with no denominational affiliation, 17% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish.

Older Jews are more connected with Jewish social networks than are younger Jews; 44% of those 65 and older say all or most of their friends are Jewish, while far fewer of those ages 18-29 (25%), 30-49 (32%) and 50-64 (30%) say the same about their close circle of friends.

Hebrew Language Ability

Facility with Hebrew is much more common among Jews by religion than among Jews of no religion. Six-in-ten Jews by religion say they know the Hebrew alphabet (60%), compared with 24% of Jews of no religion. And whereas 15% of Jews by religion say they can have a conversation in Hebrew, just 2% of Jews of no religion say the same.

Jews with a high school degree or less education report being able to understand written Hebrew at somewhat higher rates than do Jews with college experience.

Hebrew proficiency is higher among Jews who attended a yeshiva or Jewish day school than among Jews who had some other sort of formal Jewish education only. Four-in-ten (39%) of those who attended Jewish day school or yeshiva report being able to understand all or most Hebrew words, and a third (32%) say they can have a conversation in Hebrew. Proficiency rates increase with the number of years spent in formal schooling; 83% of those who attended yeshiva or a Jewish day school for more than 10 years can understand all or most Hebrew words, and 64% of that group can hold a conversation in Hebrew. Fewer than one-in-ten Jews who had some other formal Jewish education only (other than yeshiva or day school) can understand all or most Hebrew words (7%) or carry on a conversation in Hebrew (6%).

Adults’ Upbringing and Education

Three-quarters of Jews say they were raised Jewish by religion (77%). One-in-ten (11%) say they were not raised Jewish by religion but were raised Jewish aside from religion (e.g., culturally, ethnically or secularly Jewish). Nearly nine-in-ten Jews by religion say they were raised Jewish by religion, and 5% say they were raised Jewish aside from religion. Almost half of Jews of no religion were raised Jewish or partially Jewish by religion, with 28% saying they were raised Jewish aside from religion.

Nearly all Jews say they had at least one Jewish parent, including 96% of Jews by religion and 97% of Jews of no religion.

All in all, 98% of Jews (and, by definition, 100% of Jews of no religion) were raised Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent; 2% of Jews had no such background but indicate they had a formal conversion to Judaism, while 1% did not formally convert.

Nearly one-quarter of Jews (23%) say they attended a yeshiva or Jewish day school as a child. And nearly six-in-ten say they participated in other formal Jewish education programs aside from day school. Overall, 67% of Jews either attended a Jewish day school or participated in some other kind of formal Jewish education.

Jews by religion are more likely to have participated in these kinds of programs than are Jews of no religion. But even among Jews of no religion, sizable minorities say they attended yeshiva or day school (13%) or some other kind of Jewish educational program (44%).

Roughly half of Jews (51%) say they have had a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah. Most Jews by religion have undergone this rite of passage (58%), whereas about one-quarter of Jews of no religion have had a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah.

More than one-third of Jews say they attended an overnight Jewish summer camp as a child, including 44% of Jews by religion who say they had this experience. Fewer Jews of no religion (18%) say they spent time at an overnight Jewish summer camp.

Child Rearing

Among parents of minor children, more than nine-in-ten Jews by religion say they are raising their children Jewish in some way; 71% are raising their children Jewish by religion, 15% partly Jewish by religion and 7% Jewish but not by religion. Among Jews of no religion, by contrast, two-thirds (67%) say they are not raising their children Jewish in any way.

Among Jews in the largest denominational movements – Reform, Conservative and Orthodox – roughly nine-in-ten or more say they are raising their children Jewish. This includes 97% of Orthodox Jews and 88% of Conservative Jews who are raising their children Jewish by religion. But nearly half of Jewish parents who have no denominational affiliation (47%) say they are not raising their children Jewish (either by religion or otherwise).

There are vast differences in the approaches to child rearing by Jewish parents who are married to a Jewish spouse compared with Jewish respondents married to a non-Jewish spouse. Among the former group, 96% say they are raising their children Jewish by religion, and just 1% say they are not raising their children Jewish. But among Jews married to non-Jews, just 20% say they are raising their children Jewish by religion, and 37% say their children are not being raised Jewish.

Participation by their children in all of these types of activities is far more common among parents who are Jews by religion than among Jews of no religion. Nearly six-in-ten Jews by religion (59%) had a child participating in at least one of these kinds of programs, compared with 13% of Jews of no religion. Similarly, Jewish parents who are married to a Jewish spouse are roughly four times as likely to have enrolled their children in one of these types of programs compared with Jews who are married to non-Jews (82% vs. 22%).

Among Orthodox Jewish parents, 87% say they have at least one child enrolled in at least one of the youth programs asked about in the survey, including 81% who say they have a child enrolled in a yeshiva or Jewish day school. Three-quarters of Conservative Jewish parents (77%) say they have a child enrolled in at least one of these activities, as do roughly half of Reform Jewish parents (48%). Among Jewish parents who have no denominational affiliation, 14% have a child enrolled in a Jewish educational or youth program.

• For more details, see the Pew Research Center’s January 2012 survey report, “ Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society ,” and August 2011 survey report, “ Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism .” ↩
• In addition to analyzing all parents with minor children residing in their household, analysis also was conducted among parents of children of various age ranges (e.g., parents of children ages 6-17, ages 8-17 and ages 8-13). These results cannot be reported separately because of insufficient sample sizes for subgroups, but the patterns reported for parents overall closely resemble the patterns seen when the analysis is restricted to parents of children of specific age ranges. ↩

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On the rhetoric of jewish solidarity: a hebrew-israelite’s perspective.

I am a Palestinian Hebrew-Israelite (or simply “Israelite” for short).

By the foregoing confession, I do not mean that one identity or the other is ontologically isolated from the other. Nor do I mean that one is embedded in the other, or even that they are qualifications of each other. For I am also a rabbi who works with gender-nonconforming Jewish teens. None of these qualities inform my Israelite identity. They   are   my Israelite identity. The radicality of this assertion has been the source of much confusion in the media about who Hebrew-Israelites are. And in light of recent years’ focus on Jewish activism, perhaps it is time for some clarifications.

The Paradox of Faux Jewish Solidarity

My Jewish story begins with the Middle Passage as much as it does with my grandparents’ flight from Palestine. Because slavery, sex, trafficking and diaspora are seminal to my existence, al-Nakba , for example, can never for me be a singular 20 th century event. It is rather the entire constellation of violent processes that made modern Jewish coloniality, as well as that singular catastrophe, possible. This is why I have for many years been publicly critical of using allegories and analogies to promote cross-communal solidarity. The problem with their use is not only that they can provoke collective traumas while reasserting Jewish metanarratives that demand my community’s phenomenological disappearance. It is also that they often betray a deep-seated desire for us as Jews to construct mirrors of ourselves without a background context through which to assess the self-images we promote. For example, the “BIJOC” label (Black, Indigenous, Jews of color), in both genealogy and referential axis, is not for me an inclusive signification. In fact, in many ways the acronym provokes in me a cultural memory of rape and sexual violence, a common theme when it comes to the history of how identities are superimposed on people from without. My community, on the other hand, is uniquely and unparsimoniously self-referential, hence the term “Hebrew-Israelite”—that is, people of Israel who by nature “ transcend .” This description (as opposed to the racist labels “ Black Israelite” and/or “ Black Hebrew Israelite”) is important for understanding the many anticolonial (not decolonial) complexities found in the global South’s Hebrew-related communities. These peoples may include all future descendants of earthlings, for transcendence to us means moving beyond religion, culture, nationality, humankind, and all other significations rooted in coloniality.

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself.

Without sounding too dismissive, it seems to me that appeals to Jewish relational analogies, even if drawn upon to promote cross-communal interest-convergences, can powerfully reinflict trauma, particularly when such appeals are made without acknowledging some obvious historical contexts that make them problematic. There is a gadflyish paradox in Jewish attempts to mitigate the violent historical effects of Jewish coloniality through a quest for justice-oriented solidarity with BIJOC and/or other peoples of color. Whether in Israel, Palestine, or diaspora, Jewish colonialism was a catastrophe. It led to the proliferation of Jewish races and imposed a legitimation crisis on Jewish activism: How can Jews claim solidarity with people of color while rejecting those who are Jews because they are   people of color? What kind of solidarity is this?  In the Hebrew-Israelite community’s case, it can be nothing less than a faux solidarity precisely because the catastrophe (or al-Nakba ) of human trafficking that attended African American origins are what have provided us with the whiteness and privilege of many Jews that make such Jewish “solidarity” possible.

Hebrew-Israelites and the Lesson of Community-Building

We Israelites learned generations ago that attempts to evade the inevitable cultural integration resulting from modern colonial violence prove themselves to be futile in the end. All communities are, by definition, in the constant process of growing and renegotiating boundaries. But in the case of Hebrew-Israelites, our intra-communal debates over the margins of identity have been used to not only depict us as kooks in popular media, they’ve also been used by Jewish communities themselves, including self-espoused BIJOC groups, to justify the policing of Jewish existential legitimation. It is my position, however, that such policing has consistently ignored the necessary encounter with Others attending our experiences as people who embrace a variety of genealogies as “Israel.” These are not allegories nor analogies nor metaphors “of” Israel, but rather Israel as such. Even when acknowledging the nodes of incommensurability between Jewish self-determination and other liberation movements such as that embraced by Hebrew-Israelites, the process of community-building with Others is inevitably aided and abetted.   Al-Nakba   occurred as a result of efforts to ignore this process. One such effort was the invention of new speech-acts that segregated Jews who are “in” from those who are “out,” irrespective of whether those victims of segregation understood themselves as such through those speech-acts—especially when the mixtures and creolizations inherent in Jewish coloniality made this segregation untenable. While portraying the segregationist as like an “evil sower” from a New Testament parable,   Prophet William S. Crowdy   describes this very dilemma in one of his sermons:

Evil sowers are those that invent[ed] separation between one blood, for the scriptures said that the Lord out of one blood created all to dwell upon the face of the earth, but the evil sower says, ‘No, we shall not be together, but we shall have jim-crow cars, jim-crow boat lines, jim-crow railways, jim-crow boarding houses, jim-crow churches, jim-crow barber shops, and jim-crow laws for the Jews to live under’ (175–76).

By focusing on the invention of “separation between one blood,” Crowdy appealed to a  shared  human dimension of Jewish existence. Unlike contemporary Jewish solidarity movements, he was not referring to an analogy, metaphor, or allegory to establish and/or reinscribe ties between Black and Jewish communities. For him, such kinds of discursive linkages were insufficient to address what centuries of human trafficking engendered. He was instead pointing out the historical and conceptual problem that racial segregation poses for Jews who wish to live  beyond  the confines of a jim-crow Torah (or a jim-crow law for Jews).

Eliminating Misunderstandings

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself. Existential ruptures of this kind always feed off the false ideals of ontologically isolated communities. For example, consider the malignant and exoticist narratives promoted about Hebrew Israelites in the popular media. According to these narratives, Hebrew-Israelites are members of militant cults that embrace a racist kind of heretical, and at times criminal, counter-narrative against normal Jewish traditions (including BIJOC traditions).  But this narrative is largely false, and it is false to such a degree that one is tempted to believe that such an account of my community’s history is built more on spite, suspicion and racism than historical accuracy. When members of early postbellum Hebrew-Israelite communities were asked by outsiders where our religious practices came from, there was one historical explanation that was consistently dismissed over and over again: Jewish slavery and sex trafficking. [1] The memories of such events are alive and well in Hebrew communities across the Americas. Yet those narratives are ignored, and exoticist ones are popularized instead, particularly the long and racist tradition of portraying Black people as violent, corrupt, and prone to criminality. And although this aspect of Jewish culture and religion has been  intentionally  and conveniently ignored by some preeminent scholars of American Jewish history, Hebrew-Israelite communities continue to bear, in  the words of Caroline Randall Williams , “rape colored skin.”

One thought on “ On the Rhetoric of Jewish Solidarity: A Hebrew-Israelite’s Perspective ”

Thank you for this insight rabbi. I am neither black, nor Jewish. I am a white atheist that had been raised Southern Baptist. It was enlightening to read about the many different “Jewish” communities and schools of thought. I appreciated your emphasis generational trauma as it results from trafficking and understanding the stigma others place on survivors and descendants. Thank you for explaining situations when other Jews have found someone too “other” to be a Jew like them. Your call for internal solidarity is well written and I agree that it will have a positive impact on the community’s ability to work positively with other people groups. Wishing you well, Mike Parsley

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The War in Gaza and the Emerging Rift in American Jewish Life

A conversation on whether liberalism and Zionism can continue to coexist for American Jews.

By Peter Beinart and Max Strasser

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

In this interview with the Times Opinion editor Max Strasser, the journalist Peter Beinart explores what he calls the twin pillars of American Jewish life: Zionism and liberalism. Beinart argues that the two are fundamentally in conflict with each other, a longstanding tension that has become even more fraught since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel retaliated in Gaza. In this conversation, Beinart makes the case for liberalism over Zionism and calls on the American Jewish community to see that “Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety.”

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

“The Opinions” is a collection of audio essays from Times Opinion. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Max Strasser: Peter, hi.

Peter Beinart: Hi.

Max Strasser: Your recent guest essay starts with the idea that there are two pillars of American Jewish life: liberalism and Zionism — progressive politics and support for Israel. Let’s start with the first one.

Tell me about where American Jews have tended to fall politically, at least until now. And in what ways have liberalism and Zionism been really integral to American Jewish identity?

Peter Beinart: Since American Jews came to the United States in large numbers in the early 20th century, they have identified on the left politically. Some of them came with socialist or communist backgrounds from Eastern Europe, and they merged that — certainly under Franklin Roosevelt — into American liberalism.

American Jews have voted for the Democratic Party in every presidential race since the 1930s in large numbers. They’ve been overrepresented in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the L.G.B.T. movement, the labor movement. And so this has been one of the things that I think defines how many American Jews see themselves, as a group of people who have a history of oppression and want to be on the side of other people who are struggling for equality.

Zionism was also a force in American Jewish life from the early 20th century, but it really became dominant after the 1967 war, when American Jews were filled with pride by Israel’s victory and felt that the sense of powerlessness of the Holocaust had in some ways been overcome by Israel’s military success. So starting in the 1970s, you really start to see that Zionism becomes a dominant ethos in American Jewish organizations. And those organizations also claim — most of them — that they are liberal organizations. So liberalism and Zionism sit alongside one another as the dominant creeds in American Jewish life.

Max Strasser: But there’s a tension here, right? American Jews celebrate Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. But Israel, which they have this great loyalty to, has certainly not lived up to the ideals that Martin Luther King promoted — democracy, equality, civil rights. So how did our community hold on to both liberalism and Zionism simultaneously for so long?

Peter Beinart: Yes, the two ideologies, if you think about them, are really quite dissonant with one another. American Jews have tended to support the idea of equal citizenship in a government that is secular and doesn’t prefer any racial or religious group. But Zionism — certainly the political Zionism that has structured the Israeli state since Israel’s creation — is based on the idea that this is a state essentially for Jews, for the safety and representation, above all, of Jews.

I think that American Jews were able to hold those two ideologies together because there were not strong voices pointing out the illiberalism of Zionism in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, but in the last decade or so, I think that’s begun to change.

Max Strasser: I think that’s especially true since Oct. 7. Oct. 7 was, to me, the most seismic event in Israel-Palestine in my lifetime. I don’t know if you feel the same way. It’s really changed the trajectory of the conflict and how we talk about it. Part of that is because of the horror of Hamas’s attack and how that’s shaken people. But it’s also because of the way Israel has responded: As of right now, more than 32,000 Palestinians killed, and Gaza is on the brink of a famine that humanitarian agencies say Israel could prevent. Do you think that’s part of what’s changing the conversation also?

Peter Beinart: I think there were changes that were underway before Oct. 7, but they’ve been accelerated.

For the last decade or so, roughly, you could say the American left has been moving in a more pro-Palestine direction. Interestingly, if you go back decades earlier, Israel was often considered a leftist cause in the United States. But as Israel has moved to the right politically, more people on the left, I think, have started to identify with the Palestinian cause. But it wasn’t necessarily a dominant political issue until Oct. 7.

What Oct. 7 did was put this issue on the front page. The pro-Palestine sentiment that existed among kind of leftist activists all of a sudden went from being one of their concerns to being among their top concerns. That has produced a really unprecedented movement for Palestinian rights and against this war on the left, and that has started to change the culture of many of the institutions in which Jews reside. This leftist pro-Palestine politics has started to change American liberalism in ways that make it harder and more uncomfortable to hold liberalism and Zionism alongside one another.

Max Strasser: What does this shift mean for mainstream Jewish institutions that remain committed to Zionism?

Peter Beinart: I think mainstream American Jewish organizations that see their fundamental goal as protecting Israel are seeing that liberalism and the Democratic Party are becoming less hospitable.

Yes, there are many Democratic politicians, like Joe Biden, who are still very, very pro-Israel. But the Jewish organizations can see that at the grass roots of the Democratic Party, especially among younger people, there’s been a dramatic shift. They can see that pro-Palestine activism is really growing. And so they are responding by making a kind of an alignment with forces on the political right because the pro-Israel consensus remains strong in the Republican Party and because Republicans have their own reason for wanting to try to suppress this leftist pro-Palestine activism. They identify it with a larger agenda, which they call woke, which they see as a threat.

Max Strasser: You write in the essay that this alliance that’s forming between Zionist institutions and Republicans and other forces on the right — it’s an uncomfortable one for a lot of American Jews. Can you talk a little bit about how liberal Zionists are trying to make sense of that and reconcile that tension?

Peter Beinart: Yes, it’s uncomfortable because most American Jews are still voting for the Democratic Party and seeing themselves in some ways as liberals. But the institutions that speak for them are moving into closer alignment with the Republican Party.

For instance, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, probably the most powerful pro-Israel, largely Jewish organization, endorsed a large number of insurrectionists — people who did not support certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory — and that’s very uncomfortable for many American Jews. But for the time being, I think they are able to still hold these two things because there are enough pro-Israel Democrats in politics that they can still support. But I think that in the years to come, there may be fewer of those and that holding these two things will be harder.

Max Strasser: We’ve talked about the uncomfortable alliance that’s happening on the right, but what about on the other side? The Palestine solidarity movement, it’s definitely growing. It’s growing rapidly. It’s growing in the amount of attention that it gets. But how do you think progressive Jews fit in?

Peter Beinart: On the one hand, there are a substantial number of Jews who are in the Palestine solidarity movement now through groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. But that movement, as it’s growing stronger, has also been growing more radical.

I think it’s been radicalized by Israel’s move to the right and now by this destruction of Gaza, which is making people so, so upset. And so what we’re seeing in the Palestine solidarity movement is that the language of equal coexistence, which was stronger a couple of decades ago, has receded a bit in Palestine discourse. That’s not to say that the movement is saying, “The Jews need to be kicked out of Israel.” We’re not hearing that. But there’s not a vision that’s being articulated that actually explains where Israeli Jews really fit into a vision of Palestine liberation.

I think that puts the Jews in this movement in a slightly awkward place. They want to oppose the war. They want to support Palestine liberation, as I do myself. And yet I urge in this essay that they should be willing to speak out in defense of a vision of coexistence that explains where Israeli Jews fit into this vision of Palestinian liberation.

Max Strasser: I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you mentioned your own views here, and I want to ask you a question. You wrote this landmark piece in 2010 in The New York Review of Books about the failure of the American Jewish establishment, and a decade later, you wrote a piece for The Times called “ I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State .” What has your experience been like, making that ideological migration?

Peter Beinart: Yeah, I guess you could say the essay in some ways is a little bit autobiographical because I, for most of my adult life, identified myself as a liberal and also as a political Zionist, someone who supports a Jewish state. And over time, I felt like I was forced to reconsider that because there seemed no prospect of Palestinians getting their own state alongside Israel but also because the notion of group supremacy — of Jewish supremacy — started to become more and more uncomfortable to me as I noticed how similar it was to the voices in America who were talking about maintaining a demographic majority and seemed to have a vision of first- and second-class citizens.

It was really through reading and listening to Palestinians who had for a long time been making these deeper critiques that I began to move toward the idea that I should try to square my support for equality under the law in America with the vision of equality under the law in Israel-Palestine.

It hasn’t always been an easy or comfortable journey. At times it’s been quite a painful one. But I felt like, as a writer, I had to go with where my mind and my heart were taking me if I was going to be able to write with any integrity. And although it has ruptured some relationships for me, as it has for other American Jews who’ve gone on my path, it’s also led to a new set of relationships that I couldn’t quite have imagined. And those are very gratifying to me.

Max Strasser: In your essay you quote Adam Shatz of The London Review of Books talking about this double homelessness of anti-Zionist and post-Zionist Jews and how that’s a really uncomfortable place to be a lot of the time. There’s a lot of discomfort all around here, isn’t there?

Peter Beinart: Yeah, there is. And I can’t — you know, everyone has to figure that out for themselves. For me, at a personal level, what I try to remember is that I see the Jewish community as a kind of imagined extended family. And so you have responsibilities to maintain connections to that extended family, just like to your immediate family, even if you have very, very deep disagreements.

And it’s important to try to find the points of commonality. And I also think it’s really important that while American Jews need to listen very carefully to Palestinians — and I have learned, myself, so deeply from reading Palestinians — it’s also important for us to remember that Palestinians are not a monolith. And that even though Israel is oppressing Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that Jews don’t have the right to have our own opinions and our own moral visions and that we have something to contribute to this discourse that I hope would bring the liberation of both peoples.

Max Strasser: Speaking of the Jewish community broadly — the extended family, as you described it — what do you hope that the community prioritizes in the future?

Peter Beinart: I hope that in the future, more people will look at the tensions and come to see that there is a real danger if we make an exception for Israel from our general liberal principles.

The danger is that if we say, “Yes, we believe in equality under the law everywhere, but we need to make an exception for Israel because we’re a small people who have been persecuted and we can’t afford it,” then it makes it easier for other people to say they want those same exceptions, whether it’s in India, whether it’s in Hungary, whether it’s in the United States.

And then we are, it seems to me, able to really be on the side of a global struggle for equality under the law against the forces of ethnonationalism and supremacy that are powerful everywhere.

So I would hope that more American Jews, as uncomfortable as it is, would look at these contradictions and also find ways of overcoming this deep-seated fear that we have of Palestinians. Often a fear that’s, I think, enhanced by the fact that there isn’t much engagement between Jewish institutions and Palestinians. I hope we see that Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety, that in the long term, actually, that Jews may be more safe living alongside Palestinians who are free and equal than Palestinians who are subjugated.

Max Strasser: Peter, thanks for doing this.

Peter Beinart: My pleasure.

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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Fractures in the Grand Alliance between Black and Jewish Americans

Devan Schwartz

Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Close your eyes and you might be able to conjure the iconic image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, with a white bushy beard, as he marches alongside Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It's 1965 and they're at the front of the delegation from Selma to Mongtomery, Alabama. Everyone wears big Hawaiian leis – given as a symbol of support and solidarity by Reverend Abraham Akaka.

Scholars say this moment enshrines the so-called Grand Alliance, in which Black and Jewish leaders worked together in support of civil rights and voting rights.

After marching that day, Heschel said, "I felt my legs were praying."

And from the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, King said, "The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man."

Just a few months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

So was this a major moment in the ongoing partnership between Black and Jewish leaders — or simply the high-water mark in a relationship that has long since receded?

"Today's Black Jewish relationship is encased in amber from the civil rights era, and I don't think it's properly understood," Jacques Berlinerblau, Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, told NPR's Morning Edition . "And until we properly understand it, we might not be able to make sense of current political developments."

Berlinerblau has long studied the relationship between these two communities. He co-authored the book Blacks and Jews: an Invitation to Dialogue with Terrence Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Civil rights demonstrators pass by federal guards as they make their way from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, on the third leg of their famous march. AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Civil rights demonstrators pass by federal guards as they make their way from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, on the third leg of their famous march.

In speaking with NPR, Johnson defined the Grand Alliance as a group of elite African-American leaders working across racial religious lines to advocate for the masses in terms of voting rights and desegregation. And this sort of leadership went on to work with Jewish leaders with the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and the Urban League a year later."

"In some respects," Johnson continued, "those organizations represented the dream team of black and Jewish leaders, mostly men, unfortunately, but leaders nonetheless, who wanted to in many ways address the lingering problems of racial inequality and religious discrimination."

Johnson and Berlinerblau's book originated from a Georgetown University course they taught for years, engaging students in dialogue about the myriad ways that Black and Jewish Americans related to one another.

"It's an historic alliance because both groups have been demonized by what they can't control–a narrative of otherness," Johnson said. "And remember who was considered human in this country: Anglo-Americans. Jews were corrupted because of their blood and blacks were inferior because we didn't have a soul. And those fundamental issues are what we are haunted by now–what we hear with Black Lives Matter protests and related outcries around anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism."

And this relationship still looms large in the imagination of contemporary movement leaders. "There's no alliance more historic, nor more important, than the alliance between Black Americans and Jewish Americans," said Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League in 2020.

A TROUBLED GRAND ALLIANCE: THEN & NOW

In a recent NY Times piece , Morial said the Grand Alliance is "being tested" by the Israel-Hamas war, with each group holding diverging views.

Recently, a group of more than 1,000 Black pastors issued a demand that the Biden Administration push Israel to curb its military campaign. In a pressure campaign, the Black pastors say the support of their parishioners, key to Biden's reelection , could be on the line. And with Jewish Americans and Black Americans providing two key constituencies for Biden's reelection bid, this could be a tough needle to thread.

Reverend Leah Daughtry leads the House of the Lord Churches, a network of churches throughout the U.S. She was also CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention committees. She recently told NPR that "we as faith leaders have to be concerned about the moral toll of this war and what our authority is. And what our responsibility is in ensuring that all people are safe, are able to live their lives in freedom and security, and that all children are able to grow and to live a thriving life."

Going even further, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a well-known Black institution, recently called for the U.S. to "immediately withdraw all funding and other support from Israel." It goes on to allege that "the United States is supporting this mass genocide."

The Israel-Hamas War clearly represents a pivotal moment — but Johnson and Berlinerblau say diverging interests and perspectives have tested the Grand Alliance from the very beginning.

"The Grand Alliance was more fraught on the ground than is commonly understood," Berlinerblau said. "And it was probably a lot more wobbly than we would generally assume."

For example, their book examines persistent accusations made by some African Americans against Jewish Americans for their alleged involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. They cite historian Seymour Drescher, a noted expert on slavery and anti-slavery movements. In his essay entitled "Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade," Drescher found that "at no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims."

Nonetheless, such claims continue to resonate and reverberate, canonized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in his 1991 book The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews .

"Indeed, the Nation of Islam's worldview has pervaded Blacks and Jews for decades," Johnson and Berlinerblau write.

In fact, distrust between Black Americans and Jewish Americans created a sizable rift just a few years after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched together for racial equality and civil rights.

According to Terrence Johnson, the shockwaves of 1967 can be felt even today.

That's the year of the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab States. Many Black leaders began embracing the Palestinian and Arab cause, especially with Israel expanding its ties to the Apartheid government of South Africa.

Subsequent conflicts included the purging of white and Jewish members from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War; a teacher strike in New York City and the Crown Heights Riots in Brooklyn, both pitt ing Black and Jewish residents against one another–as well as ongoing disputes over affirmative action.

Many scholars say the partnership between Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock hearkens back to the Grand Alliance of the 1960s. Win McNamee/Getty Inages hide caption

Many scholars say the partnership between Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock hearkens back to the Grand Alliance of the 1960s.

With ups and downs between the Black and Jewish communities over the years, and many misconceptions, Johnson and Berlinerblau say they wanted to emphasize discussion and mutual understanding in their teaching and writing.

They set out to co-write their book in part to update the 1995 text by Cornel West and Rabbi Michael Lerner called Jews and Blacks: A dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America.

While assembling their own book, they both saw the rising support for Palestinian rights via the Black Lives Matter movement. They also witnessed a partnership hearkening back to the Grand Alliance — the 2020 victories of Georgia Senators Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossof which demonstrated a partnership between prominent Black and Jewish leaders.

Johnson and Berlinerblau write that this could be seen as "another turning point in the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition." But since they, along with other authors , argue that the Grand Alliance of the 1960s is romanticized and oversimplified, they instead call for new ways to seek mutual understanding and collaboration.

BRIDGING THE BLACK-JEWISH DIVIDE: ART & COLLABORATION

Many scholars and movement leaders find inspiration in the indelible artistic and cultural ties between the Black and Jewish communities.

"So one reason to hope that the relationship finds a new footing or moves forward in some dynamic way," Berlinerblau told NPR, "is the sheer awesome political, artistic, cultural intelligence of these two communities working in concert."

He cites such artistic examples as: Cannonball Adderley's jazz cover of "Fiddler on the Roof," Grace Paley's short story "Zagrowsky Tells," Anna Deavere Smith's performance piece "Fires in the Mirror," Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman , and the Safdie brothers' film, Uncut Gems .

Johnson adds that a shared Old Testament notion of Zion appears frequently in hip hop music, epitomized by Lauryn Hill's song, "To Zion."

This famous Hebrew Bible story involving Moses leading the Israelites from bondage toward freedom shows the Harvard Divinity School professor a possible path forward for reunifying the Black and Jewish communities.

"Exodus and Zion keep recurring in hip hop, so there's something about the use of these stories that are so powerful and so beyond life that captures imagination and it becomes an entry point," Johnson told NPR.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights in 1965 featured Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., joined by allies including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights in 1965 featured Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., joined by allies including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

"I was thinking of Abraham Heschel, who described this idea in 1963 of the Exodus is ongoing. And he said it was easier for the children of Israelites to cross the Red Sea than for a Black or Negro to cross the line at a university in the U.S.," Johnson said. "And there's something about this story that allows us to kind of peek into history and then figure out what's missing and whose voices are not there, even though they're very visible...and my sense is that the narratives will in some ways revive a moment that's much bigger than what we can imagine."

Berlinerblau and Johnson say that cultural and legal forces such as redlining and gentrification created physical distance between the Black and Jewish communities that were once more proximate.

"It doesn't mean they loved one another all the time," Berlinerblau said. "But they had a very, very organic, almost daily relationship with one another. And what Terence and I are increasingly seeing is that proximity, that physical proximity between African-Americans and Jewish Americans is kind of missing."

Some organizations doing this work of reconnection include: Rekindle, the Black/Jewish Justice Alliance, the Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance, and the Black and Jewish Leaders of Tomorrow. In many cases, art continues to reemerge as the bridge.

"The (Jewish) Federation in Baltimore recently had a yearlong exhibition around trauma in black and Jewish communities and used art as a way to invite people in to have these conversations," Johnson added. "So I think there are a lot of things happening on the ground. The issue becomes how did that get translated into a kind of political vocabulary that we can actually see structural change?"

Besides organizations and politicians with shared intentions, Johnson and Berlinerblau argue that reimagining Black-Jewish relations could best be accomplished by those who identify as both Black and Jewish.

Certainly, we can think of prominent celebrities such as Drake, Rashida Jones, Daveed Diggs, and Tiffany Haddish. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. In their book, the authors mention famous converts such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Nell Carter.

"We were extremely intrigued by the position of Afro Jews, Jews of color in the United States, of which we believe there may be more than half a million, if not more than that, in the country," Berlinerblau said. "But perhaps one way forward is to let this community, which physically or theologically or spiritually embodies a lot from both communities, maybe to let them lead...and to tell us where we all might move forward together."

Leah Donnella, who is Black and Jewish, is senior editor of NPR's Code Switch. And in a recent conversation, she reflected on her own upbringing. "My parents were very intentional about talking about those identities as being intertwined and related–and they did that very much through the lens of justice," Donnella said. "Fighting for justice has always been a tradition for both Black communities and Jewish communities. That's a lot of how both of my parents understood their faiths and their identities."

Outside of her own home, Donnella witnessed a major contrast. "Black people and Jewish people were not in the same spaces. There was not a lot of that overlap," Donnella said. "So that feeling of this identity being very integrated and very cohesive was not the demographic reality in the outside world."

Autumn Rowe, a songwriter and Executive Committee Member of the Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance, bridges the two backgrounds the organization seeks to unite. Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance hide caption

Autumn Rowe, a songwriter and Executive Committee Member of the Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance, bridges the two backgrounds the organization seeks to unite.

While spending time in Jewish spaces, Donnella finds herself being asked to speak on behalf of Black people. And with inflamed passions on all sides since the October 7th attacks by Hamas, and the subsequent Israel-Hamas War, she says the divides aren't necessarily deepening; they're revealing what was already there.

"I think none of the reactions that different communities are having are that surprising to me," Donnella said. "But I think it's easy to feel surprised about some of the different reactions and takes if you are not interacting with a really diverse community of different people, both racially, demographically, and just on the political spectrum."

In terms of the legacy of the Grand Alliance, and the snapshots of Heschel and King, Donnella said it's not about connecting via racial or religious identity–but about shared beliefs, and how they're being pursued.

"For me, it comes back to that childhood thing of justice," Donnella said. "A lot of it is very central to the Jewish identity I was raised with, to be focused on the idea of Tikkun Olam, healing the world. And that's also really central to Black American identity."

But in terms of putting values into action, Donnella said the details are paramount. "It obviously gets tricky when you get really real about what justice means to you," she told NPR. "What does justice look like for everyone? And how do I help make that happen? And then you go from there–and then I think the connections happen organically, because people are after the same thing."

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

CHICAGO — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS 'EXPECT A SOB STORY'

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. (AP Video: Noreen Nasir)

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa, second from left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, stands for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

*Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa, left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa sits for a portrait after her step team practice at Lincoln Park High School Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS ‘EXPECT A SOB STORY’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

Max Decker reads his college essay on his experience with a leadership group for young Black men. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Hillary Amofa reads her college essay on embracing her natural hair. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .