Bad Jew
I’m a bad Jew. I didn’t have a bat-Mitzvah and I don’t fast on Yom Kippur. I’ve adopted a few sweet traditions to share with friends and family, like baking challah on Friday and lighting Hanukkah candles, only in my adulthood. But while I didn’t grow up with many traditional customs, I always knew I would get married under a chuppah.
It was how my parents got married. Though theirs was not in a synagogue, under a carefully embroidered tapestry, but in a tiny kitchen, away from prying eyes, where ten men held up a tablecloth to bless their union. This was just how it was done in the Soviet Union, where being a Jew was difficult. It’s why so many families packed what they could into immigration-specified duffles and came to the US throughout the 80s and 90s.
They came with what they could carry, things that seemed important when they dismantled their lives: gold on their bodies (that’s how I got my ears pierced), clothes for the wrong weather, worn handyman tools, stamp collections, and wrong-sized pillows. They tucked away their doctorate diplomas and picked up minimum wage jobs, happy to watch their children grow in the land of opportunity. I was only a child when we came to the golden state, knowing why we left but never having experienced the hardship my parents were fleeing.
I’m a bad Jew, but I know who I am with every cell of my being. I feel it viscerally and unquestionably, and that’s why the hateful rhetoric finding its voice anew today is scaring the daylights out of me. I feel angry, baffled, and dejected. I can’t say if the current war is right or just, but no people should have to defend their place on this earth as repeatedly as mine.
For the first time in my conscious life I wonder if my family is in harm’s way. I wonder if my girls look too ethnic when they step onto their school campus. I wonder if our friends feel more secure after purchasing a firearm. I wonder where we might go if “they come for us” and what kind of useless junk I might sift through when we get there.
I naively believed we were protected in the States, cocooned in the progressive Bay Area where activists work so hard to model belonging. Alas, I was unprepared for swastikas outside a Starbucks my daughter frequents. Nor could I comprehend how boycott signs appeared on the windows of a Jewish-owned business in 2024.
I don’t understand why history repeats itself in such ugly ways.
Someone’s parents were killed in a pogrom… Someone’s sister crawled out of a body heap… Someone’s family missed an evacuation train which got bombed… Someone’s father executed alongside several Jewish colleagues one day at the office… These aren’t stories I heard or read about. These are real stories from my family, just as heartbreaking as so many — too many — stories inherited by every single Jew alive today.
Someone, a fellow ex-Soviet Jew, once pondered if it’s really worth remembering these stories. Why pass this ugliness on to our children if they’re so full of pain? Wouldn’t it better to forget? But I suspect he’s a bad Jew just like me, and he too remembers it all.
