Jews Come In All Colors
When my son was small, we joined a group called The Jewish Multiracial Network. Each summer for about 5 years, our family spent a few days at a camp with other mixed-race Jewish families. It was the first time that my Korean son saw Jews who didn’t look like his white dad and mom. At the end of our first summer, someone took a photo of about a dozen of the campers. Only one of them was white and born in America. The picture was made into a poster with the caption, “Because Jews Come in All Colors.”
That was almost twenty years ago.
How things have changed! Back then, everyone still had home phones with cords attached to the wall; the word “stream” meant a small river; and it was very unusual to see a Jew who was not white in an American synagogue. Personally, I am happy that all three of these things are no longer true.
During the late 1800’s through the early 1900’s, many thousands of immigrants poured into New York and the East Coast of the United States from around the world. One of them was my grandfather. Like other Jews who immigrated to the United States during this time, my Syrian grandfather had a different skin tone, different Jewish traditions, and a different language. He sang different tunes in shul and ate different foods on the holidays than Jews who had lived in the United States for generations and Jews from other countries who had just arrived from overseas.
If you think that Jews stuck together and supported each other in their new country, you would be right. But there was also a separation, even suspicion and tension, between Jews from Russia and the north (the Ashkenazi Jews) and those from the Middle East and the south (Sephardim, like my grandpa). In fact, the story in my family is that when my Sephardic grandfather wanted to marry my Ashkanazic grandmother, both families went crazy and almost cancelled the wedding! That’s how separate these two groups of Orthodox Jews were! We saw some of that separation in Jason Belongs between Jason and his white school friends.
I wish I had talked more with my grandfather about how he felt as an immigrant Jew, “a stranger in a strange land.” Growing up, did he live mostly with Jews from his own country? Was he bullied when he was a boy because of the way he looked or spoke or prayed? Did he ever wish he wasn’t Jewish? How did his feelings change over his long life, as he moved to Jewish communities that were mostly American?
If you think that Jews stuck together and supported each other in their new country, you would be right. But there was also a separation, even suspicion and tension, between Jews from Russia and the north (the Ashkenazi Jews) and those from the Middle East and the south (Sephardim, like my grandpa). In fact, the story in my family is that when my Sephardic grandfather wanted to marry my Ashkanazic grandmother, both families went crazy and almost cancelled the wedding! That’s how separate these two groups of Orthodox Jews were! We saw some of that separation in Jason Belongs between Jason and his white school friends.
I wish I had talked more with my grandfather about how he felt as an immigrant Jew, “a stranger in a strange land.” Growing up, did he live mostly with Jews from his own country? Was he bullied when he was a boy because of the way he looked or spoke or prayed? Did he ever wish he wasn’t Jewish? How did his feelings change over his long life, as he moved to Jewish communities that were mostly American?