Of Course There Are Half-Jewish People
In response to Joanna Brooks’ piece today, “There Is No Such Thing as Half,” we heard from Robin Margolis of The Half-Jewish Network. Robin writes:
I gather that you are the parent of a child of intermarriage. But you don’t think there are half-Jewish people and are worried that your daughter might think of herself as one.
Of course half-Jewish people exist. As the Coordinator of the Half-Jewish Network, the largest international organization for adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage, that’s the preferred term that my group members use to define themselves.
We have a website at www.half-jewish.net
Before I started the group, I did internet research to determine what term adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage apply to themselves most frequently.
Answer: half-Jewish.
And they don’t just sit around and kvetch, mind you. This Network has big ambitions:
We need your help in fighting the discrimination against us in the American Jewish community, where the adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage are treated like second-class citizens.
We’d also like to solicit your help for the half-Jewish citizens of Israel, who face a complex web of social and legal discrimination. They’re treated like third-class citizens.
There are three Israeli Jewish organizations working on this issue, filing lawsuits in the court system, lobbying in the Knesset, but they would welcome more help.
We would welcome practical help from you. I know your essay was well-meant, but too many interfaith parents write essays on what we children of intermarriage should call ourselves and how we half-Jewish people should think of ourselves, when we need our interfaith parents to write letters to the editor, protesting the latest attack on us.
Imagine if parents of gays and lesbians wrote essays on how their adult children should really go back to calling themselves “homosexuals” because their parents preferred that term—when gays need their parents to lobby their congresspeople for legislation to give them full citizenship.
We need our interfaith parents to lobby for us with the Jewish establishment to set up specific outreach for us. Programs targeting interfaith couples don’t reach us.
Many shuls that accept interfaith couples and have programs for them treat us very coldly and turn us away.
Robin also responds to Brooks’ suggestion to “Ask American Indians”:
With regard to the Native Americans, I am uncertain as to why you invoked them as an example for us—they have been treating their descendants of intermarriage quite badly recently—if you don’t have the right blood “quantum,” a descendant of intermarriage can be pushed out of the tribe and can lose other benefits.
I’ve seen a lot of Native American websites attacking their descendants of intermarriage. They sound like Jewish websites that disparage us half-Jewish folks.
I love Brooks’ sentiment, but I also appreciate someone standing up for people who want to shout, loud and proud, that they’re in the middle. I wrote about my own half-Judaism last week. And just today I found a lovely list of famous Jewish-Catholics and Catholic-Jews just like me. It’s wonderful company. There’s a special place in Killing the Buddha heaven, we hope, for people stuck in the margins of religious classification.
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October 15th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Not only that, but Killing the Buddha editor Laurel Snyder edited a wonderful book called “Half/Life: Jew-ish tales from Interfaith Homes,” to which I (I’m also an editor) contributed a chapter.
October 18th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
I’m not sure the point of the article was that “Half-X” don’t exist, but that such people are actually a perfectly whole amalgamation of their cultural antecedents.
I’m also not sure the article was trying to deny the existence of persecution…the article cited an example of a rabbi bugging people for not affixing to a unitary identity.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:27 am
Nathan and Robin: I believe you are telling the truth when you say that persons who identify themselves as half-Jewish experience discrimination. I am not of Jewish descent, but I believe that the Jewish people have a profound history. However, it seems to me, that it is personal identification with any label that needs to be psychologically eliminated in order to bring about the change you hope for — that is what I took away from Brooks’ essay.
Brooks’ philosophy and the education of her child (and all children) could bring about in one generation what has held mankind back for thousands of years. That is, to me, the precept of this site: “Killing the Buddha is about finding a way to be religious when we’re all so self-conscious and self-absorbed. Knowing more than ever about ourselves and the way the world works, we gain nothing through nostalgia for a time when belief was simple, and even less from insisting that now is such a time.”
It almost seems to me that you and Robin are nostalgic for a time that never was — an interlude when identifying yourself as a portion of a religion or culture was somehow an improvement. If that time came and went, it was necessarily brief because it was not furthering humanity. I have nothing but respect and fascination for the culture of my ancestors and yours. But, that is history. We need to change overnight; there is no such thing as half. Psychologically, if we do not soon identify ourselves as the same(humans or earthlings or mankind) instead of different, the point could become mute.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:21 am
The gent who built the The First Temple of Jerusalem (Solomon) was half-Jewish: his mother was a Hittite. The Hittites were an Aryan people of the Middle East who went extinct.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Nathan, I don’t agree. You can’t be half Jewish. Judaism is a religion. Are there people that are half Methodist and half Unitarian? They belong to one or the other, usually. You definitely can’t be half Jewish and half Methodist. You either believe in Jesus or you follow Judaism. Being Jewish is not a race or nationality where you can be half Swedish and half English.
Unlike many religions, being Jewish also means belonging to a cultural group such as Ashkenazis or Sephardis with language, food, customs included along with belief.
My mom converted from being a Swedish Luthern to being Jewish when she married my Russian-Jewish father. I’m Jewish because my mother was Jewish. I was sent to a synagogue sunday school.My mom considered herself always as being Jewish. There were cultural things she could not give up such as an Xmas tree, etc, and when I was an adult I didn’t continue that practice. Instead, I studied more and went to Israel and was an EFL instructor in a junior high and have Israeli citizenship after living there for 5 1/2 yrs.
No, I would feel like a fish out of water if I were half Jewish.
To me it would be interesting to have a website which covers problems of religious intermarriages. If partners are of different religions, how to they handle life with children? Are the children confused?
Through dna studies we are finding that there are many haplogroups where Jewish people fall into, not just one.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Nadene, thanks for your remarks. If I listen to my heart, I’m afraid I don’t have much choice in the matter. I tried to be not-Jewish. I even converted to another religion once. But I can’t escape that heritage any more than I could dodge my grandmother’s disappointment at my conversion.
Of course your assumption that Judaism is a religion is something that people contest. “-ism” suggests some ideological content beyond race, but, it can easily be more complicated. For example, you mention Jesus—if, in fact, Jesus was at least a halfway decent Jew, there should be nothing un-Jewish about “following” him (calling him God may be another matter). The Jews for Jesus certainly claim that this is possible.
Naturally, like most ethnic and religious communities, Jews tend to be careful with their borders, and by nearly every standard, I’m not in it. Fair enough. But they can’t take back my family, my blood, and the culture I imbibed (some of).
Perhaps half isn’t the right proportion. I don’t think I’d want to quantify it. But I will lay claim to this tradition. As for all our ancestors whose life and legacy we inherit, I will do honor and homage to it. I am grateful for what good it has given me, and I will take it upon myself to help make amends for the harm it has done.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:22 pm
According to Gilbert Porter Blythe we are all Jews now.
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/blythe4.htm