Ironically, it was my eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law, who found it among the ever-growing Jewish-pride-paraphernalia that had cropped up on social media since the horrors of October 7, got me the hat for my birthday, a navy blue baseball cap with the words “I’m That Jew” and a white Star of David embroidered on the front—ironically, not because my mother-in-law is particularly shy about her Jewishness, but because she is one of the more conflict- and risk-averse people in the world, someone who lives in genuine and perpetual fear of having people angry at her, of putting herself out there, of stirring the pot, so speak (though to her credit, years earlier, back when protesting Israel was more of a side-hustle than a way of life for so many people, she walked by a group of anti-Israel protesters on our way to a Portland Trail Blazers game and muttered, Am Yisrael Chai, which, all of us, my wife and sons, were damn impressed by, “Go grandma!” the boys said to her, which found her suddenly standing up quite a bit straighter.) and there was undoubtedly something provocative about the hat. But like a lot of risk-averse people, my mother-in-law also thrills in the risk-taking of others, which explains why, when I sent her a photo of me donning the hat at a local coffee shop soon after it arrived, she said to me, “You’re brave, Andrew!” a little breathlessly, making me suddenly stand up a little straighter, before I promptly felt something closer to despair. “That this is now a form of bravery is precisely the problem,” I said, to which she couldn’t help but sadly agree.
. . .
The dilemma of Jews deciding if and how and how loudly to broadcast their Jewishness, of how publicly to embrace our religion, our ethnicity, our peoplehood, a dilemma borne of fear, persecution, displacement, dislocation, diaspora—of the understanding that there are a lot of people out there who hate Jews and won’t hesitate to act on that hatred in violent ways—has been around so long, has been such an essential part of our history, is so deeply intertwined with our sense of who we are and why we’re on this earth in the first place, that it is by now almost synonymous with being Jewish. As early as 800 B.C.E., when the Assyrians captured and relocated thousands of Israelites, and the subsequent conquest of Northern Kingdom of Israel, Jews had to be making some pretty serious calculations about the costs of publicly embracing their Jewishness, and certainly by the time of the Destruction of the First Temple and the murder and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Jews by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians a few hundred years later the question, the dilemma, must have been etched into their psyches, though it was of course the destruction of the Second Temple and the massacre of a million Jews in 70 A.D. and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion sixty years later, after which Jews found themselves spread across the earth for the next two thousand years, living, if you can call it that, at the mercy of foreign governments, during which they were perennially, unceasingly marginalized, threatened, expelled, massacred, victimized in one form or fashion, that secured this legacy, guaranteed that picking and choosing and worrying over how and if and how publicly to be Jewish (and to be clear, I’m talking about moments of real agency, when Jews actually had something resembling a choice about how publicly to embrace their Jewishness, as opposed to the myriad times when they, we, were simply, without being given a choice, banished or slaughtered, when, in other words, we faced what historian Haym Soloveitchik refers to as “Relative Coercion,” as in, “I choose to bow down to the idol because I fear otherwise being murdered,” as opposed to “Absolute Coercion,” as in “Someone throws me down in front of an idol,” though the line between the two, the threat of violence and the violence itself, is a fine one indeed.) would more or less define our lives once and for all. Though the establishment of the State of Israel, the space and relative safety it provided for Jews to stand up and declare “I’m a Jew!” unabashed, unapologetically, without fear, more or less resolved this dilemma for a significant number of Jews, it didn’t do as much for the millions of Jews who continued to live in the Diaspora, especially in places like, say, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, but also throughout Europe and even here in the United States, where, long before October 7th, long before Jews realized that the so-called Golden Age of Jews in America was coming to an end, the dilemma was reflected in every name change, nose job, and synagogue security system.
We may not have been on the front lines of virulent antisemitism, but to say that we weren’t making decisions at every turn would be naïve.
In this context, in a world where broadcasting one’s Jewishness, where being a Jew in public has always been high risk behavior, where wearing, or, I should say, choosing to wear, one’s Jewishness on one’s sleeve has rarely been a good idea, it’s no wonder that stories of Jews doing just that—sticking their necks out literally and figuratively, standing up proudly and publicly and saying, “I’m a Jew!”—are a source of such deep pride in the Jewish world, on par with the stories of the Israel’s War of Independence, the Six Day War, the capture of Adolf Eichmann, and the rescue in Entebbe. Jewish history is replete with breathtaking examples of Jews showcasing, broadcasting, standing by and/or standing up for their Jewishness in the face of the greatest peril, including Judah Maccabee and his brothers of Hanukah fame; the hundreds of Jews at Masada who, when push came to shove, chose to kill each other rather than be captured; Rabbi Akivah, the most famous of the Ten Martyrs, who read Torah in public to his students against Roman law, and then, when he was punished for it, defiantly sang the Shema as the Romans “combed his skin with an iron”; the Anonymous Mother, who encouraged her seven sons as they were publicly flayed alive for refusing to eat pork and otherwise forgo their Judaism; and the great Queen Esther who risked everything by revealing her Jewishness in order to save the Jews of Persia, to name just a few, all of them mythical figures, heroes of the highest order, veritable rock stars in the pantheon of Jewish history, whose actions, whose willingness to put it all on the line, to sacrifice themselves in the name of their God in the act of Kiddush Hashem rather than compromise their Jewishness has captured the collective imagination of generations of Jews and even been woven into the liturgy, as pointed out by Rabbi Shira Lander, in prayers like Av Harachamim, calling on god’s mercy for the sake of those “who laid down their lives for the sanctification of the divine name,” and the Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father Our King, recited during the High Holidays, and the “Yizkor recitation of memorial prayers for the martyrs,” liturgy that most of us have been reciting since we were children—all of which, the heroes and heroines, the remarkable feats and stunning courage, the beautiful liturgy made my decision to start wearing that hat around our little neighborhood with its antique shops and organic restaurants, a neighborhood, to be sure, filled with progressive-minded people, many of whom carry strong anti-Israel sentiments, but who are generally not inclined to make a fuss out of it, who are more or less content to enjoy their lattes and go about their business, seem like a low stakes proposition, a pedestrian undertaking, an embarrassment really, something, less akin to Akiva or Esther, and more akin to, well, my mother-in-law muttering Am Yisrael Chai outside the Trailblazers game.
And yet it did feel like a risk of sorts, as I sat there that first morning, sipping my coffee at the window bar facing the street, partly, because like everyone else, for months I’d been frantically watching the news, reading about the encampments, the stories of keffiyeh-wielding mobs roaming neighborhoods, shouting at, spitting on, threatening, even attacking Jews, and even if they hadn’t yet shown up in our neighborhood, I knew they were out there somewhere, that eventually, sooner or later, they would show up here, even if it seemed difficult to believe at the moment, which is to say nothing of the, let’s call them, traditional Jew-haters, the white nationalists, the Q-Anon nutbags who held dark beliefs about Jews and power and money, whose presence always felt close-at-hand here in Oregon, people who, long before October, I’d worried might throw a rock through our window during Hanukah, and the idea that I was making myself such a visible target was disconcerting. Then, too, there was the fact that by wearing the cap, I was putting myself out there, exposing myself in ways I just wasn’t used to, that on some level went against every fiber of my being, violated my strident disinclination to stand out, to wear anything on my sleeve. And there was the matter of identity politics, this cultural obsession in recent years with broadcasting one’s identity or identities that some part of me frowned upon, disdained, found on some level frankly appalling, that made me feel embarrassed to wear the hat, as though I’d stooped to some level I never respected in the first place.
Taken together, there was a lot working against me when I put on the hat and texted my mother-in-law.
But if some part of me resisted it, if some part of me disdained it, if some part of me felt shy, embarrassed, undignified, uncomfortable, exposed, fearful, worried as I sat there sipping my Americano that first morning, another part of me felt exhilarated, and too, profound relief, as though I were sucking in air I hadn’t even realized I’d needed. Because the truth was since October 7th I’d felt a kind of suffocation, a desperate urgency, a nearly unbearable feeling of having to do something, that I couldn’t keep living like this any longer, keeping my head down, going about my business, pretending that nothing had changed, that my relationship to the rest of the world was the same as always—a feeling that couldn’t be satisfied by the letters I’d sent to organizations that had seen fit to pile on Israel or the ten-day trip I had taken there to volunteer or the donations I’d made to various Jewish organizations or the Hebrew class I’d signed up for or my regular attendance at shul, a kind of wild, primal howling inside me, a burning need for people to know who and what I was and where I stood, to see me for who I really was, and the hat, I realized, was exactly what I had been looking for. Indeed, when I got home a few hours later and my wife asked how it had gone, I said, “Great!” and I meant it.
. . .
If my mother-in-law thought I was brave, my own mother, eighty-six, diminutive, the child of shtetl-born parents who fled Europe and lost a lot of family along the way, as anxious a person as ever walked the earth, and, too, a person whose tendencies towards privacy made my own seem like an afterthought, a woman whose guiding ethos could more or less be summed up as, “Never draw attention to yourself!” was worried. “You’re not really going to wear that around, are you?” she asked, and I said, “Why not?” sidestepping the fact that I’d been wearing it for days, that I was at that very moment wearing it in the grocery store. “Don’t go looking for trouble,” she said angrily.
For his part, my older son, nineteen, a college sophomore who of his own accord had started wearing a Magen David months before October 7th and had continued to wear it ever since, seemed disappointed. “You don’t really need to be wearing it,” he said. “Too antagonistic?” I said, and he shrugged, “I think so,” and I knew what he meant: it seemed unnecessary on some level, if not looking for trouble, looking to make a statement the value of which was questionable. If I simply wanted to show my Jewish pride, I could wear other, milder, more approachable identifiers, like his Magen David or a Chai or my Jerusalem Bird Observatory cap. (Of course, I could also move in the other direction, be more provocative still, wear an “I Stand with Israel” cap, for instance, or one of those T-shirts I’d seen with a map of Israel and the words, “Est. 1273 B.C.E.” but doing so, I thought, would let people off the hook for what I could no longer ignore was lying at the bottom of so much of their hatred of Israel: a deep distaste for Jews.)
Yet the hat captured something true, real, honest about my experience; it seemed an accurate reflection of what I was feeling, had been feeling for months now, a sense not just of being different, separate, but problematically so, at odds with the rest of the world, not just an outsider, but a bothersome one, a hateful one, not just a Jew, but That Jew, and over the following days as I wore it to the gym, to the bank, on various errands, I did so with a chip on my shoulder, daring people to say or do something, almost wishing that they would. I took special pleasure in showing it off at the coffee shop where so many people seemed intent to showcase their embrace of cultural diversity, their rainbow pride, their gender fluidity, loudly proclaiming in one way or another how liberal-minded they were. One day I saw an older woman, an avowed and vocal progressive, who years earlier, back when off-the-cuff comments about Jews seemed easy to brush aside, my wife overheard say something about being “struck by Jewish lightening” in the context of a business deal. I sat down at a table right in front of her as if to say, “Come and get me.”
. . .
These were not, I confess, new feelings. Rather, they were the latest and certainly most intense iteration of feelings that had first surfaced shortly after I arrived for an eight month writing residency in Israel in the fall of 2000, right as the Second Intifada began to hit its stride, during which, betwixt and between the suicide bombings, as I traveled up and down the country, studied Hebrew and Jewish history, celebrated Shabbos and the holidays, marveled at being in a country built around Jewish life, I felt a sudden, nearly overwhelming sense of purpose and meaning and belonging, an exhilaration, a sense of myself as a Jew that nothing in my prior twenty-seven years had prepared me for—not our kosher home, not our Shabbat dinners, not my bar mitzvah or our family trip to Israel—a sense of myself as Jew that was so big, so deep, so all-encompassing that I had a regular and nearly irresistible inclination to shout at the top of my lungs, “I. Am. A. Jew!” It was though I’d found a part of me that I hadn’t even realized I was missing, and I came to believe that if Jewishness wasn’t the essential component of my being, it was damn close. In this context I developed a kind of obsession with all things Jewish—the history of the Jews, the gifts of the Jews, the accomplishments of the Jews, the dilemmas of the Jews, the enemies of the Jews, the conspiracies about the Jews, the myriad disasters that had befallen the Jews, the seemingly impossible conundrum that had always confronted the Jews, not just a chosen people but a relentlessly besieged people—the intensity of which made it difficult for me to think about much else and too made me feel completely out of place eight months later when, as had been the plan all along, I returned to the States to set up life with my wife in Portland. There, amidst the farmer’s markets and jazz festivals and outdoor wonders that had once drawn us there, I found myself acutely sensitive to how different I was, we were, strangers in a strange land, painfully, maddeningly aware of all the ways I, we, had to adapt our lives to this gentile reality, feelings that I tried with mixed success to ignore, to tamp down, to compartmentalize as I began teaching and we started raising first one child and then another, feelings that flared wildly during the Christmas season when it seemed like we might be suffocated by the holiday and whenever Israel was under attack or some antisemitic incident occurred, feelings that made me feel so alienated from the world I was suddenly inhabiting that if I ever fully indulged them I would have almost certainly packed us all up and moved back to Israel.
Which is to say, everything I was now feeling had been on a slow burn for years, decades even, before it boiled over in October.
. . .
If I relished rubbing it in the faces of the anti-Israel contingency, the encampment dwellers, the illiberal left, I was no less eager to show it to That Sensible Jew, That Keep-Your-Head-Down Jew, That It-Could-Be-Worse Jew, That Better-To-Be-A-Compromised-Jew-Than-Dead Jew. (If you’re wondering what I was I thinking about the traditional antisemites, the rightwing lunatics, the card-carrying KKK nuts, in fact, I wasn’t worrying about them at all. On the contrary, I had a kind of nostalgic affection for them; all things considered, in light of everything else going on, they didn’t seem so bad.) How dare they sit idly by, skulking along, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed, pretending they could conduct business as usual, acting as though it might somehow work out better for us this time.
Not that I didn’t understand them, identify with them, feel compassion for them (and to be clear, I’m talking about Jews who actually identified as Jews, knew and celebrated themselves as such, believed in our right to self-determination in our homeland even if they didn’t agree with the actions of the Israeli government, but just didn’t feel like they had to be public, let alone defiant, about it, as opposed to, let’s call them, Jews-in-name-only, people who were born Jews but no longer identified as such, who had long ago assimilated, felt little if any connection to the people, the culture, the possibilities for living and embracing a Jewish life, or, for that matter, the Jewish fringe, the rabidly anti-Israel Jews, the Jewish Voices For Peace extremists who seemed primarily interested in weaponizing their Jewishness against the Jewish state.). I mean, I’d spent most of my life being that kind of Jew. It’s how I’d been raised, and even after I’d returned from Israel, even after I’d become overwhelmed by sense of myself as a Jew, I’d never seen the need to go public with it. Even now, for all the zeal with which I wore the hat, for all the relief I felt in finally having it, my Jewishness, firmly, visibly, adamantly on the table, some part of me was desperate to go back into hiding.
I was particularly worried about seeing people I knew, neighbors whom we’d always had cordial relationships, the guys who helped me at the hardware store, my mechanic, centrist, conservative-minded people who had no vocal, obvious issue with Jews or Israel, people who probably weren’t paying attention to the issues and didn’t care enough to make a fuss about it if they were, people who, to the extent they knew we were Jewish and ever sat down to think about it would have categorized us as Those Keep-the-Peace-Jews, Those-Mind-Their-Own-Business Jews, Those Aren’t-They-Such-a-Nice-Little-Jewish-Family Jews but would, I feared now, see us, me as That Troublemaking-Jew, That Who-Does-He-Think-He-Is Jew, That We Didn’t-Think-You-Were-That-Type-of-Jew, judgements that seemed on some level more worrisome, more threatening than the prospect of any physical assault. Indeed, a few times I impulsively pulled off the hat so as to avoid having someone like this see it. On those occasions when I was able to stay my hand, to at least play the part of That Brave Jew, That Defiant Jew, I found myself smiling weakly, making small talk, becoming That You-Don’t-Have-to-Worry-About-Me Jew, That I-Really Do Know-My-Place-Jew, as though to compensate for the hat.
But if I understood this approach intellectually, if I was often tempted to go this route and occasionally gave into the temptation, another part of me scorned this approach, rejected it entirely, saw it as a grand betrayal, if not pathetic, deserving of the severest of judgements. The idea that you had to ask for permission to be who you were seemed disgraceful, and, worse, certain to result in the very outcome all of us were trying to avoid. One day a Jewish man on the street looked over at me with something between fear and scorn, as if to say, “Are you trying to get us killed?” and I glared back at him with fury as if to say, “Better than running.”
. . .
The debate we seemed to be having was, of course, an old and fierce among Jews, one that had occupied some of the greatest minds in Jewish history. Indeed, for all the adoration of Jews who’d stuck out their necks, for all the celebration of those willing to publicly stand by and stand up for their Jewishness, for all the lore surrounding the likes of Judah Maccabee and Rabbi Akiva and Queen Esther, for all the Talmudic and liturgical reverence for Kiddush Hashem, there have always been Jews who have questioned the wisdom of this approach, rejected the ideal of martyrdom, argued that it was better to survive a compromised and/or secret Jew than die a pure, public one, Jews who have insisted that, when all was said and done, it was better, smarter, saner, to keep your head down, to make do, to accommodate, not out of fear per se (though God knows there was plenty of that), but out of pragmatism, good sense, wisdom, a perspective articulated during the Roman siege by Rabbi Jose ben Kisma, who as the scholar Gerald Blidstein explains, argued that Jews needed to submit to Roman power even if it meant compromising parts of the Torah because “the same God who gave the Torah is also the master of history, and He has clearly handed the rule over to Rome. Refusal to acknowledge this fact brings death—certainly and deservedly,” though it was worse than that, for, as he continues, “Not only will you die in your willful rejection of God’s will. . . but your apparent loyalty to Torah will in fact guarantee its destruction: your Torah will be burnt with you.” It’s a perspective most famously, most colorfully embodied by the great Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who, while the Zealots were busily fighting and mostly dying en masse, insisted this was the wrong path, that fighting back not only wouldn’t stop the Temple’s Destruction but likely hasten it; who, having failed to convince them of the wisdom of his approach but recognizing the looming catastrophe, faked his own death and had his students smuggle him out of Jerusalem in a coffin; who visited Vespasian and asked that when he became emperor he set aside a small corner of the empire in Yavneh so that the Jews could have a little school and study Torah in peace, which Vespasian not only promised but did, more or less securing a future for Judaism in the aftermath of the Temple’s Destruction. Indeed, at every turn of history, in the face of every threat—from the Roman sieges to the Crusades to the expulsion from Spain and England to the Holocaust—in every instance where Jews faced calamity, That Stand-Tall Jew, That “I’m a Jew!” Jew has invariably been challenged by That Sensible Jew, That-What-Good-Is-It-If-We’re-All Dead Jew, That Let’s-Not-Rock-the-Boat Jew, Jews, that is, who argued that if standing tall wasn’t exactly inviting trouble, it just wasn’t going to help.
Personally, I wasn’t convinced.
. . .
The matter of identity politics continued to bother me. I told myself that this was different. I wasn’t trying to use my identity to game the system. I wasn’t trying to claim victimhood or special status to gain something. If anything, wearing the hat was more likely to diminish my status than improve it. But the idea that I was clinging so tightly to my Jewishness, defining myself by it, put me at odds with a part of myself that didn’t feel comfortable doing so, not just because it seemed petty per se, not just because it seemed divisive or manipulative, but because it seemed false, untrue, antithetical to the natural order of things—a part of me that came of age around the time I turned nineteen, almost a decade before I went to live in Israel, during which I got deep into Eastern philosophy in general, and Buddhism in particular, and most of all this idea that this self we seem to be, this me that dictates so much of our lives, these identities that we hold fast to—teacher, father, good person, American, Jew—are illusory, ephemeral, small-minded fabrications conceived to help us navigate the vicissitudes, the uncertainties, the terrifying realities of life but, when all is said and done, have little to do with who we really are, our true nature, an idea whose impact on me was as profound as it was obvious, and too whose apparent truth I’d never been able to shake. Even after I arrived in Israel, even as I came to understand myself as a Jew first and last and most of all, part of me continued to indulge this Buddhist perspective, to see the world through this, let’s call it, universalist lens, and, in this context, felt hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, to continue defining myself so stridently as a Jew, to hold so tightly to this identity, even as it was emotionally, viscerally, as compelling as anything I’d ever felt. How could I hold fast to my Jewishness when I, or some part of me anyway, believed, knew that these kinds of identifications were at best partial truths, fragments of the fundamental realities of life on this earth?
Yet, setting aside that parts of me didn’t seem capable of relenting, that emotionally I couldn’t let go of this even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t be sure that this universalist lens wasn’t a copout, an escape, an effort to do what Jews had always tried to do, had always felt they had to do, namely blend in, assimilate, though not just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, change-my-name or get-a-nose-job kind of assimilation, but rather what historian Todd Endelman refers to as radical assimilation, an effort to extricate oneself from the dilemma, to free oneself of the burden, “to shed the stigma of Jewish-ness, to be free, once and for all, of a highly charged, troublesome label” often by converting, but also, more insidiously, by identifying with a larger enterprise—science or atheism or some “universalistic, non-revealed, syncretic, religion.” What better way to rid yourself of the dilemmas of being Jewish than by ditching Judaism, or at least core elements of it, for a nobler cause?
But even if we ignore for a moment the shame and fear and self-hatred that has always fed these efforts, the humiliating realities of trying to erase one’s own identity so that others might ultimately accept you, the truth was, it didn’t work. As Endelman writes, invariably Jews “discovered that acceptance was still elusive. Jewish difference continued to loom large in the non-Jewish imagination, and homogeneity continued to trump heterogeneity in social and cultural life. For Jews…their origins were still a burden, their Jewishness a source of discomfort and anxiety, especially in illiberal societies.”
Which is to say that even when Jews have been willing to try to forget their Judaism, the rest of the world has not.
. . .
Periodically, every now and then, I removed the hat, set it aside for a few days, wore my Yankees cap instead. And what a relief it was! To be That Blend-in Jew! That Sip-My-Coffee-in-Peace Jew! That I’m No-Different-Than-You Jew!
I mean, it was exhausting to wear that hat every day, to always be That Jew, to feel so braced and embattled and on guard all the time. Without the hat on my head, I felt lighter, more relaxed, almost, well, like a genuine member of the family of nations. During these times I felt as though I were sliding into a dreamy, intoxicating trance: What, I wondered, was all the fuss? No one was threatening me or preventing us from practicing Judaism. On the contrary, we lived as comfortably, as freely as people, Jews not least of all, could ever hope to live on this earth. When that changed, when the trouble finally arrived, we could deal with it then. In the meantime, who cared if we had to be a little vigilant? Who cared if we couldn’t feel perfectly at ease in public? Who cared if we were a little compromised? Even the Rambam, who’d argued that Jews should choose death rather than convert, advocated for compromise up to a point. The fact was, most of what was beautiful about Judaism was private, internal to the community. And while it was awful that so many Jews around the world were under siege, what could I really do about it? Certainly wearing my little hat wasn’t going to make a difference.
Invariably, however, before long, I snapped myself out of it, put the hat back on, partly out of principal, a sense of responsibility, because I never liked someone else paying my bills, and the idea that they, the visibly Jewish, were paying a price for me seemed wrong. Why should Jews wearing kippahs bear all the burden? Why should Israelis be putting their lives on the line every day while I was lounging around in my Yankees cap? Why should I live in the luxury of anonymity while Jews everywhere were taking it on the nose? If in Israel large parts of the population were shirking their responsibility when it came to military service, here in the Diaspora we had a similar problem, and I wanted no part of it.
But it was more than that: there was something about the discomfort I continued to feel whenever I wore the hat, the subtle fear and anxiety, the self-consciousness, the host of unsettling feelings and associations that worked their way through me, that I didn’t like, not because I couldn’t deal with them, but because I felt like I shouldn’t have to. Why should I have to hide who I was when others didn’t? Why should I have to disguise my Jewishness while others freely dangled their crosses around their necks? Why did I have to tip-toe around while others walked forth with swagger? Though I would never presume to understand the experience of people who couldn’t blend in, people whose skin color, for instance, made it impossible for them to go incognito, I couldn’t help wondering when all was said and done, that would be preferrable, not easier, but preferrable—to just have it, me, all on the table, to be done with the dilemma of broadcasting who I was once and for all.
Occasionally, though less frequently than I might have in a city with a larger Jewish population and often when I wasn’t wearing my hat, I ran into other Jews showcasing their Jewishness. I saw one woman wearing dog tags for the hostages, another wearing a Magen David, a couple of guys wearing kippahs. Yet while none of them seemed too concerned, while to an outsider they probably appeared to be going about their business, I sensed their guardedness, the ways their eyes glanced around to see how people might be reacting. One day I approached a young guy wearing a large Chai who seemed initially ready to fight. When I told him I liked it, he looked embarrassed. “Gotta stay strong,” he said, though rather than an assertion of strength, it seemed a weary articulation of the dilemma we were all facing.
. . .
I kept waiting for someone to say or do something, for something to happen that would free me from it, resolve the dilemma, once and for all extricate me from this vortex of feelings, or at least give me an opportunity to discharge my pent-up anger, frustration and outrage. But save for the occasional double-takes, the extended stares, save for the one Jewish person who walked over very quietly and told me she liked my hat, people didn’t seem to notice or at least indicate that they noticed. On those occasions when people did respond, I often couldn’t be sure what their response meant. One day a woman looked at the hat and pointed and laughed. Was she laughing at me? Was she laughing with me? Another day a Middle-Eastern-looking man stared hard at me while I was sitting in the coffee shop, and I braced for a confrontation. But then he turned and walked off with his girlfriend, chatting and holding hands, and I wondered whether he had registered the hat at all.
Increasingly I sensed that the hat was revealing as much about me and my inner realities as those surrounding me. The hat became a kind of megaphone for the feelings that I and presumably so many Jews around the world were navigating all the time, often just beneath the surface of our consciousness. I mean, it was so easy to project antisemitism onto everyone whenever I wore the hat, to take on the worst, most degrading, hateful Jewish stereotypes—pushy, scheming, manipulative, dirty, deceitful, conniving, grotesque—to feel not just like the object of everyone’s hatred, but the cause of it. What is the matter with you? people seemed to ask. Why do you have to be so difficult? Can’t you just leave us alone once and for all? Worse still: part of me agreed with them: Why did I have to be so difficult, problematic, oppositional? Why did I, we, have to intrude on peoples’ happy little lives?
Yet no sooner had I thought this, then another voice arose inside: Who was intruding on whom? What exactly were we doing to anyone? Would it not be more accurate to say that everyone was doing something to us? Could it not be said that my, our defensiveness, our pushiness, our difficult way of being was a natural response to a world where you were constantly threatened, vilified, battered? Could it not be said that our “villainy,” as Shylock put it, had been “taught” us by the very people who loathed us? In this way, the hat confronted me with the most vexing of Jewish questions: Who or what was ultimately responsible for the Jewish experience of otherness? Who or what was finally to blame for our perennial outsider status? What was cause and what was effect when it came to Jewish life on this earth?
Sometimes I grew philosophical, told myself that if I just acted confidently, if I just stopped worrying, I could create a different reality, put this all to rest. At these moments I became That Mind-Over-Matter Jew, That Use-the-Force-Jew, That The-World-is-What-You-Make-of-it-Jew. But while this was an appealing idea, while I enjoyed thinking that we were all masters of our own fate, that we could shape the world to do our bidding, the idea that, to take just one example, some thirteen year old French kid, who, upon revealing her Judaism to her boyfriend was raped by him and his friends, was somehow responsible for what happened, seemed a very tough pill to swallow.
. . .
The more I wore the hat, the more I realized I was trying to solve a problem that had no answer, resolve a feeling that had no resolution, prove a point that could never finally be proven. It was as though I were struggling against a creature whose grip only entangled me further the more I tried to extricate myself from it. Increasingly I understood what some part of me had always known but didn’t want to believe, what so many other Jews had faced up to long before I’d arrived: the fear, the hesitation, the anxiety, the debate, the dilemma—all of it—wasn’t something to sort out, to be solved or resolved, but was the inevitable, inescapable reality of a displaced, unprotected, vulnerable people living at the mercy of an often hostile world, that save for a few remarkable, stunningly rare blips on the vast screens of history, it had alwaysbeen the reality of the Jews, that to the extent any of us had been able to forget about it for a while, it had been a fluke, the rarest of windfalls, that even if, like me, like a lot of American Jews until recently, you could for a time avoid actualtrouble, you couldn’t avoid fearing it, bracing for it, preparing for it, trying to preempt it, that if the last year had taught us anything, even Israeli Jews were not immune to these feelings, that even in the so-called safety and security of our homeland, they, we, were stuck trying to sort it all out, that when all was said and done, this was the fundamental reality of being Jewish, the overarching dilemma that every Jew everywhere—religious, secular, everybody in between—had always faced and always would face, and that in this regard it wasn’t a matter of wearing the hat or not wearing the hat, acting like Rabbi Akivah or acting like Rabbi ben Zakkai, keeping your head down or not keeping your head down, that no amount of agonizing would extricate us from it, change it, put to rest once and for all, because that was the nature of dilemmas, and to think otherwise, to continue to entertain the possibility that you could was at best naïve and at worst a kind of lunacy not to mention a terrible waste of time.
All of which, from a certain perspective, from the perspective of those parts of me that had always hoped for a resolution, that had worked so desperately to try to solve it, that were even now still hell-bent on trying to do so, was very depressing. After all, what chance of happiness could one really hope for in the face of such dilemmas? What kind of joy could one take in a life that was so hemmed in, hamstrung, curtailed by worries of this kind? What possibilities for freedom existed in the face of so much that was so finally inescapable?
Yet that was exactly the feeling that came over me late one Friday afternoon almost a year after the horrors, the news getting worse by the day, as I sat in the coffee shop wearing it, trying to get some work done before Shabbos: a feeling of relief, a sense of freedom borne of the understanding that if there was nothing to resolve, then I didn’t have to keep trying. And if I didn’t have to keep trying, then there were other possibilities—possibilities that found me suddenly remembering something that I had almost completely forgotten amidst the tumult and turmoil and agony of recent months: that I loved being Jewish, loved the holidays, loved the stories and history and debates and arguments and rituals, loved going to Israel, loved being different in this regard, separate, not despite the ongoing fear and worry, the seeming intractability of the situation, the exhaustion of navigating it all, nor exactly because of it, but simply because being Jewish, and everything involved with it, gave my life such shape and meaning and purpose, satisfied me in ways that I suspect would be impossible for most people out there to ever understand, made me feel whole. As I packed up my bag and walked outside, a Kabbalat Shabbat melody suddenly on my lips, I felt exquisite relief, and too, real joy, knowing as I did then that this was me and I was this. That when all was said and done I was That Jew. There wasn’t any other kind.
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Andrew Cohen lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two sons. His essays have appeared as part of the Jewish Book Council’s Witnessing series, and in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Zyzzyva, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and The Missouri Review, where he received the Editor’s Prize.