LRN No.6: genetically Jewish
Plus: the proof, the whole proof
I’m not very good at being Jewish, but I probably don’t try hard enough.
There are four different aspects to being Jewish:
the religious part
the ethnic part
the cultural part
the political, Israel supporting part
I totally fail at Points 1 and 4. I don’t believe in any God, Jewish or otherwise. I’ve never been to Israel and I think it’s racist when people assume that I must be pro-Israel simply because of my ethnicity.
Which brings me neatly to Point 2, which I have covered, because I am 100% ethnically Jewish. Point 3 kind of follows from Point 2: if both your parents are Jews, you can’t really escape Jewish culture. I managed to avoid gefilte fish because my mother is Sephardi and not Ashkenazi Jewish, but I got the sense of humour. And the guilt.
I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be Jewish ever since I interviewed Kara Rubinstein Deyerin for my radio series about lives changed by at-home DNA tests. (She appears in the episode that comes out on Monday 2nd October.)
Kara grew up mixed race, with a white mother and a black father, and had to deal with kids calling her 'half caste’, ‘zebra’ and ‘Oreo’ at school. She wanted to find out exactly where in Africa her Dad’s ancestors came from, so she could work out where to take her three sons on holiday for a “finding our roots” tour.
Aged 43, she took a DNA test. The results revealed she was 50 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish. The man who raised Kara wasn’t her father – and she had no African American heritage at all.
When I interviewed Kara five years after this discovery, she was wearing a Star of David pendant in our Zoom call. She’d recently returned from spending a few months in Israel. She said when she went to a synagogue for the first time, something profound resonated within her, and she knew she’d found her people. Even though her Jewish biological father had passed away more than a decade earlier, and his family refused to have a relationship with her, she has become a practicing Jew.
That means Kara has Points 1-4 covered. It made me feel a bit sheepish about my own identity. Jew(ish).
In an age of identity politics, where your race can give you different claims in the world, how much do your genes actually matter?
Kara isn’t under any illusion that ethnic identity comes from DNA: In today’s world, we got to choose the identity that resonates with us, she told me. Relying too much on what your DNA tells you is a dangerous path. “Being of Jewish descent, we know how much of a slippery slope it is,” she said with a nod.
In other news, advance proofs of my book, The Price of Life, exist and are now out in the world for book bloggers, reviewers and people who might want to say nice things I can put on the cover when it comes out on 14th March. (It will have a different cover then.) It’s thrilling to have something to hold in my hands after all this time.
Things that have caught my eye:
The incomparable David Runciman spent two months following the same Twitter accounts as Elon Musk - with depressing results
The BBC’s big three part series on Picasso, the unstoppable artistic force who collected women, smoked like a chimney and died aged 91 leaving behind 100,000 artworks, scores of grandchildren and no will. What a life
Frankie Boyle, who I saw live for the first time. Joe Biden is so old his translucent skin is like a Vietnamese spring roll, apparently
Anthropology at the Hampstead Theatre. There’s a great play to be written about the digital afterlife, but I don’t think this is it
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I was raised and still identify as a Christian today, and have some sense of what you are talking about here. I never feel comfortable publicly declaring my faith because of all of the negative connotations which now accompany it, and the political labels (anti abortion, anti LGBT). On the flip side, these extreme interpretations of christianity occasionally make me try to express something of my faith in a much more explicit way, as I don't want the evangelicals to have 'ownership' of it. If that makes sense?
Your LRN No.6 piece "Genetically Jewish" makes a false distinction between "2. the ethnic part" and "3. the cultural part." The words _ethnic_ and _cultural_ are synonymous. In recent years, writers who are uncomfortable with the word _race_ have tended to use _ethnic_ instead. But as with your usage, this is confusing and misleading. Please resist using _ethnic_ as synonymous with _racial_ or _genetic_; it is not.