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Small city Jews find conviction and inspiration in their upbringing

By Kiera Wiatrak
Special to The Chronicle

December 1st, 2009

Madison — Last winter, then UW-Madison junior Karsyn Durkin returned to her hometown of Waupaca to find a nasty surprise in the local newspaper. A woman had written a letter-to-the-editor complaining that the kids were singing too many Jewish songs in the elementary school Christmas pageant.

“When they did sing the Jewish songs, as a little kid I was like, ‘Hey, finally a song for me,’” Durkin recalled “And seeing my friends singing it too, it was cool.” Durkin was one of the only Jews in her Wisconsin hometown.

“Here we are living in the community for over 16 years,” she said. “Both my sisters were valedictorians. We’re a Jewish family that produced very well-liked kids who gave back a lot to the community, and we were kind of being attacked.”

Small town Jews share a common experience fueled by a sense of isolation that is unknown to Jews raised in large Jewish communities in cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and yes, Milwaukee.

Durkin comes from an interfaith marriage with a Jewish mother and Catholic-raised father. Though she has never been to synagogue — her mom worked weekends and the nearest synagogue was nearly an hour away in Appleton — Judaism played a critical role in her upbringing. Her mom would come to school to teach the other kids about Chanukah and homemade matzah ball soup is one of her favorite foods.

But a lot of her memories of being Jewish are polluted by the awkwardness of standing out. “I was like the outsider in that way, and that was hurtful because I didn’t feel like I was any different than anyone else,” Durkin says.

For a lot of small-city Jews, their minority status doesn’t disappear when they join larger Jewish communities, like the Jewish population on the UW-Madison campus.

While Jews raised in large Jewish communities often stick together once they get to college, Jews from smaller Wisconsin cities, once a minority in their hometowns, are now a minority among the big-city Jews.

University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Ben Borsuk has sometimes felt more like an anomaly on campus than he did growing up in Oshkosh, he said.

“I don’t reflect a normal Jewish kid that goes to Madison,” he said, explaining that most Jews on campus are from big cities. “Fitting in with those Jewish kids is probably more difficult than trying to hang out with a bunch of non-Jews.”

This divide between big city and small city Jews is nothing new. Madison Area Technical College history instructor and humanities department chair Jonathan Pollack says this tension on college campuses first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, when Jews began enrolling in universities en masse.

In his article, “Jewish Problems: Eastern and Western Jewish Identities in Conflict at the University of Wisconsin, 1919-1941,” he points out that Jews from big cities all over the country began flocking to UW-Madison because it was one of the only universities at the time that didn’t have a Jewish student quota.

“Under pressure of anti-Semitism from outside the community, friendly jokes and stereotypes about manners, accents, and attitude acquired a sharper edge that has characterized regional differences among American Jews on college campuses to the present day,” he writes.

Often, this leads to a hesitancy to take advantage of opportunities not available in smaller communities because of a sense of not belonging here either.

“Now that I’m here, I feel kind of self-conscious around other Jewish people because, it’s like, ‘Am I Jewish enough?’” Durkin said.

But according to Pollack, that tentativeness is often overpowered by a thirst for opportunities not available in their hometowns. “I think that oftentimes Jewish students from small towns will really want to prioritize a college experience that will have a big Jewish context,” he said.

“They’ll seek out Hillel activities, they’ll try to get involved in Jewish fraternities and sororities…. That’s like a really big draw, that finally they can be around other Jewish people and they don’t have to be explaining themselves all the damn time.”

Borsuk joined a Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, when he got to college to experience firsthand what he was only able to imagine his entire childhood.

“I learned things, but it was textbook material and it was somewhat common knowledge, but I learned the answers and the depth of Judaism when I got to college,” he said.

Despite the camaraderie small city Jews find on campus, they’re still thankful for the unique sense of identity they acquired as one of the only Jews in their hometowns.

UW Hillel Religious Life intern Simon Dick, who went to high school in Green Bay, says he’s grateful for his small community upbringing because he feels it forced him to find his own reasons for being Jewish.

“Perhaps I missed out on the educational opportunities a larger community can provide,” he said, “but at the same time, my reasons for being Jewish, I feel, are stronger [because of] my connection with the past and my need to keep the traditions going,” said Dick, whose mother is the rabbi at Green Bay’s Congregation Cnesses Israel.

Borsuk meets with a rabbi weekly to learn more about the spiritual aspects of Judaism. He believes that his curiosity is a direct result of his small city upbringing. If he’d grown up in a large community, he said, “I wouldn’t be as curious about it or as involved in it because I’d be so used to it.”

But in smaller cities, non-Jewish peers also tend to be curious about the Jewish religion.

“You wind up becoming kind of an expert on Judaism and Jewish history and things like that, even if you’re not especially interested in it because people always ask you questions,” Pollack said.

In fact, when classmates and friends are constantly approaching the only Jew they know with their questions, small city Jews often feel they are the only ones around to answer these questions, and therefore responsible for representing the entire Jewish population.

“It’s a pretty intense responsibility,” Dick said.

However, some smaller Jewish communities are just big enough to form a tight-knit, intimate setting that can infuse an even stronger sense of Judaism and identity into the community.

“I think growing up in a smaller community gave me positive experiences with a synagogue, and helped me recognize the hard work that enabled my Jewish education,” said UW-Madison junior and La Crosse native Levi Prombaum in an e-mail interview.

“The smallness also means that there is little room for apathy or dormancy; the proportion of active, committed% families is consistently inspiring,” said Prombaum, whose father is the rabbi at La Crosse’s Congregation Sons of Abraham.

Prombaum’s friend and UW-Madison peer Hannah Blanke looks back fondly on community life at the synagogue.

“This personal attention made me feel like I wasn’t just a number, and since I have lived in La Crosse my whole life, the whole congregation has watched me grow and prepare, so that when I had my bat mitzvah, it wasn’t like there were tons of strange faces, since I had seen most of these people weekly (at least) for years,” she said in an e-mail interview.

Growing up in a smaller Jewish community, said UW Hillel campus Rabbi Andrea Steinberger, “allows a person to understand that a community takes a lot of individuals who are able to contribute in different ways, and that a person doesn’t have the luxury of sitting back and just watching and waiting for someone else to do it.”

She says it is these people who often emerge as Jewish leaders on campus, and seek out Jewish professions when they graduate.

“I can think of a dozen students who come from throughout Wisconsin who came to many, many things at Hillel just because they were happening,” she said. “They just said, ‘If this is what’s happening, I want to be a%u2028 part of it.’”

Regardless of the connections Wisconsin Jews make when they leave their small cities and join the UW Jewish campus community, they never forget where they came from.

After Durkin read the letter-to-the-editor in her Waupaca paper, she decided to fight back. While being the only Jew wasn’t easy growing up, she knew that her community had more integrity than the article suggested.

She wrote a letter in response, which was published a few days later and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

“I had people I had not talked to in a long time come up to me and say,your article was really good, your letter was really nice,” she said. “Living there didn’t mean people weren’t open.”

Kiera Wiatrak is a former Chronicle intern and a communications specialist at University Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.