In days gone past, journalists in the Jewish press could scan the dailies for Jewish sounding names as a way to identify members of our community. The names were Ashkenazi and they told vivid stories of those families’ roots and Jewish migration.
Cohen, Eiseman, Glazer, Kaplan, Miller, Rubin, Schneider, Shapiro. The surnames told of their priestly status or their ancestors’ professions or the European countries where their great-great grandparents lived.
But the Jewish world, in all its complexity and diversity, has come crashing into our American Jewish reality, and it’s an unequivocal blessing.
Now, journalists at Jewish publications can no longer identify Jews by their names and expect to get it right. Our community leaders include such names as Armstrong, De Happy, Harari, McKinney and Yamahiro.
We are every color. Our native tongues include Arabic, Spanish, Swahili, Italian, Irish, Afrikaner and Chinese.
I remember when I arrived at my college dormitory, flushed with first-year nervous energy, and became friends with Alberto Fishman, a Jewish student from Caracas, Venezuela. My mind stretched, open and pliable.
This month, our Jewish community has been host to an extraordinary series of visitors, whose presence and sharing certainly stretched the paradigms that many held about what it is to be Jewish.
First there was Joshua Nelson, an African-American Jew from New Jersey. His “kosher gospel” filled the sanctuary of Congregation Shalom as he helped the community celebrate the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s 2007 Annual Campaign on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
Though the idea of Jewish words and texts set to African-American music (much of it rooted in the slave experience) may seem inorganic, this is precisely what Jews have done wherever they settle — from Libya to India to Singapore, from Morocco to Moldavia.
Our people, in exile and now back in the modern State of Israel, have built homes in every corner of the earth. One needn’t exercise any particular investigative prowess to find Jews in most countries around the world. And in each of those places, Nelson told the crowd gathered to see him, Jews have adapted their texts to local sounds.
In spite of my cerebral understanding that Jews come in all shapes and colors, it was exciting to see Nelson working to live with integrity as both African American and Jew, to deny neither part of his identity and to seemingly rejoice in both.
As if on cue, just eight days later, came Aaron Kintu Moses from the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda. He brought with him stories of Jews with surnames such as Keki and Namudosi. And he sold recordings by the Ugandan Jewish Kohavim Tikvah Choir.
Though I had read about the community and its history, it’s still a thrilling surprise to see a man in African robes wearing a hand-knitted kippah and talking about our common Jewish identity.
While here on a visit sponsored by Kulanu, an organization dedicated to finding and assisting lost and dispersed remnants of the Jewish people, and American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee chapter, Kintu Moses talked about the hardships that the Abayudaya face, including persecution, lack of Jewish education and intermarriage.
Sound familiar?
And just this week, the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning hosted Rabbi Natan Gamedze, an African prince who became an Orthodox Jew and made his home in Israel.
As our perspectives about who is a Jew expand to match the real diversity in our world, we can no longer live comfortably within the bounds of “us” and “other.” The other becomes us.
The distant becomes near, the unfamiliar sheds its threatening veil. And the world becomes a little smaller and easier to navigate — a place that demands our kindness, tolerance and bold commitment to its repair.
We, Jews and Americans, are collectively children of immigrants who fled persecution in search of a better, freer life. A recent event brought that parallel narrative nearer and clearer.
Last week, I attended the annual interfaith Thanksgiving breakfast hosted by the AJC with the Milwaukee Ethnic Council and the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee.
During the morning program, participants shared their stories of “how they got here” with the others seated at their tables. At first, I was reticent and not fully engaged. But I was drawn in as I listened to the first person to speak at our table. This young woman choked back tears as she talked about how her immigrant grandmother’s commitment to education led her to become a teacher.
A couple sitting at our table shared their families’ journeys from Europe to settle in Brooklyn. Now living in Glendale, their adult children are still migrating.
Then there was the Italian exchange student who talked about his family’s trans-European identity. And the boy who wasn’t sure about his family’s roots but is struggling to finish high school in Cedarburg while living on Milwaukee’s South Side.
The overwhelming message of the breakfast was clear: Though our stories are different, most of us are immigrants. Many came to America fleeing hardship and seeking refuge.
The breakfast also included a seder-like responsive reading of AJC’s “America’s Table: A Thanksgiving Reader,” which concludes with a look forward:
“We are the stewards of America, her ideals and institutions, her cities and natural beauty.
“We are entrusted to understand America’s past and guide her future.
“To create an ever more just America that is secure and free, abundant and caring for all her inhabitants.
“We are thankful for the freedom to worship.
“We are thankful for the freedom to change our minds.
“We are thankful for the freedom to chart our lives.
“We are thankful for the freedom to work for a better world.
“We are thankful for the freedom to celebrate this day.
“In America, each of us is entitled to a place at the table.”
As we sit down with our families this Thanksgiving, may we celebrate the many different faces that make up the world Jewish community. And may the wide embrace of our Jewish world propel us to kindness and good works. Happy Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving represents confluence of identities
By Jody Hirsh
Years ago, in the 1960s, when I was a student at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Thanksgiving was a major challenge.
For most of the American students, having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner was imperative. We couldn’t possibly forsake our culture as Americans and just ignore it, even in a foreign land where Chanukah and Sukkot were national holidays, but not Thanksgiving.
However, in those pre-consumerist days in Israel, which was then only 20 years old, it was hard to get the raw materials for a Thanksgiving dinner.
First of all, we needed to find someone with an actual oven. Back then, most student apartments were not equipped with such appliances. No matter how creative we were in using our gas burner rings, roasting a turkey was impossible without an oven.
Pumpkins as we knew them in America were unknown in Israel. We had to concoct pumpkin pie wannabes from squash.
We all had our families send us cranberries or cranberry sauce well in advance. In fact, very few people even today know how to say “cranberry” in Hebrew. (Ask me, I’ll tell you.)
If we looked up the proper term, no one in any of the Israeli groceries knew what we were talking about. Quite a cry from today when many of the big groceries have “Chodesh America,” America Month, in November, with every American product you can imagine.
The biggest challenge, however, was the turkey. Yes they had turkey in those days. In fact, turkey was a major staple.
However, a whole turkey for roasting was unheard of. Ground turkey, fine. Turkey parts, OK. But a whole turkey? Never.
I actually convinced my local grocery to get one for me, ordering a very long time in advance. It came frozen and stretched out, as it had been hanging by the legs. A huge, raw, pink, naked bird which probably stood several feet high, stretched out with its wings on top and feet at the bottom.
Since it was frozen that way, it wouldn’t fold back up in the neat form that we’re accustomed to seeing in roast turkeys. No manner of turkey wresting would fold it back to a shape that would fit in the oven.
Based on Sukkot
Finally I had to tie it together, though not with thin twine the way we might truss a turkey in America, but with industrial strength rope, knotted securely in several places.
Even then, we had to roast the turkey with the oven door open, since it was too big for the oven. Oh, those were the days!
So why is Thanksgiving so important to us as American Jews? All of us know the answer to the question.
We are American. We are Jews. Thanksgiving seems to represent to us the confluence of these two parts of our identities. In my family, scattered as it is around the country, the one time we all get together is not Passover or Rosh HaShanah, but Thanksgiving.
Very few of us, however, know that Thanksgiving is actually based on the biblical holiday of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles.
The early Pilgrims identified with the ancient Israelites. They had escaped an evil pharaoh (the King of England), miraculously crossed a new Red Sea (the Atlantic Ocean), and come to the Promised Land (the New World).
The Puritan leaders of the new colonies so identified with the ancient Hebrew that many of them took on Hebrew names. Increase Mather, the pastor of the Old North Church in Boston was named “Increase” which is a direct translation of the name Yosef (Joseph), which means “God will increase.” The official shield of Yale University, which had its origins in Puritan days, has Hebrew on it.
Benjamin Franklin, expressing his post-revolutionary disdain for the King of England and the “King’s English,” even suggested that Hebrew, not English, be made the official language of the new “United States of America.”
How appropriate, then, when at the end of the last harvest of their first year, when the Pilgrims wanted to express their thanksgiving for the bounty of the land, they chose the biblical autumn festival of thanksgiving, Sukkot, as the model of their holiday.
Even at the beginning, the absolutely American holiday of Thanksgiving had Jewish connections. It continues to be a powerful holiday for American Jews who want to express their American identities.
Jody Hirsh is Judaic education director at the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
GOP should keep fighting for Jewish votes
By Jonathan S. Tobin
The pundits and newsiest who peddle post-election analyses generally run in packs. Once a catch phrase is put about as the conventional wisdom of the day on any issue, most members of the chattering class of scribes quickly latch on to it.
This year the theme most writers seemed to pick up on was a shift to the center.
Democrats won independent voters over with candidates who couldn’t be pigeonholed as liberals.
So centrism — rather than an anti-Iraq war trend — has been anointed as the trend by which we ought to remember 2006.
But even if we assume that it’s true — and there are good reasons to believe that the fear of being labeled an extremist will play a role in much of what happens in the next two years — there is one slice of the political demographic to which it cannot be said to apply: American Jews.
In national exit polls, American Jews gave African-Americans a close run for the title of the most one-sided sector of American politician life.
According to the poll conducted by the National Election Pool and published in The New York Times on Nov. 9, Jews gave 88 percent of their votes in congressional races to Democrats. African-Americans topped that total by just 1 percentage point.
So despite a concerted campaign by Republicans to showcase the president’s support for Israel and the prominence of some anti-Israel elements within the Democratic Party, nothing has changed.
Democrats can crow that exit polls show that, if anything, Jewish support for Republicans declined this year from 2004, when President Bush got nearly a quarter of Jewish votes.
Liberal agenda
Most American Jews are still likely to see Judaism as more or less synonymous with a vision of social justice that vaguely resembles the liberal political agenda.
Conservatives may argue that this is a slanted interpretation of Jewish teachings, but it is the way most Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews see their religion.
Jokesters can dismiss this as liberal Jews interpreting their faith as being the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in. But there’s no use denying that this is how many of us see the world.
Many Jews, especially the elderly, also tend to see through the prism of their youth, when Republicans were viewed as a country-club party that tolerated anti-Semitism.
Republicans can argue that this is not a rational way to look at Jewish interests today, but so what? That American Jewry remains a bastion of liberalism is a fact that must be acknowledged.
That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss the Republican effort as completely futile.
The 88 percent is a national figure that includes many congressional races that were not competitive. Indeed, the largest concentrations of Jewish life tend to exist in urban “blue” areas where Republicans provide a serious challenge.
In those places where Jews form a significant slice of the population — and where the GOP did put up a fight — Republicans did tend to do better than that abysmal 12 percent figure produced by the national exit poll, but not by much.
The Republican Jewish Coalition conducted its own poll of Jewish voters in New Jersey (where Republican Tom Kean fell short in his effort to topple Sen. Robert Menendez), Florida’s 22nd Congressional District (where Jewish Democrat Ron Klein unseated Republican incumbent Clay Shaw) and Pennsylvania’s 6th District (where incumbent Republican Jim Gerlach beat the national trend and won re-election over Democrat Lois Murphy).
The Jewish vote in these races wasn’t encouraging for Republicans. Even in just these competitive districts, the average Jewish total for Republicans was just 26.4 percent.
But the survey did show, as previous polls have tended to illustrate, that the younger the Jewish voter, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican. The same factor applies to synagogue attendance.
If Giuliani runs
Those figures probably leave Republicans just enough hope to encourage them to keep fighting for more Jewish votes in the future.
Let’s hope they do. The worst thing that could happen to Jewish interests would be if Democrats come to treat them with the same indifference and contempt that they often dish out to loyal African-Americans.
While they may not have garnered for the GOP the Jewish votes they hoped to win, the RJC ad blitz on the Israel issue did force the Democrats to play defense in the waning weeks of the campaign.
Cynics can dismiss some pre-election pledges on Israel as pandering, but that’s the way democracy is supposed to work.
But if there is anything that might aid Republicans in their quest for a more respectable share of the Jewish vote, it is that national trend toward moderation.
Contrary to the idea that the key to gaining control of each party is for candidates to veer hard to the left or right, polls are consistently showing that presidential aspirants who hew to the center are the most likely nominees in 2008.
Right now, the most popular Republican in the country seems to be ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who’s been the candidate of choice for almost half of all Republicans polled.
Some still refuse to believe that GOP primary voters will ever back a man who favors abortion rights, gay rights and gun control. But if he runs, the security-minded Giuliani will be a formidable match for any darling of the Christian right.
Guiliani’s identification with pro-Israel sentiments, as well as his moderate stands on social issues, would challenge the Democrats and might even dwarf the record Jewish vote for Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Thus, even amid the rubble of a smashing Democratic victory, and a humiliating outcome for Jewish GOP stalwarts, the seeds of a reversal of fortune may have already been planted.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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