Assimilation into Whiteness and Jewish Identity

Growing up on Long Island in New York, I became very familiar with the term “Jewish American Princess.”

JAP: a wealthy, bratty young girl who had a Bat Mitzvah party to turn her classmates green and the best camp friends to join. As a Jew on Long Island, I was expected to take on this role.

I certainly did not.

My mother is the first generation American daughter of Israeli immigrants, a Mizrachi father and a Sephardi mother. They named her Orna — light.

My father is the descendant of Polish and Romanian refugees. Those who managed to escape the Iași pogroms, then Nazi genocide, fled to Brooklyn and, naturally, opened kosher delis.

The funny thing is, all my Jewish peers had similar backgrounds of instability. So how would the children of a people who’ve been forever hunted and broken and taken from and given away, now be seen as privileged princesses?

It’s really all too common. Your identity threatens your survival, so surviving means hiding it, sacrificing it.

Losing it.

You become the same as your white peers.

This is assimilation.

Growing up on Long Island, I believed I was just as white as my seventh grade Home Ec teacher, Mrs. Smith. But as much as I believed it to be true, willed it to be true, generations of inherited trauma were still cemented in my genes, to later be revealed as a series of mental illness diagnoses and targeted microaggressions that for too long, I couldn’t even recognize. As much as I tried to convince myself that I was the same as everyone else, they were sure to remind me of how I was different.

Somehow, it was the threat to whatever residual Jewish identity that remained in my chest that encouraged me to hold on to it and let it expand.

As a Jew, I am a contradiction. Our faith, our family, and our culture should never have survived. We should never have survived. But with every match struck to light Shabbat candles, every challah torn, every mezuzah kissed, every t’filin wrapped, we continue to live in firm resiliency.