Outside Jew

When people ask me where I live, I say "South Williamsburg."  Then, inevitably, in an inept and snobbish attempt to distinguish my neighborhood from Fancy Williamsburg, I add: "Where the Jews live."

Then I get even more awkward, usually because of the startled look on my conversation partner's face.  What follows is an increasingly ridiculous and offensive ramble:

"The Hasids!" I blurt.  "I'm Jewish.  Well, half Jewish.  But I live in a super Hasidic neighborhood.  They hate me because I'm the wrong kind of Jew.  But not all Hasids feel like that -- just the Satmar, that's one of the sects, Hasidism has sects.  I mean, sects, like sect.  Not sex.  Anyway, that's the sect that lives in my neighborhood.  And maybe they don't even hate me, I mean, I just feel like they know that I'm Jewish and I have tattoos so that I can't be buried in Jewish cemetery, I guess?  Anyway, those Jews.  I guess I also live where other kinds of Jews live, because I'm Jewish, so wherever I live is where Jews live?  But, um, anyway, HASIDS."

At this point, the person I'm talking to inevitably does one of the following things:

a)  nods slowly with a bemused look on her face and gives me a moment to collect myself,
b)  asks what I mean about the sects,
c)  or makes a vaguely anti-Semitic comment.

It's that last one that haunts me.  Every time I mention the Satmars, I feel as if I'm tacitly welcoming anti-Semitism into the conversation.  I say things about them that generalize in a way that I would never, ever accept in a conversation about any another ethnic group.

Example:  as you may have heard, there was a blizzard in New York on Saturday.  The side streets in South Williamsburg were not plowed until 3:00 a.m. Monday morning.  Sunday was a study in Hasids vs. snow, as minivan after minivan squealed to a halt in the middle of the road, blocking traffic until Hasids and volunteers from the Spanish church across the road combined forces to dig out the stranded vehicles.

Here are ways that I did not tell this story at work the next morning, but wanted to:

"And of COURSE they all have minivans, because they each have a billion children."
"They cannot drive, like, at ALL."
"I hope from now on they're nicer to the people of color in our neighborhood.  They're generally hecka racist."

Why do I think about them this way -- and why do I sometimes slip up and talk about them this way?  Because I'm sort of Jewish, and it seems like I'm "allowed"?  When I'm around other Jews, all I have to do is mention the Satmar and we're instantly on the same page.  There's the same wary thread running through the conversation every time:

1)  These people are crazy, and
2)  They make people anti-Semitic,
3)  Which makes us nervous because people see them and think that that's what a Jew is,
4)  But for real, they're CRAZY, right?
5)  But what can you do?

And that's the thing:  Every now and then, when I say this stuff around non-Jews, the conversation can get anti-Semitic fast.  Then I scramble to distinguish myself from "those" Jews -- I talk about how they wouldn't even accept me as Jewish, how they sort of maybe thought that Hitler was sent from God to punish the Jews for assimilation and Zionism, how they're trying to repopulate the Jewish people after the Holocaust, or how I've heard that the incidence of domestic violence in the community is alarmingly high.  I don't really have sources for these factoids -- I've done my Wikipedia research, read Unorthodox, by Deborah Feldman, and have a friend of a friend who works at a domestic violence hotline, but I wouldn't take any of that evidence to court. 

Still, I assure the people I'm talking to, "they're not normal Jews.  That's not normal."

Therein lies my true hypocrisy:  I'm hardly a "normal" Jew either, if there even is such a thing.  My mother is Jewish, but my father isn't; I grew up in a tiny Ohio town and was raised in a casually agnostic household; I didn't know how to pronounce "Rosh Hashanah" until I was in college.  I've been to a few Passover seders -- and led one, nervously, but at a space-themed evening where everything was covered in tin foil.  I've been to services exactly twice.  I had latkes for the first time when I was in high school.  It would be fair to say that I am neither religiously nor culturally Jewish.

And I have so desperately wanted to be Jewish, all these years; I want the sense of belonging, of history, of flamboyant grit in the face of persecution.  I cling to sayings like "a Jew believes in one or fewer gods," and the stubborn Jewish abhorrence of dogma.  I know a lot about Jewish history; when people ask if I had a specialty in my history major, I tell them that I largely took classes related to "secular Jewish history at the turn of the century," and that leaves out the classes I took on Jewish theology and time I spent studying the Jewish community of Thessaloniki.

I am an outside Jew: that is, both an outsider to the Jewish community and a Jew on the outside, but not the inside.  I'll say, tentatively, to a Jewish friend:  "My grandfather sat down with my mother and told her, 'it doesn't matter if there's a god.  It matters that you live your life in the best possible way, and you should do that without thought of future reward.'  That's kind of a Jewish idea, right?"

Or I'll say, "I've always thought that the ultimate thing Jews believe in is argument -- the importance of argument, I mean.  Do you think... is that what you think?"

If they say yes, I belong.  This is important.

My confused reaction to the Satmar in my neighborhood is largely a result of my own insecurities.  I imagine that they hate me for being "the wrong kind of Jew" because I am desperate for them to recognize me as any kind of Jew.  Simultaneously, I reject them and separate them -- en masse! -- from myself because they live a form of Judaism that makes me not want to be Jewish, and that is a very strange place for my head to be.

I don't know how to reconcile all this, and I don't know how to end this post.  Because even though I know how much all of these feelings stem from me, there's still an angry little voice in my head that says, "but they are usually terrible drivers, and the women have to shave their heads when they get married, which for some reason bothers me in a way that the hijab does not, and most of them won't look me in the eye, like I'm not even a person, and also they are often really really racist."

And those things are true.  But it's not how I want to end.

So maybe I'll leave you with this:

A few months ago, I was walking home from work during a brutal rainstorm.  It was dark out, and I was playing the "don't fall in a puddle" game at which I am so often a failure, as a Satmar father and his daughter walked towards me, heads bent against the wind.  All of a sudden, a gust whipped the girl's pink umbrella out of her hand -- it popped inside out and then flew into the street.  The girl shrieked, and the father ran into the street to fetch the umbrella.  Every time he reached it, the wind blew it just out of his reach until his daughter's screeches had turned from dismay to laughter, and he was laughing also, shouting with triumph as he finally caught the umbrella -- tiny, pink, frilly, ridiculous and precious against his sober black coat -- flipped it so that it was right side out, and returned it to his daughter's joyful hand.