Why I am Not Jewish
but I sometimes strategically claim my Jewish ancestry
Since October 7th, 2023, many people around the world have been engaged in deep processes of learning, uncovering, catching up, and getting a whole lot more real. This essay documents one piece of my learning over the past 22 months.
Race and Rebranding
Even though both of my parents and all of my known ancestors are Jewish by normative standards, I’ve concluded that I am not Jewish.
I recently came to this surprising (to me) clarity by following the history of concepts of Jewishness through a series of miscalculations and suspect prescriptions. These are not simple.
In the late 19th century, the heyday of scientific racism and social Darwinism, early Zionists began to reconceptualize Jews as a monolithic racial group.
The “Jewish race” construct was initially invented and deployed by non-Jewish, European anti-semites to prove Jewish inferiority.
It was later rebranded and redeployed by early Zionists. They used the concept to argue for a Jewish state in Palestine populated by a single race of people returning to the biblical land of Israel.
But the aims of Zionism are more complex than this.
The writings and speeches of early Zionists such as Theodor Herzl and Ze'ev Jabotinsky point toward a central motivation of the Zionist founding fathers: to prove themselves capable of embodying patriarchal colonialist European culture and thereby gain a seat at the table of their oppressors.
This aim was made explicit in so many ways. We can see it, for instance, when Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, helpfully suggested that the new Jewish state would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”1
He implies that Jews could take their place as strong and civilized insiders if they could find new barbarians and offer to defend Europe against them.
Zionist Anti-Jewishness and the Zionist Man
The early Jewish elaborators of Zionism were disgusted by what they perceived as a degraded European Jewish culture and especially, Jewish masculinity.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky was a prominent Russian Zionist leader who met Theodor Herzl and greatly admired him. Herzl held many anti-semitic views, but Jabotinsky literally loathed Jews.
Jabotinsky viewed Jews-as-he-saw-them and Zionism as diametrically opposed. He positioned Euro-American anti-semitism as a legitimate response to the particularly disgusting character of male Jews.
Jabotinsky’s new “Hebrew man” would correct the weaknesses he saw in his own kind. This weakness was embodied in the figure of the Jewish male scholar who wanted, according to Jabotinsky, only to cower in a world of religious observance and books and who had no courage or physical prowess or taste for conquering the world.
This Jewish man could never be the equal of the colonialist conquerers.
Jabotinsky introduced into Zionism and the Jewish state movement what became one of its main motivations: to construct a new Hebrew masculinity.
This is Jabotinsky:
To imagine what a true Hebrew is, to picture his image in our minds, we have no example from which to draw. Instead, we must use the method of ipcha mistavra (Aramaic for deriving something from its opposite): We take as our starting point the Yid (used here as pejorative for Jew) of today, and try to imagine in our minds his exact opposite.
Let us erase from that picture all the personality traits that are so typical of a Yid, and let us insert into it all the desirable traits whose absence is so typical in him. Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks handsomeness.
We shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, stature, massive shoulders, vigorous movements, bright colors, and shades of color.
The Yid is frightened and downtrodden; the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is disgusting to all; the Hebrew should charm all. The Yid has accepted submission; the Hebrew ought to know how to command.
The Yid likes to hide with bated breath from the eyes of strangers; the Hebrew, with brazenness and greatness, should march ahead to the entire world, look them straight and deep in their eyes and hoist them his banner: “I am a Hebrew!”2
Hebrew colonialists
The Jewish man, rebranded as Hebrew superhero, was also explicitly to be a colonizer. In the late 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, “colonialist” was a badge of honor. It denoted the entire package of assumed cultural and racial superiority. Who wouldn’t want to be one, especially if you lived among them as the marginalized and vilified?
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian historian, writes:
The social and economic institutions founded by the early Zionists, which were central to the success of the Zionist project, were also unquestioningly understood by all and described as colonial. The most important of these institutions was the Jewish Colonization Association (in 1924 renamed the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association). This body was originally established by the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and later combined with a similar organization founded by the British peer and financier Lord Edmond de Rothschild. The JCA provided the massive financial support that made possible extensive land purchases and the subsidies that enabled most of the early Zionist colonies in Palestine to survive and thrive before and during the Mandate period.3
From weak, disengaged Jewish scholar to invulnerable warrior colonialist hero. This was, and is, Zionism.
From soul to biology to ???
Not every Jewish person is a Zionist, and an increasing number of Jews, including some orthodox Jewish people, are outspokenly anti-Zionist. All major Jewish sects now reject the notion of a Jewish racial identity.
But within Judaism, questions of the transmittal of Jewishness and Jews as a “people,” continue to be debated.
Jewish rabbinical doctrine during the Roman Empire posited the existence of a soul or essence that included one in the Jewish covenant with God and was transmitted through the mother.
This gift of Jewishness from mother to child has been re-interpreted by some contemporary Rabbis to be a kind of combined biological-mystical essence.4 By others it denotes a collective with shared ancestry, culture, religion, and history. But however it is conceived, the transmittal functions as an involuntary initiation that lives deep within the core of an individual.
The narratives of this transmittal just might be the root source of the confusion among some people of Jewish ancestry, including myself, about the status of our Jewishness even if we have left or have never practiced Judaism.
One can be an ex-Catholic or an ex-spouse, or an ex-dancer, but can you be an ex-Jew or even a non-Jew if your mother was Jewish?
Many orthodox and conservative Jewish sects say no. Jewishness persists even if you have never practiced or have rejected Judaism or have embraced another religion. And even after formal conversion to another religion, traditional Jewish law maintains the person's Jewish status for most legal and communal purposes
In Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, Jewish identity is not indelible, even if one's mother is Jewish
So why am I not Jewish?
As has been widely revealed to millions of people around the world, including many Jewish people, Zionism is a colonialist, racist, and patriarchal political ideology. But many Jewish people, Western politicians, and university leaders conflate Zionism with Judaism to some degree or another.
Along with many others of Jewish ancestry, I reject any formulation of Jewishness that relies on the construction of a Jewish race or Jewish soul or Jewish essence or Jewish biology that can be transmitted through one’s mother. I also reject the notion of a Jewish people or any kind of Jewish exceptionalism.
More recently, I have divested myself of the concept that there is a distinct, unified Jewish culture. In other words, that one can be meaningfully “culturally Jewish.”
Jews come from everywhere on earth and have many different languages, histories, and cultural expressions depending on where they live and where their immediate ancestors have lived.
I’ve come to understand that the cultural Jewishness I identified with as a young person was actually a medley of the cultures of my parents and grandparents who hailed from several specific countries at specific times, not from some global Jewishness.
Even if we look at the question through the lens of epigenetics—the potential for complex patterns of emotions and behaviors from ancestors to express in their descendants—Jewishness is not among them.
We might experience epigenetic traces of trauma or deeply engrained experiences of our specific ancestors that many Jews from some places and times hold in common, but these do not define what Jewishness is in any global or essential sense.
Try as Zionists might to claim that Jews are monolithically indigenous to Palestine and constitute a “people”, this is simply not the case. Jews are many peoples and many ethnicities. The Jewish religion may have originated in Palestine, but Jewish people come from everywhere.5
Non-practicing = Not Jewish
So what is being Jewish?
When we shear off the essentialism, exceptionalism, pseudoscience, colonialism, and racism, Judaism is a religious tradition. To be Jewish is to practice Judaism. This simple calculation is written into the most ancient Jewish law.
I want to pause briefly at this point and say that I’ve dedicated my life since I was in my mid-twenties to practicing in spiritual traditions from North India and Tibet.
Growing up, my family never practiced Judaism other than very tangentially.
My mother was an atheist. My father taught art at a Hebrew high school. He was the most Jewish-identified member of our family.
But he didn’t go to synagogue. He also believed in reincarnation. His Judaism was mixed with his own, homegrown mysticism.
We did not observe the sabbath or any Jewish dietary laws. I did not attend Hebrew school. No children in our family were bar or bat mitzvahed. We only intermittently celebrated Hanukkah and Yom Kippur.
I also was not raised with any education in Zionism or any attachment to Israel. I did not even realize that Israel and Zionism were such anchor points for so many American Jews until October 7, 2023.
But despite all of this, there was some identification with what I then called “cultural Jewishness.” By this I meant certain ways of speaking that included “Jewish” intonations and a degree of playful snark, various foods we enjoyed, a high tolerance for chaotic conversation, the capacity to laugh even in the midst of tragedy, and a good measure of bluntness and inquisitiveness.
I now I realize that these expressions of “Jewishness,” are in fact expressions of particular people from particular places and points in history. They are not universally “Jewish” or immutably Jewish or evidence of a Jewish people, race, or global family.
Here’s what historian Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro has to say about the question of “What is a Jew?”.
There's a story in the Old Testament about God giving the law to Moses and the Jews at Mount Sinai. At that time when the Jews got the law, the law required them to fulfill 613 commandments…
Anybody who is obligated to fulfill those commandments is a Jew. There is no other difference between Jews and non-Jews except for the religious obligations that the Jews are obligated to fulfill.6
Rabbi Shapiro goes on to say that the folks gathered on Mount Sinai were not Jews until they received the law. Without this, there would be no Jews. Accepting the obligation to follow the law makes you a Jew. The end.
613 commandments?
Most of us would surely balk at the idea of following 613 commandments. But it seems obvious that Judaism was inaugurated with a divine instruction to practice Judaism and is actually constituted by that obligation to practice.7
I am just speaking for myself now because Rabbi Shapiro subscribes to something like “inherited obligation.” In other words, he says that if you don’t follow Jewish law, you aren’t Jewish, but you have broken your covenant with God, a covenant given by God at Mount Sinai and passed on to you through your mother.
I’m not sure what obligation is inherited if your mother has also broken her covenant, but whether or not I have broken a covenant, the fact is that I hold some historical and cultural experiences in common with other people in my life who have called themselves Jews, including my immediate ancestors.
But I have no Jewish gene. I have no Jewish soul or Jewish essence. I am not culturally Jewish. I have never practiced Judaism and in fact have dedicated my life to other spiritual traditions.
Initially I found this to be jarring, but I’ve acclimatized to the inevitable conclusion: I am not Jewish.
Deploying Identities
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my mother took me to anti-war protests in Washington, D.C. In her everyday life, she wore rather counter-cultural attire. But when we drove to D.C., my mother would don a conservative string of pearls and “adult” her clothing.
I once asked her why she did this. Her answer: I want them to know it’s not only young people who are protesting.
I don’t think I’ve publicly claimed to be Jewish for several decades, although, until recently, I still identified with a vague and unexamined concept of cultural Jewishness.
October 7th changed that for me. I began to excavate and examine Jewishness in my own psyche and also to read more about Jewish law and history. This essay is an outflow of that study.
It also began to seem important to show up and counter, as a person of Jewish ancestry, dominant Zionist narratives.
I’ve written dozens and dozens of messages to my elected officials since October 7th. In each one, I mention being Jewish or of Jewish ancestry and that I am 68 years old.
Following in my mother’s footsteps, I am doing this as a strategy. Part of the cover story of successive U.S. administrations is that they are defending Jews.
I want to keep reminding them that a broad coalition of people in the world, including Jews, are determined to stop them from aiding and abetting the commission of genocide. If they see me as a Jew by normative calculations, fine. I can use that.
My spiritual traditions teach us not to hold onto anything too tightly, including our identities. This gives us room to play with them, and even play with them for the greater good.
So, for all of the people committing genocide in the name of Jews and Judaism, I am that Jew who will never let you get away with it.
For everyone else, 🤷🏻♀️
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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Rashid Khalid, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (p. 10). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Wikipedia entry: Ze’ev Zabotinsky, retrieved on Sep 5, 2024.
Khalidi, (p. 13).
“Motherhood and Matrilineal Descent,” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Tikvah, Dec 11, 2013, retrieved on Sep 6, 2024.
Some, but not all people of Jewish ancestry can trace their ancestors to Palestine, or in my case, to many different countries in the Middle East. But indigeneity is not about having some distant or distant genetic relationship to a place or to a religious origin story about a place, even a dearly held story.
“The Traumatic and Inconsistent Ideology of Zionism”, a lecture by Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY: Feb 22, 2024, YouTube, retrieved on Sep 5, 2024.
As a long-time spiritual practitioner, I am not dismissive of communications between humans and wiser manifestations of life, including Gods.