About not knowing where to start
Since October, I've bitten my tongue raw. It still feels pointless to speak, but impossible not to say something.
I’ve been married to a Jewish man for over 15 years. This isn’t my first otherness rodeo. But it feels different this time. Harder. Sadder.
I wonder how easy it’s been for me to close my eyes for so long. And I feel a bit sick about how much I thought I understood but hadn’t let sink beneath the skin yet.
When we first got together, I remember saying I’d be open to conversion. He seemed grateful; my parents didn’t take it brilliantly but they didn’t take it awfully either. They loved him—so much. My dad said if I converted he might struggle to come to a wedding and see that, because it wouldn’t feel right. But it wouldn’t stop him welcoming the marriage or seeing my husband as family.
Knowing my dad, I actually think he would have come anyway (you’ve never seen a man so excited at being invited to a Seder). In the end it didn’t matter; we married within two years, brutally obsessed with each other, and Ash was the one to tell me not to change. He fell in love with me as I was; slowly, then all at once. We’d work out how to raise kids that were mixed. But I should be me.
There were matters of culture and conscience on my side too (and, to be completely frank, laziness; Jewish conversion is not like any other because it’s naturalisation into a nation, not just a religion, and that’s hard work). But over the years those have become less and less important. And standing with my husband in his Jewishness is more and more so.
He tells me I’ve made him care about it more, not less. That I’ve moved him closer to who he is, not further away from it. I still worry, sometimes, that I’ve diluted his life somehow. He claims the opposite. I’d pull my heart from my chest, put it in his hands and trust him to keep it beating, but sometimes I struggle to believe that. That’s on me, not him.
For the first time since we moved in together in 2007, we don’t have a mezuzah by our front door. He took it down in November, because “our daughter’s bedroom window is by the front door”.
I find that I don’t know how to tell people what they don’t know. I’m hardly the authority on Jewish identity, nationhood, or practice, and I wouldn’t dream of shiksasplaining to anyone with actual Jewish blood—even if they’re not especially connected to it. Neither am I qualified to educate anyone who isn’t part of the group. But the staggering tidal wave of ignorance burns.
Contrary to popular discourse, I don’t believe that staying silent is a bad thing. Not everyone’s voice is needed. But the sadness—and the anger—has been welling up for so long, and I don’t know where else to put it.
At first I could sort of ignore half-baked ideas because the outrage came from a good place: everyone should be moved by suffering, politicians are often arseholes, war is horrific, and no army, anywhere, can be trusted not to do terrible things—because all of them always have. But now I see that what I didn’t quite want to believe, but on some level always knew, is true. It goes deeper: a bone-deep, knee-jerk instinct to assume the worst. Accept the most evil. Drink down every blood libel, shadowy cabal, greedy, grasping trope and vomit up a version of it that claims justice. Not even deliberately, but unthinkingly—which might be worse.
Let’s be clear: I’m not unfollowing people who are critical of state actions (if I did, I’d have to unfollow every Jew as well). Or people who are just hurt by it all and just want it to stop (then I’d have to unfollow myself). And I insist on following people that challenge my views and that I might disagree with—because echo chambers drown out nuance. I have friends who sincerely feel differently than me and we can stay friends because we recognise we’ve both put thought and compassion into our opinions, even if we’ve come to different conclusions.
But some stuff has been quite extraordinarily unhinged. Quite staggeringly hateful. Embarrassingly tokenistic. And quite blithely disseminated without an ounce, a gram, a sprinkle of critical thought.
In Australia, friends post ‘always was, always will be’, and then show a complete and utter ignorance of the roots and indigeneity of pretty much anyone in the SWANA region (but then, there’s no real chance indigenous Australians are ever getting anything back, is there?). In the rest of the world, people can’t seem to co-ordinate on the precise location of “where you came from”—they just agree it couldn’t possibly be the place of historical and genetic record. The mind-melting horrors of those famous death camps are now just a football kicked lazily around with the skill and contextual sophistication of jumpers for goalposts.
We reached into the grave and instead of drawing out Yorick, got Shylock.
I’m not here to present or defend a detailed political position to you; I could, but not only do I not want to, I shouldn’t have to. This isn’t me demanding anything; it’s me expressing pain. It’s me deeply wounded by a reality my closest loved ones have had to live with their whole lives.
I live every day with a man who’s been assaulted in the street before, just for being Jewish. Literally just set upon while walking quietly down the road with some friends, by men who made it very vocally clear why they objected to the group existing. It was before I knew him—20 years ago, because none of this is new—and he had come to terms with it. Almost brushed it off. He was not, he emphatically told me, going to live as a victim, and this was his home. He’s been as close to comfortable in his Jewishness—not Judaism, that’s different; Jewishness, the ethnic, cultural reality that’s unaffected by belief or lack of it—as he could be for the whole time I’ve known him. Until the relentlessness of misinformation, violence, and bad faith that’s hit in the last eight months.
“Is it terrible that sometimes I’m tired of being Jewish?” he asked plaintively the other day. And no, it’s not. But also no, he’s not. He loves being Jewish. I love him being Jewish. What he’s tired of is how hard it is to keep being the byword for survival. It’s a reputation to be proud of. But it’s paid for in scars that never have a chance to fully heal before being slashed back open.
Consider putting down the knife, and using your hands to pick up a book and learn something. Think. Or maybe save your voice for when you actually have some understanding of a situation that’s vastly more layered and complex than an AI-generated bit of performative nonsense.