An Experiment in Second Person Writing: Notes on a Partial Jewish Identity

Introduction

In this writing, I consider my cognitive dissonance in what I call here my partial Jewish identity, as well as the pulls toward making a final identification and the pushes against it, through narratives I write in the second person. Postmodernism concerns, among other things, the contemporary fragmentation of racial and ethnic identities through essentialism and anti-essentialism (Stubblefield, 1995), globalization (Dervin & Machart, 2015), mobilities (Urry, 2007), and mass media effects (Gergen, 2000). Within this context I write, in a style unique to sociology, this personal and political exploration of my experience as a self-and other-identified partial Jew.

What, though, is a partial Jew? I consider here how categorical schemes are made and re-made through what Foucault called “blank spaces” (Foucault, 1994), discourses, politics, and the practices of everyday life. Foucault saw blank spaces as the in-between creating and validating the categorical scheme itself, the hidden and sometimes revealed mental constructs that have real-world implications and effects. Interstitial social identities are key to understanding the development of social categories as social constructions, through potentially emergent categories that might serve to deconstruct a categorization scheme (Zerubavel, 1991). Social categories contain, delineate, and construct the Other and the Self—who I am and who you are. They create statuses that are always already relational. The deployment of social categories and social identities involve emotions, behaviors, and cognition, a full human sense of what constitutes reality. Such categories and identities are malleable, fragmentary, contextually and abstractly based. I cannot see another’s thoughts, and am left wondering, “What do they think of me? How do I size up? Where do I stand with this person, now and in the past and in the future? Who are they to me?”

Categories, in this case linked to social identities, are tools for getting a social fix on someone. Daniel Kahneman (2013) indicates humans rely on mental categories in fast thinking, or what Kahneman calls System 1 thought, in trying to get a quick understanding of the world around us. System 1 thought is easy, unreflective, primal, and prone to stereotyping. It is rooted in the amygdala, in evolutionary needs of humans to quickly make sense of dangerous environments: “Can this eat me, or can I eat it?” System 2 thinking, rooted in the prefrontal cortex, takes work, concentration. It is rooted in logic, problem solving, rational and critical thinking, and in deconstructing assumptions.

Unlike Kahneman’s associations of stereotyping with System 1 thought, I wonder if being or identifying as a partial Jew possibly involves both automatic, fast thinking, and System 2 thought, which is rational, slow thinking, of assumptions quickly framed and subtly re-framed. Here I explore that dialectic, of a Jewish identity imposed on or claimed by others, the near-simultaneous invalidation of that identity, and the creation of a new identity that those in and outside of it further scrutinize. Here I interrogate a category marginally marginalized, or a marginal marginality. A partial Jew could be seen as playacting, posing, inauthentic, but also seen as potentially rooted in an authentic, essentialist, undeniable Jewish background, and through such an identification, an identity emerges in earnest.

I explore this identity through writing in the second person, a style I hope helps draw the reader into a unique way of thinking through “identity work” (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003). Here, I take a stylistic cue from Claudia Rankine (2014) and her book Citizen: An American Portrait. Rankine combines vividly described instances, presumably from her own life, of seemingly inadvertent, and at times overt, racial denigration. She also uses texts about racism today, and draws from current events to show the lived experience (personal, professional, and social) that African Americans have of contemporary prejudice and discrimination (her book is categorized by her publisher as “Poetry/Essays”). Her work inspired me to consider an identity that I, until I began writing the material here, had not scrutinized myself as having. It has been revelatory to me to explore my thoughts about my partial Jewish identity I have had for decades but, until recently, could not articulate.

In specific, I adopt Rankine’s stylistic use of “you” instead of “I,” which she uses to denote the subject when she describes events and scenes. Most English speakers have been taught to write in the first person and to be comfortable using the third person; the second person is not often employed. Consider the following passage by Rankine (2014), a single page in her book:

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. Her mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle. (p. 12)

Rankine’s use of “you” forces me to slow down, to re-read the passage, and to consider a few times what it means.

Rankine’s use of “you” as the sentence’s subject in giving an account is a style of presentation that, as a sociologist, I have never considered trying. Rankine’s intent could, on some level, promote ambiguity. Her reader is placed in the position of the person experiencing the story, the event. That heightens the reader’s identification with the experience, but also as I read these accounts the “you” feels foreign, like a question: “Can you relate to these events? Can you understand how I might have felt in this situation? Does this require any further elaboration, or explanation?” The “I” in the above-cited passage is in fact the Other, the daughter and the mother, both of whom are presumably members of the dominant racial group. The “I” is the daughter who doesn’t want to sit next to Rankine, and the mother who ultimately must.

Rankine’s use of you, though, might be considered heresy in sociology because it brings into question whether she is describing actual, “real” experiences, and whether these are indeed her accounts. Are these authentic, or imaginative? Though there is no explicit statement in her book about her having had these experiences, I imagine they are drawn from her life and/or people she knows. Her use of “you” also reminded me of long-standing debates in ethnography (and autoethnography) concerning whether or not such writing is fiction (Clifford, 1986; Geertz, 1988). Primary issues in those debates concern the role of authorship in any account, as well as how language captures and also cannot possibly capture subject positions, experience, and Reality.

The use of “you” can also assume a universalized experience that everyone, naturally, shares, or what the experience is fairly obviously like for all having (or who had, or who are going to have) it. If someone asks, “What was it like to lose a child?” and a respondent says, “You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself,” the response seems like an explanation of a common feeling. At the same time, though, the use of “you” distances a speaker from an experience. A person traumatized by an event, such as in the abovementioned example, could use “you” to avoid feelings too awful to be re-lived. “You” turns the person who had the experience into someone else, in a rhetorical technique that could be described positively (as a coping strategy), or negatively (as dissociation).

Passages throughout Rankine’s work cause me to look at her writing as a rhetorical mirror. This style of writing might represent a new tool for creating Mills’ (1959) sociological imagination and/or Mead’s (1934) “I/me dialogue,” as well as interrogating their limits. Social identities and demographic categorizations today are sometimes discussed as a two-way street: Categorizations in the traditional past were largely imposed from outside, and the individual so categorized was labeled and strongly encouraged to accept that label as Reality. Today, Western individuals are encouraged to choose among several and multiple racial, ethnic, and other social/demographic categories, encouraged even by dominant social institutions such as the U.S. Census Bureau, which in 1990 began allowing individuals completing census forms to choose multiple racial and/or ethnic statuses (Thompson & Hickey, 2011). Though there seems more fluidity today regarding how an individual chooses to identify himself or herself through various social and demographic categories, there is also pushback: various social groups now also appeal to essentialism when enforcing labels in deciding racial, ethnic, or other social categorical boundaries. An excellent recent example of social groups negotiating essentialism and social constructivism in identities was the debate among radical feminists in 2014 about whether or not transsexuals identifying as women should be allowed to use women’s restrooms at a conference (Goldberg, 2014).

Ambiguities in writing seem inherently provocative, presenting a rich style and method for exploring complexities of content through complexities of form. In writing accounts using “you,” who is doing what to whom? Who are you, and who am I, literally(?), in Rankine’s accounts (p. 63)? Who is labeling, stereotyping, discriminating, and who is targeted? What can you understand in, and about, this situation? Even the title of the book, Citizen, raises the questions, “Are all the people in the book U.S. citizens in the same ways? Are all Americans endowed with inalienable rights, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

My writing here, then, involves two experiments. The first is considering the social category of partial Jew as real and imagined, as identifiable and a joke, as authentic and dismissed, simultaneously. The second is an experiment with style of presentation à la Rankine. By employing and playing with the subject as “you” (and through my also using her lack of quotation marks when people speak), I hope this writing might create empathy, self-reflection, confusion, discomfort, rejection, and/or a questioning of one’s identity in relation to others. In particular, the use of “you” then brings to life Foucault’s blank space, and what might reside there.

Identifying the Past

Your father’s father was Jewish and your father’s mother was Catholic. Both were born in the mid-1800s. Granddad was born in Danzig, Poland. He was held in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938 for over a week after Kristallnacht. Grandmom died of natural causes prior to the war. Before the war, granddad and your step-grandmother managed to emigrate from Germany to Holland, where they survived.

Your father was born in 1920. Soon after his internment in Buchenwald, granddad got your father on a train out of Germany. Your dad survived the Holocaust by immigrating to Italy. He was held in an Italian concentration camp, Camp Ferramonti, late in the war. He escaped that too. When the war ended, dad was held in a Displaced Persons camp in Italy from 1945 to 1951, when he immigrated to the United States. He remarried your mother, a Catholic. You, their son, were born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1968. Your father passed away in 1988.

After dad died, you find his identification documents from the pre-war and war period. His religious and ethnic identity was sometimes listed as “Catholic,” sometimes as “Jew.” He had a Jewish father. You try to decipher German documents indicating he was baptized Catholic, documents with Nazi-era stamps featuring an eagle atop a swastika. Was he Jewish? Was this conversion under duress? Orthodox Jews, and many other Jews around the world, believe that a child can only be Jewish through being born to a Jewish mother (Neusner, 1988).

Growing up, you hear him occasionally refer to himself as half Jewish.

Is that an identity?

Identities on your father’s various cards, from the Red Cross and from Nazi documents, reveal a tension millions of people felt in Europe especially between 1933 and 1945. How are you identified by the state? How do you want to present your identity within a racist context? How might you try to “pass” as a non-Jew? How did virtually any link, cultural or biological, to Judaism you experienced from 1933 to 1945 in Europe, mean you would likely suffer persecution and, potentially, death? And might that potential alone sear a sense of identification with Jewish-ness for you, and for your offspring, long after the threat of murder has ended?

You are a kid, sitting in his store. He tells you that before emigrating from Germany, he daily fought kids who called him a dirty Jew. One time he uses the phrase Jew him down, after successfully negotiating with someone. But you’re old now and forgetting, or confused. How did he look when he said those things? Did you understand irony then? Did he say Jew him down with a tight-lipped smile? Did he see it as anti-Semitic, or as a point of pride that he came from people characterized as good businessmen? Was it a slur rooted in a positive kernel of truth?

He seldom identifies as Jewish in public. He had been an altar boy in Catholic churches. But was the conversion simply instrumental, something his parents did to avoid his persecution? He always calls himself an atheist. He said the Holocaust proved God did not exist.

You heard that, after his brain tumor was discovered, he prayed with a local minister who had been arguing with him for years about the existence of God. Were those prayers also instrumental, a last ditch effort at covering all his bases, an embodiment of Pascal’s wager at the end of his life?

Who was your father?

In your teens, he took you to temple one night. Once. You can’t remember why. Perhaps to show you his heritage. Or was it because someone invited him and you happened to be in the store that night before he drove home?

Your mom could be called a lapsed Catholic, of English and Irish descent. You feel virtually no sense of identification with that heritage, that background. You sit in dad’s store, listening to his friend with the numbers tattooed on his arm. He shared something with them. Did he? Could you too? Do you latch onto this? Do you (want to) see yourself as a descendant of an historical underdog, as someone righteously wronged, as someone who ought to be on guard for slights? Is this why you feel visibly different from your classmates?

Your father. The 6′2″ German man with gray, slicked-back hair, brown pants, black boots, the thick foreign accent. Exercising daily. Wearing a large black winter coat most of the school year. You are embarrassed when so many classmates ask, Is that your grandfather? That thick accent in a booming voice, probably from his loss of hearing during the war. He was likable. You focused on his quirkiness, his dissimilarities from others. How many kids of immigrants go through this self-conscious rite of passage, hyper aware of your foreign-seeming parent?

You were given the names of your grandfather and a granduncle, clearly European, completely unique names among your friends. You don’t think of your names as American. You are envious of the kids, plural, named John in your class. You want to be John. John is normal, fits in, accepted. One day John tells you, look up there, pointing. John kicks you in testicles. You lie on the ground; John walks away, friends laughing. You hate John, but you want to be John’s friend. You are never John’s friend.

Your dad is an outsider. Are you? How so? How do you become an outsider?

Outside of what?

You think being born to someone who could be called a Holocaust survivor grants you something, a special label you learn is a “second generation” survivor (Berger, 2001; Gottschalk, 2003). The label provides you a status, a justification for your anxieties and doubts, something you might blame for whatever you can’t do or eventually be. You also better succeed because others never had the chance you’re getting. He never stops telling you. You get to eat good meals, every day. You get to go to school. You get to sleep in a warm bed. You should appreciate this.

You overcame something because he overcame something, but at a steep cost. But what have you survived exactly? Having to feel a lingering sense of guilt about being born when so many others with a similar heritage perished, like how Art Spiegelman (1996) describes his relationship to his father in Maus? Are you a survivor of your experience of his experience, of him?

Have you inherited his stinginess? His hook nose? His partial Judaism? Have you inherited that blend of biological and cultural traits always convoluted by bigots? Have you inherited cognitive dissonance, a fragmented identity, and, potentially, a self-hatred?

Biology and Destiny

You get a personal DNA test through the company 23andme. You spit in a tube until your saliva reaches the tube’s line. You place it in the mail. The results are not scientifically debatable. One quarter of your DNA comes from Ashkenazi Jews. Your dad was exactly right about being half Jewish. And perversely, Hitler (1998) was not completely wrong—Jewish identity is, in part, biologically rooted. Jews might convert to another religion, or not identify as Jewish, but their biological markers connect them back in some ways to Judaism, to a religious category of people.

Scientific indicators, DNA indicators, empirically grounded, not emotionally or culturally. Your genetics define you. Mark you. Betray you.

Recent research indicates the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors is passed on to their children’s genes (Thompson, 2015). You are a mutation of your father. Of your father’s experiences. Of persecution. Add it to your biological indicators, your ethnic-looking nose (aren’t all noses ethnic), close-set eyes, wavy hair, sharp facial features, and a circumcision (unrelated to religion). But do people around you even know, or understand, these indicators? You make choices about revealing your history, your family background, and your genetics, to others. In everyday life, most of this never comes up. It’s there, dormant, possible, hidden in plain sight. One more element of your impression management (Goffman, 1959).

Context of Identity

You are nineteen, traveling in Europe for two months. You can’t speak a single romance language. Lonely and tired, you meet Ron, a Swiss backpacker and devout Christian. He speaks English. You become friends, travel together, sharing pensions and food to save money. His presence assuages you. After a week, Ron asks about your ethnicity. You tell him German, Irish, Jewish. Jewish, he says. Yes, he smiles. I see it now.

In Europe, you become an entirely different person.

You look into, and learn, about discourses concerning ethnicities in the United States, ideas about Eastern Europeans eventually passing as White. Sometimes.

Jewish people are stereotyped as good with money, overly literate, cosmopolitan. But for racists, Jews simultaneously embody opposing qualities. Hitler masterfully blended antithetical characteristics in stereotyping Jews: They are cunning and stupid, physically identifiable yet able to blend in, relentlessly religious and immoral, a dirty and pure race (Browning, 2004; Hitler, 1998). Such nonsense, though, drives all racism. Reference to the rule must explain exceptions. The protean Jew becomes a perfect scapegoat for all the ills of Modernity, for the transition away from the traditional era that likely terrified the average European (Bauman, 1991). The Jew was to blame, the scapegoat, the one who unfairly took advantage of the situation to dominate. But in the United States, other minority groups, particularly some Asian ethnicities, have long been considered “model minorities” (Chou & Feagan, 2014). Could this characterization/caricature, in some ways, also apply to Jews as well? Your team includes Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Marx, Zukerberg, innumerable cultural heroes, and influential figures. But many of those are or were not Orthodox Jews. They were/are partial Jews. Were they, are they, partial Jews?

Are you a product, or a symptom? Does the continued fragmentation of racial, sexual, sex and gender, and ethnic identities, among many other potential demographic characteristics, mark you, or mark the new, postmodern era? Contemporary life has been characterized as “post-racial” (Carbado & Gulati, 2015; Poussaint, 2014; Wise, 2010), promoting cyborgs (Haraway, 1990), and giving rise to the concept of cisgender (Erickson-Schroth, 2014).

What could you be?

Professional Identity

You teach sociology in a midsize, Midwestern public university. Students have varied levels of college preparedness. Most lack a prolonged exposure to culture outside of the state. Eighty-plus percent of your upper division students have not been abroad. You are surprised, at first, at how few have visited other states.

Diversity, though, has increased in your eighteen years of teaching. You’ve seen a threefold increase in students self-identifying as having two or more races within the past five years, and a threefold increase in Hispanic students in attendance within a ten-year period. Still small numbers, though, in an overwhelmingly White, Nebraska-born-and-raised environment.

You are in your first year of teaching. A twenty-eight-year-old student in an all-White introductory course asks why she can’t call a Black student the N-word as they use it to refer to each other. No one blinks. You decide you must become an advocate of empathetic imagination, raising critical questions. What exactly is a minority group, and how is that defined not by the size of the group, but by their power? How do people with less power feel in different situations? How do people with greater privilege come to take their privilege for granted?

You find it hard to communicate to some how they are privileged, how structural racism, sexism, and homophobia work, and why such things should concern them. One student says, this doesn’t affect me. You face him three times a week. Others in the class support him. You wonder, in this context, is he right? Are you crazy?

You debate how much you should reveal and conceal about your personal background in your classes. In your Holocaust course, you have more students whose extended family includes Holocaust perpetrators than Holocaust victims (see Steinweis, 1999 for further examples of this pattern). Many students in your Holocaust course tell you they do not know any Jewish people. You teach for over ten years before one student self-identifies as Jewish. In private.

You debate coming out to your students. You are the son of a survivor. But this isn’t relevant to Holocaust content. It’s personal. And minority groups are called minority groups, you remember, because they suffer.

You meet a lay rabbi in town. As a woman, Orthodox Jews would not recognize her as a rabbi. You join her small group of locals who are, as she puts it, exploring Judaism. You attend Shabbat on Friday nights, practicing Hebrew, reciting prayers, having wine and braided bread and kosher food with a small group. A man from Ecuador has distant relatives who were Jewish. His kids, and sometimes his Catholic wife, also attend. You meet a lifelong Nebraskan who recently learned he also has distant family ties to Judaism. He is eager to embrace Judaism, willing to make the two-hundred-sixty-mile round trip regularly to the nearest big city with a synagogue, undergoing conversion over a year with a rabbi.

The man brings his adopted son, who has no biological ties to Judaism, to Shabbat. His son regularly beats you at recognizing the Hebrew letters and words on the flash cards. You go home. You sometimes feel good. You sometimes wonder what you are doing.

Your rabbi says what she is doing is a Mitzvah, a good deed. She is intensely spiritual and knowledgeable about the Torah. She writes a weekly newsletter to your group with selections from the Torah, announcements, and information about meetings. But Orthodox Jews require that there be ten Jewish males present for prayers to be recognized by God. Does God recognize your group? There are differences of opinion, even within Judaism, as to who counts as Jewish (Neusner, 1988). An eternal paradox—How do believers cope with a lack of certainty?

Attendance at Shabbat is inconsistent. People have other commitments, school activities, or visits from extended family. Some nights it’s just you and her. And after a long week, your middle-aged brain doesn’t want to struggle with practicing Hebrew. You forgo the flash cards. You say prayers, slowly, enunciating. You eat.

You decide one year to come out to your class on the Holocaust, at the final course meeting. You show them the letter your father wrote from Italy, asking for a sponsor in Alaska, someone to help him and his first family immigrate. It is well written, published in a local newspaper, convincing enough to change his life, to have made your life in this democratic, tolerant, and wealthy country, possible. You note that although he mentions concentration camps and persecution, the words Jewish or Jew are not to be found. Impression management. You and dad, claiming a narrative. Highlighting. Omitting. Choosing.

Some students in your class are drawn to the letter. You imagine they now see your teaching a course on the Holocaust as bringing your family story full circle. Two women, though, make tight-lipped smiles. You’ve had clashes with them all semester.

Do they now think the class was rooted in your personal agenda, that you the Jew want to be all-powerful again, pushing an underdog narrative to gain sympathy for himself and his people? Has this whole semester been just another Jew whining about the Holocaust? You can’t control their reactions.

Such reactions, yours and theirs, are, in a sense, why you teach the course in the first place.

Teaching About Hate, Teaching Hate, Teaching, Hating

You show the film Architecture of doom (Cohen, 1991) early in your Holocaust class. Through it you are teaching them easy, prejudicial associations, stereotypes, which they did not know before your class. You feel conflicted, teaching someone prejudicial associations while saying they are wrong, hurtful, now so obviously stupid. You focus on the easy, knee-jerk, hurtful associations, ones they didn’t even know, before showing them the thoughtful, logical, slower (Kahneman, 2013) way to think of this. Your students, you think, have to learn these associations to understand the mechanisms of the Holocaust. Why did people believe such strange things, a student asks. That Jews used the blood of Christian children to make Passover bread. The associations work, you say, because of the idea that Jews kept separate from other communities, leading others to grow suspicious of them. Christian children would sometimes disappear, and Jews were easy to blame.

You want to develop their ability to see through the stereotypes rooted in the sensemaking of those determined to vilify Jews, while arguing that they are caricature representations with little basis in reality. You are working on developing their slow, System 2 thinking. But you do it by first showing them the fast, System 1 thinking of the past, teaching them the prejudicial associations. You think about Merton’s (1936) unintended consequences. By teaching about this history, you are keeping it alive.

Years later, you realize you should start courses by introducing Jewish people as simply people, a people and culture that are human. People with families. With faith. With hopes and dreams. Who laugh and love and cry and don’t understand and keep going. You should have started with this, not with the prejudicial characterizations first. You started with the Nazi perspective. You see late you have failed years of students.

But maybe not failed entirely. You are also teaching social psychology, particularly that hate does not have to be a precondition of genocide. You teach Christopher Browning’s (1998) book Ordinary men. He argues that even those face-to-face killers who did not feel anti-Semitism did, through repeated face-to-face killing, grow to despise and dehumanize their victims. It’s cognitive dissonance—faced with a conflict between our behavior and our thinking, we grow uncomfortable and we want a resolution. In the end, it becomes easier sometimes to change our thinking than to change our behavior. According to Browning, the frontline killers, through repeated actions, moved increasingly into the category of true believers, of ideologically driven Nazis. You think about Pavlov and Skinner, and about how people come to associate things through repeated pairings and conditioning. You think about priming, that culture is all about priming, priming that people don’t see as priming.

Mid-career, you think the Holocaust is a cornerstone for what you most want to teach others. To paraphrase Browning, the Holocaust represents a watershed moment in history, where the full resources of a state were devoted to killing every last member of a category of people. Knowing the progression and dynamics of that event, and appreciating the complexity of it, helps all of us better understand why minority group members must be valued, why democracy is fragile and requiring constant support, and how capable we are of harming each other.

Some days you feel like you get paid not for what you do as much as for who you are and what you have done. You’re paid as someone well trained with particular skills, someone who has been deemed necessary in this under-populated geographic area where citizens of the state want their kids to get a postsecondary education, but one not too far from home. You are someone outside the surrounding culture introducing a cosmopolitan worldview. Maybe their parents want their kids, now legally adults, to have that, and maybe they don’t. But those young adults get to choose. You are paid to teach them about things you love to discuss. But your personal cost is living in what you sometimes think is cultural and geographic exile, in what your academic friends call the flyover zone. At times, you aren’t even sure what you’re teaching.

A student in your Holocaust class wants to do her final paper on the abortion holocaust. You spend hours thinking about how you could gently dissuade her, and if that might, somehow, land you in trouble over a student’s right to self-expression. Hours wondering how you failed her. How you failed here.

Fragmentations of Faith Without Us

You are in Israel, touring with other Holocaust scholars. A man in your group wants to say a prayer for his deceased father at a synagogue, but they need ten Jewish males. You are roped into going. You can’t, though, keep up with the Hebrew. You feel inauthentic. You are concerned midway through that you shouldn’t be there, that you don’t want to ruin the authenticity of the ceremony for such a devout man. At one point you whisper to the tour leader, an eighty-year-old Auschwitz survivor, you are not Jewish.

He looks you in the eye and says, you are now.

*  *  *

You are in Manhattan, attending a seminar on the Holocaust. You and the participants attend a Shabbat service. You have trouble following. You feel self-conscious, judged. It’s a religious space. Why do you feel judged? Isn’t religion about tolerance? Or intolerance? What is not to be tolerated? Why can’t you stop reflecting about your failed religiosity? Is it the missing piece, the root of all your failed relationships? You, an impostor, someone here but not belonging. Why are you here? What is supposed to happen to you now, in this space? Why do you start crying? Is it the music? Is it envy toward the faithful, the ones who know the songs?

Your growing environmentalism stokes your intolerance of religious righteousness. What is a special relationship to God? An immortality? Who first thought of infiniteness? Was it the man who invented plastic? Who first burned coal? The men who thought they could improve upon nature? That they were better than green grass, blue skies, and birds? The hubris of our thinking, of our endless thinking, killing us. That will kill us. Losing species every day, of birds, fish, trees, plants, insects (Kolbert, 2015). What will people do? How will we live then? Will faith save you from global warming, a hell we have created on earth, created to burn our offspring? A burnt offering? We, the victims. We, the perpetrators. We, the bystanders.

You without offspring, without faith. You stumble and mumble through prayers. The rituals now happening all around us, step by step, until we are people no more. In the beginning was the word. And in the end there will be texts. Texts and commentary. The word. Words without readers. Words that will burn, will disappear. Words now fire. Ashes. Ashes.

You want to disappear, and in an hour, you will. We will. We will be ashes, stampeded by cockroaches and rats. Engorged rats, on islands without predators (Weisman, 2008). The rats we carried, by ship, everywhere. Megarats, overrunning the land, the last predators. The rats and cockroaches, the top of the food chain, enormous, like dinosaurs.

The rabbi directing the rituals. Rituals. Forever. Forgetting we created them. Forever. Forgetting. Creation. Our creation. Our thoughtless harm through thought. Our wealth of death. My lovely shirt of microfibers. Our microfibers now flowing in streams. The fish now wearing microfibers inside themselves. The latest fish fashion. The detergent, cleaning our insides, clearing space for cancer, cancer that will clear up the cancer that is us. Destruction as cleaning, destruction as a form of beauty, as the wave of the future. Environmental destruction as cleansing, ethnic cleansing, the ethics of cleansing. A blinding destruction, destruction through blindness, as blinding as a nuclear bomb. A blast. A shadow burned into the ground. A shadow of someone falling from a rooftop, a shadow through a window that you mistook for a bird. A bird that flies, a cry from a power line, but that isn’t there. Something you completely misunderstood.

Can you picture it? The art on the walls of the synagogue. Pictures of a life and a time, those inventions that hold it together against forgetting. Pictures of the Holocaust, the vision of visions, the black and white of history, of permanence. What you can’t see, what others saw. The blankness if that photograph fades, will fade. Continuing in your mind, distorting, the contours changing shape, fading into a Rorschach test. What do you see when you look at a pile of dead bodies in striped pajamas? Yourself? The future? A fish crawling onto a rock? The uniqueness of an individual life? What did dad see? Granddad? The waiting for the creation of a place no one thought could possibly exist? Where you saw each other naked, naked to the core, so naked you were invisible, to your captors, to others, to yourself? The invisible man, the person who matters but doesn’t, there but not there, real but not real, human, but not? Who can see in the world but not act in it? A you who realizes, who will realize, what you could have been?

You will have no children. You will not beget.

They will not hear these songs. They will not pray. They will not face east. Face all that is left.

Coda

While the material is real, the sections you have created here are, of course, constructed and artificial. Your family background, your identities, your personal and professional life, are intertwined. Dividing them allows you moments of linear, analytic thought, then fractured by fragments of moments of reflections, memories, or triggers. System 1 and System 2 thinking. Fast and slow (Kahneman, 2013).

You aren’t convinced, at the end of your writing, that your experiment worked. Have you failed? Is the failure worth something? Does it have value? And who gets to decide?

The term microaggressions (Sue, 2010) came into favor long since you finished graduate school. Microaggressions are not cross burning, blatant sexism, or overt homophobia. Not overt aggression. They are small, everyday minor incidents faced by minority group members, reminding them of their minority group status in subtle, indirect ways. They are behaviors or statements where, if the minority group member takes offense at them, the offended is charged with being too sensitive, in finding offense where none was intended.

Microagressions involve “unwitting racism,” the idea that words, even innocently delivered, can harm. They are, in the eyes of some critics of the term, a “subconscious offense” (Furedi, 2015, n.p.). Furedi (2015) derisively appraises the idea of microaggressions by saying,

All that matters is whether the alleged victim feels that the words disrespected his or her identity. Here, the meaning and status of a statement is defined by the victim. To ignore or question someone’s claim that they have been offended is to indulge in the unforgivable crime of “victim-blaming.” (n.p.)

Though minority group members now commonly reclaim derogatory names or labels for their social category as indicators of pride at a shared oppression (such as with gay people and Black people, among other social identities), the term Jew seems resistant to such re-categorization. When used by gentiles, it retains its bite (Ferris, 2014). A term that is so easily associated with all those classically anti-Semitic stereotypes: Jews are cheap, Jews are cunning, Jews keep to themselves, Jews think they are better than everyone else.

Could even the everyday use of the word Jew be a microaggression? You too wonder what counts as a microaggression and how much aggression each contains. How much sensitivity should you feel about what you could interpret as a microaggression? How should you respond: with a microdefense? Should you go nuclear? Or would that backfire, inducing a mutually assured destruction?

Development of the term microaggression suggests that our social life is becoming more complex. Much is in the eye of the beholder, and much is at stake, particularly “regimes of truth” and their foundations in power (Foucault, 1998, p. 63). Who has the right, to free speech? To offend? To feel offended? And then what?

Perhaps microaggressions represent the fragmentation of slights and slurs paralleling the fragmentation of identities, the supposed invisibleness of racism, sexism, homophobia, in an era where identities are themselves contested as inauthentic and simply choices. Perhaps the notion of a partial Jew is then also a symptom, combining and reconfiguring the “blank space” of the partial, the “blank space” of the Jew. The marginal marginality, a double negative. A passive aggressive unintended aggression. A negative negation. Jewish people used to be thought not-quite- or partial-citizens, always loyal to something else besides their home country. Now they aren’t even loyal to themselves. They don’t know who they are. And neither do you.

Is partial always already incomplete? How can you reside in a blank space? Does anyone reside there? Does everyone?