Watching the musical Cabaret with the inimitable Marisha Wallace as Sally Bowels and Damon Gould as the Emcee, I was left with lingering ambivalent feelings. Whenever I'm unsure what I feel, I process these feelings in writing, and this time is no different.
I've long had mixed feelings about my Jewish identity. I'm not particularly religious, and being Jewish is complicated, especially being an expat Israeli Jew. Growing up Jewish in Israel means growing up in a dominant culture without even realising it, as the separation is so complete in Israel. Being an immigrant means acknowledging that you are no longer within the dominant culture, which opened the window, for me, to realising that I was a part of the dominant culture growing up. And being Jewish outside of Israel means, invariably, that you can't escape your Jewish identity, hard as you might try.
Growing up in Israel, my Jewish identity was never in question. I didn't really have to think about it. School and work holidays are based on the Jewish calendar. Everyone has a family dinner on Friday night. No one works on Saturday; everyone works on Sunday. There's a tension between orthodox and secular Jews, sure, but I never had to work hard to have a Jewish heritage.
It's different when you live in a country that is predominantly Christian. I quickly realised that switching to celebrating Christian holidays is the easiest thing to do. It's just weird to celebrate New Year in September. We had to choose to celebrate the Jewish holidays. Some years we did, some years we didn't. The change came when the children were born. Suddenly, we had to work hard to ensure they had Jewish heritage.
Having mixed feelings about my Jewish identity has meant that sometimes I push it down. It's what Kenji Yoshino calls covering. I don't keep it a secret, but my English is pretty good, and I mostly don't have to deal with the whole Israeli-Jewish thing when I go to the grocery store, for example. Unlike being a visible minority, I don't have to deal with this identity constantly. And sometimes, like when your home country shows genocidal tendencies, it's so tempting to ignore it, to push it down, to pretend I'm not Jewish.
But every so often, I can't cover it. For example, when I write a book that takes place in Jaffa, in which the Jewish Israeli protagonist discovers her childhood home used to belong to her Palestinian husband's family. Or when I watch the Emcee in Cabaret serenade a performer in a gorilla suit, saying that if we could see her through his eyes, “she wouldn't look Jewish at all.”
The number is meant to be a critique of the Nazi regime; the last line is supposed to shock the audience. And that shock was palpable in the audience I sat with at the Kit Kat Club, a stone's throw from Charing Cross. The line was shocking in the 1960s when the musical debuted, so much so that they had to change it on Broadway (but not in the original London run). The musical was written by two Jewish composers, and New York Jews ran the debut production, so there's no question that at least some Jewish people find the line necessary. I think it meant to mock antisemitism. Even in the 1930s, everyone knew that the Nazi's insistence on “the Jewish look” was not anchored in reality. Many Jewish people passed in Europe during WWII, my grandmother included—it's how she survived.
The gorilla in Cabaret cannot pass. She cannot ignore her Jewish identity like I sometimes do. Watching Cabaret reminded me that being Jewish is part of my identity, in the same that being Israeli is.
In the final scene of the current production, all characters don a beige overcoat and fall in line, telling us that they all enable the Nazi regime. It got me thinking about whether my covering is also a form of enabling. When I conform to the dominant culture's demands, when I don't flaunt my Jewish or Israeli identity, I allow myself some measure of comfort, but I also look away from the reality of rising xenophobia in Western society.
I left the Kit Kat Club that night with no clearer sense of how to reconcile these feelings. But I think perhaps that's the point. The point of art is to put a mirror to our behaviour, which is uncomfortable—it can't be anything else. And maybe this post, what I'm doing here—processing this ambivalence in writing, in public—maybe that's enough for now.
Without a doubt, growing in Israel does not prepare you to live as a Jewish in the diaspora.
Much of the Jewish life is based on the synagogue, on the one hand, and in the Jewish school for the children for the other.
Being a lay and progressive Jew in the diaspora today is not easy.
For me the fundamental thing was to ask myself: what do I say of me when I say that I am a Jew?
In the search for this response I began to study tradition, read the sources that I previously considered religious and that I discovered that they were not, that they were a school of humanistic values, a different way of thinking than…