Photoessay #2826 - Intersection/Assimilation

A recent picture of myself at my youngest daughter's 24th birthday celebration at a theme restaurant.  Self-criticism aside, myself in late middle age.  Is that what being 61 is called?

So who is this person?  Is she a Jew no matter what she thinks?  Is it brought down to her no matter what her intention?  Is it something inherited, passed down, not to be denied.  Does this woman 'look jewish?"

She does. 

Must she assume this identity?  Is there any escape?  Not if I was in Europe sixty years ago.  There would be no choice nor escape.  Would I be easy picking for those that were determined to destroy the Jews?

I grew up in a family in the California suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s.  My parents fervently embraced the postwar American family dream.  The aeronautical engineer father with the ivy league school education.  The housewife mother in the ranch style house in a California suburb with curving streets with Spanish names.  Not in the city; outside where things were cleaner and safer.  The three kids.  A lot of care going into financial stability.

Upwardly mobile doesn't really fit.  My father grew up in a family that comfortably came through the depression with an insurance executive father.  My mother's family faced near-poverty most of her childhood but came from a family which had previously known affluence on both sides. 

Both parents of my parents came from Jewish New England families.  They believed that they could build a white middle class family free from ethnic influences.  They did.  They wanted to and they did.  They didn't hide their Jewish roots (with a name like Ginsburgh?) but they didn't exactly emphasize it either.  They joined the Reform temple across town.  They had an active adult social live; bridge parties, dinner dances, cocktail parties. 

On reflection, most (but not all) of their social friends were other young Jewish couples they knew from Temple.  There weren't many Jews in our neighborhood.  Maybe one or two other kids in my class at school.

"You are just like everybody else," my mother would tell me, "you just go to a different church.  But it's not called a church, but it's the same thing.  We are the same as all of the other families."

I believed her.  I thought we were just the same.  I did experience some antisemitism.  Probably more than I knew.

I thought I could jettison the identity if I didn't want to bother.  Change my name.  I could do it if I wanted.

Now, I don't know......