I Learnt Some Surprising Assumptions Someone Made About Me Being Jewish

Clearing up some of the everyday conclusions people can jump to

Nov 18, 2024

This is a guest post from the JPF family by Sally Prag originally published on Medium.

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A selfie of me wearing sunglasses, with the background of my garden wall and some greenery. — Me just being me. Author’s photo.

I Learnt Some Surprising Assumptions Someone Made About Me Being Jewish

Who am I? That’s a good question.

I’m a pacifist and always have been. I have strong beliefs in equality and despise the greed that can drive some people in this world — often those with the most money.

I’m also a woman with strong feelings about misogyny and oppressive systems. I stand firmly against abuse by male superiority in any way.

Oh, and I’m also Jewish.

My beliefs in pacifism and equality stem from my upbringing, the reading I’ve done, my personal experiences, and my interpretation of the world around me. My feminism stems both from my experiences as someone who is biologically and hormonally female in a petite physical form, with inferior physical strength, living in a world that does not automatically favour women, and from the atrocities committed against women throughout the world.

My Jewishness — that comes from my birth, my ethnicity, and my cultural upbringing that was grounded in an ancient faith.

You could say that all of the above are simply facts of life though perhaps I could refute all of it at any point. Perhaps if I invested in the right stocks and shares and suddenly became wealthy, I would stop caring about equality. I could stop believing in women’s rights and start believing that women’s subordination is best for all of society — if I really wanted to.

And I could just say I’m not Jewish. Some might question whether I’ve converted to another religion, which wouldn’t make much sense to me because I’ve never been a religious Jew. Some might simply accept this, in the spirit of choosing to identify however we please. Others will find it comical that I am attempting to refute my Jewishness when, owing to Jewish law, if your mother is Jewish then you’re Jewish. It’s nothing to do with following a religion, it’s all to do with blood.

Beliefs are one thing. Being Jewish, however, is something that we don’t necessarily just chop and change. Some Jews convert to another religion. In those situations, they will always be seen as new converts. Some Jews who have never been brought up to observe any Jewish traditions and might only have one Jewish parent don’t especially relate to the term ‘Jewish’ at all.

And then there are Jews who were raised to be very aware of their Jewish roots and traditions, even if not brought up to be religious, and will simply accept and embrace this fact of life. I am one of those Jews. Just as I have no care to ditch any of my beliefs in pacifism, equality or feminism, neither do I care to refute my Jewishness.

Moreover, in the face of rising antisemitism around the world, and division growing throughout the social world owing to the devastating conflict in the Middle East, I have chosen to stand proudly as a Jew rather than hide in the background and hope that no one notices me. Being Jewish, whether I care for it or not, is a part of me and my upbringing.

Growing up in a place with no other Jewish families in the locality, I was brought up as a minority ethnic race in a society that revolves around the Christian calendar and traditions. I may have been able to blend in as white by colour, but I don’t have the pasty complexion or blue eyes of an Anglo-Saxon. My family never had a Christmas tree nor cooked Christmas lunch, and Easter eggs were only something I was gifted by neighbours or family friends.

In other words, there was always enough about me that reminded me and those around me that I am not quite one of them.

Being Jewish with Levantine heredity — coming from a family that had lived in Palestine/Israel for six generations before I came along — is part of my identity. And, although it’s something I have rarely considered, it has stayed with me throughout my life so far.

And so, I happily let people know that I am Jewish when it happens to crop up in conversation.

Not because I think anyone “should” know, or because I expect anyone to treat me differently because of it. For me, it’s simply a fact of life, like my age or where I live.

The last thing I expect is for anyone to form beliefs about me because of it.

And yet this is where, in recent times, I’ve realised I can be very wrong.

I recently had some interaction with a new friend. We had a lot of laughs and I felt that many of our approaches to the world and beliefs aligned.

However, there was one area where we clearly weren’t aligned. He has very strong views opposing Israel, believing it to be an oppressive, racist regime, which I understand but doesn’t relate to, owing to my own knowledge and personal experience as a British-Israeli dual national. We spoke a little about it — very respectfully — and then decided it wasn’t a topic worth talking about, given that it shouldn’t really affect how we related to one another.

We closed the door on it, and that was where I thought all contention was left behind.

This is why, weeks on, I was completely thrown when he announced that he couldn’t be friends with me due to my views.

Some discussion followed. I was pissed off; I felt that I had fully respected his right to his views and not made any derogatory comments about them, yet here he was condemning mine. But as the discussion unfolded, what I realised was that his aggravation with me came from somewhere much deeper.

Essentially, he decided that we were fundamentally too far apart, and this was all down to… guess what? Me being Jewish.

I was shocked. But what was even more surprising was that he believes adamantly in equality and doesn’t believe that differences matter. By nature, he seems kind and tolerant. So I spent weeks scratching my head, trying to decipher how someone like this could find my Jewishness to be the factor that stopped us from being friends.

What I gradually began to understand was not that he ‘disliked’ Jews or held typically antisemitic sentiments, but me simply owning my Jewishness made him jump to conclusions about me that he wasn’t comfortable with. The following are the things that bothered him.

1. He assumes that I can’t empathise with the poor

One of the facts about himself that he told me is that he is a socialist and empathises with poor people. While he wasn’t brought up poor as such, his family certainly wasn’t wealthy, and he was taught to be very careful with his finances.

It wasn’t until he began explaining this about himself in our recent discussions that I realised what he assumed my being Jewish meant — that I came from some level of wealth that set me apart from his socialist values.

Here’s what’s so crazy about this belief that Jews tend to be wealthy: most of the Jews in the UK are of Ashkenazi origin and arrived in this country dirt-poor, as they also did everywhere else they landed.

But Jews have always been very good at working themselves up to a level of comfort and wealth — always through grit and hard work. My own grandfather had little education and worked in the mines in Wales, where he was born. Unfortunately, he was fired after joining the union strikes. Needing to find another means of earning money, he began going from door to door, offering to buy unwanted jewelry. Eventually, he moved up north, opened a shop, and then opened two more which he gifted to family members. He worked hard because he wanted to give his six children the opportunity to have a good education. He instilled great self-belief in them and four did get to go to university, two of whom won scholarships to Cambridge.

None of those kids went out into the world with much money but each of them was able to get into work that paid well. Two of my uncles did become very wealthy, not because they came from money but because they, like their father before them, worked extremely hard to get there.

Personally, while I’ve had help from my parents in small ways, the one thing they have never done is prop me up financially. I’ve worked hard for everything I have, and at times have been on the poverty line. While I’m not there now, I know that it would only take a few low months for me to be back there because I don’t have wealth to fall back on, and as a self-employed single mother, I am considered among the poorer members of this society.

But my friend never knew about any of this. It turns out he assumed that being from a Jewish family, I would never have known poverty at all, nor be able to empathise with the poor. And this, for him, put a big division between us.

2. I am blindly lost in the Jewish religion

Britain has, for a long time, been considered a secular society. Religion is not especially a part of life here at all, and most people I know have not been brought up going to church or observing any religious beliefs.

For this reason, it’s very hard for people in this country to understand what it means to have a “Jewish nation”. I often hear criticism of Israel as the Jewish nation, which people assume to mean religious superiority. Therefore, aligning to my ethnicity as a Jew, in my friend’s eyes, also meant that I aligned to the religious beliefs which include this notion of being the superior race, or the “chosen people”.

My friend’s defence around this was that he doesn’t believe in religion at all, or that religions should exist, and therefore he can’t relate to who I think I am.

However, what he and possibly many others are missing is that the Jewish population of Israel is largely secular or atheist, and the society itself encourages religious freedom. Yet Jewish people don’t define themselves as Jewish because of the religion — they define themselves as Jewish because it’s their ethnicity, their race. Just like being ‘Arab’ is not a religion either, but defines one’s origin.

In truth, I’m not sure he knows who I think I am.

3. Being openly and proudly Jewish equates to staking a claim on Palestinian land

To put things very simply, being Jewish has no direct link to what one believes about land ownership. Yet clearly the majority in the West are very confused about this.

There are proud, openly Jewish people who have stated that they feel no connection to Israel (and imply they have no opinion on its existence as a state), such as comedian David Baddiel, who has produced extensive content calling out antisemitism in the world. Personally, I am of the opinion that Jews living outside of Israel only have the benefits they have because Israel exists. With so many Jews having remained unwanted in refugee camps following the end of WWII — the exact same camps their families were murdered in, only renamed — Israel’s existence is the one reason that Jews have been able to thrive. And still our population is smaller than it was prior to the Holocaust, at only 0.2% of the global population.

But that aside, the conflict in Israel/Palestine is not, and never was, about land ownership. It was always about Jews and their rights to self-determination and independence, about borders, and about the rights of each people to live on certain lands. It’s far too complex to get into because of the many contentious points about the realities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the violence both before and since. I, like many Jews invested in Jewish rights to self-determination, do not deny that terrible atrocities have been committed by the Israeli state. Many of us acknowledge that the trauma inflicted on Palestinians is utterly beyond humane, and criminal. But we will also not whitewash those atrocities committed against Jews and the Western democracy established in the Middle East, nor that the Palestinian governing bodies are inflicting much of this pain upon their own people.

But looking to today, there are many, many inhabitants of the Levant — both Jewish and Arab — who desire and believe in co-existence and equality of rights.

No matter what my friend might think, desiring to remain on a certain landmass while embracing co-existence with Palestinians does not equate to claiming a stake on land that doesn’t belong to them. It equates to exercising equal human rights between two peoples who both need their rights to be heard.

And human rights are something each one of us has every right to stake a claim to.

Final thoughts

I wouldn’t expect anyone to be friends with me if they are uncomfortable with my Jewishness. Especially if they ever end up meeting my family, since they all own their Jewishness too — even my dad, who moaned like anything when my mum would drag us all to the synagogue when I was a kid.

But when it comes to setting us apart from our non-Jewish peers, there’s really no sense at all. Like all of society, Jews are from diverse social and economic backgrounds, and we’ve all experienced life from many different angles.

Being Jewish definitely doesn’t make me one thing or another. It doesn’t make me more or less wealthy, devout, or superior. It just means that I have recognisably Jewish DNA and the cultural upbringing that came with that. And proudly and openly defining myself as Jewish simply means I don’t believe it compromises my innate equal human rights on this planet.

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