You Don’t Look Jewish, and Other Ethnic Insults I’ve Endured

I have heard this nonsense for years. Can you tell me what a Jewish woman is supposed to look like?

To all the men I’ve met before. This is not a pickup line. This is not a line that will get me to go home from this bar with you. I don’t know what you are talking about when you tell me I don’t “look” Jewish. I do know that the basic premise, that because of my religion I am supposed to “look” a certain way, is insult enough for me to walk away from you and look down my lovely Jewish nose at your inability to see me for me and not expect some stereotype you have in your head to suddenly appear on my face.

I am the daughter of a Jewish mother and an absent mixed up father. By mixed up I mean not only in his goyisha kup but in his ethnicity. He is basically, as far as I know, just white. My mother comes from Eastern European roots. Deep, strong, Ashkenazi roots, from families that came to America through Ellis Island in the late 1800’s. My great grandfather Louis, my mother’s father’s father came to Ellis Island with his four brothers. He was young, Jewish and poor. He didn’t have the money to buy his way into America and his brothers didn’t have it to lend him. He was sent back to Europe to re-earn his passage to America. He was having none of that shit, and instead of coming back through Ellis Island, he earned his passage and came to the US through Canada. By coming through New Brunswick rather than through New York, his surname was translated to English differently than his brothers names, something he once shared with them that this country took away from him. A unique immigrant story, as unique as every other immigrant story.

I have very green eyes. I’ve been told they are not very Jewish looking. Is there a stereotype for Jewish eye color? I have a straight, flat nose, my Grandma Roses’ nose. Rose, the daughter of Russian Immigrant Jews fleeing the pograms in their small village. My grandmother, the daughter of parents whose marriage was arranged by well-intentioned relatives and produced four siblings. Four siblings that all did important work in this country, union organizers, store owners, builders. My grandmother who was a secular Jew, only entering a synagogue at the insistence of my mother. My grandmother who used to sneak me a shrimp cocktail or let me have milk with my hamburger when I visited her. If you’re Jewish you will understand the significance of that sentence. My grandmother who lived long enough to hold her Great-Great Grandson, having 5 generations of my family all together for her one-hundredth birthday. Rose was striking in her youth, tall, elegant, smart funny and bright. She met my grandfather, short, and balding, and married him 6 weeks later. My grandparents were my model for love, and they were obviously in love for the rest of their lives.

My grandmother once told me an awful joke about looking like a Jew. It went something like this. You know there are all kinds of Jews; Israeli Jews, Italian Jews, Black Jews, Chinese Jews, but no Orange Jews. (Orange Juice, get it?). I come from a long line of Jews that are not related to Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner, may his memory be for blessing. My family, not only didn’t “look” Jewish but we didn’t act particularly Jewish, by perceived “white” American stereotypes. We didn’t move to the suburbs in the great white flight of the 70’s nor were we wealthy. In New Haven, where I grew up, the area where many upwardly mobile Jewish families moved to, a neighborhood beyond our means, was called the “Golden Ghetto”. I think about that and realize how insulting that was, when many of these families were the children of survivors, or survivors themselves, of earlier, uglier, European ghettos.

But this ghetto was for the gilded of the Jews. We were not them. My mother found her love of our religion in her 20’s after being left with 3 children by my goyisha father. She took her Judaism seriously, not like her mother, who kept it but didn’t practice it. In my mother’s home we kept kosher, went to shul every Saturday, and I was Bat Mitzvahed at 13. I don’t know if any of those early rites of passage have affected my looks, I’m not sure if religious practice gets written on your face.

What bothers me most is that by telling me I don’t “look” Jewish, people, men in particular, in some way think they are giving me a compliment. I guess if you’re Black and someone says to you “You don’t look black” they think they are giving you a compliment. What is it about “otherness” that makes people think that those of us who are not “mainstream” white Americans want to be mainstream white? And who are they to think that it is in some way complimentary to us to say, “Hey, I think you can pass”? Pompous, yes, a compliment, no. I am proud of my Jewishness. I can be silly about it, critical of some of the Zionistic aspects of it, and I am pretty secular in my practice of it. But I would never turn my back on it or convert to another religion. I find joy in some of the rituals of my religion, and I imagine that when I am leading a Seder or lighting Shabbos candles, or admonishing one of my sons with particularly good Jewish mother guilt, I look Jewish. However, you, the guy at the end of the bar, trying to flirt with me and somehow engaged me in conversation long enough for me to tell you of my Jewishness, you just lost my interest and can go home now, alone.