I Am Jew...Hear Me Kvetch!

A Sort of Coming Out Story

I am a Jew. 

I suspect many of you are thinking right now, yeah, no shit Gutman, it’s written all over your face. What’s your point?

The truth is, for nearly five decades now I have hidden behind a great wall of denial between myself and my identity. At times I have been so dismissive of my background that some close to me have only half-jokingly called me antisemitic. I am pretty sure my father was unhappy about my disassociation. I know my grandparents would have been heart-stricken.

I don’t want to dwell on the reasons for what I now see as a betrayal of my people. Still, in simple terms, I think I never seriously addressed the generational trauma that I believed was a result of having an overbearing Jewish mother and a host of relatives I deemed to be so stereotypically Jewish that I recoiled when I was around them in public. The other reason I denied my identity stems from the fact that I have been a staunch atheist since my early teenage years and I was never able to reconcile that fact with also being Jewish. I saw Judaism as a religion, and how could you be affiliated with something that required the belief in a supreme being and all of the mishegas that come with religion?

Over the years, and indeed, the decades, when asked about my identity I simply told people I was raised Jewish but that I was now an atheist. End of discussion.

So what changed? And why have I drafted this declaration now? Simply put, my worldview has evolved and I feel an obligation to share this news now, in particular, given the state of things in the world as it concerns the Jewish people.

I can link this evolution to two things specifically -- a newfound interest in genealogy and the fact that my brilliant and audaciously Jewish offspring has continued to challenge my belief system with facts I have long ignored or even refused to hear.

I joined Ancestry.com more than a decade ago and have enjoyed going down the rabbit hole to which this hobby inevitably leads. Yet even as I discovered new family members and long-lost relatives, I still ignored the fact that while my friends and genealogy acquaintances regularly declared themselves Irish, German, or Nigerian I wasn’t able to identify myself with a country. My ancestors came from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and even England. But they were not Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, or English. Yes, they lived in these places, but they were not of these places. People kept telling me my ancestors were Jewish. To which I’d typically answer Judaism was a religion and there is no Jewland so it’s not an ethnicity. Jewish friends would argue I was missing the point, that even secular Jews celebrated the Jewish holidays because it was tradition and it was what Jews did. And I refused to hear it.

At the same time, my kid leaned into their Jewish identity even though their mother is only 12.5 percent Jewish (her great-grandmother was named Sarah Weinberg) and they identify like me as a firm atheist. They learned the history of the Jewish people and read about historically significant Jews like Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and Emma Goldman. They studied the Jewish leadership of the European and American labor movements. They read Yiddish poetry. And watched countless YouTube videos about these subjects and more. And the kid constantly told me about what they learned. In recent years, they even changed their name from Connor to Ber in honor of the patriarch of our family and their 3x Great-Grandfather Benjamin Goodman (Gutman) who was known as Dov in Hebrew or Ber in Yiddish. Oh, and the kid even got some Jewish-themed tattoos.

And throughout Ber’s journey of discovery, they constantly reminded me that Jews were a people, not a religion. This, combined with my ancestry journey, resulted in my ship slowly starting to turn in the direction of Jerusalem.

As we began to make even more discoveries on Ancestry.com, Ber and I would have long conversations about who these people in the tree were and why they came to America. We spoke about pogroms in the pale of settlement, the Holocaust, and the diaspora that began in earnest after the second burning of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. And then Ber said something that hit me like a ton of latkes. On the show Finding Your Roots, Dr. Henry Louis Gates would often say to guests that as a result of their discoveries about their ancestry, they found their people. Ber declared that our people are a tribe known as the Ashkenazi. This tribe left the Levant after the Romans burned their temple for the second time in around 70 CE and they found their way first to Western Europe and then they were slowly pushed east toward Russia and then again west to places like Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania before leaving en masse around the turn of the 19th century for America or their original homeland in what was then called Palestine. In fact, during that period 2.8 million European Jews (mostly Ashkenazi) immigrated to the United States, with 94% of them coming from Eastern Europe. Today, about two-thirds of American Jews identify as Ashkenazi.

When Ber insisted the Ashkenazi were a people with no country, much like the Romani people or Native Americans, and that we were ethnically Ashkenazi, my mind raced with a desire to learn more. This may not have been news to other Jews, but to me it felt like a wake-up call. If I was from a specific tribe of people, then religion (or spirituality) was no longer a requirement in my mind to being a Jew. It seemed possible for the first time that I had been wrong all along about pushing down my religion at the expense of my ethnicity. I needed to dive in.

I spent the next few years reading everything I could about the history of the Jewish people from a secular perspective. It wasn’t always easy to find, but I found books and articles and YouTube videos about the history of my people that didn’t need to reference what I deemed to be the mythical “founders” of Judaism like Abraham and Moses, and the parables of the bible like the exodus and the burning bush and all the rest of that supernatural nonsense. There may not be a definitive answer to how Judaism began, but it is much more certain that a group of what would eventually become my people wandered out of Mesopotamia toward what is today Israel and settled in the area to find a better way of life. That exodus is as human as it comes.

For a deep-dive into the secular history of the Jewish people I highly recommend the series of YouTube videos called Introduction to the Jewish People by Rabbi Adam Chalom of the Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation in Deerfield, Illinois. It changed my understanding of who I am.

Things had started to come together for me. And then I got my DNA tested through Ancestry.com and I came back 100 percent Ashkenazi. Hardly anyone is 100 percent anything. Yet here I am, 100 percent Ashkenazi Jew.

When you combine what I learned from ancestry research, with my DNA, and with what I’ve learned on my own through reading and watching online lectures, how could I deny my culture any longer?

Does this mean I’m going to join a temple and start attending synagogue? That is unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out because just as my understanding of Judaism has evolved so too has my understanding of the term religion itself. Ber says that the synagogue is a gathering place for Jews, and only part of that experience is about what we understand today to be religion. Jews go to temples for community, celebrations, and learning -- and yes in most cases that experience includes sermons and spiritual teaching. But just as not all people are the same, not all congregations are the same and perhaps I will one day find a congregation that speaks to my kind of Judaism -- community without the supernatural.

So what I’m saying is that I am a Jew. And it’s time I started being proud of that fact.

As I write this in the fall of 2024, the world has increasingly become more antisemitic. The Jews have always been scapegoated, but this has intensified in the first two decades of the 21st century. The extreme right is rising in Europe and North America, brought on by the age-old fear of the other. Tropes like Jews are powerful, controlling, money-grubbing, and secretly running the world behind some mythical Oz-like curtain have resurfaced with a vengeance. And it’s not just Marjorie Taylor Green and Donald Trump -- it seems to be everywhere again. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this film before and it does not end well for the Jews.

And then there is Israel. I will not try to explain what is happening in the Middle East because I could never do it justice (I’ll give you a recommendation -- read Noa Tishby’s book Israel.) That said, I implore you to stop reacting to things you see on the news or increasingly on social media without understanding the context. Because context matters. The result of all this disinformation on the news and social media is that it has become safe for anyone with a bias against Jews to elevate racist and antisemitic language. It is ugly out there. I can’t be quiet any longer because I have awakened. I have been born again if you will. I have become what I always denied. And it is my responsibility as a Jew to make my voice heard. To quote Jeff Lebowski: “This aggression will not stand, man.”

I’ll be sharing more information down the road on my blog and on social media about how we can all stand up to hate of all kinds as I continue this journey of rebirth. For now, I’d simply like to say thank you for hearing me out. Shalom Aleichem (peace to you).