I always freeze up whenever I’m asked to describe myself. From introducing myself at the beginning of each elementary school year to writing college essays in high school, I consistently clam up in confusion when forced to encompass myself in a short paragraph. While basically everyone I know has experienced this sudden sort of panic, for me, it felt different. As I got older, I came to increasingly associate my internal ambiguity with religion, something that I was constantly surrounded with in my hometown. The majority of my classmates followed different sects of Christianity, often talking in class about their church programs and trips. I, on the other hand, was a barely -practicing atheist Jew. Though there were other Jewish kids in my school, the ones I was close to were not very religiously inclined either. I wasn’t close enough with the others to discuss that aspect of our identities.
The struggle to define my own Jewish identity was mostly self-imposed as an adolescent. Certainly I was privileged to not have personally faced antisemitism in school. But my Jewishness was often treated as a punchline by myself, my friends, and my family. When I received my acceptance—with a scholarship—to an overtly Christian college in Nashville, my mother and I made sardonic comments about how religious diversity might have played a role in their offer.
Different events in history pushed me to further consider that aspect of my identity. From a young age, I was taught about World War II and the Holocaust. My grandmother often told me stories about my grandfather, who immigrated to Ellis Island from Germany as a teenager. He was rejected from the army multiple times because he was an “enemy alien,” though he ended up getting drafted anyway. Books, too, connected me to that time: Over the years, I wrote different school papers on novels about the Holocaust like //Number the Stars// by Lois Lowry, //Night// by Elie Wiesel, and //The Book Thief// by Marcus Zusak.
The scale and horror of the Holocaust was inescapable in the books I read for school, as well as the countless other films, TV shows, and theatrical works that came generations later. It wasn’t something that I wanted to ignore, or thought should be ignored, but I found it depressing that almost all of the Jewish stories I heard as a child all tied back to the era of World War II.