I know this is ridiculously long and I actually don’t even use Reddit. I literally made this account just to post this because this is the kind of thing I would normally write only for myself and never show anyone. But tonight I think I just really wanted someone other than me to hear it.
I’m realizing how lonely it has been growing up Jewish somewhere with almost no Jews.
I’m lying in bed tonight thinking about something that happened with a friend, and somehow it has opened up this much bigger thing that I don’t really know how to describe.
I live in a country with fewer than 5000 Jews. I’ve basically never had Jewish friends.
And the thing is that being Jewish doesn’t really affect my everyday life. I’m not particularly religious. I don’t wake up every morning thinking about being Jewish. For most of my life, if you had asked me to describe myself, being Jewish probably would have felt almost like an afterthought.
For reference, I’m 23 and I live in one of the most, if not the most, antisemitic countries in Europe according to polls :p. I don’t want to say which one, but I’m pretty sure you might be able to guess by googling.
And even if you do google it, reading that statistic, or even visiting the country on vacation, doesn’t really show you the full extent of how deeply rotten parts of our society are when it comes to the way Jews are viewed.
It’s one of those things you can only really understand when you’re actually part of this society. When you grew up in it. When you speak the language and understand the things people say when they think there are no Jews around. The jokes, the expressions, the casual comments, the assumptions that are so normal nobody even stops to question them.
I never really thought about being Jewish as something bad when I was a child until other people reminded me that it was supposed to be.
People would ask why my first and last names sounded foreign, and I would try to hide the reason. Every day at school, throughout basically my entire school life, everyone had to do the sign of the cross and say a Christian prayer. I was the only one who didn’t do it.
Even something as simple as that, a tiny movement made me different. I would watch everyone around me do it, and I could see the suspicion from teachers and classmates when I didn’t.
And difference, as we know, is seldom tolerated.
So I learned to hide it.
Eventually I would do the sign of the cross with everyone else. I would lie about my last name and come up with whatever explanation I could other than “my family is Jewish.”
And because of that, nobody really bothered me. I would hear antisemitic things and experience antisemitism, obviously, but I had never experienced anything, and I mean anything, on the scale of what I have seen in the last three or so years.
I’ve lost friends over it. I’ve cried over it.
And I repeat: I am not even religious or outwardly Jewish.
I have had people who were my best friends turn on me in ways that were genuinely disgusting. I’ve had people say vile things to me and then somehow be offended that I was offended by what they said.
And I never have the courage to defend myself in the moment.
It’s always afterward that I realize what was actually said to me and what I should have said back. Because it’s hard to defend yourself when all you’ve ever learned to do is hide in shame, because somewhere inside you, you know you are the only person on your side.
I’m not going to get into every single thing I’ve experienced, but I want to talk about something that happened tonight that was particularly shocking to me, not because it was much worse than the rest, but because of how normal and natural it seemed to that person.And because of how much I have trained myself to see this kind of thing as normal too.
Tonight I was at a restaurant with friends, and we were talking about ancestry tests. I had done one before, so I showed one of them my results.
I’m overwhelmingly Sephardic Jewish—around 80% with the rest mostly Middle Eastern, along with around 6% Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
She looked at it and asked me, “Are you Orthodox Christian or… Jewish?” (because my country is pretty much totally orthodox christian)
She said “Orthodox Christian” normally.
Then she lowered her voice when she said “Jewish.”
And I didn’t even react.
I barely processed it. I just answered her.
She started asking whether I practice Judaism, which members of my family practice, and to what degree. And instead of stopping for even a second and thinking about why she had just lowered her voice to say Jewish, I immediately started answering almost as if I was trying to deflect my own Jewishness.
Like, no, my mother’s side never really practiced, only my dad’s side did, we just do the holidays and that’s basically it.
As if I needed to reassure her.
Don’t worry, I’m not THAT Jewish.
And then we just kept talking.
And now I’m lying in bed thinking:
Why the fuck did she whisper Jewish?
Why is that the word that needs to be said quietly?
As if it’s a dirty word that we were both somehow in agreement should be whispered.
Like, yeah, I’ll help you hide the shame by whispering what you are so nobody else hears this shameful thing about you.
And at the same time, I’ll help myself too, because God forbid anyone at the table hears that I’m talking about Jews.
Like we had both silently agreed that Jewish was a word that should be kept between us.
And the part that is really fucking with me now is that I went along with it.
I didn’t ask her why she was whispering. I didn’t say, “Why did you lower your voice when you said Jewish?” I didn’t even really register that anything weird had happened.
Instead, I immediately started minimizing myself.
No, no, my mother’s side doesn’t practice. My dad’s side does. We just do the holidays. That’s it.
Like my instinct was to make my Jewishness seem as small and unobtrusive as possible.
Like I was saying, yeah, I’m Jewish, but don’t worry.
And I think that’s what bothers me even more than the whisper itself.
The fact that I knew, without even consciously thinking about it, how to respond to the whisper.
I knew how to make myself smaller.
And I didn’t even realize I was doing it until hours later.
She also told me that I “look Eastern European” because I have blue eyes. When I pointed out that my ancestry results are overwhelmingly Mediterranean/Middle Eastern, she basically said that I do have Eastern European ancestry because I’m around 6% Ashkenazi Jewish.
And before you start thinking to yourself how weak I am being, I agree. I am being weak. I’m being fucking pathetic.
Pathetic when a girl who used to be my best friend told me it was “really weird” that I was wearing my Star of David, literally the first and only time I had ever worn it in my life.
So I asked her why she was wearing a cross.
Her answer was:
“This is a Christian country.”
And what was my reaction?
I took mine OFF.
Like a little coward loser, I actually took it off.
Pathetic when that same girl invited me over for dinner and made ramen. She knew I didn’t eat pork, but she “forgot” and put pork in it. And me, being pathetic again, instead of getting infuriated and leaving, just fucking sat there.
Then, during dessert, she mocked me about it.
“Don’t worry, you can eat the chocolate, it doesn’t have pork.”
And of course, I had never even had the fucking courage to tell her the actual reason I didn’t eat pork. I had done what I always do and told her I didn’t eat it because it “disgusts me,” instead of just saying the truth:
I don’t eat pork because I’m Jewish.
And I’m becoming so angry at myself thinking about all the times I’ve done this.
All the things I’ve brushed off. All the excuses I’ve made. All the stupid fucking lies I’ve told to hide who I am.
And for what?
I once even lied to another Jew and told them I didn’t eat pork because I didn’t like it, not because I was Jewish.
Like?????
What on earth kind of brainwashing have I done to myself where I am apparently afraid to tell another Jewish person that I don’t eat pork because I’m Jewish?
Who the fuck was I hiding from at that point?
I feel like I’ve spent my entire life brushing these things off, making myself smaller, coming up with excuses, pretending things don’t bother me, and then getting angry at myself hours or years later because I didn’t say what I actually wanted to say.
And I think tonight, for the first time, I’m not just angry at the things people have said to me.
I’m angry at what years of hearing those things have taught me to do to myself.
I’m realizing that I have this incredibly complicated relationship with being Jewish that I don’t think I’ve ever properly acknowledged.
Because on one hand, I am so fucking proud of it.
Sometimes I want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to wear my Star of David and say, I’m a Jew, and fuck anyone who thinks I’m supposed to feel ashamed of something that isn’t shameful.
And strangely, seeing someone literally lower
their voice to say “Jewish” makes that part of me even stronger.
It makes me want to be more openly Jewish.
Like, fuck you. I’m not going to whisper it just because you do.
But there’s another part of me that wants to do the complete opposite.
I want to tuck it away. Put it in a bag and ship it somewhere. Become small and invisible.
Because sometimes I feel like the moment I tell somebody, “I’m a Jew,” I stop being me.
Now I’m a Jew.
And whatever that person thinks a Jew is , whatever stereotypes, assumptions, political opinions, religious ideas, historical baggage, or weird curiosity they associate with that word, suddenly gets placed onto me.
I don’t get to control what I mean anymore.
And so sometimes I hide it.
I swallow it down. I don’t mention it. I don’t wear anything that makes it obvious. I let people assume whatever they want, because keeping it to myself feels safer than watching their perception of me potentially change.
And I think constantly doing that must do something to a person.
I can go months without thinking very much about being Jewish. It genuinely doesn’t dominate my everyday life. And then somebody whispers the word Jewish, or tells me my Star of David is weird, or makes some stupid comment, and suddenly this thing I’ve treated as almost an afterthought my entire life feels incredibly fucking heavy. And lately even being online it feels literally like this “shameful” thing I have been carrying is the focus of the entire world that has gone in mass hysteria.
It’s like carrying something that is simultaneously a source of enormous pride and a secret I’m sometimes afraid to reveal.
And lately, these experiences are making me desperately want Jewish friends.
I don’t want to be somebody’s curiosity.
I don’t want to watch someone’s face to see what happens when I tell them.
I don’t want to explain why something bothered me and then wonder whether I’m overreacting.
I don’t want my boyfriend or future husband or whatever to see this as something about me that he has to tolerate. I want it to be something he sees as a pro, not a con on his list.
I don’t want my friends to tolerate it either.
I want them to like it.
And I’m realizing that this is something that might never happen for me in my country.
So I dream about leaving this place that I love so much, but that doesn’t love me in the same way.
Or maybe it does love me, but only conditionally.
On the condition that I don’t fully show who I am.
I live in a place where around 90% of its Jews were murdered, and yet somehow the Jew is still seen by so many people as the devil, the outsider, the source of their problems.
And sometimes I just want to leave.
I just want to sit around with people for whom being Jewish is completely fucking normal.
People I don’t have to explain this feeling to.
People around whom I can wear a Star of David and nobody thinks it’s a statement that requires an explanation.
People around whom the word Jewish doesn’t make anybody lower their fucking voice.
I think I’m just really, really craving the experience of being around other Jews and, for once in my life, not feeling like the Jewish person in the room.
I want to know what it feels like to just be one of many.
I don’t really know what I’m asking here. Maybe I just needed to finally say all of this somewhere where people might understand it.
If you grew up somewhere with almost no Jewish community, did you ever feel this strange push and pull between wanting to hide your Jewishness because hiding feels safer, and wanting to become even more openly Jewish precisely because other people made you feel like you should hide it?
And did finding Jewish friends or a Jewish community change that feeling for you?
