Jew Is . . . Jew Ain’t
Alexandra Juhasz
May 9, 2024
Figure 1. A pro-Palestine encampment set up at Stanford University with a banner that reads “Jews say ceasefire now!”
I have always been and not been a Jew; like so many before me.1
My ambivalence becomes me.
I am not religious. I have had and want no Jewish education. I am an intellectual and artist and activist who finds meaning, community, and beauty outside organized religion and tribal affiliation.
I have Jewish relatives whom I love.
Like so many Jews before me, I have spent my life considering . . .
Ain’t I a Jew?2
My mother is Jewish, but not religious. She fled her American German Jewish and assimilated family of origin and became a women’s studies professor.
My father, also an intellectual like his father before him, survived the Holocaust, both deemed Jewish only by their Nazi persecutors as a matter of blood, but not belief. This family practiced Catholicism. My grandfather had converted decades before and married a Catholic woman.
As a boy, my dad hid with his mother in their basement as bombs fell during the siege of Budapest. My grandfather survived by hiding in a convent. My father nearly starved to death. Later, they came to America. They chose not to settle in Israel.
My father converted to Judaism in his old age and remains a pacifist about this current and all wars, given that no one should suffer as did he under the deadly grip of another’s racist repulsion and genocidal violence.
This is my Jewish legacy: is and ain’t.
And yet something unthinkable has dawned. I am a Jew. I have been made Jewish.
My lifelong ambivalence flounders in resistance to a total call for an American Jewish “safety” that I do not require and as claims made about my own antisemitism abound.
Like so many, I will not be silenced, or spoken for, about what I believe as this very Jew: a progressive, leftist, anti-racist, queer, feminist intellectual. I have been shaken from lifelong indecision by Israel’s sheer violence, bolstered by American weapons and political support, and by how some justify this as being for Jews. I have been hailed, and this time, in these unbearable conditions, I hear.
The cruelty, myopia, and self-centeredness of some American Jews, and many more American gentiles, who refuse to see my specific critiques of Zionism, racism, war, and genocide as anything but “Jewish,” have done the opposite.
In my AIDS work, I have written about how censorship and silencing produce the reverse: voice, clarity, community, defiance. While my current position is first against genocide, starvation, heedless bombing, and the hatred of any people, and for a free Palestine, it is also in my name, Alexandra Juhasz, the very Jew who I am.
Postscript
Although I have been graciously asked by the editors to discuss my response to the current campus protests and matters of free speech, academic freedom, faculty governance, and so on in relation to “the question of Palestine,” it is my sense that the internet and press, our home academic communities and sister institutions, nationally and internationally, are rife with minute-by-minute verbiage, images, actions, and responses to what is still a live and developing crisis. My working-class and poor students at CUNY who protested at City College last week were viciously policed and jailed and are currently being tried for felonies (unlike their wealthier Columbia comrades). We are working on that now: signing letters, doing prison support, talking to the press, organizing in our union. I have no clue how this will unfold, even in the few weeks between when I pen this and its publication. So, many of my words and analysis will be saved for the actions and missives that are occurring in response to on the ground needs on U.S. campuses, and then, of course, currently as new violence unfolds in Rafah.
Instead, all I could find to write was of the matter of censorship, self-censorship, and freedom of expression in light of my own evolving Jewishness, a matter of no consequence given the extraordinary human suffering waged, by some, in my name. I truly beg your pardon for the minor matters of my reflections; while hoping that the nuances of my internal transformations into public expression bear some small relevance on global shifts that might move toward freedom for Palestine, and for us all.
Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She writes about her cultural and political commitments in scholarly and more public platforms including Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Ms. Magazine, X-Tra, and Lambda Literary Review.