The Authentic Jew

The second day of class our topic was, “Ground rules: Exploring Signposts of Jewish Identity.” When I saw the name of the Cheng article that was assigned for that day immediately caught my interest; “The Inauthentic Jew: Jewishness and Its Discontents.” The notion of authenticity is a strange one because who can say what is authentic enough to be able to consider yourself a certain identity. Of course, the goal of the course is to investigate what makes someone “Jewish”, but I appreciated an article written by someone who identifies himself as a Jew without ever converting to the religion. This struggle for identity as a Jew is one that I can relate to on a more personal level. I identify with being Jewish, I was Bat Mitzvah, attended temple on the high holy days and went to Hebrew school. However, only my father is Jewish. My mother was raised Catholic and has never converted to Judaism but goes to temple with us and fully supported the choice to raise us Jewish. So I follow rituals that are thought of by many as traditionally Jewish, but my mother is not Jewish and each year we also celebrate Christmas. I liked how Cheng broke it down in his article saying that race or ethnicity, religion, culture and nation/nationalism are all components of what need to be analyzed when defining authenticity. Even when looking at these things, it is hard to conclude who and what is Jewish which we found out when we looked up different people. Do you need to fit into a certain number of categories to be Jewish? Or is having one just enough. Our group had Gwyneth Paltrow and it was really fascinating to see how she reacted to the question about being Jewish. With a Jewish father, she considers herself Jewish although she was never Batmitzvah and her husband follows a different faith. After looking into some more about what makes someone Jewish, I started to notice how the websites of organized companies that affiliate themselves with the Jewish faith define what is Jewish by their standards. For example when we looked at www.reformjudaism.org, the website highlighted a few key concepts that they wanted to be associated with the identity of Judaism like Tikkun olam, diversity, equality and acceptance of all gays, lesbians and women and God the Torah and Israel. Looking into identity is very complex and there are several qualities and characteristics that could be considered Jewish.