The Global Citizen is a joint project of New Voices and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Throughout the year, a group of former AJWS volunteers will offer their take on global justice, Judaism and international development.
My grandfather taught me the song, strumming his guitar of shades of brown, as we sat in his living room, with bookshelves and a record player and jackets that smelled of the Minnesota winter. Freyheit, freyheit, freyheit, zol zein yidn freyheit…I grew up surrounded with this yiddish culture, hearing Ashkenazic pronunciation in the synagogue. I never thought that there might be another Jewish pronunciation of words, another rich Jewish history of food and culture, invisible to me. The proper greeting on a Friday night was “Gut Shabbas,” never the crisp Sephardic “Shabbat Shalom” that I say nowadays. Cooking with chicken fat was pretty inventive, but I prefer olive oil, Mizrachi-style. It took me a while to realize that non-Ashkenazic invisibility was a direct affront
to our fight as Jews for social justice.
This is the thought with which I want to challenge you (and myself) today. Take a peek at the article Reflections of an Arab Jew. Ella Shohat writes that “in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one.” How does this invisibility hurt the lives of Jews who don’t fit into the European paradigm? What kinds of privileges am I accorded as a member of Ashkenazic Jewry? People don’t ask me where I’m from, or if I’m really Jewish, but believe me the first time I tell them. I rarely have my culture acknowledged and validated in Jewish media. I have few role models in the larger Jewish world.
Sounds almost like racism, nu? It’s tough to be a yid. First we face oppression from ze American soziety, vhere ve build noo life with struggling daily, clinging to those, like us, that came from Eastern Europe destitute and hopeful. We created our New York Yiddish newspapers. We reinforced European culture, unaware that the racist institutions of America were encouraging us to do just that.
As Ashkenazic Jews, we’re sort of white. Crack open the book “Uprooting Racism,” by Paul Kivel, and you’ll notice a chapter on how the author feels race-confused. I’m a Jew, he says! But I’m white! But I am a Jew too!
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to travel with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) to Guatemala for a week-long intensive program involving volunteering and studying global development. We interacted with indigenous Mayans who still spoke the language of Cactchikel, a culture facing discrimination from the Spanish-dominated society. In Guatemala, the largest problems with ethnicity come not always from white-black but rather indigenous-Spanish. I saw first-hand the difficulties of a farming village of indigenous people, the life of rural laborers who had faced unbelievable government-sponsored violence in the 1980’s and still felt the effects. I could see the racism – the way power lines were routed, the roads, everything, combined to disadvantage the indigenous village.
And what if it takes a voyage to rural Guatemala in order to start seeing injustice at home? I don’t know about you, but I’d gladly shlep my yiddish tuchas down to the Global South in order to fix society here at home.
