Tag Archives: Jews as outsiders

June 13, 2016 · 10:10 am

Y’all Are Different

by Judith Rosner (Sarasota, FL) 

Growing up Jewish in New York City, I never saw myself as different.  So I was unprepared for the flat Texas landscape where a church sat on every corner and religion for many, particularly Baptists, was a way of life, not a part of life.  My husband was serving his stint in the Air Force and while Texas was foreign territory for us, compared to Viet Nam where he might have been sent, it was a slice of heaven. 

I busied myself as a research assistant at Texas Christian University and also took on a teaching position there — an Evening Division class in Sociology 101.  I thought this job would give me an opportunity to test the teaching waters, never dreaming how rough the waves could be.

“Every week when I drop you off, I feel like I’m feeding you to the lions,” my husband said as he pulled the one car we shared over to the curb and deposited me in front of the campus building where my class was to meet.  He was right.  I was a brand new teacher facing students considerably older than my twenty-three years and there wasn’t a landsman among them.  I landed in a Christian arena every Thursday evening.  Each week I prepared ad nauseum, put on a confident and competent face, and came home to collapse from the exhaustion of it all.

I gave my class an assignment to prepare an oral report on a topic in the curriculum.  One evening, a student approached me and asked, “Do y’all think I could use a Pentecostal religious sect as a topic for my report?” 

“Why don’t you stay for a few minutes after class and we can talk about it?”  I said.  I needed a little time to ponder the question.

After class, I sat down with the student and said to him, “Well, religion is one of the social systems so you can use it as a topic.  But I’d like you to present your report in the form of a social movement.”  I gave him an outline to follow.

“I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say since I know nothing about this religious sect,” I said as I began gathering up my papers and purse.

“Oh.  Y’all must be Catholic.” 

“Catholic?  Why Catholic?”

“Y’all are from up North,” he responded. 

All the students knew I was from “up North” because of the speed at which I spoke.

“Gee, I didn’t know the two went hand in hand.”  I was biding time and I knew it.  Running through my mind were two incidents I’d buried deep in memory hoping never to unearth them.  One took place at a New Hampshire beach where a nine-year old playmate asked me my Baptismal name.  When I told her I didn’t have one because I was Jewish, she started looking for my horns.  The other was when my friend Elaine came home from parochial school at Easter time to tell me Jews killed Jesus.  The fear, the hurt returned and I looked toward the door, judged how far it was from where I sat and how long it would take me to run to it.  A whole minute passed.

“Well, then, what are you?” he asked.

Did he really think there were no other religions in the world?  I took a deep breath and said, “I’m Jewish.” 

His jaw dropped and he said in a whisper, “I met one of them once.  She was a rich girl from Dallas.”

I was afraid he’d next be looking for my horns, but instead he asked me question after question about Judaism.  I had difficulty answering many and thought, This is it!  This is all this guy is going to know about Jews.  The responsibility foisted on me as representative of my religion felt weighty.  And yet, in another way, I sensed a lightness that came from the relief of sharing my identity and finding that the greatest consequence was curiosity, not contempt — or worse.

There will always be part of me that fears I’ll hear an anti-Semitic remark and not know how to respond, or attempt to explain something “Jewish” and not get it right.  But I’m open with others about who I am and proud of my Jewish identity.  In the end, I’ve decided that if I am the only Jew people meet, I’m a really nice one to get to know . . . even if I can’t answer all their questions about my religion.  

Judy Rosner is a sociologist, leadership trainer, and executive coach.  She has published articles in the areas of leadership and management, stress and health, and women in the professions.  Her primary focus now is memoir.

For more information about Judy, you can visit her website www.therosnergroup.com.

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July 26, 2010 · 7:34 am

Digging to China

by Roslyn Bernstein (New York, NY)

Summer 1951

We wore aluminum dog tags with our religion stamped on them, so that a stranger would know where to bury us after an atom bomb attack. It was the fifties, a time when television was just beginning to appear in the East End. We lived in the West End, near our Lady of the Benevolent Sacred Heart Church, a wooden building with beige stucco walls and a stained glass window of Christ on the cross facing the Atlantic Ocean.

We were the outsiders, longing to belong, the only kids on the block who had never been inside the church, although we often stood by the heavy oak door peering in. Jewish girls didn’t attend Sacred Heart Church and they most definitely did not go to the Sisters of Charity School.

Joanne and I lived on the same block and we ate lunch together every day at school, unwrapping the silver foil on our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a table far from the other girls. Her father, Arthur, was a lawyer who was proud to be an atheist. Her mother lit Friday night candles, but never went to synagogue.

My parents ate clam fritters on Friday night. They sent me to the neighborhood elementary school, where green paper Christmas trees adorned the classroom doors and where a torn blue and gold Chanukah menorah was taped carelessly in one corner. Joanne and I knew the words to “Silent Night” although our mothers forbad us from singing Jesus’ name. Just mouth the lyrics, our mothers said. Never, never say them.

But I never listened. I sang “Silent Night” at the top of my voice, raising my volume when I came to the words, “Holy Infant So Tender and Mild.” After all, it was forbidden. I envied Patricia Everson, the blonde girl who sat in front of me. She was always crossing herself. “Mary, Mother of God, have mercy on me,” she said before she did every long division problem. “Lord Jesus help me,” she whispered as she stood before the class and tried in vain to spell the names of the Indian tribes in New York State.

Joanne and I often talked about the bomb. She was sure that it would strike New England, where the Boston Tea Party had taken place.

“Boston is a more revolutionary place than New York,” she told me, as we sat in the wet sand, looking for jingle shells. We had studied the American Revolution two years earlier. Now, we were deep into the Cold War and Communism. I was sure that Russia was going to drop a big bomb somewhere and that we would all disappear into a mushroom cloud of smoke.

She argued with me incessantly but there was no dissuading me from this grim vision. I read the newspapers that my father brought home every evening—The World Telegram, The Evening Sun, The Journal American. I’d sit on my front porch, swatting flies, and turning the pages.

My favorite was The Journal American, a paper that included a daily editorial on the woes of communism. “Listen to this, Joanne,” I said one day as I pulled a scrap of newspaper from my beach bag and began reading the bold headline: “The Bomb is Ticking. Do You Hear It?”

Joanne shook her head. “Don’t believe everything you read,” she said. Her voice was loud and dramatic. I continued reading: “If we don’t take any action, it will explode on our hallowed soil.” “That means on our beach,” I said. “Soil means sand.”

“I’m not scared,” she said. “It’s all propaganda. They want us to be frightened.”

I twisted my dog tag as she spoke, feeling the raised letter J for Jewish that was stamped above my name. Then, I crumpled the clipping into a ball and threw it into the water.  It landed on the crest of a wave, and disappeared into the dark surf.

Born in Brooklyn, Roslyn Bernstein moved to Long Beach, New York in 1948.  A poet and journalist, she has been a professor of Journalism and Creative Writing at Baruch College, CUNY, since 1974. She earned a BA at Brandeis University and a MA and Ph.D. at New York University, and has served as the director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program at Baruch College since it was established in 1998.

This excerpt from “Digging to China” in Boardwalk Stories by Roslyn Bernstein is reprinted with permission of the author and her publisher, Blue Eft Press (www.blueeftpress.com).

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