With a hometown that never felt like mine, in which I’d always felt like an other, I had left Central Florida as soon as I could, heading north and claiming my outsider bona fides by coming out to my family within days of arriving at college (I’d known my preferences since I was seven; why wait another week?).
And in the early years of my career, as someone not identifiably queer unless holding another woman’s hand, I made sure to list my internship with a lesbian magazine on my résumé, not wanting to take a job where all of me wouldn’t be welcome. But as my friends sported rainbow necklaces and pins, I could never quite bring myself to join in. I was out to my family, colleagues, and friends. I knew who I was. Why did I need to broadcast my sexuality to strangers? Yet last year, in the long months following October 7, I found myself drawn to make another piece of my identity public for the first time.
In December of 2023, as streetlights cast shadows through my windows, the question “Am I Jewish enough?” clanged in my head as I cruised the virtual aisles of online jewellery departments, looking for my first-ever Star of David pendant. The Magen David, or Shield of David, was derived from the Seal of Solomon and once seen by both Muslims and Jews as a mystical emblem of protection. Only in more recent centuries did it come to be known as the Jewish star, a distinctive symbol of Jewish identity.
My screen became a constellation of bookmarked possibilities: Art Deco stars, deconstructed stars (aren’t those just two triangles?), rustic “stars for men,” and stars encrusted with diamonds or a variety of birthstones.
All the while, that question—“Am I Jewish enough?”—echoed with each click.
It was the question I’d heard most often from those hoping to join Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the literary nonprofit I’d founded a year earlier.
They weren’t observant, my correspondents often said, and didn’t belong to a temple or keep the Sabbath. Many had a partner who wasn’t Jewish. One wrote with guilt of her love of bacon; another, that her family had just hosted a kosher Christmas dinner. They wrote of being “half-Jewish”—and of their one Jewish parent being “the wrong one.”
Until very recently, I’d lived an almost entirely secular life and my new immersion in Jewish communities was still not only surprising but surreal. My own question rose up to meet theirs: “Who was I to render a verdict on another Jewish person’s ‘enoughness?’” Their feelings of being an outsider were only too familiar.
In the Florida of my childhood, televangelist megachurches loomed beside the highway and classmates returned from Vacation Bible School to skip through the halls arm in arm, belting out hymns whose words I could never quite catch. High school was faux-grunge Christian rock shirts, church lock-ins, and promise rings. Yet one marker of who was in and who wasn’t never changed: The small crosses of silver and gold glinting from the pedestals of countless tanned clavicles. It felt not only othering but hard for me to parse; what message were they trying to send?
Yet this question of enoughness returned with such frequency I came to think of it, with no small dash of bitter irony, as The Jewish Question. Ironic, of course, because the question echoes the paradoxical la question juive that circulated after the French Revolution before migrating to Germany as die Judenfrage, a query popular with 19th century antisemites and then resurrected with a vengeance by the Nazis: What was to be done with these pesky Jews who stubbornly insisted on being Jewish?
Among the Nazi’s many answers were the Nuremberg decrees, the so-called racial schema for identifying, segregating, and ultimately trying to eliminate Jews. They didn’t care whether you were a blond, high-ranking German citizen who regularly attended church. With even a single Jewish grandparent, you were a Mischling, a mix-ling, a mongrel.
If those who detest us feel such confidence in telling us who we are and why we are worthy of their contempt, why can’t we ourselves feel confident claiming and celebrating this heritage?
In my correspondents’ question was exclusion and pain. As people, as poets, being Jewish mattered to them—whether in terms of religion, culture, heritage, or texts—and due to a variety of gatekeeping, they now felt dispossessed of their right to claim and explore this part of themselves.
I responded that as one who tends to find my deepest spiritual connection through the study of sacred texts, writing, and community, and rarely attends synagogue, I’d wondered whether I was Jewish enough to start a Jewish organization. But a wise friend, who is a Presbyterian minister, suggested that these doubts might make me an even better person to found a group whose mission includes providing community for Jews of all identities and ideologies. Then when people come to me with similar doubts, she said, as a fellow outsider, I can welcome them with sincere empathy.
Since October 7, with national news coverage given to authors uninvited from events after speaking out in support of Palestine, the emails and calls I’m now receiving are from Jews who feel they are being more quietly cancelled.
They have been uninvited from events, asked to step down from professional literary roles, had the publication of articles delayed, quashed, or even retracted. Yet much of what is perceived as possible cancellation is harder to pin down. Was that sudden slew of rejections for their overtly Jewish poems because the poems were Jewish or simply because an editor didn’t like them? Should they scrub evidence of Judaism from their bios, or bother sending poems to a journal who’d shared a petition that refers to “Israel” and “Israelis” in scare quotes, as though the state and its nine million inhabitants are just a fiction?
Poets called to say they are not attending readings and conferences for fear of confrontation. We speak of family and friends in danger in Israel, of our heartache for the dead and displaced in Gaza. I can hear the exhaustion in their voices and my own.
With so much anger and self-righteous certainty, with so much screaming past each other, facile answers are what we’re drowning in, what we’re being drowned out by.
But then I closed my laptop on all those possible stars and walked out under a crisp winter sky. The way I’m learning best these days is by getting offline and out into the world. My personal political thoughts are complicated and often contradictory and would make for a lousy slogan or tweet. The messy, beautiful business of actual, real-time human interactions grants the space necessary to be curious and hash out nuance, as well as the freedom to discover new things, admit I’ve been wrong, and even change my mind. Around me, the sidewalk was busy with people running errands beneath strands of Christmas lights. We smiled as we opened each other’s doors. The air smelled of cinnamon and pine.
Less than a year later, analyzing this time, the FBI will release its “2023 Crime in the Nation Statistics,” noting significant Increases in anti-Jewish (63 per cent), anti-Muslim (49 per cent), and anti-Arab (34 per cent) hate crimes in the U.S.—many people attacked and even killed because they dare to wear a yarmulke or keffiyeh. Yet as a straight-passing woman not easily identifiable as a Jew, I have the benefit of deciding when and with whom I share these facets of my identity.
The commandment to care for the stranger is found no fewer than 36 times in the Torah, the most repeated command in that text, often paired with the conjunction “because you were once strangers in a strange land.” We are living in a period that calls on us, now more than ever, to try and reach across divides, a care that we must also extend to the parts of ourselves that feel like strangers, the outsider aspects we haven’t entirely let in.
Following October 7, as the question transformed from “Am I Jewish enough?” to “Is any Jewishness too much?,” I began to see that my dismissal of crosses and rainbow paraphernalia, of people proudly signalling parts of their identity, came from a place of both privilege and ignorance.
Though most days my only adornment was a running watch, the search for a Star of David felt increasingly important—this need for a clear visible marker of this invisible yet vital facet of who I am. The pendant that finally felt like mine was two intertwined triangles composed of silver cables. The braiding speaks to the connection I feel to those who came before me, of the beloved friends and colleagues Judaism has brought me, and wider interfaith connections: I’ve received spiritual direction from my friend the Presbyterian minister; joined a national Black-Jewish Bible study group composed of rabbis and Black Christian clergy (I am the lone poet); taught workshops on using poetry to explore the sacred, classes in which I’ve learned from participants who are former nuns, practicing Buddhists, lapsed Catholics (who can’t stop writing about Catholicism), and clergy of various denominations; and have a regular walking date with a dear friend who’s an Episcopal priest. Each interaction is an opportunity to share new ways of seeing the world and together build new bridges of connection between our different traditions.
Proverbs says that when you open yourself to wisdom, these teachings “are a graceful wreath upon your head, a necklace about your throat.” Jewish sages have parsed this to mean that wisdom is not only something we study, it’s something we do.
The garland on our heads indicates that wisdom starts in the mind: The more we devote ourselves to learning, the more expansive our thinking and more open we become to the perspectives of others. But if it stops there, that abstract, unused knowledge is like treasure gathering dust in an attic. It is the second part of the proverb that guides us to action. We must allow knowledge to move from our heads to our throats, where we can alchemize it into words suffused with our own queries and experiences. And how better to do that than in the company of others?
I step outside now with this symbol at my throat, aware of it speaking even as I walk silently down the street. I acknowledge the possible confrontations it might provoke. Yet I wear this star as an affirmation to other Jews I meet, so that we might each feel a little less alone, and as a welcome for anyone who might join me in civil conversation, an invitation to breathe together for a moment and share our questions.
With a hometown that never felt like mine, in which I’d always felt like an other, I had left Central Florida as soon as I could, heading north and claiming my outsider bona fides by coming out to my family within days of arriving at college (I’d known my preferences since I was seven; why wait another week?).
And in the early years of my career, as someone not identifiably queer unless holding another woman’s hand, I made sure to list my internship with a lesbian magazine on my résumé, not wanting to take a job where all of me wouldn’t be welcome. But as my friends sported rainbow necklaces and pins, I could never quite bring myself to join in. I was out to my family, colleagues, and friends. I knew who I was. Why did I need to broadcast my sexuality to strangers? Yet last year, in the long months following October 7, I found myself drawn to make another piece of my identity public for the first time.
In December of 2023, as streetlights cast shadows through my windows, the question “Am I Jewish enough?” clanged in my head as I cruised the virtual aisles of online jewellery departments, looking for my first-ever Star of David pendant. The Magen David, or Shield of David, was derived from the Seal of Solomon and once seen by both Muslims and Jews as a mystical emblem of protection. Only in more recent centuries did it come to be known as the Jewish star, a distinctive symbol of Jewish identity.
My screen became a constellation of bookmarked possibilities: Art Deco stars, deconstructed stars (aren’t those just two triangles?), rustic “stars for men,” and stars encrusted with diamonds or a variety of birthstones.
All the while, that question—“Am I Jewish enough?”—echoed with each click.
It was the question I’d heard most often from those hoping to join Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the literary nonprofit I’d founded a year earlier.
They weren’t observant, my correspondents often said, and didn’t belong to a temple or keep the Sabbath. Many had a partner who wasn’t Jewish. One wrote with guilt of her love of bacon; another, that her family had just hosted a kosher Christmas dinner. They wrote of being “half-Jewish”—and of their one Jewish parent being “the wrong one.”
Until very recently, I’d lived an almost entirely secular life and my new immersion in Jewish communities was still not only surprising but surreal. My own question rose up to meet theirs: “Who was I to render a verdict on another Jewish person’s ‘enoughness?’” Their feelings of being an outsider were only too familiar.
In the Florida of my childhood, televangelist megachurches loomed beside the highway and classmates returned from Vacation Bible School to skip through the halls arm in arm, belting out hymns whose words I could never quite catch. High school was faux-grunge Christian rock shirts, church lock-ins, and promise rings. Yet one marker of who was in and who wasn’t never changed: The small crosses of silver and gold glinting from the pedestals of countless tanned clavicles. It felt not only othering but hard for me to parse; what message were they trying to send?
Yet this question of enoughness returned with such frequency I came to think of it, with no small dash of bitter irony, as The Jewish Question. Ironic, of course, because the question echoes the paradoxical la question juive that circulated after the French Revolution before migrating to Germany as die Judenfrage, a query popular with 19th century antisemites and then resurrected with a vengeance by the Nazis: What was to be done with these pesky Jews who stubbornly insisted on being Jewish?
Among the Nazi’s many answers were the Nuremberg decrees, the so-called racial schema for identifying, segregating, and ultimately trying to eliminate Jews. They didn’t care whether you were a blond, high-ranking German citizen who regularly attended church. With even a single Jewish grandparent, you were a Mischling, a mix-ling, a mongrel.
If those who detest us feel such confidence in telling us who we are and why we are worthy of their contempt, why can’t we ourselves feel confident claiming and celebrating this heritage?
In my correspondents’ question was exclusion and pain. As people, as poets, being Jewish mattered to them—whether in terms of religion, culture, heritage, or texts—and due to a variety of gatekeeping, they now felt dispossessed of their right to claim and explore this part of themselves.
I responded that as one who tends to find my deepest spiritual connection through the study of sacred texts, writing, and community, and rarely attends synagogue, I’d wondered whether I was Jewish enough to start a Jewish organization. But a wise friend, who is a Presbyterian minister, suggested that these doubts might make me an even better person to found a group whose mission includes providing community for Jews of all identities and ideologies. Then when people come to me with similar doubts, she said, as a fellow outsider, I can welcome them with sincere empathy.
Since October 7, with national news coverage given to authors uninvited from events after speaking out in support of Palestine, the emails and calls I’m now receiving are from Jews who feel they are being more quietly cancelled.
They have been uninvited from events, asked to step down from professional literary roles, had the publication of articles delayed, quashed, or even retracted. Yet much of what is perceived as possible cancellation is harder to pin down. Was that sudden slew of rejections for their overtly Jewish poems because the poems were Jewish or simply because an editor didn’t like them? Should they scrub evidence of Judaism from their bios, or bother sending poems to a journal who’d shared a petition that refers to “Israel” and “Israelis” in scare quotes, as though the state and its nine million inhabitants are just a fiction?
Poets called to say they are not attending readings and conferences for fear of confrontation. We speak of family and friends in danger in Israel, of our heartache for the dead and displaced in Gaza. I can hear the exhaustion in their voices and my own.
With so much anger and self-righteous certainty, with so much screaming past each other, facile answers are what we’re drowning in, what we’re being drowned out by.
But then I closed my laptop on all those possible stars and walked out under a crisp winter sky. The way I’m learning best these days is by getting offline and out into the world. My personal political thoughts are complicated and often contradictory and would make for a lousy slogan or tweet. The messy, beautiful business of actual, real-time human interactions grants the space necessary to be curious and hash out nuance, as well as the freedom to discover new things, admit I’ve been wrong, and even change my mind. Around me, the sidewalk was busy with people running errands beneath strands of Christmas lights. We smiled as we opened each other’s doors. The air smelled of cinnamon and pine.
Less than a year later, analyzing this time, the FBI will release its “2023 Crime in the Nation Statistics,” noting significant Increases in anti-Jewish (63 per cent), anti-Muslim (49 per cent), and anti-Arab (34 per cent) hate crimes in the U.S.—many people attacked and even killed because they dare to wear a yarmulke or keffiyeh. Yet as a straight-passing woman not easily identifiable as a Jew, I have the benefit of deciding when and with whom I share these facets of my identity.
The commandment to care for the stranger is found no fewer than 36 times in the Torah, the most repeated command in that text, often paired with the conjunction “because you were once strangers in a strange land.” We are living in a period that calls on us, now more than ever, to try and reach across divides, a care that we must also extend to the parts of ourselves that feel like strangers, the outsider aspects we haven’t entirely let in.
Following October 7, as the question transformed from “Am I Jewish enough?” to “Is any Jewishness too much?,” I began to see that my dismissal of crosses and rainbow paraphernalia, of people proudly signalling parts of their identity, came from a place of both privilege and ignorance.
Though most days my only adornment was a running watch, the search for a Star of David felt increasingly important—this need for a clear visible marker of this invisible yet vital facet of who I am. The pendant that finally felt like mine was two intertwined triangles composed of silver cables. The braiding speaks to the connection I feel to those who came before me, of the beloved friends and colleagues Judaism has brought me, and wider interfaith connections: I’ve received spiritual direction from my friend the Presbyterian minister; joined a national Black-Jewish Bible study group composed of rabbis and Black Christian clergy (I am the lone poet); taught workshops on using poetry to explore the sacred, classes in which I’ve learned from participants who are former nuns, practicing Buddhists, lapsed Catholics (who can’t stop writing about Catholicism), and clergy of various denominations; and have a regular walking date with a dear friend who’s an Episcopal priest. Each interaction is an opportunity to share new ways of seeing the world and together build new bridges of connection between our different traditions.
Proverbs says that when you open yourself to wisdom, these teachings “are a graceful wreath upon your head, a necklace about your throat.” Jewish sages have parsed this to mean that wisdom is not only something we study, it’s something we do.
The garland on our heads indicates that wisdom starts in the mind: The more we devote ourselves to learning, the more expansive our thinking and more open we become to the perspectives of others. But if it stops there, that abstract, unused knowledge is like treasure gathering dust in an attic. It is the second part of the proverb that guides us to action. We must allow knowledge to move from our heads to our throats, where we can alchemize it into words suffused with our own queries and experiences. And how better to do that than in the company of others?
I step outside now with this symbol at my throat, aware of it speaking even as I walk silently down the street. I acknowledge the possible confrontations it might provoke. Yet I wear this star as an affirmation to other Jews I meet, so that we might each feel a little less alone, and as a welcome for anyone who might join me in civil conversation, an invitation to breathe together for a moment and share our questions.