The ethical imperative of "Who are You"

The article “Home is Where You Make It” by Kyla Wazana Tompkins may be my favorite reading we have completed in this class thus far. As Tompkins takes her readers through her search to understand herself as a Moroccan Jew, she touches on several aspects that become critical to analyze when dissecting one’s own identity in relation to the Jewish people at-large. In the beginning of this excerpt, she identifies an experience I became fairly familiar with last summer when I volunteered in a Mizrahi community in Israel (something I will write on in a later entry). She remarks, “race in the West is arranged along paradigms of white and not-white, while the race paradigm in Israel has been forcibly recognized along lines of Jew and Arab. The Mizrahi and Sephardi experiences to not fit easily into either of these stories” (133). The Jewish people embody the stereotype of maintaining a close-knit community, for we are (collectively) the “children of Israel.” This race division was best explained to me through the example of how different communities regard intermarriage. In the US, intermarriage can occur between Christians and non-Christians or between black and white people. In Israel, intermarriage takes place when an Ashkenazi Jew marries a Mizrahi Jew (one who descended from the Middle East or North Africa), or when a Jew marries an Arab. (Now I must pose the question, as Israel is a Jewish state and as it functions as an ethnic democracy where Jews are the superior people, can a legally Jew marry a Muslim?) How did it happen that a group Jews from of this “united community” come to feel isolated and at times ostracized by their fellow Jewish brothers and sisters?
About half way through this excerpt Tompkins shines a dim light into her identity crisis. She’s caught between her own identities…those being a Moroccan and a Jew. When others look at her, they wonder if she is African, and if so is she Muslim? When she identifies as a Moroccan Jew, people wonder which parent is Jewish and which is Moroccan? And then she throws her surname “Tompkins” into the mix. What exactly does a name like that imply about one’s race, heritage, religion, and the list goes on.
I was most able to relate with her personal narrative when she declared, “My first concern is to preserve my heritage. It has become important to me not only to learn to speak Arabic but to study and understand my people’s history as well” (139). I too have values that have been instilled in me by my family and by institutions with which I have come to associate as I have aged and strengthened my sense of identity. The way I view and question my heritage, however, never would have led me to inquire about her next thought. She continues, “At the same time, I am ambivalent about the ways in which Jews seem to separate themselves from the rest of the world…the ways in which middle-class Jewish-ness has come to align itself so closely with whiteness is disturbing…” (139). Initially I read this as relating to the question of why the Torah describes the Jewish people as the chosen people but at second though I do not believe this is what she was implying. By looking to a (not the) Jewish history, one would see reoccurring episodes of isolation and persecution. But what comes first? Did the Jews isolate themselves or did their neighbors notice a difference with them and thus separated from them? Tompkin is accurate in that in order to understand today we must look to our past. We have to understand who initiated the separation, who was the first to act upon the notion that “we are the chosen people?”
Lastly I will touch upon the connection she draws between white-ness and Jewish-ness. Tompkin is “ambivalent” about this connection, or more so a lack of separation between the two. And this last point brings me back into the realm of the Jewish American community. It’s amazing but not surprising that Ashkenazi Jews have taken the lead in the Jewish American anecdote. We know that the first Jewish immigrants to arrive in America were not from Western Europe, but rather from Sephardi or Ashkenazi descent, but how then did this power struggle between the same people come into existence? Was it in America where the Ashkenazi style synagogue is clearly more dominant than the Sephardi architecture? If not here, I wonder where else this struggle between one people began.