Jewish Identity

I was never taught much about Judaism as a child. What I know I have learned from my own adult interests, apart from the blessings said over the wine, bread and candles on Shabbat. Those I learned at about the age of 8 in Jewish summer camp, and have never forgotten. There was of course the celebration of Passover and Channukah, the two Jewish holidays my mother could understand and commemorate through her radical political sensibility. But beyond that, there wasn't much. And yet, when I saw an article about me in a book called Jewish American Women Writers I felt that I had been recognized and had come home. Some of my work is specifically about being Jewish (The Flame Bearers; In My Mother's House; In My Father's Garden; Crossing the Border; My Life as A Boy).

All of it harkens back to Jewish oral story-telling traditions, where what matters is the way a story finds and shapes truth far more than the quest for some abstract thing called Truth itself. My interest in food and eating seems Jewish to me, probably because Jewish families tend to take food and eating seriously and ceremonially. My interest in mothers and daughters likewise seems Jewish, unavoidably, I suppose, since I had a Jewish mother. My concern with politics and history comes directly out of my radical Jewish background, with its commitment to social change and the understanding of history. Sex (to put this playfully) often seems Jewish to me, maybe because in Jewish tradition sex is not sinful and can be thought of as an expression of devotion to the divine. I talk with my hands, another Jewish trait. So much do I talk with my hands that sometimes, when typing, even very fast, my hands rise from the keys in order to express and gesticulate. I am an ignorant, non-religious Jew, who rarely attends the Synagogue. But when I go my heart and soul crack open. On Yom Kippur, when members of my particular congregation are called forward to prostrate themselves, I am always among them, down on my knees, then flat down on the floor, in tears. O yes, when I have imagined living other lives, past or future, in whatever periods of history I have found them placed, whether as a man or as a woman, in whichever social class, one thing remains constant and essential: I always imagine that I am Jewish.

Related Books

In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (UPDATED!)

The Flame Bearers: A Novel

Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself

Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey

In My Father's Garden

Kim's articles on Jewish Identity appear in Tikkun Magazine.