Growing Up a White Jewish Male
The North American White Ashkenazi Jews Eliminating White Racism Workshop, led by Dvora Slavin last October, provided a strong home base in which to look at where I had come from and how I had gotten here.
One highlight was a meal table with thirty men that Dvora led, at which we each shared for one minute how our early lives had been impacted by growing up white and Jewish, especially with regard to racism and classism.
There was a disarming honesty in the group as we grappled with what to share in a minute’s time. We went around the table, and what I heard was heartbreak after heartbreak: schoolyard bullying; certain types of friends being “off limits” [not allowed]; stories filled with male domination, male violence, isolation, and separation; and the things we as little boys had figured out to make it through some unbearable stuff—the ways we had “coped.” I could also see the ways we had tried (and still try) to not act out the hurts on the humans around us.
In my minute I shared that I hadn’t had any close friends in school because I’d been so focused on simply “holding myself together” (not showing the emotional turmoil I had inside, not discharging, and trying to be seen as “normal”) and avoiding upsetting anyone (upsetting people seemed risky based on what I had learned as a little one at home). It had been a narrow box to exist in.
There were Co-Counseling sessions after lunch, and I discharged heavily on what it had been like to have the scant emotional resource available to me as a son of an assimilated Jewish mother who had survived the Shoah [the Holocaust] as a “hidden child” and a Protestant father who had acted out violence and anti-Semitism in our own home. I was also able to discharge on behalf of all the men and the heartbreaking stories we had shared.
Because of the work we did at the workshop, I was able to see more clearly than ever the devastating price that I and so many of my people had paid to be “white,” “American,” upwardly mobile, and “acceptable”—how we had had to “buy into” [accept] this society and all its oppressive hierarchy. Our families had compromised and given up big pieces of who were—our language, food, customs, homeland—and there had been zero space to notice all that we had lost. Dvora helped us see how this had contributed directly to the racism in our minds, our families, and our communities.
It was a powerful workshop, made so in part by the commitment of all of us who were there.
I want to close by expressing my gratitude to Dvora. Her lack of blame, her steadfastness, and her love made it possible for me to do the work.
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Ho-Chunk Land
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
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