Lack of religion = missing Jew?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jews came to the US to celebrate being Jewish and to practice their faith openly. There were booming Jewish communities across the United States from the 19th century onward, sending letters back to the home country encouraging people to come to the US. The antisemitism they encountered was, by the standards of the old world, quite mild. You may have been excluded from clubs but people didn't burn down your houses or lead pogroms in your neighborhoods. The college antisemitism was mainly at the Ivies, not across the board and not the land grant universities. And the US did reward Jews with tremendous prosperity through their hard work and Jews soon established a political presence as well, with Louis Brandeis appointed to SCOTUS in 1916. Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States, outside of perhaps a handful of social climbing people but even that would be pretty limited.

The idea people would emigrate to the US to specifically hide their Jewish ancestry flies against documented history. It doesn't rule out an individual who didn't care about their Jewish heritage and was an atheist leaving behind their Jewish heritage as part of starting a new life. They may very well have been leaving behind previous marriages and unhappy family lives. People had many stories and reasons for emigrating to start a new life. But I'd think hiding a Jewish heritage would be one of the weakest ones.

I don’t know. My grandmother was flat-out fired from a job when they found out she was Jewish, in the 1930s. She didn’t speak about it much, but I know that they depended on the money and it must’ve been devastating emotionally. At that time Jews explicitly could not live in my current neighborhood, nor could they attend the school that my son attends.

Yes, there were no pogroms, but the burden was still there (balanced off to some extent by a vibrant community). You wrote “Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States” - that’s true with regard to personal pride, but there were plenty of practical reasons to conceal Judaism.

I see people more desperate to make a theory fit despite prevailing evidence otherwise. Your story is anecdotal, subject to misinterpretation, and it was also a time when women were fired from many jobs as soon as they got married because the husband was expected to take care of her, just to use as an example of the complexities of the time. Did antisemitism exist? Of course! But there is a difference between not boasting about a faith and heritage in public versus simply pretending it never existed. The latter would be unusual. The enormous success of American Jews makes it a weak theory. It's possible an individual would, for various reasons, walk away from a Jewish heritage but we can't rely on it as a likely answer to OP's story.

This is an overly defensive take. Jews came to the US for a variety of push-pull factors, and just like some Black people opted to “pass,” so did some Jews in the face of antisemitism. And considering that many Jews don’t consider mixed marriages to result in Jewish kids, that in an of itself would probably result in a fair number of people with no Jewish self-identity (along with a presumably normal rate of out of wedlock birth and adoption).

And sometimes religion really does just disappear over a few generations — especially in the past when we did not preserve copious artifacts, and parents/grandparents died much younger. I have two Jewish friends who are basically completely un-identified with Judaism and I didn’t even know they were Jewish at all until well into our friendships. Their own kids have no Jewish identity.

I agree. The New England states have the most people who identify as having no religion. The Catholic and Jewish kids would do the confirmations and bar mitzvahs and then kind of fade away from the church/synagogues. There are still people who will only marry in their religion but it seems to be less and less every generation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

That means everyone else was Catholic or Protestant. I doubt truly religious people would give up their church because 1 member of the family was a different faith.

Do you have religion now? I feel guilty about how ignorant my daughter is about religion because my husband and I are not religious and weren’t really taught ourselves.

Why would you feel guilty? I didn't grow up religous but learned about it in the culture where I've lived - like why Christians celebrate Christmas and Easter, why Jews celebrate Hannuka and Purim, why Muslims celebrate Eid and fast during Ramadan. My kids (now young adults) are the same. No guilt.

[Anonymous]

Just do 23 & me and you will find out, but to be honest, not a good time to do 23and me or to be a Jew. I hate that there is a database on the dark net where loons know I am a Jew and if you think that is paranoid then listen to some speeches given by leaders of Hamas. They want us to be murdered throughout the world. I'd stick with what you were told until it's a better time to be a Jew, which is actually never.

[Anonymous]

I know 23 & me provides detail on Ashkenazi Jews because that popped up in both of my kids' profiles. Here is what a quick google shows: 23andMe customers can go to their Ancestry Overview and learn specific insights into whether they have Ashkenazi ancestry. Are you still waiting to be a customer? Find out more about 23andMe's ancestry offerings here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

That means everyone else was Catholic or Protestant. I doubt truly religious people would give up their church because 1 member of the family was a different faith.

Do you have religion now? I feel guilty about how ignorant my daughter is about religion because my husband and I are not religious and weren’t really taught ourselves.

Why would you feel guilty? I didn't grow up religous but learned about it in the culture where I've lived - like why Christians celebrate Christmas and Easter, why Jews celebrate Hannuka and Purim, why Muslims celebrate Eid and fast during Ramadan. My kids (now young adults) are the same. No guilt.

My son has picked up a lot of knowledge because that’s the way he is. What you and your kids learned is all she would need. I’ll try to bring it into conversation.

I’ve never read the Bible so sometimes I wish I knew what people were talking about when they say all these names.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jews came to the US to celebrate being Jewish and to practice their faith openly. There were booming Jewish communities across the United States from the 19th century onward, sending letters back to the home country encouraging people to come to the US. The antisemitism they encountered was, by the standards of the old world, quite mild. You may have been excluded from clubs but people didn't burn down your houses or lead pogroms in your neighborhoods. The college antisemitism was mainly at the Ivies, not across the board and not the land grant universities. And the US did reward Jews with tremendous prosperity through their hard work and Jews soon established a political presence as well, with Louis Brandeis appointed to SCOTUS in 1916. Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States, outside of perhaps a handful of social climbing people but even that would be pretty limited.

The idea people would emigrate to the US to specifically hide their Jewish ancestry flies against documented history. It doesn't rule out an individual who didn't care about their Jewish heritage and was an atheist leaving behind their Jewish heritage as part of starting a new life. They may very well have been leaving behind previous marriages and unhappy family lives. People had many stories and reasons for emigrating to start a new life. But I'd think hiding a Jewish heritage would be one of the weakest ones.

University of Michigan accepted some Jews, Blacks and Japanese, but wouldn’t let them live in the forms.

[Anonymous]

Dorms*
(Co-op houses addressed this somewhat by side-stepping the university housing system.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you did a DNA test and it didn't show Ashkenazi it's very unlikely they were Jewish.

This OP. Being Jewish is one explanation, but people left religion or changed their names for many reasons.