Reply to Lack of religion = missing Jew?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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