Being Jewish

Pretty much everyone here knows (or will figure out sooner rather than later) that I'm Jewish. What most people don't understand is that this isn't like being Christian-only-not.

I don't agree 100% with everything in this essay, but I endorse the hell out of it. And you should read it.

Originally posted by vschanoes at Being Jewish

I was reading a great piece about queer YA lit the other day about intersectionality, and the multiple ways that characters and people can embody differences from the normative “white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, Christian (or similar morality structure) and more often than not, male.” While I really like this piece, I was brought up short by “or similar morality structure”—I couldn’t help read it as a reference to Jewishness: we’re different, but not quite different enough to count. I blame the right-wing use of “Judeo-Christian,” to be honest, but more on that later. I want to emphasize that I have no idea if Tristina Wright meant it that way—she may have meant something entirely different, and the anger in this essay is not meant to be directed at her. It is directed at what feels to me like an attempt in the US to erase the historical differences between Christians and Jews, an erasure being committed in order to exonerate Christians of their history of violent anti-semitism while demonizing Islam.

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