I’m done with hiding my Jewish identity - The Jewish Chronicle

Showing up “as your authentic self” is a phrase that generally makes me turn the page, lower the volume or shut the book. In fact, anything that sounds like an import from the American school of self-help science gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t have any “lived experiences’”, I’ve just lived, and, while we’re at it, I never “reach out” unless I’m in Pilates.

But when I was asked this week by a friend why I started writing his column – it’s my two-year Schleps and the City anniversary (happy birthday to me) – the phrase “showing up as my authentic self” just tripped off my tongue.

Before you turn the page, let me explain. As a journalist, whether now at the Telegraph or previously at the Mail or Glamour, I’ve covered a lot of ground, but being Jewish has barely and rarely come into any of it. The idea of writing a column for the Jewish Chronicle and bringing my whole self to the page felt liberating. I’d written plenty about juggling motherhood and work in the past, but never mentioned that added pressure of Friday night entertaining; I’d written about parenting, but never the stress that comes with having your kids home for half of September and October for the yom tovs; and I’d written about fashion, but never about the ultimate shopping challenge that is clothing a family of five for your son’s three-day bar mitzvah bonanza. These are niche quirks of my Jewish life. And back in 2022, that life hardly ever got an airing in a work setting – not on the page nor in conversations with colleagues either.

Fast forward two years and that concept of being our authentic Jewish selves is so much more loaded – and utterly changed from what it meant pre-October 7. Anything related to being Jewish comes with silent reverberations. The word is no longer neutral. In order to cope with this uncomfortable new reality, it can be tempting to blur that Jewishness out. And certainly I have friends working in many walks of life who have felt pressurised to do some heavy blurring, whether they work in the NHS, at a school or in the charity sector.

For me, because of the nature of what I do, showing up to work as anything other than my “authentic Jewish self” over the last year and a half, would have felt utterly fraudulent. I couldn’t sit in a features meeting on October 9 and not mention the tears inside shul on Simchat Torah and the grief we felt as a community; or acknowledge the approach of International Women’s Day without mentioning the hypocrisy of UN Women; or keep silent about the sinister colonial narrative being fed even to my own kids on social media; or ignore the heartbreaking and desperate hostage families who have wanted to raise their voices about their loved ones’ captivity.

In my work environment, not showing up as my authentic self is no longer an option. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t understand the impulse to blur in certain situations. It can be tempting for the bar mitzvah you went to on the weekend to become a party in the retelling, for the Friday night you’re planning to be a “dinner party” or to just be vegetarian when being offered that beef canapés at a work do. Why drop the kosher bomb? But as a wise friend (and founder @yourjewishlife) said to me this week, that suppression of Jewish expression is an indication that we’ve “internalised the shame” – shame that has been heaped on us for centuries and never more so, in most of our lifetimes, than right now.

Antisemitic tropes and slurs have not only influenced other people’s perception of Jews across centuries and continents, but they have also trickled into our own minds, altering our own internal narrative of ourselves, to the extent that sometimes, in certain situations, we can actually feel ashamed of who we are. Turning the bar mitzvah into any old party, pretending we’re getting presents for Christmas instead of Chanukah – or indeed anything that supresses our Jewish identity – is allowing those who despise us to shame us from within. It’s just about the saddest thought there is. We know there are people who hate us, but that hate seeping into our own consciousness and identity gives it a different sort of twisted power – one of which we need to be aware. We may think we’re making it easier for ourselves in the moment, but in the long run that’s undoubtedly not the case. Because what can possibly be more oppressive than suppressing our own identity because it has been made to feel shameful?

Back to my Schleps and the City anniversary and it’s true that two years ago, when I started writing this column, it was a place to add a little Jewish authenticity to my work life. That Jewish identity is now much more out there – both at work and on social media. But what this column has given me is more valuable than I could ever have imagined back then: a connection to so many readers at the toughest of times and a reason to pause, think, untangle and attempt to articulate the intensity of the last 14 months. To try to fathom how it’s moved us and changed us. And if absolutely nothing else, to realise why it’s so important that I never call myself “vegetarian” again.

Topics:

Jewish identity