Jewish by ethnicity, American by right
Recently, President Trump issued an executive order meant to protect Jews from discrimination on college campuses. I was not reassured. Here’s why.
I was raised as a middle American — white, Texan and somewhat Jewish. I was a descendent of refugees, but my family’s stories of persecution and flight were mostly lost, the remainder neatly reframed to fit their version of the American Dream. Instead of pogroms or an ocean crossing, my mother told us about her father relocating the family to Dallas when she was a girl, and how he, an uneducated immigrant, walked into a bank in the midst of the Depression, and on sheer force of personality he secured a $500 loan that would start his manufacturing business, because this is America.
In Europe, for hundreds of years my people were forbidden to own land, to be members of the aristocracy or guilds controlling industry, to marry into nonJewish families or enter most universities. We were doubly and triply taxed, kidnapped for ransoms, murdered without consequence, locked into ghettos, persecuted by the Church, our children stolen and forcibly converted, deemed soulless money hoarders as reason to rob us and banished altogether from hundreds of towns and entire countries. Unpaid rebel militias that historians still call “crusaders” raided our communities for provisions. They raped our women, killed us, looted, destroyed our property and marched on. Our women were raped by marauders so often that rabbis ruled Jewishness could be verified only through the mother. Later, pogroms were the same, often ordered by the government as police stood by.
The 19th and 20th centuries brought a burst out of the ghettos and into universities, and even a move into the middle class. But a history of racism embeds itself in a culture like a fever, one that I find, as an American, all too familiar. Discrimination remained overt even in polite society. In Eastern Europe where towns and cities could be 30 to 70 percent Jewish, ghettoizing and poverty was a norm. It was all a very old tradition by the time the Germans fed their war machine on Jewish property and silenced any claim. Like Congo, we were a nation to rape for its resources. Or just to rape.
Like every oppressive antiJewish regime in history, the Soviets labeled us a separate
nationality — always a basis to then insist that we are permanently foreign, other, not really from here. Disloyal or loyal to somewhere or something other than our country. The label always came first, and the restrictions followed.
But my grandparents left Europe for America 30 years before the Germans came. Between the four towns my family lived in, where graves marked with the name with which I grew up date back 300 years, the Germans slaughtered over 100,000 Jews, while my family waited in the U.S. for news.
I grew up unaware.
Who of my family stayed behind and lived a long life? I was never told. Who died by fire, who by starvation, who by exposure, who by sickness, who by bullet, who by gas? The family I knew was a remnant, here only because they decided to leave a place where they were forever told
“you are not from here” and rebuild, not on ashes, but in a welcoming land.
We are not unique. The U.S. is a nation of immigrant families, and many of our origin stories have faded over generations. I imagine all those legacies of displacement, resilience, resourcefulness and loss like an underground train running beneath every American family. Sometimes I hear the rumblings. As Americans, we are descended from such a mixed mass of cultures, it is a wonder that we have managed to craft a peaceful society.
Those journeys, voluntary or involuntary, are in a way who we are. From the Pilgrims’ voyage to the Middle Passage, from Native American forced migrations, to arrivals at Ellis Island, to 20th and 21st century migrations to our borders, journey stories have defined America from the beginning and will continue to do so. There is always the sudden head turn in recognition, the jolt, whenever I ask anyone, “where are your people from?”
After Mr. Trump’s executive order, a rumor shot through the country that it defined Jews as a nationality. Given our history, that alone raised hackles everywhere. But I read the actual text and found it wasn’t so. It was wellcrafted, although it charts no new ground. This only somewhat reduced my concern.
I fear this order will give the administration a false reputation as our active defender, while during his years in office, hate crimes against my people have increased by 99 percent, and more of them are violent. Seriously violent. A disproportionate percentage are on college campuses.
And, anti-immigrant bias continues.
I am a Jew by ethnicity, by heritage, sometimes by religion. I am an American by birth, by right, and not any other nationality any more than any other American.
My family came to this country because here they could be just one more remnant from elsewhere newly sewn into the American fabric. Which is why it was that here they hoped they had finally come home.
Leah Lax is the author of “Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home.” She lives in Houston and is working on a book about Houston's immigrants.