I’m actually writing this in the airport lounge in Cyprus just before leaving for Tel Aviv. I thought it would be fun to give my impressions of Israel before actually getting there and then looking back at what I wrote after I leave. Mary Beth has told me repeatedly that no one in Israel will believe that I’m not Jewish when in Israel. I certainly have the name and the nose but most likely beyond that too. My father gave up the religion a few years after his bar mitzvah. He stayed involved for a few years because he told me it was a good place to meet girls. My mother’s mother was a Protestant of various kinds and my mother’s father would sit in the car and wait for her to get out of church. They had two weddings, one in a Rabbi’s study that my mother’s parents never knew about and one Unitarian that my father’s parents never knew about. They became nominally Unitarian but I refused to go when I was six years old. I felt that if Santa Claus didn’t exist, neither did any of the other stuff or maybe it was that I just didn’t want to get up for a boring church session.

My parents became Humanists and I grew up non-religious but feeling a definite connection to my Jewish half roots. I love the passion for learning and the outspokenness, the love of the arts and politics and so on. These are shared by many, if not all other groups but there is something unique about the Jewish culture that I can’t figure out. So I’m actually quite baffled by what Israelis will be like. Will they be like some of the brash New York City people I’ve known in college? Will they be like the Hassidic Jews that were my neighbors in Montreal? Will they be like my college roommate, one of my favorite people, who I’ll be seeing in a few hours? Now I’m disappoionted. I was hoping that I would have some real guesses but I don’t. I’m excited to be going there.

I’m picking this up after a couple of days now in Israel, sitting in my hotel rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean. Since what I wrote above, I feel like I have some beginning insights into who I am (at least into one of the halves of who I am). I’ll describe more about my Tel Aviv “10K” in Part 2 but while my college roommate Mickey and his wife Orly and I were walking through a crowded market, we ran into their friend Mike. Mike left Los Angeles to live in Tel Aviv  and has a very strong feeling of anti-semitism in the US. When I told him about my background, he asked me to describe anti-semitic incidents I had experienced. Surprisingly to him, I couldn’t think of any. All I could come up with is that many people don’t understand the concept that I’m not of 100% Jewish ancestry even after I explain it well. Maybe I have experienced anti-semitism but if people criticized something I said I assumed it was because I probably said something stupid or they just didn’t understand.

Mike’s Jewishness is not at all based on the religion. He claims to be totally non-religious but his Jewish  identity is very strong. I need to get back to him because he explained what Jewishness was to him in incomplete terms. He described the feeling of not fitting in in the US, of people not respecting him for who he was, of a world that disliked him without knowing him. Israel represents a haven for him.

The feeling of alienation from society is something I’ve felt all my life. I went to Kindergarten in Sri Lanka (off India) and dropped out of 3 schools because I couldn’t fit in. I went to a working class public school in Ithaca and was the only child of university parents. I was with a group of friends in high school that were toatlly alienated from the high school world of proms, football games, and school clubs. For the first half of ninth grade I was the only European in a school in Ghana (West Africa).  At McGill University, I was a foriegn student. I worked in a factory with all French-speaking workers. In Buffalo, I was the Canadian who worked in a can factory. In Indiana, PA, I feel at home but it’s not the place I’m really from. Perhaps my 1/2 Jewishness is part of this alienation, like Mike experinced.

What I got from Mike was part of the story. It’s the history of alienation from society that has always been part of the Jewish tradition. What I didn’t get from Mike in the few minutes we talked while eating the best humus I’ve ever had, was what it is to be Jewish besides the religion and the alienation. Maybe I’ll get this sometime in the next week or so in Israel or maybe someone reading this can help.