For my last blog post I couldn’t really decide on one specific topic, so like some of my other classmates I want to sum everything up, pick out the aspects of the course that made my mind do a 180 degree turn.  I would like to end the post with a few open ended questions.

The part of the course that first really changed my original perception of what it meant to be Jewish was when we talked about bar and bat mitzvah.   This raises that main issue of an American Jew.  We have studied Jews from different parts of the world e.g. Argentina Morocco.  To have this one sided American view of what it means to be Jewish is limiting, I think.  I thought that a person was Jewish if they had a bar or bat mitzvah. But we learned that this isn’t necessarily the case.  Actually the meaning of the word just seeks to tell us that someone has become of age, and not the American image of a huge party with lots of singing, dancing and putting someone on a chair.  So now when I hear someone talk about bar and bat mitzvah I pass along my knowledge of the word so they can have a better understanding.  The Diaspora also has changed my perception.  At first I thought about a Jewish person on a very narrow minded road.  I guess it has just made me realize how clueless I actually was.  I couldn’t picture a Jew in Yemen or Morocco.  I guess the first day of class when we watched that video I was really confused.  I was so confused it made me scared that I had no idea what was going on.  How could this person be Jewish if they prayed like that?  But it seemed the rest of the class had also not been exposed to this type of Judaism and this type of Jewish culture.  As the semester moved on we kept seeing different types of Jewish culture.  It was fascinating to see such diversity packed into one culture, “Jewish.”  Jewish people taking on other cultures but at the same time having the “great tradition.”  The terms like Judaizing, great and little tradition were also new to me.  At first I was confused with these concepts, but now they make perfect sense because I see this larger picture of what it means to be Jewish.  Well I like to think I see what it means; I guess I have an idea.  Class made me want to go back to my Mckinney suite while everyone was playing video games and interrupt and talk about perception of the Jewish culture.  It made for excellent long run conversations about religion and what does it mean for a person to be Jewish.  As I said in my first blog and was pointed out by Professor Staub there really should be more awareness of the culture and religion on campus.

Since I have so much new and fresh information on Jewish culture and Jewish experience (the title of our course) it leads me to a few questions.  Since there is a Diaspora and there are different types (sects…? not sure of the correct term) of Judaism Why do they clash as they have been in recent events at the Western Wall?  I suppose every religion and culture will have different little tradition views which lead to argument… In my observation of my dad I would really like to know how he could stop practicing Judaism?  Maybe his answer is simple, he has never stopped practicing.  So then I am left with what makes a person Jewish forever?

As we are halfway through the semester I feel like we have developed a good idea of the Jewish experience.  I understand terminology that I was not familiar with at the start of the semester.  I would like to address the issue of what it means to be half Jewish.  Friends often tell me that I am half Jewish and I have referred to myself as half Jewish.

I would define the term half Jewish to mean that someone in your family identifies themselves as Jewish.  Therefore, by association with a mother or father, you are then considered half Jewish.  Now if we use what we have learned about being Jewish does the term half Jewish still hold?  First it would be appropriate to use the interviews as a starting point.  My first thought is to recall the sense of community that so many interviewees expressed.  A person who considers themselves half Jewish should be able to identify with this community and feel as some interviewees put it, part of a special club.  I would ask the half Jewish person if they feel a closeness during a holiday that their parent is observing, is this holiday bringing the family closer together? If the person who thinks they are half Jewish has this sense of community then does that make them half Jewish?  Well I would say no because there are so many other parts to being Jewish.  One of those parts is understanding the stories.  Can the half Jewish person tell the story of Moses and the Exodus?  Do they know what a Diaspora is the names of the 12 tribes of Israel? The interviewees expressed the emphasis on the story line and the duty to pass the story on to their children.  I would also see if they followed the religion.  According to some of the interviews religion plays a major part when someone identifies themselves as Jewish.  They have faith in their religion and observe holidays in accordance to the religion.  Does a person who is half Jewish only have to observe half the holidays and understand half the holidays? Another point that arises when I think about Jewish culture is understanding Hebrew and certain words.  This is a part of the culture of being Jewish so if a person is half Jewish they should at least know what Hebrew is.  A few basic concepts that we have learned in our class are being put to the test in order to call somebody half Jewish.

When we say a person is half Jewish what comes to mind?  We can certainly paint a picture in our minds of a person who identifies themselves as Jewish.  I feel that in other religions and cultures associated with that religion the term half is less often used.  It seemed that in high school people always referred to me as half Jewish.  At this point in the course I am not sure I am comfortable with name tag.

Every Monday and Thursday that I attend this class I feel like I expand my understanding of the Jewish experience.  And sometimes I can relate to a Jewish experience, make a connection to an unexplained event that has happened in my home.  When this happens I get pretty pumped.  So when we had to read about cuisine, costume, and music I was able to make some connections.  Connections that are from dinners at home with my dad and a connection to costume that I have seen before because my best friend is Jewish.

The connection that I have been looking for since the beginning of class is the connection to foods I am familiar with.  About four years ago my mother began making kugel.  She wanted to make my father a “Jewish” meal for one of the holidays, so she researched a Jewish dish that would be appropriate via the internet.  When her results from the internet search were null she asked my grandmother for a recipe or something simplistic.  My grandmother just told her go with a kugel.   Ever since then she has made a kugel at least once every two weeks.  The kugel she cooks is very sweet.  She makes it with raisins and noodles, as for the rest of the recipe, I am clueless.  But in any sense, it is one of my favorite dinners because I feel like I am getting desert as a dinner.  Christy was saying that she tried a kugel and her thoughts were that it was sweet tasting too.  This made me feel comfortable with the fact that it might be an actual Jewish food.  The feeling was reinforced after looking through the cook books that Professor Staub brought to class.  There were a few different recipes for kugel, I cannot say that those kugels would be sweet or not based on my lack of knowledge of my mother’s recipe.  It challenges the question that was posed about what is Jewish about _____? In this case the kugel seemed to be a food of choice for other people who identify themselves as Jewish, thus making it a Jewish food.  Not just because a Jewish person cooked it does it make it Jewish but because it can be familiar to those who identify themselves as Jewish.  Does kugel have an original source that we can track back to the bible? I’m not sure in this sense of the answer to the question, but a connection from home to the class occurred.

When we saw the tallit katan with tzitzit that Professor Staub brought in I made a connection to my friend.  During his bar mitzvah I vaguely remember (this was a while ago) him wearing this when he was reading his Torah portion and throughout the ceremony.  I never asked him what he had thought about it or what it meant to him.  When we talked about the tzitzit in class I remembered being a thirteen year old kid sitting at Zach’s bar mitzvah.  So seven years later I am able to fill in the pieces of the puzzle that was my wandering mind.  As for the tefillin that we also saw in class, I had never seen or heard of it before, but watching the youtube of someone putting it on and listening to my classmates talk about it, there seemed to be many different opinions.

I grew up with a Christian mother and a Jewish father, though I have always considered myself Jewish.  I always enjoyed and got more out of the Jewish holidays compared to the Christian ones.  I went to reformed Sunday school every Sunday until seventh grade and did all of the studying for my Bar Mitzvah even though I never actually proceeded with the ceremony (but that is a whole other story).  It was not until I was around seven or eight years old that I learned that there were other Jews that practiced the religion much differently than my family and myself.  This happened when I was at a Yom Kippur Break Fast dinner at my fake Uncle’s (lovingly referred to as fake because he is my dad’s college best friend) house and noticed other families dressed in black with beards and other more traditional garb walking down the streets.  I asked my dad who they were and what they were doing, to which he was surprised that I did not learn about this in Sunday school (even though I probably was told about other forms of Judaism during the schooling, it is just that my mind tends to wander, especially as a child with a window view of a myriad of things to occupy my mind in the Atlanta skyline).  He went on to explain to me the three most basic types of Judaism in America, though he did not clarify that at the time, of reformed, conservative and orthodox.

Later on in Sunday school (as I was presumably paying more attention) I learned of other practices around the world.  I got the explanation that it does not matter how you practice but more so develop a relationship with God.  The teacher went on to explain that the Bible is open to interpretation and everyone does so differently.  I did not truly understand how embedded the concept of interpretation was in Judaism until much later in life when I was out of Sunday school and only attending Temple on the major holidays like the exemplary secular Jew I am.

Though I do not remember learning about the Talmud in Sunday school (there were new buildings and billboards at this point), it serves as a great stepping-stone for interpreting Judaism.  When I learned about it I was amazed that Jews were interpreting the Bible and extrapolating ideas of religious law for about 1800 years.  At this point I was in high school (still gazing at the skyline) and knew more about Judaism in other parts of the world.  I found the idea of interpretation a sufficient enough explanation of how there could be so many different forms of the same religion.

But then I came to college, where I learned, and still am, that interpretation is just one part of the equation that equals the vast array of the types of Judaism.  With the help of courses I took about human behavior in both the psychology and economics department (not to mention this course), I saw the extreme importance of the culture a person is raised in.  Even though the Talmud is the interpretation of the Bible, people still need to interpret the Talmud.  This leads to interpretations of the interpretation in entirely different contexts with the outcome of extremely different results. So now it seems utterly impossible to have ever had a single form of Judaism.  A lot of time has passed since I asked my father who those people walking down the street were.