When I was thirteen, a kid scribbled “I hate Jews and n#$%” all over my notebook in class a few months after we moved from New Orleans to Dallas. Thirty years later, though his name escapes me, I remember that day clearly. I showed my teacher the notebook with the hateful graffiti, and then I went home and asked my parents why they moved us to this neighborhood where I was essentially the only Jew and there were no other minorities.
I was starting to learn how small a group of people we were, while simultaneously serving the role in my school community as one of the tokens. Nearly every week at lunch in the cafeteria, I was welcomed to join various Christian youth groups.
“But I’m Jewish,” I would tell them.
“Oh, it’s okay,” they would reply, friendly with glistening smiles, as if just mentioning my Jewish identity was something that was maybe forgivable, a sometimes-acceptable wrongdoing, something I could—or should—try to escape by the good grace of their generous invitation. “We won’t hold that against you. Everyone is welcome here.”
Most of the students didn’t seem to care about the fact that I was Jewish, but rather they looked at me as a novelty. Despite my secular life, I was something different, something mysterious, something they’d never previously seen. A Jew.
A few days after the graffiti incident, the kid came over to my locker, his head hung low, his brown hair falling onto his brow so that he didn’t have to really look me in the eyes, and said the words he was told to say.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then I never saw him again.
I don’t know if he stayed at the school or left, if his family moved, or what really happened to him, but I never forgot that apology: quiet, demure, face down, his eyes disconnected from the intended recipient.
It was my very first pang. Most Jews feel their first one at some point. A reminder that you are different, not quite a part of the rest of the world.
I didn’t think it would happen for my kids in elementary school, but this year when my ten-year-old daughter, the lively, friendly, empathic, overflowing-with-confidence theater kid with the clearly Jewish name, was in fourth grade at her Los Angeles public school, it happened.
March is both Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM). My kids’ excellent public school was celebrating AAPIs and learning, rightly so, about AAPI history in and out of class. Some of my daughter’s classmates voluntarily gave wonderful presentations about their families’ countries of origin. She came home for the first few weeks of the month excited, telling me stories that she’d learned from her friends and classmates. Then, one day she came home a bit nervous and asked to quickly google something.
I watched as she scrolled, the glint of the screen reflected in her investigative eyes.
“No!” she said, near breathless, clarity materializing before her.
She showed me. March, she had just then realized, was also Jewish American Heritage Month, and her school had inadvertently neglected to acknowledge this. It wasn’t that there was a problem with discussing cultural appreciation months; rather, it was that the school had done so for every other culturally identified month except her own.
A few days later just before bedtime, she came to my husband and me in her pajamas, her face washed with patches of red, her eyes sore, her typically strong voice timid, almost scared.
“I really want to do a presentation on being Jewish for Jewish American Heritage Month, but I’m scared to,” she said, the words stretched thin over a vast canyon. “I don’t want people to think I’m stealing the spotlight from all of the other kids in my class who are celebrating AAPI month. I don’t want to take up space.”
She paused, looked away, and then looked back at us.
“Also …” she added, nervous. “My friend told me that other kids in the class might not want me to do it.”
And there it was. Her first pang.
We talked about it with her. We told her that the school probably just doesn’t know it’s also JAHM, and that we could talk to her teacher about it if she wanted to do a presentation, too.
“No,” she said, pausing. “I can ask her myself.”
Later that night, we watched from outside her bedroom as her light stayed on till ten o’clock, till eleven, even till midnight. We knew exactly what she was doing.
The following morning, she was awake and at the breakfast table early, her school-issued Chromebook open beside her bowl of cereal, the PowerPoint already on slide six: famous Jews, just after her favorite holidays, foods, and family traditions, replete with sound effects, and songs, and graphics.
As I drove her to school, the pang that hit me when I was thirteen years old reignited. I didn’t know how they would respond to her request and presentation. But when she came home later that day, proud and joyful, she told us that her teacher was so happy to have her give the presentation; she just hadn’t known about the month. Many of her classmates, she said with a smile, told her with excitement that they’d even eaten latkes before, and loved them.
It reminded me not just of that moment in middle school when the boy defaced my notebook out of hate but also of every other moment where I, too, was mostly the anomaly. People would frequently say to me, “You’re the first Jew I’ve met,” without negativity or hatred but rather curiosity.
We forget how small a tribe we really are at 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Despite our disproportionate societal output, we all become mini ambassadors to our existence, to our history, and to our culture. And while we don’t individually represent an entire religion, culture, or people—who look largely like every race, many of whom don’t practice religion at all—we do represent one tiny part of it. Talking about that can become one of our superpowers, spreading understanding, love, and acceptance across the globe.
ELIZABETH L. SILVER is the author of the novel The Majority, the memoir The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty, and the novel The Execution of Noa P. Singleton. Her work has been called “fantastic” by the Washington Post, “masterful” by the Wall Street Journal, and “important” by the Los Angeles Times and has been published in seven languages and optioned for film. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University Beasley School of Law, and the University of East Anglia’s creative writing M.F.A., Elizabeth has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and others and currently teaches creative writing with the UCLA Writers Program. She is the founder and director of Onward Literary Mentoring and lives in Los Angeles with her family.