“My parents decided to move to a more predominantly Jewish area and to enroll me, at the age of 8, in a Jewish day school. They hoped that in a close-knit Jewish community I’d be safe from outsiders and that I would cement my attachment to Judaism.
Instead I became a target for years of emotional and physical bullying that sparked a lifelong struggle to come to terms with my Jewish identity.”
— Aaron Hamburger, Tablet Magazinne, 2019
In Part VII we connected the well-documented phenomenon of internalized homophobia to Jewish self-hatred via the concept of internalized Judeophobia. This can be traced to a person who, for entirely legitimate reasons, has internalized the systemic Judeophobia that surrounds them. In exactly the same way a religious gay man might exhibit extreme homophobic sentiment as a defence mechanism, we observe the same behaviour in Jews around the world.
This section looks at some common circumstances and scenarios in which Jews are pushed out of Jewish spaces, or away from their Jewish identity — sometimes as victims, sometimes as purposeful pariahs. In each and every case, the person with internalized Judeophobia is experiencing one or more of fear, shame, and guilt, and in every circumstance, some meaningful degree of insecurity.
Many of these experiences end up coupled with a pull, or mixed together with one or more other pushes. They are all experiential, and very real. Any Jew reading this knows a person who fits one of these archetypes. They can often see moments in their own lives where, had they had less strength of self, they might have gone down a similar path. That familiarity is no coincidence — the resonance is the proof.
This list is by no means comprehensive. It is expected to expand as discovery and research begin to unearth more and more cases. Each of these examples is rooted in the North American context, so there is a degree of tunnel vision that needs to be applied. Nevertheless, each of these situations is dynamic, and these are mere archetypes that describe individual experiences that make up the whole.
The throughline is that these typically all happen within childhood, early adolescence, and sometimes even young adulthood. They are all formative experiences, and they all have the possibility to cascade outward and ultimately lead to internalized Judeophobia. Saliently, these insertion points do not typically come from places of malice. That is why those who end up with internalized Judeophobia should be understood as victims.
The child taught to hide their Jewish identity for their safety.
The first scenario is a child traumatized by their Jewishness through fear passed down from a parent. Especially in high-anxiety, fearful households, parents or mentors will tell children to hide their Jewish identity. This is usually a well-meaning directive — an effort to keep the child safe.
As the parents are themselves insecure and afraid on behalf of their child, they tell the child that under no circumstances should they reveal anything that might out them as Jewish. There are the classic directives: don’t talk about the Jewish holidays. Do not wear a kippah. Do not disclose any markers of Jewish identity, like a Magen David or a necklace with Hebrew writing.
The key trouble is that a child cannot easily tell the difference between hiding for safety and hiding because something is wrong. They rarely have that sophistication. So when a parent says “we don’t talk about being Jewish,” the child begins to internalize it. They don’t know why it’s bad. They just know that it’s bad. This is the initial entrance point for many Jews. This push is dominated by fear of their own identity. Especially in situations where no supplemental Jewish experiences are created, children will begin to develop a conditioned aversion to Judaism.
A young person ostracized or bullied by their own local Jewish community.
Imagine a child who, like many other thirteen-year-olds, doesn’t fit in. They might lack the social skills, have a learning disability, or be slightly neurodivergent. For any number of reasons, the young person might be the subject of bullying through their formative years. This happens in every social setting, and in every culture. In a Jewish context, this kid might attend a day school, or a public school with a high concentration of Jewish students. In those contexts, when a tween is a social outcast and gets bullied, they can feel like there is something wrong with them specifically.
A healthy person can understand that bullies are simply a fact of life, best ignored and pitied. A more resilient, mature kid might be able to weather the storm of adolescence.
But that isn’t the case for everyone — some young people are prone to feeling like victims. Justly so. But someone with a fear of taking personal accountability — an external locus of control — can arrive at a different conclusion. They can see something is wrong, but it cannot be typical teenage life. Something is wrong, but they reason, or are counselled by parents, that there isn’t anything wrong with them. They can then make the logical jump that there must be something wrong with everyone else.
From there, the jump is to draw the pattern, and the common thread amongst the bullies or the “mean girls” is apparent: They’re all Jews. The push comes in this circumstance because the individual has created a false dichotomy in their mind. We are all Jews, and that is the common thread. One common fallacious exit strategy is to determine that the others are the bad Jews. The victim of the bullying, as a defence mechanism, believes they could not possibly be responsible for their mistreatment, and so it has to be rationalized. Humans crave an explanation, so they invent ones — in this case, they are virtuous and victimized. Their oppressors are the bad Jews.
This seeds one of the most common and egregious sources of tokens as well. These are the people who say they grew up in Jewish spaces and know what it’s “really like” on the inside — when in reality, they are almost always translating their own personal traumas and shortcomings into a verdict on the whole community.
Abuse and harm within religious life.
As with any religion — especially those with strong patriarchal structures, which Judaism can oftentimes be — there is real potential for harm within cloistered populations. This can manifest in many different ways. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism especially can, like any religion, provide ample opportunities for negative experience. That association might be with strict or abusive parents, with controlling husbands, or with camp counsellors who became violent or inappropriate with kids. All of these can be the insertion point for complex personal issues that get tied back to Judaism writ large.
Sometimes children can be ostracized or told there is something wrong with them because they might not be convinced that they want to be religious or observant. Many women might feel like they cannot self-actualize because of the religion’s structure. Men who want to pursue a career might feel pigeonholed by Judaism, or might not want to go through a life of Torah.
LGBTQ+ individuals can be completely ostracized by their synagogues. Some rabbis will not perform gay marriages, and many will not perform interfaith marriages. For some, the “sin” of loving a person who isn’t Jewish might be reason enough to leave religious life entirely. That exit can have deep-seated consequences for one’s relationship to their faith, culture, and identity.
Men in particular may feel that because Judaism didn’t make space for them, there is something wrong with Judaism writ large. As with the bullied kid in the previous example, the biggest danger here is the false dichotomy that comes with thinking: “something can’t be wrong with me, so something must be wrong with them.” This becomes the insertion point. Once the ball gets rolling, it compounds on itself, and the human mind begins to detect all sorts of patterns that “prove” that mainstream Judaism is problematic.
The black sheep of the family.
In a similar vein to the child who is bullied, these children are caught up specifically within family dynamics. The black sheep is also sometimes called the alternative kid, or explained away as middle child syndrome — though of course, it is not isolated to middle children.
Jewish families oftentimes demand academic rigour at home. This is a product of the cultural carrots and sticks that exist within particularly elite Jewish societies. Many may roll their eyes when a parent jokes that there has to be a doctor or lawyer in the family. But for many kids and young people, this is a serious pressure. It sets the bar impossibly high.
For every doctor in the family lineage, there is a kid who doesn’t have that same knack for science, or whose intelligence means they’re not going to be as academically gifted as a sibling or peer. That peer might have qualified on a scholarship to day school, or to university. Comparison is the thief of joy, and for some, no matter what they do, the pressures of Jewish life — around work, salary expectations, academic achievement, or good behaviour — never let up. Even something as simple as learning their bar mitzvah portion can bring upon a young person a profound feeling of being the black sheep.
Again, this is oftentimes derived from parenting, but it can just as easily come from peers. This can all contribute to a repulsion that drives the push away from Judaism.
Judaism being inexorably linked to bereavement and trauma.
For kids forced to prematurely experience life-cycle events inside a synagogue — the death of a parent, a grandparent, a close friend — Judaism can become associated with trauma. If Judaism is the religious container for that grief, a child can come to feel that the religion itself is a source of negativity.
This, like in earlier circumstances, creates a conditioned aversion towards Jewish ritual, prayer, and spaces. When Kaddish and prayer become associated with a dying parent, or a kippah becomes a reminder of a shiva, it can become a deeply traumatizing association.
Jewish institutions have rightfully gone to great lengths to educate their children on Jewish oppression, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Jewish trauma can be easily transmitted across generations in the silent lessons taught through stories and recalled experiences — that existing as a Jew is dangerous. For many, this is more than enough to act as a push. This begs the question and suggests that the entire polity of Judaism is guilty by association.
Then there are children and families who only associate synagogue and Judaism with bereavement. If they only attend once a year for Yahrtzeit, or for Yizkor, the shul, the key religious third space, becomes associated with negativity.
These can work in concert. Bereavement already primes an individual, and then every time they are back in a synagogue, they’re learning about the Holocaust and its horrors. Hebrew schools spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the worst parts of the Jewish experience. This has the potential to become a conditioned aversion. A great many people are pushed away in this fashion, coming to associate Judaism itself with negativity, trauma, and fear.
Embarrassment at one’s own and others’ “Jewish qualities.”
Visible religious symbols drawing hate, immigrant customs, particular foods, and so on. Oftentimes, whether in adulthood or childhood, Jewish qualities bear a cost due to systemic Judeophobia. This can be as simple as the discrimination that comes to Orthodox Jews in their black hats, an Eastern European accent, or a lack of awareness around North American customs.
For many Jews further along the asymptote of assimilation, this can provide a real threat. An association with anything different can shatter the illusion. That could be a Jewish outfit or hairstyle. That could be a person’s parents speaking Yiddish instead of English. That could be a failure to moderate the noise level of a conversation on public transit. Any of these can trigger a significant aversion in a person who does not want to be associated with any of these qualities. They do not want to be represented by “those people.”
Through each of these scenarios, the pushes can continue — all of them, in their own way, are earned. At face value they are reasonable egress points. Each, however, is overcomable with the proper lessons — whether those come from parents, faith leaders, teachers, or peers. Jews writ large need to learn to understand their identity and experience inside the notion of Jewish peoplehood. Armed with that framing, they can learn to fight back against these pushes.
Like any group or tribe, there will always be benefits and downsides to belonging. Each of these is a salient risk that needs to be monitored by Jewish institutions if they want to fight against the internalization of systemic Judeophobia. This is particularly important because pushes can be controlled from within the Jewish ecosystem. Pulls out of Jewish identity are much harder to monitor and control. In the next segment, we will explore some of the many situations that can tempt Jews to start heading down the asymptote of assimilation.
Internalized Judeophobia: Explaining the Self-Hating Jew
--- “Israel has converted Jews from people who were not harmful to anyone, to people who are harmful to the whole planet. Who are the chaos engine of humanity, and of the west.”