‘Maybe that’s why we always wear our hats’: On Being a Modern Jewish Immigrant

For millennia, one thing that has bound the Jewish people together has been our disparateness. Since Abraham first ‘passed through’ to the land of Israel and throughout our long sojourn in the diaspora, we have been known for being a people who travels – this blog is subtitled ‘Wanderings through Judaism’ for a reason. Often, we have not wandered willingly, as expulsions, pogroms, and Holocaust have uprooted us from the places we have worked so hard to make our homes. But, whatever our reasons, our wandering across seas and continents has shaped our languages, our customs, our very sense of who we are as a people.

My own family is no exception to this phenomenon. I, like so many other Jews around the world, am the descendant of generations of immigrants from multiple continents who, by an incredible series of events, eventually managed to converge in the same place long enough to enable me to exist. And now, at the age of 24, I, too, have joined these generations of travellers. Having spent most of my life in the UK, two days ago I was excited and grateful to receive my green card, making me a permanent resident of the United States.

The immigration process has given me plenty of opportunity to think about the generations of Jewish immigrants that came before me and how my experiences relate to theirs. Of course, there are plenty of differences between my experiences and those of Jews like my partner’s family who flocked to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not least my rather unromantic realisation that my personal equivalent to Ellis Island was, in fact, Newark Airport (although I did see the Statue of Liberty on the way in). It is even hard at times to relate to the journeys of my own family. I did not move from the country of my birth to escape persecution or political unrest, as my maternal grandparents did. Unlike many of my father’s ancestors, I did not come to a new land seeking better economic opportunities for myself and my children. I came because, nearly five years ago, I was lucky enough to fall in love with a man I was willing to follow across continents, and after long stretches of time on opposite sides of the Atlantic, we can finally look forward to the rest of our lives together.

That doesn’t mean that life as an immigrant has always been easy. The complexities of the green card application process meant that I spent the best part of a year unable to work or leave the US to visit my family, and the uncertainty as to whether I’d be allowed to stay here certainly took an emotional toll. Not to mention getting used to life in a completely different country, from navigating the healthcare system to realising that literally no-one understands me if I give my date of birth as ‘18^th October’ rather than ‘October 18^th’. In a political climate that is increasingly hostile to those of us coming from abroad, it was also somewhat disturbing to see an anti-immigration advert on television and realise that the people railing against job-stealing immigrants were, in fact, talking about me. But I feel so fortunate to have had so many new experiences and visited so many cities I have dreamed of seeing for years. What’s more, I fully appreciate that the process of becoming a US resident was, for me, relatively quick. I am uncomfortably aware that, had I not been white, university-educated, and a native English speaker, things could have been much harder. All of which is to say that it is certainly a massive privilege to be here.

Being an immigrant has also enabled me to consider further the multiple facets that make up my identity. In England, I felt somewhat ‘foreign’ because of my Jewishness – my religious practices and cultural identity set me apart from the dominant British culture. However, in America, a ‘country of immigrants’ where Jews are more fully integrated into the cultural fabric (just the other day, I heard an Irish-American politician use the word ‘mishegas’ – Yiddish for ‘craziness’ – in a radio interview), it is my Englishness that marks me out the minute I open my mouth. That’s not to say that I’m at any sort of disadvantage because of this – reactions to learning my country of origin usually take the form of complements about my accent or questions regarding my opinion of Brexit. It’s just disconcerting to have added another layer of ‘otherness’ to my identity that has nothing to do with being a ‘wandering Jew’.

If, then, my own immigration experience has made me focus more on my British identity, heightened my sense of belonging to the very country where my own immigrant ancestors finally settled, if I came to the US relatively secure in this identity, out of choice rather than necessity, how does this experience relate to those of previous generations of Jewish immigrants? At my grandfather’s funeral, nearly eleven years ago, the rabbi giving the eulogy said something I have never forgotten. Describing how my grandfather, an Austrian-born former Kindertransport refugee, had come to England and married my Indian-born grandmother, he declared, ‘It’s the story of the Jewish people’. We travel the world, we meet fellow Jews we never dreamed of encountering, we forge our own paths together, learning from each other all the way. I am proud to be continuing that story.