Think about one aspect of your identity. This can be your name, a common family practice, a value, belief, cultural practice, or an item that shapes your identity.

               My family has quite a few holiday traditions during the wintertime. We’ve had the same holiday decorations for a long as I can remember, plus or minus a few ornaments and Hanukkah candles of course. We have a short string of Hanukkah themed lights that I’m surprised still work, we have a “HAPPY HANUKKAH” banner, we have endless strings of Christmas lights that we spend hours untangling and replacing lights on every year (you may suggest a better organizational system but that’s never gonna happen). We have our simple but beautiful golden menorah. 

There’s always Christmas music, and the occasional Hanukkah song, playing over a mobile speaker while we decorate the tree, and we sing a terrible rendition of Oh Hanukkah every night after lighting the candles on the menorah. 

We gather with my extended family in Chicago and light  around 7 different menorahs (it’s a tradition in my family, and possibly others, to give your kids a menorah when they move out so almost everyone brings a menorah to this gathering) as my mom and her siblings try to remember their back and forth one-word-at-a-time Hanukkah prayers and my uncle and cousin intermittently shout “BANANA” during Oh Hanukkah causing everyone (really mostly just me) to laugh and make our already horribly out of tune and out of sync version of the song even worse. 

While I love our family traditions (and there are a lot of them) being half-Jewish and half-Christian but also not at all religious can be confusing. I enjoy celebrating Christmas because it’s fun and I enjoy decorating the house with my family, but I love celebrating Hanukkah; in part because of our family traditions but also because it is something that is important to me. This feeling is very hard to explain to people who are not specifically half-Jewish, but I will try my best. 

I have no connection to Christmas outside of it being fun but being Jewish and celebrating Hanukkah feels like a very important part of my identity. I’ve talked about this feeling with a friend of mine who is also half-Jewish, and we found it very relatable. Being Jewish is a part of my family history and my identity whereas being Christian is kind of just a thing (I’m not attacking Christianity this is just how it shows up in my life). I also feel more connected to being Jewish because Judaism is matrilineal; if your mom is Jewish, which mine is, you are too.

The best way I can think of to describe my identity would be to say that I am culturally Jewish but not religious. While I think that is an apt description of my identity, the more confusing part is that I have always felt guilty for not being more religious or knowing more about Judaism and Hebrew. Part of my guilt comes from the fact that I know almost nothing about my family history besides the fact that my great grandparents came to the US, more specifically Chicago, before the Holocaust and that some of my family likely died in the Holocaust. 

It feels disrespectful for me to say that I’m Jewish, when I don’t believe in the religion, while people who actually practice this religion are still constantly facing hate for it. It also feels wrong that so many people died for being Jewish, but I get to have fun with the holidays without actually practicing the religion, but the holidays are important to me, and I don’t want to stop celebrating them. Do you see the conundrum here?

I often start thinking about all of this around the holidays, but I still mostly just enjoy the winter scenery and our fun family traditions without worrying too much about whether or not I actually deserve to be Jewish but maybe this year I’ll finally ask my grandfather more about our family.