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modern appropriation of controversial symbology is most often a privilege for those who don’t have the emotional bur- den of that history). But it’s not just what your people have been through, but how that weight is carried. Many people die, but that experience engenders a resolve (the same one that drives Zionism) to preserve your identity and culture. Increasingly, as I have got older I have felt a survival-pride that I think many people of Jewish heritage feel. Not proud of themselves personally, but of their culture; its survival a testament to the failure of anti-Semitism. Essentially anti- Semitism and its more brutal manifestations, in systematic attempts to destroy Jewish culture, engenders a sense of belonging. Or an unwillingness to renounce something that was so wounded.
But as I said, I wasn’t really raised within Jewish culture in a very explicit way, so my decision does still feel like a person- al choice. For others, even after a few generations, whether or not they feel part of a Diaspora, is less of a choice. I think this feeling of being part of a Diaspora is dependent on
how much your family maintains culture from their previ- ous country, and also to what degree you are accepted as
a member of the country that your family has migrated to. A person whose family migrated to Australia 150 years ago might still deeply feel like a part of a Diaspora if constantly asked endless times, “But where are you really from?” For me in Australia, walking around with an Australian accent, white, and not being raised religiously enough to wear the yarmulke or something that visibly mark me as outside mainstream WASP culture, I am accepted and recognised as 100% Australian enough, so any feelings of Diaspora, for me are more a self-imposed attempt to acknowledge where I came from. Occasionally if I tell people of my Jewish background, they look surprised and say something like, ‘but you look so Aryan’. In fact this is one of the reasons
my grandfather survived the holocaust. He is also tall, fair and has blue eyes. (He was occasionally called a ‘sheigitz’, derogatory Yiddish slang for a non-Jewish male, because he wasn’t stereotypically Jewish looking.)
So like I said in the previous paragraph, there wasn’t really any external pressure from Australian society that pushed me into feeling a part of the Jewish Diaspora, but instead it was more of a self-imposed choice. This works according to a concept of identity in which people are free to identify as whatever parts of their background their personal feeling and experience attaches them to. However, I still question my ability to maintain a Jewish identity with my quite frag- mented experience of the culture. Am I really able to pick and choose from the traditions of family history while still respecting the integrity of those traditions? Is it slightly hol- low to perpetuate the thanking of the providence of God in Friday night prayers, if I myself don’t have a real faith in that god? It would be easy enough to teach my hypothetical chil- dren to follow the first part of Rabbi Hillel’s famous summa- tion of the Torah: “That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbour”. However, he also follows it up with “.... Go forth and study”, which seems to suggest that being a good Jew also involves understanding the religion on a more complex level. Furthermore, am I able to identify as Jewish as an individual alone, without really being part a Jewish community and embracing the deeply communal aspect of Jewishness? And if did try to involve myself more in a Jewish
community, would I be accepted according to their criteria of belonging? There can often be a harsh exclusivity; the natural flipside of a sense of community and inclusivity. I’ve met several left-wing Australians from European Dias- pora backgrounds who seem to really embrace an identity of their family backgrounds. To some degree I think this
a way to have a sense of cultural identity that feels less problematic than an ‘Australian’ one. A way to get the warm and self-affirming feeling of a personal identity that doesn’t make one feel simultaneously guilty. Because identifying as an Australian might mean identifying a part of a group that’s driving an another diasporic process; the internal Diaspora of Aboriginal people. I don’t look down on them either, it could be partly what drives me away from taking on an ‘Australian identity’ in any more than a sarcastic way.
My grandfather was finally buried in Queensland, Austra- lia, a long way from Jaslo, Poland. In his Eulogy my uncle said; ‘And yet whist I did not experience these hardships and he rarely spoke of them, they are with me as if a part of my skin and the blood that pumps through my body.’ When I first reflected on this, after reading it again recently, I thought, how? How are they part of your blood and skin, that was born here, in the relative peace and security of Australia? And strangely enough what my mind first drift- ed to was a scientific study that I read about when I was at university. It was about some Swedish researchers who discovered that grandparents who experienced famine during their teenage years in their lives, actually passed down this experience to their grandchildren genetically.*
It would be an extreme exaggeration of the science to claim that gives Jewish grandchildren some flesh-and- blood experience of European Anti-Semitism, but in some ways I think that an experience as strong as that is per- haps still in some way resonating from our genes. Children of Diaspora will never truly know the hardships that drove our parents or grandparents from where they originally lived. However their experiences still flow through us in our culture, and also apparently, through our blood.
* Well not exactly genetically, but in how our given genes express themselves (epigenetically). Google it if you want a more intelligent summary: ‘Epigenetics Överkalix famine study’ should work. A lot more research since then has supported the existence of this phenomena.