The Star of David necklace rests in the back of my dresser drawer, wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into the same long thin blue velvet box that my mother stored it in when I was a child. My great-aunt Margaret who immigrated to America from Hungary before the Holocaust, gave it to me. Mom let me wear the necklace during the High Holy Days, but for the rest of the year she insisted it remain boxed and hidden beneath her sweaters.
I loved my gold star, with the smaller silver star inlaid over it, engraved with my initials and surrounded by gold filagree. But when I asked to wear it at other times of the year, Mom would say, “It’s not necessary to advertise that you’re Jewish.” And with that, she infused me with fear, confusion, and shame about being Jewish.
Traumatized as she was by events in her own life, including the backdrop of the Shoah, my mother probably intended to protect me from antisemitic persecution. Instead, she passed on to me her own alienation from our tradition.
As a child in Queens in the mid 1960s, I had many Jewish friends, girls and boys, who typically wore Jewish stars or the Hebrew letter chai on a chain. They all complained about having to attend Hebrew school twice a week. But I envied them, not just for the Judaica they wore, and the bar or bat mitzvah parties they eventually had but also for being able to share in celebrating the faith and culture into which I was born and from which I felt banned.
Mom never taught me anything about Judaism or what being Jewish meant. We never joined a synagogue. She never sent me to Hebrew school. Once the holidays ended, and she returned our menorah to its place on a shelf behind the gravy boat, she never said a word about our Jewish heritage. I felt like I was missing out on a deep, important mystery.
Throughout my teens and young adulthood, I craved a spiritual home and sense of belonging. Yet, I rejected any thought of being Jewish, partly because I felt too embarrassed by my lack of education to claim it; and because my mother’s increasing dependence on alcohol and Valium, eventually left her unemployable and landed us on public assistance. Dependent on welfare and food stamps, I nixed any possibility that I could be Jewish since, according to my young and uninformed observations, it required having two parents, a nice house, and wealth. Yet, despite telling myself that I could be something else, Baptist or Buddhist, I felt drawn to other Jews, especially those brave enough to wear a star.
I’ve never liked personal, physical displays, like character t-shirts, labels that flaunt expensive clothing, or personalized license plates. Similarly, I have experienced religious jewelry as off-putting. Why do people need to make their religious affiliation public? But the past 30 years of belonging to a reform synagogue and steeping myself in Jewish learning have given me insight. Wearing a star, for me, is not about telling the world but about telling myself, who I am.
And it terrifies me, as it did my mother. Indeed, there have been so many events over the years that have inspired me to wear my star as an act of solidarity: the march of antisemitic white nationalists in Charlottesville, the murders at the Tree of Life synagogue, and antisemitic defiling of property in my own Westchester community. But each time, I have succumbed to the fear that my mother handed down to me.
Not today. Not after a father and son opened fire at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, murdering 15 people and injuring dozens more. Stunned and sickened, my mind flooded with images from Schindler’s List, and then of ICE, rounding up illegal and legal immigrants, as Hitler’s SS rounded up Jews. Those are my people, I thought, of the dead and wounded Sydney celebrants. Any one of them could have been someone I love, or me.
After years of rising antisemitism, this most recent tragedy is what has finally and inexplicably stirred in me the need to announce my Jewish identity as a symbol of defiance and strength.
I am not unafraid. Every night, after our Chanukah candles burn out, I remove the menorah from the window and close the drapes. Wearing my star frightens me, too, which is why I have transferred it from the blue velvet box to its new place around my neck.
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