Not the only Jew in the room after all

I’m not (yet) afraid of being physically attacked for my Jewishness, but in the current climate “only Jew” has started to feel less an amusing pastime and more like an isolating secret. It was with these thoughts that I attended an American friend’s birthday party in Bethnal Green last weekend. Most of the guests were London transplants like me, but that was about as far as I expected our cultural commonalities to go. It therefore came as quite the surprise when I encountered not just one Jewish partygoer, but two. 

It was a few hours into the evening when a kind-eyed American approached me and said he’d noticed the Hebrew tattoo on my shoulder. Was I Jewish? he asked. I answered, with some caution, that I was.

“Me too – and so is she,” he said pointing to a girl across the room, a Canadian friend of a friend whom he’d also just met. We waved her over and for a moment we all marvelled at one another like long lost mishpocheh, giddy with our discovery. We commiserated over how much we’d hated Hebrew school, traded bar and bat mitzvah stories and discussed the Jewish delis we missed from home. Afterwards we shared a childlike group high-five. “Look at us,” the girl said. “The Jew Crew.”

We didn’t talk about antisemitism or Israel or Gaza. We didn’t bond over feelings of fear or outrage at political injustices. We were, for that brief conversation, just excited to be seen as ourselves – a few lone wolves in a city far from home, where we’d all got used to being the only Jew in the room.

It might sound silly to people whose Jewishness plays a more central role in their social lives, to those readers who bump shoulders with other members of the tribe everywhere they go. But I’m a secular Jew who has, especially over the last few years, compartmentalised my Jewishness to fit into ever smaller and narrower shapes; in some rooms I’ve felt like I’m not Jewish enough, or not Jewish in the right way, and in others I’ve felt garishly Jewish simply for being the only one. I’ve had my Jewishness used as a pretext for others to vent about Israel and interrogate me on my stance on the Middle East, as if I speak on behalf of Jews and Israelis everywhere, and I’ve watched the same kind of polemical attitude to the current situation create fault lines within the global Jewish community itself.

That’s why it felt so precious to connect with Jewish strangers over such simple, immutable little joys, common to Jews everywhere.

My Hebrew tattoo had become an inadvertent calling card, an unorthodox signifier of the identity I’d otherwise never be recognised for, and I’d forgotten how good it felt to be recognised. Not for all the terrible things our people have had to endure recently, but for the fundamental shared experiences that make us proud to be Jewish.

Because it’s nice to know, at least every once in a while, that I’m not really the only Jew in the room.