Let Our Existence Disrupt the Narrative

Maia Zelkha explains how finding clarity about her identity as a Jew led her to make Aliyah, embracing Israel as her ancestral homeland and rejecting modern labels.

Nov 20, 2024

Editor’s Note: I am fifty-nine years old and have covered Jewish issues long enough to remember when there was concern that with the “end of antisemitism,” how would young people connect with Judaism? That was in the late 1990s. Obviously, the end of Jew-hatred never materialized, but neither did young people necessarily turn away from Judaism. That’s why I was happy when I heard about Wicked Son’s new anthology, Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out. I asked editor David Hazony if we could reprint one of those essays, and he suggested this one by Maia Zelkha, who refuses to let anybody else define who she is as a Jew. I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did. — Howard Lovy

I was nine years old when I visited Israel for the first time. There are three moments that I distinctly remember: seeing the Kotel, visiting distant relatives in Hebron, and a newspaper article about Batsheva Unterman, who at the time had been recently murdered by a terrorist in the 2008 Jerusalem bulldozer attack. A gruesome photo of her was plastered on the front page. I gathered from the adults around me that she had saved her infant’s life moments before she was crushed to death.

I didn’t understand much around me, nor the detailed history—nor the politics—but I was acutely aware that I was in a place where Jews had lived for thousands of years. We visited ancient Jewish communities, landmarks, and holy cities. Hebrew was both a foreign and familiar language to my ears. I couldn’t comprehend any of the chatter around me, but I recognized its sounds and intonations from knowing the Hebrew alphabet, and from the few prayers and Shabbat songs that I could recite by heart. I knew I was in a place of our peoplehood and history.

That history, I understood from a young age, was frequently marked with hatred and violence. While we walked around Hebron, we entered a small museum dedicated to the 1929 Hebron Massacre, an Arab massacre that resulted in the brutal murder of 67 Jews who had been part of Hebron’s 800-year-old Jewish community, with the torture and maiming of hundreds more. A special room was curtained-off, with a sign that warned “Caution: Graphic Content.” When my parents weren’t looking, I entered the mysterious, forbidden space and was confronted with a gallery of black-and-white photos depicting dead children, people wrapped in bloody bandages, and spilled brains. I ran out of the room, unable to catch my breath. In my child-mind, a simple truth was clear to me.

Those people were murdered because they were Jewish.

Batsheva Unterman was murdered because she was Jewish.

The people who murdered them hated Jews.

I was a Jew.

When I was a child, my understanding of who I was and how the world related to me was simple, without any modern-day notions or complications of race, nationality, ethnicity, or politics. I didn’t understand or care about why people hated us, or wanted to kill us; just that they did. I didn’t understand or care that my mother was Ashkenazi, or that my father was Mizrahi; the color of their skin was of utter, absurd irrelevance. They were Jewish; I was Jewish; we were Jewish.

But as I became older, that initial pureness and simplicity I possessed in understanding who I was became muddled and confused. In university, I was bombarded with strange rhetoric around identity that I found difficult to relate to. Buzzwords like “colonizer,” “indigenous,” “privileged,” “underprivileged,” “white,” and “Bipoc” fiercely entered all mainstream dialogue on identity, while non-Jews around me pushed me into its various categories. I’ve been told that I’m “white-passing,” I’ve been told that I look Arab, and I’ve been told that I look European. I’ve been told that because my dad is Iraqi and my mom is “white,” I am “biracial.” I’ve been told that because I am Jewish I am white, and because I am Jewish I am not white. The pressure to fit into a certain “box” of American perceptions of race and color made me deeply uncomfortable. I was none of those things. So then, who the hell was I?

My assertion that I was completely and solely Jewish was rejected by everyone. “That’s a religion, not a race.” “The idea that Jews are a race is literally what Hitler thought, you’re going by his definition?” “It’s an ethno-religion, not an actual ethnicity.” In many ways, they were right. To be Jewish is not a race or ethnicity. I would even argue that it isn’t a religion, since an innumerable number of atheist Jews exist.

If none of those options, then what is “Jewish”? I was deeply confused about how to present my identity to others; I often walked on eggshells when discussing things that were central to my identity, like my connection to Israel, or pride in my nation—which was not America—for instance. In my American-Jewish upbringing, I learned about our culture, religion, history, and struggle against persecution. Yet something felt missing in the story. I yearned for a concept that tied it all together.

For a long time I tried to fit into the American narrative of race so others would accept me; I realize now that was only because I lacked the words to fully represent who I was. Much of the fierce dialogue I engaged in at university about my identity as Jew was one that only existed while I was on the defense—things that we weren’t, misconceptions about us, the ways people misunderstood our customs, misinformation about Israel. I was desperate to be accepted, to fight and explain why every falsehood people believed about Jews was wrong. I recall once during a conversation with a friend about civil rights, she casually mentioned how I was a white woman who had benefited from my ancestors’ whiteness. I stared at her, mouth agape in shock when I reminded her that I’m Jewish. She was unable to recognize the incredible irony of her statement, despite my attempts to explain how Jews historically are not “white.”

It was only at the end of my time in university did I ever participate in or lead any dialogue at all about all the things that we were—our truths, and our beliefs. Why did every university speaker’s lecture on Jewish history I attended only discuss antisemitism? How come every Jewish student group typically only met to discuss Jew-hatred on campus, and how to combat it? In my last year there, when I presented to the Humanities Institute a research project I wrote on Hebrew poetry, Jewish collective consciousness, and our warrior-poet lineage, my mostly non-Jewish audience was stunned. Many came up to me after and said they had never known about any of those things before. Even more incredibly, many said that they wanted to learn more. I found a fountain of energy, joy, and passion within me when I began telling the narrative of who I truly am as Jew, and not just what I’m not.

I began to explore that feeling more when I arrived in Israel a few months later, to finish my last semester of university on an exchange program. I experienced a pivotal moment the night before Yom Kippur, when I found myself making my way to the Kotel for the last night of selichot, the period of weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which prayers of repentance and forgiveness are chanted. As I made my way through the Old City, I was astonished by the sight of thousands of Jews of all colors, religious levels, and backgrounds literally sprinting with excitement to reach the Western Wall. The entire complex was packed with people, all singing the same songs, standing before the same God, and in the same holy place where our peoplehood was born.

It was then and there that I truly, deeply understood who I was; it was as if I was shaken with a memory of the pure, simple understanding that I had as a child of what it meant to be a Jew. That we are, at our core, an ancient tribe that survived into the modern era—miraculously I might add, given the numerous attempts to destroy us. That I am part of that tribe, one that for thousands of years has had its own unique land-based rituals, purity customs, oral history, Temple lineage, harvest festivals, history and mythology, spiritual doctrines, tribal symbols, and language.

That I come from a lineage of warrior-poets. That we were violently forced from our land into a diaspora for thousands of years, yet always had communities that remained there, despite their struggle to survive routine persecution from their invaders.

That unlike Spanish, English, French, or Arabic, our language never spread to other parts of the world due to colonialism. And unlike Christian or Islamic conquests, neither did our spiritual doctrines.

That when Columbus arrived in the Americas, he didn’t find Catholic churches, Spanish architecture, communities of Spaniards, or any Spaniards for that matter. Yet when Diaspora Jews throughout history returned to Eretz Israel, we returned to a place that had troves of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, artifacts, ruins, Hebrew speakers, active Jewish communities and synagogues, and most notably, the ruins of our ancient Temple which in its direction we face when we pray three times a day.

That even the most isolated, unknown Jewish communities in history such as the Ethiopian Jews were found to have maintained highly similar traditions, purity customs, harvest festivals, dietary laws, and Temple memory as their Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi counterparts.

As I stood at the Kotel among thousands of other Jews, I was reminded of what Abraham Joshua Heschel famously wrote in God in Search of Man: “Unless being a Jew is of absolute significance, how can we justify the ultimate price which our people was often forced to pay throughout its history?” There was tremendous significance of my individual presence in that moment, absolute significance of each person around me. Simply standing there was enough. I was a tile in a mosaic of the tribe of Israel.

It must come as no surprise that only two weeks later, I decided to make Aliyah. My whole life, I had been told that we need Israel because of how the world rejects us; that we need Israel because in times of historic danger, we have nowhere else to go.

I’m sure those ideas have truth. But that’s not why I decided to return. I don’t need Israel because of the threat of people who hate me; I need Israel because it’s the place where my people came from and remained on since their conception. Because the thought of being ripped away from it stings my soul. Because it's a place which so many of my ancestors lived and died on; and because the ones who didn’t had constantly yearned to. I need Israel because I refuse to squeeze my identity into words and concepts that it clearly does not fit into; because I refuse to be suffocated by them. I need Israel because I am part of Israel, because I am a Jew, completely and solely.

It doesn’t adhere to the “narrative,” to all the words people like to hear these days. Good. Let our existence disrupt the narrative.

Maia Zelkha is the founding editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah Magazine, the first and only English-language literary magazine devoted to promoting and celebrating Mizrahi and Sephardic artistic culture and lineage. She is a contributor to the anthology Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out, and has published work with the Jewish Book Council, Parabola Magazine, Furrow Magazine, the Times of Israel Blogs, Vision Magazine, and more. She is currently part of Tel Aviv University's Master's program in Security and Diplomacy. Maia lives in a small moshav in central Israel.