Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States by Samira K. Mehta

Author:Samira K. Mehta
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Religion, Christian Rituals & Practice, General, Judaism, Rituals & Practice
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2018-03-13T00:56:26.649000+00:00

A Little Latin, a Lot Jewish

The Cordero family further complicates the categories of race, religion, and ethnicity—a family that, unlike the Wilsons, can to a certain extent “choose” to perform their ethnic and racially mixed identity, or belie it.15 Malka Singer Cordero grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where the Jewish community is small and closely connected. Her parents are both Ashkenazi Jews from the northeastern United States who relocated for her father’s academic career. Malka’s family was very focused on education—she noted that her sense of self was derived from academic achievement. She describes Judaism as central to her self-understanding, in part because the Jewish community was very small and very academically focused, full of transplanted Yankees. Her family belonged to an Orthodox synagogue; she notes there were three synagogues in town, and her parents had selected the nicest rabbi, though they themselves were not at all religious people. As a result, Malka observed that her Jewish education, which she described as taking place in a “musty, old men drinking schnapps” kind of environment, did not match her home life in any way. Her grandmother, however, had lived in Palestine in the 1930s, spoke Hebrew, and was very much a Zionist. She took Malka and her older brother to Israel and gave Malka a strong sense of Jewish identity. By the time Malka met Juan, however, she was working in civil rights and public service law in a large southern city. She explained that she was often on the road, working with prisoners, and was not part of a Jewish community. She went to the local Reconstructionist synagogue for High Holiday services when she was available, but her entire life was her work and the friends and community that it inspired. Looking for activities outside of work, Malka decided to take kung fu, and it was there that she met Juan.

Like Malka’s, Juan’s family was in San Antonio, but he had grown up in Puerto Rico. He attended Catholic boys’ schools for his entire education. He described his family as “doing what they are supposed to do as Catholics: going to mass, taking First Communion,” but it was in his Jesuit high school that he started to explore religion more deeply. The Jesuits, he said, “broke him open to the wonder of religion in the world.” He talked about going on retreat and doing yoga on the beach, of being asked and encouraged to engage with a broad range of religious traditions and philosophies. “In a way,” he joked, “that was the Jesuits’ mistake. They did not make me hate religion. They made me see that there are ways in which it is all true. And then it was hard to stick, faithfully, to the Catholic Church.” Juan explained that while he knows that there are dark spots in the Church’s history, and certainly terrible things have happened more recently, he never had a bad experience with the Church. The Jesuits who were his teachers were young men who advocated for him and inspired him.

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