In the summer of 2006, I traveled to the Balkans with a group of 23 Palestinian American and Jewish American college students. 

 

We sat on chairs made for children in a sticky Belgrade classroom in June, fanning ourselves with our massive course readers.  The staff, half Palestinian and half Jewish, had split us into two mixed groups, A and B.  Luckily, they had placed me in Group B, with the cool kids.  At this stage of the trip, there were still serious social navigation issues to be considered.     

A thought experiment: begin by writing down eight aspects of your identity.

I chose three easily: Jewish, American, woman.  Boy, my mother would be proud.  

After thinking for a moment, I added: Student.  Then: Texan.  Everyone in New York thought of me as Texan, anyway.   

Next: Israeli.  After all, my father is Israeli, my family Israeli, one of my passports— Israeli.  Sure, I had never really considered myself Israeli, but in many ways, I strongly identified as Israeli.  Didn’t I?  When pressed?  If they asked about it, I would have an explanation anyway. 

And for that matter: Moroccan.  My family had lived in Morocco for hundreds of years.  Morocco is in my blood, in my family traditions, in my understanding of myself.  Moroccan.  Yes.

Only one left.  Alright, how about something more personal.  I am a writer.  Or a theologian.  (I had just spent a year studying theology in Cambridge.)  That could be one: theologian/writer.  Excellent. 

Why wasn’t everyone else done yet?  What were they writing?  There were only eight words to write down.  How long could it take? 

Thought experiment: the staff informed us that aliens had taken over the earth.  At this point, I doubted the staff’s clearly biased information, but alright, I would imagine that little green aliens had taken over our classroom in a big spaceship.  They would let us live, the staff said, but first we had to give up two of our eight chosen identities.

Easy, peasy.  Obviously Moroccan was the first to go.  The connection there had always been tenuous.  And in any case, while my family might be Moroccan, I was certainly not Moroccan by any stretch of the imagination.  If asked, I would explain that I was really Moroccan-Israeli.  “Foreign” might have covered it better.  But the aliens were wise to consolidation and demanded certitude.   

Texan was not terribly interesting and American pretty much covered that anyway.  Goodbye, Texan.  

But the aliens were not appeased, the staff said.  Two more identities had to go. 

Student was disposable because it was a temporary state of being.  Of course, I considered myself a life-long student of the world, but that was probably covered under writer/theologian.

And woman, while certainly important, was really just a fact of life, not an identity I needed to express to the group. 

Once more, the aliens demanded satisfaction (for imaginary aliens they were quite demanding).  We were to throw away two more identities, and select a final pair to present to the group.  (The aliens were violently interested in the intersection of identity-politics and conflict resolution, it seemed.)

I had four identities left: Jewish, writer/theologian, American and Israeli. 

I hesitated over American.  I had just spent a year in England, and visions of New York in the rain and Philip Roth books danced in my head to the soundtrack of a Woody Allen movie.  To be American seemed incredibly important, but in this room it did not set me apart.   

I wanted to keep Israeli, but was I really Israeli?  If I were to say, “I definitely think of myself as Israeli,” would I believe it?  Was it something I had thought before or an identity I wanted to have in this room where nationality mattered not a little?

Couldn’t I keep them all and not decide?  Damn, I hated these aliens.

I kept writer/theologian.  I wanted to be a writer.  And I wanted to be a thinker.  (I also wanted everyone in the room to think that I was smart.)

And that left Jewish.

For all the questioning, re-imagining and truth-stretching I had to do to keep other identities in the ring, Jewish was one identity that was not optional. 

It was not a choice.  It was not a conclusion I came to by considering how I wanted this group of Jews and Palestinians to see me. 

If I threw it away, I imagined the aliens would take one look at my remaining identities and throw me in an intergalactic rehabilitation facility, where I would be forced to look at photographic stills of my ancestors in the shtetl and my ancestors in the mellah, sing Cheeri-Bim/Cheeri-Bom, and tread broth in a giant vat of matzah ball soup until I cried out “Okay, yes!  Yes!  In the words of Daniel Pearl, I am a Jew!  I swear if you let me out of this cage, I’ll donate to the JNF!”

They were doing a number on me, these imaginary aliens. 

And so that is what I told the group.  Whatever other identities might come and go, of these two things I am certain: I am a writer, and I am a Jew.

When it came time to share, and I heard the answers the other students had come up with, some of which were abstract words like "desert" and "jazz," I felt a little sheepish that of my eight original choices, half were nationalities (Texas, of course, being a sovereign state).  But I was pleased that I had discarded all of them in the end, and kept one group identity, one personal.  One tying me to the past, one opening the possibilities of the future.  Maybe every once in a while we all need some aliens to sit us down and force us to consider what our identities really are.