“I’m about to go to the chapter house for Shabbat, wanna come?” my friend asked; 

“I think I’ll pass,” I replied.

“Are you going to Hillel instead? I could be down for that”

“No, I don’t do Shabbat dinners. I’m actually not Jewish, just my dad is”

“So you’ve never eaten a Shabbat dinner before?”

“Nope”

“They’re so good, and it’s free so why wouldn’t you just come with me anyway?”

“It would be awkward”

“If you’re afraid of getting called out for being not-Jewish, trust me, it’s not gonna happen; nobody thinks your not-Jewish—”

“That’s not what I meant”

“Are you really not gonna come with me?”

“I already told you no. Let me ask you this: Wouldn’t you feel out of place at midnight mass?”

“Obviously, I’m Jewish”

“Right.  So you wouldn’t want to attend a Catholic mass.”

“Of course not.  Why would I?”

“Exactly…I’d feel out of place at a Jewish ceremony.”

“Look your dad’s Jewish, you’re 50% Jewish, that’s Jewish enough, get over it and come with me, I don’t wanna walk alone in this cold.”

This conversation I had on my Jewishness, or not, was with my fraternity brother. Like many other members of my fraternity that is two-thirds Jewish, he assumed I was Jewish because of my last name, Levine. I have reluctantly become engaged in this conversation numerous times throughout my life. It’s happened with Jews and non-Jews, with family members and non-family members, with people I’ve met for the first time, complete strangers, and with close friends. The conversation begins the same way every time: with an assumption. However, the conversation never ends the same way. Sometimes the people making the assumption of my Jewishness are left perplexed and even confused; at other times, they understand my logic.

In rare cases, the assumer becomes defensive and attempts to battle me over my assertion that I am not Jewish. The reaction becomes more intense, even heated, when the assumer believes I am trying to dissociate myself from being Jewish because I think there is something wrong with the religion or the ethnic background. I’ve seen that happen: by voicing my view that I am not Jewish, I have made people upset, especially those who pride themselves on being Jewish.

But I would have to be Jewish in the first place to dissociate from it, right? And that is the way my assertion is grounded: I was not raised in the Jewish faith and my family does not observe Jewish customs. As far as religion goes: as every Jew knows, every last one of them who has delved into the Torah and the Talmud and the like, Jews get their Jewishness from their mothers alone. Fathers cannot hand it down, and my mother is Catholic.

I thought I could use this as my unconditional line of defense: my mother is Catholic, I cannot be Jewish—end of story. But, as I grew up, I realized that being Jewish wasn’t that clear-cut. Matrilineal inheritance originates in Biblical times and can be thought of as a “pre-diaspora” definition of being Jewish. Today, the notions of Jewish religion and ethnicity are much less correlated then they were back then. While the matrilineal definition is still supported by the religious community, the broader Jewish community has expanded this definition to incorporate the notion of ethnicity.

As a result, both my father and I have seen ourselves at the center of a debate on our Jewishness. While my father was raised in the Jewish faith—by decision of my certifiably and fully Jewish grandfather—some Jews, especially Hasidic or more orthodox ones, would not even regard him as truly Jewish because my father’s mother is also Catholic. Other Jews, perhaps more reform minded, might actually view Jewishness as completely motivated by faith. So there are competing definitions here. It is easy to have the non-Jewish Jew, the irreligious or even atheistic Jew, who was handed their Jewishness through their mother. But, it is also easy to find the Jewish non-Jew: that person who cannot be Jewish because of a non-Jewish mother, but who has adopted the religion (Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump, comes to mind).

Then you could have the non-Jewish non-Jew, myself. That’s where I fit among the categories. I’m not religious and do not ascribe to any religion. I’m not part of any religious group through a blood relationship.  And yet, some see me as Jewish by virtue of my surname. I can’t get around it. This mislabeling of me has only gotten worse in college. Ignore my last name, everyone; I want to shout: let me tell you who I really am!

I grew up in an agnostic, non-religious household. Put differently, my father was raised Jewish but felt that he could not embrace the religion fully, as my grandmother is Catholic. My Catholic mother ran from the nuns and Catholic school and the whole religion about as quickly as she could as a teenager. Growing up, my parents instilled in me the notion that religion is a choice: it is not something imposed on you by one’s bloodlines or ancestry. In this environment, I was not exposed to Jewish traditions either.

And here’s the rub that has driven a few stir crazy: my father gave me a Jewish surname, “Levine,” which is about as Old Testament as it gets (from the Levites), but could not— did not—hand me down the religious part.

As I mentioned before, I do not identify as being Jewish. Yet others do: they make assumptions about my identity because of my last name, or other circumstances. The first time I can remember being labeled as Jewish was when I was eight years old and my Irish Catholic grandmother bought me a magnet saying “I’m proud to be Jewish” with an imprint of a Jewish star. Even my parents were baffled by her gift; they concluded it was because she wished I had been raised Jewish. I did not think much about my grandmother’s gesture at the time; however, looking back on it, I can think of it as foreshadowing my future labeling as Jewish.

Unlike what some people may assume, I have no problem with Judaism. Many of my family members are Jewish, as are many of my friends, and I have been taught all my life to respect other people’s religious beliefs. The reason why I feel the urge to correct people when they label me as Jewish revolves around my identity. Being Jewish is not how I identify myself; being agnostic is how I define myself in regards to religion. Most importantly, as an only child descended from American Jews and Italian Catholics, I cherish being different in the eyes of my peers and not fitting exactly into any single category, like Jewish.

I did not realize the extent to which I would be classified as Jewish until the first day of school in sixth grade, when I returned home after living abroad.

Fourth grade had just ended when my mother delivered the news that she had been named to a significant position at the World Bank, requiring a relocation to Warsaw, Poland.  It was a position she could not turn down. We moved at the end of the summer, not knowing that we would return to Washington after only one year. My family assumed that I was sad about leaving and that the move was causing a great amount of disruption in my life. 

In fact, they were quite wrong. Excitement toppled all my feelings of misery as I thought about leaving my friends, my home, and the life I had in Washington. I decided that Poland was going to be a new adventure, one that I wholeheartedly embraced.

Only a few roads were paved in Konstancin, a small village outside Warsaw known for its invigorating air located about ten miles south of the city. It was in Konstancin that we settled. On my first day of fifth grade, driving to the American School of Warsaw, my father and I rocked back and forth as we drove across dirt roads and paths fit only for horse-drawn cars. At the beginning of class, we were asked to introduce ourselves to our classmates. Timidly, I stood up and told a class of twenty-five classmates whom I had not met before that I was born in Washington DC, loved Star Wars, and had a passion for “American” football, the only kind of football.

In Poland, everyone and everything around me was different—and I cherished that more than anything else in the world. Experiencing difference is what inspired me as a child; it explains why I became infatuated with Poland. Poland quenched my desires for meeting different people, experiencing a foreign culture, and finding adventure. At restaurants in downtown Warsaw, instead of ordering chicken or a burger, I would choose to eat the traditional Polish dishes such as kaczka z jablkami (roast duck with apples) or kielbasa (Polish sausage). While I found some of these dishes very satisfying, and others revolting, it honestly did not matter. The act of taking that chance and ordering a plate that I could not even pronounce thrilled me. I begged my parents to show me more of Poland.  Warsaw’s World War Two museum and memorials, the historic Jewish Ghetto, and the Royal Castle were not sufficient, and I thrived from this sense of adventure that every new discovery I made instilled in me.

Forming friendships with my peers at the American School strengthened my desire to be different. At the American School, about one third of the students were Polish; they were sent to the School because their parents wanted them to learn English. Another third were American students whose parents worked at the embassy or in American businesses in Warsaw. The final third included a mix of students from all over the world, many of them from Sweden and Germany, whose parents worked in international agencies or multinational corporations.

With my mathematics teacher, an American named Mr. Benson, I founded the American football club at the school. My dad helped to coach the club. I spent the afternoons teaching my new friends how to properly grip and throw a football, even as they fiercely argued over their national soccer teams. My football—the American kind—would never replace their love for their kind of football, the European kind. I loved everything new—teaching football, finding new friends, experiencing new places—while valuing my own difference in the eyes of everyone around me.

It was not until I came back to the Washington for sixth grade, where I attended Sidwell Friends School, that my difference was challenged instead of embraced. Unlike in Warsaw, everyone I met at Sidwell was from the same area: Bethesda or Chevy Chase, two suburban communities at the edge of Washington, or Georgetown. Even the students that were relocated from foreign countries shared very similar views and experiences. The homogeneity of my friends and, worse, the conformity that defined them shocked me. In their eyes, “similar” meant normal and acceptable, while “different” meant weird. Being different was to be avoided. 

At the American School, my friends revolved around difference. Differences among my classmates fueled the school’s vibrant social dynamic with its multinational student body. Instead of inquiring about my experiences in Poland, the majority of my new classmates at Sidwell acted bored whenever I brought up my time in Warsaw. It was as if my experience in Poland demeaned my worth.

Once knowing my last name, my friends at Sidwell immediately labeled me as Jewish; they immediately stripped me of my identity and difference. That is, the way I saw it: I was not religious.  They didn’t get it. In my mind, being labeled as Jewish by my peers was a tactic used to normalize me, to make me “similar” in their eyes—a notion I detested. I could not achieve my own self-perceived identity in the face of a Jewish label.

When I set foot on the University of Michigan’s campus three years ago, it happened again. I ended up with, and fraternized with, an overwhelming number of Jewish students. I made many Jewish friends. I was immediately labeled as Jewish, just as I had been at Sidwell. My Jewish and non-Jewish peers assumed I would join Hillel and rush all the Jewish fraternities. I did neither.

They asked me what “camps” I had attended—that is, Jewish summer camps to learn Hebrew. I had attended none. My friends asked me if I would travel with them on birthright journeys to Israel in the following summer. I declined. The assumptions became more widespread: even my peers who did not know my name assumed I was Jewish based on my looks. I soon came to realize a stereotype within the student body at Michigan that I had become a victim of: that short, semi-bearded, brown-haired, brown-eyed guys studying here are Jewish. My self-perceived identity of being different could not match what they believed or assumed about me. In their eyes, I was simply “Jewish” just like the other thousands of students on campus.

Whatever my chosen identity, some friends of mine argue that I am ethnically Jewish, or culturally inclined to be Jewish, because of my father and it is not something I can debate. Others believe that I am not Jewish because I do not observe Jewish customs; those people interpret “Jewish” as a strictly religious identity. And I’ve heard even the most categorical view: according to Orthodox Jews in no way can I be considered Jewish—even if I were to choose this as my religious identity—because I was born to a Catholic mother.

I find these interpretations interesting, and frustrating, because I wish my identity were not up for interpretation or discussion. To me, it feels like I have become a victim of a cultural marker. But it is my identity and I need to choose what I am. I wish I did not have to launch into a discussion, which could very easily turn argumentative, every time someone assumes I am Jewish. I feel as though I have no input, no voice, into what makes me different. It is assumed on my behalf that I am Jewish.    

Even when I correct my assumer, even if they end up agreeing with my logic, they act passively. My defense is met with a complacent: “sure”. I believe this is due to the fact that being Jewish is so common that people address the topic with indifference. Imagine, for a second, that the dispute was over how someone perceived his or her gender, which, like their religion, is another piece of someone’s identity. The assumer would not act so passively after being corrected; it would be more than awkward, even offensive toward the victim of their assumption. Someone cannot impose a gender on someone else who doesn’t identify that way.

I realize that my last name is Jewish; so the assumption that I am Jewish seems easy to make. Still, it is my choice. I want the ultimate say, the final word, on my own identity. People should treat identity as self-defined, meaning they should accept an individual’s identity, as that individual perceives it without interpretation or challenge. People should respect my chosen identity and not try to force an assumed identity on me. I’m not here to make them comfortable. Just as I value people with different identities and backgrounds, my identity should be valued as different in my eyes and in the eyes of my peers.