In the final year of my grandmother's life, we found out that she was not born in the United States. The truth slipped out in a Jewish nursing home in Brooklyn, out in the far reaches of the borough. Throughout her life, she had claimed Brooklyn as her home, but in the rush of a moment in conversation with fellow residents, she accidentally revealed Romania as her place of birth.
My grandmother had a way with words. She spoke a colourful form of English full of quips and turns of phrase, reserving Yiddish for exuberant blessings and disdain under her breath. She was a tough cookie with plenty of bravado and fight in her for a woman just under five feet tall.
From the time I knew her, decades later, her persona was indistinguishable from that of Brooklyn, her true home.
We never got a chance to discuss her origin story before she passed away. Instead, a few years later, I looked for traces of her life online and found her immigration records from the 1920s. Through an ancestry database, I located the moment she petitioned to become an American citizen.
On this document, I glimpsed her lost homeland. And I saw the way she was listed on this form as a member of the "Hebrew" race. I recognised her handwritten signature elsewhere on this document, but I knew this other designation was not conveyed in her own words.
This can be read as part of a much larger history in the US of drawing up official racial categories, most often used to inscribe and formalise discrimination, and more recently and occasionally, used to protect marginalised communities.
My grandmother, and millions of ancestors and forebearers like her, navigated the terrains of nationality in the US around diaspora and difference. They fled countries and a continent brimming with anti-Semitic violence, where newly announced policies and pogroms went hand in hand.
Then, they were strangers in a new country. Like many other marginalised peoples within the US, then and today, they were problems to be solved and disciplined. In the process of going from there to here, their names, our mother tongues, were conscripted for assimilation, misspelled to fit into narrow boxes. Some maintained core Jewish identities. Each made compromises to survive and adapt in order to find ways to belong. Even though I wish my grandmother shared her fuller story, I can grasp her reluctance to do so.
The American Jewish culture I grew up in operated around the symbol of the open door. Because whether the Prophet Elijah or a stranger came to you, the responsibility was to see that person as a part of your world. The space stands for the uncertainty that surrounds us. Hence one of my grandmother's favourite phrases, an offering of necessary and constant scepticism: "You don't know."
But the open door carries a set of questions, unresolvable, even across generations of general acceptance and privilege. At which times will we be labelled as other? When will we again become a problem to be solved?
With news last week of a presidential executive order "committed to combating the rise of anti-Semitism" and a coordinated wave of press from around the administration, questions reverberated about whether Judaism was being redefined as a race or nationality. Critics like Mark Joseph Stern have carefully pointed out nuances of the announcement and that "it's unclear whether [the] order will have any impact, given that it mostly just reaffirms the current law", while others on and off-line have speculated about why now and who this serves.
The answers to these questions are varied. The truth is, the confusion was the point.
From the lips of habitual falsifiers to our ears, I cannot imagine a good faith explanation of the rollout of the executive order. Its authors and champions are the same people who brought a pastor who said Jews are going to hell to a White House Hanukkah Party, called white supremacists who chanted "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville "very fine people", and who over and over defame our reputations and traditions for their own political gain.
They are neither experts nor reliable narrators on matters of bigotry and bias, also sowing seeds of racist and xenophobic animus directed at African Americans, Latinx communities, Muslim-Americans, and immigrants each day.
Hence, however the executive order is interpreted or implemented over time, this is another chapter in a long, painful epic of deliberate misrecognition. No matter the intent, the effect is to destabilise our sense of belonging, enforce control over our ideas, divide us among our allies, and steer Jewish identity from outside not within.
In other words, those who have fanned the flames of anti-Semitism now want us to believe they have the goodwill to extinguish them.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
