What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity?
a poetic intervention
by emet ezell
2024
Each year, more and more white Germans convert to Judaism. They dye their hair brown. They clasp Jewish star necklaces around their necks. They change their names to Rachel, to Hannah, to David, to Nathan.
“Jew-facing”*— Germans, often with Nazi heritage and sometimes with a fabricated ancestral rumor, who try to pass as Jewish, either through formal conversion or simply pretending.
This phenomenon transcends the political spectrum. Germans on both the right and the left love to claim a Jewish face. But one cannot convert out of an ancestral lineage. History is a porous thing, but it is not formless. It is not without implication.
What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity? Who decides?
Often, white Germans want more than to convert. They want power. They want to speak on behalf of all Jewish people. They want moral justification and an exotic thrill.
When one converts to Judaism, one does so in order to join a Jewish community. But what is conversion when the community has been entirely decimated?
In Germany, conversion is a career booster. German converts apply for Jewish scholarships. They sit on boards of Jewish foundations, run synagogues, and direct art museums. Throughout Germany, academic positions in Jewish Studies are held by German converts or pretenders, many of whom serve a Zionist apartheid agenda.
The more I speak with others about “Jew-facing” in Germany, the more I begin to understand its geopolitical implications. There are real material, social, and cultural resources at stake.
For white Germans, Jewishness remains an extractable and valuable resource: an instrumentalized costume. One that allows Germans to forge a Jewishness in their own image.
In contemporary Germany, converts to Judaism often serve a liberalizing agenda. They allow the State to congratulate itself on the renewal of a particular sort of Jewish life, one divorced from history and religious practice. In a sick reversal of genocide, German conversion to Jewishness remains colonial: a need to possess Jews, control them, speak for them, and now: become them.
What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity?
Far before Israel’s genocide** on Gaza, Germany’s orientation to Jews resulted in obscene repression and silencing of Palestinians. In the past few months, this has only increased, with Berlin police banning Palestinian actions, events, and conferences.
Germany’s censorship and repression is often done under high-pitched accusations of anti-semitism. But who defines anti-semitism in Germany?
Solidarity with Palestine is for me, and many other Jews, a fundamental political priority. The phenomenon of German converts and similar imposters makes it harder to forge real networks of solidarity between Jews and other groups who have experienced or are now facing genocide.
In many ways, “Jew-facing” parallels a similar phenomenon in North America, a context to which I am particularly attuned, having been raised in the United States.
Each year, more and more white people in both the USA and Canada claim Indigenous heritage through DNA testing. The veneer of “science” (eerily eugenic in its biological determinism) allows these white people to instrumentalize Indigeneity. Under the pretense of heritage, they seize scholarships, tribal enrollment, professional and artistic positions.
Professor and researcher Dr. Kim TallBear notes that these individuals are often seeking “identity without relationship.” Her words boomerang back to me from between the stolpersteine: identity without relationship.
I understand my own Jewishness to be an act of ancestral and cultural integrity. When I enter a synagogue in Berlin, an ostensibly Jewish space, I am surrounded by blonde hair and blue eyes. No one in the building knows how to pray. Beside me, a woman screeches in high soprano.
I want to lean over and whisper in her ear: we don’t sing like this! Masking as Jews, Germans infiltrate Jewish space and censor Jewish expression. The parasitic relationship between Germans and Jews remains.
The colonizer wants everything, even victimhood. And the colonizer will do anything to get it— hasn’t this always been their way?
Yet victimhood cannot be the only pathway towards cultural, social, or political participation. We must forge other ways of being together, other webs of solidarity.
Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec writes:
“If we can only claim legitimacy through victimhood, then we have lost the ability to have real, political, responses to real, political, problems.”
We are losing our ability to respond.
As artists, curators, and cultural workers, how can we organize outside of these exploitative frameworks of victimhood? Amidst so many layers of deception, what can guide us?
I want to offer a term, which I learned from Krawec, that has helped me in navigating this tangled web of relations. The term is cultural sovereignty: the ability of a cultural group to define, determine, and govern itself.
What I find powerful about this concept is its ability to shift the gravitational force away from personal identity markers and towards collective power.
Thinking through and with cultural sovereignty forces a confrontation with the nefarious ways in which hegemonic – in this case, German— power functions.
Censorship, scapegoating, protest bans, and language erasure: Whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenced? Which freedom struggles are considered legible, urgent, and why?
Rather than fetishizing or weaponizing representation, we need to consider the larger impacts of our curatorial choices. How can we see through the layers of deception in real time?
If cultural sovereignty were a guiding value in curatorial decision-making processes, perhaps the German-convert foothold might shift.
This piece is excerpted from a larger lyric essay and remains a poetic intervention based on personal experience and exploratory research.
For Further Reading:
Krawec, Patty. Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining our Future. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022.
Tallbear, Kimberly. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Tzuberi, Hannah. “’Reforesting’ Jews: The German State and the Construction of ‘New German Judaism,’“ Jewish Studies Quarterly, Issue 27, Vol. 3, 199-224.
Tzuberi, Hannah. “When the State Converts: Identification and Moral Panic in Contemporary Germany,” Association of Jewish Studies: 53rd Annual Conference, December 17-21, 2021.
* See Wikipedia: “Jewface is a term that negatively characterizes inauthentic portrayals of Jewish people. The term has existed since the late 1800s, and most generally refers to performative Jewishness.”
** Editor’s note by nGbK: To the time of publishing, Germany is on trial before the International Court of Justice defending itself against Nicaragua’s accusation of complicity in genocide in the Gaza Strip. In the case of South Africa against Israel, the International Court of Justice on 26 January 2024 ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent any acts that could be considered genocidal according to the 1948 Genocide Convention.