I never realized what it meant that I was Jewish until I got to York University. There I found half a campus filled with people who were all of sudden familiar, as if I had known them all my life. I don’t even remember specific individuals, only this general sense of familiarity.
Molly Cone writes in The Mystery of Being Jewish (1989) about Martin Buber’s concept of “collective memory.”
A Jew’s collective memory goes all the way back to Abraham. Gathered through centuries, it comes from the whole of Jewish tradition and Jewish experience. It is every Jew’s inheritance.
There’s no question that there is a distinctive human character to being Jewish, though not every Jew has it. It is just like there is a quintessential Englishman, or Frenchman, or German; we recognize them as nationalities, but they existed before there were nation-states.
I came to accept that there were these collective differences, mostly cultural but also a matter of genetic inheritance, like distinctive varieties of flowers or of any other species. There are of course individual differences, but there are also, seemingly, biological as well as cultural ones. Since I grew up with no knowledge of my Jewish heritage, it seemed strange to recognize a kind of physical and emotional kinship with other Jews.
But what being a Jew means to me today is recognizing that I belong to a people that, as the culmination of in its own history of oppression, are on the wrong side. After driving them off their land, Israelis have been oppressing Palestinians for decades, and are now attempting to solve the “Palestinian Problem” through extreme brutality and genocide, living out the other side of the trauma of past generations.