The Oakland writer who became the voice for “Generation J” Jews is hearing new voices — those of 2-year-old daughter Lilli and her own concerns as a mother.
After three years of touring the country to speak on her book about unaffiliated third-generation Jews with identity issues, Lisa Schiffman says her explorations and concerns of several years ago have given way to new ones.
“Before I had one set of identity issues. Now, I have another,” said Schiffman, 38. “There’s this lineage to think about.”
At one point, when she “was on tour, pregnant, very sure of everything having to do with the future of my daughter, she envisioned a “dark, curly-haired, Semitic-looking daughter,” Schiffman said in a recent interview. “Instead, I’ve been given a blond-haired, blue-eyed, very Irish-looking child” that few assume is Jewish.
“The world never let me forget that I’m Jewish,” she continued. “People see me and treat me as such. When I was uncomfortable with being Jewish, I couldn’t escape from it. But Lilli can escape from it.”
Schiffman will be exploring some of those identity issues Monday evening at the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation building in a talk titled “Explore Your ‘Generation J.'”
“The question for me and everybody in ‘Generation J’ who has a child or children has moved from what am I as a Jew to what can I possibly pass on in this culture of maximum choices, maximum options,” she said.
For Schiffman, whose husband is not Jewish and who was raised with little Jewish identity, that involves making conscious choices to bring Judaism into the home and into her daughter’s life through such holidays as Sukkot, Passover and Chanukah. On Friday mornings, she and Lilli participate at a toddler Shabbat program at Temple Beth Abraham in Oakland.
“I had to commit early on, starting small. When you start from nothing, everything is new,” she said.
Growing up in a nonaffiliated Jewish household in Levittown, N.Y., she did not observe Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or go to synagogue. In the process of writing her book, she explored Bay Area congregations, visited a mikvah, participated in online Jewish chats and delved into Jewish laws and Jewish mysticism.
Today she sees herself as “largely a secular Jew.”
“I don’t want a picture to be painted that I’ve become an observant Jew. That’s where my story is different,” she said, adding that interviewers frequently ask her if she’s joined a synagogue or lights Shabbat candles. She hasn’t, and she doesn’t. “As we know these aren’t the only manifestations of being a Jew.”
The difference between Schiffman’s life before Lilli and her life today can be measured in time. “Before, the passage of time wasn’t marked Jewishly. Today, as Abraham Joshua Heschel was a proponent of, being Jewish involves architecting time Jewishly, which in less opaque words means living by a Jewish calendar.”
In addition to her business as an Internet professional, writing Web sites for companies, Schiffman works with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Library on a book-review publication titled “What We’re Reading: People of the Book Talk about Books.” The goal is to inspire people to read more books with Jewish content.
In her talk on Monday to the JCF’s Young Adult Division, which is open to all, she’ll be reading from “Generation J.” But “the real action” involves the give-and-take discussion, with people sharing their own stories. “The book becomes Torah and people in audience are doing Mishnah as they reflect on their own lives.”