I went to Poland and Ukraine this past summer to learn about my roots. My great grandparents left the Lviv region in the 1890s — but on my trip there I picked up some very contemporary lessons on the struggle of the Ohlone, the native people of what we call the Bay Area. I live in Oakland — but to the Ohlone, it is called Chochenyo.
In Krakow, I walked around Kazimierz, the Jewish district, and smiled at the sight of Yiddish and Hebrew on store signs across the neighborhood. Five synagogues, all of which miraculously made it through the Holocaust, still stand there, two of which hold regular services. There also is a JCC and a living and growing Jewish community of almost 400 people.
Despite that life, a sense of ghostliness started to hit me. I went on the “Jewish tour” and soon became aware that both the guide and the tourists were all non-Jews except for me. Every building had cement over the right side of the entrance where the mezuzahs used to be.
The Galicia Jewish Museum is run by awesome folks, but they were all non-Jews. The Jewish bookstore and restaurants are owned by non-Jews. Poles are selling yarmulkes as souvenirs and little Jewish figurines holding money. After hearing countless stories of how vibrant the Jewish community there had been in its pre-Holocaust heyday, I was confronted with how little of that life remains. I felt angry over the absence of my people.
As a Jew, it was a rough and challenging experience.
As a white person, it was exactly the experience I needed.
I am beginning to understand what it is like to have my culture appropriated, as so many Americans have understood for so long. I am learning from experience the pain of having my culture robbed from me before I was even born. In essence, I grew up not knowing where I came from.
I now have an inkling of the way the Ohlone may feel when we non-natives forget that there were Native Americans living here before us for untold generations.
Native people in the Bay Area continue to struggle to survive and seek justice for themselves. Ohlone people were stewards of this land before white people stole it, before we built our cities on top of their villages.
Today, they struggle to save their sacred sites, such as the West Berkeley Shellmound, an ancient burial site that is today a point of contention between the tribe and a real estate developer.
When I visited the site where 1,100 Jews, including members of my family, were collectively shot on April 7, 1943, in the village of Plebanivka, I was glad that there was a small monument the marked the spot. We deserve that and so much more. Don’t the Ohlone deserve the same?
Their struggle is similar to that of the Jewish activists I met in Lviv. They, too, are fighting to be remembered, to save Jewish cemeteries and memorials. They are struggling to stop the excavation of Jewish remains in the name of “development” in downtown Lviv in 2017.
Until a few months ago, I didn’t know that my ancestors had been shoe cobblers, carpenters, devout Hasidic Jews who spoke Yiddish and lived in the same shtetl-filled region for at least 150 years. I didn’t know that my people left during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; times were getting increasingly anti-Semitic, with more and more pogroms. So my great grandparents left and came to Brooklyn in the 1890s.
So much was lost, and my trip was just the beginning of reclaiming my history and my heritage. I came back with a commitment to reclaiming my full self. I came back with the understanding that I can’t have my full Jewish self until the erasure of cultures is stopped.
Just as I would have hoped that the villages of western Ukraine band together to protect every Jew around them, I promise I will band together with my community to support Ohlone efforts to stop the continued colonization of their sacred lands.
White colonizers robbed them of so much of their cultural heritage, and they are in danger of losing even more. This is what it means for me to fully claim my white Jewish self.
I’m always entertained when lefty american Jews identify with native Americans but tend to hate Israel.
I’m not saying this guy does because this article isnt about Israel and for all I know this guy might be the only guy attending kehila israel in Oakland that doesn’t hate israel and Israelis.
After reading this article I think I understand now.
This guy isn’t a Jew but a pole. He thinks his family comes from Poland. He thinks his family was at home in Poland.
He’s not that bright.
His family was driven from their home in Israel by successive waves of cruel inhuman imperialist colonialism. By Greeks and romans and Europeans and Arabs.
They were only in Poland because his forefathers fled their native land for fear of their lives. Being in Poland specifically happened because the kind accommodating poles who invited Jews in in the seventeenth century cause we were the only almost universally literate and educated people in Europe and they were illiterate savages. They thought we could help them administer their country.
We came and helped out reapaid by brutal pogroms that came almost on schedule every twenty or so years in which their neighbors had fun cutting babies out of the wombs of pregnant Jewish women, among other even more unspeakable acts. The shoah was merely a continuation of hundreds of years of outrages against Jews that make what native Americans suffered at the hands of the us pale in comparison by a country and it’s people who hated us. Still hate us. Just ask a pole.
His family is from Israel.
His family hoped for mochiac and eretz Israel as salvation from the fear under which they lived. They weren’t poles. Just ask any pole. Even today. They were Jews. Jews come from Israel.
Now after two thousand years of persecution that is the most brutal and most long lasting persecution of any people in history Jews carry the distinction of being the only people in the history of mankind to buck the brutal tide of colonialism and exile to return to our native land. Were it anyone but jews doing it it would be a cause of mass celebration for the oppressed in all places.
If you hold on to your culture and remember your struggle and keep hope you might get your shot at taking back what was stolen from you.
You can stay strong remember who you are and beat back the whole world.
Maybe the native Americans might take inspiration and keep fighting….cause now they know it’s actually been done.
Now I get it.
The world thinks we’re poles or Russians or Germans. They think we’ve somehow been named honorary white people. Even this tragically ignorant guy who thinks he’s polish. And now thinks he’s american.
Maybe he should ask some poles or Russians or Germans what they think about that. Might be entertaining if he asked some Americans what they think about their Jewish “american” neighbors.
It’s not that lefty Americans Jews necessarily hate Israel…it’s that they’re too ignorant and deluded to understand what Israel is. And they don’t understand who they are and what that means.
I’m sure the goyim will give them an education sooner or later. It’s a historical certianty.
We must respect the corners were we have been saved as Jews. Jewish spirituality is endless independently where we are or have been. Jews in Diaspora created an extremely nice history and culture also suffered persecution. Sad to say we suffered also from those who left the Jewish path in life, they were sometimes very bitter and ruthless. We left great contribution in civilization where ever we have been.
Thank you Mathew for a great article.
You know I’ve been thinking about time lately. How we live in it and maybe G*d doesn’t. And I’ve been thinking about Joseph too. And us.
Joseph was kind of a little jerk. He was daddies favorite and looking at his dreams G*D’s choice to lead his family into Egypt. So what does he do? He tells his big brothers that he’s having dreams about them bowing down to him. I don’t have older brothers but I’ve was the little guy when I was younger and I was smart enough to know that telling bigger kids that you’re gonna rule over them is a good way to get your butt kicked. He wasn’t so they got him. What if he’d kept his mouth shut and instead earned their respect? What if they figured out he was the leader all on their in by watching his potential unfold in front of them?
Maybe instead of fulfilling the will of G*d by going to Egypt as as a slave separated from his family he’d have led his family there as a part of the family.
But people are who people are and when you set them apart bullies show up.
So maybe at the same time G*d decided to choose us he saw the pain that would cause us and created a place where we could be safer if we stuck together.
Maybe the persecution we suffer at the hands of the goyim in diaspora wasn’t some sort of punishment but simply something that was and is inevitable when a small group of people get given our own little coat of many colors written down right there in the Torah and then choose to live as the little guy among those that are naturally jealous of our coat. Even if we didn’t ask for it. Or really understand what it means. And just want to live our lives.
Maybe G*d saw the consequences of his doing that and gave us Israel as the city of refuge joseph didn’t get. I mean he looked after Joseph like he looks after us. Two thousand years and we’re still around.
But like Joseph in prison, it hasn’t been easy. Maybe if he’d have kept his mouth shut and we’d stayed home after G*d brought us into the land and then threw us out and brought us back it would have been easier.
We’re a stiff necked people who maybe waste too much time choosing the long way around.
Yeah we made and keep making contributions wherever we land. I think that’s part if our coat of many colors. But I gotta wonder if we couldnt have made the same contributions but with a lot less of the abuse if we had stayed home.
And if, instead of making those contributions as Germans and Russians and poles and Frenchmen and Americans we made them as Israelis as Jews living in our own place with our own culture as opposed to those weird people living in strange places but not observing their customs we wouldn’t have been waving our coat of many colors in the bulls face.
Maybe that’s why G*d gave us Israel. Maybe he was giving us a short cut and we were and most of us still are too stupid to understand that.
Maybe giving us israel was his way of looking out for us.
You understand Ohlone plight as a WHITE person? The mere fact that YOU happen to be an Ashkenazi gives you an upper hand on compassion? Do you have similar heartache for Sephardi Jews? Who are not as snow white as you are? You know, almost a million of them kicked out from Arab lands where they lived for generations and generations? Are you serious?
The fact that Ohlone CAN claim their heritage BEING HERE is more of a plight to YOU then the plight of an almost a million fellow Jews who cannot do the same?
It is so ironic that a “feel-good” Jew feels more empathy for anyone but his fellow Jew. It is sad and comical at the same time
You seem to be reading a lot into this article that has me scratching my head. It doesn’t conflate the Ohlone’s situation with anybody else’s except his specific ancestors. The article does not reference Sephardim, because it is not germane to the specific issues discussed.
I’m sure if you wished to write an opinion piece focusing on the expulsion of Sephardim from Arab countries it would be taken on its own merit, and not condemned for not mentioning every group of people ever displaced from their homes. I’m betting that if you spoke to the author of this piece, you might find he is quite sympathetic to Sephardim. Unless you have some specific example of this individual holding an antagonistic opinion, I think your anger may be misplaced.
Anger? Nope. Just mockery. As “a white man” indeed
Anger? No, it was sarcasm. The same time Online were losing their right on land, half of a million of Jew were losing their lives in Bogdan Khmelnitsky pogroms in Ukraine and Poland. Just some perspective on number of victims and severity of suffering. Quite literally at the same time. These Jews are forgotten. Yep
What nonsense. Unlike the Jews of Galicia, the Ohlone are still here. Not only that, but thanks to us Europeans they got upgraded from their stone age lives. Thanks to our technology and productivity they can gorge themselves and grow obese like the woman in the picture, while keeping their diabetes in line thanks to our medicine.
And don’t imagine they were angels. How do you suppose the Ohlone established themselves in the Bay Area? Considering that humans settled North America over 10,000 years ago, it’s a good bet the Ohlone drove the previous residents — now lost to history — from the land, if they didn’t slaughter them outright. You can bet that, unlike the Polish Jews, the Ohlone didn’t come invited by lical aristocrats who valued their literacy and their administrative skills.