When Lisa Schiffman was a little girl in Levittown, N.Y., a grownup once told her that Jews didn’t exist.
In a town “where expressions like ‘Jew ’em down’ and words like ‘kike’ were heard as frequently as the roar of lawn mowers” and where her own parents were decidedly nonreligious, she did her best to pass for Italian.
So it came as a surprise when, a few years ago, Schiffman realized she wanted a rabbi to perform her wedding ceremony.
“For the first time in memory, I wanted to acknowledge that I was Jewish,” the Oakland resident writes in her new book “Generation J.”
“I wanted to be married by someone with the same heritage, the same bloodline…I didn’t want to give a Christian the authority, at this critical juncture, to change my life.”
If her sudden determination to find a rabbi surprised her, an even bigger surprise awaited. Because Schiffman’s fiancé was not Jewish, rabbi after rabbi demurred.
“I felt precisely this: my religion had rejected me…and the man I loved.”
In the end, the ceremony was performed not by a rabbi but by a cantor who had actually portrayed a rabbi in “Goodbye Columbus.” But the whole experience left Schiffman reeling at how little she knew of her own heritage. It also sparked a journey. She will discuss that journey Tuesday, Sept. 28 at Stacey’s Books in San Francisco.
In sensual language that spotlights intimate moment after intimate moment, “Generation J” shows how Schiffman sought “a doorway into Judaism.”
Scholarly by nature but thoroughly unaccustomed to synagogues, she began by sampling services all over the Bay Area. She interviewed rabbis and perused the Talmud. In further forays she explored mikvahs, the Kabbalah and kashrut.
“But one of the most anxiety-producing things,” the 35-year-old author recalls, “was this fear of being ‘found out’ as not knowing anything.”
It was Rabbi Jane Litman, then of San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav and now of Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El, who counseled the author to “just experience the moment and not worry so much about being a ‘bad Jew.'”
In the book, Rabbi Alan Lew of San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom talks to Schiffman about what she calls “the Zen of being Jewish.” At the Gay Pride Parade, she investigates the group called Kikes on Bikes. At an Aquarian Minyan Rosh Hashanah service in Berkeley, where she watches the singing and impromptu dancing, “I’m confronted with the word ‘God’ again and again. I can’t pray to God — I’m not sure I believe in God.”
Early on in the journey, talking with friends and online with strangers in Jewish chat rooms, Schiffman realized that her ignorance, her ambivalence, were hardly unique.
“I wasn’t alone.” Discovering what was “literally a groundswell of disenfranchised young Jews in their 20s and 30s,” the author sees her generation as uniquely poised in history. Post-Holocaust, mainly middle-class, “we were born assimilated. We are the first generation for whom Judaism is really a choice,” she said.
“And we are searching.”
Rather than a large-scale survey featuring many different voices, “Generation J” is a very personal memoir, bringing readers into the author’s head, her car, her apartment as she struggles to put up a mezuzah, even into her bed.
Having tried so urgently to “pass” for all those years, having internalized some of her hometown’s anti-Semitism, Schiffman at first found herself in the grips of an identity crisis. Setting out to explore Judaism, she pondered it as an outsider might.
“It’s a strange, argumentative, incomprehensible religion…a dark and hairy people. Jews can’t…even decide what, exactly, constitutes a Jew. They eat strange things like congealed chicken fat….They snip the tips of penises from baby boys and then celebrate. They’re different from everyone else in the United States, but not in the right way.”
Passages like this, chilling and revealing, give way to epiphanies as the author ventures further and further into a world that now makes her “so happy to be Jewish.”
At a San Francisco niggunim service, the wordless chants “caught me. I became interested in my own voice, in how loud I could be.” As the service progresses, she writes, “This is the sound of God. It will come at dawn, or at the first scattered sounds of night. It will reveal itself in your body, true as an electric current.” She sees the chanters as “lamps, inexplicably lit from within.”
Now she sees her generation as “a diverse community…We may have had affairs with other religions, like Buddhism, but deep down we understand that Jewishness is an essential part of us, like blood or tissue,” she said.
“Though I don’t know where I’ll end up” — in a synagogue, studying the Torah at home, or taking Hebrew classes — “I have discovered that my identity can be whole.”
She feels that her generation has an unprecedented wealth of options, including various pathways into Judaism.
“It’s so rewarding, and it doesn’t take much. That’s what I learned. I’m trying to find a place where I feel comfortable about how to manifest my Judaism. I want to make it applicable, and it’s up to me to make it apply.”