THREE

PROFILES

In each issue, Contact will profile young Jews and their individual paths towards Jewish life — on their own terms. In this issue we look at three young people who’ve found their Jewish expression through writing: one of them through comedy, a second through fiction and a third through journalism.

PROFILES by SARAH SELTZER

JON DANFORTH-APPELL

The Golem Nebbech

W hen he was growing up, Jon Danforth-Appell didn’t know some people would consider him non-Jewish. Raised in the Washington DC suburbs by a Jewish dad and a mom who wasn’t born Jewish, Danforth-Appell, 28, wasn’t exposed to traditional laws about matrilineal descent determining Jewish status. “I just assumed I was Jewish,” he says. “I didn’t know that your mom had to be Jewish.” Danforth-Appell considered his family Reform, and he attended a Hebrew school that taught Yiddish as well.

When he was thirteen, Danforth-Appell’s mom converted, and his family started keeping “somewhat kosher.” Still, he says, he didn’t share many of the cultural signifiers that others used to demarcate their Jewish identity. “I didn’t have kugel until I was 18,” he jokes.

And later on he began to resent some of the messages he received from Jewish authorities. “Since I was a product of an interfaith marriage, it got awkward when rabbis gave speeches about marrying Jewish.”

Entering college at the University of Southern California, Danforth-Appell was influenced in two directions. He stopped keeping kosher and decided to avoid campus Jewish life. “I tried to get down with the Hillel but couldn’t,” he said. “Like USC at large, everyone was very rich and more conservative, and very Zionist.”

At the same time, he got his hands on the newly-formed hipster Jewish publication, HEEB magazine, and it blew his mind. “Their ‘Passion of the Christ’ issue was super influential for me,” he says of the magazine’s controversial Mel Gibson-spoofing spread, featuring a nipple-pierced Mary among other provocative features. “You saw this snarky irreverent Jewish tone, and it wasn’t just being aimed at other Jews.”

Ultimately, those college experiences defined his later adult journey towards being a Jewish comedy writer who intertwines his Jewish identity with his passion. “I prefer being Jewish as a jumping off point for your identity rather than the whole thing,” says Danforth-Appell, who fittingly uses the twitter handle @GrouchoMarxist. “It’s the difference between a Judd Apatow or Woody Allen film and a Judaica store. Judaica stores are so single and narrow. But in these films, Jewish identity is just one part of you which influences who you are.”

He didn’t participate in communal life for much of his 20s, but when Danforth-Appell went on a Birthright Israel trip at age 26, he felt “reawakened” — but not in a religious or nationalist sense. “I’ve met Israelis, and they’re not us,” he said of the cultural differences he discovered. He also felt discouraged, again, by matrilineal descent rules. “It’s problematic that I wouldn’t be considered Jewish there,” he says. “It’s supposed to be a homeland for all Jews, which is kind of not true.”

But what he did feel was a renewed desire for Jewish community. “What’s great about Birthright isn’t the trip to Israel, it’s that you forge connections,” he says. With a (now ex-) girlfriend he met on the trip, he began making a video series called “Jew on This.”

“We’d seen Jewish comedy videos online, like the Maccabeats and ‘Bubala Please,’” he says. But they found these series way too “cheesy” and “vanilla.” “To use surreal comedy that was strange and edgy and have it aligned with Judaism felt dangerous because so much of Jewish comedy is schmaltzy,” he says. Now, as a copywriter in Los Angeles trying to break into TV comedy, Danforth-Appell says “I try to write [characters] as explicitly Jewish, even more than Judd Apatow.”

As he forges forward with his career, making vegan matzah ball soup and sporting a tattoo that says “golem nebbech” in Yiddish — standing for strength and neuroses — his focus is on using his Jewishness as a fuel for creativity. “The most energy I put into negotiating my Jewish identity is in my work,” he says. ■

It’s vital that there be a space where you can speak without repercus-
sions or censorship.

CHANEL DUBOFSKY

From Secular to Religious and Back Again

I t was her Hebrew school classmates that initially turned Chanel Dubofsky off. Dubofsky, 34, grew up in Western Massachusetts with very little Jewish involvement. “I went to day school for a minute in third grade,” she says. “And then Hebrew school until fifth grade. But I quit because it was too hard socially for me.” In particular, she now realizes, the wealth of the students in her Hebrew school compared to her own family’s financial situation made it hard for her to fit in.

Without a Bat Mitzvah but with plenty of bacon, she was not particularly primed for major involvement. “Observance didn’t matter as long as you knew you were Jewish,” she says of her family’s approach.

But then, at college at UMass Amherst, she sought out Jewish community at Hillel and elsewhere. “It was a huge school and I wanted to find people like me,” she says. “And then my mom died, and it was a place I went to for community.”

She was grateful, if somewhat bewildered. “I had no idea what was going on,” she say. “Literally. People were asking me if I wanted a shiva minyan and I was like, ‘Sure, but what is that?’”

At the same time, she began pursuing Jewish studies. She was obsessed with her Jewish women’s studies professor, she recalls. “I was genuinely excited about Jewish academia, and feminism was always important for me. So it was a natural fit.”

Her interests became even more serious. “I decided I might want to be a rabbi because I could be a professional Jew and write and learn,” Dubofsky says. She began to keep kosher, observe holidays and wear skirts — and went to work at Hillel after college. “I tried really hard to fit in,” she says. “But it didn’t work. The fronting got really tiresome after a while.”

After getting laid off in a round of cuts, which she said was devastating, Dubofsky began freelance writing, which opened up a whole new world for her. “I just wanted to make stuff, create,” she says. “Once I began getting in touch with that side of myself again, I couldn’t go back.”

But she still needed to pay the bills, so she accepted a position at a social-justice minded Jewish nonprofit. For a while, Dubofsky also lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a Jewish neighborhood where she says “the pressure to be observant was crushing,” and “the marriage rat race” depressing. Eventually, she began to make her break from organized Judaism, dropping out of religious observance and, eventually, after her contract at the nonprofit was up, going back to get an MFA and committing fully to writing fiction and journalism.

Her work can be found at the Forward, Lilith, and Jewschool, the radical blog she co-edits with a “collective” of volunteers. Their willingness to publish criticism of Israel’s policies and mainstream Judaism is important to Dubofsky because of the line-toeing she’s seen in Jewish spaces. “It’s vital that there be a space where you can speak without repercussions or censorship,” she explains.

For now, Dubofsky’ exploration of Jewishness is mostly taking place in her writing. In her fiction work-in-progress, she says, Israel is a key setting and Jewish identity a theme. “My characters are Jewish. The main character was more observant, now she’s not,” she says, in a case of art imitating life.

In some ways, she’s satisfied with her life as a secular Jew weaving Judaism into her art, but in others, Dubofsky still frets about her future involvement. “The Jewish world has this really effective way of making you feel like it’s easy to never work in it again,” she says. “I worry sometimes that if I’m out of line, saying things critical of the status quo, I’ll never get a job in a Jewish organization again.” ■

We were invited to seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners, but we had to pretend we were just roommates, fielding questions that were pushing me towards a nice Jewish boy.

J.E. REICH

Writing and Otherness

G rowing up in Pittsburgh, J.E. Reich had “one foot in one world and one in the other.” And although both worlds were Jewish, they clashed. Her mother’s family was southern Jewish, living in America since the beginning of the 19th Century — a long placeholder that led a sense of Judaism that was “vibrant” and “evolving,” says Reich. Her father, however, was British, a child of Holocaust survivors, which added a double layer of foreignness to Reich’s sense of self. She calls her dad’s version of Judaism “a museum of sorrow.” There were photos of deceased relatives lining his walls. But he was “secular and assimilationist,” while her mother observed rituals like kashrut and went to synagogue regularly.

This schism in Jewish identity created a sense of “otherness” for Reich, an alienation that increased when her parents split up and intensified when she realized, at age 13 or 14, that she “preferred women to men.”

“Hi! I’m from Pittsburgh, I’m Jewish and I’m gay,” she would say to people she met at Emerson, a private college in Boston that lacked the diversity of the public schools she’d attended as a child. “Most students were white and from a privileged background, upper middle class,” she says. “There was a large Jewish demographic, but almost all were cultural and not practicing.”

But even among those who practiced, she felt estranged. “I never got my footing in Hillel,” says Reich. She found the scene conformist, even at her progressive school. She explains that Emerson was “where everybody who is different goes to be the same.”

So Reich kept her complex and evolving thoughts about God and belief to herself and felt isolated, largely because she couldn’t turn to mainstream Conservative Judaism. In institutionalized Judaism, “There was so much I don’t agree with, particularly in terms of interfaith relationships,” she says. “I have probably dated more non-Jews than Jews.” In fact, Reich’s article “Why I Date Shiksas,” published on The Huffington Post last year, garnered lots of attention.

Reich has written for Lilith magazine and Blueprint, a New York Jewish blog, and is currently editing and writing Jewish-tinged fiction, too. In her writing, Reich explores questions of identity, including her worries about being treated as “exotic” or “commodified” by the non-Jews she dates or befriends. “Thematically, the biggest thing that ties different strains of Jewish American literature together is that sense of otherness and marginality,” she says. “This intersects with me as a queer writer and female writer, and as someone who likes to think writing can change the world.”

Reich is a proud resident of Crown Heights, where she finds herself torn between a traditional Jewish community (Chabad Lubavitch) that she sees as warmly embracing her Jewishness, and that same community’s questionable stances on civil rights and acceptance for LGBT Jews. When she lived in the area with her non-Jewish ex, “I often felt both welcome and also in the closet” in Jewish settings, she says. “I was not comfortable holding her hand. We were invited to seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners, but we had to pretend we were just roommates, fielding questions that were pushing me towards a nice Jewish boy.”

Reich often feels caught between her more spiritual inclinations — she prefers Hebrew prayers to English translations — and a dissatisfaction with the institutional Jewish modus operandi. She attends services whenever she can but doesn’t belong to a shul. In fact, “I rarely go to the same synagogue twice,” she says.

“The Jewish community as a whole has to make more strides to be more inclusionary to LGBT Jews,” she says, noting that generational trends away from organized Judaism might have to do with this attitude, as well as the approach to interreligious dating and marriage. “There was no data in the Pew Study, no polling about how people identify in terms of sexuality and what Jews think about gay rights,” she says. “But a lot needs to be done in that area.” ■

Sarah Seltzer is a writer of contest-winning fiction, essays, journalism, listicles and more. She’s based in New York City, where she grew up. Find her on twitter @sarahmseltzer.