Many thanks to Rabbi Rick Kellner and Rabbi Karen Martin for inviting me to speak at our congregation's Pride Shabbat. The video is above; what follows is the speech, adapted for Substack.
“A Lot”
I have been told throughout my life that I am “a lot.” Too sensitive, very loud, very intense, overly opinionated, dramatic. I want to say “Jewish,” but that one was usually implied.
The first person to tell me that I was “too much” was a girl in my second-grade class. She informed me with admirable clarity that she did not like me because I was short, had orange hair, and a big mouth. For the record, I am still short, I still have orangish hair, and I will always have a big mouth.
She was, in her own way, correct, and she was also doing what kids do: repeating what adults had taught her to notice. It worked because I remembered it.
I was the kid who sensed things, who picked up on the “thing under the thing under the thing,” and then was like, “Well, maybe it is not actually a thing.” I was, and remain, someone who knew when something was off — usually before other people did — and I said so. Sometimes I was even right.
In fact, my younger brother Jeffrey once told me in a moment of great fraternal generosity that my accuracy rating was approximately 97%. Regarding important things, he meant.
I am wrong about plenty — only several years ago I learned that gefilte fish swims in neither fresh nor salt water because it is not actually a fish… and here I was thinking it was its own species. But in terms of what is off in a room, or what is about to go wrong, the 97% was probably accurate.
This may sound like a good thing to have — this kind of clarity — but what it actually meant was that 97% of the time, I knew. And 97% of the time, most people did not listen. That is because I was the speaker: the sensitive, too-loud, “too much” one.
It is a lot easier to manage or dismiss the speaker than to deal with the truth. Unfortunately, it usually works this way.
The “Never To Be Forgiven Club”
As a kid, I had a lot of opinions. I was particularly offended by double standards. When I was eight or nine, I founded the “Never To Be Forgiven Club.” This was an exclusive list of adults who had wronged me in ways I considered structurally significant.
Some members included the chairman of my father’s department at Ohio State, who made me wear a life preserver on his speedboat in Maine while the grownups sat in the open air, unencumbered by a humiliating flotation device. Or my uncle, who informed me I could not play catch with him and my male cousin because they were using a baseball, and apparently, in his cosmology, girls could only catch a softball. To this day, the “Never To Be Forgiven Club” has granted no pardons.
But here is what eventually happened. As I got older, I changed the membership requirements for the club. This was not because people changed or because the bylaws were outdated; I actually stopped believing that I was someone worthy of being wronged.
Somewhere along the way, I had decided that I must be the problem. So, whatever offense would normally fast-track someone into the club, I attributed to something I had done. The club kept operating; its members became people who had hurt the feelings of the people I love.
(If you have anyone you would like to recommend for membership, please message me.)
But here is the thing about being told early and often that who you are is a problem: you start to believe it. Slowly, the way water shapes a stone.
You learn to scan the room.
You learn which opinions belong inside the room or not anywhere at all.
You apologize for things you didn’t do, and then you apologize for apologizing.
It reminds me of my grandmother, who would send a thank-you note for a thank-you note.
The Cost of Misrecognition
Some of you know that I am an antisemitism scholar and part of a team of international nerds working to establish antisemitism studies as its own discipline, like anthropology, economics, or gender studies.
When I tell people this — and I tell them my work involves creating this model that shows people we need to think about antisemitism differently, not as a belief or a prejudice, but as a framework that decides who we are regardless of who we actually are — they ask, “How did you even come up with this?”
I have an answer that I use at academic conferences that is competent and historically accurate, but here’s the actual version:
What I have come to understand after so many years of obsessing about antisemitism is that, in a strange way, it is almost not even about Jews. The suffering it causes Jews is very specific and painful, but the engine of it — the thing that gets inside a person and stays there — is about something a lot bigger than us.
It is really about how humans recognize or misrecognize each other, and the categories we lay over people and what those categories do to the actual person underneath. It is about what it costs to be seen accurately and the price we pay when we aren’t.
This is why on Pride Shabbat, I think my research is somehow on topic. I want to emphasize, though, that the closet is not a metaphor for the Jewish predicament, and the Jewish predicament is not a metaphor for the closet.
But there is a question that every human being, no matter who they are, has to face: What does it cost to be who you are in a world that would prefer you weren’t? And what do you pay if you decide not to be?
We all want to be loved and we all want to feel safe, and we will do almost anything to have those things. We will swallow our opinions, we will laugh at jokes that really aren’t funny, and we will nod along even when we do not agree. In fact, this behavior is rewarded; it is seen as being mature or reasonable.
But sometimes what we are actually doing is becoming strangers to ourselves.
The Wager
There is a moment in Jewish history I think about a lot: the Enlightenment.
A couple hundred years ago in Europe, the door cracked open for us. After centuries of being kept out of cities, professions, universities, and polite society, Jews were suddenly being invited in. We could be citizens of France, Germany, or England.
We were told, sometimes gently, sometimes not, “You can come in, but leave the Jewishness at the door. Be a Jew at home and a normal person on the street.”
Compared to the Jewish reality before the Enlightenment, this looked like an upgrade. It looked like a reasonable deal: lose the Jewishness, the dress, the language, the names, and you get to be a person just like everyone else.
Many Jews took the deal because we were tired and we wanted in. Moshe became Michael, Yiddish gave way to German. Families changed their names, softened their accents, and sent their children to schools where they could become indistinguishable. Jewish women hosted the most important salons in Berlin in flawless German with no trace of where they came from. They were brilliant, they were beloved, and they were almost accepted.
But you know how that story ended.
When the trains came, no one cared how un-Jewish a Jew looked or how assimilated they were. Whatever we had tried to soften or file off of ourselves, people could still see it if they chose to.
The deeper cost is actually one that does not require other people or trains; it is that we could no longer see ourselves.
We had spent generations becoming a version of us that was easier for someone else, and at the end of it, that someone else did not want us either.
The damage is not just what others do to you; it is what you end up doing to yourself. This is one of the hardest lessons in our history.
We cannot buy safety by erasing ourselves. The bill comes due, and the thing you sold to pay it was the only thing that was ever yours.
I Fell for the Deal
I will say it plainly because it is the only way to say it: I would rather have been mentally ill than gay; I would have taken almost any other explanation. It was not about the people around me; by the time I was old enough to know, they would have been fine. It was about me, about the version of myself I had already built — ”too much” in eleven other ways — and the absolute conviction that one more thing would tip the scale.
And it wasn’t only about being gay. In bad jobs and bad friendships, I assumed the problem was me, which is why I stayed in them longer than I should have. I tried to change myself instead of leaving.
In situation after situation, perception often outweighed aptitude —
I could be right, and it did not matter.
I could be excellent, and it did not matter.
Eventually, I started to doubt my own readings, even the 97%.
Maybe I wasn’t seeing the world correctly to begin with?
The Trap
So, I did what I learned to do: I apologized, I tried to shrink, I adjusted, I performed, I tried harder, and I tried to want less.
But there is a particular trap that closes around people who are told over and over again that they are “too much,” “wrong,” or “the problem.”
When you try to say, “Wait, I don’t actually think I am,” or you try to say, “No, that’s not true,” your protest becomes the evidence against you
“You’re being too sensitive about being called too sensitive.”
“You’re arguing too hard about being told you argue too hard.”
A frame closes around you, and you can only get out by becoming smaller or leaving the room.
After enough years, you stop trusting what you see.
When the world has told you in a hundred small ways that who you are is wrong, this is rational. It is reasonable to try to be like someone else because the cost of not making the wager looks impossibly high. It looks like loneliness; it looks like exile.
So, we make the wager, file ourselves down, and we hope that if we are quiet enough, smooth enough, and normal enough, we will be let in.
Already Alone
Here is what I have learned — and I have learned it the hard way, and I am still learning it: it doesn’t work. The wager always comes due.
The self you try to bury keeps knocking. You can outrun it for a year, for ten years, for forty years, but it lives in your house and it is the room you’re in now.
The part that took me the longest to understand is this: the thing I was afraid of — the thing we are all afraid of, being alone, unloved, or unsafe — we were already there.
We were already alone.
If you bring only a costume to the people in your life, you are not actually with them. You are with the costume. The costume gets to be loved, the costume gets invitations, and you are just watching someone else be liked.
Keeping the Receipts
What changed for me was nothing dramatic; it was slow and incremental. It was a few people who looked at me, saw the whole person, and found that fine. People who preferred it, who noticed when it was absent and wanted it back.
Jeffrey was one of them.
The 97% line came in my late 20s or early 30s. It was long after I had left home for college and grad school, and well into the years when I stopped trusting my own readings. But somewhere along the way, Jeffrey decided to keep the books on me. “I see you. I am keeping track. The world is not going to give you credit for being right, but I am going to know.”
That is one of the rare kindnesses one person can offer another: to keep the receipts on someone else’s life until they are strong enough to keep them themselves.
If you have ever done that for another person, held the record, told them, “I know what you actually are,” you are doing something extraordinary.
You are giving someone back to themselves.
What Pride Is
I think this is what Pride is, underneath the parade.
Pride is the radical, terrifying, and almost holy refusal of the wager —
I will not capitulate.
I will not buy safety with my own erasure.
I will be the person I am, and I will find out who can love that person.
The ones who can?
Those are mine.
