People Who Look Like You

“Ms. W, how do you feel about the fact that everyone here who looks like you is outside, calling us Nazis?”

My student looked from my face to my mitpachat (religious woman’s headscarf), and back down to my face. It was last year on Israel’s Memorial Day for soldiers and victims of terror, and my sister and I, as well as two of my students, had chosen to attend the joint Jewish-Arab memorial ceremony that draws hordes of protestors at its gates every year. The protestors were confined to the perimeter, but as we passed, I noticed that many more of them were dressed like me—in a skirt and head covering—than the people seated in the audience.

“It is possible to be a religious Jew and also to believe in peace. The fact that I look forward towards a solution and not backwards into hatred, that I can make room for others’ mourning even as I deal with my own grief, is part of my religious outlook that demands building out of the pain. It sounds like a contradiction, but that’s okay, I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Pretty words, Ms. W, pretty words… What other sins of skimpy thinking and bypassed paradoxes can you cover with a Whitman quote?)

I don’t think I actually said that. I remember pointing to the four or five kippot and mitpachot near us; “there are some other people who look like me in here.” There were, and they were all standing within hand’s reach of me. Perhaps mitpachot have a magnetic quality, and Beverly Tatum can write her next book on why all the religious people flock together during peace rallies.

I thought back to that moment this past Thursday. Once again, my sister and I and a bunch of my students stood in a rally for peace, this one by “Women Wage Peace,” which markets itself as a bipartisan, across-the-spectrum peace initiative that simply wants an agreement which satisfies both sides. As we drew near, we noticed that almost all the women were white and middle-aged and wearing the same t-shirts with blue sashes. Then I noticed something else. I was being noticed. 

“Did you know that lady?”

“No…” A woman in a mitpachat had come up to me and, smiling and nodding, said hi. She seemed to be the one other religious woman there… as we marched, I noticed a few more, but my observations were nothing to how people were watching me.

“I think there are more hijabis here than mitpachot.” In my head, I started counting. The people near us were giving me startled double takes, nodding approvingly, thanking me for coming… My sister noticed one and guffawed.

“That was a hard second look! She went up and down you with her eyes.” I edged away from the woman who had done it.

At one point, one of my students asked me about it.

“I’m wearing a religious headscarf, and it’s unexpected here.”

“But you always wear it at school, and you’re the only one there, too.”

“Yeah, but they know me there… and this is a very liberal rally.”

“Ah,” my student nodded in understanding. “So religious and politically liberal don’t fit together?”

In Tel Aviv, they often do. Among parts of my friend circles, we manage to make it work. But he was right. It was odd enough that everyone around us was startled by me. It’s odd enough that at moments, in my work, I wonder how my students see me. This is the first year that I’m starting already “out,” already clearly identified as a religious Jew to anybody who knows the dress code. What do the students in our peace-driven Israeli-Palestinian-International school assume about me? Will I become as close with my Palestinian students as I have in the past? Will they feel as safe in our classroom? The way my identity plays out as a teacher is something that I’ve grappled with privately for a long time, but its new visibility has me processing more urgently.

This year, my teaching has launched with a solid start. I’ve taught both my curricula several times before, and if occasionally I shake things up and teach some new material, it fits into a framework of confident experience. Now that the first few hectic weeks have ended, I’m looking for more edge. How to push the classes beyond simple English and Psychology into world-building.

Paulo Freire wrote, “reading the word is reading the world.” Spurred by some of my family, friends, and community members who, during Trump’s election, voted for him without understanding the effect it would have on minorities, I reviewed our class booklist. My students can choose to privilege their comfort above others’ survival, if they wish, but it will be a choice. They will know what they are choosing. They will not be able to claim financial incentive or party loyalty or foreign policy as reasons, together with a complete ignorance of how identity-based oppression operates. They will have to consciously choose their own advancement over someone else’s survival.

 

We will read Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, to remind them that Mexicans are writers, cooks, and revolutionaries, rather than rapists. We’ll cover Satrapi’s Persepolis and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to jog students out of a complacency in which the only history that matters is their own country’s, and for the richness of characters that uncloud some stereotypes about people living in a Muslim country, or an African one. We’ll do Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and track the historical basis for every dystopian detail. We’ll read Auden’s poetry because every gay student deserves to read a gay poet who challenged societal norms with ruthless witticisms in perfect verse.

I am flooding my students with books about and by people who look different, each to the other, so that they will read the world with all the complexity it holds. So that at their next rally, they attend without assumptions about who belongs. So that when they write the world, they don’t forget to include people who look different from themselves. And perhaps, together, we will figure out how to write ourselves, and read each other truly.