“I’m Taiwanese, and I’m Jewish.”
A story of embracing both Taiwanese and Jewish identities in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
💦 Droplets (Announcements)
☂️ Omer Circle: Shavuot starts this Sunday evening! Get ready for a night of learning with a short morning of learning. The online Omer Circles have been popping—our third and last is THIS Sunday at 10:30am ET. We’ll be talking about Shavuot and brokenness. Register here!
☂️ Good news: Remember last week when I shared the story of my missing journal full of notes on my Jewish wisdom class?! After months of stressing and obsessing (the name of my future memoir), I found it totally by accident. Or it found me. The moral of the story? Complain on a public forum and you will get what you want.
WRONG! The moral of the story is to let go and to remember that life isn’t defined by your stuff. Plus, if I never lost the journal, I wouldn’t have gotten a juicy lesson to write about ;)
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May is both Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This convergence invites us to honor the rich histories, cultures, and contributions of these vibrant communities. It also highlights the importance of embracing these mixed identities. In this spirit, I invited a member of my local community, Celeste, to share her thoughts on the intersection of being Jewish and Taiwanese, and how her journey has shaped her sense of self. I met Celeste at a Jewish storytelling event run by Central Synagogue.
The following was written by Celeste.
I am Jewish and Taiwanese, with a pause in between; a semicolon, if you will. And I stand exactly there: the precipice, the in-between, the semicolon between both worlds. Jewish; Taiwanese. Yes, a grey area, but an area I have learned to embrace within my own existence.
I was raised very much Taiwanese, but the world reflected back to me a experience that was shades of being Jewish.
Growing up, language school is a rite of passage for so many Asian Americans, and my afterschool Mandarin classes were held in a Chinese Protestant Church. My mom, as knowledgeable as she was, would point to the stiff-necked portraits of a very pasty, strawberry blonde hippie and state, "That's Jesus. And he's a Jew, just like you!"
But second-grade me had no idea how this likeness had any resemblance to me, why he looked so uncomfortable, or how he was from the hot deserts pictured in the storybooks across the church.
The weirdest phenomenon of growing up outside of a major Jewish community is realizing how many random opinions are out there about exactly what you are. And how to protect a young child's grasp of the world? I was told to be quiet, to be smaller, to say anything but being Jewish.
Being mixed on top of all of this made navigating being Jewish, well, hilarious. Kids would stare as my mom came to pick me up in her Toyota, and the same questions were asked again and again. "Your mom's Chinese? What's your other half? Does your dad have curly hair?" And elementary me would reply with the perfect explanation. "Why yeah, I'm half Gypsy actually. Like Esmeralda from that one Disney movie!" Or one I still sometimes use today: "Yeah, my dad's white… but, like, hairy white."
But as I grew into myself—and into the reflection that stared back at me in the mirror—these same questions echoed a deeper reality. How much would I let my Jewish identity truly define me—or was it just my fear of it? Of being fundamentally Jewish, and all the beautiful confusion, meaning, and duality that comes with exactly that.
And most of all, to be able to state—casually and firmly, with no “but” at the end, “I’m Taiwanese, and I’m Jewish.”
Shabbat Shalom and chag sameach! Be proud of who you are,
I badly want to go to a kosher Taiwanese Jewish Shabbat dinner. Stat!
As always, I appreciate reading your Drop. So interesting. Glad you found your notebook