I Just Found Out I’m Jewish, But Am I Jewish?

By Maegan Bergeron-Clearwood

First, if you feel called to read this essay, then you belong here. Welcome. Do you belong in the Jewish community? Are you a part of this religion, culture, and peoplehood? Are you actually technically Jewish at all? To give a very Jewish answer: yes, no, maybe. It depends. But this journey of exploration and curiosity—of questioning and wrestling—is absolutely yours for the taking. So welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Not everyone along the way will greet you with such open arms, so I want to make sure that mine are stretched extra wide.

An NPE* discovery is complicated enough, but when compounded by an ethnicity discovery—a Jewish ethnicity discovery especially—the complications are magnified. And Jewish identity is complicated enough, even for people who were raised Jewish. DNA testing may be new, but the question of “who counts as a Jew” is as old as Judaism itself. Judaism is an ethnicity, as you may have just learned unexpectedly, but it’s also a culture, a spiritual practice, a community, a set of laws, a set of holy days, and unendingly more. How many of those boxes must a person tick in order to be counted among the tribe? The answer remains: it depends.

There’s a beloved aphorism: for every two Jews, you get three opinions. Judaism is far more concerned with asking questions than it is with answering them. So if you came to this article asking “Am I Jewish?” be forewarned: you won’t get a clear answer. But you will, I hope, get a solid footing for the start of your journey, should you choose to embark.

The Rabbinic Answer

Let’s start with the answer you’d be most likely to get if you googled “Am I Jewish?” Or, let’s say you told a rabbi: “I just found out that I’m biologically half Jewish because the dad that I thought was my dad isn’t my dad and my DNA isn’t what I thought it was—what does that mean?” First, the rabbi would probably respond the same way most people do: a polite “please slow down because I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” or something of that ilk. Then, the rabbi would likely say that, according to halakha (Jewish law), you must be born to a Jewish mother or have entered the faith through conversion. For an NPE, then, this sounds like a resounding no: you are not, by law, a Jew. A reform or reconstructionist rabbi (these are the more socially progressive and halakhically creative of the four main Jewish denominations: learn more here) would tell you that patrilineal Jews count, but only if they’re raised Jewish—so you’re still out of luck.

Don’t take any of this to mean that rabbis are unfeeling jerks who won’t empathize with your situation, or that you shouldn’t seek out a rabbi with a curious heart, or even that all rabbis follow this halakhic law. But “Welcome to the tribe” might not be the first words out of a rabbi’s mouth when they hear your story, no matter how desperate you were to hear them said.

As NPEs, we are no strangers to rejection. We get it on all sides: from the families that raised us, for stirring up trouble; from our new biological families, for daring to exist; from our friends and partners, for being so damn depressing all the time. It’s particularly devastating, then, to seek refuge in our newfound ethnicity only to be turned away. These DNA results were what pushed us off the path of seeming normalcy to begin with, and now we’re being told that our DNA is not enough? If I’m not who I was before and I’m also not Jewish, then what am I?

So before you disavow rabbinic law entirely, a bit of context. The fact that Judaism exists in the 21^st century is a miracle. There’s a joke about Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat! And it’s true: on paper, Jewish history is bleak, what with the exiles, plagues, forced assimilation, slavery, to say nothing of the literal genocide—for a people who make up less that one percent of the world’s population, our existence is nothing short of miraculous. But it’s not a Chanukah kind of miracle, where God intervened to make sure oil lasted for eight impossible nights. It’s a miracle of resilience.

For more reasons than I can go into here, Jews don’t proselytize (learn more). Instead of growing in numbers, we grow in connection; Judaism isn’t about breadth, but about depth. Across hundreds of generations, Jews have passed along laws, traditions, and maybe most importantly, texts. Some of these inheritances seem ridiculous on paper (Why is God in the Torah such a jerk? Why don’t we light fires of Shabbat? And what’s the deal with shellfish?), but they’re the fibers that connect a peoplehood across the span of thousands of miles and thousands of years. This doesn’t mean that Orthodox and other more “traditional” Jews are more Jewish than Reform or Reconstructionist Jews or even than agnostic or atheist Jews, (because yes, you can be a Jew and not believe in God). To be a Jew is not to follow every single tradition. But intentionally changing or even rejecting a tradition can be an act of keeping those threads of connection alive.

In many synagogues you’ll see a sanctuary lamp, or Ner Tamid: eternal flame. It represents the menorah of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which was meant to burn continuously, across the generations, a symbol of God’s constant presence among the Jewish people. It sounds impossible, to keep one fire lit for thousands of years, but that’s the miraculous part: it’s still burning. In synagogues and on Shabbat tables around the world, the fire burns.

So yes, you have Jewish DNA. That means that your ancestors were part of this unending, miraculous chain of lights. What a beautiful discovery! Mazel tov! But if you knock on a rabbi’s door asking if you’re Jewish and they tell you “It depends,” or even “No,” they aren’t slamming the door back in your face. They’re just meeting your knock with a bit of healthy skepticism: your ancestors kindled the fire, true, but are you willing to do the same?

Because being Jewish is about so much more than DNA.

In fact, being Jewish isn’t about DNA at all.

The Ancestry Answer

 But it’s literally about DNA! Genetics are what got me into this reality-shattering mess to begin with! Science says that I’m Jewish, so I have to be! Right?

Yes. And no. It depends. But I would argue, that when it comes to this answer in particular, it’s mostly no.

Which is strange for me to admit, because if it weren’t for discovering my genetics, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I love where I am today. My NPE journey is still, overwhelmingly, a hot, stinking, miserable mess of family drama and emotional upheaval. But becoming Jewish? That’s made it all worthwhile.

When I first started telling people about my NPE discovery, this was the most common response: “I always thought you looked Jewish!” My hair apparently, is a dead giveaway. So are my eyebrows. My “dark features.” My nose. Or I just give off the right vibes. “Yeah, I can see that,” people would respond. Gentiles and Jews alike, it seems, have read me as Jewish long before I knew that I had Ashkenazi parentage. Intellectually, I was always wary at of these responses. Surely there’s no way to “look Jewish,” is there? Isn’t that what the Nazis used to say to justify murdering six million of us?

And yet—it was also strangely comforting. My NPE discovery had fractured so much of what I thought to be true about myself, and this was the affirmation I craved: yes, you are different; no, you’re not crazy; yes, you belong.

The whole reason that Eastern European, or Ashkenazi, Jews show up as an ethnic group on DNA testing sites is because of a population “founder effect”: we descend from a small number of culturally isolated ancestors who rarely intermarried, so we share enough common genetic markers to classify us as distinct. Other Jewish ethnic groups, like Sephardi or Mizrahi, don’t show up with that kind of specificity. The attempt to genetically quantify “who is a Jew,” therefore, centers Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of so many other ethnic groups, Jews of color in particular (learn more about Ashkenormativity here).

And on an even more fundamental level, this quantification implies that ethnicity is a core component of Jewish identity, when in fact, the Jewish people have always been a “mixed multitude”: as far back as our exodus out of Egypt, the Jewish nation has transcended ethnicity, borders, and ancestry. To rely on a DNA test as proof of one’s Jewishness, and to equate being Jewish with looking a “certain way,” dismisses the beautiful spectrum of Jewish peoplehood, including Jews who have joined the tribe through marriage, adoption, or by choice.

The overarching implications of linking DNA to identity, however, is not only reductive and exclusionary: it’s downright dangerous. No matter where you land on the “Am I Jewish?” question, you have to tread carefully. Race isn’t biological. It’s an organizational tool for constructing social hierarchies based on difference and otherness. Jews have historically been racialized for this very purpose, across geography and time. The most glaring example is the pseudoscience of Nazi Germany, which made claims of supposed genetic markers to prove the existence of racial imperfections and justify the eradication of entire populations of people – Jewish, but also Black, Romani, the disabled, the list goes on. Genetics, both the science and the language around it, have been weaponized against Jews and other racialized groups for centuries. In these strange times of mainstream genetic testing, if I read someone’s search history and saw “Jewish ethnicity DNA,” I wouldn’t know if they were a neo-nazi or just curious about their ancestry. Which should terrify us. (Learn more about race, Jewishness, and DNA testing here.)

Technically, sure, you can call yourself Jew-ish based on DNA alone—but you run the risk of replicating some wildly dangerous rhetoric in doing so. As someone who ended up choosing to be Jewish after finding out about my Jewish ancestry, I’ve become much more familiar with the insidiousness of antisemitism, and the potential misuses of mainstream DNA testing frankly scare me. Ironic, that DNA testing is what led to my becoming a Jew in the first place, but true.

So if you’re new to this journey, I recommend doing a bit of reading: a) on antisemitism, particularly racial antisemitism, both historically and as it appears today; and b) on the incredible diversity to be found throughout the Jewish people. It’s critical that we expand our conception of what it means to be Jewish and who “counts” as a Jew; we need to recognize the glorious mixed multitude of peoplehood, of which genetics are barely a part, if at all. And we need to be careful with our words, particularly in this age of rampant xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t explore your roots or disavow the physical traits that you inherited from your newfound Jewish ancestors—by all means, learn about your heritage and honor where you come from, if you feel called to do so. Many NPEs describe their experience as one of uprootedness, and delving into one’s Jewish ancestry can be a beautiful way of becoming re-rooted. Ashkenazi culture has so much to offer, from food and music to literature and language, so dive in! Eat, sing, read—savor it all.

Over the past four years, I’ve fallen in love with the stories of Sholem Aleichem, enjoyed lectures on theater and history the Yiddish Book Center (a wonderful resource for learning more about Ashkenazi culture), and, after some trial and error, managed to bake a few decent loaves of challah with my partner. I’ve also come to love my hair and nose in so many unexpected, tender ways, even as I remain wary of what it means to give off “Jewish vibes.”

Being visibly and genetically Jewish was my entry point into becoming Jewish, but that’s all it was: an entry point. An invitation. An awakening to new possibilities.

In a way, Jewish NPEs are weirdly lucky: we may feel hopelessly lost at family gatherings or when we look in the mirror, but at our fingertips, there’s a rich cultural roadmap for living with deep, interconnected roots. The tricky part being: we can’t just read the map. We have to actually make the journey.

Choosing an Answer

I wish I could say that discovering Jewish ancestry means that your identity suddenly makes sense. If you’re reading this article, then you’ve already been through enough emotional upheaval for a lifetime: wouldn’t it be a relief to have some simple answers for once, to just know who you are once and for all?

But remember: two Jews, three opinions. Simple answers are not, unfortunately, in the stars.

These days, you’ll probably hear the descriptor “Jew by Choice” more often than “convert to Judaism.” It’s a language choice that’s meant to recognize the activeness of the person’s journey into Judaism. It’s meant to be affirming, empowering even.

When I first started considering conversion, I bristled at this phrase. None of this was a choice. I didn’t choose to be born with this parentage; I didn’t choose to have my ancestry kept a secret; I didn’t choose to learn about my heritage in such a traumatic way. My Jewishness was thrust upon me, along with so many other complicated revelations about my identity and family history. I didn’t ask to be Jewish—I didn’t ask for any of this.

But when I look over the past four years, I realize just how many choices I’ve made along the way. When I got that email from 23andMe, I could have slammed my laptop shut and moved on as if nothing had changed. But I chose to let myself be transformed by the discovery. I chose to ask questions, I chose to do research, I chose to feel uncomfortable, and ultimately, I chose to be a Jew. I chose to light that candle, and I choose every day to keep it alive.

This article was clearly written by a Jew, someone who loves their peoplehood and religion. But I recognize that not everyone reading this is ready to seriously consider being Jewish in such an all-encompassing way. So let me frame things differently.

Recovering from trauma is all about crafting narratives. Something totally outside of your control just happened to you. Reality has become unreal. The story of your life has ripped to shreds. And the only way to unfreeze yourself, to feel in control again, is to rewrite the story, with you at the center. You didn’t choose to discover you were suddenly Jewish, but you can choose what that discovery means.

For me, becoming Jewish was a way to craft a healthy narrative. There’s a beautiful adage in Jewish mysticism, that every single Jew was present at Sinai when Moses delivered God’s commandments, when the covenant between God and the Israelites and was sealed and a united peoplehood was born. The soul of every single Jew, across history and geography, Jews of choice included, was there at the base of the mountain, being called to their place in history.

This narrative brings me comfort. Was I really at Sinai, standing alongside every single member of this sprawling, interconnected family? Is that why I felt called to respond to my Jewish ancestry discovery—because my soul was Jewish all along? Is that why all of this exhausting, traumatic family secret nonsense happened to me?

Yes. No. It depends. Chances are, I like the Sinai story because it helps me make sense of a senseless thing. It isn’t my DNA that brought me to the base of that mountain; I’m there because I choose to be. And this act of choosing doesn’t make my presence at Sinai any less true–my soul was there because I believe it to be there, and that belief is realer to me than any DNA test.

If you want to make sense of your newfound ancestry, if you want to answer the question “Am I Jewish?” once and for all, you absolutely do not have to convert to Judaism. But you also can’t just ask a rabbi or trace your genetic family tree. You have to answer the question for yourself—you have to decide whether being Jewish fits into your new narrative of personhood. Making that decision requires curiosity, energy, introspection, and lots and lots of books.

It also requires patience. You may have discovered that you had Jewish ancestry overnight, but discovering your Jewish identity will take time. It’s taken four years and counting for me, and it’s been a boundlessly radical process. It may take even longer for you. It may be wildly transformational or not a huge deal at all—but that’s not for me, a rabbi, or anyone else but you to find out.

Exploring Judaism is one of many ways to heal and construct new narratives out of an NPE experience. You’re no less valid a Jewish-ancestry-NPE if you decide against such an exploration. But if you feel called to journey, if you really need to know whether being Jewish is part of your story, then welcome.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

*NPE: not parent expected, nonpaternity event, nonparental event — discovering that a person you believed to be your parent wasn’t your genetic parent

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Maegan Clearwood (she/they) is a writer and theater-dabbler based out of Western Massachusetts. As an essayist and theater critic, their work has been published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, OnStage Blog, Howlround Theater Commons, and Everything Sondheim. They earned an MFA in Dramaturgy from UMass Amherst, with a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies, and a BA in English and Theater from Washington College. Find them on Twitter @maeganwriteson and Instagram @ottertarot.

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