People who don't know me well assume that I'm a social butterfly. I was a pretty loud kid. I didn’t find it particularly difficult to relate to other kids my age, and social acceptance was what I loved more than anything else at the time. Being Jewish has never been a positive factor in that equation. On the contrary, it was actively isolating. When people view you as an outsider, they always let you know, even if they like you. There’s a reaction; a change in behavior. When people learned that I was Jewish, it always had to be a thing.
A lot of the time, I could find ways to blend in. I would say the right thing and laugh in the right spots and suddenly I was in that wonderful, highly selective fold of popularity. I would bask in the weightlessness of my engineered lack of identity for however long I could, before it slipped out that I really wasn’t the same as everyone else. Then came the innocent curiosities that turned into questions that snowballed into casual cruelty.
I was a master of duality: the little Jewish girl who was only Jewish when people let her be. So I would feign religious apathy at regular school, study Torah at Hebrew school, then go home to eat matzo ball soup, participate in family debates where everybody had at least three opinions, and melt into myself. It’s a little bit impressive and a whole lot sad, living in reflections of yourself.
When I followed my oldest sister into the Diller Teen Fellows program, my family thought I would be truly ecstatic to finally have a sense of Jewish community. To be honest? I wasn’t, mostly because I didn’t understand its importance. I had grown up going to synagogue on the High Holy Days, lighting the hannukiah, eating my feelings in the grand Ashkenazi tradition, hesitantly going to Hebrew school and lingering on the outside of it all. Too Jewish for gentiles, not Jewish enough for Jews. My Diller persona would no doubt be another people-pleasing personality to slide into my ever-growing roster, a new carefully designed version of myself.
That very first Diller interview, meeting kids who wore their Jewishness like a badge of honor, awakened something in me. I encountered something like effortless connection. For the first time in a long time, I felt accepted as a whole person. The teens at Diller were kind and funny and unmistakably themselves.
I was also blessed with an amazing Israeli exchange partner, Einat. Einat is ruthlessly honest, pragmatic and self-actualized. She had never set foot in a synagogue until she came to Philadelphia. I attempted, at first, to present myself as the kind of person I thought she might like. She didn’t care much for that. It wasn’t until I was sitting on my couch with her, watching Criminal Minds and treating our complexions with sheet masks, that I realized that I was all I needed to be. That I didn’t need to change myself, to be less Jewish or less anxious or less me. I could sit on a couch next to a girl I met three days ago at 12 a.m. and feel more like myself than I had in years, just because I wasn’t trying to be anybody else.
I had a lot of amazing fun at Diller, and tons of experiences I wouldn’t trade for the world. Playing “Piano Man” on the hotel piano while my cohort screamed-sang around me, laughing around a mouth of S’moreo, late-night group gossip sessions with our JC Judah, and especially the late nights of bad 2000s TV and snacks with Einat. But most of all, I think finding Diller helped me find myself. Jewish, idealistic, something just shy of being proud and a little bit lonely. But not as lonely as before. For that, I am truly grateful to Diller, the Kaiserman JCC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
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Diller Teen Fellows is a yearlong leadership program that empowers teens in 10th and 11th grade from across the globe to explore their Jewish identities and become activated leaders of tikkun olam who serve as forces for good throughout their lifetimes. The Kaiserman JCC leads the local cohort of Diller Teen Fellows, which receives funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
Learn more about Diller Teen Fellows at phillyjcc.com/diller-teen-fellows. You can support the Jewish Federation’s mission to secure a vibrant Jewish future by making a gift at jewishphilly.org/donate.