Commentary: Admittedly-Bitterly Mixed

 The thing is that I’m mixed. Unfortunately, AncestryDNA —as with ftDNA—does not detect my Jewishness for me. However, both detect it for some of my matches, thank God. Because I’m mixed, I essentially got shafted over – and yes, I’m a little bitter about being mixed in that regard. I’m also a little bitter about the fact that my dad seems to have fallen into the 25% whom have no Jewish atDNA. GEDmatch however, thankfully detects Jewish/Middle Eastern/West Asian/etc DNA for me depending on the test. I have records that prove that at a circumstantial level, we cannot deny that we’re Jewish. However, even some of my family members like to conflate Jewish ethnicity and traditionally-Jewish practice—i.e., the whole “You have to be religiously Jewish to be ethnically Jewish” lie—despite that, e.g., A priest in Poland literally made up a lie on one of my ancestors’ baptism records essentially to save her life. He claimed that “the neglect of the parents” prevented her from getting baptized until she was four. She and they were Crypto Jews in Polish Russia—and many family who stayed in Polish Russia stopped talking to us once my great-great-grandparents returned to Crypto Judaism after the Farber-Kogan incident.

Whenever people even with my own family question our Jewishness, it makes me sick and it feels like a slap in the face to the memories of our ancestors. So, I get the pain of mixed and other Jews whom seem to have no Jewish DNA. As I’ve mentioned before, my case is that my family on my dad’s side and some on my mom’s side were Crypto Jews. My paternal granddad was the first one whose Jewishness I was able to confirm, and he was not happy that I found out—and he denied it until his final phone call between him and me. “If we had any Jewish blood, I don’t know about it” is the most of any kind of admission that I could get from my grandfather–and he did not admit to things easily, as that begrudging admission still demonstrates even almost seven years after his death. 

It’s hard to, on one hand, have family whom does not want to identify with our heritage for whatever reason and, on the other hand, not be able to get all the evidence just because of the circumstances. If I could only wave a magic wand and have all the evidence in front of me, but many people even then would not believe me.