Proclamation of a Jew

Growing up, my mom taught me to sing the Shema before I went to sleep. Mezuzahs lined the entryways to our home. We went to synagogue for the High Holy Days and had Shabbat dinner on Friday for most of my childhood. I had my Bar Mitzvah at 13 years old.

I had a typical Jewish-American upbringing. My family is proud to be Jewish, and I am too.

I feel it at the center of my chest.

*Imagery from Holocaust below*

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When large amounts of Eastern European Jews began emigrating to the United States in the early 1880s and the mid-1920s, there was a huge pressure to assimilate into American life. Rampant antisemitism would spread across the nation making the idea of assimilating from Jews in America to Jewish Americans a more comfortable identity for many. The question of how to be Jewish in modern-day America is a qualm many generations of Jews have today and throughout our history. Following the Holocaust, many Jewish-American artists could not even bring themselves to make work let alone speak of the horrors. Some found solace in creating work that memorialized the genocide and others found their voices within their identities in a different way.

I am a Jewish man. My art is fundamentally Jewish. I am a Jewish artist.

I am a Jew.

Photo by Cooper Janusevskis

Many American Jews post-Holocaust struggled with such a depth of trauma that many did what they could to possess as much of an American identity as possible, leaving their Jewish identities behind. In fact, many believed that this would help them in their pursuits of success in America as they wouldn’t be bogged down by the weight of antisemitism.

Clement Greenberg, one of the 20^th century’s most renowned art critics never said that he wasn’t Jewish, but rather he believed that to be respected in the worldwide community, his heritage would have to take a backseat so he could become cosmopolitan.

Jews have a privilege in America to choose how much they’d like their Jewishness to be a part of their daily life, but that whole notion stems from not wanting to deal with our past and the antisemitism that comes with it.

I think Jews are tired. We are tired of being the butt of the joke, blamed for the world’s problems, and persecuted for just trying to maintain some level of existence.

Living in a world after October 7th, even though my Jewishness is intrinsic to me as an artist and how I exist in daily life, I too am pulled astray from the lived experiences of being Jewish. In my efforts to make work that is both important and crucial to the remembrance of the atrocities towards the Jewish people, I am constantly deterred from creating the work that allows me to understand and nurture the loss of identity, expression, and love that I value within the Jewish faith and culture. Under the advice of someone I have grown to care deeply for, I was advised to make something beautiful. Just prior, I had shown her a sequence of media I made that cataloged the events that transpired on October 7^th.

To me, it’s a record of Jewish pain. Like the Holocaust, it was well documented, yet there still lies the persistent deniability that has followed Jews through the course of time. As dark, morbid, and mentally torturing it has been for me to make, somewhere inside of me I know it must be done.

Some of us feel we must bear witness to the sinister, and I am one of them.

Photo by Lee Miller

I ultimately did take her advice and made something that felt like a breath of fresh air, but ultimately this unshakable, violent urge that has been steeping inside my chest has begun tearing me apart once more. Now almost a month later, I feel as though I am stuck in the perpetual limbo that plagues Jews, particularly Jewish-Americans, when trying to confront trauma that seemingly just exiles itself inside of us to maintain whatever sliver of sanity we can find.

How do we express the inexpressible?

Holocaust historian James E. Young said, “Hitler had planned to remember Jews in his own way. By eradicating the Jewish type of memory, the Nazis would also have destroyed the possibility of regeneration through memory that has marked Jewish experience.”

Jewish Americans have to deal with quite the conundrum. Our history is undeniable and hard to reckon with.

To be persistent with Judaism is a great challenge.

To not let ourselves lose the past to make way for our future is even greater.

Arie A. Galles believes that “even if art cannot express the full horror of the Holocaust, abandoning the attempt would grant Hitler his victory.”

As a Jewish man, it is my responsibility to make forgetting impossible. It is said that the Jewish people are incessantly caught between feelings of numbness and rage. I feel as though I have found some element of comfort in Jewish limbo, a paradox that both serves and undermines the collective experiences of the contemporary Jewish experience.

Author Anne Roiphe has written, “For many of us the holocaust marks the end of religion, but paradoxically enough [it] simultaneously marks the point of reconnection of [the] assimilated jew to Jewishness, to tradition, to history, to bloodlines.”

October 7^th, while demented and vile, has brought together a unification of global Jewry.

Our people, our history, and our values will persevere.

Perseverance is a Jewish trait.

The way that I breathe, think, and carry myself in the universe starts and ends with being a Jew. My Jewishness is never to be understated, underestimated, or unappreciated for my Jewishness is what I am.

As I grapple with my own story and how I choose to tell it in my art-making, I have inexplicably presented myself as a Jew. My work, in essence, is from a Jewish point of view, fueled by Jewish values, and Jewish circumstances. Jewishness flows through my veins and circulates in my synapses. My Jewishness is what makes me Eli… it is the idea that keeps me grounded wherever I am.

My Jewishness is the truth that warms my heart and the strength that holds me upright. My Jewishness lives in the air I breathe and grows through the follicles that cover my cleft. I will follow my Jewishness wherever it will take me.

Remembering, cherishing, and persevering along the way.

Thank you for being here,

Eli, MAXIMA