Tool:
Special interest Twitter is actually a great research resource. Most days, I take a few minutes to catch up with Jewish Twitter—or, as it’s known colloquially, Jwitter—where one can encounter everything from deeply considered takes on issues of Torah and/or modern life to snarky jokes and everything in between. (I have a special fondness for the snarky jokes.) If your writing also involves researching something a whole community of people are also engaged with (and, really, with such a wide audience, it probably does), I encourage you to spend a little time seeing if you can find that community. For me, it’s sometimes lead to real insights, and even more often pointed me toward sources for further research.
The Story:
Today, a chance Tweet by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat pointed me toward an old article in the Atlantic, The Secret History of Bagels.
The section of the article that caught Rabbi Barenblat’s attention deals with a Polish law that allowed Jews to “buy and sell and touch bread like Christians.” And for sure, that’s a wow moment: it would never have occurred to me that we were ever not allowed to touch bread (which shows how little I know, and also why this research is so necessary to me, personally).
While various places, including Austria, have been credited with as being the birthplace of the bagel, this article persuasively argues that it originates in Poland. But the origins of bagels, while interesting, is a little outside my area of interest. It was this paragraph that really stuck me:
The bagel as Jewish food really came of age during the era of Polish history known as the "Nobles' Democracy." While intolerance and conflict reigned elsewhere, Poland was probably the preeminent country for tolerance, acceptance, education, and understanding. Unlike almost every other country in Europe, Poles identified themselves as citizens of their country rather than of any divisive framework based on religious, ethnic, or linguistic origins. This mindset created the environment where Jews were first allowed the opportunity to bake, and then sell, bread -- of which bagels were an integral part.
That phrase, “Poles identified themselves as citizens of their country rather than of any divisive framework based on religious, ethnic, or linguistic origins (emphasis mine) points, once again, at the roots of my question about whether or not one can be Jewish and Appalachian. If, as many Appalachians I know do, we identify ourselves as such because we are from Appalachia—regardless of religion, ethnicity, or linguistic origins—then of course I am an Appalachian Jew. If, on the other hand, those who argue that “real Appalachians” share a religious, ethnic, and linguistic similarity, then I most certainly am not an Appalachian. Since we can find people on both sides of this divide, who gets to decide?
Because I’m writing toward a question, and not to support a specific answer, the answer I think I’m heading toward continues to change. For the last little bit, I’ve been leaning toward the idea that maybe it’s not possible to be both Appalachian and Jewish, though it’s certainly possible to be a Jewish and a West Virginian (or whichever state in Appalachia one comes from). But now I wonder if ceding this is also to cede the idea of the American plurality, and that it might not allow for the exclusion of all sorts of Appalachians who I have neither the desire nor the authority to exclude?
As always, I welcome your thoughts on this, friends. Every time I start to feel like I’m finding my way toward certainty, I almost immediately find something that pulls the rugs out from under that feeling. Which is probably, at this point in the project, a sign that it’s going the way its supposed to go… but can still be unsettling.
When - where is the quote about Jewish sense of belonging in Poland ?
Appalachian non Jews likely have an imagined sense of history that aids their identity . Most arrived in the second quarter of the 20 c and are a mix of non elite eastern - Central Europeans.
And they imagine they were there when we arrived five decades earlier.