Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg – “Visible, Invisible, and Erased”
In the debut episode of Twice Blessed, Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg (she/her) discusses her experiences as a queer Jewish person of colour, how her family’s politics influence her Jewishness, and how she found the right language for herself and her sexuality. Transcript available from twiceblessedpodcast.com
[episode starts]
Shosh [voiceover] Hi everyone! Welcome to the first episode of Twice Blessed, a podcast about the lived experiences of gender and sexually diverse Jewish Australians. My name is Shoshana Rosenberg, I am a PhD student at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University which exists on Whadjuk Noongar Land in Perth, Western Australia. I’d like to acknowledge that this podcast was created on the unceded lands of both the Whadjuk Nyoongar people and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, otherwise known as Naarm, Birriranga, or Melbourne. I would like to pay my respect to the elders of these lands, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that I have both a privilege and a responsibility to the Traditional Owners as a settler on their lands. So since this is the first episode, I thought I would give a little bit of context. The interviews included in each of these episodes are an integral part of my data collection for my doctoral dissertation, which I began at the start of the year. As part of this process, I have been sitting with writing and other forms of knowledge which discuss ways of deepening and sharpening research approaches to working with marginalised peoples. In particular, I was inspired by Shawn Wilson’s book Research is Ceremony, and his assertion that research data is not just the interviewee’s voice, but the conversation between them and the researcher. As a result, I decided to release these interviews, with permission, in the form of a podcast, alongside the more traditional route of preparing and publishing a manuscript at the end of my PhD journey. I’ve decided to only put these interviews through minimal editing, mainly because the nuances of the conversation are fantastic and interesting, but also so you can enjoy the sound of me bursting with laughter and largely behaving quite unprofessionally for the setting. I promise you I will be laughing at least once in essentially each of these interviews. It’s also worth mentioning that this podcast is as much about exploring how different people negotiate their Jewishness, gender, and sexuality as it is about illuminating these perspectives for people who might not have the same lived experiences. So I’ll be popping in occasionally if any terms or ideas are mentioned that might not be common knowledge, or that might benefit from some further explaining that did not happen within the interview itself. If you are hearing impaired, there will be a transcript attached to each interview. Ok, I think that’s probably enough rambling, so please enjoy the first episode of Twice Blessed with my guest Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg.
Shosh [Interview] Alright. And I think levels are good. So, first of all, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview and meeting me here.
Elsa No worries.
Shosh And bringing me to a nice cafe. Always a plus.
Elsa I’ll pass that on to the staff.
Shosh Please! So yeah to start off, and thanks for giving me this prompt, but like, I’d love to hear a little bit about you and how you spend your time.
Elsa Yes. So how I spend my time… I spend my time doing a lot of things. I am very, very busy all the time. I work for an organization, we’re a youth-driven organization that basically we run workshops in schools for young people about how to stand up to bullying and discrimination.
Shosh Cool.
Elsa So that’s sort of my day job. I also do a bunch of other things. I volunteer for an organization called Democracy in Colour, which is a POC campaigning org. So I do some work with them. I also am really into dumpster diving,.
Shosh Ok.
Elsa So I do a lot of dumpster diving and lots of food distribution as well and trading and stuff like that.
Shosh [voiceover] Hi, former dumpster diver speaking. I just thought it might be good to clarify that dumpster is generally the practice of salvaging food from dumpsters either because you want to use it yourself and you don’t want it to go to waste, but also a lot of people like Elsa also find perfectly good food that has been thrown out and sort of redistributing it to community and to those in need
Elsa [interview] I also perform. So I grew up doing musical theatre and when I, when I turned 18, I kind of ditched it. I was sort of like “oh There wasn’t really any way to go with it” and I sort of left it behind. But this year I have kind of picked it up again. So at the moment, I’m in a show called Safeword, which is a… It’s being put on in the Melbourne Fringe, it’s a piece of physical theatre and it’s basically a queer Asian exploration of sex. So I’m doing that at the moment, too. I like camping, spending time in the sun. Stuff like that.
Shosh Amazing, that would be a very impressive, like, I don’t know, LinkedIn profile.
Elsa Thank you so much. I’ll update it after I leave today, yeah.
Shosh Oh you should, I’ll send you the transcript. So, yes, I’d love to hear a bit about your I guess, your family background or your sort of like, um, your background, both cultural and religious, whether it’s Jewish or otherwise.
Elsa Yeah. Well, so my mom is Jewish, Ashkenazi Jewish. She is born in Australia. Both her parents were born in Poland. My grandmother actually migrated to Australia before, just before World War 2. And my… I just realized I can actually call them what I what I call them.
Shosh Oh please.
Elsa Yeah. So my bubba was born…
Shosh Aw!
Elsa I’m just like code switching.
Shosh Yes.
Elsa very funny. So, yeah, my bubba was born in Poland, but migrated to Australia when she was very young, before the war. And my zeida was born in Poland, but actually migrated to France when he was 1. So was in France during the war, and then migrated to Australia as a refugee during the war. So that’s my mum’s side. And then my dad is Chinese. So he was born in Hong Kong and migrated to Australia and he was actually raised Muslim. So I’ve got… Yeah, bit of an interesting mix going on. A little bit of.. I want to say, clashing of worlds, but I think that’s more based on other people’s perception of it. It’s really a synthesis in my family.
Shosh Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about this synthesis. That sounds like a really interesting kind of combination.
Elsa Yeah. Well, yeah. My my dad isn’t practicing anymore. I would say that actually My whole family are atheists. Yeah. I think… My… It’s interesting holding on to, well looking to hold on to bits of my dad’s culture in this, Yeah, interesting first generation kind of way where you know, you in the diaspora you feel like you want to connect with cultures that you might have lost or feel distant to, even though I think when I reflect honestly they were cultures that weren’t so important to my dad and that’s why he migrated in the first place.
Shosh Right.
Elsa It was sort of some… I think Islam and Chinese culture was actually not something he hugely connected with and so looked for other places and other opportunities. But now so I’m, you know, second generation, wanting to connect with those things a little bit more is interesting.
Shosh Yeah
Elsa But my cultural connection to my Jewishness is really, really strong. Again, my Jewish family are all atheist. I would call myself like a cultural Jew, a secular Jew, I suppose. but my cultural connection to my Jewishness feels really, really important to me. And I wonder, it is a part of my identity that brings me a lot of joy. But I also wonder how much of that has been… If It is so important to me, because it’s been shaped in opposition to, you know, white Christian Australia. I wonder how important it would be to me if I grew up more in a Jewish community or, you know, with less of those external forces. Yeah, it’s something that’s pretty important to me.
Shosh So did you grow up then, relatively sort of outside of like I guess like the sort of, you know, capital C Community here?
Elsa Yeah, definitely. So I think… I mean, I didn’t go to a Jewish school, so that’s the first thing. I also didn’t go to a Jewish youth group. So I think that put me outside a little bit. I think also maybe the sort of Jews my family are as well. They’re very left wing, and I think that can also be slightly alienating of parts of the Jewish community.
Shosh Ok.
Elsa Maybe some parts of the capital C Jewish Community at least. So, yeah, I feel like I did grow up outside. I think when you don’t go to a Jewish school, it really quickly creates a little bit of a divide, which is unfortunate because so many people can’t afford to go to private Jewish schools or, you know, that shouldn’t be the entrance point into community in that way. I also think, to be honest now I’m thinking about it… The way I look has also isolated me from the Jewish community. So the fact that I look Asian rather than, you know, typically Jewish, I suppose, whatever that even means. But…
Shosh Read: Ashkenazi I suppose?
Elsa Yeah, Exactly, because I don’t look typically Ashkenazi Jewish. I don’t get read as Jewish by default. But even beyond not being read as Jewish by default, sometimes around Jewish people, it actually takes some convincing. Like I have to almost prove to them that I’m Jewish, not because they don’t want to believe me, but just subconsciously I think they don’t process it. Like I could be saying every Yiddish word under the sun and be at a synagogue. And they’ll be like, “So who brought you along today?” You know? it’s just hard for them to process sometimes. And so I think even when I’ve met people that I kind of want to bridge a somewhat Jewish connection with, there is an extra barrier involved there as well.
Shosh Yeah. So does that what’s the sort of… how does that affect you? It feels like it’s quite like disaffirming or something.
Elsa Totally. It’s super invalidating. It’s… I guess maybe because I didn’t grow up at a Jewish school and stuff like that. Maybe that was felt a little bit less by me. I was probably more conscious of the ways that I was being excluded from mainstream Christian and Anglo Australia rather than the Jewish community. It probably didn’t feel as prominent. I think it’s something that I’ve unpacked a lot more as I’ve gotten a bit older. It’s interesting, like, I kind of associate different stages in my life as unpacking different intersections and parts of my identity. And I think when I was really young, like the part of my identity that I felt I really had to work through was being really short. Like, I was like, “oh, man, I’m so short. Like, everyone makes fun”. Like that was my thing. And then when I was a teenager, suddenly it was gender and how being a woman impacted me in the world. And then later it was being a Person of Colour or being Jewish. And I think probably one of the most recent ones has been being mixed race and how that has impacted my experiences. So I think it’s something that I’ve only reflected on probably in the last few years, the way that it’s impacted. But yeah, it’s definitely felt isolating. And I think as someone, as I’ve gotten older and it’s become more important to me to connect with Jewish community, that’s something I realized that I don’t have very much and that I want. And then feeling myself come up against those barriers and then having that illuminate past experiences maybe and and kind of make some of those things click together and make a little bit more sense, You know, “oh maybe that’s why this was my experience…” Has definitely been, yeah, I guess sad to reflect on a times. In saying that though, there have been times in recent years where I have made really beautiful connections with Jewish people that maybe feel more affirming because of what those experiences have been like before.
Shosh It’s like a contrast point.
Elsa Exactly. Yeah.
Shosh Yeah. And so, like, I really want to. I want to put a bit of a pin in that and because I want to talk about community and sort of belongingness down the track. But I’m actually really interested coz you were talking about synthesis and kind of bringing everything together, so I’m kind of wondering, like, what does… And another thing that you mentioned that I thought was actually interesting was that you said, oh you know… you were, you sort of seem to like attribute like kind of being left leaning as like an actual like aspect of kind of Jewishness for you. So I guess I’d love to hear a little bit more about like what Jewishness is for you and also like what does that kind of manifest in in terms of like your… Do you have any practices or, you know, any traditions or anything like that that sort of connect you to Jewishness?
Elsa Yeah, interesting. It’s funny now that you’re saying that and I’m thinking about it. I think politics in a way is actually really wrapped up in my Jewishness for me. And I wonder if that’s just because I have a really, really political family who are also Jewish. And and that’s my point of reference.
Shosh Mhm.
Elsa So I’m thinking, yep, political stuff. And Jewishness kind of go together in my mind, at least in my family.
Shosh Mhm.
Elsa Yeah. They… I grew up doing… I mean was never practicing but definitely did some traditions. The biggest one is Pesach, for my family’s a really, really big one. And has always been the the most important tradition and celebration for me that ties me to culture I think.
Shosh [Voiceover] Hello, me again. I think this is something that’s probably worth clarifying because Pesach is going to be coming up a lot. Quite a few of my participants discussed this holiday and what it means to them and their particular approaches to it. So for those playing at home who might not know what Pesach is, Pesach is also known as Passover, it is probably one of the most major jewish holidays, and definitely one that is really celebrated by most people who engage with the traditions of Judaism. Pesach or Passover canonically marks the escape of Jews from Egypt, so the Exodus, and sort of details the journey that they took from there, 40 years in the desert, that sort of storyline. It is quite an integral part to jewish tradition and to jewish mythology in a way. So traditionally Pesach involves a Seder, or a Seder, which is a big, the big meal where you bring out the book that contains the sort of stories and songs called the Haggadah. And as Elsa is going to be discussing in a second, this is something that we’re seeing that is sort of evolving and changing, and people are really taking sort of control and agency around that. So in particular there has been a lot of focus on the Seder plate, which is a plate that contains these eight ingredients that are representative symbolically of the sort of story of Pesach, and Elsa gives a really good explanation of why this sort of practice is relevant for her now
Shosh [Interview] So what is it about Pesach that kind of gives you that connection?
Elsa Well, I think my family doesn’t do that many celebrations. So Pesach is probably one of the few that we do. I think we mainly would do Pesach and Hanukkah. Hanukkah has kind of fallen to the wayside a little bit as well. So Pesach is basically the main one. I think there’s something in the the layout of it. You know, the fact that they’re… Well, it’s a Seder, so, you know, it’s it’s not formal, nothing my family do is really formal. But the way that you step through it maybe makes it feel more ritualistic. And so it stands out to me, I think as well, the sort of… Yeah…. I think Pesach is also really political, which I really love. And not only is it political, but it’s, it has the ability to evolve in in a way that I think is really special.
Shosh Mhm
Elsa Maybe I don’t have that many points of reference for other cultures or religions in the ways that they integrate, you know, contemporary issues into their holidays or celebrations. But I think it’s beautiful that Pesach allows a space for us to discuss contemporary human rights issues and even the use of the Seder plate and how that’s evolving to incorporate, you know, issues around queerness and Palestine. And, you know… it it feels like it’s such a family cultural bonding experience, but but also inherently political, in a way that I find really meaningful for me.
Shosh So like, so it sounds like you’ve sort of modified your sort of Pesach like kind of process away from like the traditional kind of thing. So could you tell me a bit more about that? Like what does Pesach actually look like for you?
Elsa Yeah, I mean, for my family, I think it… So Pesach is like we do the… Oh, suddenly it’s come out of my head. What’s it what’s the book?
Shosh the Haggadah?
Elsa Yes, so we have a Haggadah, but it’s actually old, I’m going to redo it this year. And I’m really, really excited about it because this, actually the, this year for pesach was really beautiful, I had, you know, a Seder with my family and also did a sidebar with Queer Jews in Melbourne which had. Yeah. Hug it out. That was so, so beautiful and meaningful to our community. And then also did one at Borderforce, Actually. we had like a basically a solidarity Seder for the refugees and asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru. So I think Seders for me look like all kinds of different things, which I guess is sort of what I mean when I say how it has so much potential to evolve. But for my family, I guess it’s mostly just a dinner, You know. we do, we talk through the Seder plate and stuff. We have some great Jewish jokes in the Haggadah. We watch the Passover episode of Rug Rats at the end.
Shosh Amazing.
Elsa My mom comes up with different activities. Actually, we had this really great activity this yea where what my mom did was put basically random objects on each of our plates and we did sort of, I guess, an improvisation game where you had to pick up your object that was on your plate and talk about why it wasn’t included on the Seder plate like basically what it represents. Which was really, really fun. None of them actually belong on the side of plate, but it it’s…. Yeah. I don’t know, just I guess another way that those things can evolve or transform and some of the things that we included I was like, “oh, we should include this on the Seder plate, like it actually represents something really beautiful”. Yeah. The one I got was like a visitor’s pass, which is like a visitor’s pass permit or something for the car kind of thing. We got to my turn, And I talked about how, you know, Jews living in the diaspora, you know, we’re visitors on so many lands or on all the lands that we go to and how like this visitor’s pass reminds us that we are settlers and visitors in Melbourne, Naarm, Birraranga, on stolen land.
Shosh Mhm
Elsa And that actually feels like a really natural way to bring something into the Seder plate. You know that that is important. We should have something on the Seder plate to represent the the land that we’re on and… Yeah, so that’s a bit of what my Seders look like
Shosh Yeah, I think that sounds really fantastic. It sounds really like personal, you know.
Elsa Yeah.
Shosh And, um, do you have ways in which, like.. Do you take anything from like Islam as well and kind of like incorporate it into your life in any capacity or…?
Elsa No, not really. It didn’t really exist in my dad so much anymore. It’s more… I think it’s significant to me because it’s my history and I think as well, because I think the fact that my dad was raised Muslim is important to me in explaining why I’m not Christian. Like I think when I was younger, I… You know when I wouldn’t celebrate Christmas people would say, “why don’t you celebrate Christmas?” And I was like, “well, I’m not Christian”. And they’d be like, “well, neither am I really”. And I was like, “no, no, no, you don’t understand. Like, there has never been anyone Christian in my whole entire background”. You know, there’s nowhere for Christmas as a tradition to have slipped in, you know, and just appeared. And it’s like, “oh, no one’s really Christian anymore, but we still do it” Kind of thing. Like that doesn’t exist for me. It’s like Jewish one way or Muslim the other, like that rhetoric just doesn’t exist in my body, in my blood, like in anywhere. And so I think that’s the way that it’s the most important to me. I think there are probably some values that have informed the way my dad interacts with the world or views the world that come from that. But it’s not explicit in me or my life any more.
Shosh Yeah. And so we’ve been talking about kind of Jewishness and what that looks like for you. But I’d love to also hear a little bit more about your sort of experiences with sexuality and your kind of narrative around that.
Elsa Yeah. So my experience… so I identify as queer and identify as pansexual as well. I’ve identified as pansexual for a real… Maybe since I was 14 something. And I read the word and I was like, “oh, that makes so much sense to me”. And then I kind of just never touched it again. I didn’t, I didn’t think about it so much. I’m really lucky in that my queerness has never felt like a hardship for me. It’s never felt like a burden or… Yeah, in my family, I guess being so left leaning, they’re not even left leaning, but just completely left wing, radical anti-racist people. But yeah, being queer was just like a complete non-issue. My mom knew that I was in love with my first girlfriend even before I did. Like years before.
Shosh Right.
Elsa She was watching and was like, “oh, look at this” kinda thing. And I actually never even had a conversation with my parents explicitly about like having a girlfriend. It was just clear that she was my girlfriend and that was kind of it. I mean, we had conversations more casually after that, but I never felt like I had to go through like a coming out process in air quotes with my, with my family. Which I feel really, really grateful for. I think… I think having that label pansexual and having it cause such little internal or external conflicts for me for such a long time meant that identifying as queer actually came much later.
Shosh Mhm.
Elsa Really recently, actually, maybe in the last couple of years, I think. Which… I love the label of of queer now, I feel like it fits not only, I guess, my sexual identity, but also the way that I interact with the world and… Yeah, the way I do politics and the way that I interact with queer community and stuff like that.
Shosh Mhm.
Elsa But I think because I found the word pansexual such a long time ago and back in a time as well where queer wasn’t a word that was being used or reclaimed either. I just didn’t touch it. I just didn’t think about it again for a really long time. It was always present, but defining it didn’t feel so important to me until I noticed that other people started defining me as queer. And it took me a little while to sort of be like, “why don’t I identify as queer?” Not that other people’s definitions of you need to inform the way you define yourself, But oh man, how much that hasn’t happened in my life.
Shosh Yeah,.
Elsa But it was kind of also validating and nice to be read for something that… I wasn’t, I wasn’t averse to the label at all. It was just sort of something that I hadn’t had to think about, hadn’t had to embody in any explicit way. But I think when I was being read as queer and brought into communities as queer, it became something that I was like, “yeah. I think that is something that I want to be part of the way that I label or identify in a more explicit way”. So, yeah,.
Shosh I mean, it’s interesting because it seems like there’s a bit of a kind of theme around like legibility and like maybe like really noticing an absence of legibility and having to kind of negotiate that. You know, you mentioned not being necessarily read as Jewish but then when you are, it’s really important. Now you’re you’re kind of talking about, you know, again, like not necessarily being like… Not necessarily having that reading until like it’s been introduced to you, essentially. Is that kind of like, is that something that feels like, does that feel like a positive process for you? Like, Or like a complicated process for you to kind of negotiate?
Elsa It is so complicated. And I think issues around visibility, erasure, and… I feel like there’s something in between that as well. Like I sort of define as like visible, invisible and erased, because I think that there are parts of my identity that are invisible, but they don’t feel erased. And then there are parts of my identity that feel erased explicitly. And I think negotiating those is so, so complicated, especially when you start looking at the ways that visibility or lack of visibility can actually advantage you or disadvantage you at different times. I think as well this…. Yeah, the way the things that are visible in me, being mixed race especially, are not necessarily the things that are most important to me. They’re just visible. And so I think the things that are erased are just as complicated as the things that are visible, honestly. I think, for example, being I guess… I think this is a a symptom of being mixed race and therefore racially ambiguous, especially, is I get asked where where I’m from a lot. Something that happens to a lot of People of Colour but I think particularly for mixed race people, because people are like, “I know you belong in a box, but I’m not sure which one”.
Shosh For sure, Yeah.
Elsa And so people will ask me what my, what my background is, where I’m from, all the time. And even though where I’m from, in air quotes, in just as a significant way is in my Ashkenazi Jewish background, it’s not what people care about. And so even if I open with, you know, “oh my family are Polish Jew, Polish Ashkenazi Jews”, I can see they’re just waiting for me to tell them that I’m also Chinese. And even though my Chineseness culturally is much less significant to me, you know, I don’t know any of my Chinese family, really. I culturally have always been immersed in my Jewishness rather than my Chineseness. But because my Chineseness is what’s visible and the thing that makes me a Person of Colour, That’s what people want to know. And I guess the same… Yeah, I guess there are similar negotiations when it comes to visibility in queerness. I totally appreciate that being someone who does have relationships with men… I like, I guess, pass for straight a lot of the time and raised as a queer pansexual person, which is, you know, complicated and at times brings a lot of safety and at other times can bring erasure. I think for me queerness is something that I feel really comfortable sitting in myself. And so that bothers me less, I think, than the racialized and cultural elements of what’s visible and what’s invisible. But it’s absolutely something that’s so complicated to negotiate, especially when you’re navigating that or having conversations about it with someone whose visibility or erasure is different to yours, because there can be a lot of words attached to, attached to those things. And I think you have to hold space for a lot of really complicated feelings.
Shosh Definitely. It’s also an interesting thing because I feel like that’s sort of the way that things have sort of been flowing in the last few years, a lot of the discourse is that visibility is good and invisibility is.
Elsa Bad, babow.
Shosh Right? But it sounds like for you actually like all of those negotiations are really like situational or contextual or like relational, like even in a like a one-to-one kind of level.
Elsa Absolutely. I think, to be honest, the the narrative of like, Yeah, “out, loud, proud” kind of thing is really limiting to a whole lot of people for so many reasons. A really big one I think is that especially for People of Colour or people with migrant backgrounds a lot of the time that culturally just doesn’t align. And maybe that’s because you’re from a background that is queerphobic, but also maybe not? Like maybe it’s just the way that you culturally perform. You know? Your performance in your identity just looks different with different backgrounds. But I think it’s even… It’s complicated still with… The more identities or communities that you, marginalized communities that you’re part of, because you’re expected to perform them all in really different ways. I recently actually copped some criticism from some other People of Colour… For a while I was looking for more POC community and I was criticized by some other People of Colour. I think they thought it was advice… But they said, you know, “well, yeah, maybe you don’t have POC friends because you’re… You know, you’re too assimilated”. You know, you’re like… I had dyed hair at the time, you know, they were like “you embody your queerness in…” I guess what they were saying, a really white way, you know, a really Western way. “You have lots of white friends and so it makes you seem like you have a lot of internalized racism and like you’re really assimilated and that’s going to scare People of Colour off”.
Shosh Mmm.
Elsa And when I first heard that, I absolutely broke down. I was like “oh have these coping strategies, these methods of survival that I’ve been using for years, have they come back to bite me?” kind of thing. Also being aware of the ways that I’ve been, I’ve tried to unpack all that internalized racism for years and challenge it. But then I realized that actually [coughs] I’m sorry. I realized that actually so much of that was a complete misunderstanding of my culture and the way that I perform as an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. Like, I’m like, yes, I’m really like loud and, you know, cut over the top of people, and I am, you know, very… Not that every Ashkenazi Jewish person is extroverted or anything like that, but I think that the things that they’re saying that I embody is my Jewishness a lot of the time. And, you know, my whole family are Ashkenazi Jewish that I know. What…. What kind of culture do they want me to embody? What does, what does an unassimilated version of me look like when I have one Chinese family member that also moved away from his culture because it didn’t fit him? You know, how, How do I… How do I perform this for you? And it’s wild to think that I’m attempting to perform that for the groups that are meant to be the people I don’t have to perform for. You know? they’re the people that, you know… I spend every day in, you know, white Anglo Christian Hetero Australia performing…
Shosh Well yeah. You were talking about right at the start of this year, you were like, “oh, I don’t need to code switch”.
Elsa Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Shosh And it’s. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it seems like a lot of pressure to negotiate, especially because you exist at like multiple intersections of marginalisation or, realistically, you know, we say marginalization, but we mean points of difference to like white, white Australian kind of culture.
Elsa Yeah
Shosh Um, within those intersections, kind of like one thing I’m really interested in is like, do you have ways in which you either like do queerness Jewishly or do like Judaism queerly, if that like kind of rings true for you?
Elsa Yeah, I think… I think there’s an element of how political my family is that has almost meant our Jewishness has always been a little bit queer. which is kind of nice. My queerness has never felt like something that was incongruent with my Jewishness. I think on the flipside though, that’s been quite different. I think that Jewishness does sometimes feel like it’s incongruent with queerness, or at least maybe with the queer community.
Shosh In what ways?
Elsa I think there is anti-Semitism that exists within, you know, white Anglo Christian Australia generally, let alone, you know, a subset of that, which is the queer community. I think also being in left wing spaces, which queer spaces tend to be, can be really demanding of Jewish people and I have a very specific criteria of what an acceptable or good Jewish person looks like or needs to be. And you feel like you need to sell that in a way. It’s not good enough to just, to just be it internally, be what they want you to be or whatever. You have, you have to prove it in a way that other people don’t have to in the queer community. I think that exists especially around, you know, conversations about Palestine that, you know, honestly, I don’t have really any connection with Israel at all. But still feeling like you need, you need to perform these very specific anti Zionist narrative. And not just that… I want to stress as well, it’s not just about existing in it and having those politics, it’s about performing it in a very specific way that is really challenging, especially for someone who does exist in the Jewish community and is maybe embodying those things in a very specific way within community in a way that is far more important and… Important and influential than anything you could perform within the left wing queer community. But… Yeah, still asks very specific things of you, I suppose. I think Jewishness also sits in a weird spot because it’s… You know, I think… My friend Nevo Zisin said once, the queer community, they hate gender binaries, but they love every other kind of binary. And I think this is like just one of the best quotes ever. And I think the queer community really likes defining, you know, you’ve got People of Colour and you’ve got white people. And and I think Jewish people or Ashkenazi Jewish people, white-passing Jewish, I don’t know. It’s confusing because I say Ashkenazi Jewish, which I am, but I’m also not white or white-passing. But Jewishness falls in this weird in-between that they don’t really know what to do with. You know, it’s like they feel like Jews are white enough that they’re at least a little bit angry at them, you know? But like not… And not People of Colour enough to advocate for, or include in, conversations about intersectionality or racism. I think to be honest now I’m thinking about it, that for me has been the most jarring factor in the queer community, is like people, you know, will post a status or something warning, warning people about, you know, Nazi actions or like a swastika somewhere or something. But completely omit Jews from that narrative. And they’re saying like “queers and People of Colour, like, look out today, this is going on” and it’s like, did you forget about Jews? Because that was really us. Like, we were really at the centre of that, that we just get emitted a lot from that narrative. And I think that that is maybe the most hurtful thing, seeing people who are so politically engaged push Jewishness and the political issues that surround the oppression of Jewish people to to be completely left out of the narrative.
Shosh Yeah. And I feel like, you know, again, that’s another thing that keeps coming back to like this idea of like performance, and this sort of effortful performance for you. And I guess in a way that seems like a really salient aspect of your life. But I’m also wondering, like it kind of, within yourself, is there ways in which you’ve found harmony or integration between your sort of Jewishness and between your queerness.
Elsa Yeah, definitely. I think it’s something that I’m still growing into. But I now have some people who are really, really dear to me. I have a friend of mine who is like a friend, but also somewhat a life partner who is queer and Jewish. And doing Jewishness with them is, has been one of the most healing and validating experiences ever because you just feel held in these two parts of yourself that have never been held together in that way. And it doesn’t even have to be purposeful because you just exist and you just are both those things. It’s just a real synthesis. You know, it’s smooth. It doesn’t feel like a performance. It just is. I think that’s been one of the most validating and healing things to get to share that, that joint space with with another person who gets it and feels it and knows it in their body in a similar way.
Shosh And so, yeah, that’s kind of interesting, right, because it’s, you’re talking, we’ve been talking a lot about these like high energy kind of things that require a lot from you. So it’s quite interesting to hear that actually for you within yourself, it’s a relatively sort of calm sort of space in terms of where all those identity sit,.
Elsa Yeah, it’s interesting. I never actually thought about it like that. But now that I’m reflecting on the way I describe it and the way that I feel it, that is what it feels like. It’s like leaning in, you know, you just sink into it. It doesn’t… Yeah. It doesn’t sit up here anymore. It’s like in in your guts, in your body, just… Yeah.
Shosh And we’ve touched on this throughout, and I know I said I want to put a pin in that kind of at the head of this, but I do, I do want to hear I suppose what have been your experiences of like belonging, like in different communities but also in Australia kind of broadly.
Elsa Mmm.. Fraught. Yeah, belonging I guess is really complicated. And I guess there’s… Yeah I’m just thinking of all the different aspects of me that have felt belonging or could feel belonging or want to feel belonging. I think it’s interesting because in lots of ways I feel really grateful for my ability to have found belonging in my life, I think the biggest one is in my family. I have always felt like I belonged in my family and have always felt really valued and honoured and at home with my family. And I think that that set me up with a lot of resilience for not feeling belonging in other places, actually, because I think for a lot of people who don’t have that, that’s far more difficult. I think, yeah, I mean, growing up as… I think Jewish was the first thing that I noticed before being a Person of Colour, like I noticed that I was Jewish and everyone else wasn’t. At school, like when we would do RE or something and I’d be cordoned off to a separate room with like the other Jews and like Muslim kids, you know just like, there’s like four of us who are all like colouring, you know, while all the other kids do their Christian RE, um, religious education. too, like at Christmas time or Easter time, whenever there was a holiday and, you know, going to art class and everyone else is colouring in like an Easter bunny and you get like a star to colour in or something like that. I think a lot of those things you feel a lot when when you’re a kid because you do just kind of want to be like everyone else. You have a really keen sense of justice as a kid as well, you know, and it’s, you know, you’re not, it’s not informed by, you know, intersectional politics, or like…
Shosh Quite personal.
Elsa It’s so personal. And you’re like why are all those kids colouring one thing, and I have to colour in something else, you know? But it’s so acute at the same time. And it’s amazing that a kid can identify that, But… And yet no one else seems to think that that’s an issue. But yeah, so I think that my Jewishness was the thing that I felt first excluded by. Like I didn’t belong when I was younger. I think I also had to answer lots of questions. You know, there was a really big line of questioning that made me feel like I didn’t belong. I think as well, there are lots of very public reminders that you don’t belong when you’re Jewish. I think holiday season is a really big one. I hate going into shopping centres at Christmas time.
Shosh Mhm.
Elsa You know, it’s just this constant reminder that you don’t belong. That, you know, the place that you’re in isn’t built for you, which I’m sure a lot of people feel for a whole lot of different reasons. But yeah, I think holiday time is always hard. I think as well people’s questioning of me through my life as I named being mixed race and being a Person of Colour particularly, always being asked questions by just anyone. Like you, You know, at my…. Basically, all my jobs that have been customer-facing jobs have frequently involved inappropriate lines of questioning, which apart from being overly personal and invasive, are just reminders that you look different to everyone else or that you are different to everybody else. I think that those things can be kind of hard to reconcile, I suppose. And even at times it’s interesting… I think at times I’ve actually gotten some relief from asserting the fact that I don’t belong.
Shosh Mhm
Elsa So there’s a specific example I can think of. I used to work in a musical theatre school, and there was a parent who was talking about Easter, we just had the Easter holidays. And I think she, there was a mom and she asked, you know, what did, you know, “How much chocolate did you eat over Easter?” Something like that. And, you know, my co-worker responded, and then I responded in jest. I was like, “oh, no, chocolate’s not kosher. So I didn’t have any chocolate over Easter”. kind of thing. That was sort of my way of like, I guess asserting visibility. But then she responded, she actually covered her child’s ears and she said, “the Easter Bunny visits everybody”. And it was just this really bizarre experience of I suddenly felt all the tensions of like, you know, not belonging. Attempting to assert myself, make myself visible, take up space, make myself bigger and then be shrunk down again. So, yeah. I think belonging… It’s so interactive, you know? Yeah.
Shosh Do you have… Do you have places where you do feel like you belong?
Elsa I do now, actually. I think interestingly… I guess this isn’t… Well, I guess it is relevant to being Jewish and being queer. I think one of the ways that I’ve actually felt like I haven’t belonged in a lot of my life has been politically. Because I think, I mean, starting off with a family that is so left wing, I often in school… And and also just, not just left wing, but socially conscious, had a lot of empathy and a lot of, instilled in me a lot of commitment to stand up for what you believe in and voice your opinion and care about other people. I think that has also always been something that has set me as an outsider a little bit, especially at school. I think I lost a lot of friends or often felt on the outside because I would bring up something that I thought wasn’t okay or, you know, it wasn’t… Whether that be political or just the way someone was treating somebody else, and that made me feel quite excluded. I actually think that in the last few years, moving more into… I mean, I don’t consider myself an activist, but I guess in more social justice-centred and -focussed spaces is probably where I’ve found my biggest feelings of belonging. I think finding friends more recently that are really, really aligned with our values means you get that same, that same feeling of being able to lean in and sink into it because you’re not on edge that someone’s gonna make a joke anymore that you don’t think is okay or that someone is going to say something that is particularly ignorant or offensive. I mean, we all say things and slip up sometimes, but it gives you the sense of security and solidarity that means that you can actually let go a lot more, let loose a lot more, and just be silly in a way that often when you’re social justice focussed in spaces that aren’t you don’t get the opportunity to do that because you’re constantly on edge and worried about what’s going to be said or done next. And I think being, having more community that shares my values has been a massive place of belonging for me. Yeah.
Shosh So that’s the end of episode one. I’d like to thank Elsa for her time, and thank you for listening. Also, apologies for the background noise, we didn’t expect it to suddenly become rush hour at this little cafe, and it felt a little awkward to leave halfway through. If you have any questions, or would like to take part in this podcast, please do get in touch at twiceblessedpodcast@gmail.com. Take care, and shalom velehitraot!
[episode ends]
Twice Blessed Podcast 