of not looking Jewish, because it was her father— the son of a Holocaust survivor —who instilled that understanding of her- self growing up. “I wasn’t raised Jewish,” she says. “I was essentially told I wasn’t Jewish, and I didn’t look Jewish.” She was three when her parents divorced, and she moved with her moth- er to Vancouver, leaving her father in Toronto and flying back regularly to visit him once she turned seven. In those early years, Gardner remembers a game he taught her that they would play on the weekends. “On Saturday mornings, we would go for coffee and a bagel and ‘Jew watch’ for fun,” she says, using air quotes. “This is what I re- member about coming to visit my dad in To- ronto: sitting with him at the bagel shop, and I would say, Is that a Jew? and he would say yea or nay. It’s one of those core memories.”
TOM
I GET JEWISH WOMEN who say to me, If I’d known that Jews could look like you, I would’ve kept looking! Which is lovely, but not very nice to their husbands. At the other end of the picture, I get gen- tiles saying, You don’t look Jewish, to which I usual- ly say, Does this help? [Tom covers his mouth and eyes so only his nose is visible.] The thing about being an under- cover Jew, as it were, is that people feel emboldened to say things around you be- cause they think you’re on their side. I used to teach accent re- duction, and I had a student who was a very respected Italian academic. We were talking, and at some point this person said, Oh yes, but the Jews are always com- plaining. I’m sorry, what? Because she wasn’t a native speaker, my first impulse was to say, Oh, be careful, be- cause the way you phrased that actually sounded quite antisemitic. And she said, No, no. I say what I mean.
VISIBLE JEWISHNESS IS NARROWLY DEFINED AND CAN FEEL EXCLUSIONARY BY NATURE.
The irony of a Jewish man teaching his daughter to identify Jewish people using a checklist of antisemitic tropes, all while eat- ing bagels, is not lost on Gardner now that she’s an adult. But it took years before she understood this wasn’t a normal experience, given her imposed position of outsider. “The characteristics I was told to look for were dark curly hair, big nose, big ears — none of which I had,” she says. “I don’t think I realized it was problematic until I started telling other Jewish people about it, and they reacted with a gasp. I’ve brought it up to him and, to this day, he does not see it as a problem.” Gardner is basically estranged from her father now but has worked hard to reclaim her Jewish identity over the past eight years. She’s gone on a Birthright Israel trip and found camaraderie and connections with other Jews outside of her family— bonding over experiences ranging from the
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