A crappy, crappy Jew.

It is possible that I just might be the worst Jew ever. It would help if a Hasidic rabbi were to confirm this, though it would not mean all that much, I would still be a shitty Jew regardless.

Most people, especially friends, who might be reading this, will no doubt attribute my self-flagellation to the point that I do not observe Jewish law, including but not limited to kashrut, Shabbat, mezuzah, coveting and shotnez. Or it might be pointed out that I am not as bad a Jew as I might think being that I live in Israel, do not engage in bestiality and put on tefillin every morning. But my status as an ever so crappy Jew has nothing to do with my observance of actual Jewish law, which I care almost nothing about.

Rather, I am a horrible Jew because I am a fifth, possibly sixth, generation American.

My ancestors, all from the Ukraine to the best of my knowledge, came to America long enough ago to miss out on that quintessential European Jewish experience best known as the Holocaust.

I am a second rate Jew because I have no close relations who were murdered at the hands of the Nazis.

Fucking Nazis, right?

At no family gathering on either my maternal or paternal side were there old Jews with hooked noses nor numbers on their forearms who horded leftovers in their sport coats or purses in the hopes of being prepared for when the Nazis come a second time. A fact of which my non-existent forbearers would have been un waveringly assured.

I missed out on having a personal connection to the defining Jewish experience since god chose us as his people. A curse that has haunted every last Jew everywhere (me especially) but to which only a lucky few were able to witness in its most tragic of manifestations.

For all intense and purposes my family would have been that one group of Africans who, upon not finding the proper tree from whose wood to manufacture a drum were to have thus decided to move to America in search of a better life, resulting in having missed out on the whole middle passage. How very ludicrous!

And the reality of it is that there is no going back. There is nothing, no comparable Jewish experience that can allow me to make up for a the lost Holocaust.

I suppose I could tell people that I am of Mizrachi decent. But that would not be right. Anyway they had their own Holocaust type event that no Ashkenazi Jew even cares about. And, I do not want to try and make up for one Holocaust by pretending to have a connection to a much crappier incarnation of one.

No matter how many times I might watch Schindler’s List or walk the grounds of the camps – Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ramah or Terezin – I will remain with this permanent handicap. My complete lack of a direct familial connection to the Holocaust. And, I fear, that is the single, greatest source of my virulent anti-Semitism – making me an ever so crappy Jew.