Shifting Faiths: Latino and Jewish Religious Identities

Abstract

Growing up in Puerto Rico as a Catholic with a Jewish mother was a constant exercise in shifting between religious and cultural identities. I did not really embrace my Jewish roots until I was 18, when I attended a small liberal arts college, Sarah Lawrence, just outside New York. There, surrounded by my newly found friends, I was declared Jewish. “Your mother is Jewish,” a friend proclaimed, “therefore you are Jewish.” Perhaps it was because I had the opportunity to start a new life or because my Catholicism had eroded; perhaps I wanted to belong and intuitively understood that this was my in, this new group of Jewish friends that had adopted me so easily based on an inherited legitimate cultural religious identity that I barely understood. Or perhaps I was crafting a whole new identity, even rebelling a bit from the constraints of Puerto Rican Catholicism. Whatever the case, I decided to audition this new identity. It seems to have stuck; post-college I went to work for the New Israel Fund. I married a Jewish man. My children are Jewish.