Big J’s? Little J’s? Jewsplain Us No More

By instinct, we steel ourselves. Before the commentators can switch on their mics, before the first “Breaking News” headline screams, we anticipate what’s coming: Jew-blame. We exist in a space in which Jews are automatically assigned responsibility for all manner of social and political ills, in which wrongdoing against Jews is dismissed out of hand as somehow deserved: victims of Oct. 7, 2023 must be complicit in their own murders; Jewish preschoolers in Michigan are understandably targeted because their terrorist attacker lost Hezbollah family members in a bombing; the list goes on.

At first we were shocked. Today we are prepared, our guard rising against the venomous storms that continue to hit us from the usual sources and sometimes from surprising new ones, when others tell us who we are and define our lived experiences for us. When they Jewsplain — for instance, condescendingly school us — about Jewish history in the land of Israel, confidently announce that all Jews are white or categorically deny the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust — they fail to consider that we, as individuals and as a people, already know who we are and what we have endured.

The global pervasiveness of this phenomenon is front and center in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 debut novel, “Everything Is Illuminated.” In it, a character articulates a perception of Jewishness in a contemporary European expanse awash with antisemitism, telling the protagonist, “Mother asked about you yesterday. She said, ‘And what about the troublemaking Jew?’ I informed her that you are not troublemaking, but a good person, and that you are not a Jew with a large-size letter J, but a jew, like Albert Einstein or Jerry Seinfeld.”

And therein lies the persistent rub: In this post-Oct. 7 moment, in which Jewish expression may be fraught with complications both extra- and intracommunal, to be a Big J or not to be a Big J is, indeed, the question.

The character’s statement is tinged with his pride at having mounted such a grand defense in spite of his acquaintance’s fatal flaw of being a Jew of any sort, and drips with the kind of “Some of my best friends are Jewish” sickly sweet sincerity and self-aggrandization that has traditionally enabled gentiles to feel good about inappropriately essentializing Jewishness. As portrayed, a “large-size letter J” Jew is not someone great to have around, while a “small-size letter j” Jew is a benign representative of the group — secularized, shorn of obvious religious or cultural affiliation and therefore altogether untroubling. Einstein and Seinfeld are tolerable as long as their respective scientific and comedic personae do not manifest as members of the tribe.

This constructed essence of Jewishness exists from within as well. In an internal twist, it reflects ideas about Jewish performance, about how we, as Jews, put into practice the varied strata of Jewish identity. I even referenced this phenomenon in an academic conference paper, my introduction describing a longtime friend who had deemed my husband and me unworthy company when we discontinued our synagogue membership.

Despite my pal’s devotion to bacon-wrapped asparagus and mine to eating kosher-style, and despite her own professional life being unrelated to anything Jewish and my professional lifetime of work centering on Jewish American literature and the Jewish American experience, I was no longer quite “Jewish enough” in her eyes. For her, a tie to a synagogue — even if largely for social purposes — was the singular requirement for admission into the Big J Club, so in my diminished state I was now a mere little j, a background player on the stage of Jewishness, regardless of where I might designate my own place in the Jewish mise en scène.

So over time, Jews have attached their identities to social structures created from the outside — structures that are fickle and fluctuating. It’s no wonder that in the recent, choking chaos of antisemitism that has erupted so forcefully, American Jews are only very gingerly laying claim to or even defining their position as Jews. Deciding to wear a Star of David in public comes with hesitation and deep deliberation. Equivocation regularly winds its way into conversations expected to be disdainful of Jewish experience: that “Jews are the canary in the coal mine of racism, the first to be endangered but never the last,” some caution, instead of just saying outright that Jews are under siege for being Jews.

It’s no wonder that in the recent, choking chaos of antisemitism that has erupted so forcefully, American Jews are only very gingerly laying claim to or even defining their position as Jews.

As the days, months, and now years since Oct. 7 pass — and as new attacks, whether online, academic or physical, continue to spread — the fight over who gets to be the Big J may be inevitable, but it’s also risky. When a community’s sense of itself starts to crack, its ability to protect itself can crack too—and this isn’t the moment for that. Already rendered vulnerable by dangerously dissipated memory and diasporic distance, what it can withstand without crumbling altogether is anyone’s guess.

Our irritated dismay at the pronouncements of the “As a Jew” crowd, then, is no surprise. We already encounter daily what feels like an entire world teeming with strangers spitting at us their inaccurate, vitriolic and antisemitic definitions of Jews. Those who are not strangers among us — other Jews — might as well be when they “doth protest too much,” seeking to appear as separate and far-removed from the targets of global derision as possible.

In recent weeks, this painful betrayal is on display once again, with many Jews rallying not to denounce the numerous attacks on synagogues around the globe, but rather to explain sympathetically why terrorists believe violent aggression against Jews is warranted. Ironically, in advancing themselves as Jews with the power to declare what Jews are — to play the role of Big J’s in this context — they simultaneously shrink themselves into little j’s, relegated to inhabiting the smallest space possible. Because performativity neither epitomizes nor encourages authenticity. And authenticity is necessary for emotional fortitude and both personal and collective survival.

Jewsplaining and the assignation of Big J and little j identities, no matter which direction they assail from, assail nonetheless. Only we, as individuals, can define what it actually means to be Jewish, what that connection signifies in our lives. Certainly, “To thine own self be true” takes on a whole new resonance when considered in the dimmed light of our current, confounding world.

Audrey B. Thacker, Ph.D. is Adjunct Professor of English at Cal State Northridge, where she is Chair of the Matadors Against Antisemitism Faculty and Staff Resource Group. She is also a 2026 Faculty Mentor of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).