I'm Not Jewish, but I Love Jewish Culture

The universal joy of dancing the hora, eating latkes and lighting candles

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

“You would’ve made a great Jew,” a friend says to me, at the bat mitzvah of our mutual friend’s daughter. The Rabbi is parading the Torah around the sanctuary as we, the congregation, sing:

Bim bam, bim bim bim bam,
Bim bim bim bim bim bam. 
Bim bam, bim bim bim bam,
Bim bam, bim bim bim bam,
Bim bim bim bim bim bam.
Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shabbat Shabbat Shabbat Shalom.

We are clapping and smiling and hugging the bat mitzvah girl and her parents and her siblings and each other. I am singing louder than anyone else, soaking up the moment in all its splendor. And there is so much love.

I had to look up the name for that particular moment in the ceremony: the Torah service. While I didn’t know its name by heart, not the way I knew the chant, I’m flattered by my friend’s suggestion. I smile and shrug, but I agree: I sure would have made a great Jew. I love lighting Hanukkah candles, dancing the hora, and helping my gal pals raise our best friend, the mother of the groom, onto a chair. Joyful and powerful, women raising women, as we celebrate her on the dance floor.

We are united. We stand together in love and friendship and tradition and life. In raising good humans who will someday raise the chairs of their friends, and on and on, for generations to come. Tradition.

I recently saw a meme about an Italian and a Jew bumping into each other. After a funny schtick, one asks: “You mean you’re not Italian?” The other asks: “You mean you’re not Jewish?”

“Italians and Jews,” they say simultaneously. “Same corporation, different division.”

I chuckled. Is it my one-hundred-percent Italian lineage that would have made me a great Jew?

As a kid, my mother, who loves good food and a good celebration, made all holidays special. During Passover, my snack included peanut butter and jelly on matzah. On Hanukkah, I spun a dreidel. We made latkes and exchanged gelt. On St. Patrick’s Day, we ate Irish Stew. The Natelli family was open. I was raised not just to accept, but to embrace the traditions of my friends. If Diwali was as widely celebrated in the United States in 1970 as it is today, I have no doubt my mom would have made us gulab jamun.

I was also raised to read everything and form my own opinions. In college, I studied the works of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Night, based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, has stayed with me forever.

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior,” he wrote. A master of words and a survivor of evil, he has said that we must remember the atrocities of the Holocaust so that they never happen again. And yet, here we are. Just over one year out from October 7. Innocent lives taken. Our world shattered, again, by antisemitism, hatred, bigotry. We can’t forget.

But oh, how I wish we could remember: We are more alike than different. We love our families and holidays and rites of passage. We love tradition and protect our children ferociously. And we love our ethnic food; as Italians enjoy zeppole, the Polish snack on chrusciki, the Spanish chomp on churros and our Jewish pals crunch kichels. At the end of the day, it’s all just fried dough.

Please, I pray, let’s unite in the splattering of oil and the sprinkling of powdered sugar. Let’s stand together in love and friendship and tradition and life. In raising good humans who will raise the chairs of their friends for generations to come.

Recently, my mother had her DNA tested, and discovered that she isn’t one-hundred-percent Italian, after all. She is one percent Ashkenazi Jew. 

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Judith Natelli McLaughlin is an Amazon best-selling author who publishes across genres, including children's chapter books, poetry books, middle grade, women's fiction and romance. Her most recent novel is Summer on Butterfly Bay.

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This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.