I Can't Escape My Jewish Genes
A BRCA diagnosis changed my relationship with my Jewishness
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.
I’ve never felt more Jewish than when the doctor told me—as I lay on an exam table, 33 weeks pregnant—that I had breast cancer. Perhaps even more surprising was that I had tested positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation. While the BRCA1 genetic mutation is not limited to Jews, it is 10 times more likely in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
I didn’t think I was Jewish enough for BRCA. I had always observed a “Jewish lite” lifestyle. I attended Jewish camp, but there was no religious component. I married a Conservative man—which, in my friend group, was considered the equivalent of marrying a rabbi. I assumed BRCA was reserved for people who spent their semesters abroad in Israel and only had Jewish friends.
Passover was about two weeks after my diagnosis. I remember sitting at the Seder table, looking around at my family and feeling deceived. The ultimate imperative of the Jewish population is for Jews to marry other Jews—that’s what I had been told on Birthright. And I had done that. How could Josh and I have contributed to potentially passing this deadly mutation on to our children?
That holiday, I took my one-year-old to a non-kosher restaurant and ordered a shrimp sandwich. Feeding him like a mother bird, I wondered whether the way to save my children was to encourage them to become secular.
At seven or eight, I stared out the window of the backseat of my mom’s Jeep Cherokee. I can still see the neatly cut green grass lawns of the mostly Jewish homes that we passed. I can still feel the shame sitting heavily on my shoulders. I had just received a lesson on the Holocaust. As my morah told us how Anne Frank hid in an attic, I kept thinking: Why didn’t she just convert?
I sensed this was a question I shouldn’t ask. But I confessed to my mom that I didn’t understand why people would continue to light Shabbat candles if it would get them killed. Being Jewish is not worth dying over. The same thought would come back to me as I lay on the exam table some 25 years later.
“It didn’t matter if you converted, Jen,” my mom replied, while driving. “They still considered you a Jew.”
My Jewish identity had been inscribed on my genetic code. I could not hide from it.
This was the thought that came back to me on October 7. Those partygoers at the Nova Festival, those children sleeping in their beds in the kibbutzim, were killed for being Jewish. They were not killed for taking someone else’s land. None of them personally chose to kick anyone out of anywhere. They were just living their lives.
And it wasn’t just in Israel. It was in the way my breath caught every time I heard the sirens of a police car in the vicinity of my children’s Jewish preschool. It was in the way the Jewish families on my street started a group chat to discuss the safety of displaying pro-Israel signs.
The sense of fear that we had inherited from our grandparents had almost come to feel like a bubbameister. But now we knew that it could happen to us. Now. In 2024. Once you know what it is like to no longer feel safe in your skin, the sense of safety rarely returns. You think twice before letting your son wear his Israeli flag T-shirt to school or telling your hairdresser that you are getting your hair done for Rosh Hashanah. You wonder if that pain in your hip is from carrying your baby or whether it is a harbinger of things to come.
BRCA didn’t care that I was on the precipice of becoming a mother for the second time. It didn’t care that I had a one-year-old at home. It didn’t care that I had privilege and education. BRCA was a terrorist. A terrorist that upended my life, massacred my breasts and left me with scars. I still have panic attacks every time I walk through the doors of Mount Sinai Hospital.
When I gave birth to my daughter as a tumor grew in my breast, I thought about what it must have felt like to give birth in a concentration camp. That ultimate act of hope and despair.
Trauma has a multiplier effect on joy. It forces you to reconsider what you value and how you measure gratitude. It is a splinter of light peeking out from under a dark curtain, and it can illuminate the entire room. Like a miracle. Like a newborn baby. The joy of survival, as heavy as that word can be — especially for Jews (poo poo poo)—cannot be extracted from fear.
I ended up giving my daughter a very Jewish name. Lyla Orli means “light in the night.” I couldn’t change her genetics, but I could make her appreciate the beauty that comes with the pain of being Jewish.
Jenny Leon is a breast cancer survivor, veteran lawyer, writer and mother of 3 under 7. She has appeared on various podcasts including Dear Nina and Life's Accessories. Her memoir in progress tackles the trauma of being diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant and how she used that trauma as a sherpa to immerse herself in life.
Instagram: @jennyrosenyc
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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I haven’t changed my mind…….you can’t decide not to be Jewish. But you said it more eloquently than I ever did! Beautifully written.