![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reverie on Attributed Ancestry
May. 13th, 2004 03:22 pmSusan and I were talking on the phone last night about the arrangements for tonight. Somehow the story of our first NYC email exchange came up, which goes like this: Susan and I had done many shows together down in Virginia, she as a dancer, I as a singer. Eventually she started getting dance gigs in more exotic locations--I believe she first went to Japan in 1995. I had her address for awhile and somehow lost it amid MY numerous moves (moved in '94, '95, twice in '97, big-ass move in '99 when I accepted the cruise ship gig, THREE TIMES in 2000...). A mutual friend of ours gave me her current email, saying she lived in the city. I emailed her, asking where she was living, and she replied with the subject line DID YOU KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD VAS TAINTED? (She and I give each other shit about how representative we are of our respective ethnic groups. I am Aryana; she is the classic JP.)
From there the conversation went to the book I read last winter, The Jews of Prime Time, and the parlor game of "Is s/he or isn't s/he?" According to the book, Rachel Green on Friends has not definitively been established as Jewish, although there are clues given that hint at her being so including her name (the book says Green is a classic "ISOIS?" name and of course color names--Rosen, Schwartz, Black--are often Jewish). Which got me to thinking--I wonder if anyone ever wondered that about me? My mother once told me that Grandpa Butch (my dad's dad) sometimes got asked at Princeton, but as far as I know (and we can trace it back pretty far), the Greens have been WASPs forever. I told Susan I'd LOVE that if someone...maybe...wondered...is she or isn't she? I'd love to get some of that attributed ethnicity. I'd kick ass if I had some Russian Jewish blood. I would be strutting all over the city. Hey! I fucking ROCK with my Jewish ancestry!
I won't put down my Northern European, Christian ancestry--I'm proud of that too. But how cool would it be to have something a little different in there?
I think I have the opposite of the Helsinki syndrome. But I love my name now.
From there the conversation went to the book I read last winter, The Jews of Prime Time, and the parlor game of "Is s/he or isn't s/he?" According to the book, Rachel Green on Friends has not definitively been established as Jewish, although there are clues given that hint at her being so including her name (the book says Green is a classic "ISOIS?" name and of course color names--Rosen, Schwartz, Black--are often Jewish). Which got me to thinking--I wonder if anyone ever wondered that about me? My mother once told me that Grandpa Butch (my dad's dad) sometimes got asked at Princeton, but as far as I know (and we can trace it back pretty far), the Greens have been WASPs forever. I told Susan I'd LOVE that if someone...maybe...wondered...is she or isn't she? I'd love to get some of that attributed ethnicity. I'd kick ass if I had some Russian Jewish blood. I would be strutting all over the city. Hey! I fucking ROCK with my Jewish ancestry!
I won't put down my Northern European, Christian ancestry--I'm proud of that too. But how cool would it be to have something a little different in there?
I think I have the opposite of the Helsinki syndrome. But I love my name now.
