On the Fear of Assimilation

When I was in Hebrew school, our teachers warned us about the dangers of assimilation. I’ve almost forgotten how often they did this, mainly because even at the time, I didn’t take it seriously. Some of them talked about it like the mainstream white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society Borg were going to plant their nanobots into the entire Jewish people, but I knew my family and I were already “assimilated,” at least compared to some of my classmates. My mom’s family ate shrimp and bacon. Both my parents drove and worked on the Sabbath. None of us kept strictly kosher. We identified as strongly with our Canadian culture as we did with our Jewish heritage.

But our teachers persisted. They told us about the number of Jews who married outside our faith/culture. They reminded us over and over that we were Jewish, that being Jewish meant something, and that what it meant was a continuation of an unbroken cultural line that had survived hardships, discrimination, and violence.

Overall, the impression I got from school was that now that we Jews had finally achieved tentative equality — nobody was actively trying to eradicate us, yay! — the pendulum had swung the other way. If the majority didn’t actively hate us, there was nothing stopping us from eradicating ourselves. Now that we didn’t have to fight so hard to exist, maybe we’d forget how to fight our own impulses to fit in. Maybe now that we finally were invited to be friends with our neighbours, we’d like the lifestyles we saw.

Obviously, assimilation doesn’t rank among the top ten — or even the top hundred — of things I’m worried about today: I married someone who isn’t Jewish. I live and work in diverse communities, and I embrace plenty of things that would make my great-great-grandparents roll over in the graves. But there is an aspect of it that concerns me more than it did.

I worry about losing aspects of my heritage that matter to me because I don’t have the energy to resist majority-culture pressure. I worry about others losing theirs too, about those in my community who want to shuffle people unlike them into a melting pot instead of a mosaic. Who support diversity in theory… but only until they have to make an effort to understand and tolerate.

When I first started working at Ryerson, I didn’t ask for the High Holidays off, both because I didn’t know I could and because I didn’t know how to cope with the consequences of doing so (e.g. planning a lesson that someone else could teach without putting those students at a disadvantage compared to my other classes). So I taught a class while fasting on Yom Kippur; I taught instead of going to shul on Rosh Hashanah.

At the time, it seemed like the only choice. Not just because the structures of Canadian public society made it difficult — and they did and continue to do so — but also because the only Jewish community I felt a connection to was back in my hometown. I wasn’t interested in going to a new shul by myself, especially since the cost of High Holiday tickets felt like paying too much for an option that wasn’t my first choice anyway. What I really wanted was to be able to go home and spend the holidays with my family, but taking holidays and additional travel time off work was definitely out of the question.

It felt pretty awful. It felt like losing some part of myself that I had the opportunity to connect with only once a year. It felt like the serious version of spending hours and hours lovingly creating a video-game avatar — don’t pretend like you don’t spend forever choosing the hair, the nose, the eyebrow-angle that reflects who you want to be in the virtual world — only to have an update erase all my data and having to go with the default who didn’t look a thing like me, because going through all those menus, all those choices again would be too much and too hard.

At school, I realize, what I dismissed was the warning against willing assimilation — informed choices to do what others do because you simply like it better. I don’t find value in, for example, eating only food with a kosher symbol or adhering to traditional Jewish gender roles. I don’t think I am living a less authentic Jewish life because the person I love and chose to marry isn’t Jewish.

But unwilling assimilation, becoming more like the dominant culture not because you’ve looked at it and thought, “Yeah, that’s for me!” but because it’s too draining and difficult not to — that is a danger. And our teachers were right that surrounding yourself with a community of fellows helps mitigate this pitfall of multiculturalism.

However, I still feel uncomfortable with the overall concept, because it meant that multiculturalism was characterized to me as “us” vs. “them.” Us, the minority culture, and them — literally everybody else. But there are plenty of other minority cultures in Canada. Lumping together the threat of cultural erosion from other marginalized groups and from the dominant groups is a false equivalency. Multiculturalism and diversity isn’t the enemy; lack of equity is.

I also reject the narrative — both from Jews warning against assimilation and from members of the dominant culture excusing lack of consideration — that cultural erosion is a natural, inevitable process. In this telling, it’s natural that, when multiple cultures coexist, the dominant one will eventually swallow the others. Only the diligent effort of members of the marginalized cultures can prevent this. Sometimes, this comes with a pseudo-evolutionary moral justification: the reason the dominant culture will erase the others is because it’s objectively better, as evidenced by one’s improved standard of living as a member of the dominant culture within the dominant culture.

This, especially the last part, is nonsense.

It’s true that dominant cultures have vested interest in staying dominant, whether or not their members actively pursue this goal. True multiculturalism requires more energy on everyone’s part because nobody can make unchallenged assumptions; nobody gets the convenience of doing what they do without having to think about it. Minority cultures already have to expend this energy, but dominant cultures can choose whether or not to do so.

But in even an imperfectly multicultural society, most of us belong to multiple cultures. I’m not “just” Jewish or “just” Canadian. In some ways, my culture is dominant; in others, like the Jewish aspects of my identity, it’s a minority culture. Oversimplifying the interactions between cultures, distilling them to an “us” vs. “them” narrative from any perspective, inaccurately represents the reality.

I can’t become “assimilated” because I started as a mix of cultures, and that’s valid. I can allow others’ power to erode my boundaries, and I can allow others’ boundaries to erode through the way I exercise my own power. But, much as people around me might try to define what my boundaries are for me, the only one who gets to decide what culture means to me is me.