Robin Margolis, an activist for children of interfaith marriage in the Jewish community who has written for us at IFF, has been posting about the issues adult children of intermarriage face in the community on Jewcy.com. In her latest piece, Why Many Jewish Outreach Workers Ignore Half-Jewish People, she creates a list of all the ways and all the reasons the Jewish community doesn’t offer explicit welcome or programming to adult children of intermarriage.

The list is comprehensive, but I think it misses the point. Most outreach workers are ignoring adult children of interfaith marriage because they don’t think adult children of interfaith marriage have a problem being accepted into the Jewish community. They really just don’t know, and when individuals try to explain, they think these individuals are exceptional. It’s the ignorance of privilege and it’s more intractable than active hostility.

I’m speaking for myself now, here, too. I remember the first time I met a Jewish woman of color, in college. She was an amazingly cool person and I had not known she was Jewish. I was very excited to learn we had Jewishness in common. She explained that because her mom was Jewish and her dad was African-American, Ashkenazi Jewish kids where she grew up told her she couldn’t be Jewish.

“But that’s not right,” I said, and went off into a pedantic explanation of the Jewish law, blah blah blah, to cover my distress. I wanted us to be connected by this identity that was important to me, and she had been pushed away from it. (We were still friends anyway, though she was considerably cooler than I. When I finish writing this I’m going to look her up on Facebook.) It was years before I saw that her experience was not an unusual one.

It’s not that committed Jews, whether we have one Jewish parent or two, don’t like people with complicated Jewish identities. We’ve seen all kinds of complication. It’s that we can’t accept our community could be rejecting. We think we’re good at accepting, and we aren’t. We have to wake up and realize our personal experiences of being Jewish aren’t the only ones.