34 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, November 8, 1985 LEVIN BEAUTY Kosins ALL AT DEEP DISCOUNT PRICES Uptown Southfield Rd at 11' : Mile • 559 3900 Open 7 Days Big & Tall Southfield at 10' Mile • 569 , 930 OAK PARK 547-9669 Coolidge at 10 Mile Opeo Daily 9 to 6 Send Someone Special a Gift 52 Weeks a Year. 'Where Fit is Foremost' Fragrances Beauty Supplies Cosmetics West Bloomfield Plaza 851.7323 Orclord lab Rd. S: al Maple Opeo Daily 9 to 6 S. 11 to 5 COMMENT Who Is A Jew? Check Your Passport Send a gift subscription to THE BY JOSEPH AARON Special to The Jewish News JEWISH NEWS! My name is Joseph Aaron. I've been spending some time recently wondering how Jew- ish-sounding that is. I've been wondering that because of a crippled old man in a wheelchair who wound up being thrown into the Mediter- ranean with two bullet holes in him. 'Because of his J ewish- sounding name. I've been wondering, too, because of seven passengers on TWA Flight 847 who were kept separate, treated dif- ferently, cut off from the other hostages, until the very end. Because of their Jewish- sounding names. Two more lessons for those of us with Jewish-sounding names. As if we needed yet another lesson. But maybe we do. It has, after all, been 40 years since the war in which six million in- nocent people were slaught- ered simply because of their Jewish-sounding names. Forty years since six million very dif- ferent people — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Athe- ist, Zionist, Socialist, Corn- munist, Pole, German, Lithua- nian, Rumanian — with no- thing in common to provide a reason for their extinction, were deemed to have every- thing in common. Because of their Jewish-sounding names. That was enough. It was enough to result in the murder of my grandfather and my grandmother and my 16-year-old aunt and my dozens of other relatives, all with Jewish-sounding names. Even despite the fact that the family had changed its name to Aaron from the 'more Jewish' Hershkovitz some 100 years before to avoid some other pogrom. Aaron, evi- dently, was Jewish-sounding enough. And so, again in 1985, there is a selection made, again hav- ing a Jewish-sounding name is enough to get you special at- tention. And so, again, a simple Jew named Aaron is wondering. Wondering be- cause Aaron, is after all, out of the Bible, as is Joseph. Which, I guess, makes it pretty Jew- ish-sounding. Yet, it's not as Jewish-sounding as my neigh- bor's name of Cohen or the names of some of my friends — Shinsky, Skolnick, Rubinstein. Yet still I wonder, for who's to know, who's to say for sure. And I'm not alone in that wondering. A friend who doesn't have a particularly Jewish-sounding name, and who didn't loseiany relatives in the Holocaust, also began wondering when his long- planned trip to Italy and Greece was set for last week. 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For though it's the end of the 20th century and he's a citizen of the most enlightened nation of Earth, having some- thing Jewish-sounding re- mains something that can be hazardous to your health. Leon Klinghoffer and TWA Flight 847 reminded us that while technology and the times may change, some things don't. That while it's as true today as it was 300 years ago that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it is equally true that a Rosen may be in as big trouble. And so, when the world ac- cuses us of being paranoid, of suffering from some complex or other, of being security- crazy, of making an issue out of being Jewish, we should re- mind them that it is they who make the issue of it. They who do not let us alone. And so, when we begin to engage in self-bashing, in destructive debates over who is a good Jew, who is a better Jew, who, in fact, is a Jew, maybe we ought to remember that the world already has an answer for that. All it takes is a peek at a passport. That is reality. As for why that is, perhaps it's a question best left to philosophers and theologians. For me, though, I've always thought the best answer to why? was given by my favorite writer, Mark Twain, in an essay he wrote almost 100 years ago. "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extrav- agantly out of proportion to •the smallness of his bulk. That, in the end, is our burden. And our blessing.