The Scene
Jewish Identity, To A 'T'
T-shirt, that is. The latest in "tribal" fashion and cultural pride for 20 and 30-somethings.
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JULIA GOLDMAN
New York Jewish Week
New York
ant to create an instant
community? Just add
cotton.
That's what one San
Francisco-based entrepreneur says she's
doing with a line of T-shirts silk-
screened with the slogans "Yo Semite"
— a play on the national park's name
— and "Jews for Jeter" — in support
of the Yankees' star shortstop.
Undeniably clever, the shirts ($15 to
$20) are "no joke" to their designer,
Sarah Lefton, 30. They are "a way to
find other Jews, a way to stick out,"
she said. "Yes, there are ways to
express that religiously, but why not
culturally as well?"
Lefton's ironic expressions of secular
Jewish pride are part of a larger crop of
conversation-starting T-shirts and other
apparel emblazoned with pro-Semitic
slogans like "Jewcy" or "Jew.Lo" (a
Hebraic spin on "J.Lo," the nickname
for singer/actress Jennifer Lopez).
Visitors to the Columbus, Ohio-
based wvvw.JewishJeans.com site can
choose from 21 styles of T-shirts bear-
ing phrases like "Naughty Jewish Boy,"
"Nice Jewish Girl" and "Pursue Peace,"
as well as key chains and baseball caps.
(Jewish jeans currently are unavailable.)
True, public displays of Jewish soli-
darity are hardly new. "The first per-
son to put on a yarmulke was the first
person to wear Jewish apparel," said
Josh Neuman, the publisher of Heeb
magazine, which sells its own line of
T-shirts hawking the 2-year-old
urban-culture title.
But T-shirts that have hit the Web in
the past few years complement the
contemporary rise of cultural Judaism
as a significant form of ethno-religious
identification. At the same time, larger
trends in American life point to the
creation of communities, or "tribes,"
outside of the conventional delin-
eations of race, religious affiliation or
_
even family.
"Traditional religious Jews — it's
easy for them to find each other," said
Lefton, who does marketing for a
Jewish summer camp located in
Yosemite National Park. "I feel like
more liberal Jews are a tribe, too."
11 / 7
2003
84
Or as "comedian-chanteuse"
Susannah Perlman put it in an inter-
view, "We [unaffiliated Jews] need
love. We need to feel a part of some-
thing. It can't all be about J-Date," the
Internet dating service.
Lefton was active in the Reform
youth movement growing up in
Columbia, S.C., and she participates in
her local Jewish community today. But
nearly half of American Jews (49 per-
cent) identify as secular or "somewhat
secular," according to a 2001 survey of
American Jewish identity conducted by
the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York.
The question is, "Can you make a
Jewish community that is somehow
unconnected to Jewish religious prac-
tice?" suggested Paul Zakrzewski, the
editor of Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from
the Edge (Perennial), a recently released
anthology of new Jewish writers.
Jews are not the only ones banding
together and marking their identities in
unconventional ways. "More and more
we're becoming a nation of tribes," said
Heeb magazine's Neuman. "People are
tattooing themselves, people are pierc-
ing themselves. It's a tribal world."
reflect factors that both inspire and
complicate pronouncements of Jewish
pride: the heightened conflict in Israel
over the past three years and the coin-
ciding global rise in public expressions
of anti-Semitism.
"It's all in the environment,"
Zakrzewski, 35, the director of literary
programs at the JCC in Manhattan,
said. "And it all somehow contributes
to what the T-shirts mean."
Steven Verona, 34, president and
co-founder of Jewish Jeans, was
motivated by an awareness of
growing anti-Semitism to launch
the line, which sells for $24.95 to
$49.95. He started with two shirts,
one reading "Nice Jewish Boy" and
the other "Fight Anti-Semitism."
Connecting
In his soon-to-be published book
Urban Tribes (Bloomsbury USA),
author Ethan Watters describes a new
social phenomenon among long-term
singles in their 20s and 30s. These
"never-marrieds" form tight-knit
groups of friends or co-workers "with
unspoken hierarchies, whose members
think of each other as `us' and the rest
of the world as 'them,'" Watters wrote
in an October 2001 issue of the New
York Times Magazine.
In that spirit, Lefton calls her T-
shirts a kind of "counter-assimilation
mechanism," but new Jewish tribalism
doesn't necessarily make for clannish-
ness. Several T-shirt Web sites —
including Lefton's
wvv-w.jewishfashionconspiracy.corn
"Putting the racy back into conspiracy"
— feature multi-ethnic models.
On wvvvv.jewlo.com , founder Julia
Lowenstein, 27, says her brand "sees
Jewish pride as a first step to a more
multicultural and happy society."
To some observers, the T-shirts also
Heeb magazine
uses Jewish and
Asian models.
One of "Jewish Jeans" baseball caps.