What's Cantonese for Mazel Tov?

            Okay, kids, let’s line up and celebrate America’s diversity, if only to piss off the nativists.

            After Ethnic Day, the preschool sent pictures of the costumed kids, all with faces pixilated. here’s a sari on some girls, a turban on a Sikh (I guess) boy. An Italian family opted to dress a son like a Chico Marx style paesano. (Chico was a 20th century Jewish comedian born in NY as Leonard Marx. What about the Pope, Michelangelo, or da Vinci?) We saw a sombrero on a head of pixels, a Dominican Day tee shirt on a toddler boy (or girl), and just one Rutgers tee. Nobody dressed like a Pilgrim, a Colonial, or a Delaware, the Indigenous tribe of Jersey.

            My granddaughter, above, wore a traditional Chinese design outfit and topped it with a yarmulke.

            Discussion question: The Chinese are people who “come from” China. Are the Jews a nation, “coming from” a specific place, Israel? Or are Jews a religious group existing in minds, hearts, and books, coming from anywhere?

            Some folks in my Chinese family asked when we came over from Israel. My bloodline left the Levant a thousand years ago, having migrated, with or without duress, from somewhere in the “Holy Land”. They spent a millennium isolated in the farming villages, shtetls, of greater Russia, or in urban ghettoes. The deepest roots I know of are in eastern Europe-Lithuania and The Pale of Settlement. My children’s roots are in the Bronx and Queens. Dress them like the cast of Fiddler, or Hassidim, but that ain’t us.

            For now, I’ll opine that Israel is not the place I “came from”.

            The Chinese in my family could say medieval Cathay is where they “came from.” Most, like my son-in-law and his parents (my machatunim) don’t follow a religion. Some, like Tina’s parents, adopted Christianity before they left northern China. Others follow Buddhism, but that’s more about lifestyle and good personhood. Judaism, with its old man on a throne in the sky, writing commandments with lightning and deciding who’s gonna make it to next Yom Kippur, that’s a religion.

            Today, there are about a thousand Chinese of Jewish ancestry living today in Kaifeng, Henan province, China. Every spring, you can find pictures of their Passover seders on the Internet. Same for the Jewish Taiwan Cultural Association in Taipei. Ask them to dress like where they think they “came from.” Don’t get involved in the whole China / Taiwan issue.

            Thousands of Jews fled the Nazis to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they got along okay. But they left after the war, saying, Thanks for your hospitality, China, but the road (to Ellis Island, or Palestine, or Galveston) is my middle name. Will be in touch. BTW, love the food.

            While Ethnic Day was a fun exercise for Julianna and her daycare pals, and sent a positive message for diversity in central Jersey and America, it failed to address an inevitable question my granddaughter’s cohort will ask: If where we “came from” so memorable, why are we here?