With each new class I teach in Budapest, I begin with an opening exercise where I ask each student to write down whatever comes to mind when I mention the following: America or Americans and then Jews in America. Of their responses, some I had anticipated and some were surprising.
Among the more common answers for America: football (not soccer), baseball, films, McDonald’s, hamburgers, fat, ethnic groups, Trump, Native Americans, White House, flag, freedom, rich.
Among the more common answers for Jews in America: Orthodox, New York, Jewish comedians (Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen), Abraham Lincoln (the student thought he looked Jewish… I assured them he wasn’t), George Soros.
What became very clear to me was that, while they all have impressions of America, few of them had given much thought to Jews in America. Which of course made sense to me. If I did this exercise at home with my students at CESJDS, I doubt they would have much to say about Hungarian Jews. So how do I foster a connection between the two groups?
In my classroom at CESJDS, I have a world map hanging on the wall. I refer to this map often in my Modern Jewish History classes as we discuss the world-wide migration patterns of Jews throughout history. I always begin my Modern Jewish History course by handing my students pins and asking them to place their pins on the spot from where their families came. The vast majority of pins end up clustered in Eastern Europe, the former Pale of Settlement. When I asked my Hungarian students where they thought my American students placed their pins, the consensus was that they had placed them in America. I had uncovered an interesting discrepancy. Every Jew in America, and perhaps every American, has a sense of himself as both American and simultaneously “from” somewhere else (for Jews, this is mostly Europe). America is a nation of immigrants, and we are keenly aware of that fact. However, for Hungarian students, this is not necessarily obvious. If their families have always been from Hungary, they assume that American Jews have always been from America.
In my future classes, I will build off of these assumptions and focus on the theme of immigration as a core element of the American Jewish experience and identity.
