Growing up, I was told that Clark was an “Ellis Island name.” The story went like this: when my great-grandparents arrived in New York from Eastern Europe in the early 1910s, the immigration officers could not pronounce their Jewish surname—too foreign, too many consonants—so they assigned them something simpler. Something American. Clark.

I never questioned it. A lot of Jewish kids I knew growing up had similar stories. Smiths and Greens and Millers—names that sounded like they had been in this country since the Mayflower, all supposedly handed out by overwhelmed clerks at Ellis Island who could not be bothered to learn how to spell a name from the old country. It was a cute story. An origin myth for American Jews. We came here with nothing and they couldn’t even let us keep our names.

It was also not true.

After October 7, I went into what I can only describe as a deep-dive hyperfixation—reading everything I could about the history and sociology of antisemitism, trying to build a framework to make sense of the world I was suddenly seeing around me. One of the books that hit me hardest was Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, which I cannot recommend strongly enough to every person, Jewish or otherwise, reading this.[1] And it was there that I learned the truth about Ellis Island names.

They were not a thing. Immigration officers did not rename anyone. Our great-grandparents were not stripped of their identities at the door—they stripped them off voluntarily. They changed their own names, deliberately and intentionally, to avoid the scrutiny they knew would come from being visibly Jewish in a new country. They wanted to leave the pogroms and the persecution behind them. They wanted a fresh start. And then they told their children and grandchildren a more comfortable version of the story—because the truth was harder to say out loud.

The truth was that they wanted the option to move through the world as something other than a Jew. Because it was easier. Because it was safer. Because they had learned, through generations of brutal experience, that being identifiably Jewish came with a cost.

I understand why they did it. But I have come to believe it taught us exactly the wrong........

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