Last week I wrote about the reality that Judaism was never just a religion. Here, I want to consider what happens when we start labeling what kind of Jews we are, or labeling others. I was listening to a podcast recently when someone said, “I’m just a Reform Jew,” almost apologetically, as if she needed to qualify her own belonging before someone else did it for her. I kept coming back to that word, “just” and what it says about us that so many Jews feel the need to diminish their own Judaism before anyone even asks them to explain it.

Then I was in a conversation about a potential teacher, and someone described her as a “committed Jew.” When I asked what they meant, the answer was that she knew t’fillah and brachot. To be clear, those are important skills, and they were genuinely relevant to the role we were discussing. But what stuck with me was how quickly and naturally the language of “commitment” had become synonymous with a specific type of liturgical knowledge, how, without much reflection, we had taken a broad and complex idea about what it means to be part of a people and reduced it to a single, narrow measure.

These two examples are connected, and I think they point to something that has challenged American Jewish life for some time, a persistent assumption that there is some sort of hierarchy of Jewish authenticity. Some Jews are more real, more legitimate, more genuinely committed........

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