THE PUERTO RICAN JEW AT CCNY

At a dinner party, the hostess -a progressive educator who also claimed to be the professional Jew at CCNY, though she was an atheist- said, almost bragged about it, that her adult children were not practicing religion, and with a laugh, that they were typical Americans. If you study assimilation processes in multicultural settings, such cases are not abnormal, quite common. The anecdote would have been inconsequential, pedestrian, had it not been for how she responded later on that semester to a question formulated by a Puerto Rican colleague -intentionally, though, he sounded just curious-. He asked how children of Jewish ancestry born and raised in Puerto Rico would see themselves. Without losing a step and quite annoyed, she answered, “Jewish, of course.” The impression given was how they even think of themselves as Puerto Rican. Since the questioner had met quite a few of those children in Puerto Rico, he knew that they saw themselves as Puerto Rican Jews, like any descendant of Lebanese, Catalonians, Corcicans, Chinese, Yorubas, Arawaks, Mestizos, Dominicans, Cubans, Irish, would identify if they were born and raised in the Islands of Enchantment. After all, many of their ancestors had arrived in Puerto Rico before Manhattan even had paved roads or latrines. Some towns in Puerto Rico were urbanized very early during the colonization process and all kinds of immigrants participated in the enterprise. Years later, I asked a young New Yorker the same question and he did not answer; just made uncomfortable facial gestures. I guess, for some, Puerto Ricans are all alike, and a group one must not be identified with. Did they know who Roberto Kuferschtein was or Matías Bruckman or Cayetano Coll i Toste or Julia de Burgos or Yeyita Pérez or Lola Rodríguez de Tio or Haljmar Flax or Eduardo Lalo or that some of Puerto Rican ancestors were Sephardic Jews who were forced by the Inquisition to become Christians? Anyway, for some, egos are bigger than facts or historical patterns.