The Full Severity of Our Connection: Lessons from the Jewish Diaspora

By Kayla Harris Cohen

On a Jerusalem-basedgap year program before beginning college, Kayla Harris Cohen traveled the world, and she distills her adventures in lyrical and stirring vignettes, interviews, and essays in her debut book, The Full Severity of Our Connection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637300718

Book preview

Praise for The Full Severity of Our Connection

"Kayla’s journey with KIVUNIM around much of the world provided the seeds for the flowering of her incisive and brilliant thinking that is reflected in The Full Severity of Our Connection. Never one to take the first answer as a final one, Kayla made it her business to challenge and examine and ultimately refine the thinking of her peers, her teachers, and the expert guests who cross KIVUNIM’s path each year. You will meet a few of them in this beautifully composed book, and it is not an exaggeration to say that they will meet themselves in new ways as well, for Kayla often managed to draw out of people a different way of expressing their own thinking. Speaking personally, my lengthy conversations with Kayla sharpened my own understanding of the Universal/Jewish tightrope I have been walking and educating upon for over 50 years."

— Peter A. Geffen, Founder and President, The KIVUNIM Institute; Founder, The Abraham Joshua Heschel School, NYC; Recipient of the 2012 Covenant Award.

Kayla goes beyond sound bites and stereotypes—in particular when it comes to her time spent in the Middle East. Through her captivating descriptions and vulnerable reflections, she invites the reader to join her on a transformative journey and process of discovery. It’s a journey worth joining her on.

— Daniel Wehrenfennig, Ph.D., Founding Director, Olive Tree Initiative

"I met Ms. Cohen during her gap year in Jerusalem back in 2017, and I was immediately impressed by her sense of curiosity and thirst for knowledge. The Full Severity of Our Connection’s greatest force lies in the journey it inspires within readers to interpret and find answers to its questions. Cohen will continue to wrestle with these questions, I am sure, and I cannot wait to read more from her."

— Hamed Q., UN Human Rights Officer

"When I describe KIVUNIM to people, I sometimes say it was like standing on top of the bimah at the end of your bar mitzvah when everyone throws candy at you and you try to catch all that you can, but most of it flies by, and sometimes there’s so much that you hide behind the microphone stand. In this metaphor, Kayla would be the person who stood on top of the microphone stand, caught twenty pieces of candy, and then picked up all the extras … One particular passage in the book brought me to tears from how poetic and familiar it felt. Kayla put into words a thought process and feeling that I could never describe … I’m excited to share The Full Severity of Our Connection with my family. It speaks to the experience of this current generation of Diaspora Jews in particular, and I think it’ll help them understand me in a way I haven’t been able to express fully."

— Alan Jinich, KIVUNIM alum

The Full Severity of Our Connection

The Full Severity of Our Connection

Lessons from the Jewish Diaspora

By Kayla Harris Cohen

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Kayla Harris Cohen

All rights reserved.

The Full Severity of Our Connection

Lessons from the Jewish Diaspora

ISBN

978-1-63676-903-5 Paperback

978-1-63676-967-7 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-071-8 Ebook

For Baba and for Yonim.

I dedicate this book in blessed memory of my grandfather, Dr. Rahim Cohen, my first mentor. Baba was a brilliant physician, a well-respected journalist, an activist, a bridge-builder, and a man of great vision. His lifelong service to the Iranian Jewish community in Tehran and Los Angeles instilled in me from a young age a love for Judaism and a budding curiosity about language and its limitless potential.

I also dedicate this book in blessed memory of my dear friend, Yonim Schweig, who passed away in a tragic accident in the summer of 2020. I first met Yonim during our respective gap year programs in Israel. Once we were both settled in Berkeley—Yonim’s hometown and my new place of study—Yonim’s friendship, curiosity, unique brilliance, vast knowledge of Jewish texts and philosophy, and love for people enriched my life in countless and enduring ways.

Strikingly, my grandfather’s name, Rahim, translates to mercy in Hebrew, and Yonim’s name translates to doves in Hebrew. More than being deeply rooted in the particularities of their Jewish identities and commitments to the Jewish people, my grandfather and Yonim were also both motivated by twinned visions of mercy and peace for the Jewish people and their neighbors—for Baba in prerevolution Tehran and its typhoid-stricken Jewish, Muslim, and Baha’i communities and for Yonim in his Arabic classes and at the Multifaith Living Community at UC Davis, as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

I hope this book works toward their twinned visions, and I hope it inspires my readers to do the same. May both their memories be for a blessing.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

OUTSIDE: DIASPORA

Greece

India

Morocco

Spain

Bulgaria

Berlin

INSIDE: ISRAEL/PALESTINE

Israel/Palestine (2017–2018)

Shabbat in Tel Aviv

Israel/Palestine (Summer 2019)

Shabbat in Los Angeles

Berkeley: On Betweenness, Political Polarization, and Antisemitism on the Left

INSIDE OUT

The Full Severity of the Self: Inner Multitudes, Contradictions, and Institutional Recognition

The Full Severity of Our Diversity: Reevaluating Jewish Identity in Relation to Jewish History

The Full Severity of Our Connection

Acknowledgments

Appendix

For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.

- James Baldwin

Author’s Note

My grandparents left on one of the last flights leaving from the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran before it was bombed in 1980 in the Iran-Iraq War. At that same time, my father was on the other side of the world, struggling to remember the words for the parts of the human body in English for his biology class at his new high school in San Jose, California. He had left for the United States at the age of sixteen in December of 1976, with looming fears about the possibility of a revolution. He left uncertain about when exactly he would see his family and return to Iran.

I was born nearly two decades later in Los Angeles, a city that ballooned post-revolution with Iranian Jewish political refugees like my own family. My growing up in the Persian Jewish community, like the growing up of many first-generation children in general, was informed by strange cultural estrangement and longing. And like many other children in my community, I had many questions about the Iran my family had left behind.

While growing up, I almost exclusively heard English at home. I listened to American radio in the back of my father’s car and watched American TV with my family. When I was little, I ate Iranian dishes only on Friday nights, and I heard Persian only when I was surrounded by my extended relatives or while eavesdropping on my father’s phone calls throughout the week. From a young age, I understood that my love would be most fluent when I used touch and gesticulation rather than words to communicate with my grandmother.

From time to time, my father would recognize a neighbor from Iran or a colleague of his father from medical school, and I would stand quietly and observe the formal greeting of bowing slightly while asking, "Hale shoma chetore? Choob hasteed? Familesh? Momonesh, baradareesh? Salam beresoon!"—How are you? Are you well? How’s your family? Your mother, your brother? Send my regards! I was watching my father interact with a stranger from a different past, almost as if my father himself was a stranger from a different past.

What I had were romantic stories: stories about my great-uncle’s orchard, the family’s day trips to the Caspian Sea in the summer, the treasured sweetness of mulberries still ripe in my father’s memory ("charabeh—it’s trash"—my grandma would usually say, referring to California’s watery produce and dairy in her kitchen). I learned stories of cousins bundling on the rooftop of the family’s Tehran apartment and sleeping there the entire summer, stories of my grandmother and her sisters being so bonded that their children felt like they had three mothers.

My positioning as a Persian American Jew was complicated, and its complexities were made even more apparent to me when I considered the Iranian diaspora, teeming with its own anxieties and longings for return (and the great and intimidating cultural ground that I and other first-generation Iranian Americans had to make up for) within the larger Jewish diaspora, with its different set of anxieties and longings in America.

I was raised in Jewish institutions whose leaders were of largely German and Eastern European descent. Many of my classmates referred to their grandmas as Bubbies (Yiddish is foreign to my family) and ate gefilte fish on Shabbat, which had been branded as a universally Jewish food to me and my peers and was confirmed as such by mainstream American media (even though it was, again, foreign to my family). I was raised in a school system that taught me and my peers that my family is Sephardic (even though the Persian Jewish community was initially established without any connection to Spain—after the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE, not after the Spanish Expulsion in 1492).

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my family and the generation that had to start over in the United States were caught in turbulent tides. To me, the Iranian Jewish communities that I knew in Los Angeles represented a post-1979 Iranian Jewish diaspora, a dispersion of Jews from one center of life, a people who sought refuge in America and carried anxieties and longings and half-hopes to return to their homes in a safer Iran. My Ashkenazi peers and their families did not share in these specific longings. Their families experienced their own respective diaspora, some from the once most vibrant centers of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, and carried with them a range of their own unique hopes, longings, and anxieties informed in part by the antisemitism they experienced under their own hosts. These diasporas, indicative of anti-Jewish sentiment that reduced or liquidated Jewish centers of life across the world at different points in history, are situated within the greater Jewish diaspora and longings for return to the Jewish homeland of ancient Israel. These competing centers of Jewish life differed greatly from the center of my world during my childhood: America. Here we were, caught in different cultural currents, forgetting all that they blurred. For our institutions, forgotten were the particularities of different Jewish families’ host cultures and their legacies. For my generation, often lost was knowledge about our family traditions before they were hybridized, themselves influenced by American culture or the cultures that other Jewish families had brought with them to America.

When Yom Kippur arrived each year, my family attended services hosted by the Iranian Jewish Senior Center, which my grandfather had cofounded. When I was little, I’d look off to the windows, kicking the bottom of my chair as forests of adult bodies rose for the appropriate prayers. The chants were foreign and haunting. They’d dissolve into trills, rendering the prayers indistinguishable to my ears.

Once, when I had grown a little older, my father described the strange, nostalgic feelings that the Muslim call to prayer sometimes stirs in him. I found this particularly telling; the melodies from his childhood synagogue in Tehran and the Iranian Senior Center’s synagogue in Los Angeles better resembled the chanting in Iranian mosques than the European-influenced melodies of the synagogue in which I was raised.

My growing up was reflexive—as I grew older, I’d loop back around to question the influences that shaped me, starting with ideas and values and then working my way up to the language that surrounded me. This was motivated, in part, by the distance I felt from my Iranian origins. But it was also motivated by the more particular, doubly confusing estrangements that came with being mixed. I was the child of two immigrants from two different parts of the world, bearing the legacies of not just my Persian Jewish paternal line, but also my Scottish matrilineal line.

As I grew older and began entertaining questions about my family history and identity, I found language to be the most intimate and revealing. I learned at a young age that the Hebrew word "shalom and the Arabic word salam, which were both referenced in a popular Jewish camp song I grew up singing with my peers (and without being questioned), meant peace and that this was no coincidence. This was never probed further until I spent considerable time visiting Palestinian communities over my gap year in Jerusalem, where I began to recognize the Arabic words seamlessly integrated into the common Persian speech that my family used at home (and again, without questioning): salaam to greet people on the phone and welcome guests into their homes, mashaAllah when offering praise, yaanee to specify, inshaAllah when sharing their best wishes and prayers. I began to consider how my Persian classmates’ first or family names derived from the Arabic words for light or wisdom or resplendent had integrated into the Persian language. For example, my own grandfather’s name, Rahim, was the Arabic counterpart to the Hebrew word rachamim, meaning mercy or compassion." That same year, I salvaged the Persian script I had learned in high school (I would formally learn the Arabic script in college) to write the names of my Palestinian hosts in Arabic. Our conversations were limited to simple English, and the fact that I could demonstrate something—even their names in the two languages’ shared letters, mocking that of a kindergartener just learning to write her own name—made us both immeasurably happy.

These experiences raised seismic questions about my family’s position about who we were and where I stood as a Persian American Jew—caught somewhere between the Semitic twinned languages of Hebrew and Arabic, between Persian language and culture and its Arab or Islamic influences, and between Ashkenazi-American Judaism, its European and Christian influences, and general Persian and American culture. That, with the complicating additions of my Scottish-Protestant