I loved my grandmother to death. The epitome of a Jewish matriarch, she was resilient and ever-present in my family’s lives. Though her large house could have felt empty and eerie, every room overflowed to the brim with character and the smell of her saccharine perfume. My grandmother is gone now, but somehow her sweet scent still cloaks her jewelry and the boxes in which she kept her things. While it’s true that I loved her and I do my best to remember her as a whole person, time and memory often make me romanticize her. The only memory that mars her perfection in my mind is the way she would sometimes tell me I “looked like Pocahontas” and would obsess over my deep brown, silky, Asian hair. Those comments never bothered me at the time, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand them as my first real experiences being othered because of my racial identity. My grandmother’s comments were certainly not my last experiences either.

Over time, the feeling of eyes gazing over me, encasing me with a perplexed interest, has come to feel almost comfortable. Almost comfortable. Yet, there’s always a point where the stranger looks for a moment too long and I suddenly feel as though I’m being peeled apart like old paint. They don’t understand why I’m here. They don’t understand why I look like that. They don’t understand how every glance pushes me another mile away from them.

I remember when I rushed for BBYO, hoping to get more involved with Jewish kids my age. We started in a common room with all of the other prospective members and then shuffled around, with representatives from each chapter in each room. In the initial room of close to 200 girls, I was the only one who wasn’t white. After going from room to room, I still had yet to meet anyone who could relate to my intersecting identities. I remember how hard I tried to act the same as everyone else. I wore the tacit uniform of nondescript Ugg boots and black leggings, And I even remember seeing a couple of other girls wearing the exact same shirt from American Eagle as I was. By the end of the night, though, people had thrown copious amounts of flower leis around my neck, several had told me that I didn’t look like I played sports, and I’d been called “beautiful and exotic” nearly a dozen times over. Worst of all was the room where someone told me I looked like Moana and then pressured me into singing a song from the movie in front of all of the room’s occupants.

After that night, I settled quietly with my friends and decided to surrender a bit of my dignity to join one of the BBYO chapters. I took many breaks from attending meetings and gave my chapter about five second tries before eventually going on an indefinite hiatus during quarantine. It was also around this time that my mother recommended me for a BBYO summer camp. She’d heard about the camp from her good friend, whose daughter was much more heavily involved in Jewish youth activities than I was. She signed me up for the summer of 2021. At the time, I was apprehensive and burnt out about BBYO. The post-protest season political climate only exacerbated my bitterness and doubt about BBYO’s exclusive culture. As summer rolled around, I scraped for alternative plans, but I eventually (begrudgingly) agreed to go to the camp.

To no one’s surprise, all of the other campers were white, save one Jewish Mizrahi boy. The shift in the political climate had also seemingly caused a shift in etiquette: it was no longer socially acceptable to immediately ask someone where they were really from, which was a refreshing break. However, I soon found out that prodding questions had been replaced with shallow and alienating attempts from white authority figures to preach about tolerance and the experiences of minorities—to an audience of majority-white kids. The camp told us to return to our schools and become friends with minorities, due simply to the fact that they were minorities. Meanwhile, those same people had scoffed at me when I said that interfaith marriage brings diversity to the Jewish community. Now, they all seemed determined to jam a discussion about every single hot-button issue, no matter how insensitive or superficial, into a one hour time-slot.

Towards the end of the summer, we separated into traditionally gender-divided groups and did our own nighttime programming. My group gathered in a circle around a massive oak tree strung with lights. There, counselors and campers read aloud stories about diverse Jews—of course, to a crowd of white people. On paper, the idea might not have been horrible, but in practice, it was almost laughable hearing the camp’s attempts to shoehorn in diversity, followed by applause for each story as if it were an acting performance. That night, I heard a piece by the Asian American and Jewish writer Rebecca Kuss. I connected with her story of alienation and frustration instantly, and was moved to tears as I sat in a circle of about seventy girls, feeling more alone than I ever had. It dawned on me in that moment that my fellow campers were so disconnected from the actual, real-life diversity of the Jewish community, that they didn’t even consider it possible that the stories of oppression they so self-righteously read aloud might actually resonate with someone sitting right beside them.

I’ve spent my life being told that I’m the “other,” being used as an example of a “minority,”  and being made to feel wildly out of place—and even my loved ones, like my grandma, have contributed to all of this. I know, though (as I stated in the final sentence of my confirmation speech), that “I am no more or less Jewish than I am Asian, queer, or just me. And so, when the world asks me, ‘What are you?’ I say, ‘I am a Jew.’”

The conscious and unconscious othering of minorities in Jewish communities is a phenomenon that runs deep, and can’t be remedied through half-hearted, self-congratulatory performative activism. And this certainly isn’t an issue that can be solved overnight. I hope, though, that my Jewish peers who find themselves gazing at a person who looks out of place learn to be mindful of the small ways in which they may be alienating someone. And to diverse Jews like me, who face the discomfort of everyone else’s stares—know that you aren’t alone, and we’re navigating these complexities together.