Interview with Zack Richard
- Zack Richard is a personal friend of one of our group mates, Hannah V. He currently works at a youth rehabilitation camp as a camp counselor. He is a skater, a vegetarian, a Jew, an online chess player, and–as described by Hannah–an all-around good dude. He also claims that he works part-time as a stunt double for Brad Pitt, but our sources have yet to verify this. He says of himself, “I’m Jew-ish–emphasis on the –ish.” Zack’s interview has provided us with another lens with which to look at Jewish experience, however casual or understated it might be.
We encourage our site visitors to read the interview and remain faithful to its context: an ultimately casual exchange between friends. Though this was done for a project, this original context is important in order to understand one of our approaches to the Lurcy project: though we only had unspeaking documents to work with, we were ultimately engaging a conversation so as to learn about another person. One of the only ways to converse with someone who is not alive to converse with is to engage anyone or anything who might have been attached to them, however loosely. One of the more concrete attachments were Alice and Lewis Nelson, relatives of Alice Lurcy, but we were lucky to even have that. By expanding our project to include Jewish experience as a whole, we are then more equipped to draw parallels and seek similarities between Georges Lurcy and other people who shared a common and important trait: Jewishness.
This is very difficult territory to navigate for several reasons. On one hand, it is not our intention to suggest a single, cohesive Jewish community in which everyone is connected and ultimately similar by virtue of their Jewishness. However, it is also not our intention to suggest that there is nothing at all that actually connects one Jew to another. Because it is the nature of this territory to be murky and difficult–this strange, ever-liminal, tense, relational territory between difference and sameness, between otherhood and selfhood–we have embarked on this expedition with friends, with people we love who work with us to reach mutual understanding, and where understanding cannot be reached, we are content with acceptance.
H: So, we’ve been examining this single person, Georges Lurcy, a super-wealthy French Jew who lived in France while Hitler was beginning to invade Europe, and he married a woman from NC, and there is this whole problem and dramatic narrative surrounding him trying to get his belongings from France to the US. His original name was Levy and he changed it to Lurcy, we can only assume it was for protective measures…
Z: It seems it was obviously for protective measures…
H: Yeah, that’s what we’re going with. He ultimately had a very sublimated Jewish identity. Very few of his relatives knew he was Jewish, few people knew about his name change, there are only a few documents where it mentions anything about it, etc. And this sublimation could have been conscious or unconscious as there were obviously political and economic reasons at the time, but we also don’t think he was very religious in general, however, through an examination of these documents, we’ve seen how his Jewishness has affected his story and life trajectory, and we’re still discovering narratives about Jewish diaspora and preservation such that this personal story informed and is informed by a more universal (Jewish) story. So my question is, how integral is your Jewish identity to your overall intersectional identity, and how does it show up in surprising ways? I believe there is a degree to which sublimating, suppressing, or just neglecting a part of our identity has the potential to make it more pronounced such that it is inevitable that it will manifest in other ways that might be surprising. Could you speak on that?
Z: I absolutely will, but I have a question first. Do you have to type up this whole interview?
H: Yeah, pretty much.
Z: Okay, so if I say “anaphylactic, 1234567, antidisestablishmentarianism, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” you have to type all of that?
H: Okay, no, I am not typing all of that…
Z: What? Come on?
H: I doubt that makes the final transcript, we’ll see.
Z: I definitely think it should, but anyway, I gotta say for my identity as a whole and my Jewish identity, I gotta be real, I feel like I’m free to be as Jewish or un-Jewish as I want, and I think that had led to me not feeling a lot of pressures to integrate it actively. What it means to be Jewish for me is really related to how I adapt to the fact that I’m Jewish, I don’t feel like I’m supposed to believe anything or present myself socially a certain way, I think it’s just about this decision about how I want to express or make it known that I’m Jewish, it doesn’t feel like it’s a huge part of my identity, it’s just inconvenient at some times and convenient at others. Like when someone says something Antisemitic or thinking about the fact that my ancestors were murdered because of it, those are bad experiences, but I’m also a white liberal dude, so it feels good to have some cushioning from that whiteness, and in that capacity being Jewish is nice—in that way, I feel like I have more room to talk about things like tolerance and social issues I’m passionate about without it being performative.
H: Your Jewishness is a very naturalized part of your identity is what I’m hearing. For example, I don’t need to celebrate the fact that I have brown hair. It’s just natural, it’s there, it’s not a huge deal, but it is a part of me. Is that accurate, is that what I’m hearing?
Z: Yeah, absolutely you said it perfectly.
H: So, I mentioned it coming up in surprising ways that you may not know to attribute to your Jewishness…you might not even know because it’s so naturalized. For example, I know that though you don’t keep Kosher, you are vegetarian, so there’s obviously a part of you—whether it’s attributable to your Jewishness or not—that believes that what we consume and how we consume it is important. Can you speak on that or think of any other instances like that?
Z: I think something that frustrates me is how often I act super Jewish without at all trying to act Jewish, haha. I am a vegetarian, so I naturally keep Kosher—I deeply believe in the premise around Kosher-ness. The whole idea is about having “properness,” Kosher comes from the word kaser which means “proper,” and to me being deliberate about food has been important whether it’s about health or being mindful and attentive to ethical and unethical consumption practices and patterns. Additionally, Jewish people for centuries have been trying to figure out reality, and I guess a lot of people do that, but I feel like a descendant of that mind, and doing good deeds and doing things because you think they’re right, so while there are arguments surrounding the belief systems themselves, there is a consensus I ultimately I find myself broadly falling into, even though I don’t arrive at the conclusions through the Jewish lens, I still come to the same conclusion, and maybe that’s the manifestation of centuries of Jews raising Jewish children who are imprinted with this stuff whether they’re teaching deliberately or not, or maybe it’s some innate Jewishness that I have, I don’t know, but I’m really close to the Jewish identity in a lot of ways, but I don’t feel like I got to it through Judaism.
H: That’s really interesting—can you explain what you mean by that?
Z: I agree with most Jewish premises, and I know I’m blanketing Jewish culture here, but I just sort of have a sense of how a Jew would do something that is both very much separate and very much apart of what I would do. When it comes to Jewish values, the reason I have those is not because I intentionally dedicated myself to learning them, it wasn’t through Judaism—it just feels like it’s something that’s happened.
H: I gotcha. So, in talking about nature versus nurture, what would you say the ratio is in making you as Jewish or not as Jewish as you are today?
Z: I have no f***ing clue, haha. That’s tough because my mom’s mom died when she was five, and her dad was super distant, and she didn’t really have a Jewish upbringing because she didn’t really have an upbringing, so it’s hard to say I had a Jewish upbringing because I wasn’t raised in a synagogue, I didn’t really know I was Jewish until I was older because I wasn’t told except maybe in passing, there weren’t many Jewish objects around to integrate, I just sort of found out and when I was told I had no idea what that meant, I didn’t know what a Jew was, so it’s hard to say nurture, and I think nature is bulls**t too because we’re all just human beings, I don’t think there’s a nature that makes someone Jewish or whatever the f***…am I allowed to cuss…I’m gonna cuss…I’m Jewish but I’ve also got a lot of European mixed in, so I don’t know about the whole nature/nurture thing. I don’t have a great explanation for the alignment I have with Judaism or Jewish values except for the identity itself.
H: So, you said you didn’t know you were Jewish for the longest time and I definitely want to know what it was like to “come into” your Jewishness, and if there weren’t objects/embodied rituals that helped you come into it, then what does that look like, what does that mean?
Z: So, when I found out I was Jewish, I was deeply bummed because it felt like something I could be made fun of for, so it was something I made sure not to tell people, but as I got older I realized it wasn’t such a big deal, no one really cared if I was Jewish or not. I was maybe eleven when I found out, so integrating the facticity of my ancestry was really an act of hiding it, I just didn’t tell people and nobody would ever guess because I don’t “look” Jewish, and when I was fourteen after I got into some trouble, my parents sent me to a Jewish school for a year and had me learn some Hebrew and s*** and read the Bible, the Old Testament, the Torah, whatever and study rabbinical literature and my natural response to that was a complete rejection of everything because all of the rituals and forms seemed to be grounded in a God in didn’t believe in at the time and it was all completely inaccessible to me and it was frustrating and annoying, and after that Jewishness sort of became this curious little adjective that just happened to be amongst many of mine, and it wasn’t until I was older and more curious and believed more spiritual stuff (that was not Jewish) that I started revisiting Judaism and realizing that maybe my 14-15 year old brain was not able to comprehend a lot of what I had been taught. I realized I might have missed out on something, so my relationship then became one of seeing Judaism as any other religion, but it’s one I have a connection with whether I want to or not, which makes me want to learn more about it.
H: So, you said something really interesting about how learning about the facticity of you ancestry made Judaism something to hide about yourself; with George Lurcy, I’ve already discussed how his Jewishness was something that he suppressed, but that through that suppression it arguably made it more pronounced, because when we suppress certain parts of our identity they typically just manifest in more distinct ways and sometimes in strange or unanticipated places. I did the same exact thing with Catholicism…I didn’t realize I was Catholic until I was old enough to understand what that meant and I went through the same process of repudiation and rejection and when I finally did come back it was through a lot of other religions, philosophies, and spiritual pathways, and a lot of the conclusions I came to were very Catholic…I think in trying to getting away from it in the first place made me come back to it in a stronger way, and I think that’s a part of growth and evolution in general because we do it with our parents, too. Nine times out of ten, the more different we try to be from our parents, the more we become like them, which is why I refer to this as a human evolutionary process, but that and the Freudian psychology surrounding repression that I’m referring to requires a whole other conversation. I’m not sure I have a question, I just want to hear your thoughts on this, because I feel like outright rejection or repudiation is just a way to reinforcing and buttressing that part of our identity more.
Z: I definitely think everyone has gone through that, yeah. I would love to give a clear-cut answer, but the reality is that it was never that big of a deal for me, so when I rejected it, it wasn’t really a rejection of everything Jewish, it was more like, I just didn’t want people to know. It was like I had the option to be normal or not be normal, and I simply checked the normal box. I will say, I experienced a similar rejection with my parents who were kind of spiritual when I was growing up and I kind of eventually declared myself an atheist and had fervent denials of any spiritual entities or anything beyond the material realm, and then that didn’t last and I got more spiritual and Jewishness came back after that. But I definitely see what you’re saying and I completely agree, like you gotta fight that war with what you’re raised with, but I wasn’t really raised with enough Jewishness to ever need to fight a war against it, it was more just like this tiny skirmish that I won out. But I will say that something interesting about Judaism is that you don’t really have to believe anything to be a Jew, because on some fundamental level it’s as much about ethnicity as anything else, so while you can treat it religiously, I interact with it more as an ethnic thing.
H: Yeah, it’s just something you’re born into. Another kind of big part of this class is examining—obviously—material culture and how we relate to objects and materiality, and I know you said there weren’t many Jewish objects when you were growing up and stuff like that, but if there aren’t any discrete objects you can think of, can you think of any embodied existence that your Jewishness has taken on?
Z: So there were some materials that came later in life, like my family has a f***ing menorah now, and when my grandpa died I inherited his yamaka as well as some of his other Jewish stuff, which is all kept in a safe place, except for the yamaka which I sometimes wear on Shabbat, but other embodied stuff, I don’t know, my parents and I every year we say we celebrate Chrisma-Hannu-Kwanz-ukah since we don’t have any particular identification with any holiday, and we use it as an opportunity to joke about it with our various identities since my dad was raised Catholic. We don’t do it seriously, so it’s hard. Like sometimes we make latkes, but we do it as a joke like “haha we’re Jewish,” like we’re not making them because we’re Jewish, we just do it because latkes are delicious. It’s always done sort of ironically.
H: Do you honestly feel like you would make latkes if you weren’t Jewish because I feel like the joke is a whole part of it…
Z: I guess the Jewishness sort of creates an opportunity for the latkes, you’re right, but it’s not because of our Jewishness that we make them like we’re not trying to maintain some deep connection to our ancestry, we just wanna joke around and eat potatoes.
H: That sounds like a good family pastime. I wanna know if you’re willing to share about any family experiences of diaspora and also speaking about movement and travel in general. I know you moved around to different schools a lot when you were growing up, and something we’re analyzing in this class is in what ways can we make place, what ways can we make a home when we’re constantly moving and shifting. Not just physical places. I feel like that’s just a very human thing—to change like the seasons—and in talking about all of the displacement Jews have undergone throughout history, what has helped them maintain their Jewishness? What beliefs, what objects, and rituals? What remains constant with you as you’ve moved throughout your life—physically, psychically, and spiritually—and I guess what do you consider your identity? What is your core that stays mostly changeless as you move through the changes of life? How does Zack stay Zack? Sorry, I know that’s a big question—not sure you want to answer that on a Monday morning.
Z: Yeah no I love that question. I want to first talk about the movement thing because my great grandfather came from Poland before the Holocaust and he proceeded to not talk about his Jewishness for his whole life, then my grandfather was in the Navy and moved around a lot, and my mom moved around a lot, and so I grew up with the expectation that I was supposed to move around a lot. My mom has always expected me to pack up and go somewhere else, like whenever she asks about schools, it’s always about out of state and out of country schools and it’s always about where I’m going and never about staying and that doesn’t come from a place of wanting me to leave but having an expectation about movement. A really praised quality of Jews and my family is one’s ability to adapt and be flexible, and my mom has always encouraged and to put me in new situations so I could get used to them, and so there’s been a lot of movement and I expect there to be a lot more. I know my mom has always put a lot of effort into making a safe, comfortable home environment and I think she ties that to her Jewishness because she sees the home as being a place of rest and grounding, but even historically Jews even brought their f***ing tabernacle with them even through the desert, ya know wandering is the identity. I don’t think there’s any expectation that things are going to last; the fragility of life and circumstance is deeply acknowledged, at least it has been in my life, and so diaspora is just a part of the Jewish identity, I mean how long has it been since we’ve had Israel? And how long did we actually have it? Realistically the norm is changing, so I think a lot of pressure is put on the individual to maintain some kind of social/spiritual balance but also to be ready to throw it all away and go somewhere else, and I think that’s probably to some degree a result of years of diaspora and low expectation of homeland and secure social structures.
H: It definitely doesn’t require the research I’ve been doing to realize that change is the only constant of human life; you’ve got to learn to adapt, and that’s kind of how I’ve been approaching this Lurcy project as well. There’s one quote I really liked from one of the extraneous sources I’m using…I can’t pronounce his name…
Z: Please try.
H: Okay, it’s Csikszentmihalyi [I pronounced this VERY poorly], so Csikszentmihalyi says: “I wish to emphasize that our dependence on objects is not only physical but also, more importantly, psychological. Most of the things we make these days do not make life better in any material sense but instead serve to stabilize and order the mind.” So, studies have been done about kids who move a lot during their adolescence/childhood and don’t have a stable home and how that might give way to some psychological pressures later on in life, usually we need some sense of home—and I don’t even mean a physical place necessarily—just a sense of belonging, a sense of safety, a sense of “okay, if I’m gonna go out into the world and do my own thing, I want to know I have a safety net essentially to fall back on,” and since you’ve moved so much, what has comprised that home, safety, security, however small that sense may be? It may be a very fragile sense of security, but I feel like it would be almost impossible to—as humans, not just in your personal experience—to move and change as much as we do without something to anchor us.
Z: That’s a good question. Perhaps the family. I don’t know. What is the anchor, what keeps things stable…I guess relationships, family units, that’s the only thing I can honestly say, I don’t think there’s anything else.
H: And I mean, home can move. When I talk about this, I’m not just talking about a stable, static, immutable environment that never changes. Discourses about Jewish diaspora always include stories about how Jews have consistently made homes of foreign places, and essentially become natives—they’ve gone from being foreigners to natives to foreigners to natives over and over in a constant cycle, so what I’m getting at is this ability to make a home of any place—how do we do that? With what tools and beliefs? And I think you’re right, there’s nothing else I can point to either. I’m not looking for a specific answer, but if I were asking myself that question, I would say the same thing: family, relationship, other people, Love, and Loving Relationship itself, which I believe to be God. Another thing I was analyzing was Georges’ final will—at the end of his life Georges made a very quick revision to his will and didn’t leave anything to his wife, and he was super rich…the narrative I’m trying to discover and analyze is did he view his choice to divest her of their physical belongings as a gift? In relation to this, I’ve been thinking about recently how throughout the Bible the Israelites/Jews are constantly dispossessed and repossessed and it’s a constant ebb and flow, and the question of what has kept them themselves and helped maintain identity through all of this has come up several times, and if we believe that “God” is Love, which I do, that’s what’s kept them together, that’s what kept them going and helped maintain an identity when they’re constantly being stripped of the objects and kingdoms that they vest their identity in, and I feel like I’m hearing you agree with that. The Hebrew God of the Bible does this so they see that they should only have a dependence on Him/Love because everything in this world is impermanent, everything here will pass away, the Jewish God is essentially saying “you are going to have to adapt and readapt over and over and the only thing you’re going to be able to keep through all of this is Love, so you better get used to it”…this is stuff I’ve been discovering through the narrative of this project, interpersonal conversations with you and others, and the conclusion I’ve come to in my own life, and I know you’re a spiritual person so I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on some of that.
Z: Yeah, I thought that was a really beautiful empathic capturing of what the Jewish experience has been for a lot of people. I think that nicely marries our thinking about the diaspora and faith and how one affects the other because I think you’re right, it’s forced them to isolate certain elements of the spirituality and scripture and take advantage of them and really lean on those elements of things and put their focus completely on the ultimate reality rather than the triviality of worldliness, even when it’s not so trivial and you’re losing your home and belongings, to be able to see even beyond that. Yeah, I think it’s a really nice way to think about it because, in truth, we can all become so hopeless physically that our only hope lies in the “beyond.”
H: Yeah, absolutely. We’re constantly being forced to see new and deeper layers. Okay, I think I have one more question then I promise I’m done–I know this has been heavy stuff for a Monday morning. In talking about all of this, we’ve been examining how we vest identity in our objects, how they can take the personality of their own how they can help us and be a sort of conduit to the “beyond” and help us understand those bigger realities, but also how they can be appreciated for their own sake. In your own life, to what degree do you feel like the material realm and objects can be a pathway to that “ultimate reality” we were talking about, and to what degree do you think it can be a hindrance to it, and should that be the ultimate goal of materiality?
Z: So, I was in Israel once, and I met this dude named Moshi and he asked me if I’d ever put on tefillin, and when I said no he was super blown away and disappointed, because he said when he puts them on he feels an incredible power surging through his body and I totally believe that, so for Moshi, it really helps him connect with spiritual stuff and they’re really important and have been passed down through generation of Jews, and my grandfather might have even had some of them, but Jewish objects for me have held very little importance, but for many Jews, they’re very important. That’s no to say whether it is or isn’t an integral part of Jewish identity or diaspora and retaining culture, but it does show how varied the Jewish experience it is. It is a religion and ethnicity, and even if you vibe with the religion there are so many ways to believe and I think the Jewish experience is just incredibly arrayed, so it’s difficult to draw parallels and to make equations about anything concrete because every Jew is so spread out and has so many other interacting elements of their identity that it’s hard to ground the Jewish experience, so the objects for me weren’t relevant but I understand why they would be for other people.
H: I understand—the role of objects is a necessarily subjective experience. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I very much appreciate it—I’m sure it was difficult to think about some of these heady topics about identity on a Monday morning, but I thoroughly appreciate it, this helps me a lot and you have a wonderful brain and wonderful thoughts.
Z: Yeah absolutely, could I read your paper once you’re done with it so we can talk more about it?
H: Yes, absolutely, I would love to—there’s definitely a lot more for us to discuss.
When asked if he could provide any pictures relevant to our interview, Zack provided this picture saying, “Here’s the inside of a Jew’s freezer.” Is this a case of a mundane object being made Jewish by virtue of it belonging to a Jewish person, as Vanessa Ochs suggests in “Material Culture: New Rituals and Ritual Objects” (pp. 107), or is this just a joke between friends? It could really go either way.