Losing My Religion, Under a Secret Cloak of Shame

It's time to be out and proud

Ash Jurberg
Human Parts
Published in
6 min readNov 21, 2023

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My grandparents had life-threatening reasons to hide their identities but didn't. My motivating factor for hiding under my invisibility cloak was embarrassment and shame. Thirty years on, I am still embarrassed and ashamed — but for different reasons.

I.

I am.

I am Jewish.

It took me a long time to be comfortable saying that.

1986: That's me in the corner

Why do Jews have short arms?

Why do Jews have big noses?

Watch me throw this one-cent piece in the gutter and see if it attracts any Jews.

This is the banter I hear daily at my private Christian school in Australia. "Jew jokes" were de rigueur, and as I progressed through the grades, they got increasingly racist. Soon, they revolved around the Holocaust and the atrocities that occurred.

Hey guys, I heard a new one last night. What do you call a Jew that…

It was why I remained firmly in the closet. No one at school knew I was Jewish; they could never know. While I didn't join in the jokes, occasionally, I pretended to laugh at them. I felt sick, but knew I would be…

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