My Jewish Identity

My name is Leo Helzberg. If you have spent any time in Kansas City, you have probably seen the name before it belonged to me. It does not whisper. It announces itself as Jewish. For a long time that has been both a gift and a complication.

My great-great-grandfather, Morris Helzberg, was a Russian immigrant who opened a jewelry store in Kansas City in 1915. The business stayed in the family for three generations. My grandfather, Barnett Helzberg Jr., later wrote books about what he learned running it, and he became more interested in the part after the store: putting people who had built something in a room with people who were trying to, so they could trade what they already knew. I mention all of that for one reason, and it is not a résumé. It is the name. You cannot carry Helzberg through American life and pretend you are not Jewish. The letters themselves refuse the disguise.

That did not stop earlier generations from softening the edges. Not by converting. Not by disappearing. By fitting in. By treating Judaism as something to be grateful for in private and careful with in public. My grandfather was not bar mitzvahed. He was confirmed. That was the fashion of a certain kind of American Reform Judaism in the middle of the last century: less Hebrew, more English, less spectacle, more belonging to the broader civic world. A last name like ours already did enough announcing. The concern, as it was explained to me, was not embarrassment so much as prudence. America had been good to the family. They wanted to keep it that way.

They were not failing at being Orthodox. They were trying to make America work. Religion could wait. The country they had reached could not. The city the family came from in Lithuania was taken in 1944. I am here, in a life that includes college, because the people who left, left. I get to treat Judaism as something I can study and write about because I am safe enough to. They were not.

If you grew up Reform, you already know this story with different proper nouns. Confirmation instead of a bar mitzvah. English instead of Hebrew. A temple that looked like a church on purpose. Friday night when it was convenient. A Seder that was mostly family dinner with a few extra pages. Nobody in those houses was trying to misplace Judaism. They were trying to raise American children who would not be punished for a name, an accent, a Saturday. For a long stretch of the twentieth century that was not a failure of nerve. It was the assignment.

It is easy, now, to look at that generation and say they lost it. I do not buy the charge. You cannot ask people to disappear into the culture and then condemn them for succeeding. A lot of what gets called “lost Judaism” is just what happens when a minority is told, for decades, that the polite thing is to keep the particular stuff at home. Some of it thinned. Some of it went quiet. Some of it survived as a last name, a funeral, a joke, a holiday they could not quite drop. That is not the same thing as throwing it away.

I was bar mitzvahed. I do not speak Hebrew. I cannot sit through a full traditional service without getting lost in the page numbers. I asked Daniel, who is from Miami, what the strings coming out of his shirt were. Tzitzit. They mark the commandments. He was glad to explain it. Same city, same kind of thing a quiet Reform house does not teach you to look for: an eruv, a line around a stretch of Miami so that on Shabbat it counts as one shared domain and you can carry your things. I have, on a hard Yom Kippur, eaten a piece of bread because I felt like wreckage and decided God and I would work it out later. I do not mind if men and women sit together. A few weeks ago I was at services with someone who had a soccer match going, volume down, and asked whether that was sacrilegious. I said no. He had chosen to be in the room. Choosing to show up is not nothing. For a lot of American Jews I know, it is the whole beginning.

I know that paragraph will land differently depending on who is reading it. If you daven every morning, it may sound sloppy. If you have not been inside a synagogue since a cousin’s wedding, it may sound like I am making too much of a fuss. I am trying to write from the middle, which is where most of the American Jews I grew up around actually live.

This is not a demographic paper. Still, the middle is not an invention of mine. Pew’s 2020 survey of Jewish Americans found that about nine percent identify as Orthodox. Reform remains the largest movement. A large share identify with no branch at all. Plenty of us were called to the Torah at thirteen and then spent the next decade treating Judaism as a holiday table, a last name, and a feeling we cannot quite name. That is not a secret crisis happening in a few sloppy households. That is the main American Jewish story of the last two generations. If you have ever felt underqualified in a room full of Jews, you are not a failed Jew. You are a very common one. And your parents are not the villains of the plot. They handed you what they had been taught to hand you.

On the other side of my family there is a sentence I think about more than the store. My great-grandmother was married to a pastor. She told my mother to be Jewish so her grandchildren would have a religion they could return to. She was not Jewish. She still understood that a person needs a house that stays standing. A lot of Reform families have some version of that voice: a relative who married in, a grandparent who was not Jewish, someone outside the tradition who could see, more clearly than the people inside it, that the quiet version was still a version, and that it was worth keeping.

College is where the gap got specific for me. I started going to Chabad after I arrived at the University of Denver. I never went to Hillel there. Rabbi Yossi and Chanie made that house feel like a place I was allowed to be. I owe them a thank-you for that. I am now at the University of Colorado Boulder. I have been to three Chabad events now. Each time I was welcomed the way people who have never met you still somehow already made extra food. No one asked me to prove anything. No one quizzed me on Hebrew. No one made a face when I did not know what came next.

That last part matters, and I want to say it plainly, because the rest of this essay will be misunderstood if I do not. Chabad has not shamed me. The rabbis and the students I have met have been warm. The door was open. I felt invited. If there is an awkwardness, it is mine. It lives in the gap between the intensity of the room and the thinness of my practice.

Chabad is not a casual operation. That is the point of it. The fire is the point. The regularity, the Hebrew, the meals that appear as if by magic, the families who have built a home so that other people’s children can walk into it on a Friday night in Denver or Boulder and feel less alone. I have thought about writing this piece for a long time. The reason is not that anyone there did something wrong. The reason is that the intensity is real, and intensity makes a person take inventory. You look around and think: I love this. I am not sure I belong to it the way these people belong to it.

I do not want anyone to feel bad for being “more Jewish” than I am. That phrase is a little ridiculous on its face. Judaism is not a gym membership with a leaderboard. But I also do not want Reform families to feel bad for being the kind of Jews they actually are. Reform Judaism, in the American sense I grew up inside, is not a watered-down apology for the real thing. It is a serious attempt to keep Jewish life livable in a country that lets you choose almost everything. Choice can look like laziness from the outside. From the inside, it is often the only honest way through. If the Hebrew went missing and the Saturday morning went missing and the children cannot daven, the answer is not to put the last three generations on trial. The answer is to decide, now, what we want to pick back up.

My family has been trying, in its own uneven way, to bring some of those traditions back. That is a good impulse. I think it should stay an impulse, not a program. Traditions that are jammed down a throat do not become beloved. They become homework. The Jews I admire most, across every kind of observance, are the ones who chose it. The ones who walked into the room on purpose.

That is what I keep coming back to about Chabad. The people who staff those houses chose a demanding life so that students who had not chosen much of anything yet would still have a table waiting. The intensity is not a scold. It is the engine. Without it, there is no Friday night to wander into when you are twenty-something and a little lost and your last name is doing more Jewish work than you are.

I am not writing a manifesto for how anyone else should practice. I am not interested in ranking Orthodox against Reform, or in telling a rabbi that mixed seating is the future, or in telling a Reform Jew that a full fast is the only honest Yom Kippur. I have no appetite for that fight. What I want is simpler, and harder. I want a Jewish life in which a person can walk into a Chabad House without pretending to be more observant than he is, and walk out without pretending the fire did not move him. I want Reform kids to stop treating their upbringing as a stain they have to explain. It was a life. It can be a beginning.

If you are Orthodox and you read this as an excuse, I hope you will read it again as gratitude. If you are Reform and you read this as a complaint about Chabad, I hope you will read it again as a love letter with some nerves in it. If your family did the American thing and you have been told, ever since, that this means you lost the plot, I hope you will put that verdict down. You are allowed to want more without prosecuting the people who got you here. If you are not Jewish and you have ever stood at the edge of a tradition that was yours by inheritance and not quite yours by habit, you already know the feeling.

My name is Leo Helzberg. I am Jewish. I am still learning how much of that sentence I want to live, and how much of it I already do just by showing up. The showing up is the part I am trying to get better at. The rest, I think, can be chosen in its own time.