The photo kept circulating on my social media: a giant billboard bearing the message, “Judaism: Come for your girlfriend. Stay for the lack of Hell.” Neon pink-and-white text, over an image of flames (like Hell, get it?). But also, in smaller text, “Free Wedding booklet!” All brought to you by an organization called JewBelong.
What’s happening here? The visually arresting but poorly-worded sign does not immediately spell this out. Who is being addressed, and in what sense should this individual come for their girlfriend? Do they mean, you know…, and if so, where does Judaism enter into it as it were?
Rabbi Avi Finegold and I did our best to parse this billboard (and more) on the latest episode of Bonjour Chai. The gist seems to be that it’s addressing someone—maybe a man, maybe not, it is after all Pride Month—who has a Jewish girlfriend, but is not Jewish. And the message is, convert for her (or, if not convert, join up; more on this distinction in a moment) and once you’re there, enjoy the fact that Judaism is not Catholicism. Or something.
Indeed, per its website, JewBelong is a broadest-tent outreach organization. Not conversionist per se, but welcoming of anyone with a preexisting connection to Jewishness:
“We exist for Jews, and for people who aren’t Jewish but are part of a Jewish community, for anyone who has felt like a Jewish outsider (which TBH is probably most of us), and especially for Disengaged Jews (DJs for short).”
There is, at least in theory, a market for this sort of thing. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor came to Judaism for their husbands and stuck around. Popular musicians Robbie Williams and Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) are raising Jewish children with Jewish wives, with Tweedy converting as well.
Falling perhaps just outside the target audience: former adult-cinema performer Jenna Jameson, whose apparent conversion to Judaism upon marriage to a Jewish man is not mentioned in the recent coverage of her latest wedding… in a church … to a presumably non-Jewish woman.
JewBelong, but—if you were not born Jewish—only if JewWantTo.
JewBelong has a two-pronged mission: it’s a social justice movement against antisemitism, and a group aiming to encourage people on Judaism’s peripheries to become enthusiastic Jews. These two goals seem a bit at cross purposes. If being Jewish is centrally about people hating you, why would you want to make this a bigger part of your identity?
Although as I type, I realize this is possibly a stupid question. Maybe the idea is precisely this: to play to an audience of young people who see the world through an identity-politics lens, and for whom community-based self-defence is the logical place to find meaning. That said, someone was a touch asleep at the wheel when deciding there should be a subsection of their website called, I’m not kidding, “JewBelong’s National Antisemitism Campaign.” Something amiss with that wording, recalling as it does various antisemitism campaigns of yore, but anyway, moving on.
While the organization itself seems well-meaning, a visit to the JewBelong website is a strange, dystopian experience. A banner ad at the top, in the brand’s signature hot pink and white combo, reads, “Fighting antisemitism isn’t cheap. Please donate today!,” complete with a link of where to do so. But what exactly are you donating to, and do what end? Seemingly to fund still more billboards, placed in high-traffic areas of New York City and elsewhere, promising to “#EndJewHate,” and promising to do as liberal denominations already do: accept you as Jewish even if you are not already observant, even if you don’t have a Jewish mother, even if you have not formally converted in.
The messages recall those of the Manhattan Mini Storage ads from some years ago, which adds up when you consider that both are the brainchildren of the same woman, Archie Gottesman. It’s a sensibility that livens up ads for urban storage spaces. Does the same PR strategy work for an ancient religion?
Where you fall in this will depend on whether you’re charmed or put off by an ad that reads, “Blonde since birth. Jewish since marriage.” Get it, because Jews are always brunettes, or something. There’s a lot of or something to be had here. Is the target audience a Baby Boomer who would go for a “shiksa” reference, which is what that is? Is it a hip and cool young person, who will see something hot pink and be like, wow, this really speaks to me?
The part of the website that most caught me off-guard, and did so in real time as we were recording the Bonjour Chai episode, was an aesthetically chipper pop-up with this ad, which appeared last year on a JewBelong billboard in Toronto:
“We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate isn’t an overreaction.”
An overreaction, perhaps not. As for whether a billboard like this constitutes Holocaust education or Jewish outreach, or offers comfort to Jews, or offers anything of substance whatsoever, that I cannot say.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz
