You are only going to be asked your conversion story if people are interested. The opposite of interested is uninterested. Would this writer prefer that Jews had no interest in her?
Emily writes: So I told and I told and I told. But after a while it stopped being fun. After a while, somewhere in between our son’s bris and the daily grind of keeping a small synagogue afloat, I stopped wanting to be a hyphenated Jew, a Jew-by-choice. I started to cringe a little when people would start playing Jewish geography with me. Yes, I grew up here… wait a few beats… no, I didn’t come to this synagogue as a child… wait a few more beats… um, because I wasn’t Jewish as a child. Yes, conversion is fascinating, isn’t it? Insert polite smile.
“Is your husband Jewish?”—that’s another loaded question. If I say yes, which is true, people assume that I converted in order to facilitate marriage to a Jewish husband, but if I tell the truth, that we both converted, then I really have no choice but to tell the entire story and, frankly, it’s not something I want to share with everyone I meet.
