If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Don’t expect converting to Orthodox Judaism will be easy. Don’t expect becoming Jewish to be easy. It’s a challenging life. If you want love and acceptance without judgment, convert to another religion.
If you show you can be easily intimidated, you will be. If you show you can be bullied, you will be. It’s funny, nobody has tried to bully me in over six years. The last person who tried, an Orthodox rabbi, got his nose bloodied (metaphorically). If you try to bully me, I fight back.
Anyone else notice how much Bethany Mandel whines? Particularly about the Trumps? Is there a big audience for this kvetching?
No one has the right to judge Ivanka’s Jewishness or religiosity as a convert, just as no one has the right to judge—or question, or pry into—mine. Yet it is hard for me to believe anyone in her well-heeled congregation is giving her a hard time about this. Why, then, am I and the majority of converts I know, constantly the subject of such scrutiny? For any other female convert, emulating the types of posts Ivanka puts on Instagram would be unthinkable.
While conversion revocations aren’t common in the United States, there is intense communal pressure for converts to stay on the straight and narrow because of a perception that they often “fall off the derech,” or stop being observant. And the very fact that some conversions have been revoked puts intense pressure on converts, especially women (for whom the issue of modest dress is much more germane and whose Judaism their children’s identity hinge on). Who will see it? Will they “inform” on you? Will the impression of laxity give them cause to stop eating at your home, or having their children avoid yours?
As an active member of the conversion community I’ve heard enough horror stories to fill a book: shadchans (matchmakers) refusing to work with converts, probing questions at a Shabbos table with strangers, conversions overseen by rabbis who want to take a walk around the block (if you catch my drift) with their shiksa conversion candidate before she becomes officially Jewish. And throughout my own conversion process—and long after—close friends, family, and strangers would tell me: But you’re not really Jewish.
Then there are the horror stories of conversions revoked or questioned for “offenses” like wearing pants or not keeping Shabbat after the conversion. The Israeli Rabbinate—a kind of College of Cardinals for global Jewry—has lent credence to this absurdity, sending a chill through converts and conversion candidates in the United States.
All of which makes much of the Jewish community’s response to Ivanka Trump’s Orthodox conversion—or better yet, the apparent lack thereof— so astounding. Somehow Ivanka has managed to obtain what no other Orthodox convert I know has: acceptance from the Jewish community while at the same time flouting convention that the rest of us could hardly get away with. Apparently having wealth, fame and power buys you a lifetime supply of indulgences. I don’t think the Jewish community has begun to grasp how this makes us look.
