Who I am and where I'm from

I was born in Misgav Ladach hospital in Jerusalem. I lived the first four years of my life in the town of Rechovot. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Rockville or Potomac Maryland, which is where I lived from when I was four until I finished high school. 

On some level, maybe it would make more sense to say that I’m from Rechovot. But I’m ashamed to be from Israel, or what would more accurately be referred to as occupied Palestine. The town of Rechovot is next to what was once the Palestinian town of Zarnuqa. I don’t want people to think I’m a Zionist when I introduce myself, and unless I know somebody pretty well I don’t want them to know that I’m from Israel. 

I wonder if that’s some kind of cowardice, to lie about where I’m from. Maybe I should be more authentic.

Something else I feel a great sense of shame regarding is that I have a trust fund. That’s something that I also don’t want people to know about me, unless I trust them a ton and really deeply trust that they won’t judge me for it. 

I don’t think it’s intrinsically evil. To the extent that it gives me extra freedom and free time, I use that to work on social justice projects and activism. 

The trust fund comes from my maternal grandfather, who was a landlord. I think he made his money from a combination of the properties he owned and also maybe being pretty talented at selecting profitable companies on Wall Street. 

On a certain level, it’s not great that I have this money. My grandfather Stanley was allegedly a very responsible landlord, according to what I’ve heard (though there are some disputes). He was one of the first landlords in Baltimore to rent properties to African American tenants, and (from what I’ve heard) the buildings themselves were in good shape.

But at the same time, no matter how friendly of a person he was, or however you want to frame it, making money as a landlord is completely unethical. We live in an unjust capitalist system, and tenants should not have to hand over their hard earned money at the end of each month to their landlord, which is usually how it works. 

And it’s not as though my grandfather was the one who built those buildings or repaired them. He had a plummer who did the plumbing, and other maintenance people for whatever repairs needed doing. My mother once said that in all his life he never packed his own suitcase or boiled himself a pot of pasta. He was friendly and had a good sense of humor and watched Baltimore Ravens games which I enjoyed a lot as a little kid (and was one of the only adults I knew who didn’t shame me in one form or another for being a huge sports fan as a little kid). But as friendly as he was, there’s no way he was entitled to the wages of his tenants (if being working class then was anything like now, probably a hefty portion of them).

One of the more interesting things in his life was he sold some of his properties to some of his tenants. I think he actually went to jail for this, because maybe there were laws against selling to African Americans, or there were some kinds of laws restricting how buildings could be sold.

But anyway. I guess my point is not to say that my grandfather was evil. He definitely had shortcomings in his personality and was not any kind of social justice hero. In other ways, he was somewhat progressive for his time, in the way he rented to African American tenants when other landlords would not. He’s a human and multifaceted.

At the same time, I think it’s more than valid that I feel plenty of guilt regarding the fact that I have a trust fund. First of all, feelings are always valid (thank you thousands of dollars of therapy, bankrolled by you know who). Second of all, being a landlord is very unethical (even if that unethicallity is more at the level of the system and less at the level of the individual. It’s not like he was in the IDF or something (thankfully no one in my immediate family has served in the IDF, but it’s amazing how many levels of not so moral behavior I find in my family tree …)

Anyway, regarding my trust fund, some people in my family have this attitude that it’s really wonderful, because it allows us to have free time to do social justice work. My mom is a passionate activist, and we get this from her (she says she gets it from her Dad, which is interesting). But I think it’s more complicated than that. In my opinion, we shouldn’t have this money in the first place, and the social justice work we are called to do consists of undoing the simple fact that we have money that maybe we should not. But that’s just me and people in my family do not always care very much about what I think. I wonder why …