1. As a descendant of Jewish immigrants who settled around Johnstown, PA in the early 20th century, my family history also intersects with Stephen Miller's. Here's some of that history, and why it leads me to revile Miller's politics. politico.com/magazine/story…
2. The Jewish cemetery in Altoona, Pa is filled with the gravestones of my immigrant ancestors. Jacob Covitch in the front & Isidor Marcus in the back are my great-grandfathers, both fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. 
3. Altoona is 40 miles from Johnstown, Pa where Miller's ancestors, the Glossers, lived. We have family stories about the Glossers (there weren't a ton of Jews in central PA). I'm 99% certain my great-grandparents or grandparents attended temple with the Glossers at some point.
4. Isidor came through Ellis Island in 1902 & is the subject of one of my favorite (probably apocryphal) family stories. Immediately upon arrival in the US he took the train from NYC to meet family already living in central PA. Classic chain migration, as with all of my family.
5. Getting off the train he exclaimed (in Yiddish, of course) "America!!! What a country! I don't know who this Itzy Cream guy is, but he must be the richest man in America. Every station I pass it I see signs w/ Itzy Cream, Itzy Cream. One day those signs will say Itzy Marcus!"
6. Isidor's nickname was Itzy, which in cyrillic looks like "Ice." The family story does not include Itzy's response to the "womp womp" moment of learning that Itzy Cream was not a person who could be emulated. But Itzy did ok by himself, opening up a jewelry store in Altoona.
7. My other immigrant great-grandfather, Jacob Covitch, got to Western PA around 1910 and worked in the stores of various uncles and cousins until he opened his own store in Ebensburg, PA in 1923. That store is on the far right in this 1947 picture. It existed from 1923-2003.
8. This is my great-grandpa Jake in the front. The woman on the right is my great-grandmother Mary. The woman on the far left is her twin, Ella...and in between is their mother, my great-great-grandmother Hannah Grossman (who had immigrated from Poland in 1893).
9. As late as 1940, Jake was listed as an "alien" on the Census. I'm not sure what the significance of that is, but it seems notable...as if he had not gotten his citizenship papers yet. No idea why that was the case, or if it ever changed.
10. Regardless, it didn't stop him from being a small business owner, Kiwanis Club member, Chamber of Commerce member, all around respected community member. And also father of 3 sons who all served in WWII, including one son Judah who died in basic training in 1943.
11. Jake's wife Mary was, as her daughter-in-law Ruth (my grandmother) put it, "a tough cookie." Keeping a kosher household in a town where you're the only Jewish family and the nearest synagogue was 20 miles away was hard work.
12. The kosher rules decree that one must have separate dishware and utensils for meat and milk. If something gets defiled, you're supposed to either dispose of it or have a rabbi purify it. But Mary didn't care for either of those rules.
13. The story goes that if a knife touched the wrong substance accidentally, Mary would take it out into the yard, thrust it into the dirt, say "Keneinahora" 3 times, & then spit over a shoulder. A good trick from the old country she probably learned from her mother.
14. The point being, cultures are retained for a long time, they get attenuated, they evolve, they persist in various ways...and all of this is 100% American. There is no "pure, white American culture" to be preserved. American culture has always been polyglot.
15. One of Mary's 3 grandchildren is an Orthodox Jew. His children and their children have kept the faith. One grandkid is a secular Jew (my mother) who married the same. One married a Presbyterian. I've got over 30 cousins in this very diverse extended family...I love them all.
16. In 1951 Mary's husband (my great-grandpa) Jake bought one of the first TV's in town. His favorite show was professional wrestling. He'd get so excited that the carpet in front of his chair eventually wore out because he stood up & sat down so much.
17. His mother-in-law, Hannah from Poland, was not a fan of TV. She refused to be in the room when it was on. My mother remembers Hannah sitting out on the porch tut-tutting "Don't go in there, it's a fake!" everytime she, as a little girl, went in to watch TV with her grandpa.
18. A reminder that Hannah came to America in 1893. In 1952 she was still speaking Yiddish & heavily accented English, and refusing to participate in mainstream American culture. Somehow, over all of those years, she failed to cause the demise of Western Civilization.
19. I love these two pictures of my grandfather Bernie Covitch, one of the most genteel, middle class men you could ever meet...and also someone who was proud to be the child of Jewish immigrants.
20. When he went to be inducted into the army for WWII, he discovered that his birth certificate spelled his name Bernat, not Bernard. It's because Bernat is how his father, in his thick accent, had pronounced Bernard when he was asked what his newborn son's name was.
21. My grandmother Ruth (the daughter of the aforementioned Isidor) was raised in Altoona, Pa (that's her in the picture). Her husband Bernie grew up in Cassandra & then Ebensburg. Both had memories of KKK rallies in their towns during the resurgence of the second KKK in 1923-4.
22. At the age of 8, my grandmother woke up to find KKK painted on her family's garbage cans. At the same age, my grandfather watched the fathers and brothers of his schoolmates march past his father's brand new store wearing white robes. nytimes.com/1924/04/28/arc…
23. Stephen Miller's ancestors, the Glossers, undoubtedly had similar experiences in the 1920s. And now their descendent is working for a White House beloved by David Duke, a White House that hesitates to condemn Nazi marches in Charlottesville.
24. Being Jewish in central PA meant that one had to carefully navigate the shifting politics of Americanism. Sometimes Jews were accepted as "white" though maybe a bit different. Other times they faced ostracization, discrimination, or even violence of various sorts.
25. My grandparents lived that ambiguity all of their lives. They played golf and bridge, led Girl Scout troops and Women's Clubs, and also ate gefilte fish, taught me lots of Yiddish phrases, and told me stories about my Jewish relatives.
26. Nothing embodies this tension between assimilation and cultural pride better than the Settlement Cookbook. npr.org/templates/stor…
27. When my grandmother set up her own household, her mother bought her the most recent, 1940 edition of the Settlement Cookbook. It's still in the family. That's my grandmother's handwriting on that recipe.
28. My grandmother made mean blintzes & noodle kugel, but she also understood the joys of jello molds & tuna casserole. She understood what she needed to do to pass as white. "Pass" is my term. She would not have used that word. She genuinely liked tuna casserole.
29. This is where the story of my immigrant family requires that I be rigorously honest. Becoming accepted as "white" required not only that my ancestors learn how to cook, dress, and talk "less Jewish," but also that they learn to identify as "not black."
30. Whiteness as "anti-blackness" is not unique to my family. It's the story of America...but here's how that story intersects with my own.
31. My Uncle Judah, who died in WWII, is a figure of legend in the family. A flaming redhead, he was apparently quite the comedian, beloved by all. I went looking for information about him on genealogy dot com and found this from his 1939 HS yearbook.
32. Our family albums also contain pictures like this, from when my grandmother, Isidor, and Mary visited the South for the first time when my grandfather was in basic training. I wish they had regarded the history of slavery with more gravity than they did. But they didn't.
33. These images depict my immigrant ancestors performing their whiteness by distancing themselves from blackness. They didn't do this because they were uniquely terrible or racist people. They were following the script available to them. I wish they had picked a different one.
34. I must also add that these grandparents taught me to respect all people. Here's a thread about the time my 90 y.o. grandpa cried with joy about the prospect of being able to vote for the nation's first black president.
35. Yet this same Obama-voting grandfather who I love dearly, when he was on his deathbed in great pain and in mental decline, spat racial epithets at the African-American nurse who was caring for him. It was horrifying. He reverted to something deep in how he was socialized.
36. And this is how we return to Stephen Miller and why, despite how hard I might try, I can not simply disavow any genealogical connection to his racism. My family was steeped in the same brew of anti-black, anti-brown racism as Miller's.
37. The difference is this. Like Miller's uncle who wrote that brilliant, scathing Politico piece about him, my family has tried (however imperfectly) to reckon with and push back against the imperative to define ourselves so forcefully against black and brown people.
38. I won't try to explain away my grandfather's end of life racism as somehow "not really him." It was really him...just as real as the grandfather that taught me that it was wrong to be a racist.
39. Miller's politics are the politics of my grandfather's deathbed id...a reactionary politics of whiteness that my ancestors benefited from and sometimes enacted in genteel ways, but which their superegos told them was wrong. Miller should know better.
