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October 10, 2003/Tishri 14 5764, Vol. 56, No.3
Jewish T-shirts express solidarity, pride
JULIA GOLDMAN
New York Jewish Week
"Want to create an instant community? Just add cotton. That's what one San Francisco-based entrepreneur says she's doing with a line of T-shirts silk-screened with the slogans "Yo Semite"- a play on the national park's name - and "Jews for Jeter"- in support of the Yankees' star shortstop.
Undeniably clever, the shirts ($15 to $20) are "no joke" to their designer, Sarah Lefton, 30.
They are "a way to find other Jews, a way to stick out," she tells The Jewish Week from her West Coast home. "Yes, there are ways to express that religiously, but why not culturally as well?"
Lefton's ironic expressions of secular Jewish pride are part of a larger crop of conversation-starting T-shirts and other apparel emblazoned with pro-Semitic slogans like "Jewcy" or "Jew.Lo" (a Hebraic spin on "J.Lo," the nickname for singer/actress Jennifer Lopez).
Visitors to the Columbus, Ohio-based www.JewishJeans.com site can choose from 21 styles of T-shirts bearing phrases like "Naughty Jewish Boy," "Nice Jewish Girl" and "Pursue Peace," as well as key chains and baseball caps. (Jewish jeans currently are unavailable.)
True, public displays of Jewish solidarity are hardly new.
"The first person to put on a yarmulke was the first person to wear Jewish apparel," says Josh Neuman, the publisher of Heeb magazine, which sells its own line of T-shirts hawking the 2-year-old urban-culture title.
But T-shirts that have hit the Web in the past few years complement the contemporary rise of cultural Judaism as a significant form of ethno-religious identification. At the same time, larger trends in American life point to the creation of communities, or "tribes," outside of the conventional delineations of race, religious affiliation or even family.
"Traditional religious Jews, it's easy for them to find each other," says Lefton, who does marketing for a Jewish summer camp located in Yosemite National Park. "I feel like more liberal Jews are a tribe, too."
Lefton was active in the Reform youth movement growing up in Columbia, S.C., and she participates in her local Jewish community today. But nearly half of American Jews (49 percent) identify as secular or "somewhat secular," according to a 2001 survey of American Jewish identity conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
The question is, "Can you make a Jewish community that is somehow unconnected to Jewish religious practice?" suggests Paul Zakrzewski, the editor of "Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge" (Perennial), a recently released anthology of new Jewish writers. An attempt to create just that kind of community was made public last month when a group of humanistic Jews announced plans to open the Center for Cultural Judaism in Manhattan this fall.
Jews are not the only ones banding together and marking their identities in unconventional ways.
"More and more we're becoming a nation of tribes," says Neuman. "People are tattooing themselves, people are piercing themselves. It's a tribal world."
In his soon-to-be published book "Urban Tribes" (Bloomsbury USA), author Ethan Watters describes a new social phenomenon among long-term singles in their 20s and 30s. These "never-marrieds" form tight-knit groups of friends or coworkers "with unspoken hierarchies, whose members think of each other as 'us' and the rest of the world as 'them,' " Watters wrote in an October 2001 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
In that spirit, Lefton calls her T-shirts a kind of "counter-assimilation mechanism," but new Jewish tribalism doesn't necessarily make for clannishness. Several T-shirt Web sites - including Lefton's www.jewishfashionconspiracy.com, ("Putting the racy back into conspiracy") - feature multi-ethnic models. On www.jewlo.com, founder Julia Lowen-stein, 27, says her brand "sees Jewish pride as a first step to a more multicultural and happy society."
Steven Verona, 34, president and co-founder of Jewish Jeans, was motivated by an awareness of growing anti-Semitism to launch the line, which sells for $24.95 to $49.95. He started with two shirts, one reading "Nice Jewish Boy" and the other "Fight Anti-Semitism."
"I was in a bar (wearing a shirt) and a guy walks up to me and gets right in my face and asked what that was all about," Verona, an inventor who co-owns a construction company, recalls.
After a few minutes of explanation, "He started to understand what I was saying," Verona says. "I felt like if I made a difference even with just this one guy, this could be something that could make a difference in the world."
Still in the red, the year-old Jewish Jeans has donated $10,000 to $15,000 to Jewish causes, Verona says.
Some funds will go to his personal mission: finding a media spokesperson for the American Jewish community who can promote the image of Jews as a peace-loving people.
"At the moment, we have no response, and left with a void, people fill in the blanks with their own prejudices," he says. "That's what the problem is."
"I'm never going to suggest that a T-shirt is a serious sign of religious identity," says Lefton, who aspires to attend rabbinical school. "But it's a fun way to stick your chest out and say 'Yeah, we're Jews.' " Lefton is currently designing a "Haman's Angels" motorcycle shirt for Purim 2004.
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