My Father Took My Punches For Me: Living Jewishly in Ohio

My Father Took My Punches For Me

Living Jewishly in Ohio

WORDS BY Max Bleich

The weight of generations could be felt in my dad’s words of recollection as he toiled through some of the toughest realities of being “the other” in America.

For my father, Timothy (Tim) Bleich, his Jewishness is something that has defined him throughout his life to his friends and neighbors, classmates and coworkers and everyone in between. Despite his other identities — his whiteness, his masculinity, his love for Cleveland sports or his status as a business owner — he is often reduced to his identity as a Jew. Young Tim Bleich was picked on for being Jewish, so much so that my grandfather would tell him,

This essay is a brief exploration of culture, identity and what it feels like to navigate two worlds where you are a perpetual traveler, yet never a resident.

Growing up, I was lucky to not face much antisemitism until I went to college in 2014, where someone in the dining hall joked about there being “numbers” on my arm when he learned of my Jewishness — a cruel and obvious reference to the tattoos forced on prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.

Weeks later, my dorm room door would have a quickly painted swastika on it. Not too long after that, a game of Cards Against Humanity ended when one of the players whipped out “Jewish Fraternities” and “in Auschwitz” as his round submission.

Until college, I didn’t really think of my Jewishness as anything more than something about my identity; but when I found myself in college, it became everything about my identity.

Importantly, it wasn’t until I left my safe, little Beachwood bubble that I would decidedly present myself as being more proudly Jewish now that I wasn’t to be constantly and exclusively around people who are just like me.

Most notably, my experiences with antisemitism would be extremely more mild than those of my ancestors. For my dad, his identity to his peers would become reduced to his Jewishness from the very beginning of his life.

My grandparents settled in the then-rural town of Chesterland in the late 1950s, around the time my dad was born, where he and his four siblings would grow up as one of only two Jewish families in the area.

“When you grow up as a Jew, you have to take shit. I don’t like taking shit, and I don’t want you to either.”

My grandfather would teach my dad everything he knew about boxing, and my dad would indeed use the knowledge to protect himself from the cruelty of a largely racist, xenophobic, homophobic and antisemitic town that he would grow up in.

In contrast, the Bleich household was not one where bigotry was allowed past the front door. My grandparents would simply not put up with it.

“The big thing [my parents] instilled upon us was acceptance of everybody. Where we grew up there was none of that. In fact, there was so much antisemitism, racism, bigotry, homophobia, everything you could imagine, very redneck. That’s what these kids were being taught in their homes, so they could walk around and call you a dirty Jew and use the standard jokes [against us]. The thinking that others were somehow less than — we were never allowed to think that way,” my father says.

Other than the unfortunate, pervasive bigotry in Chesterland, my dad does speak fondly of the things

he had in common with his peers: growing up in the countryside, playing outside and exploring nature and playing sports.

The Bleich family would eventually leave this rural town and move to Lyndhurst, where they would find more Jewish friends and face a lot less trouble for who they were.

However, that didn’t mean Tim would avoid antisemitic attitudes altogether.

In college, he recalled someone in his dorm at Ohio State University asking where his horns were on his head — falling for an age-old antisemitic stereotype that asserts Jews are actually demons.

He would also face the embarrassment of being kicked out of his girlfriend’s holiday party once her Catholic father learned of my dad’s Jewishness, saying:

“He told me he was sure I was a good guy, but that I had to leave and that he didn’t send his daughter to Catholic school just so she could end up with a Jew.”

Those were my father’s experiences with his neighboring community and culture. What struck me during our interview, however, was his experience with the Cleveland Jewish community and with our shared Jewish culture and heritage. The Bleich children would be sent to Temple in Beachwood for religious school on Sundays, where my dad recalls feeling like he didn’t fit in with his Jewish peers.

He and his siblings felt so embarrassed by their financial status that they would hide away from the other students at the pick-up area around the temple and hope those other, more wealthy kids didn’t see them pile into my grandfather’s beaten-down car of the era.

This feeling of not fitting is one my dad attributes mostly to how kids at his temple treated him and his siblings for not having as much money as they did. But also, it could likely be because of the approach to Judaism that each of my grandparents would take.

“My father did not grow up with any religion, but he read books on Jewish thought and philosophy later in life. My mother grew up in an orthodox family where her parents were immigrants. When she was able to get out and move away from her parents, she pushed away from that lifestyle of orthodox Judaism. When she got older, she tried to bring it back — I remember she would light candles every Friday night. She was looking for her own reconnection [to Judaism],” he says.

While approaches have become refined over the years, the concept of liminality is an apt construct for explaining Tim’s experience growing up.

While he doesn’t live on a physical border, he is forced to traverse the invisible walls between the Jewish and non-Jewish spaces he occupies.

Anthropologist Viktor Turner defines the experience of living as liminal or “threshold people” as “neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between various cultural positions.”

Despite my uncertainty as to whether it is appropriate to label him (or anyone) as a liminal person, I like this description because I feel it captures how he conveyed his experience to me and how he has depicted his life to me throughout the years. Interestingly, my father continued to return to this idea of “not belonging” in either place throughout the interview, and it seems to have made a large impact on how he navigates cultures even today.

Approaching my dad’s experience with a critical perspective on identity, we can bring in the important context surrounding the identity formation of the Jewish American (or, the American Jew, depending on one’s own preference).

If we accept that identity is dynamic in nature, then we also may analyze my dad’s struggle with identity contextualized by the history of Jews in America. This interview has given me a priceless opportunity to reflect upon my family history and also my own experience with bigotry.

Ultimately, I feel that this conversation has rejuvenated my sense of hope that, despite recent events (namely, the Tree of Life Synagogue Attack in 2018), the collective attitudes in America towards Jews and other marginalized groups are trending more positively.

I don’t live with the same type of fear, uncertainty or experience with hatred as my ancestors did. And yet, there is still much work to be done to ensure that this is the case for all those who feel unsafe in this country.

All said, I feel lucky that I grew up surrounded by people who were both like and unlike me, that I was able to foster relationships with others and embrace our cultures instead of being beaten up for mine.

My dad took all those punches so I wouldn’t have to.