Daniel Cohen
Roots Exercise
My family are primarily the descendants of Jewish immigrants from Russia, but even my grandparents are second-generation. However, my family looks very, very white, and doesn’t interact with the Jewish community, resulting in a white American lifestyle, and all the benefits and disadvantages that come with it.
My mother went to Brooklyn College for 2 years. She was majoring in sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and she didn’t finish because she wanted to get a job. My grandparents paid for my mother’s tuition, and she worked for pay throughout her career. She worked for, among other things, an architectural firm, a private library, an executive outplacement firm, a magazine, and a trade show. She primarily worked in graphic arts, assembling advertisements for her many employers. She didn’t really benefit any particular community with her work, aside from her personal friends, as she helped them further their own businesses with her graphic arts expertise when she could. No-one worked for my mother because she never went into business for herself. When my grandfather began to run his own small business, Mom and Grandma also worked under him for no pay, making it a family business. My father also went to Brooklyn College, and stayed at home, majoring in computer science. My dad’s parents paid for his college education, though my dad also paid part of his tuition with a job of his own. My paternal grandfather was a truck driver, and my dad maintains that their work didn’t really affect him.
My maternal grandmother, like everyone else in my family, went to Brooklyn College, although unlike my father, she didn’t finish. She really wanted to go to nursing school, but she graduated from high school at 15, and the nursing school wouldn’t take her because she was apparently too young to attend. At 17, she left Brooklyn College, and then entered Bellevue nursing school. She eventually decided that she didn’t actually enjoy nursing, so she left Bellevue and never actually finished college. After she left, she quickly got a job, and soon after that, she got married. My grandmother worked for pay, and her first job was managing purchase orders for a forklift company. She tells me she worked with a Telex teletype machine during her time there. Her second job, her sister got for her, working for a television and film distributor. The owner of the company was “also into investments.” Grandma’s job was to keep track of the owner’s investments, as well as do some basic bookkeeping. She worked there until she had her first child, and then stopped working until her children were school-aged. After that, she got a job at a minority advertising agency, and she continues to work there to this day. Her work helps the African-American and Latino communities, because the advertising agency she works at primarily hires black and Latino people.
There are several things that I have in common with my family when it comes to a college education. For one, we all went to Brooklyn College (though I still attend, obviously). But the most important thing is that my parents both (mostly) had their parents pay for their tuition. In my mother’s case, she wasn’t in danger of debt because she had someone to pay it for her. In my case, I have a full scholarship through Macaulay Honors, so my family doesn’t even have to pay much at all. Although, as we have seen with my mother and grandmother, it isn’t necessary to graduate from college to find steady employment. As we have also seen from my mother and grandmother, however, women who don’t graduate from college tend to find financial security in marriage and childrearing. My mother, for example, used to do freelance graphic design jobs, but the pay from said jobs could hardly support our current lifestyle, and she doesn’t even work anymore. My father is the breadwinner of the house, and is the primary reason we’re middle-class. This allows me to move up the social ladder efficiently because I am not only male, but pale-skinned and middle-class, causing me to not be judged as harshly by others, even with my blatant autism. However, my lifestyle also means that I do not know the ins and outs of many of the other cultures in even my own borough. I am relatively sheltered: I find myself searching Urban Dictionary whenever I encounter many slang terms. That, or I ask the person who just said the slang term in question what they meant. But this is hardly a serious disadvantage. No, my skin color and my ethnicity do not disadvantage me in a very great way. But you know what does? Autism. I regularly embarrass myself and make countless social mistakes, and it is statistically unlikely that I will be able to get a job, keep a job, or live an independent life as a result.
While technically speaking, my mother’s side is Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jews), and my father is of Kohen descent (The Kohanim are patrilineal descendants of the biblical figure and Jewish high priest Aaron, Mose’s brother. Cohen, my last name, is an Americanized version of Kohen.), we do not participate in the Jewish community, and would best fall under the category of “white Americans.” Thus, I’ve typically been treated as a white person by people who didn’t know I was Jewish. A somewhat unusual example was when I was in an internship at NYU-Polytechnic University a high school summer. Sitting with me at lunch were a black friend and an Asian friend. The black friend makes a “joke” saying that everyone sitting at the table were the types of people who would be targeted by Nazis
during World War I. Then he pointed to me and said, “Except you. Cause, you know. Hitler.” This prompted me to break out in a fit of both mirth and shock, and incredulously claim, “I’m a Jew!” Everyone laughed, including me. When you put the joke like that, it isn’t very funny, but it does show how I was often mistaken for a person of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon decent.arents and I have in common when it coems to a college education job of his own.
