Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist, has a witty and thoughtful essay in the current Weekly Standard:
Funny, but I do look Jewish, at least to myself, and more and more so as the years go by. I’m fairly sure I didn’t always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent….
I have always wondered what it might be like not to be Jewish but to have a Jewish-sounding name–Sarah Jacobson, Norman Davis, Mark Steyn–and often be taken for Jewish. First, there would be the worry that someone might hold your being Jewish (when you’re not) against you; and, second, there is the discomfort entailed in getting special treatment from another Jew or philo-Semite because that he or she thinks you are someone you are not. I once saw a man who was a dead ringer for the old actor Cesar Romero wearing a bright red T-shirt with bold white lettering that read “I Am Not Cesar Romero.” Perhaps people with Jewish-sounding names ought to wear T-shirts, or at least carry business cards, that read, “I’m Sidney Ross, But Not Really Jewish.” Glenn Gould, whose name and face and manner all falsely suggest Jewishness, could have used such a T-shirt.
Read the whole thing here.
So far as I know, I’ve never been “taken for Jewish,” nor do I expect to be. I doubt if anyone in the United States looks more goyische than me, and “Terry Teachout” is roughly as Jewish-sounding as “Thurston Howell III.” I do, however, have highly cultivated tastes for lox and bagels, the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jewish jokes of the way-too-close-to-the-knuckle sort, and it also happens that I’m the music critic for a magazine Jewish enough to have been mentioned by name in Annie Hall. I keep hoping that some raving anti-Semite who only knows me on paper will jump to the wrong conclusion, thus allowing me to reply, “No, but I wish I were.” Alas, it hasn’t happened yet….
I know a very WASPy-looking WASP musician, by the way, who used to play a lot of recitals at synagogues, where she would invariably be approached at the post-concert reception by at least one old lady who told her, “You don’t look Jewish, darling.” Eventually she came up with the perfect response: “I know, that’s what everybody says!”
UPDATE: Cup of Chicha links to this posting, and (as always) adds some intriguing comments of her own. Take a look.