Generation J

Generation J is a beautifully written, constantly courageous, hip, wise memoir by a young woman determined to figure out what it means to be Jewish. Lisa Schiffman, who grew up in the mostly Christian community of Levittown, New Jersey, writes of her own alienated adolescence: "We were a generation of Jews who'd grown up on television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn't something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born." Feeling unmoored in early adulthood, Schiffman begins a search for the essence of the Jewish identity she feels exiled from. She undertakes experiments such as eating nonkosher food every day for a week, and gently confronting her parents' ignorance of their own religion. Oddly, her greatest religious epiphany comes from the experience of getting a henna tattoo--a vine across her torso, with the Star of David at the end. The tattoo sets off what she calls, elsewhere in the book, "a big think-through": "There is the vine. There is me. There's Judaism, the religion of paradox and reconciliation. I'll learn from it what I can. I'll sort out my own conflicted truths. I refuse to reject myself--any part. I no longer choose to exile." --Michael Joseph Gross