What’s in a Name (When You’re Jewish)?
When I was pregnant with the baby who turned out to be Robbie, I had a pretty short list of boys’ names I wanted Jon to consider:
Robert, after my maternal grandfather
Andrew, after my paternal grandfather
Daniel, after two friends with that name who passed away in their 20s and because I liked it
Nathaniel, just because I liked it and, technically, after an ancestor on my mother’s side
Benjamin, just because I liked it.
With the exception of Robert and Andrew, all of these names are both classic and Jewish - the two criteria by which I judged all possibilities outside of the immediate family options. They weren’t too Jewish, though. By virtue of being pretty consistently popular over the last few centuries, a Daniel, Nathaniel, or Benjamin could be of any faith - and less likely to be on the receiving end of antisemitism than, say, a Noam or a Lev.
My priority for girls’ names even above wanting something classic and Jewish was that I didn’t want anything that could be abbreviated into an -ie or -y ending, which ruled out traditional Old Testament names that I otherwise loved like Abigail and Susannah. We had a really hard time agreeing on a name for the baby who became Claire!
I could say I wanted to avoid obviously Jewish or Hebrew names to give my children the option to choose another faith (or none) when they grew up, but it was pure cowardice on my part. I’m proud to be Jewish, but I don’t want my kids to suffer because I decided they’d be recognizably Jewish on paper.
When I was pregnant with Claire, my grandmother asked if we were considering Mary or Margaret after Jon’s grandmothers Mary and Peggy. I demurred, explaining they were too blatantly Christian for me. She argued that she knew lots of little Jewish girls named Mary and Margaret when she was growing up. I had to laugh at that; Nana grew up in the 1930s, when most Jews were doing everything they could to assimilate in response to anti-immigrant sentiment and antisemitism, so it’s not surprising that parents would choose New Testament names for their kids.
In the end, our kids’ names - first and last together - sound pure Scots Presbyterian. Robbie’s certainly not the only kid without a definitively Jewish name in his Hebrew School class. And I know there’s so much more to being Jewish than what you’re called.
We invited a few families over for dinner a couple of Fridays ago. It was Shabbat Shuvah, the first Shabbat after Rosh Hashanah. Most of our guests weren’t Jewish and had never been to a Shabbat dinner before, so I explained all of the prayers as we said them - the ones over the candles and the wine and the challah; the shehechyanu, which you say the first time you do something each Jewish calendar year, and the priestly blessing, which is recited over the children. Parents and kids alike were fascinated, and one boy turned to Robbie. “Are you Jewish?” he asked.
Robbie beamed at him. “Yes!”
Sometimes I wish I had been braver in naming our kids but, as the author of this fantastic Kveller piece wrote, “Fear is a learned behavior and somehow, I forgot to teach it to her.”
