Reflections on AAPI: What it means to be Asian Jewish Today?

Benjamin M. Nuland

As I reflect on Asian Heritage Month as an Asian Jew from Shanghai, China, I want to

leave one question intentionally unanswered: what does it mean to be an Asian Jew? I don’t know, but I believe my answer should be less of a definition and more of an active experiment — to attempt to form my identity through history, practice, and the work of building new communities.

As a history major, I think the best place to begin is with how deeply intertwined Asian and Jewish histories have long been. Growing up in Shanghai, Judaism was never something abstract or distant to me, but a historical reality embedded within the city itself. Shanghai was, in many ways, an East Asian city built upon successive Jewish beginnings. In the nineteenth century, Baghdadi Jewish families such as the Sassoons and Kadoories helped shape the city’s commercial development. In the early twentieth century, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms, Bolshevik revolution, and persecution after the Russo-Japanese War contributed to Shanghai’s intellectual and cosmopolitan life (and was one of many factors that introduced Communism to China). Most famously, German and Austrian Jews escaping Nazism and Kristallnacht established the “Little Vienna” community within Shanghai’s wartime Jewish ghetto, creating schools, workshops, and synagogues under conditions of exile. After Reform and Opening, a new generation of Israeli, American, and British Jewish entrepreneurs again became part of Shanghai’s transformation into a global city. Even today, traces of this history remain visible in the former Jewish homes and museums scattered across Jing’an and Hongkou.

Despite this historical legacy, however, I had little access to formal Jewish education

growing up. My father first brought me, barely able to speak English or Chinese, to weekly

services at Ohel Rachel, a reclaimed colonial estate that functioned as one of the city’s only synagogues for a population of more than twenty million people. Through Chabad, I learned melodies, memorized prayers, and found community through song and ritual. But the only Jewish world I came to know was short-lived. Chabad leaders learned that my mother was Chinese and Buddhist and began questioning the legitimacy of my parents’ marriage. At the same time, restrictions on religious life in China were tightening. The Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office increasingly limited the participation of Chinese nationals in religious institutions, and by the time I was around five years old, police officers were stationed outside Ohel Rachel checking passports and nationalities before entry. Bound by both religious and civic law, my family had no choice but to leave Chabad.

It felt crazy to think that in a city with such a rich Jewish history and heritage, we were exiles in our own home because of our mixed background. Yet rather than abandoning Jewish life altogether, my family discovered that many other mixed and interfaith families in Shanghai faced similar experiences, and were eager to create another organization that supported both jews both disillusioned by Chabad and Asian Jews with mixed background kids like us. But how do we create an Asian Jewish community from out of nothing? We had no permanent congregation, no synagogue or meeting place, no Torah, no Rabbi, and we received little support from the larger Western Jewish institutions we initially had hoped. Still six families came together to create Kehilat Shanghai — a non-traditional NGO that was a non-profit, volunteer-led religiou and cultural organization — that relied on the grassroots support from Asian Jewish families to build our own Judaism.

To remain within the law, we even worked with local Communist Party officials to ensure our registration, hoping to ease restrictions on our gatherings. We initially held Seders and High Holy Days in hotel multipurpose rooms, Shabbat services in private homes, and piloted informal ‘religious’ classes in rented coworking spaces (Weworks). With what little funds we had, we flew in rabbis for brief three-month stays — often those already passing through Asia. Through our determination, we began reclaiming pieces of Shanghai’s Jewish past. We convinced the CCP local officials to permit the use of the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum — the former Ohel Moshe synagogue of the wartime ghetto — for community Bar Mitzvahs, including my own in 2017. Later, we managed to bring home a Torah once carried to Shanghai by German Jews during World War II, long exiled in Rio de Janeiro after 1949. It returned to us in a Chinese fencing bag, carried by a traveler flying back from Brazil, and was restored in Australia.

The Judaism our community built, however, was never simply a replica of existing

traditional Jewish models. Instead, we experimented with incorporating Chinese cultural

elements into Jewish practice in ways that reflected the realities of our lives. We were flexible on Kosher. Sometimes certain prayerbooks for major services and bar/bat mitzvahs were translated in Chinese to help extended family follow along. Bat/Bar-mitzvah speeches similarly delivered in English and Mandarin intertwined the moral teachings of Chinese fables with the lessons of the Torah. Community members drew loose parallels between Jewish stories and Chinese mythology, comparing God to Pangu 盘古 dividing heaven and earth, to Nüwa 女娲 molding humanity from dust and clay, and to Dayu 大禹 taming the waters of a great flood. In informal Jewish class, we explored with the etymologies of Chinese characters like 婪 — a woman in a forest — to Eve in Eden’s garden. Even the cloth wrapping around our Torah scroll was decorated by children in the community with Chinese characters and symbols meaningful to them.

None of these connections were perfectly coherent, nor were they always textually or theologically rigorous. But that was never entirely the point. There was a shared desire to create the possibility that Chinese and Jewish identities could coexist meaningfully within the same communal space. The adults in the community understood that their children occupied identities neither fully recognized by the Chinese world nor fully legible within many traditional Jewish institutions. In that sense, creating an Asian Jewish community meant accepting that identity does not always arrive fully formed, defined, or expected. Sometimes it must instead be assembled gradually through ritual, experimentation, and the deliberate creation of spaces where people can belong.

When I first arrived in the United States, I experienced a major “Jewish culture shock.” Americans have highly developed Jewish institutions, including Jewish-only K–12 schools, multiple Torahs and rabbis within a single congregation, and extensive denominational infrastructures. American Jewish culture also seemed heavily shaped by New York Jewish stereotypes and Israel-centric discourse that I had never encountered nor was exposed to growing up in China. Different institutions were organized according to varying “levels” of religiosity, with each congregation maintaining its own hierarchy of religious authority among members. Combined with the contemporary politicization of identity, I observed that many Jews felt insecure about the legitimacy of their own Jewish identity. Similarly, like many other Asian Jews, being perceived as foreign meant I suddenly found myself on a treadmill of performative validation, constantly trying to prove to others that I was “Jewish.” This ultimately felt futile to me, because Jewish idealism sometimes resembled Benjamin Franklin’s “Ladder of Perfection” where there always seemed to be someone more authoritative who could question another person’s Judaism. Therefore Judaism in the United States felt less grassroots than it had in China,

and more institutional and top-down.

Yet outside these formal institutions, I was struck by the diversity of Asian Jewish life in the United States. I met Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, and Uzbekistani Jews, alongside an equally broad spectrum of Jewish observance ranging from Reform and Conservative to Orthodox and Chabad. I met Asian converts, children of mixed marriages, and descendants of small but enduring Jewish enclaves across Asia. We were not nearly as “niche” and “specific” as people assumed. It also did not take long for mixed and Asian undergraduates to realize there were far more Asian Jews than expected. At Yale, a conversation in the Stiles Buttery eventually led to the creation of the Asian Jewish Union, which grew from four undergraduate members into a community of roughly fifty students now. Similar organizations have since emerged at institutions such as University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Brown University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. National networks such as LUNAR have likewise expanded these conversations among students, graduates, and young professionals alike.

Although this enduring national and ethnic pluralism made the cultivation of a unified “Asian Jewish” identity more complex than many outsiders assume, it was nevertheless clear from these stories that we shared a number of common challenges. Many Asian Jews find themselves navigating identities that others often assume exist separately, explaining an “Asian Jewish” identity to both Asian and Jewish communities in a world that increasingly favors clearer cultural and political categories. We may share similar “Asian” or “Jewish” experiences without necessarily inheriting a single narrative or cohesive communal tradition that fully binds us together. Many of us therefore carry the quiet exhaustion of moving through institutions and social spaces not designed with this kind of plurality in mind. As a result, Asian Jews often learn to compartmentalize these conversations, treating identity as secondary to profession or achievement.

Yet perhaps that ambiguity is itself meaningful. Asian Jewish identity has never depended on uniformity or political cohesion to exist. Its history has instead been shaped by adaptation and coexistence across worlds that were never meant to fit neatly together. In that sense, being Asian Jewish is not only historically rich and deeply pluralistic, but also an opportunity to continually discover, experiment with, and redefine what this identity can mean in the present.

With the Asian Jewish Union at Yale, we’ve tried to approach this ambiguity not as a

problem to solve, but as a space to build within. With support from both the Joseph Slifka Center at Yale and the Asian American Cultural Center at Yale, we intentionally designed programs that treated Asian and Jewish identity not as separate spheres, but as traditions capable of existing alongside one another in the same communal space. We initially hosted monthly Asian kosher meal gatherings, Asian Jewish game nights at Slifka, and Lunar New Year celebrations to cultivate a stronger sense of Asian Jewish community at Yale by blending familiar Asian cultural elements — such as hawthorn flakes and seaweed rice crackers to games like Chinese checkers (跳棋) and Carrom — into distinctly Jewish spaces. In 2025 and 2026, we expanded that approach by partnering with the Hindu Student Organization to organize Holi-Purim celebrations at Slifka that combined Jewish holiday programming with Indian traditions such as halwa and boli-making alongside Holi-inspired tie-dye as an indoor alternative to color throwing.

As these conversations grew, we sought to situate Asian Jewish identity within broader public and historical discussions. We hosted figures such as Rabbi Angela Buchdahl and Judge Florence Pan to speak about navigating public life as Asian American Jews (whether be a Rabbi or a high level justice respectively), while also turning attention toward Jewish communities across Asia itself. Through exhibitions, we highlighted the histories of Jewish life in Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kaifeng, and beyond. Conversations with Indonesian Jewish leaders focused on the history the contemporary realities of the country’s grassroots community-building, engagement with the Indonesian ministry of religion, and questions of representation within broader Jewish international institutions (despite their Dutch and Portuguese Jewish historical roots), while discussions with Kaifeng Jewish leaders explored the history, the contemporary condition of the Kaifeng Jewish community, and its efforts to sustain decentralized religious and communal life across families through its Persian and Central Asian Jewish traditions despite Chinese government oversight.

With support from Hillel International, these efforts culminated in the largest regional gathering of undergraduate Asian Jews to date: an Asian Jewish Shabbat at Yale attended by more than 500 students, faculty, administrators, and community members. Undergraduate leaders from thirteen universities came together not just for a cultural event, but to kickstart a broader national conversation about what it means to be Asian Jewish today. In many ways, the event was not important because it offered a definitive answer, but because it demonstrated that a community once assumed to be niche or fragmented was beginning to imagine itself more collectively.

So what does it mean then to be an Asian Jew today? I’m still not sure, but in many ways perhaps it is no different from being an American Jew, an Asian in Asia, or an Asian American in the modern era. It is to act as a preserver of heritage and a continuation of a long and intertwined history across continents and communities. It is to embrace pluralism without feeling compelled to reduce identity into single narratives. It is the power to act on the heritage you have to create inclusive and unique events, build discussion, and shape new cultural communities. And perhaps most importantly, it is to treat identity not as something fixed, but as something continuously reinterpreted as an ongoing experiment in what community and belonging can mean. Perhaps being Asian Jewish today means accepting that identity does not always arrive fully formed. Sometimes it is built gradually through historical memory, crafting ritual, kickstarting conversation, and creating the small independent space we have for one another.

About the Author:

Benjamin M. Nuland is a History major at Yale. He was born, raised, and Bar Mitzvahed in Shanghai, China, then moved to Princeton New Jersey where he attended High School. At Yale, Benjamin is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Yale Dialogue on U.S.–China Relations and the Asian Jewish Union, President of Asian Crossroads at Yale, Former Publisher of the Yale Review of International Studies, and Former International Collaboration Lead at The Politic. He is also a student leader at the Central Asian Initiative, an undergraduate affiliate of the MacMillan Center’s European Studies Council and an undergraduate head of the 1768 Foundation. Benjamin aspires to join the U.S. State Department, where he hopes to leverage his regional expertise and cross-cultural experience to advance American diplomacy and international cooperation.

Photography: Yale Asian Jewish Union, Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, Hillel International, Kehilat Shanghai