American Part

[Kusi Bertoldo]

Inthe aftermath of the Tết Offensive, the civilian and military casualties were staggering. The government estimated 14,300 civilians were killed and another 24,000 were wounded. That year, the ARVN had the highest number of casualties with 27,915 ARVN soldiers killed. Americans lost 14,589 young men and women. In the City of Huế alone, the VC buried over 5000 civilians and government officials in mass graves.

How is it then, given the severity of the Tết Offensive, that its impact on South Vietnam is lost in representations of the war? Rather, with a minimization of the context, all eyes focused on Loan, ignoring all other images, and, with the help of the media, stuffed all of the nastiness of the war into this single man. And there was a lot of nastiness.

These all directly involve me: my sons and daughters, my friends who are part of the armed forces, and most of all, those things that many of us take for granted that add to the global issues that cause conflict, global poverty, and marginalization. It informs who I am ethically as a Vietnamese American.

Truth is a proactive activity. To assume without some analysis, especially in this Internet age, that all information provided to us is complete and truthful is just lazy. Why would we do anything less for our past?

The poem and story in italics is my fictionalized metaphorical interpretation of the attitudes of some South Vietnamese about Nguyễn Ngọc Loan based upon research and review of Vietnamese media, Internet blogs, online discussions and chats following Vietnamese blogs and articles, etc. Though these portions are loosely based upon the public figure, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

As for the war between north and south Vietnam, to a large degree it is for the aforementioned reason that it occurred. Contrary to what most people think, Ho Chi Minh was not a communist. He know nothing about Marxist doctrine. The reason and the only reason he went to the USSR was to learn revolutionary tactics so he could lead his country to be free of the French.

When the US declined to answer his letters and support his request for help to keep the French out, Ho Chi Minh did what makes absolutely perfect sense in light of his mission. America turned him down. The Chinese agreed to help. The fact that it was the Chinese communists had nothing to do with it. His decision was purely one of expedience and necessity, not one of ideology.

American University Washington College of Law offers one of the premier part-time law programs committed to ensuring a high-quality education and personal experience for our part-time students. Ranked 4th in the nation, AUWCL's part-time program provides part-time students with the same breath and depth of courses available to their full-time counterparts. Part-time students are fully integrated in extracurricular activities including moot court, mock trial and alternative dispute resolution honor societies; law journals and law briefs; and participation in our nationally ranked clinics. One of the focuses of the program is to ensure that part-time students can succeed in law school while balancing full-time employment and all of the demands of everyday life.

AUWCL Administrative Office, such as the Office of Career and Professional Development, Office of the Registrar, and Office of Student Affairs, are dedicated to the unique needs of part-time, evening students. These offices offer unique programs tailored to the needs of part-time students and are available on campus during the evenings to support them.

The part-time and evening students at WCL are an extraordinary bunch. Every year the U.S. News publishes its annual ranking of law schools and of law school programs. The numbers change. What remains constant is the qualities of students in the part time program and the high level of instruction they receive. As associate dean for the part time and evening program, I have been very impressed with the commitment students, faculty, and staff have shown over these past several years to ensuring a quality educational experience at the school.

Sociologists Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt look on during their son Ari's bris. They've worked together to research how kids with mixed Asian-American and Jewish heritage think about faith. The Kim-Leavitt family hide caption

Chung and her husband, Maury Povich, had just announced their intention to adopt a half-Chinese, half-Jewish child. At this, my mother, watching on TV in our living room, did a double take. She looked at the screen. Then she looked at me, her half-Chinese, half-Jewish, fully-misbehaving daughter. "How would you like to go live with that woman?" she said.

This view, it turns out, is ancient. "You shall not marry (gentiles), you shall not give your daughter to their son ... because he will lead your son astray from Me and they will serve strange gods," it is said in Deuteronomy. Thousands of years later, many still share this opinion.

Cohen was referring to the fact that children of intermarried Jews tend to be less religiously Jewish than those born to two Jewish parents, as found in the Pew Research Center's 2013 Portrait of Jewish Americans. But there's another way of looking at it. While they may be less religious, more and more mixed-race Jews are choosing to identify as Jewish. Among the adult children of intermarried parents surveyed, as many as 59 percent identified as Jews.

Two scholars on the forefront of understanding the changing face of Judaism are Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt, sociologists at Whitman College in Washington state. For the last decade, Kim and Leavitt have trained their attention on the intersection of Jewish and Asian cultures. This is no coincidence: The two are a Korean-Jewish couple, raising two Reform Jewish children. Every week, they celebrate Shabbat dinner, observe the Sabbath as a day of rest and perform the Havdalah service as a family.

President Barack Obama puts his arm around Rabbi Angela Buchdahl during a White House Hanukkah reception in Dec. 2014. Buchdahl, who is Korean-American and Jewish, leads New York City's Central Synagogue. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP hide caption

Kim's and Leavitt's interest began when, flipping through the The New York Times style section, they noticed something strange. Suddenly, it seemed that more and more couples looked like them. Jewish-Asian pairings filled the news, from "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua and husband Jed Rubenfeld to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.

Some children of these marriages are grown up and in the news, too. Angela Buchdahl, the wildly popular Korean-American rabbi of New York City's Central Synagogue, has written about facing challenges to her faith as a young adult.

"I did not look Jewish, I did not carry a Jewish name and I no longer wanted the heavy burden of having to explain and prove myself every time I entered a new Jewish community," Buchdahl recalled in a 2003 essay in the journal Sh'ma.

The affinity between Jews and Asians has some grounding in culture, according to Kim and Leavitt. In 2012, they published a study that sought to explain what draws these two ancient cultures together. Both Asians and Jews, they found, shared deeply ingrained values of academic achievement, strong family ties and frugality. There are also fewer religious barriers: While Asian-Americans may subscribe to a philosophical system like Buddhism, less often do they have overt religious beliefs that clash with Judaism.

"This was the logical next step," says Leavitt. "We wanted to know how these kids are going to make sense of the different strands of who they are." So they decided to do something novel: ask the kids themselves. For their next study, published last month in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Kim and Leavitt conducted in-depth interviews with 22 children of Jewish-Asian marriages.

Unfortunately, a strong sense of personal Jewishness didn't stop the haters. At school, in the synagogue and in casual conversation, respondents recalled getting the same doubtful looks and comments that I did. If it wasn't "Funny, you don't look Jewish," it was "Oh, you must mean half-Jewish." (This is usually the case when your father is Jewish; in more traditional strains of Judaism, it is believed that Jewish identity flows through the maternal line.)

Nevertheless, Kim and Leavitt's approach is "highly original and needed," says Keren McGinity, the editor of the journal in which the work was published, and a Jewish historian at Brandeis University who specializes in intermarriage. "The very idea that there can be multi-racial, multi-ethnic Jews is a wake-up call."

Far from being "diluted," these mixed-race Jews saw themselves as critical to what today's Jewish values are all about. For them, "multi-raciality and Jewishness are intrinsically tied together," the authors wrote.

"These kids are thinking about being Jewish in a variety of ways," says Leavitt. "Spiritually, religiously, culturally, ethically. It's a huge smorgasbord of what parts of Judaism they draw on to connect with."

This question is always a tricky one. Do I cite my grandmother's matzo ball soup? My love for the lilt of Hebrew prayer? The fact that I was so drawn to my Jewish roots that I ended up working for a Jewish magazine? Like Buchdahl, I can no more explain what makes me feel Jewish than what makes me feel Chinese, or female, or human. I usually go with, "It means I really, really like Chinese food."

The point, for Kim and Leavitt, is that today's Jews have a choice. For millennia, being Jewish was like being pregnant: You either were, or you weren't. But as the number of Jews with hyphenated identities continues to rise, that idea needs rethinking. Maybe it isn't an all-or-nothing affair. Maybe the question shouldn't be, "Are you Jewish?" but: "How are you Jewish?" Maybe, for some, being chosen can be a choice.

3a8082e126