Dear Trisha Paytas

My culture is not your latest personality quirk

By: Gracie Kibort

If you’re anything like me, you probably felt a multitude of emotions as you watched Trisha Paytas exploit culture after culture, group after group, throughout the years. It wasn’t until a year ago that they targeted the Jewish community with full force due to their new relationship with a Jewish man. They posted TikToks devouring their “Jew lunch” and videos featuring their continued fetishization of Jewish culture. Although all of it was largely laughable, it infuriated me. I could not let it go. Suddenly I realized why their latest derogatory content about my inherited culture, foods, and tradition made me so irate. It was because they outlandishly represented the microaggressions that I, and so many others in my community, have faced throughout our lives, especially in the age of social media.

My upbringing has been defined by the culture that has hugged me when sad, cheered me on during achievements, and pushed me to grow as an individual. I feel intrinsically connected to the people I’ve grown with and what I have learned from them. But from a young age, I felt like I existed in two dimensions: embracing my culture and simultaneously making myself smaller to hide it, a double life with Hannah Montana incongruities. I attended public school and had friends from similar backgrounds but often felt like an “other.” When seldom included in Hanukkah crafts and songs, I felt tokenized just enough to check a box. I couldn’t be a Girl Scout because it conflicted with Hebrew school. I listened to my grandparents’ stories of surviving the Holocaust. Then I smiled as I half-heartedly sang Christmas songs in choir concerts and sat uncomfortably in middle school as I saw swastikas scribbled on desks. I shrank in my seat when a boy gawked at me in math class, pointing to me and saying, “she’s the Jew.” Friends commented on my body type, saying I looked the way I did because of my ethnicity, all the way down to the length of my legs and the size of my ass. The list persisted through high school. In my freshman year of college, a swastika was drawn on posters in my residence hall. Microaggressions became tallies on a chart I knew all too well. Everyone I know who is a part of the Jewish community has had similar experiences.

Jewish people have been persecuted dating back to the Bible. The idea that we’ve walked around with targets on our backs since we roamed the desert is an unfortunate cornerstone of our traditions. According to the Anti-Defamation League, acts of bigotry have led us to represent 58% of religious targeted hate crimes in 2020, despite only constituting 2% of Americans. Social media exacerbates the danger and fear of being a Jewish person in 2022, especially as a student. It has aggravated my anxiety. Acquaintances often post Instagram graphics and stories featuring “10 acts of anti-semitism this week that you didn’t hear about.” I feel my blood pressure rise as I reflect on all of the people who want me obliterated. Dead. Gone. The comment sections are polarizing and even more frightening. In minority communities such as mine, we often exist in online echo chambers. While these facilitate feelings of community, they also allow us to feel confident that change is coming and word is being spread. I foolishly believed everyone I knew had heard about the hostage situation at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas in January, despite a lack of news coverage. For a week, my endless chain of Instagram stories focused heavily on the topic, but when I brought it up to my non-Jewish friends a week later, they hadn’t heard about it. My feelings of confidence vanished. 

“They tried to kill us—now we eat!" is often heard at dinner tables during the holidays. Perseverance is intertwined with everything we do. Persecution and times of misery and misfortune are taught amongst themes of love and pride. The values I’ve inherited are taught through persistence, gratitude, and generational trauma, things that Paytas knows nothing about. Despite these values, by acting like it’s a costume to take on and off, Paytas could not begin to understand the weight that we carry and the fear that consumes us.