She Understood The Assignment

JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: Introducing Vanessa Hidary

“Last night, just before I went onstage, I received a very hateful message from someone I’ve known since high school, with whom I was very close. This is a guy who was like a brother to me. And he went on this whole rant about me being, you know, the worst kind of white person — a Zionist, a white supremacist. It was pretty awful. I thought I’d kind of gotten to the point where I wasn’t as hurt by these things, but it just crushed me.”

“I grew up a reform liberal Jew on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My parents were both public school teachers who carried Channel 13 PBS tote bags and shopped at Zabar’s, but the twist was that the Upper West Side was a very diverse neighborhood back then. My parents actually bought a brownstone here in the 60s, and we lived in the neighborhood when it was still developing.

So my childhood friends were all very diverse: many Latin (Dominican and Puerto Rican) families, Black, white – I really had this kind of Free To Be You And Me upbringing and I thought everyone grew up like that. Then I went to LaGuardia, the arts school, for singing, which I don’t really do anymore, but I was a vocal major. And again: the setting was very diverse. All my friends were from different boroughs.

That’s how I grew up and I was always very involved in social justice. My parents read The New York Times every day and that was my life. When I was in high school, there was this kind of rebirth, or golden age, of hip hop -- with Black and Latinos really claiming their heritage and being proud. And I was someone who very much knew my boundaries and I never tried to be something I wasn’t, but they inspired me to look into myself and ask myself, Well, who am I? What is my history?

It was a slow start, but when I went to graduate school for acting in Rhode Island, that’s when I started to feel very keenly that I was Jewish. I was in a kind of culture shock there – I didn’t know how to drive; I was out of the city setting I’d been in all my life. I never felt like I was even all that Jewish until I was in New England. I don’t know if I’d ever even met a WASP before.

In some ways, I was very protected in that NYC diversity bubble. I thought everywhere was like that. So it was a very different world for me. I remember we didn’t have time off for Yom Kippur. And it wasn’t like I was so religious, but I definitely felt some sort of way about that. And then I just noticed that even my energy, my sense of humor, everything – I was like, God, I am so Jewish! I hadn’t felt that so viscerally before.”

“That was when I started writing, and I remember writing this story about a girl who was based on me (though my teacher didn’t know that): a Jewish girl who hung out with all these different people. And after my teacher read this story, she said, “This is not a realistic character.” I was like: oh, that’s so interesting, because I based it on myself. But it didn’t fit her idea of what a Jewish girl was like.

And everyone was supposed to have what was called a “back-pocket monologue” that was really you, that showcased your personality. And I couldn’t find any kind of personal representation in anything. I was a Jewish girl with this urban experience, and I didn’t relate to any stock Jewish characters.

So that was when I started writing. Because then I could create my own stories. And I started getting attention for writing, but I really wanted to be a movie actress. So I got scared that I was being pigeonholed as a writer. At the time, there was much less emphasis on writing for yourself – that wasn’t even really a thing yet.

In my MFA program, I got cast in every role where they just didn’t know what to do with that person. I played a mute; I played someone with no legs; I played an 85-year-old doctor when all I really wanted was to be Juliet: someone pretty and young. I think that ended up really serving me, but at the time, it was hard.”

“When I got out of grad school, I started seeing all these people writing one-woman shows, and they appealed to me. I wanted to write from a perspective that was different from the stereotypical Jewish characters I was seeing — like, for instance, some princess type who went to Brandeis.

I was like: where is the Jewish girl who loves hip hop, who’s friends with all these different people? It didn’t yet exist, and I thought: I guess I need to write that. So I started writing these monologues. I still wanted to be a movie actress, but I thought this would be the bridge.

Then I went to a poetry slam at the Brooklyn Museum, where they were trying out the model for DEF Poetry Jam on HBO. When I saw those performances, I said to myself: you know, I think this is what I was looking for. It was mostly people of color doing these passionate social justice pieces about race. What you looked like didn’t matter much, which was the antidote to the hardest thing, for me, about being an actress: the obsession with aesthetics, and auditioning, and the way you’re typecast.

Discovering a scene where that wasn’t important was so astonishing to me. I could write about what mattered to me, and no one cared what I looked like. And there was a hip hop / rhythmic element to it, which I loved. So I thought: I’m going to try this but with a Jewish voice, which I wasn’t really seeing out there.

The first piece I ever wrote began: Baruch Atah Adonai Viva Puerto Rico Ha’Olam Hamotzi Fight The Power Min Haaretz Amen. It was a mash-up of what I called a prayer of my neighborhood. I had a poem, Culture Bandit, about being a person who went in and out of different cultures.

So I went, I auditioned, I started attending events in the spoken word scene. I went downtown to all the open mics and to the Nuyorican, and then I was just in the scene, and slowly I was realizing that this was truly my thing.”

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Fam, I am so proud to be featuring brilliant, beautiful spoken word artist Vanessa Hidary as our Jew Of The Universe today.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS PROFILE, please click HERE. Comments are enabled for everyone at JUDITH, so if you appreciate Vanessa, please leave your love on the site!

Much love to you all, and back with you Monday.

Shabbat Shalom.

Am Yisrael Chai.